Capitulation and Recapitulation

Phhhhhhheeeewwww….

What was that? Could it be? A sigh of relief? Maybe…

I don’t know if it’s just the weather (gorgeous) or all the final performances/projects/events going on around me, but all of a sudden it’s spring, undeniably spring. Even an avowed grump like myself can’t trundle on quite as grumpy and stressed out as before. Bind Their Wombs wrapped up with a sold-out final performance on Saturday (more when I get the pictures!). The trees outside FPH are getting their bloom on. And on Friday I went for a barefoot walk at the Hampshire Farm and saw a mass of second-year bullfrog tadpoles and a very excited flock of White Throated Sparrows.

The sparrows shouldn’t be that much of a surprise – they winter in Massachusetts – but both they and I have been cold and reclusive for months, and anyway I’ve never seen quite as many of them altogether as I did on Friday – there must have been fifty at least in the brush between the tomato fields and the cow pasture. Along with the song sparrows, white throats were pretty much the first sparrows I learned to pick out from the lumpy subcategory of “little brown birds.” They’re bigger than house sparrows, and their striped heads and bright yellow nares make them an easy spot once you know what you’re looking for. Also, they’re just uncommon enough in the places I tend to walk that every time I see one I get a little thrill, something like doing laundry and finding five dollars that I’d forgotten in the pocket of my jeans. They make me feel lucky. Hope a thing with feathers, etc. Someday soon, when I’m done with all this – and I’ll be working until at least the afternoon of May 6th – I have to get myself up to Mt. Holyoke and go birding.

Finished up my Div 3 retrospective last Wednesday. The idea of the retro is to reflect on the process of your project, recapitulate what you did, identify what problems emerged, the things you’re proud of and the things you need to work on. The actual requirements vary from Committee to Committee. Action Deb told me to write something informal to remind her of what exactly I’ve done this year so she can include everything in my final evaluation; my friends Joe and Pete are writing more involved artists’ statements, of which I am jealous and which I plan to do myself when I have a little more time. Still, all this retrospecting got me to thinking about Higher Education (it doesn’t take much to get me thinking about ‘higher education’), so it was amusing to me to read Mark Taylor’s op-ed in the New York Times about The End of Universities as We Know Them. He’s talking about grad school, of course, but many of his points about the structure of teaching and learning in your typical institutions of higher learning are the same ones that Hampshire faculty and administration are always pointing to when they try and explain how different and valuable the Hampshire education is. Our system hinges on direct interaction between undergrads and their faculty – we have no web of graduate students and teaching assistants propping up the system. [Instead, we have visiting professors and an overworked faculty. What can I say - you can’t have everything…] We’re already heavily invested in institutional collaboration; honestly, we couldn’t exist without the Five College Consortium – we’re practically the parasitic orchid sprouting from the better-funded resources of Smith and Amherst. Our professors don’t have tenure, interdisciplinarity is built into our academic structure, and Div 3s (structured as “mini-dissertations”) often take untraditional forms. We have our own problems (MANY of them. Don’t even get me started on what they’re doing to the office of Residential Life next year…), and as an institution we waste a lot of time and energy designing programs and “improvements” to the curriculum/school structure that generally end in disappointing compromise and wasted money. I don’t think Taylor knows quite the organizational mess he’s getting himself in to when he talks about replacing departments with flexible programs. But still – I love my school, and it’s a kick to see someone arguing for a more Hampshiresque mainstream in education, at least at the graduate level.

I would argue with (or add to?) Taylor’s article that not only are graduate students being trained to do jobs that aren’t available (jobs as university faculty) but also that the whole concept of higher education as a career path – as a single “field” – is untenable. I might be committing treason here: as the daughter (And niece. And granddaughter…) of academics and as a soon-to-be college graduate, I owe a hell of a lot to the institution of American higher education. I wouldn’t for a second argue that colleges and universities are outdated, or even that they’re quite as removed from the world as some (whoever finds it convenient at the time to talk about how incurably cloistered academia is – ahem, FOX News) would have you believe. There’s certainly been a lot of changes in education “as we know it” in the last thirty years. But just as there is much criticism of business schools (and, to a lesser degree, other career-track educational fields) for turning out graduates with no breadth of knowledge and no skills in critical thinking, I think we could – I think we need – to be more critical of how the current system of graduate schools and universities allows (hell – encourages) those widely read critical thinkers to go straight into grad school, specialize, then spend the next thirty years frantically publishing and teaching and arguing about the structure of higher education. I’ve got a lot more to say about that than I have space or time (that old excuse), but in short…In CalTech’s commencement address last year, Radiolab’s Robert Krulwich made a plea to scientists: that they do their best to explain what they do in plain language, to the average unscientific listener, because (he says) the other side, the religious luddites, sure do, and it’s important for the ordinary people without advanced degrees to get both sides of the story. (I’m paraphrasing badly – to hear the address, search WNYC for the show ‘Tell Me a Story’). In the humanities, I think the opposite is true: we need to free ourselves from advanced degrees. The greatest advantage graduate school bestows upon its suppliants is the academic community, a place where ideas and opinions are supported and refined, where (ideally) students are constantly exposed to new ideas and opinions. Why can’t this kind of community be created outside the confines of an institution? I don’t know. I’ll get back to you…

And with that…phew…back to work. In case you were interested, here’s that rough draft of my retrospective. I really want to expand the middle part into something like an artist’s statement on how fiction is inherently empathetic and cross-cultural, but I’ll save that until I have time to breathe. The original had footnotes. I’ve put some of them in brackets, but I’m not pleased about the change. [It’s just less classy…]

Sixteen months. Four of them writing…
That’s how long I’ve been working on this Thing, counting from December 26th, 2007 when I first read the name Ceausescu in the (otherwise completely unrelated) book Monster of God by nature writer David Quammen to the day (today) I turn in my retrospective. We could probably tack on another month or two to the tally for the time it will actually take me to edit and rewrite to my own satisfaction, so…this project is an eighteen-month old. A terrifying age. If my Division III were a child, it would be walking.

What was I doing all that time I wasn’t writing? Well, let’s see…

- I learned Romanian. Studied three semesters of it through the Five College Language Center at UMass with at least two ‘A’ grades (Note – Div 3 Learning Activity #1) According to my current tutor, I could call myself ‘conversationally fluent.’ As far as I can tell, this means I can catch a train, order food and yell things at other cars while driving.
- Spent six months researching Romanian history, from pre-Roman to post-Communist eras, wrote a fifteen page research paper on Romania, from prehistory-1952 as part of my Div 2 final portfolio, then came back and did even more research after my trip.
- I applied for and won a competitive grant from CORC to partially fund my research/volunteer work in Romania over the summer.
- I spent approximately three months, from May to August 2008, living and working at the Pro Vita Children’s home in Valea Screzii, Romania.

If I were to go back in time and tell my eighteen-months-ago self about all of this, she’d probably be a little surprised – it was only November 2007 when I was all set to go to Ethiopia for a semester [These plans fell through when Ethiopia went to war with Eritrea; Kenya, the location my backup plan, had a crooked election followed by rioting. A month later, I was signing up for Romanian classes. “Oh life is a glorious cycle of song” indeed…]. But if I showed her my research, my plans, and the finished story, she’d recognize it in a second as the same old project idea I’ve been sitting on, more or less, for the last three years. As I wrote at the tail end of my second year:

“I have no country I particularly want to experience…what I know is that I want to go to a country about which I have very little previous knowledge, to immerse myself in this entirely unknown culture and, through study and experience, make that country and its people something familiar enough to me, something I am engaged with fully enough…to write about it.”

On my bad days, I worry about this plan: “Am I just a cultural mercenary? Am I just avoiding telling my own stories? Do I have the right to write about these things?” On my good days, I can answer myself – “Yes. Maybe. Get over yourself.” It’s true that I have a phobia of writing about things too close to my own experience [A fear created by too many writing workshops, though perhaps now that Romania is out of the way, I will be free to write self-involved prose about college students and their hijinks.]. I came to writing almost as an excuse for my need to try and understand EVERYTHING, and I have a real tendency to turn anything that interests me into a story. But whether I am writing about Romanian orphans or Johannes Kepler or my own grandmother, I approach my subjects the way my work as a CA has taught me to approach other people – as a listener. The heart of my writing is empathy.

Story and Style

It would be a lie to say that writing was easy after all that preparation. Still, for all my whining and flailing around, I feel that the heart of this project – my personal experience of being ‘foreign’ in Romania, the personal stories of the kids I met at Pro Vita, my fascination with Romanian “community dogs” – was well-established even before I left Romania. Writing, as far as I’m concerned, is just a series of choices; my job this year was to make the choices that best served the story that already existed somewhere back there in my brain. I knew from the beginning, I wanted to write fiction [ There was some confusion about this, but not on my part. David Quammen, author of the book that started it all, mentioned that he started as a novelist but advised that I think about “a nice little piece of nonfiction” instead. After reading one of his novels, I can understand why he would take his own advice. For my part, fiction was the right choice.]

The Dog voice came to my head, so I read dog-voiced books and experimented. I experienced Romania as an American, so I added an American: Hannah’s voice, which is the closest to my natural writing style, gave me a path into the story I’d created. I’d schemed and plotted, but until I started working with Hannah, I physically couldn’t write. I plotted two completely different books – a 30-character version of the current story and something I think I characterized as “a road trip through the entirety of Romanian history with The Devil” – that both expert advice and my own intuition demanded that I scrap in favor of something more breathable (Even though the second involved scrapping a fully-written piece, the one in which Hannah and the old woman I later split into the two characters of Elena and Doamna Thereze try and chase a cow out of the kitchen). I tried to make one or the other of the voices third person; they insisted on remaining first person. I tried getting rid of the most difficult voice, the Romanian Vassilike; the story fell flat without his insight. The choice to have an alternating, three-voice narrative, which now that I think about it is probably the most distinguishing structural feature of the entire piece, was barely a conscious choice on my part. I knew I was creating a place; I knew that there were many people in this place; I knew that no single person was in the position to understand everything that was going on there – only the writer. Or the reader.
I can remember that none of these were simple choices, but when I finally made them, the elements clicked into place like the squares of a Rubix cube – as if the solution had been there all along, waiting for me to stop being dense. There was a point in late March when I realized that plot points were adding themselves without my knowledge. “Dogs are the spirits of the dead? Wait! What’s going on here? I started with what I knew, because that was the only way to measure what I was working towards; now, I measure my success by the things I didn’t expect, the little surprises that grew naturally from the framework I created. I still have writing and editing to do, and it will be done. There is nothing left that I do not know how to finish.

Demons
Since I was seven [The age I determined that I would have to be either a writer or an archeologist. Or a movie star. Or the governor of Texas], the biggest problems of my working life have been time management and self-doubt. THIS year, writing THIS story, my biggest problems have been time management and self-doubt. At least I’m consistent.
The actual strains of writing – plotting, cultivating, ruthlessly cutting apart – are something I have been working with for a very long time; I don’t enjoy them, but I’m good at them. Still, writing itself is a lonely, fitful occupation, and knowing this does not make it any easier to accomplish. Writing all the time is not a sustainable way of life for me – I write about other people – so I’ve worked very hard to balance my personal work and my involvement in the community that supports me. This has mostly worked very well, especially in the area of feedback about my writing: I chose not to be involved in any writing courses this year but I’ve kept a Div 3 Blog and helped organize an unofficial Div 3 writer’s group, both of which have provided me with a lot of helpful suggestions and a community of people invested in my work. Still, I consistently take on work for other projects – acting in a play, agreeing to extra work or volunteer hours – which take important time from my writing and I generally do this with the idea that this other work is somehow more worthwhile than my own. The play, which went up in late April, especially messed with my editing schedule. I enjoyed the experience, but I will not be choosing acting over writing again any time soon. This piece is safe – it’s escaped the labyrinth – it’s done. But I need to watch these things if I’m going to go ahead and write the next one…