Suffering CATS.  If I ever say I’m going to do this again – at least, this way – shoot me.  Thousands of little bits of paper.  ARG!!  But we have come up with the three winners: (cue Kermit: YAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYY!!!)

So the first winner is:

Okay, now Andy – let’s get that right -

But you don’t know who number 4 is, do you? So how about a name? Congratulations Melissa Laing!!

Second winner:

Okay.  You can’t even see the number.  But it’s a 5.

Congratulations Dawn!!

Third winner:

 And who is this?  Are you ready Donna?  This presentation of your number is TAILOR MADE FOR YOU by Cam himself.

And there we have it.  Interesting enough, the odds actually were increased by the number of points.  So thank you all for playing along with me, and giving this book a chance.  I can’t tell you how grateful I am too you all.  For those whose numbers still languish in the bowl – there will be other times and other things.  But you are beloved in this household, and I want to hug every one of you.

LOVES!!

——–=0=——-

This isn’t, like, HUGE news. I mean, not for anybody but me. But the formatting has been finished for the Breaking Rank ebub – the format accepted by Barnes and Noble and the iTunes store.  (I am feeling my coding strength.)  The book isn’t in the latter store yet because I still have to add their little special HTML touches, but it’s hanging out at Barnes and Noble, just waiting to be sucked up and sent at the speed of light to anybody’s Nook.  Same tiny price, as we care more about being read than we care about paying for food.

Now, here’s the real news – and I will be SO sad if nobody takes me up on this: three hardback copies of Breaking Rank are up for grabs. Let me remind you that hardbacks of this book are on the endangered species list.  Worse, actually.  Their numbers are down to double digits in the whole world. So if you would like one of these, enter. It will even be signed.

In the spirit of internet giveaways, you can sweeten your chances in the now traditional ways:

1. Leave a comment on this blog – not mine, but the workshop blog.  You get an extra chance if it’s an interesting comment.

2. You get an extra entry if you do any or all of these things (one entry for each thing) and then come back here to report it in a comment:

A. Tweet about the giveaway (and thus, about the book).

B. Post about it on Facebook – especially if you have 50,000 reading friends.  You can simply share the link to this thing you’re reading right here if you like.

C. Reblog this entry.

D. Do a review for Amazon or Barnes and Noble.  Or write one for GoodReads or Shelfari – wherever you share a reading community. Put the comment in the link.  And yes, it has to be an honest review.  You do not lose points for hating the book. (oh, how I wish you could –)

3. You get five extra entries ( you need to enter them as comments) if you have proof that you have bought this e-book.

4. You get EIGHT extra entries if one of your friends has proof of buying this ebook after reading your tweet, your facebook bit, or your reblog or simply because you have brow beaten them into it.  Have them comment here and mention YOUR NAME as the brilliant person who turned you on to this thing. So if YOU don’t read e-books, make your friends buy them and get the credit!

There.  I’m proud of myself.  Totally mainstream.  Not that I, in my eternal self-doubt, expect more than three people to show up here – but hey!  Hope blooms eternal –

Good luck, my dears!  I’ll have to get your mailing address when you win, so make sure your contact info is active.

I will announce the winners on March 24th, 2012.  So waste no time!  Oh, I hope you do this -

I don’t even know how to start this.  When I was little, we lived in L.A.  Everything was within walking distance.  The school, for instance.  Two blocks away – long sides.  An uncomplicated walk, it was not uphill and it never did involve snow—just sometimes torrential rains and huge, convulsing knots of drowning earthworms.

In the beginning, my mom walked to school with me.  By “in the beginning” I don’t know if I mean my whole kindergarten year, or just the first time or two; my mom was an independent woman and she expected me to be an independent woman, too.  Of course, I was only five years old at the time—but, hey.

The thing I am remembering is the first time I took that walk by myself.  I imagine mom crossed the first street with me. Put my little feet on that first long sidewalk, turned my face schoolward and said, “See ya!!”  I don’t remember how far I got.  About a block, maybe.  Or half a block.  But at one point, I succumbed to terror and sentiment, the great indefinable size of the world and my own solitary smallness.  I stopped, burst into tears, spun on my heel and began to run back the way I’d come.  Ended up with my face buried in the dress of a total stranger, a girl maybe fourth grade or fifth.  And there I adheared..

I still don’t know who she was, but I love her.  She calmed me down, took my hand and walked me the rest of the way to school.  What a woman she was.

I am remembering this, I think, because last night I did a thing very much  like walking to school alone for the first time: I published my own book.  Just me as publisher, I released my new book to the world through Amazon’s Kindle shop.  And I was just as terrified doing that as I was–frozen in the middle of a sidewalk in LA a hundred years ago.

I’ve been published lots before.  By companies.  Companies with money and cover artists and editors all working on the book and validating it and pruning it along the way.  I had to believe, even in my fits of artistic-minded collapse of self-confidence, that the book was worth taking up room on the planet—because they were willing to put money behind it.  And they wouldn’t have done that out of any sense of altruism.

But this time, it’s just me.

And I am terrified.

What if the books stinks?  How will I know till it’s too late?  And if the book is good, how will anybody even know it’s out there?  THIS IS SCARY.

And I miss Rosemary.  Do you hear me girl?  I MISS YOU.

My first editor was a wonderful, very proper English gentleman, George Bickersraff.  He told me that in England, the philosophy of publishers had little to do with story editing.  Copy editing, yes—grammar, spelling, punctuation—that kind of thing.  But publishers there believed (at least, they did then) that the story belonged to the author—and they did not prune.  For the good or the bad, the author was in charge of her own content.  Reading Rowling, I suspect that this is still the way things go there.

But I have owed so much to the wisdom of George and Tonya and my Rosemary; hanging myself out there like this is—difficult.

I have stopped in the sidewalk several times in the last year.  But there have always been solid angels behind me to catch me when I spin to run.  Some of them simply love me into turning around.  Rachel, my kids, Melissa Proffitt, Guy—and so many others.  Some actually took me by the hand and walked me the rest of the way, like Laura and Tracey, without whom I would have left this manuscript and my confidence to languish in gray limbo.  And without whom I would never have had the courage to attempt to unravel the very arcane path to this Kindle thing.  They are magicians.

And Chaz—who held my hand last night.  Well, not really,  She sat in my chair and filled in all the blanks at Amazon while I stood behind her, afraid to watch.

It’s such a weird thing—being driven to tell stories, and then having the utter chutzpah to expect that anybody on the planet might—or even should be expected to read the things.

But there you are.  And so I make the announcement—formally, with hope and trepidation:

Kristen D. Randle

Award winning author

Holder of the California Young Readers’ Medal

has just published her new book:

The Gardener

available here and Kindle-ready.

Please come.  Please read.  I hope you enjoy it.

Gahhh!!!  My hands are just shaking.

A danged lovely read.

Written by Joni Newman, guest essayist ~

A few years ago as an undergrad I took a literature class that very nearly sucked all the life out of me.  The class included a plethora of post-modern literature.  It meant a semester with authors like Cormac McCarthy and Toni Morrison – authors that other people (re: not me) found genius because of their innovative writing techniques and mystical storytelling.  It also included spending a huge amount of time with a professor who, while certainly very qualified in her field, drove me absolutely batty with her elitist views on literature.  The books that I was even tempted to enjoy were so destroyed by class discussion that I started a countdown to the end of class.

Now, for you to appreciate any of this, you must understand that my favorite thing in the entire world to do is to talk about what I’m reading.  As a student I was an overactive participant in every class discussion (including this professor’s.)  As a teacher in my own class, my primary method of inspiring life-long reading in my students revolves around discussion.  I still believe that talking about books is a fun and productive way for people to enter into the world conversation.  For a teacher to out-discuss a book to me takes a huge amount of work.  Somehow, by her focussing more on commentaries on the book rather than the book itself, I managed to leave her class every day with the mad desire to never touch another book again.

But then, at the end of the semester, we were assigned the book Mr. Pip by Lloyd Jones.  It was one of those “kindred spirit” reads that so resonated with me that I simply could not bring myself to write what I had been writing all term to please my professor.  Before, I had played the game and written exactly what I knew she would like.  It was the kind of high brow writing I could do well, but didn’t enjoy.  This time, this one last time, I wanted to write for myself just as I had read for myself.  So I presented a plan to my professor.  I reminded her that I had done spectacularly on all her other assignments and suggested that perhaps I could try a different style this time?  Specifically a personal essay instead?  My professor nodded, said that would be a fine idea, and I tripped off home to write.

I wrote about how the story of Mr. Pip had resonated so closely with my dearest reading experiences.  Those times when you read a book that takes you away to the point where, upon returning “home”, you feel as though you’ve left it and aren’t quite sure what to do with yourself.  I wrote particularly of my time with Anne of Green Gables, the dearest and most personal of my reading experiences.  I wrote about how, like the main character in Pip who had grown obsessed with Great Expectations, I felt closer to Anne than nearly any “real” person.  The resulting essay was a fairly sentimental tribute, perhaps, but I meant it.  Throughout my college experience I had enjoyed analyzing the symbolic and historical significance of great works of fiction very much, but this time I wanted to honor it.

Knowing that my professor was often rather forgetful and was likely to need some reminding that she had, in fact, approved my experiment, I included a cover page to my essay.  I thanked her for assigning the book and let her know how much I enjoyed it.  Then, feeling more than a little cheeky and daring and fed-up after a long semester, I included the following quote:

The elitists are such boneheads they think literature exists to be admired.  Wrong.  Literature exists to create memories so true and important that we allow them to become part of ourselves, shaping our future actions because we remember that once someone we admired did this, and someone we hated and feared did that.

Literature matters only to the degree that it shapes and changes human behavior by making the audience wish to be better because they read it.

It becomes importantly bad only to the degree that it entices the audience to revel in actions and memories that debase the culture that embraces it.

Next to that, questions of how one literary work influences other literary works, or how the manner of writing measures up to the tastes of some elite group are so trivial that you marvel that someone who went to college could ever think they mattered more.

(Orson Scott Card, July 29, 2007, “Uncle Orson Reviews Everything”)

This was, admittedly, a very foolish and risky thing to do.  My professor, after all, was a bonehead literary elitist.  But given the subject matter of Mr. Pip I figured that, in spite of the jab, she had to be fair enough to see that the quote was actually supporting the lesson taught by the book she’d assigned me to read.  If she had a soul at all – she had to see reason, right?

Wrong.

On the last day of class when my portfolio was returned, I pulled out my essay to see that it didn’t appear to even have been touched.  There was no crease by the staple, at least.  Only the cover page had any response to it.  Next to the quote by Orson Scott Card was written, “Not true.  This is a very silly remark.  See if you can figure out why?”

I left class that day absolutely fuming.  Even now, two years later and well out of this woman’s grasp, I still get frustrated thinking about it.  I hated her for being such an elitist that she’d forgotten why people should read to begin with.

If you ask people why they read, I would imagine that very few people would tell you that they enjoy reading because they enjoy high faluting literary commentaries.  That may be part of the reason.  This essay, after all, is a commentary on literature.  I don’t think literary analysis is bad at all – I think it’s what helps to keep a book alive and relevant.  But if you talk to most readers about their favorite books, the analysis will only matter to them if they have connected to the book individually as well.  If that book, as Card says, “shapes and changes human behavior by making the audience wish to be better because they read it.”

I’ve realized this even more now that I’m on the other side as a teacher myself.  For the past two years I have been the one to present students with books they will be forced to read and then graded on.  I’ve fought to make sure that I find books and plays that I love and have tried to pass that on to my students.  Because I teach a combined English and History class, I also try to find books that will make particular connections that can link to their immediate reality.  Studying To Kill a Mockingbird and Asian philosophy together, for example, provides a nice discussion on how to live your life in a way that is at peace with difficult decisions.  It is rewarding to have class discussions where students do what the state educational system wants them to do – demonstrate understanding of important themes and symbols in literature.  But the greatest compliment I receive as a teacher is something that could never be measured – it’s when I hear a student say they love a book I’ve assigned them to read.  To hear a class refer to Atticus Finch (To Kill a Mockingbird), Reuven Malter (The Chosen), Jonas (The Giver) or Napoleon (Animal Farm) as examples of people they do or don’t want to be like.  And these are all people (and a pig) who never technically walked the earth.

I remember being in second grade and coming to class every day with a pile of books as tall as I could carry.  I would read one chapter from the book on the top of the pile and then put that book on the bottom and take the next one down and so on to maximize the number of books I could read at a time.  I remember falling asleep with my mother’s copy of Anne of Green Gables when I was young, flipping through the pages long before I could read the words on them, aching to be old enough to read it.  I remember getting my drivers license and going to the library for my first drive alone.  I remember staying up until way past my bedtime reading books by flashlight.  I remember the first time I read Jane Eyre. I remember finishing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and immediately starting the book again because I wasn’t ready to say good-bye yet. The first piece of furniture I ever bought for myself was – what else? – a bookshelf.  I remember packing my emergency kit when I was young and agonizing over which book I loved most to save if I had no time to save them all.

That is why we read, isn’t it?  Because we want to fall in love.  Because stories matter.  They take us away, they bring us back, they touch our souls and enlighten our minds.  At their best, stories inspire us to be better than we could have been on our own steam.

I look across my bedroom and see Mr. Pip on one of my bookshelves now, situated in alphabetical order between The Turn of the Screw and Ella Enchanted, two completely different works of fiction.  One I read to work out my brain and for the pleasure of words perfectly formed, one I read for the pleasure of a simple story well told.  I wonder where Mr. Pip sits on the shelves of the office of this old professor of mine.  I wonder – hope, really – that she has a book that she reads every year just because she wouldn’t feel complete if she didn’t.  I hope, too, that she read a book this year not as a teacher preparing for students but as a human being that needs to be connected to other human beings – even if they are fictional.

image credit

One year, I made the mistake of agreeing to judge our state novel writing contest.  It shouldn’t have been bad; there were only five or so manuscripts entered.  The first one I looked at  was all about “flatulence man,” a superhero(I am not making this up).  One was a fairly creditable historical novel. But the rest of them were these stories about wanna-be writers meeting real authors and getting mixed up in steamy mysteries—or in what wanted, very very badly, to be steamy mysteries.

I sat with that mound of misery in my living room for a solid week.  If I’d been a drinking woman, I’d have poured my hooch over all but the passable one and then put a match to the pile.  Not in my living room, though.  Outside.  On the driveway.  Oy.  As it was, it took me months of washing out my mind with Gouge and Shinn and a little bit of Dickens to clean up the hard drive.  My brain, I mean.

I’m telling you this because those manuscripts taught me something: what the last three mentioned had in common was their naive and purely fantastical sketches of  the State of  Authorness.  I suffered through the sexy, glamorous Author.  But writhed at the celebration of the dashing rogue Author who spends his time in the jungles of South America aping Indiana Jones.  What I came away with was the realization that the world at large just must not have a very clear idea of what actually being an author is all about.

Do you know how many novels are published every year?  Or used to be, anyway?  I don’t either.  But the number is in the thousands.  Thousands of authors published.  Many of them terrible.  Most of them forgotten in a year.  Some very few – very, very few – are remembered for more than three years or five.  And then there are the famous ones who are read for decades.  This does not mean that they write well – but it does mean they tell a dang good story.

I have never met an author who actually vacations with a bull whip and a leather hat.  I’ve come across precious few that are rich.  Some of the wildly successful ones are really nice people.  Some are not.  Some are intelligent and deserving.  Some are not.  But very few have the Hollywood kind of glamour most people associate with fame.

When you realize that most royalties come in at ten to fifteen percent of book retail, you begin to see how tough it is to get rich: two bucks (for a hardback – paperbacks come in often at five percent of the sales price) or maybe seventy cents at a time.  A healthily selling book – maybe eight thousand copies in hardback?  Not going to make you rich.

But this isn’t really what I’m wanting to write about here.  Storytelling, in the traditional sense, was a performance art.  You stalked around the campfire, using your voice to set the tone – speaking softly and slowly – then exploding into volume and speed – mincing around or tramping out the vineyard as required.  All of this pretty much requires an immediate audience.

But book writing isn’t like that.  It’s a solitary art.  You can’t chat while you do it.  Or watch TV.  Most of us retreat into bedrooms or closets or the dead of night (face bathed in the unhealthy glow of a compter monitor) or to mountain cabins far, far away from any human interference while we tell our stories.  You don’t have to own a wardrobe to do this job: sweats and bunny slippers are just fine.  You can stutter.  Or be tone deaf.  Or be bald (thinking about the women, here).  You can weigh too much to get through the front door of your house.  In short: a great author is usually not a glamourous trailer-and-special-diet-demanding person.  In fact, many a fairly notable author has been nothing short of a recluse.  As I recall, it was very rare for anybody to see Salinger.  And  Beverly Cleary disliked author visits because she didn’t enjoy being around children (or so I have heard).

Books about the lives of authors?  Wouldn’t sell.  Maybe a book about F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was clearly crazy and made horrible life choices.   And whose books had to be heavily edited and reconstructed by their editors (or so, again, as I have heard).  But most of us?  Boring as sand.  And, if not boring, as people – often less than stellar.

In truth, sometimes I wonder how people who have time to write about life ever work in actually living it.  Somehow, there’s this conception that authors – often being people who like to stand on the sidelines, not so much participating in real life as constantly kibitzing and feeling superior to it – know more than the rest of humanity.  As if THEY are the ones who have not been fooled.  As if THEY see clearly.  The exceptions that prove the rule, then?  And we happily take their stories as more true than our own.

In fact, many English teachers use “literature” as sermon fodder – at least in my experience, moving all over the country as we did – teaching not so much the art of language use as morality, psychology, social duty, and political perspective.  They use the perspective of the spectator to build behavioral models for the people in the trenches.  Isn’t this the kind of thing that irks us in the corporate and political world? Policies made by people who have never dug a ditch, made to regulate the ditch diggers?

I would paint a picture here: the author as a fairly self-centered person hoping that what they want to do will turn out to make a living for them.  Some write because they have this romantic vision of what being a writer is.  Many write because they can’t stop writing.  Some write to escape their real lives.  Some write simply to make a buck.  But few writers become published authors.  And probably, few deserve to (some of whom do, in fact, end up published).

Whatever.  In the end, it’s cool to hold a book of your words in your hand.  And to be invited to places where people will ask you lots of questions about how THEY can become authors.  But almost nobody recognizes you in airports or restaurants or Disneyland lines.  And when you are pitiful enough to casually mention the fact that you are an author, very, very few people will recognize the title of your book.  They still make you show your card at Costco, the bills still show up monthly in your mailbox, and your spouse will not let you out of doing the dishes.

So what I’m saying here is this: if you think it’s fun to tell stories, or if you can’t stand not to sketch in words – then by all means, have at it.  But if you are looking to get rich, or become glamorous or suddenly have a use for a bullwhip in your life – well.  Just – keep your day job.

You might have more fun buying your own hat and bullwhip and making up stories on the fly – say, at dinner with your boss.

I’m just sayin’.

The image I used above this column is wonderful.  But I had to search the entire internet to find any hint of who may have drawn it.  Finally found it with the artist’s name “Warren” in Green, an Australian mag.  I can’t believe it’s been used by so many educators without the signature on it.  Warren, whoever you may be, this is brilliant.

To start with a simple declarative:

We are English teachers.

And what, exactly, does that mean?  French teachers teach French – that is, they teach the structure, vocabulary and idiom used by French speakers in the common course of verbal communication—n’est-ce pas?  I took French all the way through junior high (excluding seventh grade – schools in Parkville, MO did not offer French in those days—too far, I guess, from both Canada and the Louisiana Purchase) and high school.  In those classes I learned your basic nouns, verbs, adjectives – how to organize them, how to place them in time—and as time went on, how to place them in the throes and subtleties of circumstance.  I suppose what I am getting to here is that the first concern of the French class was the nuts and bolts of the actual language.

In English classes, I diagrammed sentences.  I never did it right once.  I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing, and I didn’t care about doing it.  I still don’t care.  And I still cannot diagram a sentence.  What’s more, all that diagramming didn’t teach me anything at all about using language in order to facilitate communication.  But it was gradable.  Sort of.  And that, I suppose, was the essential beauty of it.

The difference between teaching French to English speakers and English to English speakers is, of course, rooted in the fact that familiarity breeds contempt.  And blindness.  And bad habits.  I say “bad habits” simply because aberrant forms of language, while they might be very eloquently used within a given cultural context, are not all that useful outside of that context.  Thus, the word “ain’t” is not actually bad – it’s simply of limited, and sometimes negative, social and communicative value.  What I’m saying is that people who are already using English to get what they want every day of their lives will probably not be easily convinced that they need to know what an adjective actually is.

Our job then, as English teachers, is to inspire in our human, and so, essentially self-serving students the understanding that language is actually a sport.

Walking, running, throwing—all fairly common skills.  But not everybody makes a million bucks doing them.  And why not?  Because the pay-offs go to people who are good enough at these things to score.  Same with language: if you want to score (read: if you want to get what you want out of other people), you have to learn the game.

That is the real job: teaching the game.  Creating a hunger.  Generating some excitement: “I will teach you the moves you need—“

The basic stuff is the easy stuff – spelling, vocabulary, punctuation, economy in grammatical structures.  These are work-sheetable, testable, gradable and thus measurable sorts of things—perfect for the rigors of the classroom.  A caveat: grammar gets a little sticky once you sally forth from the exercise books and enter the dynamic stream of actual usage.  Not many teachers are that brave.

And I believe that not that many teachers are actually capable of making that journey.  Beyond the mechanics, there be art.  I imagine that there are plenty of coaches who aren’t personally all that good at the sports they lead.  I can’t help but think, the better a coach is at his own game, and the more experience he has had playing it–successfully—the better he will coach.  Assuming he can communicate what his body knows.

Is teaching language any different from this?  How many of us, as teachers, are really in control of our own language?  Can you, for instance, write a Relationship Letter that actually speaks to its audience?  Is your poetry any good?  Come on – is it really?  Are you capable of achieving a personal essay?  Do you write with charm?  With wit?  With power?  Is your own sentence structure so integrated with your meaning that no words are wasted—so that the very structure is essential to the statement you are making?

Obviously then, I see true English teaching as going far beyond correcting vocabulary tests.  It involves nurturing skills with rhythm, nuance, critical thinking, voice, compassion, insight – the million components of artistic and effective communication.

It occurs to me that adding literature into the mix might be, at least in some cases, a side-stepping of responsibility.  I will say this: reading literature (a relative term) – reading almost anything – is an educational exercise.  I’m not so sure I can say the same about classroom analysis of literature.  I think I’d rather see students pulling apart ad copy in the classroom.  Or political speeches.  Finding symbols in books where (often) none were planted is all well and good, but it really is its own reward.  Artistic writing can be very complex; in my not-so-humble opinion, language function can be understood far more clearly in a more prosaic venue.

If we teach literature as a treat – sharing with the students we love the books we love – that is one thing.  A caveat here as well: what moves you as an adult may be too strong, too complex – or too specifically appropriate to your own psyche for your young students.  Even for young adults (by which I mean people from 18-21).  To make someone read something you have found meaningful without considering that it might only be meaningful for you – well, you may find yourself assaulting your students rather than enlightening them.  And holding the grades hostage – is it fair for you to require your students to share your emotional responses?  To mirror your thinking or your taste or your emotional needs?

If we teach literature as if it held the Secret of Life – or the answers to humanity’s conundrums, or even Wisdom, we are stepping out of our true job description.  At that point, we have to ask ourselves: did these authors achieve the Perfect Life?  Did they succeed in relationships?  Were they capable of getting what they wanted from the world while maintaining their moral integrity? Are they, by virtue of the fact they have been published and are being published, then qualified to be our spiritual and behavioral guides?

Here’s a question: what is it humanity wants out of life?  Besides wild, carefree sex, I mean.  Is not the end of all our yearning the very thing that Tolstoy shrugs off as “all the same”?  Do we not want to be loved in a committed relationship – to have people in our lives who are truly our friends, our family?  Safety?  Comfort?  Success?  Freedom?  Do we not wish to draw satisfaction out of our work?  Do we not want peace?

But most of the literature we respect is not written by people who had these things.  Quite often, art really does come out of suffering.  Unhappy, lonely, frustrated, isolated people often produce what the rest of us worship as mature truth.  Writers are very often people without families (read that: people who actually have time to sit down and write something cogent).  Artists have traditionally been people whose lives are nearly the polar opposite of what we want from Wisdom.  So how is it we conclude that they know so much we don’t?  Is not living joy an art?  But we don’t respect people who do that; we think of them as just too cute, too simple.  We want to be happy, but we want happiness that is edgy, deep, mysterious, gland-engaging, exciting and dangerous.

I suppose this point should lead to a discussion of the concept of emotional maturity.

Nah.

If we teach literature the way a coach shows his team film of the people who really do this thing well – I see that as a legitimate use.  Again, though – remember that medicines are doled out with a mind to the age, the size, the weight and the health history of each patient.  And not every person sitting in your classroom needs the same medication.

That’s another point – when we read, often what we are really doing is self medicating.  Give that one a thought.  Because when we read good writing – or even bad writing – we are asking the author to change our brain chemistry.  That’s what really good writing does.  Depending on your native levels of willing suspension of disbelief, you can allow bad writing to do almost the same thing – just on a more broad brush, straight to the hypothalamus basis.

Another thing that we have to remember is this—when you pierce the mystic aura that protects our designated “classics,” what you find is a commercial product.  Somebody wrote the thing – why?  Why do writers write?  Because they have to?  Well, yeah.  Maybe.  A lot of bad writers “have to” write, too.

Because they want to.  That’s a better answer.  Part of what they want is an audience, and part is commercial success.  If you want to write stories more than  you want to machine pipe fittings, then you have to make enough money to justify doing it – or at least to keep you alive in your cold and lonely garret long enough to write something more.

Notice that the artists do not simply write the books and then burn them.  Or hide them in attics.  No – they send their manuscripts to publishers.  And why would a publisher take on the cost of printing, binding and merchandizing a book?  For art’s sake, are you saying?  Ha.  Because altruism demands that this marvelous, wise book be made available to the world?  Ha again.  Because it’s going to make him some money?

Ah.  Truth.

Every classic (well, maybe excepting Beowulf) began as a commercial product.  Certainly Chauser was going for popular success.  And commercial means that the book has to provide entertainment.  In the end – art may be grand and rarified – but if it doesn’t entertain in some way, nobody will buy it.  Sometimes the entertainment is visceral.  Sometimes it’s intellectual or emotional or spiritual.  Whatever, the art must connect with the audience, create a conversation.  Or again, nobody will buy it.  Unless the purchase is status driven.

Now you may be thinking—not all the books ever published became classics.  And that, too, is true.  Not even all best sellers make it.  Twain survived while most of his Gilded Age contemps are long gone.  Why is this?  Even now, hundreds and hundreds of Young Adult books are published every year.  A fraction of them make the ALA nominations.  This doesn’t mean that only a fraction of them are worthy – just that a fraction fell into the hands of, or pleased, or fit the kind of people who nominate.  More than a fraction of them, however, are just really not that good.  Some of the ones that make the list aren’t even that good.  So we have good books going unrecognized and bad books canonized.

The book business is not hard science.

In the end, most of these books will soon be out of print and forgotten.

Of all the books published in the world, some few have lived long lives.  Sometimes, it’s because they were handled well by their publishers.  Sometimes because their authors were colorful enough to leave history behind them.  Some books happened to appeal to the right people – the professors and critics who really, in the end, decide how long the life of a book will be.

Some books continue to live because they have truth in them, you may whisper.  And I will not argue that.  A really good book is one that has bones of truth – whether the author happened to be in control or not.  But not all books that are popular or stay popular with the world at large are good or true – some of them appeal to the silly romantic audience.  Some to the gamers.  Some to the sex interested.  Some books shock the soul, and that shock is mistaken as some kind of spiritual experience.

In the absence of true meaning, intensity is often mistaken for significance.

Any given book I love, you might read and find stupid.  Or depressing.  Too accessible.  Boring.  Too long.  Too name-burdened.  Too romantic.  Too irresponsible.  Too simple.  It’s glorious when we love the same book – like discovering that we are long-lost cousins.  What you consider deep and classical, I may find arrogant and full of itself.  What the Pulitzer prize people think is wildly significant, I may find obnoxiously quirky and completely disconnected with real life.

Who is right?

Who cares?

I do—if the book comes into the classroom.  You can read the Times best seller lists and decide for yourself what you’re going to read on the train.  But your students have to read what you require them to read.  And I find that grossly unfair, and often, ethically wrong.  What gives you the right to decide that your students “need” to read any given book?

Again, if we are using literature as a demonstration of words well used, we can do that by offering sections of writing.  We can start by studying the sentence structure – comparing the styles and voices of a number of authors and trying to learn what makes them different, and then—what works and what doesn’t.  Or we can choose books that are well put together but still gentle in their view – and make no mistake, power and gentleness can exist easily side by side in the story of a fine writer.

Still, I come back to this.  Our first job in teaching English is learning English.  What is it that makes a “good” sentence?  Perhaps the word “good” needs to be replaced with the phrase “aesthetically appropriate.”  Can you write that kind of sentence?  Can you write a paragraph full of them?  Are you capable of writing a story?  What will your story mean?  What have you done with your life that you have something to offer?  Will your story come out of pain?  And should you write that painful story?  Or should you take the million other stories that have been told out of pain, finally learn something from them, re-examine your life, change some things and see how that feels – and then write?

And really, how can you teach writing unless you actually know something about doing it well?

Perhaps part of the answer to this question has to do with being a good audience.  You may recognize writing that pleases you, and you may, through your critical abilities, be able to explain why it pleases you, or why it does not.  Still, there is no scripture that says your analysis will be “right.”  It will simply either be well stated or not.  Your analysis may speak to one, but not to another.  The safe critics are the ones who know how to draw blood, and so intimidate their audiences out of debate—might making right.

All of this dithering done, in the end, I think we are not really trying to turn out reams of students who will be sending manuscripts to New York (who would do the real work then?).  What I think we want to do is turn out students who are alive, who can express themselves – but who can also question themselves, thinking below the surface of things.  People not too easily satisfied, but willing to be refreshed by good things – truth, solid art.  People who can see through campaign speeches and the acrobatics of Madison Avenue to make intelligent choices.  People who can read contracts and write them and do the business of life.  Perhaps most important of all: people who can communicate with the ones they love, choosing well to begin with and then maintaining their commitments, teaching and nurturing their beloved children—ultimately achieving that boring, consistent sameness of joy that Tolstoy found so un-noteworthy.

I think that may be job enough.

To be continued…

Once I saw this PBS thing about the Beatrix Potter story—how she’d inked her charming illustrations and written the stories to match and finally, bucking civilized behavior, actually found herself a London publisher to make all of this into books.  The thing in the story that amazed me and filled me with what was honestly yearning was this:  the relationship between publisher and artist; it was like the deliberate formation of family.  Beatrix didn’t always hand her publisher something that was perfect for publication.  But he had taken on her career, not just one book or two.  He had signed her on for the long haul, and he brought her along – pruning and teaching and nurturing her talent.  They worked together to make something beautiful that would last the ages, and they were friends all through her life.

There weren’t a million books published every year in those days.  And while, of course, profit was the point of the business, and while every business hopes for some kind of hit that will make it wildly successful, I think people had more time and patience – looking for authors they could establish long term relationships with, bringing their authors along and creating a strong vein of literature together.

It just seemed so personal.  So human.

As I understand it, F.S. Fitzgerald was a fairly horrible writer.  His quirky characters and edgy, relentlessly contemporary stories sold him to editors who had to reconstruct them using language people could decipher.  I wasn’t around then, so I don’t know if this is true; I was taught it somewhere along the line.  But again, here an editor or a publishing house recognizes something extraordinary in a writer and nurtures what they believe is there.

I knew of an R & R guy in the music biz maybe twenty five years ago who told us he got two hundred taped submissions a DAY from hopeful bands and artists.  How are you supposed to wade through all that hopeful material?  And editors and publishing houses?  I don’t know their numbers, but it has to be nearly that.  So much literacy.  So many people sure they’ve got a hit on their hands.

Couple that with this shift in the business of selling books – the mom and pop book stores closing all over the country.  Middle sized book sellers gone.  The huge ones beleaguered.  Hard to find a place where you can cruise the aisles and run your finger across the backs of likely books.  Now, you have to find them on Amazon.  At least you pay less when you stumble on something that looks (sounds?) promising.

The last year I was on the ALA Best Book list, there were two hundred books on it.  I think I was shocked.  I wouldn’t have guessed there were that many books even published in a year.  But these were only the elite out of maybe a thousand.  We’ve been drowning in books.  And judging from any number of published things I’ve picked up, a lot of this stuff is – ummm – less than stellar.  But still – published.

So when you’ve got a burgeoning supply and a dwindling demand  - and when your portals are closing right and left – you’ve got trouble, my friend.  You’ve got publishers having to cut down their editorial and production staffs.  You’ve got editors who are doing twice as much work as they used to do.  If you’re me, you’ve got a manuscript sitting on each of two NY desks for almost two years – liked by the editors, but still without contract.

The bottle neck is at once too wide and too narrow.  Way too narrow if you’re an author wanting to be read.

The way it used to be, you’d write your book (and hopefully re-write it fifty or so times), then write a query letter.  You’d search Writer’s Market or find some other way of getting a publisher’s info, then send the letter – and wait six months for an answer.  If the answer was “send,” you’d send and then wait another six months, hoping that the eventual response would be a single paged acceptance rather than a fat envelope with your returned, dogeared manuscript in it.

If the book had caught the editor’s attention (and here’s the chancy part: the editor who ended up with your manuscript might not like it, while the editor at next desk down would have loved it), she’d work with you on it – giving you instructions about how to make it better – so that she could hand it to the readers and take it to the publishing committee.  After all that, the committee would either take it or not take it.  And if they took it, then came the almost year-long process of editing and copy editing and cover design and printing and shipping.

Now, authors fish for agents the way they once fished for publishers.  Agents have become the first sieve you have to pass through. And unless you live in New York and travel in publishing circles, HOW DO YOU KNOW WHAT AGENT TO APPROACH?  You actually sort of need an agent to FIND an agent.  And once you get one’s attention, that agent reads your stuff and passes judgement – on the story, the genre, the writing – all from her own point of view.  And agents have no problem rejecting you.  You’re a dime a dozen.  Even if you’ve had past success.  (Does this begin to sound like a personal experience?) Again, Agent A may hate the book while Agent B would love it.  But you don’t know which is which.  In fact, you have no idea how to find Agent B in all that city mess out East.

And your book has to be perfect.  Because that’s all editors have time for.  Books that are perfect.  Not interesting authors they can bring along.  But perfect hit books.  And they get them.  Because the agents have become editors and the editors have become – gateways.  And when you, as the gateway, have so many perfect submissions to choose from, all you have to do is pick your ten perfect hits a year.  Publishing houses have no time for potential, now.  And once you write them a really great book that sells well (Harry Potter really warped the YA market expectations), there’s no guarantee your house will even consider a second book.  Which means you start all over again with your second book, knocking hat-in-hand at some agent’s kitchen door.

Some authors start out by aiming at the hot genre (like SF and Fantasy or Urban Fantasy).  Usually, I have to warn you, the ones who do well are the ones whose minds and imaginations were already there – not necessarily first.  I just mean, the best ones were already “living” in that genre.   And sometimes authors publish themselves. (Here, a word of caution – there are, in this business as in the music business, shysters who pass themselves off as publishers – they take your copyright and they charge you big fees – and you get nothing in the end.  With no way to get your money back.  The “publisher” simply says your book doesn’t sell.  And they have your rights.  Be VERY careful of that trap – this is NOT a personal experience, by the way.  If it feels too good to be true or too easy or not right, then get out of there.)

Real self publishing is a lot of work.  You have to write the book, then re-write (find yourself a knowledgeable reader/editing advisor), design the book itself, then the cover, then find a printer you can trust and afford – then promote yourself all over the place.  It’s exhausting.  You have to do a large enough run to keep the single unit price down.  And then you have to warehouse the twenty to hundred boxes of books somewhere.  And fulfill orders – which means invoicing, processing checks, shipping.   If you sell enough books on your own to get some media attention (and it’s not all that likely you will), you may get the attention of the big publishing houses.  Of course, if you sell enough – you may not CARE whether you get their attention or not.

The interesting thing that’s happening now in both music and books is happening because of social media and the internet.  Self-publishing becomes a whole different thing if you can use social media to gather an audience and sell to them.  When The Alien was in the middle of selling it’s 110,000+ copies, there was no way to establish a network of readers.  I wish I could find them all now.  I have email addresses from many who wrote – but man, so many of those aren’t active anymore.  And you do have to stop and consider that returning a fan letter with hype for your next book might be construed as less than gracious.

So you learn to work the market a new way.  To find the people who love to read you.  And if you can do it, then you can develop this lovely little symbiotic relationship:  you provide them with dreams and words and catharsis, and they pay your mortgage.  It could be a beautiful thing.

I am not the person to tell anyone how to do this.  The person who can do that is Tracy Hickman, and you can find him at ScribesForge – there’s a link on my navigation bar.  It’s worth a look.  Tracy is a New York Times best selling author, and a very smart guy.  Take a trip on over there and see what he has to say.  Or find yourself a copy of Writer’s Market, pick a publisher or an agent out of that collection, write a query and give it a go.  It’s work.  It’s a lot of heartbreaking work – unless you’re inordinately lucky. Or unusually talented.  Or at least, your stuff, good or not, has hit the market where it lives at the moment.  And some people have been lucky – like one person in every several hundred thousand.

The hard thing about writing is this: you write a song, you can sit on your porch on a summer evening, strum your guitar, and charm the neighbors with it.  Then the song is real.  But with a book – it’s not real till somebody reads it.  And they can only do that one at a time.

So maybe the end of all this is to ask you – have you considered giving your life to song writing???

Once upon a time, somebody told the first story.

I’m sitting here, trying to imagine it.  Who it was.  Who she was telling it to.  What the world looked like then, and what the story might have been about.

Maybe it was an answer to a question, like, “Where did you come from?”  Or “Where did you find that Paleolithic deer?”  Or “How did you get that black eye?”

Or maybe it was a mother, telling her child about the night he was born.  Or more likely, making up something scary to keep him from wandering out of the cave while she went out shopping.

Certainly, as time went on, the story became a tool.  As communities formed, as tribes came together, stories held their histories—explained their creation, their identity on the land and under the great, dark press of the universe.  Stories entertained in the evening around a good fire—but were more than simple entertainment.  They carried in them the norms and mores that bound the people together in peace with each other, that gave them hope and the courage to stand against enemies and monsters and weather.

Stories taught the young what to grow up to be as men and women.  Taught them roles.  Taught them what to die for.  What to live for.

Tales explained the universe, outlining strategies for dealing with and pleasing the God or gods who held the reins of fate.  And taught the ways of earth – of seasons and planting and hunting.

And as we live our lives, our own experience with stories pushes us to look for the narratives that make sense of our own situations.  We hope for good endings.  We expect conflict, human cause and effect.  We believe in balance and judgement, and expect a certain order and timing for things.  Which is sometimes why we are left blinking and defenseless in the face of shocking, abrupt bad news.

As I wrote that last bit, I began to wonder if maybe our seemingly primal need for narrative might actually be a disadvantage—creating in us certain expectations.  Like – that good will prevail and evil will suffer.  Like, that—no matter what—everything will turn out all right in the end.  Which often does not prove to be true.  Unless you extend the narrative past death – to where justice might unfailingly apply and restitution be made.

Stories are, unquestionably, the most potent means of productive human communication – you are more likely to make your point if you tell a story that frames it obliquely, or paints an example inside a context that belongs to the person you are talking to.  Compared to, “You always stomp all over my heart,” the story actually has a chance of being listened to.

A story can engage the emotions.  Can drum up sympathy or passion.  Can reach into the brain, calling on memory and the sets of chemicals that create emotion (we must instinctively know how to tweek these in each other, mustn’t we?) in order to bring about an emotional state in the hearer.

If I, as a storyteller, do my job well, I can string together words (or print them on a page) so that when you read the words, or hear them, the hair on your arms will stand straight up in the air – exactly as they would if you were to hear a strange, unexplainable sound outside your window one night.  I can make the skin on the back of your neck prickle – and I can do it from hundreds of miles away, and maybe hundreds of years.  Or I can make your body respond to my words the way it responded to your first kiss, or your most embarrassing or frustrated moment – without ever asking you to leave your corner of the couch.  Without my needed to be in the room with you.  Without any other outside stimulus at all.

“There is no frigate like a book to take us Lands away . . ..”  Emily Dickenson wrote that, and I have always resonated with it.  I remember lying in the top bunk of our bedroom, reading Walter Farley’s Flame—the part where the airplane is going to crash, and Alex has to save The Black and himself (yet again).  The palms of my hands began to sweat and my heart to pound.  I had to lift my eyes off the page because the experience was too hard for me.  But I couldn’t stop reading it.  I knew something odd was happening to me—I wasn’t on that plane, but I felt like I was on it.c So amazing.  In fact, I remember it so vividly, all those things just started happening in me again as I wrote this.

We use stories to inform us.  To give shape to our dreams.  Sometimes to help us escape from our present, real situation, even if it be for a very few moments.  To lift our hearts and minds.  Or to indulge our dark and secret selves.

But now, in our time, story is no longer only in the hands of the story teller.  Now, everybody’s a story teller.  And we don’t tell the stories around the fire, after all have come in after a day’s good work in the fields and forests.  Instead, we all want everyone else to work, and to bring us – the story teller – dinner.  But since there are so many story tellers, the game is to come up with a story that will please the most people – not teach them, not warn them, not remind them who they are or help them deal with the world – but what will amaze, arouse, thrill, and indulge them.  We want them to come to us with their dollars and their wide open hearts and minds, so we will be rich and safe.

And some who succeed in this actually have disdain for the hearts and minds left on theit doorsteps, wondering how people can be so gullible.  I saw an article in TV Guide once, an interview with a Hollywood insider who confided that his writing staff regularly referred to their faithful TV audience as “the trailer trash.”  And it wasn’t like they were writing WWF or bounty hunter shows.

I think we, as an audience, have to take care now, picking whose stories we open ourselves to.  Not that everything we take in has to be vegetables.  But – you know – there’s a story thrown up on screen every half hour on every one of 600 cable channels every day.  How can there be that many good stories?  And it used to be that the  ALA Best Books for YA list alone  had about two hundred books on it a year.  Can we really crank out that much stuff worth telling?  And what about the stories that are lies – setting up situations but writing unrealistic consequences – telling us what we want to hear instead of making us face the truth?

Walter Farley jacked with my brain chemistry big time.  It’s probably why I get so antsy now when I fly.  But how many other strangers have left their traces in my head, I wonder?  They say you still have in your mouth the DNA of every person you ever kissed.  Makes you want to be a little more discerning, thinking about that.

Who can I trust enough to let them stick their fingers into my brain?  And who am I to ask people to let me stick my fingers in theirs?  I think, if an artist isn’t asking those questions, maybe he isn’t somebody we want to trust.  As story hungry as we all tend to be, maybe we ought to just think about that.

You remember Tootsie?  That movie that had Dustin Hoffman in it – the one when he got the soap opera gig?  Yeah, well, there’s this scene in the middle of it somewhere when he’s talking to his buddy, and they’re discussing this scene in a play the guy is trying to get produced.

“You know what’s wrong with that scene?” (I”m going from memory here.)

“What, the necktie scene?  That’s a great scene!  What’s wrong with the necktie scene.  Nothing.”

“It’s the necktie.  The necktie is what’s wrong with it  . . .”

There is some amazing law in the universe that can be put roughly this way:

The chances that a piece of writing you have done is sucky rise in direct proportion to the affection you have for it.

One of my writer buddies (wouldn’t it be fun to go ex-patriot together?) told me once about this woman in a writing group he was part of.  Writing groups are – groups of people who write – and then bring what they’ve done and somehow, everybody reads everybody else, and then they give constructive criticism – ACTUALLY, I don’t really know, as I have never been in one.  I THINK that’s what goes on at these things.  But the point is, this woman was working on a book she felt had been DICTATED TO HER BY HEAVEN.  And she was not willing to change a single WORD.  And the manuscript was – predictably – AWFUL.

Granted, all artists are a little weird.  Some are very weird, but very good at what they do (and do we all register on the autism scale?  And are some of us close to idiot-savant?).  But others—and there are so very many of these –  are very, very weird and very, very, very bad at what they do.  While managing to be absolutely confident of their own brilliance.  If you don’t believe me, watch the So You Think You Can Dance auditions episodes.

Or, as Star Trek put it: “If there’s nothing wrong with ME, there must be something wrong with the universe.”  (Which, *cough*, actually happened to be true in that episode.)

The question always has to be: is that me up there, looking like a total idiot and being taken totally by surprise that people are looking at me like that?

On the other hand, most of the brilliant artists I know do NOT think they are all that brilliant are generally surprised that anybody actually likes them, and as their popularity grows, so does their worry that they’re actually not any good and someday, somebody’s going to figure that out and they’ll be dumped and forgotten and die unknown and be buried in a mass grave in acidic ground.  Which actually happens to most famous people in the end.  Not the buried part, but the forgotten part.  I mean – not to everybody.  But – well, to the pretty ones, anyway.

(There was actually a study done a few years ago – the chance that you did well on an exam tends to be in INDIRECT proportion of your self-assessment.)

What I’m trying to say here is that EVERYBODY will have an opinion about what you are writing  - and some of them are going to be right.  If you’re working with a publisher or a professor and your goal is being published of keeping up your GPA, you have to listen.  Or no – you don’t have to listen, but you don’t get the contract or the grade.  If you write for yourself alone — knock yourself out.  But don’t stress other people by making them read you – and then telling them they don’t know what they’re talking about when they tell you what they actually think.

It really is a tough thing – telling what parts are good, and what needs to be cut.  What you need to find are intelligent readers  - two or three of them (not like my husband, who can’t tell characters apart if their names start with the same letter) – and listen.  And learn.  And keep reading the good stuff.

And when you’re finished with your manuscript, cut it down by thirty percent.

Yeah.  That’ll teach you.

In comedy, timing is everything.

Change the timing, and a comedy can quickly turn into tragedy.

In music, timing is the foundation of everything.  Even in freeform stuff like Eric Whitacre’s work, there is a time to let go of a chord.  The right time.

You’ve seen movie scenes that have made your eyes roll heavenwards: “Will this ever end?  Shut up arready.”  And I’m sure you’ve read books that have places in them that act on your forward motion like deep sand takes a runaway truck.

Or sometimes, things just happen too fast.  CG guys love to have things happen just inside the too fast zone—that way, no body notices the gaffs in the graphics.  But when’ you’re watching a real story, you kind of want to know what’s going on, which means that things have to happen so that you can tell what’s happening, and then there has to be a tiny pad built in – a pause, a long look, a pan back – so that your brain has time to process what it’s just seen within the context of the larger narrative.

And so it is with writing.

From the formation of the first sentence, to the size of your paragraphs (William Faulkner – are you listening?), to the rhythm of your dialogue – and the length of it – descriptions, word choice, chapter endings and beginnings, all of these are involved in the pacing of your book.  Dwell too long on a dramatic, emotional scene, and you lose readers.  Keep back all the juicy stuff till the end, your reader just might bail on you.  Cram too much in  too quickly, ditto.

We’ll talk about the sacred cows in another section, but it interfaces nicely with this one.

One thing you can do is read your work out loud to yourself – or, if you have a willing victim, to someone else.  As you read, you will begin to feel how long something is going, or how abruptly something has just happened.  Are you feeling impatient to get to the end of what you’re reading?  Are you left unsatisfied with the abbreviated way that was put?  Learn from that and rewrite.  Rewrite as many times as it takes to get the FEEL right.  But if you end up re-writing more than about three times, put the manuscript aside for a year.  Then pick it up – and do one more fresh re-write, this one from the beginning – and see what happens.

By doing a lot of good reading, I think we learn a sense of effective timing.  Some people are born with perfect pitch – some with a perfect sense of rhythm.  Others of us have to learn these things.  And some people may never get it.  But exposing ourselves to the masters doesn’t hurt.  Except, by masters, I don’t mean Nathaniel Hawthorn, who does not shine in this particular consideration.  Caveat: if you read boiler plate stuff as your staple, you are doing yourself harm.  Dumbing yourself down.  Programming your brain with inferior patterns.  So be careful of what you ingest.

Then again, if money is what you’re after – read the junk that sells.  That’s really the way I learn a different style.  Reading it.

But choose intelligently and deliberately.  Once you get programmed with a style, it’s really hard to shake off.

In the last – oh – maybe decade or so, there’ve been a lot of people fah-reeeking out about what the internet is doing to literacy.  Me?  I don’t really get why they’ve so got their shorts in a knot over this (and what does that actually mean, “shorts in a knot?”).  Seems to me we’ve got more people reading and writing now than EVER in the history of the world.

The writing tends to be in short bursts, yes.  The spelling reeks, yes.  And more often than not, because the writing skill isn’t the strongest, the short bursts are rude and stupid – yes.  But is that really so much of a change?  At least the rudeness is in writing.  And people are learning that you CAN communicate through a keyboard.

There are problems, of course.  When people are reading actual books – well, decently written books – the language tends to expand in their heads; they think a little more deeply, maybe even more lyrically, and they can learn something about the world outside themselves.  Assuming that the book in question has any truth or intelligent insight in it.

The internet is being underused in some important ways, though.  There is such potential for discussion in social media—I’ve been part of discussion groups that have changed my life for the better, simply by feeding me both information and insight into people and thus, widening my perspective.  But most of the groups I’ve been part of don’t have discussions.  Or if they do, there doesn’t seem to be a real passion shared – or once it is shared, it seems there’s nothing else to say.

In a few of my groups, the discussion is rapid, dense and interesting. Sometimes misused and nasty, but most of the time interesting.  The trick is to get every person contributing to ask real questions and give real answers.  Not to give into the easy out of abusive and weaponized language.  I had my life threatened by a nasty mouth dude I stood up to once.  I got him kicked off the service – and rejoiced that he happened to live half a planet away.  But it shook me up. Admins need to administrate, and people need to learn to communicate.

Conversation has the same problems, but without the protection of anonymity. But even when some people are face to face, their go-to is bluster and insult and threat.  And how is that going to solve anything?  Well – aside from the fact that it shuts down a conversation obviously distressing to the blusterer.

I have seen calm voices (written ones) disarm situations like this on groups, bringing the discussion back to something meaningful, and certainly, for those participating and lurking, that has to be an education.

It’s interesting to me, the concept of “manners.”  People used to teach “manners.”  But the truth is, your manner is your style.  They didn’t teach a unit on civilized manners, then one on low-class manners.  Even though both could be a legitimate study.  They should have called those classes “improving your manners.”  And maybe they did call it that.  Before my time.

I heard a news report on a high school class in our state – the teacher had used To Kill A Mockingbird as the heart of a year long study of civility.  The language in this book is beautiful.  The dialogue reflects a different time, a more graceful time with underpinnings of southern fluidity and graciousness.  The students were asked to think about these things, to absorb them.  And in the interviews, those students expressed the fact that their own increased civility had improved the quality of interaction in their homes and hallways.  That when the word they used were civilized, so were they. I think this teacher was very wise.

So I hold the short-burst internet on one hand, counting as a virtue the daily exercise in simply reading and writing words, and the reading of good, long-shanked books in the other.  And I think, in the end, that we need both.  And that having even this casual, vulgar (meaning simply, “the way of the commonest folks”) and pretty constant exercise of language in social media is WAY better than nothing.