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The Beautiful Struggle:
Teaching the Productivity of Failure in CNF Courses
Megan Brown
3.2
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In the achievement-oriented environment of higher education, situated within the broader context of a culture that encourages even young children to be competitive, well-managed subjects, fear of failure—and resistance to discussing failure—comes as no surprise. Yet, a close look at creative nonfiction writers’ struggles to achieve the goals they set for themselves is productive, in that it can promote student learning about such crucial matters as representation, stylistic experimentation, and process. I define “failure,” here, as the way writers represent their attempts to fulfill difficult, unending, and even unreachable goals in their own work. In the classroom, attempts to address student fears of, and resistance to, such failure do not always go smoothly, but I would like to offer as examples student work and pedagogical approaches focused on three nonfiction texts: Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (co-authored by photographer Walker Evans), Ander Monson’s Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir, and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me. Click here to continue reading.
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Go Craft Yourself:
Conflict, Meaning, and Immediacies Through J. Cole’s “Let Nas Down”
D. Shane Combs
3.2
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As I bring “Let Nas Down” into my introductory writing classes for us to study, I find myself wondering about the role of the life writer in a world where people seem so entrenched in and by their own ideologies. Anyone with a watchful eye and a social media account can see how divided most of us are. It feels, at times, that the world is stuck in J. Cole’s phase one of immediacy: each of us saying wild things in defense of ourselves, our interests, our own hurt feelings. Twitter, as well as other forms of social media, has fostered this cult of immediacy as well as asked us to consider modes and forms of what constitutes personal life writing. Thus, one role of life writing may be to remind each of us that a first impulse is not the only impulse, a first immediacy, no matter how seemingly pressing, is not the only immediacy. When we feel trapped in conflict, as life writers, we can be reminded that the other side of conflict is meaning, is triumph, is the power to define our lives and thinking. With life writing, there are always potentials to be explored. There are nuances to be known. In being life writers, we learn that some emotions are meant to be owned, some to be tried on, and some to be passed over altogether. Our stories, though impacted by the tragedies around us, remain ours for the telling. That is empowering. But it doesn’t start on the page. It starts with crafting our lives, with what we believe life to be and what we believe life could be. And when it seems easier to live and write out of our worst impulses? We must remember the fluidity of life writing, where we can listen before we speak, consider and craft, listen again, reconsider, recraft. Click here to continue reading.
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Brothers, Keepers, Students:
John Edgar Wideman Inside and Outside of Prison
Michael Ranellone
3.2
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I first studied John Edgar Wideman’s Brothers and Keepers in prison. As a sophomore at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York, I’d enrolled in the first incarnation of a literature course titled “Life/Sentences,” which met inside the walls of the state’s only Supermax facility, an hour away in Malone. Every Wednesday, our professor, Bob Cowser, drove eight of us from campus in a Ford E350 van to meet with our eight incarcerated classmates. (It’s important to note that, in keeping with the Temple University Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program guidelines on which the course was based, we as students did not teach the incarcerated men.) We studied alongside them as peers, analyzing works including James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” Ursula K. LeGuin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” Beverly Lowry’s Crossed Over, and, of course, Wideman’s masterpiece. We endeavored to treat our classmates as equals in spite of the prison’s insistence that we call them criminals first, humans second—if at all. Dr. Cowser had chosen the famous Terence quote “Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto / Nothing human is alien to me” as an epigraph for the course. With each hour-long van ride, we set out to test its limits. Click here to continue reading.
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"You have to listen very hard”:
Contemplative Reading, Lectio Divina, and Social Justice in the Classroom
Emma Howes & Christian Smith
3.2
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As educators and scholars, we believe the social justice work contemplative practices have allowed us to conduct in our classrooms is worth the sometimes difficult experiences of opening conversations around race and identity. We are admittedly at the beginning of this journey ourselves and are grateful for institutions like The Center for Contemplative Mind in Society that have allowed us to learn and connect with others who share this mission. In moving forward, though, we continue to explore the ways non-fiction and contemplative practices can create a space where students can enter into new discourses with a sharper understanding of self and other, moving them—and ourselves—towards greater compassion and more ethical ways of being in the world. Click here to continue reading.
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