Scotland

Over a year ago now, when I was out of work, panicked, and looking for a way to focus my energy, I started writing a paper on a piece of literature I knew could get me back into the swing of academic reading and writing: the Harry Potter series. In the process of applying for graduate school I knew I would have to submit a sample piece of writing; I also knew that nothing I had written in college or grad school before would accurately portray the kind of work I wanted to do during this foray back into  academia. I had a theory and I wanted to pursue it. So I planned, read, went to university libraries all over San Diego, and wrote page after page.

About a month or so into this process I started thinking about the problem with academic writing in liberal arts: it is done in a vacuum, often with no connection at all to the wider world of academics or even literature as it is used outside of universities, and it is done without express purpose. I figured that if I wanted a purpose, I would look for one. So I searched CFPs for young adult literature and Harry Potter, hoping that I could find some conference somewhere that I could write for, with no real intention of submitting my writing at all. But then, I found it -  A Brand of Fictional Magic: Reading Harry Potter as Literature. The very first fully academic, literary conference entirely devoted to Harry Potter. In St. Andrews, Scotland, at one of the most prestigious universities in the world. Abstracts due by Halloween, no pun intended.

I sent my abstract as a whim, mostly to keep my writing on track and give myself purpose. Less than a month later I got an email saying my paper on reading the last three books of the series as an entrance into dystopia had been accepted. I was shocked. Now, I just had to figure out how I could get there. There was no option or whim present now - I had to go.

It took months to write my paper and at 36 pages, it still feels incomplete to me. There is so much to say, so many nuances to examine, so many questions to answer. I was lucky that over the course of my composition phase I had people around me (my colleage, Mr. Elfman in particular), who could listen to my theories and find the discrepancies in them. I had the luxury of time to develop my ideas and hone my style. Then, when it came time to cut the entire text down to something that could be read in 10-15 minutes, I had enough courage to slash more than half of the paper, delete lines, and cut almost all of the background.
The conference itself was an unreal experience. I was surrounded by such brilliant literary scholars with deep and intriguing ideas I'd never considered before. It was enlightening and refreshing, exciting and overwhelming, and exactly the push I needed to remind me why I want to go back to school at all. Eight years after completing my bachelor's degree in literature, I am so ready to return to academia to recharge my batteries and renew my passion for literature. (Just for a little extra taste, here's keynote speaker John Granger's synopsis of the conference.)

Mom and I outside the St. Andrews University building where the conference was held.

Afterwards, all fifty of the conference speakers were invited to submit their papers to be published in a compilation book. Again, it was a whim. Again, I was stunned when I found out I was accepted. Of the fifty papers, about a dozen are in the process of being turned into a book and mine is one of them. If I weren't still so overwhelmed by this, I'd be hollering from the rooftops.

From the right: kilt, kilt, kilt, pajama pants, kilt towel, no really.

Scotland, itself, was a surreal experience, too. I got off the plane and was paralyzed with fear (as I almost always am the moment I realize what I've gotten myself into). The trip came less than a month after Joe and I had chosen Option 4 and I knew that I would actually be MOVING to the UK for a year with him. We were in Edinburgh for a few days before taking a train to St. Andrews. It was beautiful and historical and a lot more interesting than I expected, especially since I was on the plane before I realized that I really hadn't done any travel research at all for this trip. Beyond eating so much sugar, fat, and white flour in the first 24 hours to make me sick (so that I had to sleep it off for HOURS at the hotel), we enjoyed everything about Edinburgh. Views? Awesome. Weather? Held up well for the forecast. Kilt shopping? Don't mind if we do.

St. Andrews was small, freezing, and everything closed at 5 pm. We ate dinner at the same restaurant 2/3 nights. But the conference was so amazing that it didn't matter. I do understand now why Rowling put Azkaban prison in the middle of the North Sea. Weather forecast for one of the days = 42 degrees, real feel 26. Yikes.

One additional highlight? Fantasy grocery shopping, wherein Mom and I wander the aisles of Marks and Spencer pretending that we're shopping for groceries for my London flat where I live with Joe while attending University. We even planned a dinner party based on the things we found, and oh man, my fantasy dinner party was awesome!

Discrepencies

I haven't had the time or energy to blog for many months. This is not for lack of subjects in any way - I've just been too busy doing the things in my blogs title (reading, teaching, traveling) to sit down and reflect much on any of it. Tonight, however, I need a little venting space.

Last fall my school's principal talked about a book called The Global Achievement Gap by Harvard Education professor Tony Wagner. The premise of the book is that there is not only a gap between the level of education received/pursued by middle-class American students and low-income/minority students, but also a gap between what even our best-performing schools are teaching and what the students will actually need to know in order to succeed in the modern world. My principal offered copies of the book to any staff member who was interested and I dutifully lined up for my copy. I'm an English teacher - I never pass up a free book.

Last night I began reading and continued until 1:30 am. This may or may not demonstrate to you the power of this text, but remember that I love sleeping and napping and have an alarm that goes off at 5:40 am on most mornings. I emailed the author at midnight. He responded with a message specific to my comments/concerns at 8 am this morning. I spent the day in a technology training for 9th grade English teachers, learning how to use a tremendous technological resource with my students. Needless to say, I was feeling pretty empowered today.

I feel, like many educators, that I am stuck in a system that doesn't work but I can't change it by myself. In fact, in order to keep my job I must continue to fulfill goals I don't fully believe in. I must prepare my students for multiple choice tests that don't test anything more than their ability to memorize, repeat, and sit still for long periods of time. I have to assign formulaic writing prompts and check off boxes in a rubric that say they've met the most minimum of writing requirements. No one likes it. Not the teachers, the administrators, the parents or the students. But in many ways our hands are tied. Test scores determine money for the district and property values for the community. Test scores determine whether or not my students are accepted to colleges - EVEN IF THE TESTS HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH THE SKILLS THAT ARE NECESSARY FOR SUCCESS IN COLLEGE.

I love my students. I love my job. I love going to work every day and working hard to help my students as best I can. There is frustration with the system, the budget, the union, the parents, the kids - but most of the time that is all in the background and my students and their immediate needs are the foreground. It is only occasionally that any of us teachers allow ourselves to let the frustration rise and take hold for a few minutes, before we suppress it again because we have teenagers to tend to and lives to lead. Today I felt like I might see the light in the tunnel. There may be ways to fix the problems - we were getting technology for 9th graders, a Harvard professor has some ideas about better testing systems...

Then, as we were leaving our training and gearing up for the rollout of our new, forward-thinking, technology-based lessons, we were reminded that while we are all excited about this new opportunity, for the next month at least our Assistant Superintendent of Curriculum wants to be sure we realize that the focus should really be on the up-coming state exams in April.

Talk about a needle in the balloon.

Life Like Fiction

Happiness isn't entertaining. What I mean is that being happy isn't interesting to write about. It doesn't create intrigue or suspense. It doesn't make good TV or movies. No one goes to the theatre to see happy people, they go to see drama and passion and obstacles and action. Unhappy people, or maybe I should say unsatisfied people, are the ones with the excitement, the gossip, the STORIES. People who are unsatisfied have things to write about because every event could be the first stone on a path toward satisfaction. The pursuit of happiness involves a twisted cast of players whose every action and reaction can be analyzed, dissected, observed and written about. Heartache is ever-changing and evolving.

Happiness, on the other hand, is relatively stagnant. It's wonderful and fantastic and beautiful and full of glitter and hearts and roses. It's great and I'm not complaining. But it's also calm and certain and stable. I am currently happy with consistancy. Because of this overall sense of happiness, I don't feel the urge to write about what's going on in my head nearly as much. There is no necessity for "working things out in writing." How many hours can I legitimately spend expressing joy? Answer: Not half as many as I can spend ruminating on situations that confuse or frustrate me. Writers be honest: An ambiguous text message is a much better muse than a sweet one.

So herein lies the problem.

Six or seven months ago I was truly inspired to start a novel. Between my own experiences and those of my book club friends, I had plenty of material to start a novel about modern dating life in a metropolitan (but not exactly centralized) city like San Diego. I used my time almost exclusively to read, write, and "collect ideas" about the difficulties of dating in a time when meeting a potential life partner in an organic way seems less and less likely every year. The characters were fabulous reincarnations of people I know whose statuses ranged from happily married and pregnant to dating like mad. The plan was to write about relationships in all stages and create insightful situations to express the frustrations of trying to find real, lasting happiness.

But then the worst possible thing happened to my plans - I got Plans instead. Dating someone takes all the fun out of writing funny but bitter anecdotes about dating. Suddenly instead of writing about relationships and love and the desire for intimacy, I was curled up with Plans enjoying the honeymoon months of a brand new romance. Writing and even reading have dropped down to minor priorities and the ideas I had about ridiculous pick-up lines, speed dating, wine tastings and meetings for SD Young Professionals were part of a distant memory of plans gone by.

Still, I know it can be done. Happily married people still have successful careers as authors, right? Maybe in a few months the inspiration will spark again. Maybe Plans will do something annoying or we'll pass the honeymoon stage and I'll be able to concentrate on incorporating the story about the home-tattooed, unemployed, divorced, scummy guy who hit on my friend the other day into a relatable narrative describing the Pursuit of Passion in the Big Bad World of Dating.

Daunting

New day, new struggle. I have now told far too many people that I have started work on a novel. (If I hadn't already told you, well, I guess now you know...) But getting back into the saddle of writing isn't quite as easy as I'd expected. You know that saying "it's like riding a bicycle..."? Well it turns out that does not apply to everything. I sit in front of my computer screen or with my journal and a pen and sometimes the words come out no problem. But other times... It's like picking my French Horn up after not playing for 7 years - both entirely familiar and entirely foreign.

I have overwhelmed myself now. I find the whole process daunting, to be honest, because I want so badly to do it well.

Problems I am faced with on the particular project I have chosen? There are several.

I have envisioned a sort of Sex in the City set in San Diego with 5 female characters based on the most consistent members of my book club. This puts my potential novel squarely in the "Chick Lit" category - a genre that is stereotypically formulaic and unrealistic. I can accept that to an extent, but since my characters are based on real people that I really care about I do not want to turn any of them into caricatures. However, the characters are still fiction and need to be separated from their real-life counterparts. But how much should be fiction, how much non-fiction?

Problem #1: How do I give the characters recognizable features of a real person without attributing every neurosis of that person to fiction?

Problem #2: Defining the scope and goals of the novel as a whole. Even in flitty, awful chick lit there are always a few key issues that are neatly wrapped up by the end. Right now I have a series of personality traits and singular events, but I'm still brainstorming the ways to pull those things together into one cohesive narrative. You can't sell a novel that is just a collection of random experiences between girlfriends, even if the dialog IS witty and insightful.

Problem #3: Defining each character's individual "voice" so that we don't overlap. So often in this type of novel the way that authors get around this problem is by categorizing their characters into predetermined archetypes - the bitch, the disapproving one, the pretty boy, the gay best friend, the slutty/flirtatious coworker. I really don't want my characters to be so superficial that someone could write a facebook quiz about them like they do about Sex in the City: "OMG! I'm such a Carrie!"

So I'm following the most common recommendation I've gotten so far: Read. Read everything in the genre. Readreadread. And now suddenly everything I would do normally has become "research." The characters go to the gym and the movies and out to clubs and bars and get hit on by ridiculous men and sexy men and nervous men. The characters make great decisions concerning their careers and stupid decisions concerning relationships. Or vice versa. They talk to each other - a lot. (Be on alert, oh girlfriends mine, my ears are perked up for good dialog.)

And now, sigh, I must return to either writing or reading and stop using my blog as an avoidance tool.