Off for the second day of departmental TA training / boot camp for the introductory creative writing course we all teach. It’s fun to have more of an idea of what’s up this time around.
My freshman roommate has been in town for the past few days, too. Been getting to see more of Baltimore with her–we went to Fed Hill last night for dinner with an old friend of hers from Kauai.
or did you get lost in Amsterdam?”
– Guster
I have been mounting a lot of defenses of creative writing programs lately. It’s come up when talking to Harvard lawyers, to Hopkins grad students, even to complete strangers. May and June of 2010 seems to be defend-your-workshop season.
My favorite strategy, hitherto only used in my head, is the one where I quote song lyrics as if they mean something. “As Ray LaMontagne writes in ‘Hannah,’ ‘I lost all of my vanity when I peered into the pool,’ which I think we can use as a metaphor for the workshop process.’ ” Like that. I’ve started to view everything as a potential defense for creative writing programs, since every occasion becomes an occasion for defending them.
I’ve thought of putting one up here, or writing a kind of point-by-point rebuttal to all the questions I’ve gotten since doing a year at this program, as well as to the objections made in print. It seems like it might be of interest. What might be of more interest would be a bad satirical defense of creative writing programs, in the manner of the “Dr. Grant Swinger” character, invented by Daniel S. Greenberg*, from the mythical Institute for the Appropriation of Federal Funds. Perhaps both.
“SWINGER: …Actually, our people have an advantage. They aren’t torn between research and teaching. They’ve resolved that conflict.
GREENBERG: How?
SWINGER: By doing neither.”
– from a mock interview in the 2002 Science
Not right now, though. I’m going to go for a walk, as I have for the last five days running. First thing in the morning, before trying to get any work done. Blogging beforehand is cheating, a bit. But rules were made to be bent.
* Heard about Greenberg & Swinger from this NYT review of Greenberg’s new campus satire, “Tech Transfer,” in which Nicholas Wade writes:
“…“Tech Transfer” is the world of Dr. Swinger writ large, populated by scientific entrepreneurs who have learned how to absorb federal funds, suppress charges of malfeasance and live high off the hog. When Dr. Winner assumes the presidency of Kershaw University, he learns the folly of challenging the tenured faculty on any of their sacrosanct, non-negotiable issues:
“These included annual pay increases, lax to near-non-existent conflict-of-interest and conflict-of-commitment regulations, and ample pools of powerless grad students, postdocs and adjuncts to minimize professorial workloads. As a safety net, the faculty favored disciplinary procedures that virtually assured acquittal of members accused of abusing subordinates, seducing students, committing plagiarism, fabricating data, or violating the one-day-a-week limit on money-making outside dealings.”
The quad behind the library has so many people in it it looks like a political rally. Graduates, sweating, shielding their faces with massive envelopes. People in mortarboards wandering around Charles. A younger brother, too excited to listen, bounding around the cafe, asking everyone where the vending machines are. He asked me, and then five minutes later, he asked the guards. Older relatives, with swollen feet and nowhere to sit down. I saw a man walk up a set of narrow stairs and back down the same set of narrow stairs. A petulant girl to her family: “I want to stay with the group!” Not going to happen. The point of this is that you have to leave the group. Making my way in to campus, I saw a couple of the usual-suspect graduate students, caught in the flood of families, looking like squirrels at the tops of trees with the water rising, resigned to getting no work done today.
Summer is upon us. Baltimore rains, as if to say “Summer, yes, but on my terms.” Saying goodbye to students and to classmates. Classes are over: finals are almost over. We have all gone back to work, or have made preparations to leave town. We have had and are having more goodbye/hello/hello/goodbye parties. I am staying, and settling in. I have been exchanging a lot of emails with the incoming class of new MFAers, both poets and fiction writers. It’s exciting to think of them being here soon.
And in the midst of all these routine routines, today is a day in which something happened which had never happened to me before. (Isn’t every day?) Yes, but this one, especially.
Thursday: Last class of the spring IFP section, followed by more of the Levis paper, followed by the end-of-first-year department conversations, followed by rehearsal for the Choral Society concert tomorrow, followed by more of the Levis paper.
Concert info:
Love and Madness: Choral Society Spring Concert
Come out to the Choral Society’s free spring concert, Love and Madness, on Friday, May 7 at 7:30 p.m. Concert held at First English Lutheran Church, on the corner of North Charles and 39th. Featuring works by Brahms, Schumann, and Britten. (The Britten’s text is Christopher “For I Will Consider My Cat Geoffry” Smart’s Jubilate Agno.)
Tonight is our department party, followed by the concert, followed by the department after-party.
Finally, this weekend I am attending a conference on new Russian drama, to be held at Towson, at which I’m going to see a number of East Coast friends who I haven’t seen since the trip to Poland last year. I’m really happy to be able to go.
The last graduate reading of the year was tonight. Fiction, poetry, science writing. I like that there are a couple of events where the fiction writers and the poets are more intermingled. This is one of them. There’s always more to be done than there’s time to do in the last week of classes, but I’m really glad I went.
for an interdepartmental par-tay on May 15. You know it’s nearing finals when you are having to plan post-finals blowouts. I’m in D Level again, and there are many other Writing Seminarians here, trusting the library’s atmosphere to make us productive.
Started a new story yesterday, about a woman who has an antagonistic relationship with her infant. It’s a lot of fun to write, even more so because it’s required for nothing.
with snow boots. Still navigating knee-deep curving trenches through the snowbanks of Charles Village, some so narrow you have to walk like you’re on a balance beam. The snow sits on the ground. But we’re back on campus, at last. It’s great to have classes again: theory, seminar, reading series, the whole nine. I even got into a practice room tonight.
We never know what we have lost, or what we have found.
We are only ourselves, and that promise.
Continue to walk in the world. Yes, love it!
He continued to walk in the world.
– RPW, from “Audubon: A Vision”
Working on the intersession course on musical theater. We’re going to watch films and write lyrics and imitations: the lyricist is the lens for most of the interpretation. It starts on January 4th, and runs the 4th-22nd, before spring semester commences. My class is full. I’m very interested to see what kind of students have signed up for it.
Last night, department holiday party – shades of ON BEAUTY. I feel relentlessly adult, attending a department holiday party that is not my father’s, but my own.
It’s snowing. It’s Baltimore and it’s snowing. Unlike with rain, I always wonder how the sky doesn’t run out of snow. It seems so laborious to produce.
Some days, days when lots of work needs to be done and words placated, you start the day by losing your phone, and spend an hour and a half looking for it, before you discover that you dropped it inside one of your rain boots.
Still snowing. Downstairs, my roommate and friends are singing and playing acoustic guitar, a Saturday-morning service. The sound of voices and strings.
Dara Weinberg 