SR Pod/Vod Series: Poet Suzanne Marie Hopcroft

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Each Tuesday we feature audio or video of an SR Contributor reading their work. Today we’re proud to feature a podcast by Suzanne Marie Hopcroft.


Suzanne HopcroftSuzanne Marie Hopcroft’s poetry is forthcoming or has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Drunken Boat, The Carolina Quarterly, The Southern Humanities Review, and Valparaiso Poetry Review.  Suzanne is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Yale University and will begin her MFA in poetry at The University of California, Irvine in the fall.

 

To learn more about Suzanne, you can visit her website.

You can read along with her poetry in Issue 9 of Superstition Review.

To subscribe to our iTunes U channel, go to http://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/superstition-review-online/id552593273

Guest Blog Post, Matthew Gavin Frank: Memories of Arizona as Filtered Through Some Theories on the Sonoran Hot Dog

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Matthew FrankI’ve been thinking about spice.  As vine, as flower.  As catastrophe in the mouth.  As some kind of biological confusion.  The duping of the blood, the forcing of it to the tops of us.  The feeling faint, the feeling amorous.  The disintegration of the tongue, even though it’s all we can do to keep from kissing anything that moves.  Even the Kokopelli tablecloth in our dining room.  The window’s open.  It’s unseasonably warm.  I had too much red chile sauce on my Sonoran Hot Dog this morning.

*

This is Arizona and the saguaros are wilting; Arizona, where the hot dog shuns the boiling, demands the comal.  In this: 30 horrible jokes about how it’s a dry heat.

*

Here, in the Sonoran Hot Dog, everything assimilates: cotija cheese to onion, red chile to mayonnaise, tomatillo to tomato. This is what we tell ourselves.

*

In Hermosillo, the Yaqui Indians dance dances named after the coyote.  In Phoenix, we allow even our hot dogs to hurt us.

*

There’s a hunchbacked flute player on my tablecloth, playing to my fertility.  I wonder what this has to do with my longing for ketchup and mustard.

*

I’m keeping from kissing the tablecloth.  From taking it into my mouth.  Tablecloth as spice blotter, as shroud.  As if, post-spice, the tongue is grieving.  Sonoran hot dog as a blurring of borders.  As both brain and heart.  As American as manzana pie.   As the pig graffiti’d in chili-cheese.  I will say nothing of the encased, or defaced.  It’s too hot to speak about the heat.

*

In Hermosillo, you can top your Sonoran Hot Dog with pineapple, with avocado, with chorizo, with poblano crema.  In Arizona, you can perfume your neck with saguaro flower essence, in order to, according to Sonoran Alchemy (Let the Essence of the Desolate Uncover the Essence of You ™), “balance your masculine and feminine attributes… help in working through power struggles with parental or authority figures… and, like a true father, help us see how we can help ourselves,” while you eat your Sonoran Hot Dog.

*

I help myself to too much red chile.  You blow hot air over my nape.  If you blow hot air over my nape, why do I shiver?

*

The Sonoran Hot Dog as all confusions of the body.

*

The tongue as false father, the Sonoran Hot Dog as sexually confused.  The saguaro is braced to praise or punish, hands on its hips, hands in the air.  It calls penis, penis, penis through the window.  I’m not sure if this is ridicule, or advice.

*

My mouth hurts.  I want to kiss.  It’s hot, and I’m in the Sonoran, and there are no yellow leaves here, nothing to remind me of ketchup, mustard, any less spicy sauce.  If there were yellow leaves here, every yellow leaf but three would have fallen from the maple in the backyard.  This big-ass eyelet of yellow on the lawn, the tree itself the stick jammed into the iris—precisely the shit they warned us about at recess all those years ago, back when I lived in the Midwest.  Ronald Jarrell lost an eye that year.  Lucio Aguilar too.  Mr. Basofin, the principal, that winter banned snowball fighting.  We all stood around, whistling, holding our snow.  Hot dogs holding their mysteries in the casing, the chile confusing the mouth—mystery eats mystery.  I can’t make sense of these things.  Can’t tell how blindness informs assimilation.  Can’t tell what depth perception has to do with the Sonoran Hot Dog—the eating of it from the top down.  And: Open windows, yellow leaves, a little rain, spice?  The maple is a cactus.  The snow, red dust.  And lawn?!  If it rains here, we have to double up on the most surprised of our vowels.  The hot dog is meant to be eaten horizontally, you tell me, but I’m not sure how you know this.  But we know this: When it rains here, we call it monsoon. 

 *

The heat outside as authority figure, as sheriff.  The heat in my mouth as my true father.  Outside, the brush dances in the wind, and some wild canine tears the throat of the javelina.  Moaning pigs communing with other moaning pigs.  Each moving closer to the bun.

*

The brush as lit from the inside.  The lovely creosote as creosote burning.

*

The Sonoran Hot Dog as stereotype made dangerous.  As the sort of communion that makes us scream before accepting…

*

Hydrochlorofluorocarbons dripping from the walls like malarial perspiration, we eat our dressed-up hot dogs in the shuddering, weakening A/C.  The spice beats in our temples like a machine gun.

*

In spice, a confusion of identity.  How, when the sun burns us, we feel cold.

*

Here, in this kind of heat—no trees—even the hot dog needs a costume.

*

The hot dog as inappropriate chills, as trying so hard to contain its violence.  As a racist sheriff in need of window-dressing.  As a demand for papers.  As tortured criminal, red chile sauce as his monster mask.

*

In the summer of 2005, Phoenix decided to ice its 120-degree cake with a pair of simultaneously-operating serial killers: The Baseline Killer (or Baseline Rapist, so named for his prowling of Baseline Road, who escalated his criminal activity from robbing at gunpoint a Little Caesar’s Pizzeria to murder, and who disguised himself in a Frankenstein mask, or as a homeless man, and raped his targets before shooting them in the head) and the Serial Sniper (or Serial Shooter—who later turned out to be two men, or shooters—who began blowing away dogs and horses before going randomly after human pedestrians, especially those on bicycles, a vehicle which, at the time, served as my primary mode of transportation to and from work at Arizona State University).  My wife would wring her hands until I came home from talking with other nerds in a cinderblock classroom about the poetics of space.  The entire city was gripped in this fist of fear, this cult of anxiety about setting foot outdoors into the be-pricked and be-bulletted heatwave, the communion with Son of Sam a pale conferva indeed.

*

The spice shooting the hot dogs from our mouths.  This landscape of sand as a neat trick.  Indeed.

*

Now, I can’t tell if it’s the spice that invades the hot dog, or the hot dog that invades the spice.  Can’t tell creosote from algae, the plant from the meat.

*

Now, I can’t tell if it’s the spice that’s the flower/vine, or the hot dog.  Which has the longer stem.  In what part of us, it is planted.

*

Here, the kudzu uses other plants as its grow-base in order to invest the least amount of energy in reaching the sunlight.  Here, the kudzu is known as an “invasive exotic.”

*

Here, for the light, the plants mask themselves in other plants.  Here, too much light yields the burning, and the burning begins with the smoke.

*

Mascara means “mask,” or, literally, “more face.”  During early carnivals, behind a mask, one could be who one wanted, do anything one wanted (from illicit sexual escapades to murder), and would not be held liable.  In the mask, is the pardon.

*

The Sonoron Hot Dog is not liable for its spice.

*

Disguise means “off-style.”  Costume means “custom.”  These are meant to be opposites.  Linguistically-speaking, we mask our costumes in disguises.

*

Something outside of our window is burning.  On your breath, something so much more than the hot dog.  You’re hot, and confused, so you pull the blanket around you.   In this is confused theory, and a spicy mouth craves the sort of water that will not cool it down.

*

The bun as more efficient cooling tool.  Your breath as inadequate to uprooting the saguaro.

*

Camouflage means “puff of smoke” or “to blow smoke in someone’s face.”  No one knows where Sonora comes from.  Its origins are merely theoretical.  Some feel it’s the Yaqui pronunciation of señora (in response to an image of Nuestra Señora de las Angustias, or Our Lady of Anguish).  Others feel it’s a Spanish mispronunciation of the Yaqui term sonot, or natural water well.  Like Water to Anguish, each theory is inadequate to the other.

*

In home, in home, in home is ownership.  In ownership, an assertion of dominance.  Dominance sweet dominance.

*

So, we dig beneath the toppings to find a sense of home, the home being closest to the bread.  The bread as tablecloth as spice blotter as the soaking of one thing into another thing.  The awful stain into the purity of the napkin.  This is also what we tell ourselves.  The home as the familiar hot dog, the familiar as the familial, the home as the thing we, be-masked, stole for ourselves.  Words like destiny and birthright confused as whether to be the blotter or the blotted, the costumes, or the disguises.

*

So, we praise, we punish, we rise like the vines:

At the Phoenix Wells Fargo, I fill out a deposit slip for $165.00.   A young mother in a green neoprene kerchief (Dragonfly Salon is just around the corner) walks up the six steps from Home Mortgage into the bank lobby.  She’s out of sight of the tellers, and the personal bankers, as usual, are away from their desks.  She drags her daughter, seven-years-old at the most, by the sleeve of the girl’s pink windbreaker.  The girl’s hood is up.  It’s 114-degrees outside and the little girl’s hood is up.  Tendrils of blonde hair snake from beneath it.  By the way they hold their mouths, I can tell they’ve had an argument—the little girl acting up in front of the loan officer.  A pink mylar foil balloon—a gecko—is tied to the girl’s right wrist with a length of scrolled green ribbon.  The mother carries an obese white purse, stops at the landing.  The tellers can’t see her.  I sign my deposit slip and stand where I am.  The mother opens her purse and removes a wooden pepper mill as long as my forearm.  The little girl knows, frowns.  She lifts her chin, sticks out her tongue.  The mother raises the bottom of the pepper mill to the girl’s mouth, completes eight twists and the eight twists of ground pepper collect into a pile on the girl’s tongue.  The girl closes her mouth, tightens her lips.  Is silent.  The deposit slip is getting wet in my palm.  The ink is beginning to run.  Mother and daughter walk to an open teller window, and the mother chats to the teller—a young man in a white shirt, red tie—about the heat.  They laugh.  The daughter is too short to see the teller.  The teller sees the mother standing next to the gecko.  The daughter’s face becomes more and more red.  Her eyes close.  She says nothing.  Makes no sound.  No cough or sneeze.  Not a whimper.  Her feet begin to dance on the tile as if she has to go to the bathroom.  The sleeves of her windbreaker swish so quietly against the torso, as if shushing all of us.  The gecko begins to shake.  After four minutes, the mother yanks the daughter, still tight-lipped, by the arm.  I imagine the popping sound of her shoulder dislocating, a half-dollar of bone jumping from the pink collar.  The balloon failing.  The pain and its wonderful release.  The spitting of the pepper.  The scream.  They open the door to the sidewalk.  Silent.  The weather storms inside.  Defeats the A/C.  They turn the corner.  I watch a lone Fry’s shopping cart push itself up the street.  I’ve never been good at these things.  At divining the rubric necessary to decide what they are.  I have trouble distinguishing the cacti from the redwoods.  I’ve been lying again.  I don’t live in Arizona anymore.  Now, I live in Michigan.  At my neck, I can’t tell if that’s your breath, or the desert, or the snow.

 

 

 

Guest Blog Post, Lynda Majarian: Writing in Solitary Confinement

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Lynda MajarianAlmost every writer I know is a procrastinator. I certainly am. That is, I was, until I moved to Shanghai, China, last fall to teach, and found myself with six classes and 160 students crammed into two days of classes, and five days a week with nothing to do. I teach oral and written English to graduate students at one of the country’s leading universities, yet homework in my course is discouraged by the administration, so unless there are papers due—and that’s not often—I have roughly fourteen waking hours a day to pass alone. I’ve explored the neighborhood, the campus, the local shopping centers, and all the city’s major museums. Most of the shrines are merely tourist traps, but I’ve checked many of those out, too. As for friends—there aren’t any. So how did I end up here?

Four years ago, I taught in a remote city in northern China and shared an office and too many good times to count with other foreign teachers, many of whom remain good friends. In Shanghai, although it’s a bigger and more international city, the foreign faculty who share my apartment building keep to themselves. The few who speak English are busy with their young Chinese girlfriends and side jobs. We had a getting-to-know-you meeting in the fall, and one dinner at a Brazilian barbeque restaurant in the New Pudong District, but as the semester wore on there were fewer, and then no opportunities to socialize. My only regular contact is the British professor who teaches across the hall from me. He lives off-campus with his Chinese wife and child, and we chat and complain to each other for about five minutes on the two mornings a week we teach.

At my apartment, the one English-speaking channel on television delivers propaganda disguised as news, so I’ve unplugged my TV. Most outside news sources commonly available via internet in other places have been cut off by the Chinese government. I didn’t even know there was an Avian flu outbreak in Shanghai until my parents told me in their weekly phone calls. And as far as the local authorities are concerned, those thousands of dead diseased pigs floating in the Huangpu River haven’t damaged the local water supply one bit.

In short, I live in a vacuum, a world insulated from the West, fearful and often disdainful of Westerners, and very lonely. Although I enjoy my students, it would be unprofessional to socialize with them. Using the few Chinese phrases I know, nodding, and smiling, I have friendly relationships with a few shopkeepers; others, and even older people walking down the street, scowl at me in disapproval. So I pass the time taking walks, reading, listening to my ipod, watching American television shows I download onto my laptop, and, yes, writing. I’ve finally begun my memoir, the one I’ve been meaning to start forever, and that blank computer screen that used to be my nemesis is now my best friend. I find that writing about my solo experiences, observations of people, loneliness, and occasional despair is not only cathartic, but serves as a sort of friend, someone with whom to share my deepest feelings—ironically, many that I wouldn’t share with other people, but which may be open to anyone who cares to read the piece if it is ever published. I’ve even applied for a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship to help to finance me in finishing my memoir-in-progress.

So far, I’ve completed fifty pages. To be honest, the writing flowed more easily during fall semester. There were those occasional faculty outings to write about, my solo excursions, and my students’ reactions to different contemporary topics I gave them to discuss during oral English lessons. I’ve woven in my earlier experiences in Shenyang, China, and there still is much to say about that (mostly good, along with one dreadful experience I won’t go into here). I’ve written about spending Thanksgiving as a normal working day, and strolling through the lovely French Concession area of the city alone and miserable on Christmas day.

Over time, however, I’ve become less and less productive. Early in the spring semester, depression settled in to stay. This illness isn’t entirely new to me—I’ve experienced major bouts of depression periodically throughout my life—but the disease breeds in isolation, when there is nothing to do but ruminate on one’s own dark thoughts. I’ve grown to understand why human rights advocates believe that putting prisoners in solitary confinement is a form of psychological torture, because I could hardly be more isolated than I am unless I were in a jail cell. Still,  I can put on a bright face for my students, and give a friendly wave to a colleague when we pass on the street, or exchange a brief greeting with him (I’m the only female American teacher here), and send coherent responses to the administrative staff when they contact me about holidays or exam dates.

One thing I know for sure:  I will never return to China, and probably never teach abroad again. The stakes are too high—I don’t know if I’ll find amiable cohorts, as I did in Shenyang, or end up totally alone again. And my father, who is frail and in poor health, needs me to come home and help care for him. I miss my adorable five-year-old niece immensely, even though we Skype every Sunday night. I fear I am missing the best months of her life, and wasting much of what’s left of my own middle-age. I will finish my memoir, I know. It just might take me longer than I thought it would.

Guest Blog Post, Lynn Levin: Beloved, open your door!

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Lynn LevinAt one time or another, you may have had the unpleasant situation of being shut out of your sweetheart’s apartment or bedroom. You might even find your way blocked to a less intimate place, such as a business meeting, a maxed-out class, a bar after closing time. There’s a poem for that: the paraclausithyron.

A paraclausithyron is a motif in poetry that expresses a lover’s lament before the beloved’s closed door. I learned about this arcane delight from a couple of my students who had studied a good deal of Latin. One day in creative writing class, they started talking about this word, which is hard to pronounce at first, then rolls off the tongue in a couple of dactyls after you get the hang of it. Pára-claw-sí-thi-ron. The i’s are pronounced as short i’s as in the word “it.”  I’m not sure what triggered the discussion: a stuck or squeaky door, an image of one character trying to gain entry to a house? Those students knew of the motif because some of the best-known paraclausithyra come from the Latin poets.

In a paraclausithyron, the lover, often speaking at night, pleads entry. His tone may be seductive, cajoling, angry, comic, rowdy, drunken, desperate, or a combination of any of those things. Ovid, in The Art of Love (Book One: VI), has his speaker cry out to a gatekeeper in the dark of night and begs him to open the gate just enough to let him slip in to visit his lady. Horace, on the other hand, takes a rather threatening approach in his paraclausithyron “To Lycia” (Odes, Book Three: X). Instead of sweet-talking Lycia into opening her door, Horace first tells her that she could do a lot worse than to have him as a lover. Then he insults her virtue, calls her cold-hearted, and warns her—while standing in her garden on a freezing night—that there’s a limit to his patience.

Edgar Allen Poe offers a haunted paraclausithyron in “The Raven.” As the speaker sits in his study on a midnight dreary, he hears a tapping:

As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.

“’Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door –

Only this and nothing more.”

***

“’Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door; –

Some late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door; –

This it is and nothing more.”

As with many paraclausithyra, the poem takes place at night, and the speaker is a bereft lover. But who is that knocking on the door? Not the lover but the raven appearing as the ghost of the speaker’s lost Lenore.

I find that the paraclausithyron makes an extremely effective poetry prompt. I include it in Poems for the Writing: Prompts for Poets (Texture Press, 2013) along with a selection of paraclausithyra written by my students, plus one by me and one by Emily Dickinson.

I encourage you to write you own lament before a shut door. Your paraclausithyron may be spooky, ardent, funny, apologetic, hopeless, or optimistic. Your speaker may even succeed in gaining entry.

 

SR Pod/Vod Series: Poet Claire McQuerry

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Each Tuesday we feature audio or video of an SR Contributor reading their work. Today we’re proud to feature a podcast by Claire McQuerry.

Claire McQuerryClaire McQuerry is a Creative Writing Fellow at the University of Missouri and the Contest Editor for The Missouri Review. Her poetry collection, Lacemakers, won the Crab Orchard Series First Book Prize, and her poems and essays have appeared in Mid-American Review, Creative Nonfiction, American Literary Review, and other journals.

You can read along with her poems in issue 2 of Superstition Review.

To subscribe to our iTunes U channel, go to http://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/superstition-review-online/id552593273

Guest Blog Post, Lori Jakiela: A Portrait of a Young Artist in Suburbia

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Lori Jakiela

A Portrait of A Young Artist in Suburbia

My daughter Phelan wears a frog hat to drum lessons. The hat has felt eyes that google on top of her head. It has legs for ear flaps, a tongue for a visor, and chin straps that look like a lilypad and lotus.

“Stylin’,” her teacher Mike says, “a real drummer,” and pats Phelan right between her amphibian eyes.

Mike looks like Billie Joe Armstrong from Green Day — black spiked hair, smudged eyeliner, mellow rock swagger. He’s kind and patient and says cool with two syllables a lot.

Phelan is 8. She is blonde haired and green eyed and the nicest person I know. She also questions a lot of things.

Last year at the school talent show, she did a tough-guy drum solo, Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger.” She wore a pink skirt and sequined top. Her glittered shoes lit up like an emergency whenever she took a step.

My daughter confuses people, which confuses her, which worries me.

“I like girl things and boy things,” she tells me, like she’s confessing something, like she wants me to give her some penance to do.

“You’re perfect,” I say. “Always be yourself.”

“Always be yourself,” she repeats to her older brother when he’s embarrassed by her abundant joy and questionable fashion sense.

My son is 12. It’s a tough age made worse because he worries too much about what other people think. When he was very young, around four, he’d do stand-up routines in our basement. He had a catchphrase – “And I threw up… two times” – that could make adults howl.

Then something happened. I don’t know what. A year passed, maybe two. He stopped telling jokes. He stayed away from microphones. At the playground, he’d stand like an accountant, hands in pockets, and watch the other kids play before he’d join in.

“Don’t smile too much. Stand back. Be cool,” he tells his sister now, his advice on being popular.

“I’m my own person,” she says, and whacks him with a drum stick.

It’s not good for my daughter to whack her brother with a drum stick. She gets in trouble for this. Still, I hope she’ll find some way to go on holding the world off. I hope my son will find his way back.

In my kids’ school, there are anti-bullying signs everywhere. The signs have inspirational messages. “Everyone is Special.” “You’re Perfect the Way You Are.” “Difference is Beautiful.” “Nothing is Better Than Being Yourself.”

But being yourself costs, especially when you’re 8 like my daughter, especially when mean girls are rising up, all preen and snicker, hips jutted out.

People say kids are naturally mean, but I think meanness is a learned thing.

Those anti-bullying signs are earnest. My kids’ school is wonderful. We live in the suburbs and our school district is one of the best around. But in our district there are subdivisions with regal names, pre-fab houses with coordinated siding and matching mailboxes.  All the homes look the same, eggs in a carton. There’s a push, I think, for all the people to be the same, too – paperweights in their own little boxes, scissors with blunted tips.

“We’re very particular about who we let move in here,” one woman from a nearby subdivision said recently.

I don’t know who she meant by “we” or who exactly fit her criteria.  Or maybe I do know and it’s too awful to think about.

Difference is scary. If it can be gated off, if it can be shrunken down into something manageable, a petri dish, life can seem easier to navigate.

This doesn’t excuse anything.

“Do you know your enemy?” Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong wants to know.

My family lives in the house I grew up in, close to the cluster of subdivisions this woman was talking about. Our house has been here for 40 years, but still some days I feel like an outsider, even though most of our neighbors are wonderful, the kind of people who help in an emergency. They’re the kind of people who bring casseroles and who, if they see your trash can rolling down the street, will stop, pick it up, and deliver it back where it belongs.

But my husband and I are writers, which makes us seem a little odd. We don’t have expensive furniture. We do have a lot of books. We have a lot of paintings and music, too. We’re what my mother would have called “arty.” She would not have meant this as a compliment. My son constantly reminds us we live in a house and not an art gallery.

“Can’t we please be normal?” he says.

“Do you collect books?” a neighbor asks.

“I know why you have so many books,” one of my daughter’s friends says. “So people will think you don’t watch TV.”

“Books, huh?” one of my son’s friends says.

Yes, I say. That’s right.

“Be yourself,” I tell my daughter, even though most days I’m a hypocrite, terrified of being found out.

About writing, the great Harry Crews once said, “World don’t want you to do that. World wants you to go to the zoo and eat cotton candy, preferably seven days a week.”

I want my children to be their own beautiful selves. I also want the world to go easy on them. I’m not sure it’s possible to have both.

If meanness is learned, other things are learned, too. Contradiction, for instance.

When I was growing up, subdivision wasn’t a word people used. We had our street, neighborhood, block.

I think about that word now, subdivision, the root of it. The division of a larger division. The act of dividing again and again.

“Maybe I should try cheering,” my daughter says when she worries about fitting in. “Maybe I should get an American Girl doll.”

But I’m thankful she hasn’t followed up on any of that.  She sings and plays softball and every Thursday, she straps on her frog hat and does her drum lessons with Mike. Right now they’re working from a book called The Rock and Roll Bible.

“It’s a foundation,” Mike tells Phelan. “Once you learn your system, you’re solid. You can do anything.”

They count together, one-e-and-a-two-e-and-a, and my pretty blonde daughter bangs out a beat like Charlie Watts. On her head, the frog eyes bob. When she plays, she’s happy, but serious, too. She wants to get this right.

The thing about frogs is they’re as comfortable on land as in water. Lotuses are rooted and floating all at once.

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time.” F. Scott Fitzgerald said that.

“Mom, you worry too much. We’re fine,” my son says.

I watch my daughter drum, her whole body moving, connected, one undivided beautiful self, and for this moment believe it.

Guest Blog Post, Bethany Reid: The Writing Assignment

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“Work on one thing until finished.” –Henry Miller

“Try not to shoot off in every direction like fireworks.” –a Fortune Cookie’s advice

Bethany ReidBesides being a poet, a wannabe novelist, and mother of three teenaged daughters, I also teach English, full-time, at a community college. I do committee work. I advise. I’m busy. I like to consider myself the queen of getting-things-done. Many of my students, on the other hand, haven’t figured out how to find time to do the reading and studying  that they need to do in order to be successful in my writing classes. So this quarter, I decided to try a social experiment.

It helps that we’re reading a book of essays, Real Questions, that focuses on contemporary issues like what we eat and what media we consume and how we conduct our relationships. While reflecting on such things, it seemed plausible to imagine making some real changes in our own lives. What if we each changed one thing, and wrote about it? I worried that it sounded a little hare-brained, as if I were practicing to become a life-coach. The students loved it. Only a handful of them wanted to change something to do with writing or studying, but they all wanted to change something.

I cooked up a multi-part assignment in which students  1) write a blog-like proposal about something they would like to change, something they can actually DO, daily, for the next forty days of the term; 2) write a persuasive paper about why such a change is desirable; 3) tweet or just write a short reflection which they share with the class daily about the change for those forty days; and then 4) write a follow-up, reflective essay about how their experiment worked out.

In the proposing stage, goals tended toward “Lose 30 pounds,” or “Become a nurse,” or “Get an A in this class.”  One man wanted to quit smoking, which I applaud, and another wanted to “be happier,” which I wouldn’t mind doing as well. But even quitting smoking is not quite in the category of “doable,” at least not in the sense that after fifteen minutes one could declare success.

You can write a novel, you can lose 30 pounds, you can quit smoking. But you can’t really do those things right now, today. The first part of this social experiment, it turns out, has been a critical thinking step of figuring out how to narrow one’s focus, how to break things down into parts so small that they’re not merely doable, but scarcely avoidable.  I told them to think of things they can do in a single fifteen-minute increment.

When I thought seriously about what I could do, right now, and repeat for 40 days, I decided that the one change I craved was getting through my interminable novel rewrite.

WritingI’ve written this on a list of goals before, and I immediately began to line up my excuses for why it was impossible. This time, however, a voice intervened, a voice I knew—it was the voice I had been inflicting on my students for two full weeks. You can’t rewrite your novel today, but you can write on the novel. So I decided on writing, at my desk—like a smoke break without the cigarettes.

I already write every morning and blog about it, but writing in the afternoon—evening as a last resort—would double my time with the pen. It could make a difference in my rate of progress.

For her first day’s reflection, one student lamented that because the baby kept her up late the previous night, she didn’t get up early and didn’t do the two hours of work on her home business that she had intended. She couldn’t even start, she explained, because her desk was a mess and the thought of organizing it overwhelmed her, and then the baby woke up, and then it was time to plunge into the day. And now here she was, the day half-done, opportunity missed.

And there was that voice again. Wiser than my voice. Don’t give up. Spend five minutes tonight before bed clearing off your desk. Take out one project and lay it out. Just one! (Maybe you’ll actually do something on it! Maybe one step will turn into more!) Check today off your list. Done. Don’t excuse, negotiate, I told her.

I shared a quote that helped me get through my doctoral dissertation when my daughters were small, something the sculptor Barbara Hepworth—mother of four children including triplets—once said:

“I loved the family and everything to do with them….We lived a life of work and the children were brought up in it, in the middle of the dust and the dirt and the paint and everything….I found one had to do some work every day, even at midnight, because either you’re a professional or you’re not.”

How did my own plan work out? The first day it was 5:30 before I remembered. I needed to go home. Then my 13-year-old daughter wanted to go out for coffee and do homework. I, too, had homework, essays to read, a short story to reread in preparation for the next day.

But I couldn’t escape the voice. It’s not midnight yet, the voice said. What would I tell my students? Fifteen minutes? How can you begrudge yourself 15 minutes?

So I ordered my decaf latte and my daughter ordered her Frappuccino and we found a table. I set up my laptop. I went to www.e.ggtimer.com and set it for 15 minutes. I pulled out my manuscript and I started reading and making notes. I circled an image and I brainstormed and I suddenly saw something I hadn’t seen before. I worked for 25 minutes.

I can’t wait to tell my students.