Interview with Beth Gilstrap: I Am Barbarella
In 2011 Beth Gilstrap, an MFA candidate at Chatham University, contacted me by email about interviewing me (ironically) for The Fourth River literary journal. My first novel, Men of Winter, had been released at the end of 2010, and I was anticipating my publisher bringing out another book, the novella Weeping with an Ancient God, so our conversation focused mainly on writing those two works. Beth and I exchanged a few emails, and then wrapped things up with a phone conversation. My publisher reneged on bringing out my second book, and things ended badly between my publisher and me — but it was the proverbial final straw in convincing me to establish my own press, which I did, Twelve Winters, in 2012. I eventually brought out a revised and expanded edition of Men of Winter and also Weeping with an Ancient God. I wanted to reprint the Fourth River interview in each of the books, so I contacted Beth asking for her permission. I checked in on her website in 2013 and again in 2014 to update her biographical information that I included when I reprinted the interview, and I noted each time her growing list of publications.
Then, in 2014, I was reading fiction submissions for Quiddity literary journal, and a familiar name popped up in my Submittable queue, Beth Gilstrap and her story “Juveniles Lack Green,” which I admired very much. And I obviously wasn’t alone in that opinion, as it was given the thumbs up by several readers and ultimately the fiction editor, David Logan. The story ran in issue 7.1 of the journal. Beth’s story appearing in my reader’s queue was serendipitous because not long after that I was scouting around for projects for Twelve Winters, and I recalled Beth’s story. Given the number of published stories that she’d accumulated I figured she must have a collection ready for publication. I emailed her to see if that was the case . . . and the rest, as they say, is history. I was impressed by the composite collection that she’d created, and I’m very happy to say that I Am Barbarella was released in print February 19, 2015. Digital editions for Kindle and Nook soon followed, and Beth is working on an audiobook as well.
Turn about is fair play, so I sent Beth some questions about her collection and the writing of it. What follows are her unedited responses.
I Am Barbarella is a composite collection (or short story cycle), where we have a fairly large cast of characters who show up in various stories, or are alluded to, or events in their lives from other stories are alluded to. What drew you to this form for the book?
I went into my MFA program with a novel chapter and an idea for a fairly complicated story told in the first-person plural point of view. It was an attempt to capture a sort of Southern noir small town groupthink as I saw it. As you might expect, there was little left of my self-esteem or the story by the end of my first workshop. I still like the idea of that story, but I was nowhere close to being able to tackle something so left of center. Then, my mentors (Sherrie Flick, Diane Goodman, and Robert Yune) suggested reading books like Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, and The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat and that was when I decided I loved this approach to longer works. This type of book is a hybrid form. I set out to write stories that would be able to stand on their own and have been able to place a number of them as short stories, but they also work thematically in the collection.
It was my intention from the beginning to explore the impact these characters’ actions had on each other, the sort of ripple effect of secrets and heartache. Even the stories that aren’t interconnected on a character level are spiritually connected. I fell in love with the mosaic form. I like how the picture looks when you pull the camera back to reveal the structure in its entirety and I like moving in and looking at the individual tiles such as the elderly neigbhor’s lifelong secret from her best friend or the Dad’s desire to finally leave now that all his family duties have been fulfilled. It felt more playful than a traditional narrative form and I hope I structured it in a way that builds tension — a sort of slow reveal of each character.
How do you think a composite collection differs, in the writing of it, from a collection of independent stories, or a full-fledged novel?
I think it’s an extremely difficult form for a first book. It’s a bit like juggling and having someone on the sidelines who keeps throwing other objects into the mix. Maintaining consistency with such a large interconnected cast of characters and a broad timeline takes major organization and commitment. It is something you must set out to do. What I lacked in organization in the beginning, I made up for with a general idea of what I wanted to achieve and a rabid determination to make this book in this form work. This is my first book and writing it taught me so much about how to approach the novel I am working on now. In some ways, it made writing straight short stories more difficult because I tend to get attached to characters and want to spend more time with them.
You were rethinking the order of the stories up until a few weeks before the book went to press. How difficult was it to come up with what you felt was the proper order? What were some of your guiding principles in ordering the stories as you have?
It was all about the tension for me. I had a handful of other stories from the Loretta/Hardy/Janine cycle, but once I took those out and put in some of the shorter flash pieces, I liked the conversation the stories had with each other. These stories move along a continuum of existential angst. I originally had “Spaghettification” last because I felt the last line of that story was a hopeful way to end. Last lines matter as much as first lines. I tend toward the dark side of the force, but not always, and I wanted to highlight that fact, but in the end “B-Sides” was the natural ending of the book. Thematically, the book needed to end with Janine’s point of view. There’s a line in an earlier story, which reads, “You can get so much from B-Sides.” How can you not end with the story with a title built from that line?
How much time have you spent with these characters? In other words, when did you start writing about them? Do you plan to return to some of them in future projects?
I wrote the first draft of the first story (“Paper Fans”) in 2010. Four and a half years. I am finished with most of these characters, but my novel does include Dim and Sunday from “Yard Show.” It’s a tiny story that has led me into writing a rather large book.
Charlotte, North Carolina, where you were born and raised and still live, is a common setting for the stories. Some of the characters have also spent time in Pittsburgh, where you earned your MFA. How important is “place” in your writing?
For me place is as much a character as a walking, breathing person. It shapes everything: plot, character, atmosphere, you name it. I grew up reading Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Mark Twain, Toni Morrison, Carson McCullers, and Alice Walker so place was already vital in the literature I loved. Chatham’s emphasis on place-based writing was one of the reasons I chose their program. My bones, my heart are the South, for better or worse, whether I like it or not. I am built of this land and all the ghosts that accompany it.
Sometimes a character says things that aren’t kind about your hometown. How much of that criticism of Charlotte is purely fictive, and how much is your own sense of the place?
Some of it is fictive and based on the perception of Charlotte as nothing but banks, barbecue, and Nascar (Even The Onion did a piece on Charlotte), but a great deal of it comes from a natural desire to break away from my hometown. Most people I grew up with have moved away. When I meet someone and tell him or her I’m from Charlotte, I am usually met with shock. Most folks who live here aren’t from here. I started this book immediately after our plans to move to Pittsburgh fell apart. I was heartbroken. As I wrote the book, I realized I had not ever committed to my town. I had not tried to find kindred spirits here or participate. I no longer take my beautiful city for granted even if I still long for more of a literary community here. As a vegetarian artist who has never been terribly interested in sports, it has been difficult, but I also recognize how much I tend to isolate myself. That’s the tough thing about connecting with other writers. I know there are some here, but we’re all so terribly introverted we never socialize.
How do you think the book will be received by residents of Charlotte? Perhaps even family and friends who may see themselves reflected in your writing?
I hope people will recognize the truth in the book’s (and its author’s) complicated relationship with Charlotte. As far as friends and family, I hope if they see themselves, they’ll recognize that I’ve tried to draw each character with empathy. Most characters are not based on any one person, though. These characters are processed in my brain blender. They are little bits of me and everyone I’ve known swirled together into a version of truth. This is why I love fiction.
Music plays an important part in many of the stories — and in fact you compiled a playlist to accompany the book. Where does that emphasis on music come from? Are you a musician yourself?
I am not a musician, but I’ve always wished I’d learned to play an instrument. My older brother is the musician in the family. He got his first guitar when I was ten. His learning to play and compose and write was my background music. I watched and wrote in my notebook. There were times, like when he went through his black metal phase, that I wanted to take a chainsaw to his guitar, but now I am so grateful for it. It was such a unique experience. We were alone a lot since we were children of a single mom and we challenged each other to be creative. He encouraged me to tell stories. I listened to everything he did and all the records he played. I dated his band mates as a teenager and went to their gigs and though I rarely talked, I listened and wrote. I wrote my first album review for the high school paper. I married a man who worked in a record store when he was young. Music is vital in our home. I cannot write, cook, drive, or take a walk without it.
You’ve taken on the role of editor-in-chief of Atticus Review. How does that role impact your own writing, or your artistic sensibilities?
Well, as I’ve adjusted to the job and addressed a submission queue of greater than 600, I’ve definitely spent less time on my own writing. I’m still trying to find the balance between being an editor and being a writer. I am a work in progress, but I am proud of what we’ve done at Atticus in a short time. It’s a wonderful feeling to be able to put other people’s work into the world, to give back in that way. It is so exciting to discover a story in the slush pile and to be able to make someone happy. It has taught me to be more patient with my own submissions and it has also taught me patterns in what types of stories are overdone. I won’t be writing any dystopias anytime soon. And I always valued personal rejections before, but now that I’m an editor myself I value them even more. It really is a big deal to receive one.
Describe your writing process.
When I am at my best, I am extremely diligent about my process. I have a schedule for myself and I stick to it. I read early in the morning, walk my border collie (when it’s not in the single digits outside), and write for the rest of the afternoon — usually 4-5 hours. Lately, it’s been taken up with editing work. I hope to get back to my regular schedule once I have my sea legs as an editor.
You’ve been working on an audio edition of I Am Barbarella. Do you tend to read your work aloud usually? Describe the experience of recording the stories. Do you think they’re well-suited to oral performance?
I always read my work aloud. It’s part of my editing process. If I trip over words or don’t like the way a sentence flows as I read aloud, I revise. Recording is frustrating, but I think the final product will be great. I don’t think my book would sound right read by someone else. Maybe that means I have control issues, but most of my favorite recordings are author-read — they’re these little time capsules. Nothing compares to being able to hear that rare recording of Virginia Woolf’s or Flannery O’Connor reading “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” And yes, I think most “Southern” literature is well-suited to oral performance. My grandfather never learned to read, but he was the best storyteller I knew. We’re trained for it, whether we realize it or not.
Beth Gilstrap’s stories and essays have appeared in numerous journals, among them Ambit, Superstition Review, Quiddity and the minnesota review. She holds an MFA in fiction writing from Chatham University in Pittsburgh and serves as editor-in-chief of Atticus Review. She was born and raised in Charlotte, North Carolina, where she still lives with her husband and enough rescue pets to keep life interesting. (Author photo by Tatyana M. Semyrog)
Interview with Rachel Jamison Webster: The Endless Unbegun
In the fall of 2013 I attended a reading at Edwards Place, an historic home in Springfield, Illinois, and one of the readers that evening was Rachel Webster, who read from her poetry collection, September. I was very taken with her poetry and her presentation of her work. My fiancée (now wife) Melissa and I were anxious to speak with Rachel afterward and to get a copy of her book, which I ended up admiring very much. The following year I was looking for projects for Twelve Winters Press, and I heard via the literary grapevine that Rachel Webster had a manuscript she was interested in publishing — but it was not an ordinary collection, which of course piqued my curiosity even more, since the Press’s main mission is to publish literary work that is especially difficult to place because of its risk-taking nature.
I contacted Rachel via email, and she graciously sent me the manuscript, under a different title, and I discovered that it was a hybrid collection of both short prose pieces and poems, and that it told an ambitious, multi-layered story that took place over several centuries. In a word it was wonderful, and exactly the sort of project that seemed tailor-made for Twelve Winters Press. Email exchanges began, and we worked out an agreement to bring out the book in print, digital and audio editions. Rachel wanted to revise the manuscript further, which she did over several months. Then late last fall, 2014, she sent the Press a significantly reworked book, including a new title, “The Endless Unbegun” — and the editors at Twelve Winters and I began the very rewarding process of bringing the book to print, working closely with Rachel at every phase.
Publication was delayed a bit when Quiddity international literary journal and public-radio program interviewed Rachel for their upcoming issue, 8.1, and Rachel floated the possibility of including the interview with the book. I thought it a terrific idea, so with Quiddity’s editors’ permission, we prepared the interview for inclusion in The Endless Unbegun. The Quiddity interview focuses in large part on the philosophical and theological ideas that are at the heart of the book, so for the below interview, I deliberately turned my attention to other issues.
The print edition of The Endless Unbegun was released February 5, 2015. Editions for Kindle and Nook soon followed, and the audiobook is in the works as well. I emailed Rachel some questions, and here are her unedited responses.
You’ve said that the book began as a novella and eventually became a hybrid collection of short prose pieces and poems. I’m wondering if, for you, certain subjects lend themselves to prose expression more naturally, and others to poetry? And if not subjects, then perhaps themes . . . moods?
Yes, definitely. When I write prose I am combining voices — the voice of the artist, as well as the voice of the teacher or friend. I know that I am talking outward to another, and so my understanding of that audience is invariably woven into the form and content of the prose. In this sense, I usually write prose in a way that is reflective of some wider societal or temporal situation. Even if I am writing prose from my own experience, I am connecting it actively with what I suspect is a shared experience.
Poetry also reflects shared experience, but that connection is trusted in a more intuitive, subterranean way. It happens way beneath the ground. So the act of writing poetry — for me — feels like talking deeply to myself, tracing my own subconscious or dreams, my own deepest memories or questions. I don’t write poetry thinking about audience at all — I just follow the rhythm of the words, and I really interrogate my own feelings and questions in the poem. There is no “other,” because the self is the aperture to the other. That was especially true of the poems in The Endless Unbegun, which are elemental and very physical in their rhythms and knowing. When they do talk to a “you,” they are love poems, and meant to share my deepest being with the “you” as beloved, who only late in the game becomes the reader.
I think of this poetic space of connection as pretty unusual and rarified, and so my idea for this book was that a prose novella would sort of walk the reader into a more and more poetic, metaphorical space, and that in this way, it would be like walking deeper and deeper into a relationship. The fact is, we meet on the level of persona and appearance, and then we move further and further into knowing one another (and ourselves, ideally!) in an elemental and soulful way. Eventually, we are at the archetype — the repeating pattern, where we realize that all of our deepest, most individual experiences are not original at all! They are human, and therefore shared.
Is there a piece in the book that was the one that led you to realize you were beginning to write this book — as opposed to simply writing another related piece that would eventually be published as a stand-alone narrative or poem?
This one was always a book, which was why it was tricky to publish many of these poems individually in journals. The book came on in a torrent, and held me in its sway for months as I wrote and rewrote its first drafts, and the poems in it were always deeply intuitive, somehow merging story and poetry, self and other. It was like they needed their own space, their own book, to make sense.
I experienced this book as a crossing over into a new wavelength. I learned to write more from my own intuitive power, and less from some expectation of form or audience.
You made some significant changes to the manuscript after it was taken by the Press for publication. Did thinking of it as a book that was actually going to be out in the world — as opposed to simply an ambitious creative project — influence how you approached revision? And if not that, then what led to the major changes in the manuscript?
Well, because the book was so intuitive I felt that I needed to do some rearranging and clarifying to externalize its themes a bit more, and guide the reader through its movements.
I also put the prose novella back in. I had been taking that out as I sent out the manuscript, because it didn’t fit most contest guidelines. But when Twelve Winters accepted the manuscript and I thought about what I most wanted to share and explore with this book, I knew that it was important for me to have this strange, layered shape, and these characters who are recognizable to us, and who also have rich universes within — like any of us.
And finally, I took out a couple of love poems and added some new ones — simply to make the emotional experience of the book present to me again. A book that was important to me for many years is Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola-Estes. It is a book about elemental feminism, and the creative process in which Estes retells fairy tales and folktales to track archetypal shapes in a life. She talks about the woman as creator and says that when a project feels stuck, or stalled, we should just take something out, get rid of something, in order to lighten its energy and renew it again. I really experienced this phenomena with The Endless Unbegun. I took out some poems, added three new ones, and then changed the title, and the book was made new again — like, finally, it had found its moment in time.
What’s the manuscript’s history as far as publication? In other words, how long did you work on it as a book-length project? Had you approached other publishers? What made Twelve Winters seem like a good fit for the book and for you as an author?
I worked on this as a book-length project for a decade, and I always believed in it, but I suspect there was too much going on for editors to see it clearly or to trust its voices. The poems themselves seem more performative, archetypal and intense than a lot of what is being published right now. It was a semi-finalist for the Dorset Prize a long time ago — maybe in 2007. And its poems inspired the creation of a band in 2008 — called the Very Small Quartet. I read many of these poems and musicians in the quartet set them to original music, and we performed them live around Chicago. Then Dancing Girl Press published some of its poems in a chapbook called “The Blue Grotto” in 2009.
Twelve Winters was wonderful to work with because the relationship was always founded on respect and understanding of the author’s own experience. I did not feel that I had to fit this book into any one container, or even one genre, but could really present it in its best possible shape and form. That has been a thrilling opportunity for me as an author, and the entire process of finishing this book has been a pleasure. The Twelve Winters readers and editors were respectful and encouraging, but also meticulous in editing, crediting and proofreading, and so I knew that we were releasing a book that we could all be proud of.
You’re working on an audio edition of the book. One can imagine that poets especially are interested in performing their work for an audience, as opposed to offering it in print only. What are your thoughts or hopes regarding producing an audiobook of The Endless Unbegun?
I love reading my poems aloud. They are usually woven together by sound, and I think when I read them, the listener/reader can really enjoy that and get swept into a more physical, subconscious rhythm.
I am seeking a grant to pay for a really strong recording of this book, because I want to be able to share it in an audio form, in my voice.
What are some of the challenges of recording your poetry, besides any technological ones?
Well, none really. Just little technical things, like don’t wear bracelets that jangle, and don’t lisp. Oh, and the technical glitch of the ego, of course. I never like my voice when I hear it again. It is embarrassing. It always sounds too slow, sad and deep to me. But it is my voice, and I am the one to vocalize my poems.
I co-produced a radio series on poetry for WBEZ a couple of years ago and had to listen to so many hours of my own voice during the production process that I learned to detach from it, much like the way you have to detach as a writer from the idea that an experience is yours. In the end, these are just two more tools — the voice, the experience — that you can use to share with others.
You teach courses in poetry at Northwestern University and you’ve worked with younger writers as well. Teaching is time consuming of course, and it can be energy draining, but how does teaching influence your writing in positive ways?
I feel so fortunate that my day job is to talk with 20-year-olds about poetry! And what they teach me, more than anything, is that all of this work is relevant, even necessary. I mean, if you are just out and about reading the billboards in this country and watching the sitcoms, this stuff we are doing seems pretty anachronistic and irrelevant.
But in my classroom, I get to see how deeply we seek meaning, how much we crave the kind of relational intelligence and emotional awakening that poetry creates. I watch students embark on this experience of creating and evolving consciousness, and they help me to evolve my consciousness, as well. My students come to poetry classes, because they want to, because poetry provides a space for us to talk about these ideas of relationship, of creation, of trusting the intuition, and acknowledging the deeper self, and we need these conversations — now more than ever.
And the Jon and Marisol sections, especially, are dedicated to my students. I put them back in because they represent a kind of atrium in life where we may find ourselves, maybe especially in our twenties or early thirties — the sense that we want to drop down deeper, we want to relate to people soulfully, but our coolness and our intelligence somehow prevents us from sharing all we know and sense. I think my students are weathering those situations quite bravely, and their earnestness and intelligence gives me hope.
What are you writing now?
I am working on two projects. My prose project is a book of personal essays that circle experiences of birth and death. They take place during the first years of my daughter’s life, and during the illness and passing of her father from the disease ALS, when I was caregiver to both. These experiences were simultaneous, which led to many personal challenges, but also to rich reflection on what we consider opposite — birth and death, heaven and hell. I now experience these states as related, even interdependent.
My poetry project is a collection of poems written in the voices of Native Americans who can verbalize a very earth-centered, relational consciousness. Some of these voices are not unlike Radegunde’s, who, as a Pagan, had a different relationship to time and to the earth, but they are taken outside of the context of Christianity, and placed in another time in history.
Rachel Jamison Webster is the author of the full-length poetry collection September (Northwestern University Press, 2013) as well as two chapbooks, The Blue Grotto and Leaving Phoebe, both from Dancing Girl Press. Her poems and prose writing have been published in numerous journals and anthologies, including Poetry, Narrative, Tin House and The Paris Review. She teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Northwestern and edits universeofpoetry.org, an international anthology of poetry. (Author photo by Richard Fammerée.)
Interview with John McCarthy: Extinguished Anthology
Last March, Twelve Winters Press released [Ex]tinguished & [Ex]tinct: An Anthology of Things That No Longer [Ex]ist, edited by the Press’s contributing editor John McCarthy. At the time I didn’t have the presence of mind to interview John about the book, but the Press has recently announced its Pushcart Prize nominees from the anthology, so I thought it would be appropriate to post an overdue interview.
John and I have known each other since around 2008 because of our mutual involvement with Quiddity international literary journal and public-radio program. I was a founding editor who eventually took a step or two back to prose reader; John was an intern who eventually assumed the role of assistant editor. When I launched Twelve Winters Press in 2012, John was quick to lend his support. Knowing his talents and work ethic I was happy to hand him the reins on an editorial project for the Press. In the winter of 2013 we sat down to a Thai dinner and brainstormed possible themes for an anthology. The ideas were flying fast and furious. I recall that I spitballed the possibility of a collection of literary zombie stories. John was … dubious. Somehow we eventually came up with the general idea of extinction, which was refined to extinguished and extinct–and John, as I knew he would, hit the ground running.
We composed the wording for the call for submissions of poems, prose poems and flash fiction, and posted it on Submittable and here and there. Then I sat back and let John and the Press’s associate editor Pamm Collebrusco do what they do so well. They meticulously read and sifted through the submissions that soon began pouring in, selected their favorites and worked through the editing process. John designed the cover and interior pages. I got involved again at the very end for an additional proofreading and to actually publish the anthology, which ultimately offered the work of 37 contributors from five countries. I couldn’t be more pleased with what John and Pamm had produced.
Here, then, is my interview with John (via email) about his editing the anthology.
John McCarthy
What attracted you to the theme of “extinguished and extinct”? What about it made you think it would yield plenty of interesting material?
Part of good writing–part of its goal–is to craft something timeless, something universal people can relate to. When I started brainstorming themes, I decided the best way to do this was to address something permanent. I thought of a line from Larry Levis’s poem, “My Story in a Late Style of Fire,” when the speaker is lamenting a former lover and explains “even in her late addiction & her bloodstream’s / Hallelujahs, she, too, sang often of some affair, or someone / Gone, & therefore permanent.” And what is more permanent than the total, absolute absence of someone or something? Extinction, death. I didn’t want the anthology to be just about a personal death. There are plenty of grief anthologies out there, but in a sense, all poetry is about longing, grieving, lamenting, or venerating the fleeting. I wanted to expand this idea of the permanence of loss to anything: things that are endangered of becoming extinct; things that are extinct that deserve a modern voice; as well as a traditional elegy for a person or thing. I wanted it to address personal emotions as well as open up dialogues about socially conscious topics such as the importance of eco-preservation as well as race and gender. I didn’t want it to be just an anthology about wooly mammoths or dinosaurs, I wanted writers to redefine or reinterpret the word extinction. I wanted them to apply this word to specific entities and abstract concepts. I wanted to make something permanent by pulling it from permanence. Levis is lamenting this woman because she is lamenting someone she lost before him, so it’s this other absence–her own experience with extinction–that inhibits her ability to be totally present with Levis, so in a way, extinction for me means seeing beyond the duality of things dead and things living. It means appreciating absence, acknowledging it in such a way that it really isn’t absent anymore. Once something is, it is forever. That’s a certain kind of philosophy with a lot of debate to it, but it was the jumping ground to a lot of great work which I received.
How many submissions did you receive (more or less)? Were you surprised by the response?
I got about 1,500 submissions in total. I wasn’t surprised considering how well the calls for submission was promoted. My surprise was with how much quality writing I received and had to sift through. I was worried that the extinction theme would generate a ridiculous amount of genre stuff dealing with zombies, nuclear fallout, all that apocalyptic stuff, which is fine in its own regard, but it was not what I was looking for with the anthology. I received a couple submissions like that, but not as many as I would have thought. I had to decline a lot of good work, too. I had 37 contributors in total, but if I had unlimited page space, I would have accepted around 50 I think. I got quality submissions dealing with everything from extinct animals, to foreign dialects, to pokemon, to jukeboxes, even rotary phones, libraries, and turn-tables. It was exciting to see so many people interpreting and reimagining these historical contexts in new voices. It was cool to look at things that are “gone, and therefore permanent,” but were given light to everything we lost.
Did ideas for any other themed anthologies come to you while reading through the submissions?
Yes, I want to do an anthology dealing with the opposite of this anthology. “Things not yet existing.” I want to see how imaginative and prophetic writers could get with things that don’t yet exist in the world or how curet existing things might get reimagined in a contemporary context. Obviously, I would worry about receiving too many hard science fiction submissions, but I would open it up to any extrapolation of the idea dealing with things that are existing currently. Like maybe a Latino president would be an awesome prophecy, a new kind of rug that floats around the house, maybe a new way of giving birth, or escalators to the moon. I would really look for inventiveness. I would also like to do an anthology of short stories or formal verse at some point. I always have ideas, always looking for platforms to execute them.
How did reading submissions and editing the anthology impact your own writing?
I love working with the persona poem and the elegy. I think it is fun to piggyback off of other persons or events in time. It helps develop a stronger sense of empathy within the work. It was a good exercise to work and edit other people’s interpretations of their personas and the elegies. There is so much you can do with projection. Memory is the world within the world. Working with this anthology helped me access, explore, and appreciate that inner world.
John McCarthy has had work appear or is forthcoming in RHINO, The Minnesota Review, Salamander, Jabberwock Review, Midwestern Gothic, Oyez Review, and The Pinch among others. He is an MFA candidate at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He lives in Chicago, Illinois, where he is a contributing editor at Poets’ Quarterly and the assistant editor of The Museum of Americana and Quiddity international literary journal and public-radio program. Follow him @jmccarthylit.
William H. Gass at 90: Passages of Time
I’ve just returned from Washington University in St. Louis where I attended “Passages of Time: A literary event marking the 90th birthday of celebrated author William H. Gass.” The reading and reception were held in Umrath Lounge from 4 to 6 p.m. After welcoming and introductory remarks by Jeffrey Trzeciak, University Librarian, and Dr. Gerhild Williams, German professor and vice provost, Gass read from several of his works for about 40 minutes.
William H. Gass preparing to read for the celebration of his 90th birthday at Washington University.
Gass, or “The Master,” as I call him, arrived via wheelchair and gave his reading from a chair, but while his mobility was impaired, he appeared sharp of mind and his voice was clear and robust–not remarkably different from other readings of his that I attended in 2009 (AWP Conference in Chicago) and 2013 (Left Bank Books in St. Louis). For the most part, Gass read from his works in published chronological order, beginning with passages from the novel Omensetter’s Luck (1966), followed by selections from “Order of Insects” (in 1968’s In the Heart of the Heart of the Country), The Tunnel (1995), “Emma Enters a Sentence of Elizabeth Bishop’s” (in 1998’s Cartesian Sonata), Middle C (2013), and concluding with his translation of Rilke’s “The Death of the Poet” (in Reading Rilke, 1999).
Between selections, Gass spoke briefly about each piece, often humorously. Upon finishing his reading, the large gathering gave the author an enthusiastic standing ovation. When the crowd quieted, Gass said, “Rilke is good.”
Watch the entire reading here:
Several of Gass’s books have been re-released and were available at the reading and reception in autographed editions. Unfortunately, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country had not arrived in time for the event. Gass has supposedly been working on a new story collection as well as a new collection of novellas, a form that he especially likes. I hope to hear the author reading from those books at his 100th birthday celebration.
I recommend the following links to learn more about The Master:
Washington University Libraries’ Special Collections (the William H. Gass Papers and International Writers Center)
“William H. Gass: The Soul Inside the Sentence” (digitized manuscripts, photographs, readings and more)
And keep up to date on Gass events and happenings at ReadingGass.org
Outside of Umrath Lounge just following William Gass’s reading. (Photo by my wife, Melissa)
Principals unwitting soldiers in Campbell Brown’s army
(This is a long post — and for that, my apologies. But it’s important, and I encourage you to take your time and read it thoroughly.)
Because of my interest in the subject (as demonstrated in my blog posts over the past few months), I was invited to participate in a video roundtable via Skype with administrators from several schools about implementing the Danielson Framework for Teacher Evaluation, and I found many of the comments, well, bewildering. Even though it was a select group, I strongly suspect that their attitudes and approaches are representative of not only administrators in Illinois, but across the country — as the Danielson Framework has been adopted by numerous states. Before I go any further I must stress that these are all good people who are trying to do their job as they understand it from the State Board of Education, their own local school boards and the public at large. Around the video table were a superintendent of a k-12 district, building principals of elementary, middle, junior high and high schools, and even a k-12 curriculum director, along with three teachers — elementary, junior high and high school (yours truly). I’m going to try to represent their words accurately, but without attribution since their comments were not on the record. In fact, as the two-hour video chat became more heated, several people were speaking with a good deal of candor, and clearly their remarks were not intended for all ears. (By the way, kudos to the tech folks who brought us all together — it worked far better than I would have suspected.)
I considered not writing about the video conference at all, but ultimately felt that I owe it to the profession that I’ve devoted my adult life to (as I enter my 31st year in the classroom), a profession that has been beleaguered in recent years by powerful forces on every side: attacking teachers’ integrity, our skills, our associations, our job security, our pensions. We feel we have so many enemies, we don’t even know where to focus our attention.
What is more, most teachers are afraid to speak candidly with their own administrators and they’re especially afraid to speak out about what’s going on in their buildings. In spite of education reformers blanketing the media with the myth of “powerful teachers unions,” the truth is that associations like the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers aren’t all that powerful — if they were, would teachers be in the plight we are now? — and individual teachers are very vulnerable. Nontenured teachers can be terminated without cause, and tenured teachers can be legally harassed right out of the profession. In fact, it happens all the time. Moreover, teachers tend to be naturally non-confrontational, which is why they chose to go into teaching in the first place. People with more aggressive personalities will seek other kinds of professions. As a result, we’ve been lambs to slaughter at the hands of reformers, legislators, school board members, administrators … at the hands of anyone who wants to take a whack at us. Rather than fight back, it’s easier to keep quiet and bear it, or to move on.
I’ve been writing about educational issues for the past several months — the unfair termination of young teachers, the inherent flaws of the Danielson Framework, the way the Framework affects teachers, and my issues with PARCC and the Common Core. My posts have been garnering hundreds of hits, and a few online likes, but many, many private, under-the-radar thumbs-ups and thank-yous. Teachers appreciate that someone is speaking out, but they’re not only afraid to speak out themselves, they’re even afraid to be seen agreeing with my point of view. If this isn’t evidence of the precariousness of being a teacher and the overall weakness of “teachers unions,” I don’t know what is.
Public Opinion and the Rarefied Air of Excellence
Much of the round-table discussion had to do with the Framework’s insistence that very, very few teachers rank in the top category (identified as “Excellent” in many districts’ plans). Before Danielson, districts tended to have three-tier evaluation instruments, which were often labeled as “Excellent,” “Satisfactory” and “Unsatisfactory.” Danielson adds a tier between “Excellent” and “Satisfactory”: “Proficient.” Many veteran teachers who had consistently received an excellent rating under the previous model were downgraded to merely proficient under Danielson. This downgrading was predicted as early as two years ago when the new instrument emerged on the educational horizon. I didn’t want to believe it would be that severe, but it has been this past year, the year of implementation, with very few teachers being rated as excellent. For the record, I was rated as proficient — not as excellent for the first time since I was a nontenured teacher, more than 25 years ago.
In fact, as I wrote in a previous post, the Illinois Administrators Academy offered a special workshop this past summer to train administrators how to deliver the unpleasant news that a veteran teacher has been downgraded to proficient — the downgrading was so pervasive across the state. The Framework was originally developed by Charlotte Danielson in 1996 as a way to evaluate first-year teachers, so it made perfect sense that a single-digit percentage would be deemed as excellent. The Framework has undergone three revisions since then and now purports to be an instrument that can assess every teacher, K-12, every subject, and even nonclassroom professionals like librarians and school nurses. Nevertheless, the notion that very, very few teachers will rate as excellent has clung tenaciously to the Framework throughout each revision.
I asked the administrators why that aspect of the Framework remains even though the Framework’s purpose has been expanded dramatically since it was conceived in the mid-1990s. I was told by the k-12 superintendent that the Framework has gained such wide acceptance in large part due to that very aspect. Under previous evaluation instruments, 90% of teachers were judged to be excellent, and the public doesn’t accept that as true. In fact, the public believes (and therefore school boards, too, since they, like the public at large, are almost always noneducators with no classroom experience) that the traditional bell curve should apply to teachers. The bell curve, or Gaussian function, is of course the statistical representation that says the fewest examples of anything, qualitatively speaking, are at either extreme of the gathered samples, and the vast majority (let’s say 80%) fall somewhere in the middle, from below average to above average.
According to the superintendent, then, the public believes that the bell curve should apply to experienced, career teachers as well — that only a small percentage are truly excellent, and the vast majority fall somewhere in the middle (to use Danielson terms, in the satisfactory to proficient range). First of all, who cares what the uninformed public thinks? In our country we have a fascination with asking pedestrians on the street what they think of global warming, heightened military involvement in the Middle East, and allowing Ebola victims to enter the country. John Oliver of “Last Week Tonight” did a segment on this phenomenon that went viral on social media:
Assuming this is true — that the public believes only a small percentage of teachers are excellent based, unconsciously, on the principle of the bell curve (and I’m willing to believe that it is true) — the belief yet again speaks to the ignorance of the “man on the street.” In this instance, the bell curve is being fallaciously applied. If you take a random sampling of people (let’s say, you go to the mall at Christmas time and throw a net around a random group of shoppers) and task them with teaching some random topic to a random group of students, then, yes, the bell curve is likely to be on target. In that group of shoppers, lo and behold, you netted a couple of professional teachers, so they’re able to teach the material pretty effectively; another much larger group of shoppers who are decently educated and reasonably articulate could do a passable job imparting the information; and a smaller group on the other extreme would really make a botch of it.
But career teachers are not a random sampling of shoppers at the mall. They’re highly educated professionals who have devoted their lives to teaching, who have constantly worked to improve their craft, and who have honed their skills via thousands of contact hours with students. It stands to reason, in fact, that career teachers should be excellent at what they do after all that training and experience. No one, I suspect, would have an issue with the statement that all Major League baseball players are excellent at baseball — some may be bound for Cooperstown and some may go back to the minors or to some other career altogether after a season or two, but they’re all really, really good at playing baseball compared to the average person. Why is it so hard to believe that 90% of career teachers are excellent at what they do?
The Fallacy of the Bell Curve and Nontenured Teachers
Unfortunately, the acceptance of the bell-curve fallacy has an even more devastating impact when applied to teachers in the beginning of their careers. One administrator shared that her board expects a few nontenured teachers to be terminated every spring, that the board implies the administrators aren’t doing their jobs if every nontenured teacher is retained. I was dumbfounded by this statement. It’s barely a figurative comparison to say that it’s like having to sacrifice a virgin or two to appease the gods at the vernal equinox. It’s no wonder that many young teachers feel as if they’re performing their highly complex duties with a Damoclesian Sword poised above their tender necks. I know firsthand one young teacher who resigned last spring after two years in the classroom to pursue another career option because she’d seen the way other young teachers were treated and had already experienced some administrative harassment. And this was a teacher who by all accounts was doing well in the classroom (in a specialized area in which there aren’t a lot of qualified candidates). She didn’t even know what she wanted to do for a living, but it will have to be better (and professionally safer) than teaching, she believed. I have to believe she’s right.
But, again, in the case of young teachers, the bell curve is being applied erroneously. Generally speaking, when teachers are hired, administrators are drawing from an applicant pool in the hundreds. They’re college educated, trained in their field, and they’ve passed their professional exams. They often have to go through multiple rounds of interviewing before being offered a position. Of course, even after all of this, there can be young teachers who have chosen their profession poorly and in fact they’re not cut out for teaching — but school board members shouldn’t just assume a certain number should be cut from the herd to make room for potentially more effective young professionals — and if that sort of pressure is being applied to administrators, to be the bearers of the bloody hatchet every spring, that is grossly unfair, too.
The Danielson Group’s Indoctrination
The evaluation training that administrators have to undergo, all forty hours of it, indoctrinates them to the Danielson Framework’s ethos that excellent is all but attainable, and it has led to all kinds of leaping logic and gymnastic semantics. An idea that was expressed multiple times in various ways during the roundtable was that proficient really means excellent, and a rating of excellent really means something beyond excellent — what precisely is unclear, but it has to do with teachers going above and beyond (above what? beyond where? … no one seems to know or be able to articulate). The Framework was often referred to as “fact-based” and “objective,” yet administrator after administrator couldn’t put into words what distinguishes a “proficient” teacher from an “excellent” one. It’s just a certain feeling — which is the very definition of subjectivity. The Framework for Teacher Evaluation approach is fact-laden, but it is far from fact-based.
The Danielson model is supposed to be an improvement over previous ones in part because it requires evaluators to observe teachers more than in the past. In the old system, typically, tenured teachers were observed one class period every other year. Now they’re observed one class period plus several pop-in visits, which may last only a few minutes, every other year. The Framework recommends numerous visits, even for veteran teachers, but in practicality evaluators are doing well to pop in a half dozen times or so because they have so many teachers to evaluate. Nevertheless, the increased frequency seems to give administrators the sense that they have a secure hold on the behaviors of their teachers and know with confidence what they’re doing in their classes. This confidence, frankly, is troubling. Let’s be generous and say that a principal can observe a teacher for a total of three class periods (one full period, plus bits of four or five other ones). Meanwhile, the typical teacher teaches, say, six periods per day for 180 days, which equals 1,080 periods. Three class periods represent less than one percent (0.3 percent, rounding up) of that teacher’s time with students during the year. How in the world can an evaluator say with confidence Teacher A is excellent and Teacher B is really close, but definitely only proficient based on seeing them teach less than one percent of the time?
Yet one principal said with confidence, bravado even, that he could observe two high-performing teachers who had always been rated as excellent in the past, and based on his Danielson-style observations he could differentiate between the excellent high-performing teacher and the proficient high-performing teacher, because, he said, the excellent teacher was doing something consistently, whereas the proficient teacher was doing that something only some of the time — what that something is was left undefined. If a writer submitted an academic article to a peer-reviewed journal and was drawing rock-solid conclusions based on observing anything .03% of the time … well, let us say that acceptance for publication would be unlikely.
The same standards of logic should be applied to judging teachers’ careers and assessing their worth to the profession. Period.
The Portfolio Conundrum
The confident administrator may point to another component of the Danielson model that is supposed to be an improvement over the previous approach: a portfolio prepared by the teacher. Teachers are supposed to provide their evaluator with evidence regarding their training and professionalism (especially for Danielson domains 1 and 4, “Planning and Preparation” and “Professional Responsibilities”), but there are some inherent problems with this approach and a lot of confusion. As far as confusion, principals seem to be in disagreement about how much material teachers should provide them. Some suggest only a few representative items, but the whole idea is for the portfolio to fill in the blanks for the evaluator, to make the evaluator aware of professional behaviors and activities that he or she can’t observe in the classroom (especially when they’re observing a teacher less than one percent of their time with students!). However, if teachers hand in thick portfolios, filled with evidence, the overburdened principal (and I’m not being sarcastic here), the overburdened principal hardly has time to pore through dozens of portfolios that look like they were prepared by James Michener (I debated between Michener and Tolstoy) — which leaves teachers in a conundrum: Do they turn in a modest amount of evidence, thereby selling themselves short, or do they submit copious amounts of evidence that won’t be read and considered by their evaluator anyway?
And it’s a moot question, of course, since nearly all teachers are going to be lumped into the proficient category to satisfy the public’s erroneous bell-curve expectations.
The Undervaluing of Content
I’ll add one bit more from the conversation because it leads to another important point — perhaps the most important — and that is one principal’s statement that he mainly focuses on a teacher’s delivery of the material and not the validity of the content because he usually doesn’t have the background in the subject area. In larger school districts, there may be department chairs who are at least in part responsible for evaluating teachers in their department (so an English teacher evaluates an English teacher, or a math teacher, a math teacher, etc.), but the vast majority of evaluations, for tenured and nontenured teachers alike, are performed by administrators outside of the content area. This, frankly, has always been a problem and largely invalidates the entire teacher evaluation system, but when the system was mainly benign, no one fussed too much about it (not even me). Now, however, when tenure and seniority laws have been weakened, and principals are programmed to be niggardly with excellent ratings, the fact that evaluators oftentimes have no idea if the teacher is dispensing valid knowledge or not undermines the whole approach.
Not to mention, the Danielson Framework claims to place about fifty percent of a teacher’s effectiveness on his or her knowledge of the subject. The portfolios are supposed to help with this dilemma (the portfolios that aren’t being read with any sort of care because of time issues). I’m dubious, though, that this is a legitimate concern of the framers of the Danielson Framework because they definitely privilege an approach to teaching that places the burden of knowledge production with the students. That is, ideally teachers are facilitating their students’ acquisition of knowledge through self-discovery, but they’re not imparting that knowledge to them directly. Indeed, excellent teachers do very little direct teaching at all.
This devaluation of content-area knowledge has been a growing trend for several years, and it’s not surprising that administrators are easily swayed toward this mindset. After all, teachers who go into administration have made the choice to pursue knowledge not in their subject-area field. Very, very few administrators have a masters degree in their original content area in addition to their administrative degrees and certificates. In theory, they may accept the idea that broader and deeper knowledge in your subject area is important, but they can’t truly understand just how valuable (even invaluable) it is since they didn’t teach as someone with an advanced degree in their field. They’re only human after all, and none of us can truly relate to an experience we haven’t had ourselves.
Campbell Brown and Her Unwitting Campbell Brown-shirts
We didn’t talk about this during the video round-table, but it seems clear to me that none of the administrators had any sense of the role they’re playing in the larger scheme of things. The players are too numerous and the campaign too complex to get into here in any depth, but there’s unquestionably a movement afoot to privatize education — that is, to take education out of the hands of trained professionals and put it in the hands of underpaid managers so that corporations can reap obscene profits, and turn traditional public schools into barely funded welfare institutions. The well-to-do will be able to send their sons and daughters to these corporate-backed charter schools, and middle-class parents can dig their infinite hole of financial debt even deeper in an effort to keep up and send their children to the private, corporate schools as well.
Campbell Brown and the Partnership for Educational Justice were behind the lawsuit that made teacher tenure unconstitutional in California (the Vergara decision), and they’re at it again in New York (Wright v. New York). The Danielson Framework, wielded by brainwashed administrators, is laying the groundwork for Vergara-like lawsuits across the land. Imagine how much easier it will be for Brown and partners in “reform” like David Boles to make the case that public schools are failing because, see, only a handful of teachers are performing at the top of their field. The rest, 90-something percent, are varying shades of mediocre, with powerful teachers unions shielding their mediocrity from public view.
Superintendents and principals have drunk the Campbell Brown-colored Kool-Aid. In this instance the metaphor is especially apropos because there are already movements underway to dismiss traditionally trained administrators as underqualified. In Illinois, the State Board of Education is changing from certificates to licenses and in the process requiring additional training to become an administrator. It is a recent change, but already there are insinuations that administrators who received the traditional training are going to be underqualified compared to their newly licensed colleagues.
Moreover, what does it say about a principal as recruiter of young talent when a significant number of his new hires have to be terminated year after year? What a waste of money and resources, and what a disservice to children! And what does it say about a principal as educational leader of his building when he can’t even shape the majority of his veteran teachers into excellent practitioners? Clearly, he’s not especially excellent either. And all those well-paid superintendents who hired all those lackluster principals, well … And all those publicly elected boards of education who hired all those lackluster superintendents, well … the gross mismanagement of taxpayer dollars is bordering on criminal fraud.
As I see it, the Partnership for Educational Justice’s grand scheme is to have principals help them dismantle professional associations like the NEA and AFT via their use of the Danielson Framework, state by state. Then they’ll systematically replace public schools with corporate-backed charter schools which will be staffed by undertrained, low-paid “teachers,” and instead of principals, each school/franchise will be overseen by a manager — just as it works in the corporate world now. Instead of boards of education who answer to taxpayers there will be boards of directors who answer to shareholders. Brilliant.
So every time principals sign an evaluation that undervalues their teachers, they’re also signing their own resignation letter. It’s all right: they’ll look quite fetching in their Brown-shirts as they wait in the unemployment line.
Here’s my beef with PARCC and the Common Core
Beginning this school year students in Illinois will be taking the new assessment known as PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers), which is also an accountability measure — meaning that it will be used to identify the schools (and therefore teachers) who are doing well and the ones who are not, based on their students’ scores. In this post I will be drawing from a document released this month by the Illinois State Board of Education, “The top 10 things teachers need to know about the new Illinois assessments.” PARCC is intended to align with the Common Core, which around here has been rebranded as the New Illinois Learning Standards Incorporating the Common Core (clearly a Madison Avenue PR firm wasn’t involved in selecting that name — though I’m surprised funds weren’t allocated for it).
This could be a very long post, but I’ll limit myself to my main issues with PARCC and the Common Core. The introduction to “The top 10 things” document raises some of the most fundamental problems with the revised approach. It begins, “Illinois has implemented new, higher standards for student learning in all schools across the state.” Let’s stop right there. I’m dubious that rewording the standards makes them “higher,” and from an English/language arts teacher perspective, the Common Core standards aren’t asking us to do anything different from what we’ve been doing since I started teaching in 1984. There’s an implied indictment in the opening sentence, suggesting that until now, the Common Core era, teachers haven’t been holding students to particularly high standards. I mean, logically, if there was space into which the standards could be raised, then they had to be lower before Common Core. It’s yet another iteration of the war-cry: Teachers, lazy dogs that they are, have been sandbagging all these years, and now they’re going to have to up their game — finally!
Then there’s the phrase “in all schools across the state,” that is, from the wealthiest Chicago suburb to the poorest downstate school district, and this idea gets at one of the biggest problems — if not the biggest — in education: grossly inequitable funding. We know that kids from well-to-do homes attending well-to-do schools do significantly better in school — and on assessments! — than kids who are battling poverty and all of its ill-effects. Teachers associations (aka, unions) have been among the many groups advocating to equalize school funding via changes to the tax code and other laws, but money buys power and powerful interests block funding reform again and again. So until the money being spent on every student’s education is the same, no assessment can hope to provide data that isn’t more about economic circumstances than student ability.
As if this disparity in funding weren’t problematic enough, school districts have been suffering cutbacks in state funding year after year, resulting in growing deficits, teacher layoffs (or non-replacement of retirees), and other direct hits to instruction.
According to the “The top 10 things” document, “[a] large number of Illinois educators have been involved in the development of the assessment.” I have no idea how large a “large number” is, but I know there’s a big difference between involvement and influence. From my experience over the last 31 years, it’s quite common for people to present proposals to school boards and the public clothed in the mantle of “teacher input,” but they fail to mention that the input was diametrically opposed to the proposal.
The very fact that the document says in talking point #1 that a large number of educators (who, by the way, are not necessarily the same as teachers) were involved in PARCC’s development tells us that PARCC was not developed by educators, and particularly not by classroom teachers. In other words, this reform movement was neither initiated nor orchestrated by educators. Some undefined number of undefined “educators” were brought on board, but there’s no guarantee that they had any substantive input into the assessment’s final form, or even endorsed it. I would hope that the teachers who were involved were vocal about the pointlessness of a revised assessment when the core problems (pun intended), like inadequate funding, are not being addressed. At all.
“The top 10 things” introduction ends with “Because teachers are at the center of these changes and directly contribute to student success, the Illinois State Board of Education has compiled a list of the ten most important things for teachers to know about the new tests.” In a better world, the sentence would be Because teachers are at the center of these changes and directly contribute to student success … the Illinois State Board of Education has tasked teachers with determining the best way to assess student performance. Instead, teachers are being given a two-page handout, which is heavy in snazzy graphics, two to three weeks before the start of the school year. In my district, we’ve had several inservices over the past two years regarding Common Core and PARCC, but our presenters had practically no concrete information to share with us because everything was in such a state of flux; as a consequence, we left meeting after meeting no better informed than we were after the previous one. Often the new possible developments revised or even replaced the old possible developments.
The second paragraph of the introduction claims that PARCC will “provide educators with reliable data that will help guide instruction … [more so] than the current tests required by the state.” I’ve already spoken to that so-called reliable data above, but a larger issue is that this statement assumes teachers are able to analyze all that data provided by previous tests in an attempt to guide instruction. It happens, and perhaps it happens in younger grades more so than in junior high and high school, but by and large teachers are so overwhelmed with the day-to-day — minute-to-minute! — demands of the job that there’s hardly time to pore through stacks of data and develop strategies based on what they appear to be saying about each student. Teachers generally have one prep or planning period per day, less than an hour in length. The rest of the time they’re up to their dry-erase boards in kids (25 to 30 or more per class is common). In that meager prep time and whatever time they can manage beyond that, they’re writing lesson plans; grading papers; developing worksheets, activities, tests, etc.; photocopying worksheets, activities, tests, etc.; contacting or responding to parents or administrators; filling out paperwork for students with IEPs or 504s; accommodating students’ individual needs, those with documented needs and those with undocumented ones; entering grades and updating their school websites; supervising hallways, cafeterias and parking lots; coaching, advising, sponsoring, chaperoning. . . .
Don’t get me wrong. I’m a scholar as well as a teacher. I believe in analyzing data. I’d love to have a better handle on what my students’ specific abilities are and how I might best deliver instruction to meet their needs. But the reality is that that isn’t a reasonable expectation given the traditional educational model — and it’s only getting worse in terms of time demands on teachers, with larger class sizes, ever-changing technology, and — now — allegedly higher standards.
Educational reformers are so light on classroom experience they haven’t a clue how demanding a teacher’s job is at its most fundamental level. In this regard I think education suffers from the fact that so many of its practitioners are so masterful at their job that their students and parents and board members and even administrators get the impression that it must be easy. Anyone who is excellent at what she or he does makes it look easy to the uninitiated observer.
I touched on ever-changing technology a moment ago; let me return to it. PARCC is intended to be an online assessment, but, as the document points out, having it online in all schools is unrealistic, and that “goal will take a few more years, as schools continue to update their equipment and infrastructure.” The goal of its being online is highly questionable in the first place. The more complicated one makes the assessment tool, the less cognitive processing space the student has to devote to the given question or task. Remember when you started driving a car? Just keeping the darn thing on the road was more than enough to think about. In those first few hours it was difficult to imagine that driving would become so effortless that one day you’d be able to drive, eat a cheeseburger, sing along with your favorite song, and argue with your cousin in the backseat, all simultaneously. At first, the demands of driving the car dominated your cognitive processing space. When students have to use an unfamiliar online environment to demonstrate their abilities to read, write, calculate and so on, how much will the online environment itself compromise the cognitive space they can devote to the reading, writing and calculating processes?
What is more, PARCC implies that schools, which are already financially strapped and overspending on technology (technology that has never been shown to improve student learning and may very well impede it), must channel dwindling resources — whether local, state or federal — to “update their equipment and infrastructure.” These are resources that could, if allowed, be used to lower class sizes, re-staff libraries and learning centers, and offer more diverse educational experiences to students via the fine arts and other non-core components of the curriculum. While PARCC may not require, per se, schools to spend money they don’t have on technology, it certainly encourages it.
What is even more, the online nature of PARCC introduces all kinds of variables into the testing situation that are greatly minimized by the paper-and-pencil tests it is supplanting. Students will need to take the test in computer labs, classrooms and other environments that may or may not be isolated and insulated from other parts of the school, or off-site setting. Granted, the sites of traditional testing have varied somewhat — you can’t make every setting precisely equal to every other setting — but it’s much, much easier to come much, much closer than when trying to do the test online. Desktop versus laptop computers (in myriad models), proximity to Wi-Fi, speed of connection (which may vary minute from minute), how much physical space can be inserted between test-takers — all of these are issues specific to online assessments, and they all will affect the results of the assessment.
So my beef comes down to this about PARCC and the Common Core: Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent rewording standards and developing a new assessment that won’t actually help improve education. Here’s what would help teachers teach kids:
1. Equalize funding and increase it.
2. Lower class sizes, kindergarten through 12th grade, significantly — maximum fifteen per class, except for subjects that benefit from larger classes, like music courses.
3. Treat teachers better. Stop gunning for their jobs. Stop dismantling their unions. Stop driving them from the profession with onerous evaluation tools, low pay and benefits, underfunded pensions, too many students to teach to do their job well, and ridiculous mandates that make it harder to educate kids. Just stop it.
But these common sense suggestions will never fly because no one will make any money off of them, let alone get filthy rich, and education reform is big business — the test developers, textbook companies, technology companies, and high-priced consultants will make sure the gravy train of “reform” never gets derailed. In fact, the more they can make it look like kids are underachieving and teachers are underperforming, the more secure and more lucrative their scam is.
Thus PARCC and Common Core … let the good times roll.
Interview with J.D. Schraffenberger: The Waxen Poor
I don’t recall the exact year that I met Jeremy Schraffenberger (2005? — give or take), but it was definitely at the University of Louisville during its annual literature and culture conference. I chaired a critical panel on which Jeremy was presenting a paper. As the day progressed and we ran into each other here and there, we discovered that while we both enjoyed academic writing, creative writing was our true passion — mine, specifically, fiction, and his poetry. Over the years we often met up in Louisville, and when my first novel, Men of Winter, came out in 2010, Jeremy was kind enough to help me set up a reading in Cedar Falls, Iowa, as part of Jim O’Laughlin’s Final Thursday Reading Series. By then Jeremy (who publishes and edits under the initials J.D.) was on the tenure track in the English Department at the University of Northern Iowa and part of the editorial masthead of the North American Review. In the summer of 2013 I was able to return the favor and arranged for Jeremy to come to Springfield, Illinois, to be a “Poet in the Parlor” at the historic Vachel Lindsay Home; while he was in town, he also gave a fascinating talk on the history of the North American Review and its fast-approaching bicentennial (in 2015) — the talk was hosted by Adam Nicholson at The Pharmacy Art Center.
In 2012, I established Twelve Winters Press with the intention of using it to bring out my books, or keep them in print, and to bring out the literary work of others. Last winter I contacted Jeremy about possibly working with the Press on some sort of project under his editorial direction — and much to my delight he informed me he had a collection, The Waxen Poor, that he was interested in publishing. He sent me the manuscript, which I was able to read (again, much to my delight) before meeting him in Louisville for the conference this past February. After his reading in the beautiful Bingham Poetry Room in Ekstrom Library, we sat down to cups of coffee in the Library’s Tulip Tree Café and discussed his collection and made plans to bring it out this summer.
I’m happy to report that The Waxen Poor is indeed out. See Twelve Winters Press’s Poetry Titles page for full details.
I interviewed Jeremy via email about his intriguing collection, which includes poems published in such notable journals as Brevity, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Notre Dame Review, and Prairie Schooner, among many others. What follows are his unedited responses to my questions. When I had the honor of introducing Jeremy at the Vachel Lindsay Home, I said that I always enjoyed his readings because he was the sort of poet that I respected most: one who takes his poetry seriously but not himself. I believe this engaging combination of qualities is apparent here.
What’s the time span represented by the poems in The Waxen Poor? That is, how early is the earliest poem and how recent the most recent?
The earliest piece in the collection — and the one that really sparked this whole project — is the prose poem “Full Gospel,” which was originally published in the summer of 2006 in Brevity and was later reprinted in Best Creative Nonfiction. I bring this up only because I find the question of genre interesting. I originally wrote “Full Gospel” as a poem, but then as I started to revise, I became less and less interested in lines and line breaks and more and more interested in segmentation or braiding as a way to craft the piece. I can’t say that I was consciously blurring generic boundaries — I was just trying to write something true — but I’m still not quite sure how to categorize it. Is it an essay? A poem? A prose poem? In the end, I suppose, that’s not terribly important, but insofar as it might reveal something about the composition process — in this case, I think, how memory is organized — I think it’s an intriguing question.
Two other early pieces are the first one in the collection, “Brother Tom,” and the last, “Born for Adversity.” It was important, I think, that I knew where I was heading as I wrote and revised. I would certainly not consider The Waxen Poor a novel in verse, but I did feel that there was something of a narrative arc, if not an actual plot — even if it remained subtextual — that guided me along as I worked. I had a clear sense of the beginning and I knew the end, and so the challenge became what to do with the long expansive middle. As Margaret Atwood wrote, “True connoisseurs … are known to favor the stretch in between, since it’s the hardest to do anything with.”
The most recent poem in the collection is the sequence of “Judas” poems, which came as something of a surprise to me as I wrote them. I hadn’t expected to cast “Brother Tom” as a Judas character, but there it is. Sometimes you can’t — and maybe you shouldn’t — control your characters. You can see that I’m trying to complicate Judas/Tom, though, by calling him “A man of tradition, assassin of the ages, / My translator, my traitor, my Judas, my friend” — the same kind of complication I’m attempting to bring to the entire collection. These “Judas” poems came to me about three years ago, and so The Waxen Poor represents five years of work.
Did you set out to write a collection around the topic of “Brother Tom,” or did the concept of collecting them develop over time? Either way, can you describe the thought process behind the collection?
In my mind The Waxen Poor was always a cohesive project. After “Full Gospel” I began organizing individual pieces around the character of “Brother Tom.” I wanted to explore this fraught relationship between two brothers, each of whom is like the other but also quite different — one a poet, the other struggling with mental illness. The poems are meant to be both personal and more broadly mythological, and I’ve tried to balance (or “harmonize” might be a better word) the experiential with the imagined, the everyday with the elevated. You could also say that the project is in some ways a coping mechanism, like Eliot’s “fragments I have shored against my ruins.” That is, how are we to deal with the pain and suffering in the world but through our art? When trying to understand and contend with something like mental illness, some of us turn to art, to poetry, for answers.
Many of the poems seem to be highly personal in their subject matter. Can you discuss the process of tapping into those emotions via the creative process?
As I said, I see the collection as something of a coping mechanism — but then in some ways, all art functions as a mechanism of this kind, even if you’re not dealing with emotionally fraught subjects. What do we make of this world around us and all of the various experiences we have? How do we give our lives any kind of meaning but by forming it, shaping it? Even the most experimental, appropriative forms of conceptualism in which all subjectivity has been evacuated are ways to cope.
That said, there are some poems in The Waxen Poor I can’t read in public anymore because they’re too emotionally difficult for me to get through, but I think that probably means something important is happening. I try to tell this to my creative writing students, that if something is too painful to write, you should write it, not for the sake of therapy — though that might end up being part of it — but because when a poem is difficult in this way, you’re getting near something that you care deeply about, even if it’s in ways that you can’t quite articulate yet. When we find a form for our pain or confusions, we’re allowing others to identify with it, with us. We’re letting our readers in.
The form of these poems varies considerably, and there are even some prose poems included in the collection. Can you discuss the interplay between subject and form for you as a poet? For example, how much one influences the other?
I’m a formalist insofar as I believe that form is meaning. To sever the two is to do a deep violence to the poem — and to misread it entirely. I think it takes a long time before this insight, which is easy enough to say and understand intellectually, sinks in deeply enough for it to be true as a writer. Or at least this has been the case for me. The prose poem is a perfect example of this fusion between form and meaning. I never set out to write the prose poem sequences you find in this collection. Rather, I discovered that this was the form the poem had to take — especially the somewhat surreal ones in which the thoughts and images and phenomena all seem to tumble forth, like consciousness itself. Likewise, some of the unrhymed sonnets in the collection were discovered. That is, as I began writing, I felt the rhetorical movement of the sonnet happening, the turn, and so I began shaping it accordingly. This means paying attention to more than just the “subject,” more than what the poem is supposedly “about,” and opening yourself up to different ways of knowing.
But there are a handful of exceptions. The poem “Abecedarian Advice” is a received form that I didn’t “discover” but rather imposed on myself as a challenge. And the four “Meds” poems are acrostics that spell out the names of the antipsychotic drugs “Haldol,” “Thorazine,” “Zyprexa,” and “Lithium” down the left margins of the poems. I like the way these formal experiments turned out because I found that I ended up thinking about things I never would have thought about before. The somewhat arbitrary restraint can ironically be very liberating. In fact, I think the acrostic is the most underrated form. With other forms, like the sonnet, for example, you’re dealing not only with external characteristics like rhyme and meter but also an internal rhetorical shape that isn’t always the right fit for the poem. The acrostic, though, can accommodate absolutely anything. It gets a bad rap and seems unsophisticated because we’ve all written them in elementary school. But I think there’s something refreshing about the form’s simplicity.
Several of the poems in the collection had been published individually, but it seemed that you hadn’t been circulating the collection for a while. Can you discuss the history of the collection in terms of your thoughts on its publication as a whole?
Well, I did send this manuscript out into the world for a while, entering it into contests and open reading periods at a handful of presses that I like. But I’m a constant and somewhat obsessive reviser, so I pulled it back and have been working on it periodically for a few years. I’d add a poem, remove a poem, tinker with the chronology, worry over line breaks. Was it Valéry who said that a poem is never finished, it’s only abandoned? I guess that feeling had something to do with it — a desire not to abandon the poems. And because it’s a collection that I care deeply about and is in some ways very personal, I felt it had to be just right — and it had to find the right place, too, that would present it in the way I think it needs to be presented. I’d say it’s finally ready for the world, and so I’m excited now that it’s found a great home with Twelve Winters.
You play with both Christian and Classical allusions (and bring these together in the title and cover illustration, which you found). Why overtly connect these two traditions? What do you think is the effect of their interplay in the collection?
First, I’d say that even though I am not a Christian, Christian symbols and metaphors are culturally inescapable. And so these stories and images live with us and inform our very identities quite deeply. To deny them is to deny a rich vein of cultural and personal meaning. So, too, with the Greeks. As much as the Christian bible, the Iliad is a foundational text that we should allow to enter and affect our work, even today. In this way, I’d call myself a traditional poet — though that word “tradition” rings vaguely conservative, doesn’t it? What I mean to suggest is that I’m traditional in that I attend to the past — this great gift of literature that has been left to us — and try to make meaning of and from it. I’m reminded of something Barry Lopez wrote: “If art is merely decorative or entertaining, or even just aesthetically brilliant, if it does not elicit hope or a sense of the sacred, if it does not speak to our fear and confusion, or to the capacities for memory and passion that imbue us with our humanity, then the artist has only sent us a letter that requires no answer.” I suppose I’d say that what I’m trying to do is in this collection — and in all of my work, really — is to respond to the letter that’s been sent to us from the past, while writing a letter of my own in the present. Not to mix my metaphors, but I believe artists are not so much influenced by tradition as they exist at a confluence, where the past meets the present, like two rivers meeting.
With your wife Adrianne Finlay being a novelist, you’re a two-writer household. I suspect that creates an interesting dynamic. Can you discuss what that is like, and how it may affect your own creativity?
My wife is always my first reader — and my best. Having another writer in the house is always beneficial for when you want to know if something makes sense or sounds right. But also because there’s a mutual understanding that we each need time to do our work, and so we make time for each other in that way. Of course, a big difference is that she deals with long narratives while I deal with shorter lyrical pieces, and so we’re often trying to accomplish much different things. For Adrianne, I think, clarity is very important — as is plot — whereas I might value strangeness or obscurity in a poem. As a poet, I also think the form is just as important as the meaning — as I said before, it is the meaning — but writers of novels I think tend to be less interested — not uninterested, just less interested — in the overt music of language. Or they want to foreground something else. To dwell too decidedly on sound and language might interfere with the story. That said, we both teach fiction and poetry, and so we’re each well enough acquainted with the other’s genre to be good readers. And so, while The Waxen Poor is, indeed, a collection of lyrical poems, I do think that my work slips in and out of narrative and dramatic modes, too. That’s something I think I pay more attention to because of Adrianne.
What projects are you working on now?
What’s been occupying a lot of my creative energies lately is my work as associate editor of the North American Review. The magazine was founded in 1815, so we’re about to celebrate our bicentennial, which is really quite remarkable. I mean, how many things in the United States get to celebrate a bicentennial? It’s exciting but humbling. At any rate, I’m directing a conference to mark the occasion. We have so many great events planned, including keynote readings by Martín Espada, Patricia Hampl, and Steven Schwartz. People can find the call for papers here.
I’m also editing a book called Walt Whitman and the North American Review, which collects the seven essays Whitman published in the NAR in the last decade of his life, along with the many reviews, essays, and articles on him and his work that appeared in the magazine’s pages. Editorial work is challenging but also deeply gratifying.
J.D. Schraffenberger is the associate editor of the North American Review and an associate professor of English at the University of Northern Iowa. He’s the author of the collection of poems Saint Joe’s Passion (Etruscan), and his other work has appeared in Best Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, Mid-American Review, Notre Dame Review, Poetry East, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He lives in Cedar Falls, Iowa, with his two daughters and his wife, the novelist Adrianne Finlay.
(Author Photo by Adrianne Finlay)
Lowered teacher evaluations of Danielson Framework require special training
In an earlier post I analyzed the “Danielson Framework for Teacher Evaluation,” which has become the adopted model in numerous states, including Illinois, and I pointed out some of its many flaws. One of the aspects of Danielson that has been troubling to teachers from the beginning is its insistence that virtually no teacher is excellent (distinguished, outstanding). When the Framework was designed in 1996 it was intended to rate first-year teachers, so it made sense that very, very few would be rated in the top category. The Framework was revised three times (2007, 2011 and 2013) in an effort to be an evaluation tool for all educators and even non-classroom professionals (like librarians and school nurses). Nevertheless, the idea that virtually no teacher is capable of achieving the top echelon (however it may be labeled in a district’s specific evaluation instrument) has clung to the Framework.
In my district, we were told of the Danielson Framework a full two years before it was implemented, and from the start we were informed that it was all but impossible to achieve an “excellent” rating, even for teachers who have consistently been rated at the top level for several evaluation cycles (pre-Danielson era). After a full year of its being used, it seems that administrators’ predictions were true (or made to be true), and almost no one (or literally no one) received an excellent rating. We were encouraged to compile a substantial portfolio of evidence or artifacts to help insure that our assessment would be more comprehensive than the previous evaluation approach. I foolishly (in retrospect) spent approximately six hours pulling together my portfolio and writing a narrative to accompany it. A portfolio, as it turned out, we never discussed and could only have been glanced at given the timing of its being retrieved and the appointed hour of my conference.
As predicted, I was deemed “proficient.” It was a nearly surreal experience to be complimented again and again only to be informed at the end that I didn’t rate as “excellent” because the Danielson Framework makes it exceptionally difficult for a teacher to receive a top rating. There were literally no weaknesses noted — well, there were comments in the “weakness” areas of the domains, but they were phrased as “continue to …” In other words, I should improve by continuing to do what I’ve been doing all along. In fairness, I should note that the evaluator had numerous teachers to evaluate, therefore observations to record, portfolios to read, summative evaluations to write — so I’m certain the pressure of deadlines figured into the process. Nevertheless, it’s the system that’s in place, and my rating stands as a reflection of my merits as a teacher and my value to the district and the profession — there’s no recourse for appeal, nor, I suppose, purpose in it.
I was feeling a lot of things when I left my evaluation conference: angry, humiliated, defeated, underappreciated, naive, deceived (to list a few). And, moreover, I had zero respect for the Danielson Framework and (to be honest) little remained for my evaluator — though it seems that from the very beginning evaluators are trained (programmed) to give “proficient” as the top mark. After a year of pop-in observations in addition to the scheduled observation, the preparation of a portfolio based on the four domains, a conference, and the delivery of my official evaluation, I literally have no idea how to be a better teacher. Apparently, according to the Framework, I’m not excellent, and entering my fourth decade in the classroom I’m clueless how to be excellent in the World According to Charlotte Danielson (who, by the way, has very little classroom experience).
If the psychological strategy at work is that by denying veteran teachers a top rating, they will strive even harder to achieve the top next time around, it’s an inherently flawed concept, especially when there are no concrete directions for doing things differently. As I said in my previous post on Danielson, it would be like teachers telling their students that they should all strive for an “A” and do “A”-quality work — even though in the end the best they can get on their report card is a “B.” Or business owners telling their salespeople to strive for through-the-roof commissions, even though no matter how many sales they make, they’re all going to get the same modest paycheck. In the classroom, students would quickly realize that the person doing slightly above average work and the person doing exceptional work are both going to get a “B” … so there’s no point in doing exceptional work. On the job, salespeople would opt for the easiest path to the same result.
Under Danielson, it will take great personal and professional integrity to resist the common-sense urge to be the teacher that one’s evaluation says one is — to resist being merely proficient if that, in practice, is the best ranking that is available.
My experience regarding the Danielson Framework is not unique in my school, and clearly it’s not unique in Illinois as a whole. Each year administrators must participate in an Administrators Academy workshop, and one workshop being offered by the Sangamon County Regional Office of Education caught my eye in particular: “Communicating with Staff Regarding Performance Assessment,” presented by Dr. Susan Baker and Anita Plautz. The workshop description says,
“My rating has always been “excellent” [sic] and now it’s “basic”. [sic] Why are you doing this to me?” When a subordinate’s performance rating declines from the previous year, how do you prepare to deliver that difficult message? How do you effectively respond to a negative reaction from a staff member when they [sic] receive a lower performance rating? This course takes proven ideas from research and weaves them into practical activities that provide administrators with the tools needed to successfully communicate with others in difficult situations. (Sangamon Schools’ News, 11.3, spring 2014, p. 11; see here to download)
Apparently, then, school administrators are giving so many reduced ratings to teachers that they could benefit from special coaching on how to deliver the bad news so that the teacher doesn’t go postal right there in their office (I was tempted). In other words, the problem isn’t an instrument and an approach that consistently undervalues and humiliates experienced staff members; the problem, rather, is rhetorical — how do you structure the message to make it as palatable as possible?
While I’m at it, I have to point out the fallacious saw of citing “research,” and in this description even “proven ideas,” which is so common in education. The situation that this workshop speaks to, with its myriad dynamics, is unique and only recently a pervasive phenomenon. Therefore, if there have been studies that attempt to replicate the situation created by the Danielson Framework, they must be recent ones and could at best suggest some preliminary findings — they certainly couldn’t prove anything. If the research is older, it must be regarding some other communication situation which the workshop presenters are using to extrapolate strategies regarding the Danielson situation, and they shouldn’t be trying to pass it off as proof. As a literature person, I’m also amused by the word “weaves” in the description as it is often a metaphor for fanciful storytelling — and the contents of the alluded to research must be fanciful indeed. (By the way, I don’t mean to imply that Dr. Baker and Ms. Plautz are trying to deliberately mislead — they no doubt intend to offer a valuable experience to their participants.)
What is more, a lowered evaluation is not just a matter of hurting one’s pride. With recent changes in tenure and seniority laws in Illinois (and likely other states), evaluations could be manipulated to supersede seniority and remove more experienced teachers in favor of less experienced ones — which is why speaking out carries a certain amount of professional risk even for seasoned teachers.
My belief is that the Danielson Framework and the way that it’s being used are part of a calculated effort to cast teachers as expendable cogs in a broken wheel. Education reform is a billions-of-dollars-a-year industry — between textbook publishers, software and hardware developers, testing companies, and high-priced consultants (like Charlotte Danielson) — and how can cash-strapped states justify spending all those tax dollars on reform products if teachers are doing a damn fine job in the first place? It would make no sense.
It would make no sense.
RT Tell @t_morrissey to keep going. “Scent of Darkness” hits 500 reads
My thanks to the editors at Black Denim Lit for promoting me and my offbeat literary fiction. It’s an honor to be part of BDL’s ambitious publishing agenda.
I just wanted to mention regarding Scent of Darkness. Ted Morrissey has been writing a series of interconnected stories, which he thinks of as “the village stories,” that he plans to tie together in some sort of experimental novel. So far stories that have been published are:
- “Crowsong for the Stricken” (Noctua Review),
- “Primitive Scent” (Tulane Review),
- “Beside Running Waters” (Constellations Lit), and
- “Scent of Darkness” (Black Denim Lit).
I guess we’re prejudiced, since that last one has been read more than 500 times in the first month of its availability, so we think Ted should keep going.
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