Cathy Day's Blog, page 5

How I travel back in time, hold myself accountable, and refrain from smoking

from Somewhere in Time, in which Christopher Reeve wills himself back to 1912.

I’ve been blogging a lot lately, just not here on WordPress. I’ve been using Pinterest and Tumblr for quick posts. The interfaces are simple, and the stakes are low because not a lot of people follow me there.

What am I blogging about? Well, they aren’t “essay-like” blog posts, as you are used to here. These are more visual, like a bulletin board or scrapbook. Or they’re more utilitarian, like a ledger. That’s why I don’t think to share them here on the Big Thing.

A few years ago, I went to an exhibit at the Morgan Library on diaries. I was especially interested in how artists use them.

I spent a lot of time looking at the writing journal John Steinbeck kept as he wrote The Grapes of Wrath. Here’s a great post from Austin Kleon’s blog about that.

Steinbeck’s daily ledger for Grapes of Wrath

I want to hold myself accountable, too, like Steinbeck did. That’s why I started this little Tumblr blog called Every Day I Write the Book.

I also use Tumblr (and Pinterest) like scrapbooks. A place to archive the images and maps I find.

Sometimes I just reblog a picture.

Sometimes I add a picture to a scrapbook I keep for Linda.

Sometimes I make digital scrapbooks comprised of images and maps of one particular place, like Villa Trianon.

The pages I’ve been writing this week are set at Villa Trianon, and I look at these pictures to sort of “will” myself into that time and place.

I suppose it’s no different from cutting something out of a magazine and pasting it down so that you can go back and look at it later.

If you’ve seen Somewhere in Time, you know what I’m talking about.

Sometimes I do more than just clip images. I actually start writing about what they mean to me. Proto blog posts. Like this one on the so-called “classic” look.

In this article, Edwidge Danticat talks about how she creates bulletin boards so that she can see her ideas and the images that inspire her, as well as the overall plot structure.

That’s what I’m doing, too, I guess, except my bulletin board is digital. And share-able.

But this research can’t overtake the actual writing. Instead, I play with my bulletin board/scrapbooks as a way into the writing or when it’s time to take a break from writing–instead of smoking. (The urge to do so has been strong lately for some reason.)

I’ve also been watching period dramas to keep myself thinking in the past.

A Room with a View, both the 2007 and 1986 versions
Ridicule
Austenland
My Immortal Beloved
The Other Boleyn Girl
A Royal Affair
The King’s Speech
Agora

Another way that I will myself into the past isn’t digital at all. I read books that were published at the time I’m writing about. Right now, I’m reading a novel by the Duchess of Sutherland, who was a friend of Linda’s. It’s not very good, but the book smells old, the details are marvelous, and it definitely transports me into that milieu.

If you have any other suggestions for me, let me know. Good luck with your own writing projects. Thanks, as always, for reading.

[And so ends today's writing warm ups. Time to start writing for real.]

Research Notes: Looking at Wedding Pictures

It should come as no surprise that during the school year, I blog a lot about teaching, and in the summer, I blog a lot about writing. Because that’s where my head is.

Last night, I did a little research on the technology that made it possible to print pictures in newspapers and magazines.

In a nutshell: for a long time, it was very hard.

But it got me thinking about how easy it is now. Think about how addicting Tumblr and Facebook are. Think about how addicting it is to be able to Google whatever you want to look at. I mean seriously, how do we even stop ourselves? How do we not gorge ourselves visually every single day?

A short list of things I’ve wanted to see in the last few days.

What it looked like on board the RMS Oceanic, whether the first-class promenade deck was enclosed or open to the air, what a first-class stateroom looked like, etc. Research for my novel.
What Winnaretta Singer, the Princess Edmond de Polignac, looked like. Research for my novel.
What fans thought of the Hannibal season 2 finale, so I spent an hour looking at their GIFs
What this big-ass fancy house down the street from me looks like on the inside. As soon as the for sale sign went up, I Googled that shit up. Who doesn’t like to see the inside of big-ass fancy houses?
Randomly, I Googled a woman I worked with 20 years ago and spent 30 minutes looking at her Instagram pictures. She’s on vacation right now in northern CA. She’s having a great time.
What Kim and Kanye’s wedding looked like. I don’t even like them, and yet, I wanted to know what they wore and what decadent lengths they went to in staging their wedding event. Like the giant wall of flowers. Why do you need this when you can look out at the beautiful Italian landscape? I don’t understand.

That got me thinking. About pictures.

About being able to TAKE a picture,
about being able to SHARE a picture,
and being able to SEE a picture.
how we take this for granted.

Imagine it’s 1895. That’s the year Consuelo Vanderbilt married the Duke of Marlborough. Who cares, you say? Well, imagine what would happen if Paris Hilton married Prince Harry, what a monstrous pictorial orgasm that would be.

Okay, so you live in 1895 and you want to know about this wedding. A real Cinderella story. American girl becomes a princess—well, a duchess. What does she wear? What was it like? You could stand outside the church (as thousands did) or you could buy a newspaper, like the New York Times. But this is the best they could do, picture wise: engravings.

The lovely couple!

Her lovely bridesmaids.

The dress!

The only photograph I could find of the wedding day was here:

It’s a news photo, but see, this picture couldn’t be shared. Because the newspapers couldn’t reproduce photographs yet.

The Society Portrait

The character I’m writing about was obsessed with society portraiture in all its incarnations and mediums. See these scrapbooks? They belonged to her. 89 volumes. That’s what they’re full of. Society coverage clipped from magazines and newspapers.

In times gone by, a young woman of means was painted (and then, in time, photographed) to commemorate her engagement, her wedding, the birth of her children, etc.

In times gone by, these pictures were hung on the wall in homes but also published in newspapers.

In times gone by, these were called the Society Pages or the women’s pages, but now they’re called the Style or Community pages.

A friend of mine who worked for a mid-sized city newspaper told me once that, when they moved their paper online, these pages received by far the most number of hits. This doesn’t surprise me at all.

It’s worth remembering that the reason Consuelo’s wedding was covered in the Times and so many other places is that she was rich and famous.

Billions of weddings have taken place on this earth and there’s nothing to remember them by except maybe a document with signatures or a name in a Bible or maybe one damn picture of two people standing stiffly for the camera. For posterity.

I have seen every picture of my parents’ wedding. There are maybe 15 total. When I was little, I used to look at them over and over again.

Those pictures were never published in any magazine or newspaper–except maybe the Peru Daily Tribune, my hometown paper. (I need to ask her.) For one day, my mother got to be a celebrity, a public figure, a taste of what Consuelo Vanderbilt experienced.

My mom’s wedding photos aren’t Google-able. But if they were, you’d probably look at them, wouldn’t you?

If there’d been Facebook in 1967, I’m sure she would have shared them.

In my hometown, there were two professional photographers: Mr. Fincher and Mr. Waltz. If you had money, you hired one of these fellas to take pictures at your event or to take a studio portrait which you’d submit to the local paper.

If you didn’t have money, as my family did not, you took pictures of your wedding yourself.

Today there are five photographers in Peru that come up on Google, but I’m sure that there are actually at least double or triple that number.

Today, even a person of modest means can hire someone to take super-amazing photos at their wedding, photos that look like something out of a magazine.

Because that’s the dream, right? To have our pictures look as good as a celebrity’s pictures. And thanks to how easy it is to take, share, and look at pictures these days, that’s exactly what happens. All the time.

Here’s my point

(And I think this idea needs to be an essay, not a blog post…)

People think that smartphones and the internet make us narcissistic and antisocial, but I disagree. We have always been addicted to information and images.

Today’s devices are only a different way to do what we have always done: look and look and look. 

 

How Linda Got Divorced in 1912

New York Times, 1912

I was doing a little research the other day on Linda Porter’s very public divorce from her first husband. Here are some clippings (posted on my Tumblr) that tell the whole sordid story.

Further evidence of the fame and notoriety Linda brought with her into her marriage to Cole, who was pretty much a nobody when they met.

Back to the book…

P.S. This is the first blog post I’ve ever done from my phone. 

17 years in the tenure track

Employment History

1995: I earn my MFA.

1995-1997: For the next two years, I work as a full-time instructor, teaching a 4/4 for less than $20,000 a year.  But I have health insurance for the first time in my life. I’m 26 years old.

Note: Titles for contingent faculty:

Instructor
Lecturer
Visiting Lecturer
Visiting Writer
Visiting Assistant Professor
also: Assistant Professor

1997-2000: I get my first tenure-track job at Mankato State University, now Minnesota State University-Mankato. I work with wonderful people. However, my then-partner gets a job out East.

2000-2005: I get my second tenure-track job at The College of New Jersey, formerly known as Trenton State College. I don’t bring any years toward tenure with me, nor do I think to ask for them. I work with wonderful people. With sadness, my partner and I part ways. In 2004, my first book is published and I receive a positive vote for tenure, but it isn’t official until the Board of Trustees votes on it. In an effort to get closer to family, I go on the job market.

2005-2010: I get my third tenure-track job at the University of Pittsburgh, aka Pitt. Again, I don’t bring any years toward tenure with me. I’ve now spent eight years in the tenure stream. Again, I work with wonderful people. In 2008, my second book is published. In 2009, I get married. A few months later, I get an email from someone at Ball State University (where my brother went to college) asking me do I care if a bunch of students turn my first book into a musical? Sure. Whatever. Then I go visit the Virginia Ball Center and hear the music and meet the students and faculty (making the musical is their only class!) and fall in love a little. A month later, I find out Ball State is hiring a fiction writer. And even though I’m just a few months away from turning in my tenure materials at Pitt, I decide that I really need to apply for this job at Ball State. It’s probably my last chance to get a job in my home state, which–I’ve finally, finally realized–is where I want to live and work and serve. And miracle of miracles, I get the job.

2010-present. I get my fourth tenure-track job at Ball State University. This time, I negotiate and bring three years toward tenure (I’m very grateful for this, thank you, thank you). I’ve now spent thirteen years in the tenure stream. I’m 42 years old. Again, I work with wonderful people. In 2011, I apply for promotion to Associate Professor. In 2012, I apply for tenure. For reasons I can’t fully explain, these things take lots of time to become official, and now, seventeen years after I got that first job at Mankato State University, I finally have tenure. I’ll be 46 in a few months, and on July 1, I will start a new job as the Assistant Chair of Operations of the English Department at Ball State. Most people my age have been serving in administration positions for years; let’s just say I’m due.

Summary

It took me a very long time and much, much heartache, and I don’t even want to talk about the lifetime earnings I’ve given up, sigh, but I’m finally in the exact right job in the exact right place. I don’t know too many academics who are fortunate enough to get a job in the geographic location they desire most.

I’m very lucky.

I think that if was 26 today, not 46, facing the academic job market in creative writing, such as it is, I probably would be writing my own “QuitLit” essay here instead of what I’ve written.

I’d probably be a contingent faculty member somewhere, or else be in a TT job in a place where I don’t want to live. I think I’d probably be contemplating leaving academia and getting a job in Indianapolis or Cincinnati.

I recognize that I’m fortunate to have gotten not one but four TT jobs, and at least part of that reason is pure chance, dumb luck: I entered the job market at a fortuitous time. Look at the chart below. Look at how many new BA/BFA programs were created between 1994 and 2004, the time I entered the job market! Also consider how many potential applicants for those jobs were being produced by the much smaller number of MFA and PhD programs that existed at that time.

Sometimes, when I’m feeling crappy, I think: What if I’d stayed at Mankato or TCNJ or Pitt? What would my rank be by now? How much money would I be earning at this point? But then I realize I wouldn’t have written the books I’ve written nor met my husband. I wouldn’t have been able to help my grandma die. I wouldn’t have been there the day my nephew was born. I’d see my parents less. I’d be helping young writers in Minnesota or New Jersey or Pennsylvania. I’d be an expatriate Hoosier. Once, that was my dream, but then I got older and my dreams changed.

This is the way my life turned out. This is my employment history, but as Sarah Kendzior says:

You are not your job. You are how you treat people.

To that I’d add: Your identity as a writer isn’t dependent on the school where you teach–or even if you teach. Your identity as a writer depends on your answer to one very simple question: Does your job (whatever it is) make it possible for you to keep body and soul together and get good writing done?

I’ve been asking myself that question for seventeen years, and finally, the answer is yes.

 

Thirteen years later…

Three years ago, I wrote this post for my novel-writing students about my progress on my book about Linda Porter. At that point it had been 10 years. Sigh.

Finals are over. I’m back to the novel. I’ve got about 300 pages at this point. I’m not sure how many more I’m going to need because I haven’t made up my mind where to end it. I’ve got a notion. We’ll see if it works!

I’m going to try and go off the grid for awhile so I can get a lot of work done during May and June. Emphasis on “try.”

In the meantime, I thought you might enjoy reading this old post about the circuitous route writing a novel can take. May it inspire you to keep going with your own baggy monster.

My week: Stories, Sagamores, and the Cure

This is a Storify. It’s interactive. If I shared something this week that looks interesting, click on it and off you go.

Do you like this? I sort of dig it. However, if you already follow me on Twitter, you might find it redundant.

Let me know.

A linked story about linked stories

Jenny Smith

First, an anecdote.

I “met” Jenny Smith when I was teaching at the University of Pittsburgh and she was a graduate student at Indiana University. She’d decided to write her dissertation on the short-story cycle/linked stories/novel-in-stories form, and one of her classmates at IU, Pat Maley said, “You should read The Circus in Winter.”

Pat, you see, had been one of my students at The College of New Jersey, which is where I taught before Pitt.

Pat Maley

When I heard that someone from Indiana was writing her dissertation on the linked stories form, I got really excited. I agreed to be interviewed by her. “So, you went to Ball State?” I said. “My brother went there.”

At the time, I had no idea that the book would be adapted into a musical by Ball State students, nor that I’d later end up teaching there.

Time passed.

Periodically, I wondered, “Whatever happened to that person who was writing her dissertation on the short story cycle?”

The book was adapted into a musical, and Pat wrote about it for Stage magazine. He even came to the NAMT festival so I could hang out with him. He’s a professor now, too, at Centenary College in New Jersey.

Time passed.

And then today, I took a good look at a recent post on our department’s blog. It went up last week, but I hadn’t read it yet. Jenny Smith? Why is that name so familiar. Then I got to the end of the post. Oh! It’s her.

Jenny teaches at Concordia University in Chicago and her book Provisional Identities: The American Short-Story Cycle will be out soon with Rodopi. Hooray!

Here is her dissertation, “One Story, Many Voice: Problems of Unity in the Modern Short Story Cycle.”

And here is her article from TriQuarterly, “Born in the Workshop: The MFA and the Short Story Cycle.”

Thank you, Dr. Smith, for doing this work.

And thank you universe for bringing her to my little book.

[This is a crosspost between #iamlinking and The Big Thing.]

All Fired Up About (Week of April 20-26)

Last Lecture: You’re part of a small army. What will you fight for?

A small-army meetup led by Chris Guillebeau

At the end of the semester, I write a post which functions like a “last lecture” to my students. Here’s one on that perennial question, “Am I a writer?” And here’s another on “What matters more: story or sentences?” Given that one of my classes was mentioned yesterday on Salon.com, I thought I’d focus this semester’s last lecture on the topic of literary citizenship and why I teach it.

What comes next? 

I’ve always done a last lecture, even before I had a blog.

For 15 years, I’ve ended my creative writing classes by showing students how to submit work to literary magazines. This is nothing special; lots of creative writing teachers do this. You bring in a huge stack of magazines, show students how to research where to send their work, how to write a cover letter, how to keep track of submissions, how to deal with the inevitable rejections.

I showed students my rejections. I showed them bad cover letters (names redacted) that I’d swiped from a friend who edited a literary magazine. I talked about how long it can take to place a story—months or years. I ended by saying, “If you want to be a writer, this is the next step you need to take.”

Generally, I got three types of reactions:

Some students got excited about the process of taking the next step.
Some freaked out. They said, “Why didn’t you tell us this sooner? We should have been doing this the whole time!”
Some students zoned out.

I want to talk about these three types of students.

The 1’s who get excited

The 1’s would have pursued a writing life even if I had never talked about how to submit work. Thank god for them. The end.

The 2’s who freak out

The 2’s might pursue the writing life as well, but they are very anxious. To them, I’d say, “No, you should NOT have learned about publishing at the beginning. You’re an apprentice. You’re learning. Most of you aren’t even ready to submit.”

But the truth is that I didn’t teach this sooner because nobody in higher education teaches undergraduate creative writing as a “path to publication” or “employment.” Few faculty talk about publication or professionalization at all, and certainly, nobody puts it first. Not even in graduate programs. For years and years, professionalization has been an anathema in creative writing programs. We aren’t like a journalism or professional writing program. That’s just not what we do. That is changing a little, and I think that’s a good thing, for the most part.

If you thought it would be otherwise, if you thought that we’d teach you in some sort of direct way how to write a best-selling novel or how to make a living, then I’m really sorry.

Why did you believe it would be otherwise?

Well, it certainly wasn’t because we promised that. Here is a list of all undergraduate creative writing programs in the country with links to their websites, and I don’t think you will find any promises other than “we will help you be a better writer.”

The reason you believed that a creative writing program would or should “teach you” how to “get a job as a writer” is that our entire culture has shifted towards this way of thinking. Even the POTUS thinks this way.

Here’s an example.

And why shouldn’t you expect college to function as job training? You are coming of age in difficult times, my students. I know.

But the truth is that arts programs have studied the long-term employment outcomes of their graduates and determined that no, they aren’t all working at Starbucks. They aren’t all working as artists either, which is what they probably wanted, but they are gainfully employed and use what they learned in college in a variety of ways.

This topic is too big for this post, but suffice it to say that a.) you have good reasons to be so anxious, but also b.) you don’t.

The 3’s who zone out

It’s the 3’s who I really worry about. The reason they zone out when I talk about publishing is that they really have no desire to publish. When I ask you to tell me why you’re majoring or minoring in creative writing, I get answers like this:

Because I thought it would be fun.
Because I like to read.
Because I like to read, and it seemed more practical than majoring in literature.
Because I didn’t enjoy any other majors, and then I remembered how much I liked reading stories, so….
Because I fell in love with the Harry Potter books, and I figured if J.K. Rowling can do it, so can I.
Because I’ve participated in NaNoWriMo.
Because you have to major in something.

Please understand that I think that all these reasons are valid.

I’m worried about you, and I’m not the only one. I participated in a roundtable interview recently for Scratch magazine, and Dinty Moore who teaches at Ohio University said:

Some students are going to be relentless, unstoppable over the next 15 years until they finally write a book of poetry or a novel that gets them noticed, and gets them on the track for their career. Those students are going to teach themselves; you can’t stop them. But it’s the hundreds of creative majors, or thousands across the country, who aren’t going to go on to be writers—they’re the ones I worry about, who are getting lost, and I want to convince them that writing is not just one path.

Have I shown you some paths, dear students? I’ve tried mightily to give you some stars to steer by.

You’re part of something bigger than yourself

In a few days, my department will graduate 20 newly minted creative writing majors. Maybe you’re one of them.

When I graduated from college in 1991, there were only 10 undergraduate creative writing programs in the country. Today there are 592.

Let’s pretend that 20 students per per program is the average nationwide.

So if you take 20 students times 592, that means that every year, about 12,000 creative writing undergraduates are being loosed upon the world.

You’re a member of a small army. What will you fight for?

When everything changed for me

In 2008, I changed my last-class lecture from “How to submit your work” to “How to be a literary citizen.”

I made this change after reading this post on the Brevity blog. Finally! I had a name for the activity younger writers were engaged in.

Around that time, I’d started asking myself hard questions about my purpose as a teacher of creative writing. This happened because I’d joined Facebook in 2007, and suddenly I was privy to the lives my former students were leading. Some of them were very unhappy and in a lot of debt. Had I contributed to their debt—even passively?

I realized I was part of what D.G. Myers calls “the elephant machine,” a system in which creative writers create more creative writers. I asked myself: Was this a good thing that was happening?

Also in 2008, I read this post by writer Chris Guillebeau, “How to recruit a small army.”

That’s when everything clicked. I decided to stop teaching creative writing as “skills building” and start teaching it as “identify building.”

I wanted my classes to make students “feel like real writers.”

But what if they didn’t feel that way? Was that bad?

God, no.

What I’m saying is this: If you aren’t sure whether or not you want to “be” a writer, that’s fine.

If you think that “being” a writer means publish publish publish, then I want you stop being so focused on flooding the world with your words and start making the world a better place for all words.

If you think that majoring in creative writing means that the only thing you can “be” is a writer or a college professor, then I want you to stop thinking that, because it’s not true. There are many ways to live a literary life even if you never step foot into another institution of higher learning, even if you never write another word of your own imaginative writing. There’s still so much good you can do.

Whether you’re an 1, 2, or 3 kind of student, I want you to be a literary citizen. I want you to go out there and fight the good fight. These are the basic principles.

If you’re a creative writing teacher reading this, please consider this: other disciplines instill a sense of social justice in their majors. Perhaps creative writing should turn its attention to instilling in its majors the literary equivalent of social justice. We could create a corps of people armed and ready to support literary culture whether they “become” writers or not.

Maybe we can create leaders as much as we are creating writers.

If you’d like to learn more, follow @LitCitizen on Twitter or “like” Literary Citizenship on Facebook. You can also subscribe to my course blog here.

Circus is going to Goodspeed

The good news was announced over the weekend: the musical The Circus in Winter will be produced at Goodspeed Musicals in Connecticut this fall from Oct. 23-Nov. 16.

Oh yeah, I’m going. 

The other bit of good news is that Hunter Foster will be coming on as book writer. Please note:

The book is the libretto, the narrative structure that keeps the musical from being nothing more than a disjointed medley of songs.
Hunter Foster is an actor and librettist. He’s also the brother of Sutton Foster, Tony-award winning actress who teaches each year at Ball State and who has been a huge supporter of this project.

Goodspeed is known as a launching pad for many Broadway and off-Broadway musicals. You can see the list here.

If you live on the East Coast, or even if you’re just a fan, I hope you’ll take advantage of the opportunity to see the fully produced show, full-size elephant puppet and all.

This is what it looked like when the show was produced at Ball State in Fall 2011.

The show is moving forward thanks to the ceaseless efforts of lots of people, namely Beth Turcotte, Ben Clark, and the folks at Center Ring Theatrical, which includes two Ball State grads.

You know what’s funny? All those years ago, my then-agent went to lunch with editor Ann Patty, and when he pitched Circus to her, she said, “I’m from Indiana, actually.” How lucky I am that this book has been helped on its way by so many people from my homestate.

I’m reminded of what Kurt Vonnegut wrote: “I don’t know what it is about Hoosiers, but wherever you go there is always a Hoosier doing something very important there.”