Sorry, all, for my unintended hiatus here. I flew down to Florida for a friend's wedding over the weekend and threw a 4th of July BBQ party on Wednesday. In theory, I love hosting parties. In reality, I worry WAY too much about them and stress out over it. My stupid home internet hasn't been working for over a week now (ok, I steal from my neighbors, but it's not like I'm downloading movies or something, I just want to post a blog and check my freaking email!!). I'm at a coffee shop now.
I've been thinking a lot about how to respond to this topic. It should be easy-- the first question in any Washington circle of strangers or acquaintances is invariably "so what do you do?" Even before "HOW do you do?" which, to me, seems like a much more polite question than "what."
Once before on this blog I mentioned my company by name, and then it popped up on their Google Alerts, so I won't be doing that again. Right now, though, I'm in Washington working for a government contractor (I think we prefer "consulting company"). I work on Outreach and communications for a website that's open to emergency responders and homeland security officials to review past incidents and exercises and pull lessons from them for use in the future. Until recently, I was on a team of three people doing Outreach (four people, not so long ago), but now it's just me. This has given me the ability to re-work some of the actual aspects of what I do, for example, I get to write more and have passed on some of the more inane work to a different team of people. But, well, I'm not having such a good time of it lately. Sorry for you, Dear Readers, a public forum is not the place to discuss exactly why. Everybody has problems, right?
When I came to DC a few months after getting my writing degree from FSU, my intention was to hold a full-time job to pay the bills and put food in my belly, but to spend my spare time writing and publishing. It hasn't really worked out like that. Usually when I get home I'm sort of mentally burnt out and just want to veg for a while. However, once you start vegging in an evening, it's quite hard to stop. I usually spend the evenings doing crosswords and watching Law & Order or whatever came in from Netflix. Also, I've lived here for 2 1/2 years and have yet to find more writers, or at least more creative writers. I know some journalists and some other coms people, but I haven't been able just to sit in a coffee shop or on the Mall on a Saturday afternoon and write and share my work with people and talk and laugh... Man, I was SO spoiled in college. Even the few people here who have expressed interest in this are so busy all the time, as is typical with DC schedules, we never catch each other to actually do it.
So now, my job is my job, but I won't be doing it for the rest of my days. It's not career for me yet. Who knows what I'll be doing next...
Showing posts with label creative writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label creative writing. Show all posts
Sunday, July 08, 2007
Thursday, April 19, 2007
A Different Take On The Topic
First, 100th post!
Second, Sorry I'm late.
Third, here's my post.
Within the blanket of the broad topic for this week, "words," and the subtopic censorship, I think that an interesting news story has arisen. The Virginia Tech shootings, of course, are on the news all the time, and everybody is scrambling to find an angle to take on them. It's probably too early to tell what the angle that will be repeated ad nauseum for months will be (like during Columbine it was playing violent video games or listening to Marilyn Manson), but one aspect of this attack that people are talking about that I worry might be the angle is the dude's creative writing.
Apparently, Cho was a creative writing student (he had at least taken some classes if that wasn't his major). Many classmates are coming forth and describing how dark and disturbing his writing was, and how as a result they should have seen this attack coming. Two of his plays have even been posted online, with many news organizations pointing to how twisted and dark they are. Famous poet Nikki Giovanni (I think the term "famous poet" might be a bit of an oxymoron) has said she had to speak to him in her class about his writing (and also his behavior, but that doesn't fit with my argument) and how it was disturbing the class.
Well, as somebody who a) is a creative writing graduate student, and b) wishes to teach creative writing for a career, this angle that the news is taking is bothersome. What if schools were to suddenly start deeming it necessary that all students who hand in disturbing or dark writing be reported to school counselors? Over the past semester in poetry workshop I handed in 7 poems. In 6 of those poems, there were deaths. In 3 of those, it was murder. Last semester, I handed in a poem called "Execution" to class in which a serial killer is the speaker, and he graphically disembowels a young couple and then wishes for death and hurt for all their families. In Frank Bidart's last book, Star Dust, a National Book Award finalist, there is a poem in which the speaker kills a woman with a hatchet, then stabs her through her gut and reaches up through her to pull out her heart. Frank Bidart and I aren't about to go on shooting rampages. (Well, I'm not. I don't know Frank Bidart personally, so who knows?)
In poetry, we are told (by Frederico Garcia Lorca and our teachers) that all good poems are written with an air of duende. That is, that the threat of death hovers just behind the poem, influencing the words and the way they form on the page. Even a great love poem must be written through duende, because we are transient beings who will one day die, and the love must be informed by that temporary nature.
I think that judging what people are going to do by how dark and disturbing their writing is is ludicrous. But people want to think that they can somehow be prescient about this sort of senseless act, and that's why they so desperately try to find the "cause." Additionally, if we learn something through this and are able to stop another person from suddenly cracking, then those 32 people who were killed would have died for something, rather than just senselessly. So I understand the psychological need to find something to pin this terrible act on. I just worry about how the censorship of dark ideas might influence the poetry classes I'm going to take or teach in the future. Will students start self censoring themselves so they don't get labeled as potential killers? Will the trust that must exist between a poetry teacher and student be destroyed when teachers must start turning in their students poetry to administrators for analysis?
Well, that's the end of my real argument. But I just wanted to add that Cho's two plays that have found their way online are not as deeply disturbing as all the news sites are making them out to be. To me, they just seem stupid, like the guy obviously wrote them in a half an hour just so he could pass the class. When I taught fiction workshop I was handed much more violent stories, and I never thought twice about whether or not the student was going to kill people. So we're just trying to say that the signs were there, rather than the reality of the matter, which is nobody can tell when somebody is going to snap.
Second, Sorry I'm late.
Third, here's my post.
Within the blanket of the broad topic for this week, "words," and the subtopic censorship, I think that an interesting news story has arisen. The Virginia Tech shootings, of course, are on the news all the time, and everybody is scrambling to find an angle to take on them. It's probably too early to tell what the angle that will be repeated ad nauseum for months will be (like during Columbine it was playing violent video games or listening to Marilyn Manson), but one aspect of this attack that people are talking about that I worry might be the angle is the dude's creative writing.
Apparently, Cho was a creative writing student (he had at least taken some classes if that wasn't his major). Many classmates are coming forth and describing how dark and disturbing his writing was, and how as a result they should have seen this attack coming. Two of his plays have even been posted online, with many news organizations pointing to how twisted and dark they are. Famous poet Nikki Giovanni (I think the term "famous poet" might be a bit of an oxymoron) has said she had to speak to him in her class about his writing (and also his behavior, but that doesn't fit with my argument) and how it was disturbing the class.
Well, as somebody who a) is a creative writing graduate student, and b) wishes to teach creative writing for a career, this angle that the news is taking is bothersome. What if schools were to suddenly start deeming it necessary that all students who hand in disturbing or dark writing be reported to school counselors? Over the past semester in poetry workshop I handed in 7 poems. In 6 of those poems, there were deaths. In 3 of those, it was murder. Last semester, I handed in a poem called "Execution" to class in which a serial killer is the speaker, and he graphically disembowels a young couple and then wishes for death and hurt for all their families. In Frank Bidart's last book, Star Dust, a National Book Award finalist, there is a poem in which the speaker kills a woman with a hatchet, then stabs her through her gut and reaches up through her to pull out her heart. Frank Bidart and I aren't about to go on shooting rampages. (Well, I'm not. I don't know Frank Bidart personally, so who knows?)
In poetry, we are told (by Frederico Garcia Lorca and our teachers) that all good poems are written with an air of duende. That is, that the threat of death hovers just behind the poem, influencing the words and the way they form on the page. Even a great love poem must be written through duende, because we are transient beings who will one day die, and the love must be informed by that temporary nature.
I think that judging what people are going to do by how dark and disturbing their writing is is ludicrous. But people want to think that they can somehow be prescient about this sort of senseless act, and that's why they so desperately try to find the "cause." Additionally, if we learn something through this and are able to stop another person from suddenly cracking, then those 32 people who were killed would have died for something, rather than just senselessly. So I understand the psychological need to find something to pin this terrible act on. I just worry about how the censorship of dark ideas might influence the poetry classes I'm going to take or teach in the future. Will students start self censoring themselves so they don't get labeled as potential killers? Will the trust that must exist between a poetry teacher and student be destroyed when teachers must start turning in their students poetry to administrators for analysis?
Well, that's the end of my real argument. But I just wanted to add that Cho's two plays that have found their way online are not as deeply disturbing as all the news sites are making them out to be. To me, they just seem stupid, like the guy obviously wrote them in a half an hour just so he could pass the class. When I taught fiction workshop I was handed much more violent stories, and I never thought twice about whether or not the student was going to kill people. So we're just trying to say that the signs were there, rather than the reality of the matter, which is nobody can tell when somebody is going to snap.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
