Alice Thomsen

on the wrong side of sunrise

Tag: graduate school (Page 1 of 2)

I’m a master, okay?

May 8, 2015 / / 0 Comments

I’ve mastered English. Or, at least, I’ve earned a Master’s degree in English. It feels …

Not really any different than before. Who’d have thought that a piece of paper doesn’t actually change the way you feel about yourself as a writer? (Unless that piece of paper is a publishing contract, perhaps, but I can’t speak from experience.) In fact, I don’t even have the piece of paper; at the ceremony, we got diploma holders, since final grades aren’t submitted until the following Wednesday. It’s possible we won’t actually get the grades we need to graduate.

I passed, by the way. Barring postal mishap, I will soon have that piece of paper.

The most exciting part about being done? Having the energy and brain power I used to spend on school back to myself. For writing, in part, but also for other pursuits—taking my dog for leisurely walks, studying Mandarin, maybe even finding a place to take up yoga seriously. That last one, though, will have to wait a bit; it won’t do me much good to find a yoga class in Muncie when I am, in short order, going to be elsewhere.

to ashevilleSpecifically, Asheville, North Carolina.

I’ve spent a bit of time in Asheville, enough to become smitten, and, having no factors requiring me in a given place, I decided to make it my plan. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it was on a whim, but I didn’t exactly make a pro-con list comparing a wide range of options. Still, it’s been on my mind for several months, and I haven’t yet come up with a reason to think it’s a terrible idea, so I have given it some thought.

Monday, I’m driving down to look at a house to rent. I’ve been putting in applications for jobs all over the spectrum. (My resume that includes a link to my website, so if you’re reading this because I applied for a job with you, hi! I’m super competent, I promise.)

We’ll see what happens.

On Character Building

August 12, 2014 / / 0 Comments

I’m working on creating a character. This is something I’ve done before. That’s not to say I’m an expert at it—just that I’ve done it. Only this time it’s different, because I’m creating a character for myself.

No, I’m not writing a memoir, or a story with a protagonist who’s a thinly-veiled version of myself (at least, not intentionally). I’m also not getting into LARPing.

Fall semester is approaching fast, and six days from now, I’ll be standing in front of a class of twenty-five comp students, most of whom are in their first semester. And I’ll be trying to present a deliberately-crafted version of myself.

I tried that last semester, in a way. My students found me, for the most part, either strict and intimidating … or timid and insecure. Three guesses which of those was a more accurate reading—and there are only two options, so with three guesses, you have no excuse to not get it right eventually.

A professor of mine compared teaching to performing, and I think it’s an interesting analogy. I put on my teacher costume—a blazer, a plain top, nice pants, simple shoes—and get on my teacher stage and use my teacher voice (but sometimes slip and use my normal voice and have students come up to me after class to ask me what I said because it was impossible to hear from the back of the room). But I haven’t really created my teacher character. What does she want?

Some answers that are unacceptable:

  • avenge parents’ murder (doesn’t work when your parents are alive and well)
  • achieve fame (if you can’t handle a twenty-five person audience, the spotlight is not where you want to be)
  • win the big competition (a university teaching award doesn’t count as big)
  • slay the dragon (killing your students, even the mean ones, is frowned upon)
  • get the guy/girl (ditto sleeping with them)

So what does my teacher character want? I don’t have a good answer yet, but I have at least a nugget of what she doesn’t: She doesn’t want to seem intimidating. Avoiding timid would be pretty great, too.

Psychopathology of a Grad Student

June 24, 2014 / / 0 Comments

First off, yes, it’s been over six months. I know.

I’m officially halfway through my graduate program at Ball State University. Some things I’ve done over the past year:

-Taught two sections of ENG 104, a research-based course in the first-year writing program.
-Decided teaching was absolutely not for me, because I dreaded getting up in the morning to go to campus.
-Realized that I dreaded getting up in the morning, period; days when I taught just forced me to do it anyway.
-Realized something might be wrong.

Writers are a crazy lot. It’s just something we assume, and research tends to back it up. The mania of creation, the depressive blank page, the sitting in a coffee shop wearing a too-big sweater and watching raindrops slide down the window and contemplating the human condition in all its extremes. And, you know, sometimes the hallucinations and delusions and total breaks from reality.

Similarly, we attribute an inherent neuroticism to graduate students. What sort of obsession, after all, drives somebody into that sort of self-selected servitude? Late nights hoarding books in the library, snapping, “No!” in response to every social invitation, taking naps at a desk between classes and then waking up feeling guilty for not having used that time more productively.

There’s a certain glamour in fitting these stereotypes. What’s more writerly than soul-crushing angst? As Ursula K. Le Guin observes in “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” …

The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.

And if you’re not in a codependent, self-destructive relationship with graduate school, you may as well not be in grad school at all. Clearly you aren’t taking it seriously enough.

I have a spotty history when it comes to mental health, but I like to think I’ve learned something from it. Most importantly: The time to intervene is before it becomes unbearable. You may think, But I’m still functioning. I’m still getting out of bed, after all. Thing is, you have to take action while you’re still functioning enough to get out of bed. Taking action requires getting out of bed.

Yes, there may be some link that makes writerly types more prone to the crazies, or vice versa; yes, grad school will demand time and energy and commitment. But there’s no glory in misery or self-neglect.

There’s glory in action. Or, at least, there’s the potential for it.

Week 7: Chapters vs. Stories, Part III, Section B

October 8, 2013 / / 0 Comments

This is the second of two posts (first one here) from my linked stories class. Now, we’re going to talk about Cambria, PowerPoint, and our second class activity.

So let’s backtrack for a moment to early in the class period. We discussed formatting—for our upcoming projects and for fiction in general. Prof. Day advised us not to use Cambria, which is the default font for Microsoft Word. (I’d take it one step further and say don’t use Word, but that’s another matter.) Many of Word’s settings are better changed because, as she put it, “You’re the boss of Word!”

I don’t know about Jennifer Egan’s relationship with Word, but I can tell you right now that she is the boss of PowerPoint.

Our Activities, Part II: Translating PowerPoint to Normal Story

As I mentioned last time, Chapter 12 of Goon Squad, “Great Rock and Roll Pauses,” is told entirely in PowerPoint slides. The fictional slidemaker, 12-year-old Alison, reveals a portion of her family life, including her brother’s obsession with the pauses in songs.

It’s hard to discuss how this piece works without having read it, so if you didn’t click the link earlier, go now. It’s a quick—and unique—read. Of it, Egan says,

Goon Squad is a book about time, composed of 13 discrete stories separated by gaps. And PowerPoint (or any slideshow, it doesn’t have to be Microsoft) is a genre composed of discrete moments separated by gaps. As a genre, it echoes the structure I was already working with in Goon Squad, and its corporate coldness allowed me to be overtly sentimental in ways I probably wouldn’t have allowed myself to in conventional fiction.

Our task, having read this chapter, was to take a ten-slide portion of it and translate it into “conventional fiction.” Some slides make it pretty easy by being single linear exchanges:

All slides © Jennifer Egan

Some make it more difficult by being nonlinear in form and all over the place in time:

Some just can’t be captured the same way in “normal story”:

And some are simple statements of fact:

Although we grappled with the nonlinear ones, these last, factual ones seemed to give us the most difficulty—we didn’t feel free, as Prof. Day put it, to “transform the data into good fiction” and so tried to do a too-literal translation. (As any foreign language study will show you, a literal translation of anything complex is rarely successful.) It’s a common problem even when we’re not translating from PowerPoint, though. How do we convey information without just resigning to the dreaded “info dump”? What do we do with that green-circle slide, other than turn it into a list of dramatis personae?

For starters, recognize that we can work it in over time. Take the fifth slide:

My translation went like this:

We’re walking to the car, skipping in the desert night. My arm is around my brother’s neck, and when kids say, “Good game, Linc,” I answer for him.

It’s cool air, but you feel heat coming up from the earth like from behind a person’s skin. I think I feel it through my shoes, but do I? When I crouch to touch the parking lot, it glitters like coal in the streetlight. I was right: the ground is warm.

“Alison, cars!” Mom yells, overreacting as usual (Annoying Habit #81).

I stand up, slowly, rolling my eyes. “I know, Mom.”

So, for instance, I might have referred to the junior high baseball league to approximate Lincoln’s age, and called him Alison’s older brother. I might have remarked on the father’s absence from the game to show that he’s also an important character, even if he isn’t in this scene.

It’s a good exercise, considering how you might translate these things. If you’re following along but haven’t been keeping up on the activities, try this one. Give yourself the same ten-page assignment and see what you come up with. (Leave it for me in the comments, even—I’m curious.)

What’s next?

For us, we’ll be kicking off workshops soon, looking at material for our final projects. For you, you can kick off a workshop as well. Find a writing group near you, or start one, or seek out an online community. Share what you’ve learned by following our class, and exchange stories. In other words, make links.

I am linking. Are you?

Week 7: Chapters vs. Stories, Part III, Section A

October 6, 2013 / / 1 Comment

This week marks the more-or-less midpoint of my linked stories course with Cathy Day, and the last of our reading-focused classes. (Up next: workshops.) We started the semester with the least linked stories, Short Cuts, and worked our way toward more and more tightly linked pieces, finally reaching today’s book, A Visit from the Goon Squad, whose second-edition cover identifies it as a novel.

To my regular readers: This will be a stylistic departure. I’m preparing this post as the first of two to be shared on our class blog, where you can follow along with us.

To my new readers: Hi. My name is Alice, and I’m here to talk to you about …

What We Read: A Visit from the Goon Squad

A Visit from the Goon Squad is the result of Jennifer Egan‘s challenge to herself to write a book with chapters “as different from each other as possible, yet still adding up to one story.” (source) After an interview with Egan, Emma Brockes observes,

The idea for Goon Squad came to her after her reading group got stuck into Proust. It took them about seven years to plough through In Search of Lost Time, during which she became obsessed with how to represent entire lifespans, non-sequentially and in the way people actually experience them, that is as a constant negotiation between reflection and anticipation.

The twelfth chapter of Goon Squad is written as 12-year-old Alison’s autobiographical slideshow, complete with sound effects (if read online, as was Egan’s initial expectation). Another story is told in second-person. Still another is a news article. Different narrators, different protagonists from one chapter to the next, different time periods over forty-some years—and now identified as a novel?

Our Activity: Reorganizing Goon Squad

Because of the delightfully mixed-up nature of this book, an obvious exercise is to experiment with different ways of ordering the chapters. What would happen, for instance, if we extracted all the chapters that prominently feature Bennie? Or Rob’s death? What if we put them in chronological order as best we can?

Pictured: Kate Gutheil and Ashley Mack-Jackson with chapters sorted into character-based arrangements

(A past, particularly ambitious reader had done something like this already. Tyler Petty went through the book and outlined the timelines for twelve different characters.)

As we reflected on this task—the difficulties in mapping out an exact timeline, the costs of every rearrangement—someone declared that Egan had already put it in the best order. Prof. Day said, “I know.”

Takeaways

The order of chapters/sections/stories in a book goes a long way in determining how it’s read. Chronological Goon Squad, for instance, doesn’t have the same emotional effect, because information gets doled out differently. Good Squad organized by major character loses the interwoven, interdependent feel.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that a more conventional structure is always bad. It just means that organization should never be taken for granted, that we shouldn’t default to one form because that’s how it’s usually done (or for the sole purpose of being different) without thinking about how it will serve the book we’re writing. We need to take time for these questions, to make these decisions deliberately, open to the possibility that the first way we try it might not be the best. (We also have to recognize that there are Tyler Pettys out there, so if we’re going to play with chronology, we better make sure we double check our math.)

What I Learned

I’ve experimented some with chronological deviation in novels and written chronologically-ambiguous short stories, mosaics of scenes whose temporal relations aren’t explicit but are clearly not chronological. But I haven’t written—or contemplated in-depth—something with the scope of Egan’s book. The questions and considerations presented by a project like Goon Squad are fascinating (if somewhat daunting). The most important thing, though, was that reminder that no decision should be taken for granted in writing, and that there are questions worth asking that I might not think of at first.

What’s next?

In a few days, I’ll share the second half of our class activities, which focused specifically on that twelfth chapter.

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