teaching

‘Aux Arc’ Road Trip, or How to Write a Sale Barn

No Telling

I’m the luckiest woman alive, freshly returned from a fabulous jaunt to western Arkansas, and I won’t even talk about the price of gas. I promise. I want to talk instead about what was possibly one of the best Writing Project workshops I’ve ever attended.

Steph and I left for Ozark last Sunday and spent the whole week with a group of teachers from the Western Arkansas Education Cooperative at the County Line school. We slung out writing and teaching workshops every day for a week and couldn’t be more pleased with the people, the place, and the unequaled hospitality. You know, for a long time now I’ve threatened to live out my retirement in Eureka Springs as a sidewalk typewriter poet, but I believe I’ve changed my mind. I’m moving to Ozark, Arkansas where I can join the Red Hat Society and meet with TOPS in the basement of the Methodist Church on Thursday nights. If I play my cards right, they might even let me have a column in The Ozark Spectator (be patient with the link, like all other things ‘Internet‘ there right now, the site is temporarily unhappy).

We had bad weather the first night there, knocking out the wireless at our Day’s Inn for the entirely of the week. Since I didn’t know what to do with myself, I picked a fight with the manager – the only charmless person we met the entire trip. It’s difficult to un-tech yourself like that, even for a gal who’s partial to manual typewriters. We finally had access the night before we left due to the diligence and technological wizardry of the night janitor lady, who curiously had a much better laptop than I will ever own. I’m going to send her a thank you note today.

After a full day of scribbling with our delightful hosts, Steph and I made little road trips here and there because the antiques/flea market businesses around those parts are plentiful. A few miles away in Paris we found more shops than we could visit, as well as evidence of the Sunday night storm.

Each day we drove from Ozark proper to the County Line School about twenty minutes away in Branch. Stunning drive over the swollen river and through the hills. On Wednesday we hit the jackpot – the County Line Sale Barn parking lot filled up with all manner of sellers-with-tables and livestock in the barn. It was so enticing that we convened the entire workshop there for a Write-a-thon. It was hot as hell and threatening rain, but we threw ourselves and our notebooks into the fray and wandered around talking, interviewing (I use that term loosely), taking pictures, and buying tidbits.

Those tables covered in goods told some stories. Large collections of tattered western novels, a wedding dress in a plastic bag displayed from the sideview mirror of a truck, saddles and tack, old chiffarobes and dressers, hand-labeled honey, fresh vegetables, cigar boxes full of old costume jewelry – I honestly could have made an entire day of it.


While we all shopped and talked and wrote, the animals in the sale barn mooed and snorted and whinnied behind us. A gaggle of little girls gathered at a side pen petting baby goats while old men in starched jeans and straw hats sat behind a table of shotguns and guitars.

Clearly, this wasn’t just a place to exchange money and goods – it was the weekly social event. And they liked to talk. Once they asked us who we were and decided we meant no journalistic harm, the stories flowed. One of our teachers spent the morning on the tailgate of a pick-up talking to a WWII vet. Another met a man who knew her grandfather as a moonshiner years ago, which was news to her and facilitated a phone call to her mother to verify such a thing. Apparently it was true.

Despite my vow to live in the moment instead of constantly recording it, I did take pictures. I wish I’d taken more, actually, but that just gives me another reason to go back. The Write-a-thon turned out some some incredible scribbling from our teachers, and we gathered it all together in a hasty anthology to give them on the final day. I can’t thank our flittering education angel Claire enough. She is a marvel of efficiency and caring and can never, ever retire. No one else could be as ‘Claire’ as Claire.

So I’d like to thank Claire, the Western Arkansas Educational Cooperative, the County Line school, the cities of Ozark, Branch, Paris, Branch, and Altus, the incredibly fearless teacher/writers who attended the workshop, the night janitor at the Day’s Inn, the columnists of the Ozark Spectator, and every single person at the County Line Sale Barn for giving me the best week I’ve had in a very long time.

I will be back.

On the Road…and my baby has a blog

No Telling

First things first. My daughter has one hysterical blog. Crazy Texas mommy? If you’re out there listening, you’ve GOT to stop by. I’m so stinking proud.
Now, I may not have much time on this iffy wireless connection here in Ozark, Arkansas. I’m going to write fast and let you know that I’m in fact not dead, just giving rural writing workshops up in the hills. Haven’t even checked my email since Sunday, but rest assured I’ll be home tomorrow with scads of pictures and stories. Ozark is a Very Special Place.
In the meantime, go read Generation Y’all.

M.I.A., or Who is that Woman with the Ink Stains on her Blouse?

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It’s 5:30 in the morning and I’ve already been up and grading since 3:00. I’ve been doing this for days, and I’ll probably be doing it tomorrow. Don’t feel sorry for me – I like the smell of ink in the morning, it smells like victory. Besides, in the dark early hours there is silence and good coffee.
I’ve completely blown off the blog for over a week now. The four or five of you who actually read this may not even care, but I do. I miss the writing. The laptop is shoved toward the back of the desk and turned off, for the most part, to keep me out of time-eating trouble. The typewriter is back in its case because it was the most anguishing and visible sign that I Have Other Work To Do. All distractions gone, and the papers get full attention.
And there are a great many papers.
I don’t hate grading. Once I get my reading groove on it’s absolutely fascinating to read all the hard work, the insights, the epiphanies. Sometimes the papers are badly written, but for the most part students actually care about the topics they’ve chosen and the arguments are fairly sound. I love this part of teaching even though it’s the loneliest dark-of-the-morning part of it all.
Finals are next week and I’ll be at this again. If I get lucky, there will be time this weekend to tell you about the amazing literary magazine my undergraduate students just published and the awards they’ve earned. Stunning work.
There. I’ve given you the only fifteen minutes I’ll have for a bit. Back to the essays.

Whew, I say…It’s Christmas Break

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Finals are over. All I have to do now is grade a short pile of exam essays, whip out the Large Buttoned Granny Calculator, cipher a bit, then post those semester grades. I don’t even mind going to the office on a Sunday to do it, because Monday morning I’ll be free and clear. The weeping freshman girls have all gone home, and the conniving boys have followed them. Or is that the other way around? Every student who never showed up to class and mysteriously remembered my name long enough to find my office has packed up. Tomorrow I can grade in peace without eleventh-hour student negotiations knocking at my door. I’ll press “submit,” and then I’ll be done for almost a month.

Ah, yes. Ease and relaxation.

Or it will be after I finally put up the tree, decorate a bit shabbily, wrap the presents I’ve already bought, hit the stores for the rest, realize I don’t have scotch tape, hit the stores again, finally clean my house thoroughly, sweep out the garage, then find the right screwdriver to put my new license plate on the car before I’m stopped again by that officer I used to have in my tenth grade class.

“Oh Miz Fason,” he sighed, “you really do have to put that on the car.”

After all that, I’m lounging. Hopefully with a book without literary merit and a splash of Bailey’s in my coffee. I’m going to wear old sweatshirts and raggedy warm-up pants and scumble about in my socks. I’ll still put on make-up and do my hair because, well, someone might come to the door delivering packages or collecting canned goods. My grandmother taught me that much.

I’m going to watch The Perfect Grandson bounce mightily in his jumperoo and sing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” to him at least five times a day because both of those things make him laugh. I’m going to buy my daughter surprise Christmas gifts that are just for her, because she’s an exhausted new mom who many times substitutes for the jumperoo. I’m going to play Christmas music on my outdated stereo and make peace with that damned weenie dog that keeps pooping where he shouldn’t. I’ll scan cable for all the best Christmas movies and watch them with all four of us under a quilt on the couch.

Finally, I’m going to write great gobs of nothing in particular. It doesn’t have to be earth-shattering, or publishable, or planned. Just massive scribbling to empty out a bit of what I’ve been putting off for the last few weeks. I suspect my need to write is much like The P.G.’s jumperoo craving. We’re both a little maniacal once we’re back in the saddle.

See? I’ve already begun.

Declaring a Major

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‘Round these parts, students take a class called “Freshman Experience.” It’s designed to keep first-timers around by giving them some actual study skills and a realistic view of what’s expected at the university. Not a bad idea. If I’d had such a class maybe I wouldn’t have received that “invitation to take a semester off and think about your priorities” letter I got in the mail after my freshman year.

One requirement of the “Freshman Experience” class is to interview a professor about their first year in college and include that information in a lengthy, culminating paper assignment.
It’s that time of year, I guess. Students say they come to me because they think I’ll tell good stories. Or long ones. Either way, I’m interviewed quite often. I like doing the interviews. It puts my fabulously unsuccessful first college attempt to good use.

I’m a cautionary tale.

I did so many things wrong as a college freshman that each year during these interviews I’m able to give a different slant to the cautionary tale. It keeps things interesting, I hope, for the professor who actually has to grade these papers. As a Iraq war/abortion/gay marriage paper-reading veteran, I do understand the value in a fresh piece of student prose. Believe me.
This year’s theme is Choosing a Major That Won’t Be Obsolete Before You Buy The Cap And Gown.
My first semester in college I took typing, shorthand, business machines, accounting, and sociology. I was a business major that semester and had a really, really good time, but not in class. It’s a good thing that business degree dream died quickly. No one needs shorthand anymore, the type of “business machine(s)” I learned were the clickety-clack ten-key variety, and accounting was a hand-entered ledger workbook. Believe it or not, these were core business major courses.

Sociology was handy, though. Still is.
Since successful CLEP testing threw me into my sophomore year, it was instantly crunch-time when I began. I had to Officially Declare a Major. So I did that. Several times. I majored in philosophy, psychology, speech, and broadcasting briefly and at various moments. I toyed with art, theatre (I never forgot the proper university spelling), and English. Only the Math department was completely safe from me.

As a broadcasting major I took a few interesting classes. Mostly I learned to spin reggae and bluegrass records, although not usually in the same radio show. I learned how to edit and splice audio tape with a razorblade, and how to cue up records so they gloriously began the second I flipped the switch. Even if I get the radio-bug again, my pre-digital recording skills are completely useless. FM radio itself is almost extinct, and it will be for sure when all the Generation Jonesers and Boomers get iPods. It might happen this Christmas.

In my recent research on Generation Y, I ran across some interesting information: by graduation, most college students will be taking jobs that haven’t even been invented yet. What? It took almost thirty years for my college skills to become obsolete. It will take these Gen Yers only four or five. Facebook, it seems, is better training for what’s to come than their business classes. What’s scarier is I think they already know that.

And that English major I finally decided on? While it sounded useless at the time, I’ve found that writing never goes out of style. There are entirely too many people who feel they can’t do it, making those of us who do write feel pretty special. In an online, global world it’s the difference between success and slinging burgers at McDonalds. It’s likely that soon face-to-face skills may not get you hired – your writing may be all prospective employers know of you. It’s not going to matter how you look on paper, it’s going to matter how you look online.
And all that major-hopping? Well, it turns out that may be a good idea since the average Gen Yer can expect to have half a dozen different careers in their lifetime. Careers, I said, not jobs. It’s an excellent argument for a Liberal Arts education, if you think about it. I won’t mention that in the interviews, though, because they all have parents paying godawful amounts of money to get them in and graduate them out. It’s too expensive to Find Yourself in college by major-hopping now. That revolution will have to get more affordable.

Oh, I’ll probably still include something about the importance of attending more classes than frat parties. With a college education, you must be present to win. As far as choosing a major goes I’m sure I’ll tell them to find their intellectual passion and hang on for the ride of their lives.

And to look me up on Facebook.

An argument for hazard pay, and a poem

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At a workshop I attended this morning, I sat next to a high school teacher I taught with a few years ago before I jumped ship. He told me an interesting story about proctoring an ACT test during which one young lady became horribly, projectile-ill. All over the sacred testing materials and admission ticket. All over everything, it seems, mid-test.

I guess it was time for a break at that point in the testing. That kind of thing tends to start an unstoppable puking chain reaction. And the clean up…there’s that.

A quick phone call to the testing service found them all without protocol for vomit-covered testing materials. The answer, they said, was to put the answer sheet, booklet, and admission ticket into a plastic bag and mail it back to ACT.
That’s right. That test had to be accounted for. So into the ziplock bag it went.

Somewhere soon, an unsuspecting ACT employee will open a box containing a plastic bag…

There are days occasionally stretching into weeks that I’m wracked with guilt over leaving public school teaching. Those students were my light and my life, despite the fact that most of the time I felt like the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe.

In all the time I taught high school English, no one ever put me in a position requiring me to stuff a baggie with puke-covered test booklets. For that, I’m thankful. I’m also thankful for the former colleague who sat beside me today who did, in fact, have to stuff the ziplock. On a Saturday, no less.

Bless his heart.

The whole thing makes me a little misty, so I’m throwing in (at no additional cost) a poem I wrote for my students back then. All of them.
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,

my night flowers, my
charming rascals.

We, the geezers who teach and mother you
want you to know
we delight in you absolutely:
the last-five-minute rising buzz and cackle of
your unwasted youth,
the parlay, dip, and spin of
your endless afternoon,
burst-blooming from your time-lapse
adolescence,
unfurling into women, men.

The thing is, I want to say
you must come back on Monday.
let me count the fingers and toes of you.
Let me convince you poetry can exponentially alter
the mathematics of the universe.
Gravity is not a trick.

You are not just another number.
This is not just another day.