AUTHORING
An Essay for the English Profession on Potentiality and SingularityBy JANIS HASWELL RICHARD HASWELLUTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2010 Utah State University Press
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-0-87421-762-9Contents
Acknowledgments............................................................................................ixIntroduction: English Studies and Black Boxes..............................................................11 Authoring Accepted.......................................................................................11Interchapter: Potentiality and Alice Sheldon...............................................................292 Potentiality and the Teaching of English.................................................................323 Potentiality and Gendership..............................................................................474 Potentiality, Gendership, and Teacher Response...........................................................565 Potentiality, Gendership, Teacher Response, and Student Voices...........................................636 Potentiality, Reading, and George Yeats..................................................................757 Potentiality, Life-Course, Academic Course, and Unpredictability.........................................91Interchapter: Singularity and Alice Sheldon................................................................1058 Singularity and the Teaching of English..................................................................1089 Singularity and Narrative: Character, Dignity, Recentering...............................................13110 Singular Authorial Offerings: Lifestories, Literacy Narratives, and the Shatterbelt.....................15611 Singularity, Feminism, and the Politics of Difference and Identity......................................17712 Singularity, Self-Loss, and Radical Postmodernism.......................................................19413 Singularity and Diagnostics: Disposements, Interpretations, and Lames...................................213Interchapter: Authoring and Alice Sheldon..................................................................23314 Authoring Neglected.....................................................................................236Envoi: Hospitality and Alice Sheldon.......................................................................260References.................................................................................................263Index......................................................................................................274About the Authors..........................................................................................280
Chapter One
AUTHORING ACCEPTED A word on Academies: Poetry has been attacked by an ignorant & frightened bunch of bores who don't understand how it's made, & the trouble with these creeps is they wouldn't know Poetry if it came up and buggered them in broad daylight. Allen Ginsberg, "Notes for Howl and for Other Poems"
Writing in 1959, the poet Ginsberg was angry at the initial reaction of literary scholars to Beat literature, especially "Howl," and both his intemperate dismissal of their kind of knowledge and their temporary dismissal of his kind of poetry can be chalked up to the passing historical moment. Still, Ginsberg's charge that university scholars don't know how poetry is made carries some lasting weight. How much do English teachers know about the inner workings of working authors? In the academy, the project called English largely consists of students taught to read creative literature by teachers who do not regularly write creative literature, and taught to write essays by teachers who do not regularly write essays. No wonder that authoring, as we say in the Introduction, may be the one discursive concept from the toolkit of their trade that teachers of writing and written discourse use least.
Not that English teachers are unaware of the distance between them and their disciplinary subject. Sometimes they have argued that the distance itself is necessary to their scholarly business. As we have noted, radical postmodern scholarship brackets the act of authoring in order to concentrate on contextual input and textual output. English teachers may have other reasons why they tend to keep authoring under the shelf. In many ways, the act of authoring does not fit the shape of their teaching practice, either pragmatically, ideologically, or temperamentally.
What if the phenomenology of authoring, the reported felt sense of how it is made, were pulled out from under and placed on the counter, "in broad daylight"? In the eyes of the profession, how alien would it appear? Does real-world authoring look like something English teachers and scholars could live with?
APPROACHES TO AUTHORING
The English profession approaches the act of authoring in five basic ways. On the literature side, the most familiar approach treats it as part of the biography of well-known authors. Tillie Olsen snatched what moments she could as a working-class mother, sometimes writing on the city bus, standing up if she had to. Thomas Wolfe actually preferred to write standing up, with the top of the refrigerator as his table. On the composition side, the most common approach offers teacher-sanctioned guidelines for composing. Keep your audience in mind. Make sure each paragraph has a clear and circumscribed topic. Invent first, edit last.
Two other approaches to authoring emphasize the instrumental: focus on tricks of the trade and focus on the study of authorship. With the first, composing habits are offered as literary history. By luck, novelist Kent Haruf acquired six reams of pulpy yellow paper-no longer manufactured, but a stock paraphernalia of his writing ritual. Or composing rituals are offered as advice to student writers. Set aside a time of day for writing, and write every day. With the focus on authorship, acts of composing are reduced to their social, cultural, or historical causes and effects. Literature students are told that Coleridge kept his borrowings from Schilling unacknowledged in the Biographia Literaria to uphold the "Romantic" notion of the writer as original and self-inspired. Composition students are told that their reader will know them not as they imagine themselves, individual "writers," but instead will construct them as "authors" according to the persona they project through their words, perhaps an image of the honest scholar or the empathetic caseworker.
The fifth approach to authoring does what these other four do not; it asks or surmises how authors experience authoring. Writing behavior, composing guidelines, tricks of the trade, and authorship can and usually do stand free of that felt sense, which includes drive, mood, proprioception, recollections, irritation at the barking dogs next door, and an endless wealth of inner life. Theoretically, of course, literary studies have long dismissed the phenomenology of authors as unreliable, ephemeral, even chimerical. On occasion literary biography may provide some of this side of authoring, inferring it from letters, journals, anecdotes, and elsewhere. Another source is the author interview, although that genre does not register very high on the discipline's scale of prestige. A major curiosity is that the phenomenology of authoring attracts composition studies even less.
As a systematic research effort, of course, the phenomenological approach to authoring thrives in psychology, where investigative paths have been richly sustained into motivation, self-regulation, self-efficacy, self-therapy, working memory, and other aspects of the inner life of authors. The phenomenology of authoring, if we may be allowed to keep this term, is one of the mainstay approaches of this book, in part because so far the English profession has shown only piecemeal interest in it.
WHAT AUTHORS SAY ABOUT AUTHORING
If composition studies of late have contributed little to the phenomenology of authoring, it may be due in part to a stubborn and-to our minds-enigmatic contradiction in the field concerning students and authors. The issue is whether students in composition classes are authors. Maybe they are just writers, or just student writers. An older position (e.g., Harste, Short, and Burke 1988) is that students are maligned and disadvantaged when their teachers do not treat them as bona fide authors. Teachers assign and treat course writings as exercise work not worthy of publication, or when they do publish students' work, they neglect to get their students' permission. This argument now runs concurrent with the opposing position that students are maligned and disadvantaged when their teachers do treat them as authors-when students are expected to be autonomous or original, for instance, or held to published-author standards and models they, as apprentices, are unable to meet, and the students thereby become marginalized (e.g., David Barthomolae 1986). We can appreciate efforts to explain and dissolve this contradiction over student authorship through analysis of the historical, political, and material conditions of disciplinary splits within English departments, and within the academy or society in general (e.g., Susan Miller 1993; Bruce Horner 1997). We would point out, however, that both the contradiction and these proposed resolutions tend to cut students and their teachers off from the experience of being an author. To our minds, the "student/author binary," as Horner calls it, cannot be resolved fairly unless we ask different questions. Do students share the inner life of working authors? Can English teachers find ways to help their students not only navigate authorship but experience real-world authoring as well?
This book says yes to both questions. In doing so, it follows in the footsteps of Donald Murray, whose contrarian composition textbook Shoptalk consists largely of quotations from working authors testifying about their craft. Murray believes, as we do, that of course students are authors: "My students discover that their natural responses to writing are often the same as experienced writers" (1990, xiv). He also sees that the experience of the experienced sometimes runs counter to the teaching of the teachers. "The testimony of writers often contradicts the beliefs of nonwriters and that, unfortunately, includes many teachers of writing from kindergarten through graduate school" (xiii). It bears noting that Murray worked as a writer before he worked as a teacher. He was a freelancer and journalist who won a Pulitzer for his editorials in the Boston Herald before he signed on with the University of New Hampshire's English department.
For our purposes, Shoptalk has some problems. It is dated, a commonplace book begun when Murray was in junior high in the 1930s. His snippets mostly come from fiction writers who were publishing before the 1980s. Also, Murray's own interests keep the focus of the testimony largely on craft rather than on psychology, and his categories chiefly deal with writerly strategies such as audience awareness, composing habits, beginnings, endings, maintaining flow, finding form, playing with language, and revising. Our own survey of author testimony-think of it as an excursion taking off from Murray's last chapter, "The Feel of Writing"-serves more as a synopsis than a commonplace book. Our selections and categories are equally intuitive, but tap more recent writers, achieve more of a balance between fiction and nonfiction, and center on what writers say about the phenomenological experience of authoring. The testimony we found, however, is not less divorced from English department pedagogy than is Murray's.
From our survey we construct a dozen most common traits of the experience of authoring according to working authors.
1. Drivenness. Authors cannot not write. In high school biographer and poet Muriel Rukeyser promised a friend to stop writing poems, but couldn't keep the promise because of "the pressure and the drivenness" (Sternberg 1980, 221). "There's the blank page," says Margaret Atwood, "and the thing that obsesses you" (Sternberg 1991, 156). The compulsion is so strong that sometimes it seems to come from outside: "I couldn't help myself; it was done to me, so to speak," explains Cynthia Ozick (Wachtel 1993, 13). Or else it is an internal drive so natural it can't be turned off-like a walnut tree putting forth leaf and fruit (William Saroyan), a silk worm producing silk (Doris Lessing), a baby letting out a squall (George Orwell), an adult sneezing (E. B. White), or a guerrilla never giving up the fight (Walter Mosley). Basically, writers experience writing as primal and therefore always first. Alice Hoffman tells how she put off an operation for breast cancer because she was compelled to finish a book: "More than anything, I was a writer" (Darnton 2001, 97).
2. Pleasure. Drivenness can be seen negatively, felt as an obsession, a subjection, a bte noire, a disease (Patrick White), a form of insanity (Charles Bukowski), a "quirk or virus" (Ken Donelson, Waldrep 1988, 53), "an addiction" (Lil Brannon, 22). But as with many addictions, the composing itself is felt positively as a pleasure. The pleasure may derive from other qualities of the phenomenology of authoring described below, such as the surprise of unplanned discoveries (Alice Munro), the exhilarated feel of a creation taking shape (Seamus Heaney), the joy of mental concentration (Donald Hall), the satisfaction of achieving something difficult (Joseph Heller), or the "pleasant sense of anticipation, like starting off on a journey" (Muriel Harris; Waldrep 1988, 105). Authors also describe writing as a relief from social demands or private frustrations. "How I think about my work," explains Diane Johnson, "is indistinguishable from the way I think about my needlepoint or cooking: here is the project I'm involved in. It is play" (Sternberg 1991, 141). The experiential bedrock of pleasure, however, again seems to rest on the feeling that writing is a natural and needed exercise of the whole person. "I write," says compositionist Toby Fulwiler, "because if I don't, I cannot sleep" (Waldrep 1988, 88). In a recent interview, Irish novelist Martin Waddell put succinctly what many other authors have said about composing: "It's what I want to do and I'm happy when I'm writing and not happy when I'm not writing" (2002). Working authors, like everyone else, love having written; but they also love writing.
3. Preparedness. Although the writing is compulsive and pleasurable, that does not mean it is spontaneous. The consensus seems to be that writing emerges from a feeling of readiness, and readiness emerges from material, or things to say that have long been experienced, collected, internalized, and finally are poised for the saying. Novelist and literary critic Kaye Gibbons puts it in one short sentence: "I write about what I know best" (Sternberg 1991, 60). To prepare an idea, a character, a plot, an intellectual position may take years. Books "come very gradually," says Michael Ondaatje, "It's really a case of lugging something around for about five years, and leaving things behind in somebody's house and having to go back and pick them up again, building an arc situation" (Wachtel 1993, 56). Writing is a matter of waiting, with E. B. White like a surfer looking for the "perfect wave on which to ride in" (Murray 1990, 77), with Richard Ford in "galvanic repose" (Wachtel 1993, 67), with Virginia Woolf "holding myself from writing it till I have it impending in me: grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid" (2003, 136). Writers' block is not writers unable to scribe ideas, but rather ideas that are not ready to be scribed, premature (Joyce Carol Oates), inadequately understood and in need of more research (Barbara Tuchman), not yet settled until the inessentials have been forgotten (Jonathan Raban).
4. Concentration. The sense of being prepared is accompanied, however, by the opposing yet complementary physical and mental state of concentration. There are many names and phrases for it, including "heart and mind open to the work" (Walter Mosley; Darnton 2001, 163), "intensity and attentiveness" (Susan Sontag; 223), centering, meditation, focus ("fierce and pointed"; Marge Piercy 1982, 17). What writers describe is not a sudden raptness of attention, such as a hunter might experience when a covey flushes, but a habitually heightened state of alertness, "a temperament that accepts concentration over the long haul" (Ward Just; Darnton 2001, 116). Donald Murray himself describes the author's concentration as one of the great gifts of life: "In the act of writing I experience a serene, quiet joy, a focus of all my energy and knowledge and craft on the task" (1990, 189).
5. Uncontrol. In part, the preparing and the concentration are a controlled practice with the aim of losing control. Writers associate uncontrol with different names, shapes, and feelings: dreaming, the subconscious, the unconscious, the irrational, demon, trance, disembodiment, kinesthesia, magic, the "inner teacher" (Doris Lessing; Wachtel 1993, 243). But they all describe basically the same thing-the way the drafting or the drafted sometimes takes control away from the author and assumes a "Ouija board will of its own" (Diane Johnson; Darnton 2001, 113). The experience of uncontrol is not contradictory to the state of concentration. It's like the Zen art of archery, when the archer is so focused the arrow releases itself. Nor does uncontrol mean the author relinquishes the work. Jonathan Raban describes how writers, who "are in some sense secretaries to their own books," must take control over the writing that is generated. "If the book has any real life of its own, it begins to take control, it begins to demand certain things of you, which you may or may not live up to, and it imposes shapes and patterns on you; it calls forth the quality of experience it needs" (Wachtel 1993, 120).
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