Even if I’d lived at my current address longer than five months, it would’ve been unusual to open my mailbox to find what was there on Saturday: a handwritten letter from a former student. I often hear from former students online, but handwritten snail mail: that’s a rarity. I cradled the envelope with the care I’d give any other endangered species.
Though I know that most of my students won’t compose handwritten letters after they leave my classroom, it’s an assignment I still require to supplement their writing practice. I don’t read the letters I ask them to write; I simply require them to submit letters mail-ready, in addressed stamped envelopes. I credit the students with the act of composing–not with what they write or to whom. Some students think it’s a pointless exercise; others ask if it’s okay to submit more than one letter. (It’s okay–no, it’s more than okay.)
I started the practice nearly fifteen years ago when I was teaching at Salem College. At the end of that school year, I received a note from a student’s mother, thanking me for the written account of her daughter’s freshman year–something she wouldn’t have had, she said, if not for all that required letter-writing.
Not all students write to their families, but many do. One of my students at VCU reported that the letters he’d written home were all posted on the door of the refrigerator. Earlier this month when my students at Lenoir-Rhyne submitted their last letters of the semester, one student handed me a stack of envelopes, each addressed to one of the teachers at her high school. At the end of her first semester of college, she was writing to say thank you.
I don’t write much snail mail, myself, though I do write a letter once a month along with my students. And Monday I wrote back to my former student–the one whose letter arrived on Saturday. I should write more letters, considering how much some of the ones I’ve received have meant to me. A note from one of my teachers five months before her death and one from another teacher–still very much alive and well–encouraging me to continue my writing, are ones I keep in my briefcase. Having them there makes me feel as if the women who wrote them are walking with me into the classroom. And in a sense they are–their words invigorate my teaching.
Sometimes at the end of a difficult day, I pull one from my briefcase and reread it.
The letter that I received from my student on Saturday is one I’ll carry with me as well. In it, she writes (I quote with her permission):
When my students and I read Wendy Leibowitz’s article “Technology Transforms Writing and the Teaching of Writing,” I found myself drawn less to the details about blogs, word processing, and email that dominate the article and more to a single observation about composing longhand: “I encourage students not to write their first drafts on a computer, so they might actually think before putting words on the page” (Bernard qtd. in Leibowitz). That sentence led me to reflect on the continuing role of old-school writing in my own classes. Although my students use new technology (posting blog entries and submitting papers to the university’s Learning Management System, or LMS), they frequently put pen to paper as well. I have persisted in requiring them to write longhand as a way of cultivating focus and depth in their prose. But is writing by hand still relevant in the digital age? That question—one that’s frequently raised now in response to the new Common Core Standards—prompted me to explore the science of handwriting and to consider what new technologies teachers are using with, or in place of, the old.
The bibliography that follows consists of Leibowitz’s article, which spearheaded my research, and two additional articles: one that examines the role of handwriting in cognitive development and a second that investigates how blogs have become a fixture in many college courses, in some cases replacing the traditional term paper. Together, the three articles create a strong case for preserving the tactile custom of putting pen to paper while embracing the new technologies that will inspire the best writing.
Whether these annotations (all drafted by hand) will serve as preliminary writing for an essay of my own, I cannot say. Either way, the insights I have gained through this research will inform the choices I make as my teaching—itself, a work in progress—continues to evolve.
In “Technology Transforms Writing and the Teaching of Writing,” Wendy Leibowitz reports that writing in the digital age presents both “perils and possibilities” for students (138). Her conversations with professors reveal that their attitudes and approaches vary considerably. While some require students to use digital technology throughout the writing process, others advocate limiting screen time, correlating online reading and writing with diminished critical thinking and writing skills. Whether they adhere to April Bernard’s view of Web writing as “adjunct to traditional forms” (140), or to Robert Coover’s belief that it’s a “fundamental element of literacy” (141), professors find themselves rethinking the tactile experience of putting pen to paper and seeking effective strategies for using the newest technologies to improve writing instruction.
Leibowitz’s interviews with eleven professors do not constitute comprehensive research, but her article presents an informative overview of the variety of ways professors teach writing in the digital age. Though she writes for academics—specifically readers of The Chronicle of Higher Education—her straightforward prose speaks to a general audience as well. Readers who encounter her article now, more than a decade after its initial publication, may wonder how the professors she interviewed have since adapted their teaching to address the prevalence of social media and texting in students’ lives.
In addition to publishing articles in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Leibowitz, an attorney turned journalist, has written on technology and the law for The National Law Review and The American Lawyer.
Keim, Brandon. “The Science of Handwriting.” Scientific American Mind 24.4 (2013): 54-59. Academic Search Complete. Web. 11 Nov. 2013.
In “The Science of Handwriting,” Keim Brandon explores how his belief in the benefits of writing longhand finds scientific support in recent studies. Keim recounts a five-year research project conducted by Virginia Beringer, an educational psychologist at the University of Washington, that demonstrated second, third, and fourth graders’ ability to write more rapidly and express more ideas when they composed by hand. Along with Beringer’s study, Keim outlines brain-imaging research conducted by Karin James, a cognitive neuroscientist of the University of Indiana, Bloomington, revealing that learning cursive activates multiple areas of the brain that remain dormant when we type.
Writing for readers of Scientific American Mind, Keim addresses a general audience of readers interested in psychology and neuroscience. His reporting of Beringer’s and James’ studies points to the critical role of handwriting in cognitive development, a subject of particular concern to many parents and educators as the Common Core Standards Initiative—which deemphasizes handwriting in favor of keyboarding—has prompted a national conversation about the future of cursive in the classroom.
Brandon Keim, a freelance science journalist, has written articles for Wired and Psychology Today, as well as Scientific American Mind, and has been featured on broadcasts of National Public Radio’s Science Friday and Talk of the Nation.
Richtel, Matt. “Blogs vs. Term Papers.” Newyorktimes.com. The New York Times Co., 20 Jan. 2012. Web. 13 Nov. 2013.
In “Blogs vs. Term Papers,” Mat Richtel reports on the debate in higher education on how best to teach writing in the digital age. While some professors have followed the lead of Duke University’s Cathy Davidson, replacing the traditional term paper with shorter, more frequent blog assignments, their detractors—including Douglas B. Reeves, columnist for The American School Board Journal and William H. Fitzhugh, editor of The Concord Review—argue that blog writing lacks the academic rigor that fosters critical thinking. For Andrea Lunsford, professor of writing at Stanford University, pitting blogs against term papers creates a false opposition. Rather than replacing term papers with blog posts, Lunsford requires students to produce multi-modal assignments: term papers that evolve into blogs, websites, and video presentations.
Richtel’s article offers New York Times readers a glimpse of the contrasting teaching approaches adopted by writing professors who find themselves at a critical juncture, illustrating for a general audience how, as Andrea Lunsford says, professors are “trying to figure out how to preserve sustained, logical, carefully articulated arguments while engaging with the most exciting and promising new literacies.”
A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Matt Richtel writes for The New York Times about technology and its impact of society and culture. His series of articles “Our Brain on Computers” (2010) explores how our constant use of digital devices affects not only our behavior but also our thought processes. His 2009 series about the dangers of distracted driving won the Pulitzer for national reporting.
In “Disruptive ‘Sexual’ Voices in English 101,” writing teacher Lizbeth Bryant recounts a semester marked by students’ sexual comments that she tried unsuccessfully to silence. To learn why their innuendos and puns persisted, Bryant interviewed students, studied composition theory, and re-examined the students’ words, leading her to conclude that she erred on two counts: labeling the comments (as sexual and inappropriate), and seeing the students’ voices solely from her own perspective. Seeing the error of her ways, Bryant shifted her focus from defining the students’ voices to the interactions among those voices, allowing them to develop rather than quelling them. Bryant concludes her essay by addressing how she could have “transformed these conflicts into teaching moments” (100), offering a list of talking points for classroom conversations about voice.
While Bryant’s efforts to make meaning of her students’ voices merit praise, the voice of her own essay reveals how academic jargon invites the very mimicry she seeks to understand. When she turns away from the research that focuses on what “students should be doing” (97), her journey seems promising, but Kay Halasek and Mary Louise Pratt, the scholars whose theories she adopts as an alternative, write in academic jargon that scarcely invites dialogue—except with those who speak the same academese, as Bryant proves she does. She writes that Halasek “asks teachers to examine the preformative nature of our pedagogy as an act that ‘entails answer-ability’” (97). Does Bryant mean performative rather than preformative? And what does she mean by our pedagogy entailing ‘answer-ability’?(Who knows?)
Bryant credits Pratt with helping her understand how she “us[ed] the power of the academy to impede a student’s process in voice development” (97), yet she offers no evidence that she has considered how her own voice as a writer might impede communication with her readers—or how traces of that voice may influence the voices of students in the classroom or in the interview she conducts with them.
Her discussion of the interview reveals that Bryant spoke with only two students, both female. Readers can only wonder what conclusions Bryant believed she could draw from such limited data. The interview prompts other questions as well: Did she request interviews with more students, both male and female? If so, did they decline? And if they did, what are the implications of their reluctance? Notably, in her account of the interview, Bryant quotes the students but not herself, missing the opportunity to let readers hear her own voice in response to theirs. And the absence of her spoken words prompts even more questions: What traces of the academese of her prose might infect her speech, and how might they impede her conversations with students?
Applying the theories of Halasek and Pratt, Bryant reconceives the classroom as a construction zone where her disruptive students “navigated the discourse waters of the academy and decided to bring aspects of their voices of community into the construction zone of the classroom” (99). Her almost-mixed metaphor of navigating discourse water to enter the construction zone brings to mind American Ninja Warrior, which most students—not just hers—would find more appealing than her talking points on voice.
Bryant views her students’ disruptive sexual voices as a response to her power in the classroom. As the one who wields the gradebook, she does possess power that her students lack. But that power alone doesn’t distinguish her from the students. Except for the rare prodigies who pen their dissertations in puberty, professors don’t have the libidos of eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds, and the frontal lobes of their brains aren’t still in development, either. Simply put, freshmen and professors aren’t in the same place sexually or cognitively. A study that considers the body as well the mind might offer more insight into students’ “sexual” voices and professors’ responses to them. But even if Bryant initiated such a study—partnering with a neurobiologist, perhaps—would she and her collaborator write in voices that students or general readers would understand (or want to)?
In a better world, if the jargon of one academic field met the jargon of another, the two would crash and burst, scattering smaller, more intelligible words and phrases. In the real world, though, it’s more likely for the hyper-specialized vocabularies to merge, yielding a mutant form of impenetrable academese seemingly devoid of any real-world relevance. Writer Victoria Dailey calls it “academiotics” in a recent spoof on The New Yorker’s website, where she fashions this monstrosity from the first sentence of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice:
“The heterogeneity of assumed intentions may incur a conclusory stereotype regarding gender selections in marriage-based societies, especially in those where the masculine hegemony of capital resources presupposes the feminization of property and uxorial acquisition.”
Such writing seems ridiculous because it is. That’s why it becomes the subject of ridicule, as the words Bryant spoke to her students became the subject of their mimicry. And the essay that Bryant writes in response to that mimicry risks inviting more of the same. If a student says in class, “I wouldn’t stick mine in there. Don’t know where it’s been,” asking yourself why and reconsidering your own reactions are valuable practices. But a two-thousand-word study of why-my-student-said-I-wouldn’t-stick-it-in-there may not only seem ridiculous, it may also perpetuate the worst stereotypes about scholarship.
Admittedly, Bryant’s initial audience wouldn’t ridicule her essay. The first readers of “Disruptive ‘Sexual’ Voices in English 101” encountered it as a chapter in Voice as Process, a book written primarily for them: scholars of rhetoric and composition, readers fluent themselves in the academese, or academiotics, that’s so ripe for parody. But Bryant’s decision to include the chapter in Essays on Writing, her textbook for first-year writing students, demonstrates her belief that her words speak to freshmen as well. She seems to be saying, I can have a conversation with you that I couldn’t have with those students back then.
Can she? If she turns to her talking points, asking students “How asymmetrical power relations operate in the academy,” or how students “attempt to subvert control by the hegemonic structures” (100), will they answer, or will silence fall on the construction zone?
Byant, Lizbeth A. “Disruptive ‘Sexual’ Voices in English 101.” Essays on Writing. Ed. Lizbeth A. Bryant and Heather M. Clark. Boston: Longman, 2009. 95-100. Print.
or Revisiting Roy Peter Clark’s Essay with My Students
Essays on Writing (2009)
Two weeks ago, after my students read Roy Peter Clark’s essay “I Won’t Use Writing as Punishment, I Won’t . . . ,” I asked them to compose responses to his claim that “writing as punishment is still with us” (4). I admit I doubted its relevance; Clark wrote the essay years ago, “more than 20,” he observes in the author’s note in our textbook, adding that he wishes “it was too old-fashioned or obsolete to reprint” (4).
Maybe Clark’s essay was too old-fashioned or obsolete, I thought. I certainly didn’t expect the majority of my students to recount stories of writing as punishment. But they did. Most had their own stories; others recalled instances of classmates forced to put pen to paper in detention hall.
I’ve been thinking about all those stories, ones of sentences starting with the words “I will not . . . ,” others of dictionary entries, textbook chapters, and Bible verses—yes, Bible verses—copied longhand for various offenses. Sometimes rather than copying someone else’s sentences, students were required to compose their own. Showing up for school with facial hair landed one student the assignment of writing an essay extolling the importance of being clean-shaven (as the school handbook required). Others had to explain in writing why they were repeatedly tardy. Some recalled the assignment of writing letters of apology addressed to teachers whom they or other students had treated disrespectfully. Just what they did to the teachers, I don’t know. (Details, like batteries, not included.)
I suppose, at least, that writing those letters of apology proved more instructive than writing one-hundred times, “I will not dis’ the teacher.” Still, the act of copying a sentence, not to present as your own–I would hardly advocate plagiarism—but to recreate its rhythm with your own hand can be a vital exercise. (That’s one reason I require students to write quotations in their journals, and I do in mine.) But if students have copied sentences as punishment, it may be hard for them to see the act of transcription as anything other than punishment. And writing their own words may seem punitive, too, if they’ve been sentenced to write letters and essays in the service of explanations and apologies.
My students’ responses to Clark’s essay reveal that basically every form of writing that I require of them is one that they’ve written or witnessed other students write as a form of punishment. It shouldn’t surprise me that the problem remains prevalent, but it does because it’s clearly so wrong-headed. Just how wrong-headed, Clark showed more than twenty years ago when he first asked readers to imagine ourselves telling a child that because he’s been bad, he has to draw a picture or play the piano. Of course we don’t punish children with art or music, but teachers continue to punish students with writing and then lament the fact that they don’t like to write or that they don’t write well. That said, memories of punishment aren’t the only obstacle, or even the main one, for us–yes, “us,” I write as I struggle to finish this paragraph. Simply put, writing is hard. And now in the digital age, the difficulty of developing our ideas grows as our writing shrinks to fwr ltrs & wrds.
Every year as I prepare to teach a new group of freshmen, or first-year students as they’re now called, I ask myself how I can make their first college writing class seem like more of a first rather than more of the same. This year one of my answers is the two books that I chose—ones that I’ve never used before—which approach writing in vastly different ways. The book that includesClark essay addresses social and cultural aspects of writing. The other book, Stanley Fish’sHow to Write a Sentence, as its title tells us, focuses on technique. I’ve also changed the daily journal assignment. Along with writing a quotation from their reading, they write one from something they weren’t required to read. It may seem like more punishment to them, and yes, I’m aware of the irony of requiring them to write lines from something they read for pleasure. But I want to convey to them the importance of reading for themselves by placing a value on it, giving it a place in their journals and in class discussion. And I also want to instill the importance of writing that isn’t evaluated, which I do through private freewriting in class and through letter writing. For their monthly letter-writing assignment, students submit a letter mail-ready: stamped and addressed in a sealed envelope. I don’t read the letters because I’m not evaluating them; I’m crediting students with the act of writing, which may seem like even more punishment.
Yet perhaps when they notice that I’m writing along with them—not just when they’re freewriting in class, but that I’m also composing journal entries, letters, blog entries, and essays—some will begin to see all of this as something other than punishment. Then again, they may not. (They may see me as inflicting punishment on myself as well as on them.)
By approaching my teaching as I approach my writing—as a work in progress, subject to revision—my own ideas about how to teach writing continue to evolve. Attitudes developed over the years aren’t likely to transform over the course of one semester. But they can change. And writing about our attitudes toward reading and writing—as I have here, and my students will in their first papers—offers a place to start.
Work Cited
Clark, Roy Peter. “I Won’t Use Writing as Punishment. I Won’t . . .” Essays on Writing. Ed. Lizbeth A. Bryant and Heather M. Clark. Boston: Longman, 2009. 4-10. Print.
Since I don’t read legal thrillers, I can’t compare William Landay’s prose with John Grisham’s or Scott Turow’s. But I appreciate Defending Jacobfor leading me to contemplate the differences between Landay’s sentences and the ones crafted by Jean Stafford, whose Selected StoriesI’m reading now.
In Chapter 3 of Defending Jacob, the narrator, Andy Barber, catalogs the contents of his son’s room with these lines:
Defending Jacob (2012)
“Jacob’s room was cluttered with huge oafish sneakers, a MacBook covered with stickers, an iPod, schoolbooks, paperback novels, shoe boxes filled with old baseball cards and comic books. In the corner, an Xbox was hooked up to an old TV. The Xbox disks and their cases were piled nearby, mostly combat role-play games. There was dirty laundry, of course, but also two stacks of clean laundry neatly folded and delivered by Laurie, which Jacob had declined to put away in his bureau because it was easier to pluck clean clothes right from the piles. On top of a low bookcase was a group of trophies Jacob had won when he was a kid playing youth soccer. He had not been much of an athlete, but back then every kid got a trophy, and in the years since he had simply never moved them” (23).
Back then every kid got a trophy? Back then? (Unlike now?)
I won’t dwell on the sentence about the trophy; it’s less troublesome than the string of missed opportunities that precede it, where we don’t see anything unexpected: “There was dirty laundry, of course. . . .” And the expected isn’t presented to us in surprising ways:
“. . .but also two stacks of clean laundry neatly folded and delivered by Laurie, which Jacob had declined to put away in his bureau because it was easier to pluck clean clothes right from the piles.”
As a counterpoint, consider this passage from Jean Stafford’s short story “Bad Characters,” which catalogs the contents of a dresser drawer:
“I loved the smell of the lavender she kept in gauze bags among her chamois gloves and linen handkerchiefs and filmy scarves; there was a pink fascinator knitted of something as fine as a spider’s thread, and it made me go quite soft—I wasn’t soft as a rule, I was as hard as nails and I gave my mother a rough time—to think of her wearing it around her head as she waltzed on the ice in the bygone days. We examined stockings, nightgowns, camisoles, strings of beads, and mosaic pins, keepsake buttons from dresses worn on memorial occasions, tortoiseshell combs, and a transformation made from Aunt Joey’s hair when she had racily had it bobbed. Lottie admired particularly a blue cloisonné perfume flask with ferns and peacocks on it. ‘Hey,’ she said, ‘this sure is cute. I like thing-daddies like this here.’ But very abruptly she got bored and said, ‘Let’s talk instead. In the front room’” (104).
Selected Stories of Jean Stafford (1966)
Stafford’s deft prose conveys far more than Landay’s. His narrator’s inspection of Jacob’s room yields nothing of the father’s character and scarcely more of the son’s. Essentially, he’s a fourteen-year-old from central casting.
In contrast, the passage from “Bad Characters” reveals details about the narrator, her Aunt, and Lottie. The narrator “love[s] the smell of lavender”; she’s a romantic who can also be “hard as nails” and gives her “mother a rough time.” Her Aunt “racily” had her hair bobbed. (Perhaps she was racier than the narrator’s mother, who wore the transformation fashioned from Joey’s hair.) And Lottie admires “thing-daddies,” like the “blue cloisonné perfume flask,” but she gets bored “very abruptly.”
From the list, we know less of the mother than we know of her sister, her daughter, and her daughter’s partner in crime. But the list doesn’t need to reveal the mother’s character because it serves another purpose. That’s not the case with Landay’s list. His only substitutes for character; Stafford’s constructs a scaffold for building it.
Landay, William. Defending Jacob. 2012. New York: Dell, 2013.
What’s wrong with American letters? Ask Anis Shivani, and he’ll tell you in no uncertain terms: “Mediocre new writers, whose only talent seems to be to have understood the rules of the marketing game, are lauded week after week as brilliant” while “[o]ld favorites mired in repetitive self-imitation are still offered as awesome masters” (15). Variations on those lines from his essay “Why is American Fiction in its Current Dismal State?,” appear throughout his book Against the Workshop, which brings together a decade of his essays and reviews.
Shivani offers convincing arguments, but some of his choices threaten his credibility. He chastens journals for “engag[ing] only in the mutual flattery business” (16) while his review of Jay Parini’s poetry and Parini’s introduction to the book present evidence of the same. ShivanicallsParini’s poetry “fiery hot to the touch, the apparent simplicity a form of high art” (134). Parini reciprocates–because Shivani’s pretty hot, too, it seems–writing of him as “one of the sanest voices in criticism today” a “keen vision” and “cruel wit” (xiv).
For Shivani, Billy Collins‘ poems are “single-mindedly predictable imaginative exercises” (61). But Shivani tends toward formula too, castigating in the same mode, repeatedly pinning the failings of fiction and poetry (in Best New American Voices, Best American Poetry, et al.) on an undemocratic system of graduate Creative Writing Programs rife with problems.
Shivani closes his book with an essay that likens Writing Programs to medieval guilds. It’s true; they have their masters, journeymen, and apprentices, but so do graduate programs in all other disciplines. The source of the problem isn’t Creative Writing, it’s the university credentialing system, itself. And that system now faces a challenge from MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). I wish that Anis Shivani would consider teaching one, or try working within the current system to effect change.
As I finished reading Serena last week, my thoughts turned to teaching it. A Southern Gothic novel with the feel, and some of the form, of Elizabethan drama, it’s well-suited for courses in world literature as well as Southern and Appalachian fiction. It’s a regional novel that’s universal, as all the best “regional” writing is.
In an interview in the journal Grist, Serena’s author, Ron Rash,said: “To me, one of the most interesting aspects of literature is how the most intensely ‘regional’ literature is often the most universal. There’s no better example of this than James Joyce’s Ulysses. The best regional writers are like farmers drilling for water; if they bore deep enough and true enough into that particular place, beyond the surface of local color, they tap into universal correspondences, what Jung called the collective unconscious. Faulkner’s Mississippi, Munro’s Ontario, and Marquez’s Columbia are exotic, and they are also familiar” (5-6).
Rash “consciously evoked MacBeth,” he said in his Gristinterview but “see[s] the book more in the tradition of Marlowe’s plays, which are always about the will to power” (8).
Talking about Olive Kitteredge Thursday at the Highland Coffee House marked a couple of firsts for me: my first book club meeting, and my first discussion of a book with a group composed neither of students nor colleagues. Our conversation offered me a welcome reminder of the lives of books beyond the classroom.
The members of the Coffee Talk Book Club, sponsored by Caldwell County Public Library, read constantly and widely. The June, July, and September selections (the club takes a holiday in August) reflect the members’ penchant for variety: a recent Pulitzer Prize winner, a courtroom drama, and a nineteenth-century English classic.
We considered Olive Kitteredgeas a collection of linked stories, but our talk focused primarily on matters of character and theme. I’ve been meditating on the book’s structure though, because I plan to grow a novel from one of my own stories. After examining how the stories of Olive Kitteridgeform a novel, I’ve concluded that three could be omitted. And I’m curious about the book’s genesis.
In The New York Times review of Olive Kitteridge, Louisa Thomas observes that the novel’s weakest two stories are ones in which Olive “is merely mentioned. Without her, the book goes adrift, as if it has lost its anchor.”
The two stories that Thomas refers to, but doesn’t name, are “Ship in a Bottle” and “Criminal.” Both feature a former student of Olive’s who recalls something that Olive said in her seventh-grade math class. In “Ship in a Bottle,” Julie tells her younger sister, Winnie, how Mrs. Kittredge said, “Don’t be scared of your hunger. If you’re scared of your hunger, you’ll be just one more ninny, like everyone else” (195). In “Criminal,” Rebecca remembers Olive once stopping her in the hall and saying, “If you ever want to talk to me about anything, you can” (242).
Olive Kitteredge (2008)
Both stories appeared in the pages of magazines years before the publication of Olive Kitteridgein 2008. (“Ship in a Bottle” as Running Away” in Seventeenin 1992, and “Criminal” in South Carolina Reviewin 1994.) When Elizabeth Strout wrote those stories, had she begun thinking of Olive as the anchor of a book? Whatever the case, Olive’s mere mention doesn’t warrant the inclusion of either story, and the novel doesn’t need them. Nor does it need the “The Piano Player.” Though it’s an admirable story, the life of of Angela O’Meara, the piano player of the title, doesn’t intersect with Olive Kittredge’s. Olive simply passes through the piano bar. Her cameo prompts me to wonder if Strout drafted “The Piano Player” sans Olive, adding her later only so the story could serve as one of the novel’s chapters.
W. W. Norton’s decision to replace its Scholar’s Prize with the Writer’s Prize reflects some recent and not-so-recent changes in undergraduate writing assignments. From 1998 to 2008, the Scholar’s Prize recognized what Norton calls “an outstanding undergraduate essay on a literary topic,” an essay of the sort that many of us who teach composition frequently wrote when we were freshman. Our own students write fewer literary analyses than we did, because many composition courses are no longer literature based. Instead, they’re interdisciplinary.
I’ve been thinking about these changes for the past few days as I’ve reread my students’ work to select something to nominate for the fourth annual Norton Writer’s Prize, a competition that invites a broad range of submissions, encompassing the variety of writing that’s now typical of composition classes: “[l]iteracy narratives, literary and other textual analyses, reports, profiles, evaluations, arguments, memoirs, proposals, mixed-genre pieces, and more: any excellent writing done for an undergraduate writing class will be considered.”
For their final major writing assignment of the school year, my students wrote ethical reasoning arguments per program requirement. But over the course of the year, they also wrote blog posts, snail mail, personal narratives, timed essay exams, cover letters, résumés, and highly imaginative scripts in which they placed themselves in conversation with the writers of some of the articles and essays they’d read. For some students, those scripts evolved into traditional research arguments. For others, the process of working with those sources revealed that their real research interest lay elsewhere.
I wish I could have nominated more than one piece of writing. For reasons of privacy, I won’t address the particulars of the one that I chose, and I won’t offer any details from the nominating letter that I wrote to accompany it. I will note, instead, how many students shone brightest when an assignment took them by surprise, asking that they write in new ways.
Early in the novel Mountains of the Moon, Louise Alder recounts how her teacher Miss Connor read Louise’s (Lulu’s) story aloud in class because Miss Connor “reckons I got a good way of putting things” (65).
Mountains of the Moon (2012)
Author I. J. Kay (a pseudonym) has a good way of putting things as well. But that good way of hers makes for no easy read. Though the first American edition of her debut novel appeared last July, it’s no beach book. Kay’s fractured narrative forces us to read carefully for shifts in diction and setting that signal the age and whereabouts of Louise (a.k.a. Kim, Beverley, Jackie, Dawn, and Catherine) through a parade of squalor that ends with her release from prison for a crime she may or may not have committed.
Confusing? Yes, but keep reading. Chances are, you’ll find yourself less confused. And more and more impressed with Kay’s achievement.
At thirty-one, after her ten-year prison stint, Louise travels to Uganda to see up close those mountains she first saw as a child in the pages of her book on Africa, a gift from her grandfather.
As a young teenager, she receives another book as a gift from a father figure. “The Velvit Gentleman,” as she calls him, a surreal sugar daddy—Professor Higgins and lover—gives her Lord of the Flies, which she slings across the floor of the psych ward after reading the death of Piggy.
“I wouldn’t have given it to you if I’d thought it would upset you so much,” Anton, “the Velvit Gentleman,” says. “Will you continue with it, though?”
“Seems rude not to,” Lulu answers. “Was a shock how bad I believed it. You said it was fiction, lies, but it int. It int.”
“Good,” Anton says. “That’s the point; stories tell lies in the service of truth” (287).
Kay’s own lies in the service of truth ring truer than those that shock her protagonist. Lulu’s no middle-class kid stuck on an uninhabited island. Donning a Masai’s red cloth and wielding a spear or not, she’s more warrior than any of Golding’s boys.
What makes her a warrior? The mountains (of the title) that dwell in her imagination, the ones she dreams of and writes about on wallpaper “wonky where the pattern is bossed” (87) to counter violence, poverty, and neglect.
Though flawed as all novels are—and undoubtedly some of its shortcomings escaped me—Mountains of the Moon shines with fresh language, Kay’s “good way of putting things,” that invigorates Louise’s story, reminding us of what novels can achieve but rarely do.
I don’t write much snail mail, myself, though I do write a letter once a month along with my 
students. And Monday I wrote back to my former student–the one whose letter arrived on Saturday. I should write more letters, considering how much some of the ones I’ve received have meant to me. A note from one of my teachers five months before her death and one from another teacher–still very much alive and well–encouraging me to continue my writing, are ones I keep in my briefcase. Having them there makes me feel as if the women who wrote them are walking with me into the classroom. And in a sense they are–their words invigorate my teaching.
Jane Lucas 