We’re funded through a National Parks Service grant, and we get some pretty amazing access. This summer I’ll be leading or advising projects in Zion National Park, Grand Canyon-Parashant (in the remote NW section of the Grand Canyon, and Denali National Park in Alaska. We’ll also be exploring new possibilities for projects in Olympic National Park in Washington, Great Basin, King’s Canyon, and Sequoia. We also have projects that I am not directly overseeing in Cape Hatteras and Manhattan (many are unaware of the many, many urban NPS sites).

For the last two days I’ve been hiking through an upper section of Zion National Park, called Kolob Canyons. This morning we awoke to snow. We knew it was coming, but we sort of hoped we’d be wrong about that. It made for a miserable slog: lots of mud and being cold, but it was spellbindingly beautiful.

I kept expecting to see Chinese warriors flying overhead with spears and flowing silk robes, engaging in silent battle between the sandstone ramparts and the mist.

Today was hard going, but it was very beautiful. It was a good day, all in all, because I had good gear, I was in pretty good shape, and I was at work.

• Review syllabi for all classes, to see what I said is due.
• Respond to 4 ENGL 2010 student podcast assignments.
• Write 3 final exam questions on Gibson’s Neuromancer.
• Write 2 final exam questions on the film Moon.
• Respond to 4 more ENGL 2020 short stories.
• Respond to 1 more 50 page novel section for ENGL 4020.
• Respond to remaining 4020 reading responses (this is going to suck).
• Write up response to Dean’s new policies.
• Figure out exactly when Ike will not be in school.
• Schedule early final with testing center.
• Respond to ENGL 2020 portfolios.
• Respond to ENGL 2010 final projects.
• Grade ENGL 2130 exams and compute grades.
• Send failure/low grade notifications to students.
• Go through ENGL 4020 portfolios.
• Final grades for ENGL 2010.
• Final grades for ENGL 2020.
• Final grades for ENGL 2130.
• Final grades for ENGL 4020.
• Plan for Partners in the Parks Zion project.
• Plan for Partners in the Parks Grand Canyon-Parashant Project.
• Schedule dentist appointment.
• Schedule annual physical.
• Schedule annual skin cancer screening.
• Enter evaluation data into spreadsheet.
• Nap in the hammock with a book on my face.

Trying to work out the logic:

P holds Position X
Position X = Stupid
P is therefore also Stupid

Position Y ≠ Position X
Q holds Position Y
Q is therefore not Stupid

Hmmm. I think that’s how it breaks down. In any case, dear student, hie thee now and sign up for Dr. Fiztpatrick’s logic class, please, before you run for office or get a show on AM 590.

Okay, back to grading, seriously, with maybe a break later to bake a Linzertorte.

Dr. Petersen, I worked with that Adobe Acrobat for an hour last night, and I could not make it combine files like you told us it would.

Because my next move is to start up Acrobat on my computer and show them this welcome screen and ask them to pick which button they think will help them combine files.

Which button would you choose? I know which one I’d use, but perhaps it is easier for me because I use computers a lot. In any case, the point of my rant today is that I now believe, unfortunately, that each successive generation does not necessarily get better at using technology. Perhaps if their computer was hooked directly to their phone or to a Rock Band guitar controller, this would all seem more natural to them.

I do realize that the Acrobat Professional applications in the labs might have the welcome screen shut off, meaning they could be left on their own to flail around for hours in the dark and dreary waste until finding a menu item like this one.

Sigh…I grow old, I grow old. I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

This means I’m not necessarily going to say no to new projects and appearances, but I’m going to start selecting things that fit into the “create mode” rather than the “present mode.” There is a time and a place for present, but I feel like I’ve been presenting myself into a place where my store of created material is becoming depleted pretty fast. The tank isn’t on empty, but it’s not on full either.

I want to finish a collection of interlocking stories I’ve been working on for a really long time. It’s called Small World, and there will be six long stories of about 25-30 pages each. In each story a character and/or situation from a preceding story will take center stage. In fact, each successive story will add to the plot and subtext of the earlier stories. Yes, it is a little bit like LOST in story format.

I want to throw myself into the blog a bit more. I am working on short memoir posts. On my trip to DC this week, I’m going to be sketching these things out. I’m also working on some ideas about how a creative life and family life spark when they bump into each other. I’ll have a long first post out this Sunday.

And finally I want to work on my retelling of the old folktale “The Little Red Hen.” In my version, the hen asks for help from a pig, a cat, a goose, and a coldwar-era Soviet tactical robot.

Just to keep it real, I gave a paper on heist films.

Academic conferences are strange beasts. In theory it sounds like the coolest thing possible: get a bunch of super dweebs together to talk about the things that fuel their rockets. These people, being in such close proximity, will generate a field of raw intelligence that will blot out the sun. It all sounds to me like a kind of Burning Man for college teachers.

In this temporary geektopia, the world is writ small, and then enlarged again, through the magnifying properties of something people in the know like to call a discourse. When the conference ends, I always expect to return from the mountain, touched by the one or more of the Muses. I always think I will be furiously scribbling notes in the airport and on the flight home. I imagine I’ll return to the classroom, tell everyone to stand on their desks and throw out the syllabus—we’ll guide ourselves through the rest of the semester with excitement. The upgraded courses will be so full of new ideas and features that students will shut their phones and start taking notes on pieces of paper with real pencils and pens and love learning forever.

But it almost never works out like this.

My experience with academic conferences is so unlike the hope I always hold for them. What’s the most depressing, I’m afraid, is the simple fact that most academics are absolutely dreadful in front of a crowd.

If you’ve never been to one of these conferences or seen one of these presentations, imagine Miles Davis and his late–career disdain for the audience, minus his ability to play the trumpet better than ninety-nine percent of everyone who as ever put a horn to their lips. The issue is not their ideas, or even their passion. They all seem so tired (I guess I’m included), and these presentations are often the last thing on our long list of things that must be done, a list that dominates the other lists of things we want/hope/wish we could do.

Know that I don’t arrive as a hostile audience. I am sincerely hoping to have my mind blown. I am the kid who, full of hope and ecstasy, orders sea monkeys out of a comic book, and when they finally arrive I end up, chin in hands, watching clumps of brown powder fall lifelessly to the bottom of the fish bowl.

Usually, on the last night of a conference. I retire to my room. Watch some television, and think to myself as I pack my bags that these hotels and conference centers are where ideas come to die. I want to have a different attitude, but a pattern has been emerging, and I have been observing it for fifteen years now.

There is hope. For every conference, there are a number of confederate ones that take place over dinner, in the elevators, and in the Q & A sessions that follow the gray wasteland of the headliners. I am always energized by the things people say when they are not on the schedule.

So, here’s the conference of my dreams: take our proposals, put a dozen of us who appear to be likeminded into a room, bring some nice treats, close the door, and come back in two hours.

Dr. P,

Once again the simple minded folks at the Utah DOC have set me loose upon society. I want to express thanks for the great things your mentoring provided to me. I can and will write, perhaps even shit people will want to read. In spite of the fact you have previous knowledge of this, I want to say that you are a great mind, you have and will continue to inspire. There are great writers who are a little mental, or a lot. I count myself among them, the really disturbed and dysfunctional, unique futuristic writers. I know your [sic] probably thinking, “Get off my leg.”

Thanks anyways.
Warren (not his real name)

Well, good luck, Warren. Stay out of the pokey, and write something that counts. Do I really hope that all of my incarcerated students think about me on the inside? I guess that would be kind of awesome, sort of…

1. Library Economy vs. Bookstore Economy.

One of my good friends and colleagues, Matt Nickerson, is a librarian. Through my association with him, I have learned that library use has changed a lot over the last decade or so. A lot of that change seems to be due in part to computer use. In any case, one thing librarians want to achieve is getting books and students together.

This has led us to a number of discussions on the subject of how professors get students into libraries. I responded at one point by saying, “They don’t. Teachers bring the books to students in the form of text books. Then once or twice a semester they send them off to the library to find support materials.”

The big idea is this: what if the library was the primary text? What would happen in a class in which you said that on a certain day the discussion would be on the subject of “first person narration,” use the library and be ready for discussion? I am also imagining all kinds of hybrid assignments where I assign one text and students need to add two more two the mix—their choice.

2. Using Cloud Computing On-line Applications in the classroom.

This is now a no-brainer. Google Docs is my number one choice for managing tons of documents. The searching means that the Google Docs account can really be one big bucket into which I throw these documents. No complex filing directory is necessary. It is kind of a blunt instrument, though. It’s almost just an online text editor. I don’t think Google Docs is a good composing tool, but it is great for sharing documents and collaborating on them as well.

Adobe’s Buzzword, is really beautiful and actually easier on the eyes than most on-line apps. It outputs really nicely to a PDF, which I can have students integrate very nicely into a digital portfolio. I have tried Zoho tools, and they just don’t seem to work quite right for me and from my perspective. I have tried to like them.

The use of online apps for collaboration makes the most immediate sense, but once I gained a little facility with the tools, I started to learn a little about how to hack the basic use for some interesting results.

My best discover is the use of what I’m calling the Standing Evaluation. Because I use narrative rather than quantitative evaluation in my courses, I need some way to communicate my responses and feedback to the students. I have discovered that if I instruct a student to share a google document with me, we can use that document as a platform for the evaluation. It’s ongoing, so I get to see everything I’ve written for that semester, and whenever I add anything it’s within a context of continuity. I can really chart growth. Students like it because they have a chance to respond, like with your credit report, it’s just less difficult: they are free to respond to any comment. The best students do, and it’s a real joy to have a conversation about their performance.

3. The Hobbit is a heist narrative.

I have been working on ideas about heist films for a while now, and it hit me over the head like a sack of money: The Hobbit is a heist, Gandalf’s 14, if you will. More on this later. I have the seeds of a conference paper germinating at the moment. I does foil my initial heist paper thesis that the heist isn’t a good genre for fiction but that it works best in film.

4. Putting an old lampshade iMac in the kitchen.

It’s not the fastest, but man, that rotatable, tiltable screen is great for brining up a recipe or watching the Daily Show on Hulu when you’re cleaning up.

5. Not getting a snow blower.

We’re getting to the point that (a) I can be outside without worrying that the kids will kill themselves, and (b) Alisa’s been helping, and it’s kind of nice to be out there shoveling with her. It can be quite lovely, in facr. Not an issue, though, for another six months probably. I do have a leaf blower, which I pretty much can’t do without.

To finish out the semester, I need to:

1. Read 2020-01 Portfolios
2. Read 2020-02 Portfolios
3. Update 1010 Figurator™
4. Draft 3030 Acceptance Letter
5. Send 3030 Acceptance E-mail
6. Follow up on Illustrations for Bullhorn
7. Read 4000-level Playwriting Assessment Submissions
8. Notify 2020 Students Who Need Final Conference
9. Enter Grades for 2020 Courses
10. Enter Grades for 3030 Course
11. Grade 1010 Final Essays
12. Enter 1010 Final Grades
13. Work on 3030 Magazine Template
14. Go to Honors Final Screening

That should just about do it.

I’m going to print up copies and hand them out like tracts. Props to Merlin Mann of 43 Folders for his work with the Qualified Yes.

I think this means that I will now be able to associate with the professors rather than just assist them. It also means a little bit more money (in reality, something like 1/8 of a run of the mill NBA bad sportsmanship fine).

But that doesn’t matter. The document is finished. Holes punched. Arranged artfully in a 4″ three-ring binder. Ready for submission (I’m laughing that it’s always due the day after labor day — nothing like a performance review to spice up a barbecue!).

Now there is a lightness and freedom in my mind. It feels cool, like the wind blowing through holes in my mind. Perhaps I’ll reward myself by going to see Tropic Thunder.

The big question that creative non-fiction asks a person to think about is regarding truth. We get at it by dealing with the difference in what one is going to have to do to produce a short story versus what one is going to have to do to produce a personal essay, or memoir piece.

The technical definition of creative non-fiction (CNF) that you’ll see all around the place is that CNF uses the conventions of fiction to tell a story in which the events are presented as having happened instead of presenting the events as invented. This gets immediately sticky because of what I teach about fiction and the fact that there is no creation ex nihilo. One creates by construction of new patterns from existing materials, which we gather through experience. So, in my view, even fiction is a form of non-fiction, but the source materials are a little more processed. The word I use for that in class is “granular.”

Things aren’t “falser” in fiction; the truth is not as immediately identifiable.

On the flip side, I point out that the notion of a true story is fraught with problems. My buddies over in the criminal justice department make it abundantly clear that eye witnesses are notoriously unreliable. Our senses do not constitute a security camera that records everything. The combination of our attention, the accuracy of our senses, and the faults of our memories create a dragnet of inaccuracies that we present as “our take” on what happened, with no more claim on the truth and anyone else’s take.

Which invariably brings us to Mr. James Frey and his book A Million Little Pieces and that very, very tired controversy. In order to make this part of things a bit more interesting, I brought in this YouTube video of the very important response from the erudite pundits on the View.

I was so interested in the mob mentality here, and their complete lack of understanding of even the least shred of the most basic part of this argument from a literary perspective. What struck me was Barbara Walters perspective here. She is so quick to dismiss the memoir as a concept, then she packpaddles so quickly. The entire discussion makes the memoir seem like something Al-Qaeda whipped up to undermine Western civilization. But why was Walters so bold and why did she edit herself so quickly.

Well, take a look at the title of her new book. Will wonders never cease?

Matt and I were recently awarded a grant from the National Parks Service to expand and document the program. In a year, we’ve gone from one pilot program in Bryce Canyon to six programs nationwide. Earlier this spring we collaborated with our friend Kevin Bonine, an evolutionary biologist from the University of Arizona, to take a group of Honors Program faculty from around the country on an experiential education training program along the US/Mexico border. We traveled from the saguaro country down to the Sea of Cortez.

This spring we started a series of three projects, starting with Zion National Park, followed by one in Bryce Canyon. We have one still to do on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon and then one to assist with on the east coast in Acadia National Park in Maine.

The numbers were small on this first Zion program, which was good because we really needed to get going on a new approach for us: letting go. We had two new leaders to train and observe. We were used to doing these kinds of projects on our own but we knew that we just couldn’t sustain this on our own, not growing the program to the size that we imagined giving coverage to the National Parks Program as a whole. That was the big challenge we hadn’t imagined.

It worked okay. What was most exciting was learning to manage the administrative parts of these activities with the on-the-ground aspects. We also needed to make sure that the integrity of the program was maintained, which meant that Matt and I had to know what it was, and we had to communicate it effectively to the new leaders. The Zion project went off reasonably well. I think participants really got the main idea of the whole program: study the parks by being in the parks.

Bryce Canyon was very interesting. After two days of really scorching temperatures (upper 80s and low 90s, which is hot for that elevation), the temperature dropped something like 40 degrees). We hiked in snow flurries. At night it froze, in the day, it came up a few degrees but not much. It was a real test for everyone, including the two of us, who had to learn how to run one of these programs when nothing went as planned (and almost nothing did). This was a completely different set of challenges. We also released more control and only joined the group at the half way point, for the backcountry hiking. At the same time a project in Manhattan rolled out, completely under the direction of other leaders. Two of the three on that project had been on projects with Matt and I, but they designed and executed this one on their own. It sounds like it was thrilling.

The final project is one that Matt and I are doing alone, with no other support staff. We’re heading into the really remote Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument, which is along the North Rim of the Grand Canyon between St. George, Utah and the Colorado River. As remote as it is (we need to bring extra spare tires, fuel, and a satellite phone), we’ll be staying in a pretty nice research facility on Mt. Trumbull. No real loss of creature comforts there. No backpacking either. I think the solitude will be rapturous.

More on that when we finish.

I’m waiting until there is enough time for me to work on some things I’ve been really hankering to get into, projects that have been on my mind literally for a dozen years, or more.

Despite the fact that I have the stuff and access to even more stuff, I haven’t been able to get myself in gear to work on any of those projects, except for now I think I’m close. I think I have the motivation I’m going to need to break out the screens, print a transparency, buy some Hanes Beefy-”T”s, and get busy.

My students have been driving me crazy with questions I have painstakingly answered on the syllabus in detail, sometimes excruciating detail. They’ll come right up to my face and ask about a due date, or the percentage of the total grade they’ve just botched with their last essay. I’ll tell them that it’s on the syllabus, but they’ll still ask. They will stare me in the face, as if to say, “I don’t have a copy of that with me, and plus, I’m not going to read it anyway. Why don’t you just tell me?”

So I’m going to make a half dozen of the following t-shirts, so I’ll always have a clean one. It’s going to become part of my teaching uniform.

Who knows. I might be able to sell a few on the internet and whittle down some of my student loans.

PERSON: How are you doing?

ME: Oh…good, but things’ll be better after [weekend, conference, project, etc.].

PERSON: Yeah, I know it.

ME: It’s crazy.

PERSON: Doesn’t get any better, just keeps coming at you.

I’m starting to see that it really does. This seems to be one of the clichés that is so fundamentally and basically true that it transcends the status of cliché and becomes something else–a truism, maybe.

Other things in this list of transcendences include: your kids grow up faster than you are ready for them to; time accelerates; and your body just stops moving as quickly and smoothly as it used to.

As a writer who has a surfeit of creative writing education, I have been warned and counseled and browbeaten over the avoidance of cliché. It is the thing, we are told, that will destroy our writing. Cliché is the seed which becomes fully flowered florid prose, which, in turn, becomes the throw-away airplane potboilers that no one ever really acknowledges that they have read, at least not in mixed company or without a certain measure of guilt.

Yet, aren’t there a few of these truisms out there that deserve a place in good writing? Isn’t this how people connect to a work and want to pay $20.00+ for the book (or at least want to check it out from the library)? How does one balance the cliché with the truism? How does one give the truism a new outfit so it seems like a proper insight into the truth about the human condition without simply being a set of new threads for the emperor?

In my experience in the graduate training centers of creative writing and in the editor’s chair at a couple of literary magazines, I’ve seen that the anxiety over cliché has created a whole lot of work that fails to engage anyone but the author. Or it connects with the other writers in the creative writing workshops who are so afraid of clichés that they would rather read bad prose that seems to be free of cliché than good prose that is, as they might say, tainted by it.

In the attempt to give cliché the slip, many writers have lost the reader well. It is now so hard for readers to find themselves in so much of this new writing that they much prefer “inferior” stories that have the porch light on and a welcome mat out.

And I suppose, who can blame them?

Certainly this is more of the old, art for art’s sake argument. I used to think that position had more merit than I do now. Imagine, for example, a chef who says “I only cook food for food’s sake.” Even the most obscure chef, trafficking in the hautest of haute cuisine, still must acknowledge that somebody is going to have to eat the dumpling. You can’t just make it and let it sit on the counter, what is the purpose in that?

It’ll just go bad, and you’ll have to throw it out. Thus is is with books, I think. A sad state of affairs.

I grabbed “Day in the Life,” a story shape from Jerome Stern’s marvelous book, Making Shapely Fiction. The job is to use someone’s quotidian existence to make a point.

Here’s the plot I came up with. It’s tentatively called “The Pacifier.” This was really fun for me. I never get the chance to write anymore, and this just came in about thirty minutes.

Wallace Coventry got ketchup on his tie. He’s in the bathroom at the shoe store, trying to wash out the spot. His boss, Ned, hassles him about being late for his shift. Wallace thinks of his gym teacher, who used to “dock him” for not wearing a jockstrap. Wallace’s mother was widowed and didn’t know those kinds of things were necessary. The ketchup is gone, but the spot is too apparent, so Wallace wets the whole tie and presses it between two wads of paper towels.

He goes on the floor, and a mother is attempting to fit some shoes on one child, who is screaming and kicking. The second child, still an infant, is also crying. Wallace offers to help, and the mother hands the screaming child to Wallace, who doesn’t know what to do with it. He sets his Brannock tool on the floor and bounces around, trying to calm the child. The woman talks to Wallace and to her child. It is hard to tell who she is addressing, both by the content of her remarks and the direction of her attention. It is clear that her husband has left her for another woman.

After she buys the shoes and leaves, Wallace notices a binkey under one of the chairs, which is still wet. He goes to the register and gets her address off the check and decides to return the binkey. After his shift he rides his bike to a trailer park, and finds her single-wide. It is in shambles. Wallace recalls the fancy home of a girl he took to a dance in high school. She was nice, but Wallace jammed himself up, worrying that she wouldn’t like him because his father was a foreman at a window manufacturing plant and his mother was a school nurse for a different school. Wallace leaves without delivering the binkey.

The next day, the mother returns. Wallace is getting dressed down for something. Ned won’t stop, even though the mother is standing right there. Both children are crying again. The older one is wearing the new shoes, and is running around the store, knocking things over. Ned asks the mother to get her kids under control. The mother says they need the binkey–it’s the only one he’ll take, and the store is out of the right ones. Wallace says he hasn’t seen the binkey, but he’ll keep an eye out. When the mother and kids are gone, Ned completes his dress down and goes in the back. Wallace remembers a time when some guys at his school were talking about “finger banging” a certain girl, just as the girl appeared around the corner with the drama teacher. She is devastated, and Wallace did nothing. The pause is terrible. Wallace opens the till takes all the money and drives 50 miles to buy out all the matching binkies.

When he gets to the trailer park, the woman is sitting on the front porch with a man drinking beers. The woman notices him and says hello. Wallace takes the original binkey from his pocket and presents it to her. She thanks him. Wallace goes to a grocery store and gets a chicken and some cokes and eats them on the hood of his car. When he’s done he goes to a pay phone and calls his mother and tells her he’s taken a job in New Mexico and he’ll be moving.

When she asks him where, he pauses. He says he has to work out the details. She tells him to be careful. He says the work will be dangerous, then he hangs up.

Download file

–

Todd

++++++++++++

By the way, I think a few modifications, Cool Hand Luke style might be in order for some of your policies.

POLICIES

1. I only accept university-excused absences.
2. If you’re unreasonably late, that’s a night in the box.
3. If it’s clear to me that you’re not prepared, that’s a night in the box.
4. If you fool around in class, that’s a night in the box.
5. Each absence after the first three will take two percentage points off your final grade, and a night in the box.
6. Nine absences will equal an F in the course, and a night in the box.
7. If you have perfect attendance, I’ll round up a borderline grade.
8. I won’t grade late work unless we’ve made previous arrangements.
9. Ten or more typos in any one typed assignment will get you an F on that assignment, and a night in the box.
10. I won’t read messy, disorganized, or neglectful work.

Given the current state of affairs I might have to implement these policies changes soon.

He returned the door to its resting position with the lock in place, leaving the girls alone again with the unrelenting desert heat and the obscene lullaby of the Indians in the distance.

and

The sweat on the mans face multiplied under the stare of the sun.

This kind of writing threatens to make all the other garbage worth reading, but not really. Still, it’s pretty nice to know someone cares about their sentences.

Why?

Because I know what grade they deserve without looking at their work. I know what kind of effort they have put out to learn, and more often than not, they can work the angles with the numbers and slip through the system. And like Sam Waterston in an episode of Law and Order, I must watch them slip through the fingers of the system, thinking that this is something we all must endure in order for things to move forward at all.

As you can tell from this post, I still have much to accomplish.