Art & Intent

I'm having trouble my students always complained about in which I feel that there's nothing to write. I've committed to writing a daily blog post during these tough times but this morning I've had nothing to say. That's how it feels.

But I know better.

There's plenty to say, it's just that none of it seems worthy of putting out into the world. There's a guy I read online who posts almost everything he does and thinks. I skip eighty percent of his posts because they offer me nothing. However, the other twenty percent of posts are good. Were we friends and not living so far apart, I would ask him to explain how the eighty percent is any better than pictures of dinner and dessert that people post online. Does anyone enjoy looking at those?

Writing for others, I have to consider, well, others. I don't have to cater to them, but I have to be presenting something to them. What I'm writing now may not be useful to some, but I'm writing it with intent, to stress (again) that writing and creating are things we have to keep doing for ourselves and others, and that we need to create with intent.

My friend relayed advice he had read that every single photograph has to tell a story, has to have some message. We rolled our eyes, not because it's a bad idea but because it's too simplistic. Creative endeavors must have intent (not necessarily a message) to take an audience somewhere. Art is a vehicle. Where it takes us is up to artist and audience, and is dependent on the moment.

My writing may or may not be art. It is intended as such by me, but that's only part of the equation. It is however, the only part of the equation I control, so the thing to do is to keep making art and hold onto my intent.

At the top, I talked about students I taught over twenty-four years when I was a public school teacher. I've left that career but artists remain teachers. My friend's art teachers challenging lessons by refusing easy prettiness. My writing teaches by mining my experience while trying not to be too pedantic, narcissistic, or boring.

When I approach making art with intent, it's easy to feel there's nothing within me worthy of such a thing. Nonsense. Not all of what I think, feel, and experience should be shared, but much more of it is worthy than I tend to want to believe.

Two last things:

As always, the keys are to start and keep going. I sat and typed the first thing that came to my mind then kept going until I said the last word.

Art doesn't come out the first time, so I went back to the top and shaped what I had put down. Revision took the half-baked, self-centered, indulgent thoughts and created something for an audience that just might be, if I did it right, artful. At least it was done with that intent and showed me again that there is always something to write. I'll keep writing.

Assignments

The schools around us are closing. My daughter's school is trying to hold out until Friday. Some of their reasons are good. The schools are the primary meal service for many city children and arrangements must be made to feed them. Some of their reasons aren't as good. There's the idea that schooling has to continue. Let's face that schooling will be limited-to-nonexistent over the next month or two (or three). I say close the schools immediately, take aggressive action to flatten the curve, then address feeding the kids, but I'm not in charge of anyone but myself and my child, so there's that.

A couple schools are opening Monday so students can get homework and technology . I get that and kind of support it though I still think we need to be much more aggressive responding to this virus. I also have little faith in homework making much difference. Still, as a recovering English teacher, I have ideas about what I would assign.

1. Send them with a couple books. I'd grab a few class sets of books and give each kid a couple. While separated physically we might connect a little around the same text. I'm not stupid enough to think every kid would read these things and don't care about getting everyone. It might be a comfort and use for some of them and that's good enough.

2. More books. Raid the library for a couple hundred books and get kids to choose two. If they read them, great. If they think about reading them, okay. If they don't read them, that's fine too. The books would be there in case they tired of Instagram. (Yeah, right.) I'd send no assignment with the books other than to take them and maybe read for fun. Crazy thought, I know.

3. If I had them, I would send every kid home with a fresh notebook to write while we are out of school. A page a day, but don't get stuck on the numbers. Write when you see, read, hear, or say something interesting. Paste into it. Draw. Write what you think and feel. Write questions, answers, plans, fears, and dreams. Just write. Create a record of this time in your lives.

4. Do some kindness for someone. Stay eight feet away but make contact. Call, text, send video. Leave food outside someone's door. Do secret, anonymous good deeds. Write it all in your notebook.

5. Don't sweat school. You'll learn more during this experience than you'd ever could in my damn classroom. Be strong, be brave, be curious, and for God's sake wash your hands.

Then I'd tell them to get the hell out and go home. School closed, I'd pack my things, wash my hands, and return to my family to wait this thing out, write, read, and hope for the best.

Once A Writing Teacher

I no longer teach writing for a living. I still write. That's more what my job entails now whereas it was just a benefit of the job I used to have. Teaching writing, I found it useless to ask kids to do as I said. They didn't much listen to me. But they sure watched me carefully. "Yo, what's up with that weird ass pen?" they asked about my fountain pen. "What the fuck do you have to write about in all them pages?" they wondered seeing my writer's notebook. "You like writing? That's straight up bullshit, nigga," to which I shrugged and admitted my guilt. In class, I wrote to show them about writing, but I also just wanted time with my pen. There are few things, yo, I like better than filling pages with my thoughts, and that's no bullshit, nigga. No bullshit whatsoever.

Though I'm out of the classroom, I still have opportunities and some obligation to teach writing. Yesterday, a colleague asked me to review a piece they had written. (I'm using the plural pronoun for anonymity.) They sent me a draft of something they needed to get right. Would I look it over? Sure, I said, but with some trepidation.

Here's the thing: most people don't separate their writing from themselves or their selves from their writing. Kids in school are often better at this than adults. Maybe kids are more used to it or I built relationships I haven't yet had time to build with colleagues. Whatever the case, I know that when asked to look over a colleague's writing, they're asking me to correct typos and then say it's great. If I was still in school, I could get away with that.

(In school I often told students their drafts were better than they really were. This softened things enough that they could listen to the single bit of criticism they most needed to hear. Rather than say an entire piece was out of order, convoluted, and unbelievable, I focused on the sound of the opening and how it related (or didn't relate) to what came next. Your piece is good got us to where I could teach them something.)

I do some of that with adults too. Yesterday, I said (mostly in truth) that they had written a complete, exact, and authoritative piece. Then I said, it's too long. Length matters. (Damn it.) In the case of writing, shorter is better than longer. What's true in the other realms, I don't want to consider here.

Prior to this paragraph, the first draft of this piece was 626 words long. That's not bad. Anything under a thousand is about right for me though I believe anything online that's over seven hundred words won't be read top to bottom. I don't fuss over word count yet. I haven't finished whatever I'm going to say. (Note that I don't know what I'll say until I've said all of it. I begin with an idea, but writing shapes that idea and the shape of writing it. For instance, I had no idea this would have so many damn parentheticals.) I'll keep writing until I've said whatever it is I end up saying.

Then I'll prune the living crap out of it.

In my mother's front lawn is a shrub that was half again as tall and a third again as wide. It had grown to obscure Mom's window and taken over the garden. My brother took it way down and the whole place is better for it.

It will be the same with this piece. (The 626 words became 431.)

It was the same with my colleagues' piece. I told them to remember that people need the fewest words and shortest draft possible. I put that very delicately but still worried sending that email — an email I cut by one quarter in the second draft.

The delicacy of that email grew from knowing how people conflate their identity with their writing. They should because I perceive who people are from how they present. I once worked with a spectacular person who could not spell. His writing would have embarrassed us both he was aware (and secure) enough to have me rewrite his stuff. Maybe my colleague now will be open to learning how to be concise. Maybe not.

I started this by saying I no longer teach writing. I hear you calling bullshit on that, yo. I'd revise the beginning, but instead I'll focus on pruning (significantly) and leave the beginning so as to set up this ending. If that's wrong, someone will let me know. Probably by saying, Brian, this is good piece and you're a good guy. Now about that beginning paragraph...

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I have no idea if Alan Jacobs reads this blog (I'd like to think that he does and you should definitely read his), but this appeared the next day. Coincidence? Yeah, probably. Still, I like to dream.

Scuffing

At a coffee shop waiting to meet a person, I heard someone else say my name. It was a guy I worked with when I was in college and he was in high school. We always got along, helped by a shared fondness for Springsteen's Tunnel Of Love and singing while we were supposed to be stocking shelves, filling propane tanks, cleaning, or helping customers with plumbing questions. I felt myself open into a smile and reached to shake his hand.

We talked like semi-old men. I asked about his girls, and he said that he had just been telling one of them about our old boss. I said, I've seen him around town a couple times. I didn't mention his red baseball hat that marks him as exactly the kind of man he was and always will be. I just said I'd seen him.

"He's still alive?" my friend asked, feigning shock. I nodded and admitted that I had avoided conversation. I hadn't even waved. He hadn't seem to recognize me or chose to act as though he hadn't.

My friend said he had told his girl about maybe the one bit of wisdom our boss had ever knowingly imparted to anyone.

It was back when my friend was walking around the store in untied work boots, clunking and scuffing along as was the style then (and maybe now too). Our boss called from his office, come in here. My friend went, expecting to be told to clean out the shed, vacuum the housewares section, or restock the pesticides, but no, our boss said, _don't let me hear you scuffing your boots like that. You sound lazy."

Our old boss had been wrong about many things, but both my friend and I agreed if you sound lazy, you might as well be lazy, and then forget about you.

When I taught kids who were all but labeled stupid, I told them to try and sound smart. If you sound smart, people may think you're smart, and that's almost as good because it gets you in with smart people which makes you smarter. On the flip-side, if your go-to words are fuck, nigga, and bitch, you sound anything but smart and the world will gladly treat you as such.

I heard arguments for the culture of those words, but they're the same arguments for scuffing boots. No matter what, these things project our identity and are how others project identities onto us.

My friend and I smiled at the story. The person I was meeting arrived. I shook my friend's hand again and he went on his way. The person I met had the feeling I was more capable than I really am. I've projected confidence. After our meeting, I walked out of the shop and across the street, my shoes tight against my feet, not scuffing even a little.