March 2007            

The je ne sais quoi of the creative writing department, by Sarah Black
Posted Monday, March 12, 2007 @ 04:59 PM

Sarah Black posted this as a comment to my most recent entry, "Spit out on the shores of the English department." It made me so nostalgic and pinpoints so exactly the je ne sais quoi of an ASFA graduate's college experience that I couldn't help but repost it in its entirety. Sarah has always gotten at the meat of things much faster and more simply than I have, and for once perhaps you can't dismiss my long, aching sentences as a melodramatic flair I have when it comes to the observation and writing of my own life; here is another person's account which is not unlike my own. In short, "See! Look! I'm not crazy!" The feeling she describes of having lost half my vocabulary—if not an entire literary language—has been hitting especially hard lately.

Thanks, Sarah. I hope you don't mind.

I'm taking a 100-level Literary Analysis class that isn't too bad because it's small with interesting material, more like an intense book club than a notes-and-lectures class. Most of the kids can say insightful things without having the vocabulary, so even if I have to go back over similies versus metaphors (though we were asking "is this a pastiche?" by sophmore year), at least I don't have to deal with anyone making obnoxious comments about Prufrock.

The first year of college seems to be when Creative Writers realize that not everyone considers poetry to be the Most Important Thing In The World. People here roll their eyes whenever I point at passing flocks of geese and say "hey, look, it's my place in the family of things," or snidely allude to Mark Strand as we drive through corn fields. I've left many parties this semester just to read Adrienne Rich or McSweeney's in the comfort of my new single; when I confessed this to my friends they just told me "we know, Sarah. We're not surprised; we know." I didn't realize what a large portion of our conversations came from shared literary experience until I couldn't say "what are you, fucking Kubla Kahn?" or base my descriptions of people on Faulkner characters. It's like we spoke our own language for so long we forgot that other people could refer to lanyards as something other than "you know, like the Billy Collins poem about his mother."

Of course I'm just considered a literary nerd in a community where everyone has their own nerd universe (my friends Rob and Sam spent all of Saturday night building one of these). I live across from a Billy Collins fan and joined the writers' workshop this semester, but it's still a far cry from our world where a person was inextricable from their poetry and we never thought it was weird to describe food as "bitter, like my heart." I didn't understand the unevenness of our education until I tried breaking the ice at parties with things like "High school? Yeah, I used to go down to the Creative Writing department and sleep under my desk for four hours" or "Did anyone else have couches in their classrooms?" We adored our heroes for their writing, overlooking a long catalog of personality flaws and personal demons because all we saw was their talent. There wasn't much we wouldn't sacrifice in the name of good poetry; can you imagine any other high school where tests would be extended because you had an upcoming reading to plan for?

I submitted to Grinnell's literary magazine for the first time last week, and though this semester's issue won't be coming out for a while, I was reminded of the excitement and nervousness and frustration that surrounded submitting to Cadence, which felt like the year's single measure of personal worth, a feeling five times magnified with senior readings. There's nothing that seminal in my short experience with college life. People here are accomplished and well-rounded, they're athletes and actors and volunteers, while I'm in the corner telling the bored crowd that "dude, I met Joel Brouwer once." For some kids the shock of college is in living far from home, meeting people with abstract, complicated sexualities, or being academically challenged for the first time; for me, it was finding people who made a 790 on the SAT Math portion but hadn't read "The Second Coming." Sure, in French class I didn't know what the Champs-Elysees was and I've been laughed at for my explanation of why oil and water don't mix and how there's less snow on the ground even if temperatures didn't rise above freezing, and I've cited Barthelme short stories as sources of scientific knowledge, but goddamn it if, for one beautiful moment, that wasn't all we needed.

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Spit out on the shores of the English department
Posted Tuesday, March 06, 2007 @ 04:56 PM

I wrote the following entry on November 16, 2006, but never completed it. Until now it remained unpublished.

So far I've failed to write about my English class here, which at this moment (two weeks before the end of the semester and the end of the class) I regret, since I have an anecdote which loses significance without knowledge of my previous experience with the class. Worse, I don't want to merely share the anecdote, I want to utilize it in jumbled, abstract paragraphs about my life-long dilemma of indecisiveness, specifically how that relates to my time in college, my need to declare a major, and ultimately my future. I'm telling you this now so that when you scroll down and see that this entry continues for quite some time, you won't feel manipulated or alarmed.

Many of you, through one form or another, probably know that even though I was allowed to skip all of freshman comp, I still landed in a classroom devoid of all passion—a sophomore lit class to which I drag myself twice a week. I think I've even said, at times, that within the walls of that particular classroom, examining literature is pain. Because the class is at a 200 level, it's full of students trying to satisfy their core requirement, and I noticed even on the first day that the apathy could barely fit through the door.

The professor is not the type you'd imagine. Although he dresses nicely, he is decidedly more casual than the elbow-patch/corduroy jacket type. Perhaps it's his long, below-the-shoulders hair and biker goatee that do it. During the first few weeks, he found several occasions to reminisce over hardcore shows, complimenting students on their choice of band t-shirts (NIN, Tool, that variety).

I once visited Liz, a creative writing/high school buddy of mine, in my search for colleges. During my visit, I attended her sophomore-level creative writing poetry workshop. I could overlook the mousy girl-poetry of faeries and loneliness—things that were sad and rhymed, but were rarely poetry—but when the professor wrote "assonance" on the board and was greeted by blank stares and not a single raised hand, I'm pretty sure my jaw dropped. I had a similar experience in American lit, when, on the first day of class, my hardcore professor sat on his desk and asked, "Has anyone heard of Walt Whitman?" No one raised their hand. No one spoke. After a moment or two of dead silence, I piped up from the last row, "He was the poet who introduced free verse. He had a beard and wore a funny hat." I spent the next two weeks telling everyone I knew that no one in my 210 class had heard of dear old Walt, hoping for mountains of pity and a handful of hugs. The English class I'd hoped to be my sanctuary for the semester was the first thing I considered dropping.

I don't feel pressed to declare a major. I am content to remain unlabeled and puzzling to fellow students, a possibility to professors, and a blank, relatively inert body and mind to myself. Not having a major, in a sense, helps me remain anonymous, which is something I haven't experienced at its fullest in some time. In one sense, I feel like this semester has been a needed break, and in the other, I feel like it's been (on some levels) a waste of time. I am still struggling with people, trying to make what I hope will be lasting connections.

I meet with an adviser tomorrow to try and throw together my schedule for next semester. I have enough core classes left to take that technically I don't have to think seriously about declaring a major until spring or fall of next year, but the novelty of a lack of direction has worn off. It's easy to drift in college, and lose sight of any shore. With all my boat and shore metaphors lately, I wonder if and when they will become comedic. Just wait until I get to the part about being like Jonah, vomited from the belly of a whale.

The lines between home and school definitely blur, and with them, solitude gets lost somewhere. Any and every given hour is potentially one to meet buddies for lunch, to lie in the shade of a giant tree on the quad, to rig a sound system in the tower room of a dorm for a makeshift dance party. The hours of school and home life used to be so clearly defined. Sometime late my junior year I discovered the beauty of the time that fell between the two, after everyone had gone to sleep and before I had to get ready for the morning commute. Now, no one makes us go home, and we sit at Waffle House until three, on someone's futon 'til five, and wander from dorm to dorm once things wind down, dropping everyone off at their rooms. It's amazing to have company when you don't want to sleep—to call everyone you know at 2AM to pile in someone's car for Krispy Kreme drive-thru.

The "party on the boat" (continuing our nautical theme) is exciting, especially so far from the shores of high school and college graduation. Nevertheless, my upcoming advising appointment has begged me to consider how much fun such a cruise will be if I don't decide on a destination. (Comedic yet?) Mostly I worry that I'm behind on pre-requisites for things I'm considering for majors. I've already decided on a French minor, and have nearly halfway completed it, but English and photography require all sorts of survey courses and pre-reqs before getting to the meat of the major, and I feel like I should make up my mind and get started soon. I miss being totally immersed in a niche community the way I was in the creative writing department at ASFA. I doubt anything will ever truly replicate that, but I long for the sense of purpose and direction a course of study provides. Not to mention the fact that, at a university this size, no one has any interest in really advising you if you're still labeled "pre-major studies."

As last semester progressed, my American lit professor seemed to address me in class more and more directly. Gradually, I moved from the back of the classroom to the first row, and class discussions were held primarily between myself, the professor, and one other student who chose to participate. When I came down with mono, I missed class for an appointment at the student health center, and brought my excuse to his office later that day to explain the situation. At the time we were reading As I Lay Dying by Faulkner, and he confessed that he'd missed me in class as the one other student we held discussions with had also been absent that day.

Once, after handing out our graded midterms in class, he followed me out of the classroom and asked whether I planned to major in English. The midterm had a long essay portion, which was the first real written assignment we'd had in the class. The prompt I chose from the list lent itself to quoting directly from "Song of Myself" and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," which I did, despite the absence of the texts in front of me, as I'd read them so many times in high school I knew portions by heart. When he asked my major, I explained that I'd considered English, but had been in creative writing classes for five years and I intended to pursue French or some other subject. In class, he began telling stories of English majors and creative writing classes which were clearly of no interest to other students in the class, as if to lure me to become an English major once and for all.

One day, while riding a tangent on the English department, he said, "I think English majors arrive on the shores of the English department a little like Jonah. God told Jonah, 'Go and tell!' When he didn't, God made it storm, Jonah was swallowed by the whale, and begged for forgiveness." I may have discovered that he was right—English majors try to pretend they're interested in other things until, utterly lost and disheartened, they beg for forgiveness and are spit out onto the shores of the English department, disoriented but happy to finally go and tell.

In a final effort, as I completed my final exam for the class and walked to the front to hand him the test, he gripped the paper and looked up at me very solemnly from his desk. We both held one corner of the test, and he whispered very quietly so as not to disturb those who hadn't finished, "You're going to major in English, right?"

All of this is to say that I think the whale is about to be beached, and any moment now will, in a final struggle, hurl me onto the shores of the English department. I'm a little nervous.

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