Crafting Copy for Marketing Campaigns . . .

. . . always involves alliteration!

At least as far as I can tell. I've been researching marketing copy this weekend and drafting writing examples I can use in job applications. My marketing skills are a little rusty, but after reading other people's portfolios on-line, I'm feeling confident that I could do at least as well as most professionals, if not better.

Some of the advice pages I've found about writing marketing copy have been fantastic; I found GNC's suggestions and DT&GBusiness's tips to be particularly helpful. These sites made me wish that I had taught a web-based persuasive writing assignment in my composition courses. Not only would it have been tremendously helpful to the students' general writing skills, but it would have forced my students to practice practical rhetoric, something that even I'm not used to doing.

Anyway, I've posted my marketing copy example below. I made up a business (Claire's Cakes and Candies), brainstormed some services they might have, and tried to explain these services to a potential consumer. I image that this copy would be used for the bakery's home page as an introduction to their basic services.

I tried to directly relate each service to a specific need or desire that the consumer has, like the need for convenience or the desire to impress his or her guests. I'm especially fond of my slant-rhymed tag-line: "Creative Designs for the Event of a Lifetime!"

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Claire's Cakes and Candies

Creative Designs for the Event of a Lifetime!

Welcome to Claire's Cakes and Candies! We provide . . .

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  Custom Cakes for Weddings and Special Events: We don't just make cakes, we make impressions. Let our staff of master bakers and designers shape a sophisticated, one-of-a-kind cake just for you. With our wide selection of gourmet flavors, we can ensure that your cake will be as delicious as well as spectacular. We're expert at suiting any style, any occasion, and any palate. So let us take care of your cake so you can enjoy your event! Schedule a design consultation and taste test with us today.
  
  
  
  
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  Same-day Sheet Cakes: Forgot to order a cake for a co-worker? Missed Mom's birthday? Call us on your way to work and we'll have your custom sheet cake ready by the afternoon. With a personalized message and colorful butter cream detailing, we can make any of our fresh pre-made sheet cakes (available in white and chocolate) into something special just for you. Never miss another opportunity to show that you care!
  
  
  
  
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  Cupcakes: Perfect for on-the-go hostesses and spur-of-the-moment celebrations, our cupcakes (available in white, chocolate, and carrot cake) can turn any day into an event. We whip up our no-fuss, all-fun cupcakes by the dozen. And since we they're made fresh daily, these mini cakes will let you display your party panache at a moment's notice!
  
  
  
  
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  Fine Gift Chocolates: From kids to connoisseurs, everyone loves our hand-crafted chocolate gifts, which we make using only the finest ingredients from Belgium and France. Our artisan molds transform our deluxe milk and dark chocolates into dramatic gifts for your special someone. Playful or polished, silly or sophisticated, Claire's chocolates make a sweet statement for any occasion.
  
  
  
  

About Us

Claire Schlitterwhooster and her staff have over seventy years of combined experience making custom pastries and chocolates for the Kansas City area. Though she grew up baking cinnamon buns and coffee cakes with her German grandmother, Claire chose to focus on crafting artisan cakes after graduating from culinary school in 2003. Since then, Claire and her staff have combined a passion for art with a love of gourmet sweets and fine European chocolates. Her staff includes Mark Chevre, her talented sous-chef; three full-time bakers; four cake artists; two chocolate confectioners; and long-time office manager Marie Clark.

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Isn't Schlitterwhooster a great name for a pastry chef?

I also created a pdf mock-up of what the website would look like, incorporating a few photos and a basic header image I made myself on GIMP. I converted my pdf to a couple of jpgs and posted them below. They're nothing fancy, but hopefully they'll help my potential employers imagine what my work would look like with a designer's help!

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Tips for Tentative Tweeters

Tips for Tentative Tweeters

August 27, 2009

I like Twitter.

There, I said it. I like to use it, and I like to read it, no matter how many pundits and laymen alike grumble over the microblog's purported uselessness. While not everyone who creates a Twitter account will find the site useful or compelling, the widespread appeal of Twitter is no fluke. In the right hands and with the right intentions, Twitter can actually be fun, useful, and even informative. Here's the why, who, what, when, and where of using Twitter to its best advantage.

Why should you be on Twitter?

I like Twitter because it's a quick, easy, precise way to post interesting stuff on the web. I get most of my cultural news this way: I've found new books to read, new blogs to follow, and new topics to think and write about through my friends' tweets. The best Twitter accounts should make you feel engaged, informed, and current.

Your tweets should do the same for your followers. Forwarding links, composing brief reviews, and sharing quick facts provides a varied and compelling array of information to your readers. It also allows you to promote great ideas, articles, and writers to ensure that they get the exposure they deserve. Think of tweets and re-tweets as brief, culturally enriching chain letters that can spread the best web content across the globe. But, you know, without the chain mail curses.

Twitter has not proven particularly useful for creating social intimacy or providing a space for intelligent debate. The site is not a "social network" in the conventional sense because it doesn't attempt to represent the self like Facebook and MySpace do; at best, Twitter conveys the momentary interests and fleeting preoccupations of an individual. So if you're looking for a web application to forge connections with your peers, Twitter might not be for you.

What do people tweet about, and what should people tweet about?

According to a recent study, about 40% of tweets are "useless babble" about the weather or eating a sandwich or buying a spice rack. These are bad tweets. Another 37% of tweets are conversational (meaning that they are directed at only one person, not at the general population of followers). Only 9% of tweets are re-tweets (meaning they're interesting enough to have "pass along value") and only 4% of tweets are news-related.

I'll be honest: about one in ten of my tweets is "useless babble" (actual tweet: "the plaster & paint are up @ the grandparent's house--what a day!"). No one cares. I know this, and I try to limit myself accordingly. But when I do fall under the Internet's siren song of unfettered self-expression, I try to make up for my inanity through cultural commentary attached to #hashtags (such as movie reviews or book recommendations) and links to articles that I think are worth reading.

I try to tweet away from personal topics as much as possible. Like any other form of writing, you should consider the needs and interests of you audience; your Twitter friends are following you because they want to be entertained or informed, not to be subjected to the minutia of your daily life. If in doubt about whether something personal is tweet-worthy, ask yourself this: if you were to run into one of your followers on the street, would you find it necessary to tell him or her that you "Might stop for a coffee before hitting the office!" or "Luv luv luv cantaloupe for breakfast!!!"? No? Then don't tweet it.

Who should you follow?

I follow friends, colleagues, and a few news accounts. I follow friends because we share a sense of humor and they add personal zest to my home page. I follow colleagues because they frequently post great links about interests we share; they help further my professional interests. I follow news sites to stay up to date on certain topics and publications, though I only follow news profiles if they don't tweet more than a few times a day and their interests are very similar to my own (like @newyorkerdotcom and @iwantmedia, which tracks digital media trends).

I follow less than thirty people, and I don't think that a tweeter could follow more than fifty without losing track of what's going on in real time (and that's the whole point of Twitter, right?). When it comes to who you follow, keep the list small to keep it useful.

Where does tweeting occur?

Basically, you can tweet on-line or over a mobile device like a cell phone. It doesn't matter where you tweet, but you should know that tweeting from your cell phone makes it easier and more tempting to post useless and off-putting blather to Twitter. Tweeting about a visit to the doctor's office ("Sitting in the waiting room for twenty minutes now. SOOO bored. Old Redbooks suck!") may alleviate your boredom, but it's only increasing that of your followers.

When should one tweet?

I tweet about twice a day on average: sometimes I tweet ten times a day, and sometimes I go for several days without tweeting. I have friends who tweet once a week and friends who tweet as often as they check their email (which is very often).

There is no ideal tweet frequency, but tweeting more than once an hour on average (more than 24 posts a day) is bad Twitter etiquette. It's annoying when a single tweeter fills your home page with updates. Besides, it seems implausible that a single person could have more than 20 hilarious epiphanies, bizarre experiences, enlightening opinions, and illuminating reading sessions in only a few waking hours. Anyone who's tweeting at this frequency is not tweeting much worth reading.

However, if your life just happens to be that fascinating, your mind that fecund, and your web trolling that extraordinary, you can find me at @amoebaspleez; I'll be sure to follow back.

The Womanish Novel

My boyfriend C. and I are always giving each other book recommendations. Or maybe I should say that we're always trying to recommend books to each other with little success. Again and again, he's tried to get me to read The Naked and the Dead or Blood Meridian, but I can't stomach the stuff. I don't want to read about trench warfare or scalped corpses or any world that is habitually saturated in violence. I think I paid my dues in college when I had to read All Quiet on the Western Front and The Last of the Mohicans and Beowulf. No more trenches and battle axes for me!

C. feels the same way about my suggestions. Wuthering Heights? "No way." Sense and Sensibility? "I think I'll pass." He calls these books “womanish.” When I press him about what, exactly, this means, he just says, “I don't know. They're about women and family and houses. 'Domestic spaces,'” he laughs. “I'm sure they're good books, I'm just not into them.”

I've always believed in the androgynous mind a la Virginia Woolf, that gender doesn't matter when it comes to writing or reading good literature. Female writers are just as good and as universally appealing as male writers, and vice versa. I'm a feminist, damn it, and I believe that brilliance trumps genitalia any day!

So why have I spent the last few weeks with Alice Monroe, Laura Moriarty, and Marilynne Robinson while C. has camped out with Norman Mailer and Tim O'Brien?

Our failed recommendations have made me realize that gender does matter, at least when it comes to a reader's taste. And while it's hard to hear C. calling my books “womanish” without feminist warning alarms going off in my brain, his preference for "mannish" books is only fair. Books written by and about men are usually different than those written by and about women. Female authors are often more interested in personal fulfillment than social or financial gain, in emotional survival and social acceptance more than physical survival, in love instead of conquest.

Perhaps the difference between “womanish” and “mannish” novels is just an off-shoot of the innate differences between men and women. Or maybe C. has been taught that war and adventure are cool while I've been trained to be hyper-aware of personal emotions and family interactions. Either way, I'm beginning to think that the gendering of literature is not a bad thing, as long as critiques of quality are kept out of the argument. I don't think masculine literature can be called “better” than feminine literature, and vice versa. Clearly, there are examples of good and bad writing in each: women may have chick lit and the Oprah Book Club and romance novels, but men have detective novels and westerns and sci fi, which provide more than enough pulp to balance us out. And, of course, each gender has been responsible for some universally beloved classics, including Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice and A Farewell to Arms and The Sound and the Fury.

Even though it's okay that C. and I keep our separate bookshelves, I think, too, that there should be some room for exchange, just for the sake of variety and open-mindedness. Maybe I'll trade my copy of Mrs. Dalloway for C.'s The Thin Red Line; perhaps he'll take Housekeeping if only I'll give No Country for Old Men one more try.

Finding "A Certain Type of Silence"

David L. Ulin, book editor for the Los Angeles Times, recently wrote about how he's having a hard time sitting down to read. In "The Lost Art of Reading," he describes the problem as not "a failure of desire so much as one of will. Or not will, exactly, but focus: the ability to still my mind long enough to inhabit someone else's world, and to let that someone else inhabit mine. Reading is an act of contemplation, [. . .] In order for this to work, however, we need a certain type of silence, an ability to filter out the noise."

He blames his lack of focus on the usual culprit: "our over-networked culture, in which every rumor and mundanity is blogged and tweeted." He writes that people today don't seek "contemplation [. . .] but an odd sort of distraction masquerading as being in the know. [. . .] it is more important to react than to think, that we live in a culture in which something is attached to every bit of time."

Though my gut reaction toward Ulin is one of sympathy (not only do I appreciate him as a fellow reader, but he's also written a beautifully worded article), I'm suspicious of his argument; it feels cheap and rote to blame a distracted mind on the Internet and social media. Having grown up with the Internet (I played computer games in elementary school computer labs and had AOL and Instant Messenger at home in high school), it's hard for me to say what the world would be like without these distractions, and it's hard to know whether I would be a better, more patient reader without them.

I have, however, felt what Ulin feels when I try to read, that "encroachment of the buzz, the sense that there is something out there that merits my attention." For Ulin, this sense comes from the immediateness and omnipresence of online culture, in which "time collapses into an ever-present now."

But for me, I think it's something else. Reading is certainly getting more difficult over time, and I, too, frequently feel like I should be doing something else when I sit down to read. But my distraction stems not from the Internet but from being in my mid-twenties, my increasing responsibilities, and my new worries over getting a job and being able to run my own life. Without school or a job to ground me, it's difficult to feel like I'm accomplishing anything with my time, even if I spend my days furiously researching career paths and refining my resume. My lack of paid employment makes it harder for me to enjoy reading because there's no solid productivity to make my free time more enjoyable, more emphatically my own; it's like not being able to enjoy your ice cream because you didn't get enough vegetable stew at dinner.

For me, the flash and distraction of Twitter and Facebook are certainly there, but the real distraction comes from inside, from the part of me that wants to accomplish something with my days, not just let a world of experiences wash over me.

Besides, Ulin forgets that codex books are just another form of technology, another mode of communication that was once regarded with suspicion. Our ancient ancestors shared their history through chanted poems. The Greeks used wax tablets. Writers of the Renaissance relied on hand-written sheaves of paper that they passed from friend to friend. The Victorians loved voluminous serialized books that went on for thousands of pages.

Twenty years ago, a 250-page paperback novel was the norm. Today's Internet is just another technological revolution, not the end of reading or literature. Perhaps the next hundred years will bring even newer technology against which the Internet will seem staid, traditional, solid, and comfortingly slow-paced.

I still agree with Ulin that reading has the power to help us to both "escape and to be engaged," that it is an essential "act of meditation, with all of meditation's attendant difficulty and grace." Reading a book is something that I would never give up. But I am weary of hearing people bellyache about Twitter and TMZ.com and the rapid proliferation of online media. We must learn how to take the best of what the Internet can offer while discovering a new equilibrium between online culture and our mental peace. This balance, I know, can be found; humans have been adapting to our new tools for millennia.

All Our "Excessive Passions"

It's been awhile since I've posted here, but I've been unusually busy. Between applying for jobs last week, a hectic weekend with friends, and running a lot of errands this week, I haven't been writing much. So here's to getting back in the swing of things!

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I grew up reading Robert W. Butler's film reviews in The Kansas City Star. In high school, I thought his opinion was law, and after an introductory film class at KU where I learned about editing and mise-en-scene, I spent a couple of years breathlessly following his recommendations for Criterion classics like The 400 Blows (there's two hours I'll never get back).

These days, I'm more aware of Butler's biases. Any comedy--even a well-paced, joke-laden, emotionally relevant comedy--gets 2 1/2 stars out of 4 at best; any international or independent film--including long-winded, heavy-handed, emotionally flat films--are awarded 3 1/2 stars out of 4 at worst. Butler is prejudiced by his preferences (as any reviewer must be), but he always writes intelligently and convincingly and, well, a lot (he has three bylines in today's FYI Weekend Preview alone).

My favorite piece from this week is his fall film preview "Duck and Cover--Doom and Gloom Await." Butler highlights the apocalyptic films lined up for fall and winter release, including a film version of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, the computer animated 9, and a cheesy-sounding Denzel Washington vehicle called The Book of Eli.

The most compelling chunk of Butler's piece shows up right at the end: "It’s been noted that one reason science fiction is perennially popular is that it argues that mankind actually has a future. If so, why our fascination with end-of-the-world scenarios? Perhaps we subconsciously hope that if we get our cosmic comeuppance in the movies, we’ll somehow avoid it in real life."

As I would tell my composition students, Butler's tagging this tidbit on the end of his article to strengthen his conclusion, to go beyond the obvious educational premise of his article (to inform us about new sci fi releases) and make us think for a moment about human nature. This tail makes for a nice closing paragraph, but I disagree with Butler's interpretation of apocalyptic films. He doesn't put enough thought into answering his own question, and I'm sure he wasn't given the page space to do so.

People don't watch something bad happen on screen in the hope that it won't happen in real life. Films are vicarious by nature. People want what happens in movies to happen in real life, but they want it to happen without consequence; they want to see how it feels to foil a terrorist plot or fall in love with a best friend or enact some brutal revenge on a rapist without throwing away their own security to do so. How else can one account for the popularity of formulaic romantic comedies where the heroine (who serves a stand-in for the typical female audience member) gets the perfect guy? Why do we watch movies about mobsters and criminals if not to imagine what it would be like to feel so free, so powerful, and so violent without consequence?

We watch apocalypse and disaster movies because they illustrate and involve us in a horrifying reality for two hours while we enjoy the cushy safety of our theater seats. We watch them to bring our potential doom closer, not to push it away.

But why do we want to experience harrowing disaster again and again at movie theaters? As a big fan of sci fi, horror, and disaster movies, I have some hypotheses about the source of our love of apocalyptic cinema:

1) Spectacle: Apocalypse movies tend to include a lot of explosions, twisted landscapes, tidal waves, and alien spacecraft, which makes CGI professionals very happy and gives viewers a chance to see something familiar get completely demolished. (Did anyone watch Independence Day for any reason besides seeing the White House lasered into oblivion? I didn't think so.) These movies are usually action flicks at heart: they have a big visual wow-factor and lots of good, clean, family violence. It's the Colosseum all over again.

2) Adrenaline: Not only do these movies allow for plenty of chase scenes and war zone violence (see 28 Days Later and Mad Max), but they imbue the heroes and heroines with special importance: we want them to survive the apocalypse for themselves and for the rest of us. If a few good characters survive, then humanity survives. These movies ensure our unequivocal emotional investment in the films' outcomes and guarantee that we'll all be surging with adrenaline when the movies are over. We leave the theater feeling ragged, exhilarated, and a little high when our characters survive, and an excited film goer is a happy film goer.

3) Thought Experiments: Most apocalypse movies are science fiction, and sci fi thrives on brainstorming and enacting the future's possibilities. The best sci fi involves premises that are novel and inventive yet utterly believable, like Children of Men (humans mysteriously lose the ability to reproduce) and District 9 (aliens arrive on earth and get shunted into concentration camps because of their otherness).

Because apocalypse movies take our world and put it in crisis mode, they can be deeply mentally stimulating and topical (see District 9 for its take on race and refugee-ism, or read World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War for criticism of Americans' soft and impractical skill sets). Of course, the best sort of apocalypse movies are the ones where humans are responsible for our own destruction. These movies let the screenwriters and audience mentally gripe about humanity's failings and how nuclear weapons (The Day After), environmental abuses (The Happening), or moral and religious failings (Legion) will certainly be the end of us all.

4) Survivalist Fantasies: As I mentioned above, people love to imagine themselves as a movie's hero or heroine, and we love to do it even more with apocalyptic movies. Every time I see one of these films with a friend, we come out of the theater wondering whether we would survive a nuclear winter or a zombie apocalypse. Would I be tough enough to kill my newly zombie-fied husband? Would I be smart enough to hole up in a safe cellar with lots of guns? Would I be brave and industrious enough to venture out for supplies before I starved?

These movies serve as a mental testing ground for us, a sort of training that we (hopefully) will never need. Perhaps imagining the worst and mentally planning for it is innately human; maybe these mental exercises are instinctual games we play to prepare ourselves for the worst. We used to spend every hour of our waking lives planning for a tiger attack or a long, vicious, food-less winter; now, we spend our Saturday nights planning how we would escape paralytic tree pollen and volcanic fumes.

5) Catharsis: My favorite apocalyptic film is not a sci fi movie or a disaster flick. Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal is really a historical drama about the black plague. It's relentlessly dark; everyone dies, and though the characters hope to make it through the next wave of disease, their hope is flimsy at best. Death wears a long black robe and stalks the main character. The movie's only jokes involve paintings of chess-playing skeletons. Everyone does a little death dance at the end.

The movie captures the apocalyptic mood of the Middle Ages when everyone really believed that God was wrecking his revenge upon the world's sinners in the form of black pustules and overwhelming agony. Its characters truly believe that the world is ending, that life is nothing but death and loss, and there's a finality to their attitude that goes far beyond pessimism or even fatalism.

Whenever I watch The Seventh Seal, I find myself wallowing in its dark mood, in its sense of utter defeat. I enjoy the feeling that nothing matters because everything and everyone is an instant away from death. The feeling is sickening and somehow freeing at the same time, and when I turn off my DVD player, I am inexplicably cheerful about having looked at the rotting underbelly of life and seen its worst. I don't feel grateful that my life is not so bad as the lives of the plague victims, and I don't value my health or my family any more than I did before. And yet, illogically, I feel better, somehow. Why?

Aristotle described catharsis as "the human soul [being] purged of its excessive passions" by watching another person's tragedy unfold on stage. The experience is pleasurable because it is healthful; once the audience's despair, fear, and hatred has been spent in empathy with the ill-fated actors, their emotional balance is restored and they are happy again.

Perhaps catharsis is why we love to watch our world end again and again: once we've seen it happen to someone else, felt the horror of death and the sorrow of loss through our hero or heroine, perhaps we don't need to worry about our potential for self-destruction any more. We already know what it will look like when it happens.

"Come Back Mister Scissorhands"

I occasionlly read The Best American Poetry blog, which is written by a series of weekly guest bloggers. This week, the guest blogger is Elena Karina Byrne, and today, she introduced her readers to Lynne Thompson's "Come Back Mister Scissorhands."

I really enjoyed this poem. It's weird, it's jumpy, it's associative, but I love how she does not drown in the mystery and tangentiality in this poem; she chooses a subject (a man from a dream) and lets his names whirl across his blank face like clouds across the sky. The result is a poem that is strange but clear, even though its clarity rises from gut instinct, not from logic.

I believe that this poem first appeared in Thompson's first collection of poetry Beg No Pardon, published by Perugia Press in 2007.

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Come Back Mister Scissorhands

By Lynne Thompson

In my dreams, his name is Hunger Unspoken. His name

is House Still Sleeping, is Cigarette, Wolf, and Cold Coffee.

Under my lids, his name cascades like snow,

slips away like black jade, one minute paraìso

then suddenly cara-de-cão or ninho des vespas

and I am as old as I am. In my useless reveries,

I speak more softly than the dying

when I call to him: night horn? root of a scream?

"Writing Is Just Thinking on Paper"

I spent yesterday morning revising a writing sample for a job application. As usual, I found myself struggling to keep my word count down. Wordiness is my great flaw as a writer; I tend to compose long complex sentences with too many words and too many ideas. I know, now, to be wary of my own prolixity, to be generous with my periods and quick with the delete button, regardless of whether I'm writing a blog post, a poem, or a cover letter.

Every writer has something they struggle with, no matter who they are or what they're writing. I think that the first step to being a good writer is psychological: it's accepting that writing is always a struggle and knowing that you have weaknesses as well as strengths, bad writing habits as well as innate talents.

Most beginning writers don't understand that writing is hard, hard work. The 18-year-olds I taught at Penn State liked to believe that writing was anything but struggle and revision and an uphill battle against language itself. In my composition and creative writing courses, there were a few expressions of this resistance that I heard again and again:

1) "Writing cannot be taught." Usually, this one reared its ugly head in creative writing courses and was used as an excuse to ignore constructive criticism. Because my writing has been wonderfully improved by reading great writers, listening to the advice of my brilliant professors, and scouring pages and pages of feedback from my workshop classmates, I'm almost offended when students tell me this. Not only does it devalue my teaching, but it seems to insult the many people whose knowledge, time, and generosity was invaluable to my development. In a classroom, learning how to write happens slowly, it's true, in small, nearly invisible increments that never seem like much on their own, but these changes add up over time. Besides, talent is just a starting point, not a free ride to success; you have to develop what you've been given, not stubbornly refuse to get better than you already are.

Maybe it's true that writing cannot be taught, at least not to an unwilling mind; it has to be actively learned by a dedicated student through practice, close observation, and the awareness that they can always be better.

2) "My writing is personal, and critiquing this poem is like criticizing who I am." People get all upset when you say critical things about their writing. I do it, you do it, we all do it. This happens because writing so often reflects our thoughts, and our thoughts are, in some way, ourselves. This means that our writing can sometimes feel like ourselves on paper. This thinking is natural, but it's also not true. Words are just words, and the way we put them together is a matter of instinct and accident and choice; our ideas can be expressed in a million different ways, and good writing is about finding the best possible way to do this. So if I tell a student that their story's plot doesn't make sense, that doesn't mean that they are illogical and faulty, just that their words aren't yet doing the work they were intended to do.

3) "Good writing just happens because of inspiration. If the writing isn't good, then I wasn't inspired and it's not my fault." First, "inspiration" can apply to ideas, but not to the medium expressing the ideas (in this case, words). If the sentences and images and paragraphs are crappy, you can't blame that on a lack of inspiration, just on a lack of revision. Second, even ideas usually need mental "revising"; that's what brainstorming, outlining, and thesis-writing are for: to take an idea from a hunch to a cohesive and persuasive argument. Do you think Shakespeare's plays just sort of happened? Or that the Declaration of Independence was knocked off in a half hour? Or that Descartes got to "I think, therefore I am" one afternoon while paddling in his bathtub?

That being said, there are a few instances of good writing spurting forth naturally. It happens to everyone once in a while, but even Allen Ginsberg spent months revising Howl and Jack Kerouac tinkered with On the Road before he published it. Anyone who's written for any length of time will tell you that revision is far more important than inspiration. I've revised this post about four times before I published it, and this is just a rant for a blog. So there.

4) "Judging writing's quality is subjective and based on personal opinion; therefore, no one should grade another person's writing." Most students who say this have never read really bad writing. In English classes, students are usually exposed to the best literature ever written, so they don't understand how difficult it is to read shoddily constructed, grammatically confusing, logically flimsy writing (only English teachers and publishers have to do that). Sentences with faulty grammar, paragraphs with convoluted structure, and essays with no clear message are all difficult to understand and remember. Any practiced reader can tell the difference between good writing (which calls little attention to itself because of its orderly, logical, elegant construction) and bad writing (which requires a furrowed brow and much rereading to understand).

I agree that preferring Virginia Woolf to William Faulkner is a matter of taste, but preferring Faulkner to the average freshman student's essay has nothing to do with opinion.

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I once got a fortune cookie that said "Writing is just thinking on paper," and, by God, I wish it was (wouldn't my life be easy then!). What this fortune cookie and most beginning writers don't understand is that writing is not quick or easy or a mirror-like reflection of the self. Heck, it's not even about pleasing oneself. Public writing (meaning classroom papers and published articles and creative writing) cannot be judged solely by the standards of its author. Writing is a social task, one that is dependent on the reader's comfort and understanding. No one would consider themselves a good conversationalist if their small talk amused them but always left their partner confused, annoyed, or bored, and the same is true for writing. Learning how to write well is not about practicing direct personal expression; it is about learning how to let go of your solipsism, to gain awareness of the world outside of you, and to express oneself carefully so that your readers can really hear what you have to say.

"A Small Breath": Of Ripeness and Rot

I've been busy applying for jobs this week, so I haven't been posting as much here as I would like. I did, however, spend last night making salsa with my mom. The recipe she uses involves cutting up lots and lots and lots of tomatoes, peppers, onions, and garlic; dumping in vinegar and a few spices; boiling for about an hour; and pouring the delicious mess into sterilized jars (note the empty jars heating at the back of the stove and the boiled rings and flats in the front).Because you don't boil the filled and lidded jars like you do in conventional canning, the salsa is only shelf-stable for three to six months.However, last month I made some sweet pickles with my grandmother the conventional way, and they'll stay fresh for at least a year, if not longer.The salsa turned out really well, and it's nice to have a healthy snack hanging around the house since it deters me from more baking!

I've been enjoying the local August produce here, the farmers' markets and contributions from friends' gardens, and I've been reading James Peterson's Vegetables, which covers the basics of how to cook different types of fresh veggies. Having grown up on canned and frozen vegetables, I've never cooked many types of fresh produce. I haven't tried any of Peterson's recipes yet, but his how-to section has given me the courage to take on the plastic sack of summer squash sitting on my parents' counter (delicious creamy gratin, here I come!).

The only problem with all this produce is how quickly it spoils, how willingly the peppers shrivel, the peaches wrinkle and sag, the cucumbers embitter and turn translucent, and the corn husks blight over with moldy blotches. My parents and I eat so much (nectarines for breakfast, tomatoes and cucumbers for lunch, peppers and corn and and zucchini for dinner, watermelon for dessert), and we still throw so much away. And outside, the weather mimics the produce, so that each day the air belches and smothers with its cloying heat, soggy humidity, and myriad stinks that rise from the over-heated earth and sagging, flaccid foliage. The sky is too ripe, too full, it seems, flushing with heat as the hemisphere teeters unwillingly on the edge of fall.

All this puts me in mind of Theodore Roethke's brilliant second collection The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948). It's a book full of vegetable life that is, for Roethke, rife with meaning and terror, the violence of life and the sensuous rot of death. He seems galled by the processes of the earth, and the poems that result are descriptively rich and emotional.

Here are two of my favorite poems from The Lost Son. Naturally, they appear one right after the other in the text.

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Root Cellar

Nothing would sleep in that cellar, dank as a ditch,

Bulbs broke out of boxes hunting for chinks in the dark,

Shoots dangled and drooped,

Lolling obscenely from mildewed crates,

Hung down long yellow evil necks, like tropical snakes.

And what a congress of stinks!--

Roots ripe as old bait,

Pulpy stems, rank, silo-rich,

Leaf-mould, manure, lime, piled against slippery planks.

Nothing would give up life:

Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath.

Forcing House

Vines tougher than wrists

And rubbery shoots,

Scums, mildews, smuts along stems,

Great cannas or delicate cyclamen tips,--

All pulse with the knocking pipes

That drip and sweat,

Sweat and drip,

Swelling the roots with steam and stench,

Shooting up lime and dung and ground bones,--

Fifty summers in motions at once,

As the live heat billows from pipes and pots.

"The Great Plains" and "The Good Earth"

Ian Frazier's The Great Plains is one of those wonderful books that surprised me at every turn. As I read, I never knew quite where we were heading, never expected that I would encounter Crazy Horse and hardy Russian wheat varieties and America's underground nuclear arsenal. I was also surprised at how much the book managed to teach me without feeling like a history text. Frazier really likes archival research and long lists of details and relating his encyclopedic knowledge of, say, Sitting Bull, to an extent that should be boring, but somehow Frazier manages to whip each grain of data into an emotional dust storm by the end of the book, linking ideas and characters and themes so that they all become unified and meaningful, the whole of the Midwest suddenly tied together and transformed within the dark and moving cloud of Frazier's words.

Not only did I love The Great Plains, but it also inspired me to read more Midwestern poets, something I've wanted to do since I began writing my thesis (a book-length manuscript of poetry about growing up in Kansas) at Penn State. Though being a Midwestern writer is nearly trendy these days (we had four panels of our very own at AWP's 2009 conference in Chicago!), there are very few terribly famous Midwestern poets, and those who are terribly famous (like Robert Bly and Albert Goldbarth) don't really like to talk too much about it. After all, real literature in America is about the mad and dirty streets of New York, the umbral woods of New England, the moss and humid corruption of the Deep South, and the zen mountains and forests of the West Coast, not about corn fields and highways. As if seeing horizon to horizon inhibits the writing of good poetry.

To get started, I checked out The Good Earth: Three Poets of the Prairie (2002). Ice Cube Press put out the slim volume as part of the Harvest Lecture Series, which is dedicated to the connections between "the natural environment and the spiritual realm" (according to the purpose statement at the beginning of the book). The eponymous three poets are Paul Engle, William Stafford, and James Hearst, none of whom I had read before this book.

I had heard of Paul Engle, however, as the influential director of the Iowa Writer's Workshop and the teacher of Flannery O'Connor and Robert Lowell (I'd recommend Mark McGurl's The Program Era for a detailed look at Engle's influence on Iowa's prestigious program). I had never heard of James Hearst at all, and I think, unfortunately, that my ignorance of both Hearst's and Engle's work is largely deserved, at least based on the selection found here. Engle's poems in this collection are sing-songy (and not in a fun T.S. Eliot sort of way). They present pretty images that do nothing more than sit on the page and stare back at you. Hearst, on the other hand, comes right out and says what he means but skips that whole showing business (as in "Birthplace" when he tells us there's a decrepit barn before him that makes him "tremble to think how things / Outlive the hands that used them").

Stafford, on the other hand, I mostly liked, and not just because he was born in Hutchinson, Kansas and went to KU. Another Kansas poet, Denise Low, introduces his section, calling his poems "Likeable, yes, but [. . .] not naive, primitive paintings. The poems are subtle, dark, Godly and paradoxical at once. [. . . But] they are not stereotyped rural landscapes of barns and windvanes." Low later describes how Stafford wrote to recapture a "dream vision" he experienced while camping near the Cimarron River, a vision that impressed upon him "the size and serenity of the earth and its neighbors in the sky."

Though only eight of Stafford's poems appear in The Good Earth, I liked them enough to check out The Way It Is, a selection of his work published in 1998. I'll surely say more about it once I'm deeper in, but in the meantime, I'll leave you with my current favorite William Stafford poem. It's a poem about choice and compassion and, I think, human convenience and cruelty. I can never help blaming the speaker, even though I don't know what else he could have done.

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Travelling Through the Dark
By William Stafford

Traveling through the dark I found a deer
dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.
It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:
that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead.

By glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the car
and stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing;
she had stiffened already, almost cold.
I dragged her off; she was large in the belly.

My fingers touching her side brought me the reason--
her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting,
alive, still, never to be born.
Beside that mountain road I hesitated.

The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights;
under the hood purred the steady engine.
I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;
around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.

I thought hard for us all--my only swerving--,
then pushed her over the edge into the river.

Lemony Spritz Cookies

The whole process of making Lemony Spritz Cookies started with a vague memory and a craving. A few weeks ago, I was thinking about my mother's cookie press, which she dug out of her basement in 2001 when I was still in high school. She had never used it, and I only used it once. But I remembered those cookies for their crumbly, buttery deliciousness, and I couldn't resist making them again when I found the cookie press box nestled between recipe books in my mother's pantry.

The box looks like it was sold in the '80s and has both English and French on it. Inside, the illustrated instructions are written in English, but there's also a list of recipes written in German. I suppose this is because spritz cookies are German in origin and are popular in Scandinavian countries at Christmas time ("spritz" is German for "squirt" or "spray").

I followed the recipe that came on the typed supplement sheet, and the cookies turned out splendidly. They were just as I remembered them: soft, cakey, and floury, with the same sort of dense, crumbly texture that you find when biting into a pecan sandie (a texture that comes, I think, from using only one egg--or in the case of sandies, no eggs--and using pressure to make the thick dough hold together).

I used butter instead of margarine, but I would recommend sticking with margarine or even shortening if you have it. Once the kitchen got hot, the dough seemed to have a harder time keeping its shape and sticking to the parchment paper-covered baking sheets; an artificial source of fat might not have this problem. I also countered the softening dough by chilling it in the fridge between press refills and making sure the pans were completely cooled before I re-spritzed them. Be careful not to over-bake these. Take them out at the slightest hint of brown at the edges or else they'll taste dry and burnt.

I used lemon flavored gelatin for these, which made the cookies slightly tangy but not too lemony (I'm not sure I would have recognized the taste as lemon if I hadn't made these myself!). I suspect that strawberry gelatin would also make for mild, fragrant, and delicious baby pink cookies.

Also, you should note that this recipe makes a lot of cookies with a standard cookie press. This doesn't mean that these take a long time (the cooking time is short and you can fit a lot of cookies on a single sheet), but it does mean you'll have a lot of deliciousness to go around. Since spritzes are traditionally Christmas cookies, perhaps you're meant to make them in big batches and give them away as gifts!
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Gelatin Spritz Cookies
From Kitchenmate

3 1/2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 1/2 cups margarine
1 cup sugar
1 small box gelatin (any flavor)
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla

Cream margarine, sugar, and gelatin. Add egg and vanilla and beat well. Gradually add flour and baking powder and blend until smooth. Fill Kitchenmate Cookie Press with dough. Using cookie discs, press cookies onto an ungreased cookie sheet. Bake at 400 degrees for 7-10 minutes. Enjoy!

Laura Moriarty: Best-Selling Author and Lawrence Native

Last Thursday, I went to a reading by novelist Laura Moriarty at the Lawrence Public Library. The reading was great fun; Moriarty was outgoing and entertaining (which you can't always expect from an author), and her new book sounds fascinating. I'm especially interested to read it because the heroine (Veronica) grew up in a suburb of Kansas City, attended KU, and is a resident assistant in the dorms, all of which I share in common with her. I think it will be exciting and strange to read a novel set in Kansas about someone who is at least a little like myself.

Anyway, the article below is an attempt to write a newspaper-style report on the reading. I was trying to make it terse, clean, informative, and focused on Moriarty as a writer. If you have any suggestions for improving it, please let me know! And if you want to know more about Moriarty as a person and her life in Lawrence, you can read this great little interview from Gavon Laessig of the Lawrence Journal-World.
_______________

Lawrencians Fall for Local Novelist
August 8, 2009

Not every novelist compares herself to a Border Collie and forces her characters to eat meat, but Laura Moriarty, a Lawrence resident and creative writing professor at the University of Kansas, is not every novelist. As she read to a crowd of over 70 readers at the Lawrence Public Library on August 6, the young author was relaxed, personable, and often funny, easily charming her hometown crowd, many of whom (if you go by their questions) had already read both of her previous novels: The Center of Everything, published in 2003, and 2007's The Rest of Her Life.

Moriarty's newest novel While I'm Falling, released this month by Hyperion, follows Veronica, a 20-year-old junior at KU, as she deals with the aftermath of her father returning from a business trip to find a young, shirt-less roofer sleeping in his bed. An expensive divorce follows, and Veronica finds herself scraping through college as her parents battle over money.

Moriarty weaves several storylines together in what she describes as her most plot-oriented novel yet: the parents' divorce; Veronica's mother's waning finances; Veronica's dislike of her job as a dorm resident assistant; Veronica's childhood friend Haley who undergoes a radical transformation to become the black-clad “Simone”; and Jimmy, a suspicious security guard who involves Veronica in his shady dealings.

Though Moriarty read two sections from her novel, she spent most of the hour-long reading responding to the audience's questions, including the perennial favorite of readers everywhere, “Is this book autobiographical?”

Though Moriarty also attended KU (where she earned a B.A. in Social Work and an M.A. in Creative Writing), worked as an R.A. in the dorms, and had parents who divorced while she was in college, Moriarty is adamant that, from there, she and Veronica are completely different people. When working on Falling, Moriarty made Veronica eat meat in as many scenes as possible to help keep Veronica “distinct” from her staunchly vegetarian self.

Moriarty says that the secret to her success as a novelist is writing 1,000 words a day, no matter how long it takes. She finds the most challenging part of writing to be blending her plot lines together and knowing when she should write about each character and conflict. She plans the details of each character's storyline very carefully before eventually “braiding” these lines together into a single plot sequence. When writing The Center of Everything, she used a chart hung on the wall of her home to stay organized; for Falling, she followed a very thorough outline.

As the evening wrapped up, one reader said, “You are a very prolific young author. Have you already started on your next novel?” Moriarty nodded and smiled. “Oh, yes,” she said. “The hardest times for me are when I'm coming up with an idea for a novel, so I try to start on the next one as quickly as possible. I'm like a Border Collie,” she laughed. “I like to know where I'm going.”

Berube's "From Where I Sit--Measuring the Unmeasurable"

I'm out in Lawrence this afternoon, having iced coffee at a local coffee shop, blogging, and basking in my status as a Gen Y cliche (all I need to complete the scene is a light-weather scarf and a bad texting habit!). I've spent my day hitting up temp agencies and stopping by a potential employer's office to insinuate myself with HR.

I've also been on Twitter, which lead me to this brilliant little article from the Times Higher Education. The author is Michael Berube, an English professor from Penn State (which is where I got my MFA). I've never taken a class with Dr. Berube, and I don't remember ever meeting him, but I loved this piece.

Berube believes that "the humanities help us come to terms with the possibility that some forms of difference might be unresolvable and that some kinds of conflict might be intractable." Though today's academic culture repeatedly demands easily digestible "assessments" and evaluations of "impact" (whatever that means) for its programs, Berube admits that "We do not know how to test people to see if we have enhanced their suppleness of mind or their love of lifelong learning."

This brief opinion piece seems especially meaningful to me today. Though I know that I am intelligent, reliable, professional, and capable of adapting to almost any work situation, I'm having a hard time getting a job. This isn't too surprising based on my degrees (a BA in English and Humanities and an MFA in creative writing), but it frustrates me that these degrees mean almost nothing to potential employers when, to me, they represent years of personal and intellectual development. Not only would my skills as a writer and editor be almost nonexistent without my education, but I can guarantee that I would be a poorer thinker and a less generous individual if I had not attended KU and Penn State.

When I compare the person I am now to the person I was at eighteen, I find that I'm less likely to judge others; I have more tools to help me understand new ideas and novel situations; I'm less likely to believe everything that I'm told, but I'm also less likely to instantly dismiss ideas that make me uncomfortable or challenge my previous conceptions; I'm able to see the larger implications and assumptions behind others' opinions, ideas, and beliefs; and of course, I'm a quicker and deeper reader and a more precise writer.

To me, all of these talents seem invaluable, and if I had the choice to go back to the beginning of my education, I would never change my majors or earn a different graduate degree. Sure, I'd work more internships and be less afraid of talking to my professors and network more aggressively, but I would never give up my liberal arts education and the skills it has given me.

Now, all I can hope for is an employer who agrees with my assessment of myself and my education. I need to find a company that is willing to make an investment in me, a company that knows that a well-trained mind, a strong work ethic, and natural talent may be more valuable in the long run than a person with a solid skill set and little else to offer.

Headlines: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly Truth

I've always been a big fan of The Kansas City Star, which I think of as my hometown newspaper and read regularly whenever I'm in KC. Here's a round-up of my favorite headlines from the past few days.

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Sunday, Matt Campbell reported that Kansas City is turning a portion of its biosolids (read: human poo) into fertilizer for trees and biofuel crops. According to Campbell's article, the city is currently turning 8,000 pounds of dry biosolids into fertilizer each year and plans on expanding the program in the future. The system helps the city save money by reducing the amount of waste the Water Department has to burn, by providing cheaper saplings for planting in public parks, and by contributing income to the city budget in the form of biofuel sales.

Not only is this process amazing, but it's especially impressive in Kansas City, a place that has, until recently, never seemed particularly interested in going green. But then again, large-scale composting has come to KC, so maybe we're not as environmentally backwards as we Midwesterners sometimes seem to be.

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More bad news: Today, Emily Van Zandt and Chad Day (who, ironically, are recent college grads employed as summer interns at the Star) revealed that college grads may have diplomas, but they're still missing their paychecks. Van Zandt and Day profile four local college graduates who can't find work, despite their degrees in civil engineering, music education, communications, and Latin American studies.

It's a good article, but not a terribly surprising one since I'm also struggling to find my first post-graduation job. This piece did make me wonder, though, why such articles get published and read at all. Each new issue of every paper in the country is running articles about the state of the economy and how high the unemployment rate has soared, yet nothing visibly changes day to day; there's nothing new to make this "news" exigent. So why are newspapers giving this space, and why do I find myself reading these pieces again and again?

Well, to be honest, they help me feel a little better when I don't get called back for an interview. So there.

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Mary McNamara's piece on the shrewish business woman type in American comedies first appeared in The Los Angeles Times but was reprinted in today's Star. McNamara uses Katherine Heigl's role in The Ugly Truth as an example of how most comedic movies depict independent women: as high-strung, neurotic, cold, and bitchy, at least until the manly co-star proves the woman vulnerable and persuades her into leave her career for love. McNamara argues that actresses like Heigl (and Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston) should avoid these Taming of the Shrew-style roles in movies and stick to the richer, more realistic, and less misogynistic roles found on television shows like In Treatment or The Closer.

While I don't watch enough TV to know whether or not I share McNamara's preference for women on the small screen, I do know that she's dead-on when it comes to romcoms like The Devil Wears Prada. Plots like these are why I want to hurl a copy of A Room of One's Own at my TV screen every time a Jennifer Aniston movie comes on late-night cable.

Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cookies

I've been looking for a way to jazz up the standard Toll House Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe for a few years now. I love chocolate chip cookies, of course, but they don't have much of a wow factor, and sometimes, they're just not chocolaty enough for me. Fortunately, I stumbled across Cathy Lowe's recipe for Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cookies on FoodNetwork.com. They were not at all difficult to make, but they were vastly superior to the chocolate chocolate chip cookies you can make following the old Toll House recipe; those cookies always had a corpsy grayish color and a plasticy texture.

Lowe's recipe, however, made for cookies with a lovely rich brown color; a crisp, macaroon-like shell; and a line of soft, brownie-like texture on the inside. To me, their natural cracks and fissures look a little like half-cooled lava covered with a broken crust of rock. Maybe I should call these Lava Crispies?

Anyway, their chocolate flavor is rich and very noticeable, even in bites without chocolate chips. My only criticism of the recipe is that the cookies dried out and turned hard very quickly, even when stored in an air-tight container. They're not the best cookies to keep around the house for a week, so it's better to make this recipe only when you plan on sharing!

I took the FoodNetwork.com reviewers' suggestion to bake the cookies at 350 degrees. At that temperature (and with my insulated cookie pans), the cookies took about 11 minutes per batch. I didn't grease my cookie sheets, but I did use parchment paper. I also used miniature chocolate chips so the chocolate chip texture was distributed over more cookie space. One last thing: I would suggest making the teaspoon of salt scant if you're sensitive to sodium (I was always thirsty after a couple of these!).

Enjoy!

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Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cookies

Recipe Courtesy of Cathy Lowe

Ingredients

• 2 1/4 cups flour
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 2 sticks butter, softened
• 1 cup granulated sugar
• 1 cup packed brown sugar
• 2 large eggs, beaten
• 1 tablespoon vanilla
• 1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa
• 2 cups chocolate chips, 2 Hershey's chocolate bars, chopped or M&M'S
• 1 cup chopped walnuts (optional)

Directions

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. In a bowl stir together flour, salt, and baking soda. In another large bowl stir together butter, both sugars, eggs, vanilla and cocoa. Gradually stir flour mixture into butter mixture and mix until combined. Stir chocolate chips and walnuts, if using, and stir to distribute evenly.

For cookies: Drop dough by tablespoonfuls onto greased baking sheets and bake about 10 minutes. Cool on a baking rack.

For bars: Pat dough into a greased 9 inch square baking pan and bake 20 to 25 minutes. Cut into squares when cooled

From FoodNetwork.com on Mon Aug 03 2009

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