Bleak Houses and Little Houses on the Prairie

Today is the 200th birthday of Charles Dickens, an author whom I have both loved and loathed.  I first fell in love with A Christmas Carol, the pathway of many people into the work of Dickens.  I wonder how Dickens would feel if he came to us today, and we told him of the popularity of that work.  Would he say, "Great!  I'm just happy someone is still reading my work.  It was hard enough to get readers and keep them during my day."  Maybe he would say, "Hey, I'm owed some royalties.  But what else is new?"  I've often wondered if he would say, "But I worked so much harder on works that I'd prefer you consider my masterpieces!"

I've read many of those masterpieces, but there are huge gaps in my Dickens reading.  I've read Bleak House, but only after I tried to slog through it several times before the year I finally finished it.   It's one of many classics where I can recognize the art and the mastery, while being exhausted by it.

I much prefer Hard Times.  It seems like the perfect Dickens work to me, with its scathing criticism of industrialization, education, and the plight of the poor.  I hated Great Expectations.  I felt guilty about that, until I read this great article that explores myths about Dickens in the Sunday The Washington Post.  The author says that "it has always seemed odd to me that teachers think Great Expectations is a good novel for young adults. Just when they are embarking on their adult lives, we give them this story that says: You will never fully comprehend the most important events in your life while they are happening. Any plans you make will not work out — and you may grow up to be a jerk. If you are lucky, however, a series of traumatic events will wake you up and show you how insufferable you have become."

I also love Oliver Twist.  Sure, there's that unfortunate musical that makes it look like being an orphan boy in Victorian London would be a fun romp.  But go back to read the book.  Again, Dickens shows us the precariousness of life in Victorian London.  And this book shows the plight of women, in some poignant ways.

Dickens is one of those authors whose personal life might impact our opinion of him.  He had a wife, but he took up with an actress.  He separated from his blameless wife who had borne him 10 children.  I know that many academics would tell us that it's not fair to judge writers by modern standards or by our own morality, but I don't always agree.

If you want a celebration of Dickens, I loved this NPR piece this morning.  The audio will be up shortly, but you can read the transcript now.

Today is also the birthday of Laura Ingalls Wilder, the first author whom I loved completely.  I have written about the impact of her Little House series before, so I won't belabor the biographical details or my own fascination with/yearning for homesteading.

The biographical piece of her life that jumped out at me this morning was that she didn't start writing until she was in her 60's.  I felt this odd surge of hope.  We're surrounded by stories of people who lose their jobs when they're in their late 40's or 50's, and we hear about how dim their chances are of ever getting full-time work again.

Yet there are plenty of alternate stories of people who make a profound switch at midlife or early old age.  It's never too late to reinvent ourselves!

Or, as another British Victorian writer, George Eliot, would remind us, it's never too late to become the person you were meant to become.

Turning Points and the Roads Not Taken

Yesterday, while the rest of the world got ready for its annual football extravaganza, we watched The Turning Point, which I hadn't seen since the late 70's.

How did I come to watch this movie?  Someone asked me if I knew that Shirley MacLaine had been a dancer, and I thought about this movie.  When I saw we could stream it on Netflix, that was that.  We've spent a lot of time streaming old Westerns.  It was time for a ballet movie.

For a movie released in 1977, it holds up well.  The ballet scenes, of course, are timeless.  Even the clothes, which are so 1970's, didn't distract.  The shots of 1977 New York City fed a hunger I didn't even know I had:  New York, back when it was really gritty!  And look, the World Trade Center towers, just after they were built!

How strange to think how the world barely knew Barishnikov when the movie was released.  As I watched him dance, I thought of his character in Sex and the City, and how he never really changes his look radically.

It's strange to watch this movie from this vantage point in my life.  When I first watched it, I was the young drama student, taking dance classes, taking drama classes, dreaming of Broadway.  I knew that I would never, NEVER, make choices I would regret later.  I would never wonder about the roads not taken.

Ah, the certitude of youth.  What vanity.

Now, of course, I know that I will always wonder about the roads not taken, even if I'm sure I made the right decisions or the decisions that were right for me at the time.

I wonder if people stop thinking about turning points in the roads of their lives as they get older.  It would be a relief.  Maybe it's similar to weight loss and body image.  Through the years, it's become abundantly clear to me that to have the angular body I think that I want, I'd have to cut my calories to about 900 a day--and even then, I'd probably be a curvy kind of angular.  I will never have the ballerina body I would like to have, and as the years have gone on, I've quit trying and quit yearning to have something so different than what I do have.

Maybe some day, it will be the same with careers.  Maybe some day, I will quit thinking about career paths I didn't take.

I also found myself thinking about the more recent movie Black Swan, and how I just could not slog through it.  Hmm.

And I thought about going to traditional ballets when I was in high school, how I found Swan Lake just so boring, but I knew I wasn't supposed to find it boring.  Once a modern dance troupe came through town, and I found their dances electrifying.  I felt like I was liking all the wrong things.

Of course, now, I realize that there are plenty of art forms for us all.  How lucky I was to have had access to both traditional ballet and modern dance.  And now, thanks to all sorts of cable and online resources--and of course, PBS--we have access to all sorts of art forms we would never have seen back in 1977.

Writing Prayers, Paying Taxes

I've been thinking about the fact that last year, I would have been at the AWP conference and loving every minute of it.  I had planned to attend in Chicago this year, but I will not be there.  Once the main conference hotel sold out before I had a chance to make reservations, I was less happy about going to Chicago in the winter and trekking back and forth between hotels.  Then I realized that I had been thinking that the conference was on a different week-end, and the week-end that it was actually happening wasn't as convenient.  As always, there is no travel money from my school; I should start looking for some travel money/grant money for next year, and I should start doing that now.  And it's a lot of money, and I had hopes that I would be selling our condo, which would mean that next year, I may have some extra cash, but this year, I had to bring a chunk of money to closing.

I'm trying not to kick myself for missing all the great readings this year--and I could have been part of 2 of them, because of publications in the past year.  Last year, no readings.

More importantly, I'm trying not to feel sad about the opportunities I will miss to meet people, especially people with whom I already have a connection because of my online life.  I'm hoping that we're all young enough that we can look forward to future possibilities.

Yes, let me begin to plan ahead for AWP 2013 in Boston.  I want to put together a panel presentation on women writers and how we use fairy tales; I want it to be accepted.  I have no power over acceptance, but I can submit.  By the end of February, I'll touch base with all the possible presenters.  Hopefully, they won't say, "I thought she was going to do this last year.  I'm not going to be part of this.  That Berkey-Abbott has no follow-through."

I have a year ago on the brain too, because it was a year ago that I was asked to write prayers for a daily devotional book.  I wrote this post about the serendipitous way that this assignment came about and about the AWP presenters would have told me not to write for such a tiny amount of money and why I thought they were wrong.

I wrote those prayers and loved the experience.  I wrote about it here.  It's continued to tug at me.  I'd like to create a curriculum for seminarians to talk about spiritual writing beyond the sermons that they might write.  I've noticed that many pastors either don't write prayers at all or miss opportunities in their prayer writing.  I think that poetry has a lot to teach prayer writers.

I just got an offer to be part of this year's project, and I immediately wrote to say yes.  The editor also told us that the 2011 edition of the devotion book has sold out.  Wow.

Yesterday I got my contributor's copy of Women on Poetry:  Writing, Revising, Publishing, and Teaching, a book which likely will not sell out.  It's a great collection of essays, but at $45, I wonder how many people will be able to afford it.  Ah well.  I enjoyed writing the essay that's in the book, and I'm happy to get a copy.

Again, I think of those people at the AWP panel who would tell me that I was ripped off, that someone is making money from this book, and it's not me.  They would tell me that I need to stop writing for contributor's copies.

Of course, when I do my taxes next week-end, I may wish that I had been paid more in contributor's copies, less in dollars.  When I do my taxes a year from now, the condo sale at a loss will help offset my writerly gains, such as they may be.  This year, we shall see.

Don't get me wrong; I'm incredibly grateful to be paid in real cash for some of the writing I've been doing.  That's relatively new for me in my writing life.  I have hopes that money from my writing will continue to come in to my household.  I should be a bit more intentional in my taxes and the business side of my writing life.  That will be my goal for 2012, one of many goals.

Constructing Poems, Constructing Reading

I finally got around to writing a poem about Jesus and the modern Lego set.  You may or may not remember that I have lamented that modern Legos don't seem to snap together as easily as older sets, and you've got a wider variety of Lego shapes.  What does Jesus have to do with this?  My brain swirled with Jesus as stumped creator, Jesus being taught by children.  As I wrote, I thought about my process and how the Internet has changed my process.

Some of the ways are obvious.  When I couldn't remember the specific names of children's construction toys of earlier generations, I didn't have to wait until the library opened.  For some poems, I've done Internet research in the middle of the poem composing, and the poem has gone in surprising directions that wouldn't have happened, if I hadn't stopped to research.  Often, the pictures that I find spark something that I didn't have before.

Once, I thought I had to have the poem written in my head and that I had to sit and stare at a notebook and not get up until I had a finished draft.

Now, thanks largely to the Internet, I've realized that there are a wide variety of ways of composing.  I've been fascinated by Sandy Longhorn's process (go here for an example).  When she's stuck, she often turns to books of poems and creates word banks and goes in remarkable-sounding directions.  And she starts composing before she sits down, largely by reminding herself the night before that she's got a writing appointment in the morning.

I've been noticing how much time I spend waiting for meetings to start.  I should start jotting down ideas.  I tend to like to write in the dark hours of the morning when I know I won't be disturbed.  What might I create if I knew I only had a few minutes so that I had to make them count?

I've also been thinking about the ways that the Internet has changed reading.  Dale Favier has a great post on the so-called death of the author.  He points out that "mainstream publishing was never good for writers. It never employed even a sizable fraction of the good ones. It promoted an idea of the “author” – meaning always and only, someone who writes a new novel every year or two for decades – that is limited and deadening. And it was incredibly centralized: the whole system orbited around a close, interlinked coterie of the graduates of a few universities, who had moved on (or, usually, back) to live one of the three capitals of literary English."

He concludes by celebrating the brave new world that the Internet has wrought:  "The fact that the dissemination of writing has become so cheap as to make it nearly free, that the classics are readily available, that the wealth of the literary world stands open to anyone who can afford an internet connection, is the most wonderful thing that has happened in my lifetime. It is a great good thing, and while I'm not surprised that the people who stood to profit by literary scarcity are complaining about it, I'm not about to join them. Today I will read some marvelous poems that a friend who lives off in the sticks of Kent sent me, and continue to review the manuscript of a terrific book on massage that another friend in Texas is preparing for publication. I wouldn't even know these people, if not for the internet. I would most likely never have seen the work of either of them, under the old dispensation. I'm willing to take the risk, in return, that I might miss Don DeLillo's 16th novel. I'll even forgo the $50,000 advance that Random House was poised to offer me to continue writing this blog."

I've noticed the appearance of several recent books that explore the issue of reading:  how we read, what we read, how to get more joy out of reading.  Lauren Winner, who revealed herself to be a voracious reader in her memoir Girl Meets God, reviews several of them in this essay which becomes more of a meditation on reading than a simple review.

For my next book club meeting, I've been slogging through James Michener's The Source, a book that clocks in at over 1000 pages.  You might ask, "How did you come to choose a book that's over 1000 pages?"


Well, about 6 months ago, we were reminiscing about books that had influenced us, and we talked about reading The Source--at least two of us read it long ago, and we talked about learning about the Middle East by reading Michener. I innocently said, "I wonder if we'd still see it as so revelatory now."

In my younger days, back in high school before I could drive, I could have finished this book in a week.  But now, I don't have those wide swaths of time.  It's thrilling to be reading a really big book.  I had forgotten.

Candlemas Inspirations and the Question of Being a "Religious Poet"

So, the groundhog saw his shadow yesterday.  Many of us are saying, "Six more weeks of winter?  We haven't had much winter yet."

Still, this time of year can be difficult for many of us.  The days are getting longer, but the shift is still barely perceptible.  Most of us are still driving home from work at dusk.  We're still months away from light-filled evenings.

If you need a boost, I'd recommend this post by Christine Valters Paintner.  She reminds us:  "In the northern hemisphere the time around February 1-2 is a potent time. On the Celtic wheel of the year it is Imbolc (meaning 'in the belly' and also refers to the lactation of the ewes), which is one of the cross-quarter days falling between the Solstice and the Equinox. Imbolc marks the first day of spring in Ireland, the time when the very beginning of earth's stirrings and awakenings from winter can be witnessed. As the days slowly lengthen and the sun makes her way higher in the sky, the ground beneath our feet begins to thaw. The earth's belly softens and the seeds deep below slowly rumble in the darkness. New life is getting ready to sprout forth."

She gives us some questions, along with a guided meditation, to help us discern what we might hope to germinate during this time.

I've been thinking of requiring a bit more of myself on the poem composition front.  I've been doing a fairly good job at writing one poem a week and actually working with it until it is finished, at least for the time being.  This post by Rachel Barenblat has made me think about doing more, with more discipline.

She writes about feedback she got as an MFA student:  "One of my poetry teachers noted that my best poems were frequently the Jewish ones, and urged me to try writing psalms and prayers. At the time, I didn't know the psalms well enough to really engage with that task, and I wasn't entirely comfortable with my own prayer life (or lack thereof) so writing prayers seemed implausible. So I filed the suggestion away for another day. But I couldn't seem to shake the idea -- or the growing desire to figure out how and whether I could use poetry to engage with Judaism in my own way."

She eventually went on to become a rabbi, a move that might have surprised her MFA self.  She writes about thinking of herself as a religious poet:  "I quail a bit at the term, because it so immediately suggests to me someone who writes the kind of saccharine devotional verse one might find on a cheesy greeting card. And yet there's no arguing with the fact that I am both religious (by my own lights, anyway) and a poet, and that my poetry often arises out of or wrestles with my experience of religious life."


She also writes about writing a response to each week's Torah reading, a response which early on manifested itself as a poem.  She has continued to write a poem a week in response to the Torah.

As a Lutheran, I'm part of a religious tradition that has a set of readings from the Bible each day and each week, a common lectionary used by many Christians.  I've been writing a weekly meditation on the Gospel.  It never occurred to me to write a poem.

Sure, I'd occasionally find inspiration from one of the readings and follow it where it led.  But what will happen if I approach this process more intentionally?

The Gospel reading for this Sunday (Mark 1:29-39) has Jesus healing Simon Peter's mother-in-law, who immediately gets up from her sickbed to make a meal.  There's plenty of inspiration there.  One of the early disciples has a mother-in-law?  Where is the wife who presupposes mother-in-law?  And the sick woman gets up to make a meal?  What's that about?

Some of you might say that it just shows that some things never change, that woman will get up from their sickbeds, even when they're burning with fever, to do things for the family, like cooking dinner or doing the laundry.

Some of us might aks "What's the story behind all that busyness?"

And some of us might write a poem!

And for those of you mourning the death of Wislawa Szymborska and/or needing to read some great poems of hers, I highly recommend this post by Beth Adams and this post by John Z. Guzlowski.

The Cost of College: The Next Bubble?

Today is the birthday of James Joyce.  I've written about him several times on this blog.  My favorite post is here.

It's rather accidental that I have anything to say about Joyce at all.  When I got to grad school and pored over the list of classes I could take, I discovered that most of them were full. As a new grad student, I was last to register. And so I found myself in Tom Rice's class on James Joyce. What a life-changing experience that was.

It never occurred to me to protest the fact that so few classes were available to me.  Would I have felt differently if I had been paying rates similar to today's students?  My grad school tuition was dirt cheap.  I had a teaching assistantship, so I paid a few hundred dollars a year, could take all the classes I wanted, taught a few classes, and got a meager stipend.  I graduated with no debt.  Sure, I couldn't afford to use the air conditioner in the South Carolina summer months, but I graduated with no debt.  My undergraduate education was more expensive, but I got scholarships and grants, so it never cost more than $1000 a year (in 1983-1987 dollars).

The situation for today's students has changed dramatically.  In this article in The Washington Post, Matt Miller offers these statistics:  "In 1980-81, tuition, room and board at public four-year institutions averaged about 12 percent of median family income; for private four-year colleges, the figure was 26 percent of family income (see the nearby table, developed by my colleague Steve Steigleder at the Center for American Progress). That’s a pretty serious affordability crunch three decades ago. By 2009-10, however, a year at public institutions consumed roughly a quarter of median family income, while at private colleges the figure had jumped to nearly 54 percent."


I've spent some time thinking about these kind of facts and wondering if Higher Education will be the next bubble to burst.  We certainly seem to be headed in that direction.  We are at the end of a baby boom of students, for one thing.  Five to ten years from now, there simply won't be as many U.S. students who are traditional college-age.

Of course, there will be other students:  traditional college-age adolescents from other countries, adults who need a degree.  But the demand will have changed.

The larger issue, which few colleges and universities have started to address, is that the business model has changed to something unsustainable.  When I was in undergraduate school, the shift from having states pay for post-high school education to having students pay for it had just begun.  Now, three decades later, it's almost complete.

Students have relied increasingly on loans to fund increasingly expensive educations.  That was sustainable during an age of easy credit.  Now it is not possible for many students.  Once upon a time, parents might have filled the gap.  Now, with a housing implosion and several years of severe recession, that solution won't work either.

Maybe we are about to enter a golden age of innovation--that's a possible scenario of what might happen when the old ways quit working.  My apocalyptic imagination often thinks of darker dramas.

I have a vested interest, of course.  I work in higher ed, and it has occurred to me that it might be time to come up with a back-up plan, in case the whole bubble pops, and I can't even find adjunct work.

I have friends and colleagues who assure me that the future could never get that grim.  Surely with my Ph.D. and years of teaching English classes of all sorts, I'll always be able to find some kind of work.

But longtime readers of this blog know that I'm haunted by Detroit automakers and newspaper journalists and all sorts of other workers who assumed they were part of American institutions that would not be allowed to fail--and then, they failed.

We hear a lot of politicians bellowing about saving the middle class.  But I suspect that for most of us in the tenuous middle-class, it will simply be up to each of us as individuals to re-invent ourselves, perhaps several times.

I got a wondrous box of books yesterday.  Among the haul:  the latest books by Julia Cameron and Martha Beck.  I'll report more in the coming weeks as I read them.

In the meantime, I have a short story to write.  Two weeks ago, I made a pact with a writer friend of mine who's feeling a lack of focus.  We said that by Feb. 16, we'd each have a rough draft of a short story.  It has to be a new story, not a re-worked story.

I have a writer friend of a different sort (her tastes run to academic writing) who is thinking of blogs and e-books; she wants to know what I know.  Perhaps I'll start to write it down; I think there's a market out there for people who need to come up to speed on social networking and electronic/technological opportunities, but who are easily spooked by it all.

Of course, some people (like Ewan Morrison in this article in The Guardian) would tell us that all this publishing by way of new technology is the next bubble which will pop at some future point.

Maybe I should just stop thinking about bubbles and what will pop next.  Maybe I should just follow my loves and passions and trust that they'll lead me in interesting directions.  Maybe I should resist my urge to overplan, to create not just one back-up plan, but 5 or 6.  After all, it was a happy accident that couldn't have been forestalled by 10 back-up plans that led me to that fateful class (and eventual MA thesis) on James Joyce.

Maybe at midlife, I'll commit to serendipity.

Saint Brigid, Saint Langston, Saint Miss Jean Brodie, and Me

Today is the feast day of St. Brigid, a patron saint of poets, one of those medieval women who was able to accomplish amazing things, despite the fact that she lived in a patriarchal culture that didn't have things upon which I rely, like running water and electricity.  She seemed to have no trouble living a balanced, integrated life.  Why do I find it so hard to achieve balance?

At this post on my theology blog, I wrote:  "Of course, I know Brigid across a space of centuries, through the gauze of hagiography and legend. If Brigid could speak, what would she say? Would she tell us of the sleepless nights where she wondered how she was going to find enough food, enough contributions, to keep her religious orders afloat? Would she bemoan all her administrative duties, which sucked away so much energy, when all she really wanted to do was to illuminate manuscripts?"

Yesterday I went back to finish reading the David Bowie article in Rolling Stone that my administrative duties kept me from completing on Monday.  Thank goodness I don't have many days like Monday!

I was struck by the ending of the article, where the writer claims that David Bowie did more to change rock music than anyone before or since.  Hmm.  He also claims that David Bowie did much to open up society, to make it easier for all of us outcasts to be who we authentically are.  Intriguing.

I will leave aside the discussion of who did more to change rock music, but I will say that the author makes a good case for Bowie; I can't link to the article, alas--you'll have to read it the old-fashioned way, on paper, unless you already subscribe to the magazine.

I woke up this morning thinking about which poet had done the most to change poetry.  I thought about Wordsworth and Whitman and all the 19th century poets who took giant leaps in terms of making the personal a suitable subject for poetry.  I could make the case for numerous female poets.  And of course, there are any number of African-American poets.

Today is the birthday of Langston Hughes, and he would certainly make the short list of poets who transformed the poetry landscape completely because he came along.  You might read his work with no knowledge of his biography and assume that he was part of the Black Arts Movement that came along because of the Civil Rights Movement.  Nope.  He's older than that. 

Along with other artists of the Harlem Renaissance in the 20's, he brought the lives of black Americans into poems.  He also fused what would later be recognized as jazz rhythms into his work.  He championed everyday people, and worked to make the lives of those everyday people better.  He inspired many generations, of all colors, that would follow him.

Today is also the birthday of Muriel Spark, most famous for her slim novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.  When I was in high school, PBS did a special multi-week drama of the book (like Downtown Abbey, but nowhere near as popular).  My  mom and I watched it every Sunday.  We'd make ourselves a special dessert, usually involving ice cream, and we'd settle in for some of the happiest times I remember during that tumultuous period that was 10th grade.


It wasn't until later, in grad school, that I saw Miss Jean Brodie as the problematic character that she was, when I finally read the book for a 20th Century British Novel class.  In my younger years, I saw her as a great teacher, inspiring, all the things I thought a teacher should be, all the things I thought my teachers weren't.  As I got older, I was appalled by the ways she manipulated "her girls, the creme de la creme."  And the betrayals in the book still shock me.  I suspect that they were downplayed in the PBS series that we watched.

Of course, in high school, I wasn't the most discerning literary critic.  I remember reading The Bell Jar, and thinking it was a hoot.  It wasn't until later that I realized it was really a grim story of the downward mental spiral of Plath.

Miss Jean Brodie and Saint Brigid:  perhaps I feel I'm not leading an integrated, authentic life because I have a habit of choosing impossible role models.  Instead of thinking of the students and faculty whom I've helped as an administrator, I think of the religious orders I am not creating.  Instead of feeling happy when I see an old student who tells me what a great teacher I was, I wonder if I should go back to teaching, if my life has gone off track.  Instead of seeing myself as a woman who contains multitudes, each of those multitudes having gifts specific to time and place, each multitude who will take a turn on stage, I wonder why I can't do everything, all at once.

I will try to imagine Saint Brigid through a more realistic lens.  I will write a poem where she tells me that she accomplished all sorts of things along the way, while all the time struggling to create her great illuminated work.  I will imagine something that she did that we know nothing of.  I will imagine that she will feel sad when she realizes that modern people don't even know of her great work, but instead of her institutions at Kildare and beyond.

I will think about a woman at midlife 1500 years from now, a woman who reads about my life.  What will amaze her?  How will she see the ways that I did, indeed, live an authentic life, even as I lost sight of that fact in the daily minutiae?  If she blogged about me, what would seem important enough to include?  How would she finish this sentence:  In the last half of her life, Berkey-Abbott accomplished ______________  ?