Posts Tagged: creative non-fiction

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5
Jun 06

If You Want To Go To Grad School (Part 11)

The second semester of my “limbo” year” would define my relationship with Joe, AKA Professor K, and perhaps forshadow its decline. I had become so close to Joe so quickly. I had only barely known him for a year and I was housesitting for him. And then, my professional, academic, and writerly lives became tightly intertwined and were difficult to untangle from Joe.

The second semester of the limbo year was one where I took a fiction workshop and a graduate seminar entitled “Madness In Literature” from Joe. I also continued to work on a volunteer basis for his journal. I had keys to his office, so I had a place where I could hang my coat and leave the backpack behind when wandering the campus. It was also a quiet space where I could go to do some writing or read a book. I only had to do the things Joe asked me to do, and they never took too long.

I took the “Madness in Literature” course, scheduled on Tuesday evenings, mostly because of Joe’s subtle jealousy episode in December. I wanted to take Tatiyana’s workshop, which was also scheduled at the same time as Joe’s seminar, but Joe prevailed. Though I may lament the lost opportunity with Tatiyana, a few good things did come out of my enrollment in Joe’s class. However, I’ll get into that later.

But, I wanted to take a writing workshop, and Joe offered one on Thursday evenings. Joe had become acquainted with my writing from the Form and Theory class. Most of these were writing exercises, one of which evolved into a short story, which would later get published alongside Joe’s. Joe gave a space for me to break out of the mold that was set for writers. I never wanted to write in the “Iowa” style (which is prevalent in contemporary American “literary” fiction) and Joe’s interest in post-modern and outsider narratives seemed ideal. I was interested in making pictures and integrating them with writing. It was easy to see this inclination as post-modern. I would later see it as Romantic.

The workshop was a very small one. Tomas, Joe’s longtime assistant, was in his thesis semester and just taking the class to pass time. Holly, another longtime assistant of Joe’s, was also in her thesis semester. Holly was a Japanese-American who was quite focused on her writing. She had a slight speech impediment, but managed to make herself heard. Andrew, the quiet one, definitely spoke in this small group setting. Gillian, the hipster chick on her to middle-class motherhood, added some sass, wit, and humor to the class. She was definitely one of my allies in the class. Like me, she was not a graduate student, but developed a long-term writer relationship with Joe and also hoped to get into the program at one point. Harlan was a blond but bland southern California young man who was developing as a writer. His stylistic inconsistency would point to that. Jill, a graduate architecture student, took the class as an elective. She definitely seemed very suburban. Jackson, a famous runner in his prime, took to writing as a life change. He was an avid surfer and looked the part with his leathery skin and faded blond hair. Of course, Dr. Jules was in the class. Dr. Jules was a retired physician who started taking Joe’s classes on a lark. He then decided he wanted to be a writer and hoped to use his connection with Joe to get into the MFA program. He was a negative presence for sure.

During the first week of class, I wrote a sequel to my hybrid story. I remember writing it all in one day and submitting it for the second week of class. Like the previous one, this work was a series of pen drawings surrounded by crude calligraphy. There was a picture of a glove, the diva and her Elvis-like lover, and one where the diva would make Foxy Brown proud by kicking the offending psychiatrist’s ass. Joe and the class, with the exception of Dr. Jules, gave the story a good reception. Joe took it one step further. The English Department had my application packet for the MFA program, and Joe gave me permission to submit this recent work to amend my portfolio.

As the class progressed, I got to see everyone else’s writing styles. Gillian’s stories were ironic, humorous, and entertaining. Dangerous Liaisons comes to mind for some of them, translated in a more 21st century, urban context. Holly had the most literary style of anyone in the class. Tomas wrote stories based on his boyhood in Tijuana. Andrew had lots of energy and ideas, but hardly the depth and breadth to sustain them. His stories, though imaginative, were often unfinished, and his prose style was extremely slender. Everything Harlan brought to the workshop was an experiment. It was more the experimentation of someone who hasn’t developed his voice versus an artistic one. Jackson was interested in writing novels and was extremely verbose. His work, like an overgrown tree, needed heavy pruning. Jill became competent in the form of a story, though they were often boring. Dr. Jules was a marginally competent writer who dished out harsh criticism for most the class. However, he became a big fan of Gillian’s hipster intrigue stories. He was also very adversarial towards me.

With the two stories following the first story I submitted, I remembered Dr. Jules comments the most. With the second story, he e-mailed me a note explaining he could not show up to class along with a critique. It seemed thoughtful of him despite the harshness of the critique. However, he piously decided to come to class. I honestly hoped he wouldn’t come. Whatever constructive or helpful things were said before were cancelled out by Jules’s comments. Joe was not present for that session and I never received a critique from him. The third story I presented was written during one of my house sittings for Joe. It described the narrator’s trip to LA and his search for his diva while there. All the images were of things in LA, but the diva was absent. When Joe offered me a critique in his office before class, I got a bit defensive. I did not put up arguments with him, but I found it hard to listen to any critical comments he had to offer. He felt the work needed to go beyond its bathos or end. It’s a fair critique. Somehow, I took it as an attack and definitely felt attacked when Dr. Jules had offered his critique in class. He had e-mailed it to me as well.

I normally got a ride home after class from Tomas or Gillian. I took the bus home that night. During the ride, I read the printed e-mail over and over. One of my earlier creative writing teachers suggested putting the critiques aside and reading them a week later. It was like a Christmas present I couldn’t wait to open, I just had to read it even if the time wasn’t right. I obsessed over it; I even showed it to my brother. He didn’t think it was helpful at all and said it seemed like Dr. Jules was doing this to peck at me. The question was, why did I care about Dr. Jules’ opinion so much?

When talking with my friends about the workshops, Dr. Jules became this ridiculous old man whose unremarkable mind was incapable of understanding creativity. He was the archconservative voice in the class and would only praise things that were easy for him to comprehend. All of us on some level knew he was never going to be the target reader for a literary work. His thinking was too facile for that. However, he was loud and assertive. I should have recognized him for what he was – a bully. I subconsciously did – I had a lot of fantasies of my narrator’s diva beating him up real good. It wasn’t enough. I could hear his voice loud and clear in my head, even when I wasn’t reading his critiques. Dr. Jules became the personification of my doubts as a writer.

To be continued…

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2
Jun 06

If You Want To Go To Grad School (Part 10)

In my last post, I introduced some of the people I met during the “limbo” year. There’s a few more. These people will definitely show up in future entries. All names have been fictionalized.

Dramatis Personae (Continued)
Natalie was only in the program for one year. She was strong and assertive and very charismatic. I could picture her doing these writing workshops on her own with the participants believing they could appropriate whatever talent she has. She was extremely disappointed with the University’s MFA program and decided to drop out after the term was over. When I told her I got accepted into the program, she cynically told me, “Good Luck.” I did not know how to take it. I would have plenty of time before her reaction made sense to me.

Andrew was a quiet one. He sat in the corner during the Form and Theory class and never said a thing. He was also very handsome, but stood with a slouch. He could be witty at times, but this hid the emotionally intense side of him. I would learn more about this during the following fall semester. He often wrote extremely brief stories with spare prose. Nothing would ever be longer than three pages, and I’ve often wondered how he would ever get a book done. Joe one time mentioned that Andrew rarely read and was surprised when he showed Andrew a book and he assumed it was a gift. Andrew was very geeky. He was very good at using computer technology (which made him useful to Joe), but he also knew as much about Star Trek as I did (and I know a lot). He could not get a girl to date him, despite his good looks. However, he had a steady girlfriend who was extremely dry and conservative.

Gillian wrote stories about hipsters, glitz, and glamour. I think that’s why we hit it off. She was a prolific blogger (before the term came out) and she almost posted every day on Live Journal. She was definitely an online diva with the readership to prove it. Unlike most online personalities, Gillian was outgoing, but subject to mood swings. She often was honest about what she felt in real life or on her blog. Like me, Gillian was attempting to transition from an undergraduate English career to a graduate writing career. She was also cultivating a writerly relationship with Joe and she even got her husband to meet him. She definitely kept me sane during the Joe’s spring semester writing workshop.

More posts to come. To be continued…

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1
Jun 06

If You Want To Go To Grad School (Part 9)

In some of my previous hosts, I have discussed my relationship with Professor K. I’m not completely done with that. In writing about the “limbo” year, I must also write about the people I met.

Dramatis Personae
I met a variety of people in Joe’s classes during the limbo year. Some became my friends, others casual acquaintances, and some were potentially on the enemy list. Few of the people I met during that period I now count among my very good friends.

One of the first people I met was Tomas, my predecessor as the journal’s assistant editor, at Joe’s journal party. He was heavy set, middle-aged, and a bit gruff, but genuinely kind at the same time. Tomas spent many years driving buses and getting involved with various Latino art and poetry scenes. His marriage to a very elegant Columbian woman, a high school Spanish teacher, may have been his primary motivation for getting an MFA. Getting a BA had been an on and off thing for him, but he worked very steadily towards getting a masters, most likely to become more stable career-wise for his wife and children. He had reliably served as Joe’s right hand man for the past few years before I met Joe, but his time was coming to an end. Tomas needed to work on his thesis and became busy with family obligations. However, he did find time to take Joe’s classes.

Keenan and Elizabeth were friends of Tatiyana’s and became a part of my MFA career while they were in the program. Keenan was short and stocky, with hair that stood up rather than go down. Elizabeth had long, unstyled blond hair that hung down her back. Together, they were perceived as an artsy couple, but they were more than that. They were brilliant, and unlike many artsy people, they had discipline. I have never met people who so devoted to writing like them. Elizabeth was a partner with Tatiyana in a journal they founded together in the Pacific Northwest. For a while, they edited through correspondence, but now they were back together in San Diego for a while, they were able to work together. Keenan was the more scholarly of the two, but they both were incredibly well read. First, Joe threw us together in collaborative projects for Form and Theory, and then I got to know them during Henry O’Donough’s bar hours. Keenan and Elizabeth would become some of the most important readers of my work during my MFA career.

Julian Rosenthal was a seventy-something retired physician who audited Joe’s classes. Joe was fond of addressing him as Dr. Jules, and the moniker stuck. Everyone else in the class soon took to calling him that. Dr. Jules was critical of everything that Joe presented in the Form and Theory course, because Joe’s selections were extremely heterodox. The novels and short stories went against convention and reading them was never an easy ride at all. They were provocative, nonetheless, but they had little entertainment value for Dr. Jules. He often objected to the sexuality and the presence of cuss words in the works. He found them to be morally and artistically reprehensible and would not hesitate to say so at times. He could not get past the apparent sloppiness of the outsider artists, and it was funny when he referred to a work as disciplined (because of the technical skill). His criticism was not limited to the works we studied. When I housesat for Joe, I saw his journal among the stack collected at the end of the semester and looked through it. He was critical of Joe and his classmates, yours truly included. It was unnerving to see how he characterized me, but at least I came across as a person, whether I liked it or not. He simply characterized Stevie, a good friend of mine, as a homosexual. Dr. Jules was literal minded and was seen by all of us as a conservative voice in the class.

I had met Stevie two years before in an upper division Toni Morrison seminar. He was thin, blond, sweet, and unavoidably gay. We would only hang out during cigarette breaks, but not much beyond that. The following summer, I saw him at Gay Pride and chatted briefly. It was not until Joe’s Form and Theory class that I would get to know him. I got to know about his obsession with his namesake, Stevie Nicks. Sometimes, she was all he could talk about. It’s a common discussion threat up to this day. I would later learn about the others in his “diva pantheon” – Wonder Woman, Emma Peel, a Classics professor he knew at his undergrad alma mater, and one of the resident poets of the University’s program. An early conversation opportunity was when I was riding a bus to the University. Stevie dropped his car off to get repaired, and coincidentally he came aboard the same bus. We chatted, became better acquainted, and he later dropped me off at the grocery store where I worked. While I did not hang out with him much outside of class during the course of the semester, I would keep in touch with him after the class was over. We’re still very good friends today.

Lilia was a born-again Christian, but definitely not the garden variety Christian. While she was vocal about her faith and had theologically orthodox views, she was never glib. She often looked at Joe’s selections with her Christianity, but she was also open-minded enough to learn from them. Lilia had an earnest desire to create good and interesting art that expressed her beliefs. Apart from her religion, what informed her work were two things – she was Filipina-American and she was intimately acquainted with physical suffering. She often had a disorder that would redden her skin and then leave her pigment uneven. She was allergic to all kinds of food and found it safe to be on a vegan diet. I would later learn about some of her other issues through her writing. She was dating Erik, an alumnus of the MFA program, and they would soon get married. I became good friends with Erik through a professional relationship developed outside of the University.

“Dramatis Personae” to be continued…

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31
May 06

If You Want To Go To Grad School (Part 8)

This was originally from Part 7, but I had to break it up as the post was extremely long.

The first half of the semester was spent teaching poetry. I took a lot of my poems from Barbara Drake’s book on teaching poetry, but I threw a few choices of my own too: Joe Brainard, William Blake, Allen Ginsberg, and even Dr. Seuss. It was definitely a challenge.

Apart from getting my students to read the works, I was forced to teach outside of my expertise. I have written poems and I knew a lot from the study of poetry, but my expertise was primarily in fiction. It forced me to read up, look up terms of poetry and the forms themselves. There were a few days I devoted to teaching the forms and I essentially became a math teacher. I tried to meter, rhyme, and the formulas for the forms, and it was like trying to teach algebra. How does one show the technical side of poetry without being dry? I did not want to create a bunch of formalist poets, but I felt it was important for them to know this stuff.

In addition, I had the students submit their poems for workshop. I tried having them submit the poems to the class website so that the writers would not go through the expense of copying the poems ahead of time. That did not work. I then had to go for the old fashioned photocopy for the entire class routine. I don’t think I was entirely successful in getting students to understand the schedule of the workshop. When workshops were successful, poems about relationships seemed to be the most common. Some students bemoaned the relationship poem. I defended the writer’s right to write about them and anything they wanted. If I were to teach creative writing again, I would still defend those writers.

Fiction was interesting. I initially thought I could rest upon my expertise as a storywriter, but it proved to be a bigger challenge than poetry. I did explain the technical aspects of the story, but it may have felt lost upon the students. Getting them to read the stories proved to be a bigger challenge than getting them to read the poems. There would be days where most of the students had not read the text. So, I resorted to a time-honored method employed by teachers – the quiz. I wrote simple quizzes and passed them out at the beginning of class. Some students showed that they did not read the story by their answers, some showed that they read it, and others showed a lack of attentive reading. The quiz certainly got some people’s attention, and one student claimed in an evaluation that the class “culminated into a brutally hard quiz.” Towards the end of the class, I learned from a lot of failed class discussions on how to point the material to make it a learning experience for them. When I taught “Revelation” by Flannery O’Connor, I made a worksheet by preparing four questions for my students to do as homework. I then used the worksheet to facilitate a class discussion, and one of my students sent me e-mail at the end of the day to tell me I did a good job teaching that story.

A lot, but not all, of the works were by gay authors or had a gay theme. While these works did not always have gay themes, their authors were gay: Allen Ginsberg, James Baldwin, David Leavitt. To my knowledge, Ursula K. Le Guin is not a lesbian, but the short story I assigned, “Solitude,” had a lesbian theme. I had them go over two of the songs from Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Some of my students resented this. I had an online discussion group set up for the class, and one student voiced her resentment in a post. She felt confronted by homosexuality in almost every work. Another student replied in agreement. When I got a copy of the class evaluations, I recognized the one by Mindy Shatner, though they were supposed to be anonymous. She was often hostile towards me in class. I often tried to figure it out, and the graduate advisor asked me if it could have been racial prejudice or homophobia. It was likely on the side of homophobia, as Mindy wrote in her evaluation that she was disturbed that every author was gay and that every story and poem had a homosexual theme.

On some level, I can understand the student who felt confronted with homosexuality in my assigned readings. However, I have often felt confronted with certain things throughout my life, whether in literature, cinema, or television. Literature has been presented as mostly white, male, and middle to upper class. In addition, it has also been presented as heterosexual. If the author were gay or lesbian, their sexuality was often played down. I never even knew gay authors or even non-white authors existed until I was in college. In movies and television, much of the world presented is a white, heterosexual one. It has gotten much better than the time when I was a child. At least now there are more prominent gay and non-white characters. But if the focus is gay or non-white, then the movie or television show winds up in some kind of ghetto. The same could almost be said for books.

In my defense, I did not have a “gay agenda” when it came to presenting these works. These stories and poems were for me examples of good and interesting writing. They were alive and not homogenous. They were varied in style and presentation. Chris Altacruise, a pen name of someone who criticized MFA programs in his or her article, felt American fiction was marked in its sameness of style and themes. I did not want to feed into that sameness. I hoped students would do works that reflected them. I hope I do work that reflect me, not my attempt to write like anyone else.

The summer after that first semester of teaching, I got a copy of the student evaluations. Some were exceedingly harsh, some were completely irrelevant, and some very helpful. I mentioned some of the harsh ones. There were a few others and reading them, I questioned my ability as a teacher. Some said things like the class was a waste of time or that I was a horrible public speaker. When I came across Mindy Shatner’s evaluation, I recognized it right away. The homophobia was clearly articulated and one of the things she wrote mirrored what she said during the confrontation – that she paid over $1000 to take the course and found it to be a waste of her time. Well, I certainly never got that $1000. I took a pen and wrote BUNDT* SNAP on the evaluation. I put it in the MEAN pile. I put the ones with stupid, irrelevant comments in the NOT HELPFUL pile. The few that were helpful pointed out both my strengths and weaknesses. The ones that praised me helped my spirit, and I definitely took to heart the ones that pointed out areas where I could improve.

I saw one of my students, the former Marine, on campus during the late summer. I told her about the bad evaluations and how it got me down. She told me that I wasn’t giving myself enough credit. She would not have thought about writing poetry if it were not for me. She also pointed out that one young woman, who wrote a humorous story about a fat teenager and her problems, kept going with the story in the next creative writing class. This young woman had discovered something uniquely hers and was definitely running with it.

*this is a made-up version of a cuss word, like Battlestar Galactica’s “Frak.”

More posts to come. Stay tuned.

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29
May 06

If You Want To Go To Grad School (Part 6)

In my last posts, I discussed how Professor K influenced my plans for the following spring semester of my “limbo year.” During the break between fall and spring semesters, I did not go on vacation from Joe.

At the end of the semester, I found out I got promoted to assistant editor. I had been doing the work all fall but signing my name on replies and rejection forms as SE, editorial assistant. Joe wanted me on board for the spring to typeset, although he could not promise me a living wage. Even though I was happy to declare the decade-long grocery career finished, there was still the issue of money.

I called a community college in the east county because their English department needed tutors for their writing center. I played phone tag with the professor in charge, but I was finally able to speak with her on the phone and get an interview. I took a few buses out to the college and met her. She was lovely and graceful, two qualities that are rare in Southern California. The interview went well and I had a job for the spring.

The university’s fall semester ended December 15. That same date was given as the deadline for submissions to the journal. After that ominous date, I took home some second-read submissions and checked the mailroom a few days later for any last-minute entries. I vaguely remember Christmas, but I remember taking the manuscripts to the beach to read and going to Joe’s house for a couple of meetings.

When I first showed Joe the first three pages of my hybrid work, he was encouraging. There were drawings of a glamorous figure surrounded by scribbling that filled the entire page. It grew into a short story and during the winter break, Joe gave me the name and e-mail address of an editor who just accepted one of his stories. I quickly e-mailed him the Word file of the story and mailed him photocopies of the drawings to scan. A week later, my work was accepted for publication.

That was not my only work that got published at the time. Joe wanted some artistic formatting done for one writer’s work, which was a series of one word stories, and he solicited me to do it. I took the writer’s words and played with them on Adobe Illustrator by twisting them into their shapes. I also decided to make a collage. I typed several word in a column in one page and I made a sheet by filling a word-processed page with “Plenty of White Space.” With a red Prismacolor pencil, I made bubbles for words on the white space page and cut them out, and pasted the two papers together. It was a bit disrespectful to the writer, but I experimented, seeing what could come out of it. I showed these renderings to Joe. He rejected all of the Illustrator generated submissions and accepted the collage. I was horrified. What if the writer took offense to it? These thoughts went through my mind, but I never objected. I was surprised by what Joe did next – he would credit me as a contributor to the journal. In addition to being a published writer, I would also be a published artist.

I housesat for Joe twice. The first time was during the winter break during one weekend when Joe and his girlfriend drove out to spend a weekend in the desert. I was delighted. I lived at home at the time and it would give me an opportunity to get away from my family. Joe had a ranch style home near the university with an extensive library of books and a living room that was a comfortable place to read with a view of the canyon. My only responsibility was to make sure the bird feeders were filled. Joe was an avid bird watcher and, inside the living room, he would sweetly greet the finches and jays that flew in to the back yard to feed. Making sure the birds were taken care of was no problem. It did not take me long to put the seeds and nuts where they should go and I was able to get on with what I needed to do that day.

The second time I housesat for Joe, he was gone for a few lectures on the East Coast for a week early in the spring semester. I knew the routine from the last time. I fed the birds every morning and I started my day. I took the bus to work and I got to walk to the university for my classes. Since both my classes were with Joe, he appointed Tomas, my predecessor as assistant editor, to proctor them. I made myself very much at home. I did not leave clothes or books strewn all over the place, but I took the vodka he kept in the freezer and tried to make homemade martinis. While I went through his refrigerator looking to for a snack, I found some cookies wrapped in foil hidden in the back. I pulled them out to eat one, but I couldn’t just have one. Though the taste was bitter and suspiciously familiar, I ate them until there were no more and then I had to keep eating. I wasn’t hungry, but I just wanted to continually chew on something. I chewed on pretzel sticks and carrots without taking a break. I sat down to read a book, but couldn’t because the living room started to spin like a dryer. I got up and went to Joe’s bedroom and looked at myself in the mirrored closet door, and my reflection looked like an image from high resolution TV. I then laughed, passed out, and slept for many hours. The hangover lasted for a couple of days. When Joe returned from his trip, his girlfriend called me to make sure I was ok because she was afraid something bad could have happened to me, considering how many cookies I ate. When I asked her what was in the cookies, she said it contained “special ingredients.” Though I had my suspicions of what it was (and I knew later), her answer was good enough for the time. And, dear reader, that answer has to be good enough for you.

When I created my hybrid story, I thought it would be a one-time thing only. In the first one, the narrator is sexually abused by his psychiatrist and he retreats further into fantasy, especially with his glamorous heroine. At the beginning of the spring semester, I created a sequel. The young man would be avenged by the glamorous woman coming down from Los Angeles and kicking the psychiatrist’s ass. This too had both words and images, and Joe allowed me to amend my MFA application portfolio by submitting it to the English Department. Even though my portfolio met the required 30 pages, Joe felt this piece would strengthen it. It certainly must have.

To be continued…

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28
May 06

If You Want To Go To Grad School (Part 5)

In my last post, I discussed the first half of the “limbo year,” ending with Professor K showing signs of possessiveness towards me.

I would decide not to take Tatiyana’s class, much to my regret, because it was her final semester at the University. A premature departure, I heard through some sources that she was forced to leave because she became involved with her thesis student. The evidence was difficult to conceal since it was growing in her belly. It never bothered me because it was a consensual relationship. She didn’t force some poor kid to take his pants off and rape him – the student was an intelligent and capable man in his late twenties. Joe, on the other hand, dated a woman after she took his class and she lived with him while earning her BA and MA at the University. This too was consensual and Joe never got in any kind of trouble for it. Joe was tenured, but Tatiyana was not. Gender very well could be an issue as well, since a woman is more likely to be punished for a sexual transgression than a man. Despite this, Tatiyana was allowed to be on the MFA admissions committee during her “lame duck” semester.

Since I was acquainted with Tatiyana from a couple of reading events, she gave me the news concerning my application when I saw her on the campus early in the spring semester. Joe had already told me that I was accepted, but Tatiyana was very pleased to give me the news, telling me I deserved it. Joe would later tell me that the committee was uninamous when it came to my application – he, Tatiyana, and Professor Beltran were in agreement. I found Tatiyana’s news delivery, and later Joe’s anecdote, to be assuring because Joe did not have to bully the rest of the committee or politic with one member or the other to get me admitted.

While Joe would vigorously deny this, he likes it when students are in his orbit. Take classes with him, be involved with his projects, party with him – what a student needs out of this gets lost or becomes irrelevant. I never sensed that a student’s growth as a writer or reader was important to Joe. Some of his favorite students were exceptionally literate, while most of them hardly read at all and thought his writing was utterly amazing. Granted, he is better than the average open-miker (and even some of his charges), but he doesn’t hold up to Literature. He’s good at talking as if his work does. Even though I was never a fan of his work, I had a symbiotic relationship with Joe. I took his workshops and worked for him while he was my ally in the English department. I let him cheat me out of studying with Tatiyana because I followed his cue too well. During my first year in the program, Professor Beltran taught a class on William Blake, one of my literary heroes. I mentioned to Joe that I was interested in taking the course, and Joe spoke in a roundabout manner how Beltran could not effectively teach Blake. I listened to him.

To be continued…

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27
May 06

If You Want To Go To Grad School (Part 4)

In my last post, I discussed my early academic relationship with Joe AKA Professor K and how he sought to get me into the program after I proved to be useful to him. Here I’ll continue to discuss the “limbo year,” where I had completed most of the requirments for my degree and was taking graduate courses with Professor K.

What I did not mention was during that fall semester of working for Joe and studying with him in his graduate course was I was also completing the requirements for my BA that semester. I had applied for graduation the previous semester and was declined due to not having enough units. I called the evaluations office and objected. I carried over 100 units and they accepted 70 when I transferred to the university from a local community college. I hoped I could have some of those units count, but they did not find that acceptable. They wanted me to take these units at the university. Since I had satisfied all the catalog requirements for my degree, the evaluation office did not care what classes I took as long as they were at the university.

Joe offered a course on creative writing that summer, but I was not able to take it. I was working at a supermarket at the time and my schedule there would not allow it. A co-worker’s husband was terminally ill and she took an indefinite leave of absence from my department. I remember feeling extremely disappointed that I could not attend Professor K workshop. It would have been a change for me to show him my writing. Though I only knew him for a short period, Professor K became a paternal figure to me. He certainly reminded me of my father, especially with his dry sense of humor. I had never had a good relationship with my father, even when we had managed to get along, so it was easy for me to look to other men to fulfill that role. The class would have been an opportunity to become closer, to get to know Joe, but this would happen very quickly in the fall.

I did, however, take a course on world religions and another on European history. I was already registered in these course when my co-worker’s crisis occurred, so my department head made allowances in the schedule for me. Since my classes were in the morning and afternoon, I could work evenings. On the other hand, Professor K’s class was during the evening, and my co-worker’s situation made everyone else’s scheduling situations very insane. Nonetheless, I kept in touch with Professor K.

During the fall semester, I still had to play the units game for my BA. I enrolled in two English courses – The Tragic Vision and Science Fiction. Since I was still an undergrad, I had to get an add code from Professor K in order to take his Form and Theory course. Science Fiction was absolutely wonderful. I was first exposed to one of my favorite writers in that course: Ursula K Le Guin. We also read Samuel Delaney, Alfred Bester, and Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris. The professor (I’ll call him Henry O’Donough) was a respected expert on post-modernism and we also read his anthology, which contained essays, short stories, and novel excerpts from philosophers, theorists, and literary and science fiction writers. Henry always held bar hours on Thursday evenings, and I showed up to most of them. The Tragic Vision was, well, tragic. Three hours of Tuesday afternoons were always lost to boredom and professorial pedantry. Dr. Tsongas obviously knew a lot and he droned on and on, but he could also be mean. Towards the end of the semester, I missed the deadline for one of the final assignments and he upbraided me in front of class for it. He did, however, let me turn it in late. I had that end of the semester burnout and I wanted to bail out on the Tragic Vision course altogether. One morning, when I was at the office, I talked to Joe on the phone and confided to him my impulse to leave the Tragic Vision course and fail it. He told me to hang in there and to finish it, especially since my application to the MFA program was at stake. I showed up to the final and got a B in the course. The units game was then over.

For thirteen years, I worked for one of the major supermarket chains in San Diego. I paid for my college education with my salary and the employment also provided me with medical and dental benefits. I hated working there, but the pay and benefits kept me working. I spent seven years in the bakery department working the closing shift. I went to school during the day (occasionally an evening) and worked in the evening. I packed baked goods that were not taken care of before I arrived and put them out on the sales floor, took cake orders, sold pastries and last minute cakes, and cleaned up the bakery before I left. I mopped floors every night to pay for my tuition and I was tired of it. The chain was in its first year of a merger with a new parent company and the changes were hard to keep up with. In October, when the changes seemed the most unreasonable, I put in my two-week notice and wrote that I was leaving to complete my BA. One manager empathetically told me many others were putting in their notices. Once I worked my last day, a good friend of mine picked me up to see Bjork’s awful movie and I never looked back.

During mid-December, Joe and Tatiyana, the visiting writer to MFA program, did a reading at the Cottage, located on the northwestern part of the university, right off the Mall. Before the reading, Joe and I discussed my plans for the spring semester. Joe was offering a course entitled “Madness In Literature;” however, I wanted to take Tatiyana’s fiction workshop and the problem was that both Joe and Tatiyana’s courses were offered on Tuesday nights. When Joe asked me if I was going to take his “Madness” course, I told him I wanted to take Tatiyana’s. Joe became very quiet, and I sensed it was out of jealousy. Even though he was friendly towards Tatiyana, some of my friends told me Joe felt Tatiyana stole some of his students. That silence only lasted a few seconds. It would be a year and a half before Joe gave me a longer silence. I would make the decision to enroll in Joe’s course.

To be continued…

writing — No Comments
26
May 06

If You Want To Go To Grad School (Part 3)

In my last post, I mentioned a specific university job that was nightmarish. Mindy Shatner (not her real name) made my first semester of teaching a living hell. Hopefully, she’s got some of that karma coming back to her if she teaches in grad school. Before Ms. Shatner, there was Professor Joseph K. Needless to say, it’s not his real name. My first university job was working for him, and that became nightmarish towards the end.

My MFA career began during my senior period in undergraduate school. It would be a year and a half until I was matriculated in the graduate creative writing program, but I say it began during my senior year because that was when I met Professor Joseph K. I enrolled in his upper division 20th Century American literature course. His choice of books was definitely unconventional. Apart from the somewhat canonical Langston Hughes, we read poems by Joy Harjo and Jimmy Santiago Baca. Bloods, a transcription of oral narratives of the Vietnam War, sparked discussion. We also read two of Professor K’s books – his own collection of short stories centering on murderers and sexually unconventional people, and a university press journal (centered on “innovative fiction”) edited by Professor K himself. Even though I was not impressed with Professor K’s book, I was intrigued with his journal. His text selections represented the zeitgeist, and I enjoyed reading them and contributing to the class discussion. Somehow, I had an impact on Professor K. During one office meeting, he invited to take a graduate course he was offering for the following semester. As a senior, I was honored. He thought that much of me, but some bigger surprises were to come.

Professor K picked a small group of students from the American literature class to become part of his editorial team, and I was among the elite. Once again, I was honored that he chose me as he explained to us in his office that he valued our skills as readers and critics and that we had a lot to offer his journal. After the course was over, I kept in touch with Professor K during the following summer and visited his home for a journal party before the start of the fall semester. I was only one of two people who showed up from our class and everyone else present were graduate students. Professor K introduced me to the group as an excellent writer and critic, which definitely raised my confidence.

During the start of the fall semester, the assistant editor simply became unavailable to do his duties due to the demands of graduate school and his marriage. Since he could not keep office hours for the journal, I stepped in and Professor K gave me keys to his office and the mailroom. I processed the submissions and issued them to the readers, delivered Professor K’s mail to his desk, and read and recommended manuscripts to Professor K. He trusted my opinion, but he did not always accept my suggestions. Though I was not getting paid, I enjoyed the work because I was valuable. By the end of the semester, Professor K gave me the title of assistant editor.

Sometime during that semester, I stopped calling him Professor K and started to call him Joe. Everyone who worked with him was on a first name basis with him, so I felt I should too. While my relationship with Professor K was congenial, my relationship with Joe would be stormy after my admission into the MFA program. When I was in his upper division course, I mentioned my interest in the program. Professor K was skeptical because he had not seen any samples of my fiction. When I took his graduate literature course, he gave a lot of creative response exercises. I enthusiastically kept a journal. Actually, it was an 11×17 sketchpad. I wrote in it, but I also did visual art response – collages, drawings, and a hybrid work that would grow into my thesis. I showed Joe the first three pages of the seminal work and his reaction surprised me. He said it was good.

While Joe could not guarantee me a seat, he wanted me to apply to the program. He had seen my work and I was working for him. Somehow, I suspect the latter was more important. His former assistant was transitioning out of the program, so Joe hoped to continue the working relationship he had with me. He had me show him what I had compiled for my application portfolio. Several of my exercises comprised a bulk of it, while only one early story of mine made it. My stories about a crazy Japanese auntie figure seemed too tame. Joe also grilled me on who I would get letters of recommendation from (besides him). It was a given that he would write on my behalf. I mentioned one creative writing instructor I had as an undergraduate and he did not like her at all. I mentioned another, and this one had more credibility with Joe. To satisfy the requirement of three letters, I went through few choices with Joe on literature professors, and I settled with asking a professor I took British and Romantic literature courses with. He agreed. I wrote my statement of purpose and e-mailed it to Joe a few times. Each time, I was able to refine it due to Joe’s correction. Once the application package was complete, I mailed it from a post office that was only two hundred feet from the English Department.

To be continued…

teaching — No Comments
26
May 06

If You Want To Go To Grad School…

If you want to go to grad school, run! Run as hard and as fast as you can away from the idea. If you picked up an application during a campus visit, put it down and walk away. If you had already sent to the university for an application, put the thing in the shredder. If you’re on the university’s website and have accessed the online application, type in another URL and do something else. Shop, look at porn, have cybersex, or do whatever else you like to do online. Just don’t go to another university’s website.

This advice applies if you’re considering an academic master’s or doctorate degree or you’re aimless after getting that BA or BS. Of course, there is something fun about extending a college career. The parties are better and the professors will drink with you. Oh, and there is this thing called work. For the truly dedicated who someday wish to become professors themselves, there are plenty of coveted, but low paying jobs. For $200-$600 a month, grad students can expect to work as a tutor, an assistant to a professor, or a TA (which could either stand for [student] teaching associate or teaching assistant). During my time earning an MFA in creative writing, I worked as a writing tutor, an assistant to an English professor, a lower division creative writing instructor, a TA attached to an Intro to Literature lecture class, and even as an adjunct professor at a local community college. Most of these jobs were in the $200 to $340 range each, and perhaps came to $600 if several were combined. My adjunct instructor job during my thesis semester was wonderful. I would have to work several of the university jobs for what I got paid to teach developmental writing at the community college.

Pay was only one issue of the grad school gigs. For the compensation offered, these jobs were extremely demanding. Tutoring students took a great deal of emotional and intellectual resources. Teaching lower division courses, of course, required lesson plans, attention to student work, and patience that is definitely required of high school teachers. One has to read the material, create assignments, grade papers, and interact with friendly or hostile students. While the professor takes care of lessons for a lecture class, the TA still has a lot of work. One has to work with one or two groups of students from the class (which can be up to 60 people), facilitate discussions, and give tests and quizzes (some TA’s even give homework). While the professor lectures, the TA is essentially responsible for the student’s grade. However, the professor can overrule the grades if she sees fit. The student workers must shoulder the responsibilities of their jobs in addition to the work required of them in their graduate courses. While graduate programs come with obligations to read, study hard, and write well, students often work to meet more basic needs such as food, clothing, and shelter.

To be continued…

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