Beginner's Mind

I've spent the last few days running around my old home town, taking pictures and scribbling notes, overtly to document scenes in some of my stories and to refresh memories I rely on for my fiction, but also, I admit, just to relive some of my childhood. It's a weird feeling, really, because I spent so much of my adolescence and even a lot of my young adulthood disparaging this town and region, complaining of the staunchly conservative folk who live here, or of the absence of any worldly culture, or simply of the oppressively hot, humid weather (of which we've had plenty this trip!). Yet, in the face of how much has changed around here in the last decade or so, I have been forced to look beneath the surface of the Texas Hill Country to find what I remember, and in doing so, I have uncovered a lot of charm I had, as a teenager and young college student, refused to acknowledge: the folksy simplicity and quiet pride of heritage in the people here, the unique and unexpectedly varied history and artistic culture of the region, and the fun of the surprise summer shower rolling over the scraggly hills.

Also, in noting how much has changed around here, I have realized how much I remembered--and apparently relished--from my childhood, because the Texas I write about in my fiction is always the Texas of my youth. The other day, I ventured down into the woods behind my parents' house to relive some of the hikes that informed my long novella about two boys spending a summer in the woods, and I had to search hard to find those memories under the changed terrain and through the new neighborhood construction. On various drives through town I searched for businesses and homes and even streets that feature in various short stories, only to find the businesses and streets changed, or gone. And yesterday, driving up to Kerrville on an impromptu trip, I toured my old campus--which makes an appearance in the story I'm working on now--and stopped at the bridge over the Guadalupe in Center Point--which provides the final scene in what is probably my best story--and I found both wildly altered.

The bridge was almost unrecognizable, and if anyone were to visit it looking for the final scene in my short story, they'd likely drive over it and move on, searching for the bridge I describe. It's no longer there. In fact, the bridge as it appears now renders the final scene in my story impossible, which was at first a bit annoying. (If anyone asks, that story is now officially set "in the past.")

My old college campus, though, is a different matter. There are certainly a lot of changes, with a huge new student center, a new welcome center, and a large new science building, as well as a massive building (I'm guessing a dorm) currently under construction. Yet when I reached the heart of campus--which, to my great relief, is still the old academic building and the library--I found very little changed. The quad and its surrounding buildings, like squat brick professors paternally but benevolently overseeing their students, looks so precisely as they did a decade ago that when I posted the new photos of them online, a former classmate thought they were old photos.

I am reminded of Tom Franklin's essay, "The Hunting Years," with which he opens his debut collection of short stories. In it, he returns to his old stomping grounds in the woods and swamps south of Mobile, Alabama. He had gone there to revisit some of the scenes in his stories, seeking fresh details to enliven and finalize his fiction. Instead, he encountered a man with a rifle, warning him off a public trail so the man could hunt in peace. This begins a reverie for the South that Franklin remembered, one in which hunting was a communal, not a solitary, event--a South in which friendly manners were more important than private land. Yet he, too, found less changed in his South than in himself, and he was not only able to access and use the details from his old home area in exactly the way he'd hoped, but he also was able to see his South in a new light, through a fresh perspective, in a way that lent his fiction greater depth.

I have to admit that some of this trip back to my own hometown, I modeled after Franklin's journey home. I, too, hoped to find new details and refreshed memory. But I also knew, from Franklin's essay, that other possibilities existed, that new opportunities might present themselves. I might have thought that knowing--and expecting--such an outcome would have prevented it, because I shouldn't be able to recreate what was for Franklin a spontaneous and unexpected realization. But such is the depth of the Texas Hill Country, that even knowing what I'm looking for, I can find surprise and insight nonetheless.

Two years ago, I had the great privilege of eating dinner with Judith Krug. My wife was giving a two-hour presentation on librarians in film at the annual conference of the Wisconsin Library Association, and as a member of WLA's Intellectual Freedom Roundtable, she also got to meet and work briefly with Judith Krug, the founder and director of the American Library Association's Freedom to Read Foundation and a co-founder of Banned Books Week. Krug was always looking for fresh voices in her passionate campaign for intellectual freedom and First Amendment rights, so after their work was done, she met for dinner with several librarians, including my wife; they graciously invited me to tag along. Krug was the center of attention, of course--she is an icon among librarians, practically a superhero and a living embodiment of the dearest ideals and values of librarians everywhere. She also was a charming woman, witty and outspoken and stylish, both engaging and engaged--she even expressed some interest in my own work, asking after my creative writing and, when the evening was over, wishing me luck on my dissertation, which I was then deep in the process of finishing. She was a delightful, impressive figure even to me, a library proxy who usually only gets to enjoy these sorts of evenings because I was smart enough to marry a librarian, and since that dinner I came to admire and respect her a great deal.

My wife admired and respected her even more, not only because she is a fellow librarian but because Krug later invited Jennifer to join ALA's Intellectual Freedom Committee, a position which allowed Jennifer to occasionally work with Krug more closely. She frequently speaks of Krug with a kind of reverence, as though speaking of a mentor; indeed, the more librarians I meet, the more I think many people--and not just librarians--viewed Krug as a kind of de facto mentor.

On April 11 this year, Judith Krug died. The nation mourned. (President Obama sent her family a letter of condolence.) But a nation also celebrated her life, none more enthusiastically than librarians and, among librarians, none more than Krug's friends and colleagues at ALA.

Last night, the Freedom to Read Foundation celebrated its 40th anniversary, as well as the life and legacy of their founder and hero, Judith Krug, with a gala at the Modern Wing of the Art Institute of Chicago. My wife, of course, attended as a member of the IFC, and I--ever the grateful adjunct to my wife's library adventures--joined her as a guest. During the course of the evening, book lovers of all sorts chatted over drinks while enjoying a balcony view of Millennium Park and later gazed at the astounding modern art collection (Picasso's The Old Guitarist is nothing short of breathtaking in person, but I also was stricken by the stark emotion in the early Kandinsky paintings), though, to be honest, the highlight of the gallery was a brief meeting with Judy Blume. Blume was browsing the art with her publisher and with Judith Krug's husband, but she was kind enough to greet all the admirers who crowded around her, my wife and I among them. We shook her hand and praised her speech in Madison, WI, which I have written about elsewhere--she said her husband thought the speech was disjointed and rambling, but I strongly disagreed, much to the delight of Blume's publisher--and Jennifer told Blume how much librarians everywhere, including Jennifer's mother, love and admire Blume. Finally, we left Blume alone and descended to a wide reception gallery to gather at small round tables, to eat and celebrate.

After dinner, the Foundation presented a series of awards, including two to Judith Krug--both awards had been announced prior to her death, and the latter, the William J. Brennan, Jr. Award, given by the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression, was a rare honor indeed: the award has existed since 1993 but has only been given five times. The second, the FTRF Founder's Award, was in fact created in her honor, and was presented by Krug's long-time friend and fellow champion of intellectual freedom Judy Blume, who cried during her speech--as did many of the rest of us (yes, including me). Later, we heard a long but pleasant speech by Chicago lawyer and author Scott Turow, of Presumed Innocent fame, and some delightful closing remarks by the FTRF's treasurer, James G. Neal, but though both men had broader purposes in their speeches--to support the freedom to read and the FTRF's important mission of promoting First Amendment rights--neither could help praising Judith Krug's legacy as well. As the founder of the FTRF, long-time director of the Office of Intellectual Freedom, outspoken advocate for readers' rights, and dedicated warrior librarian fighting censorship everywhere she found it, Judith Krug was, in every way imaginable, literally the reason we had all gathered last night.

These were not the first of Krug's awards and accolades--she collected pages of them in her life, all to honor her dedication to fighting censorship and promoting the freedom to read--nor were they the first of Krug's memorial ceremonies at this year's ALA conference, and they are unlikely to be the last of either. In his letter to Krug's family and friends (published in the evening's program), President Obama writes, "I trust that her spirit and strength will continue to serve as a guiding force for everyone who benefited from her life and her life's work." The fact is, if you have ever read a book or visited a library, you have benefited, whether directly or indirectly, from Krug's life and work. That's how far-reaching and how important Krug was, and how deeply important she remains, to all of us.

I'm in Chicago this weekend and most of next week; my wife has a professional conference here and I get to tag along and soak up the city. I love this town, and if I controlled the universe and could orchestrate my life, I'd probably fix myself with a nice brownstone in the Gold Coast area and just revel in this city until I retire (at which point, PEI, here we come!).

My plan was to get some writing done in the hotel room while my wife is off at meetings and conference panels, and in fact, I've done quite a bit already; last week, in Texas, I knocked out two new drafts of long-troubling short stories, and yesterday, as it rained outside, I began work on a third. This morning, I read a story from a friend of mine and offered some comments, then went back to work on my own story, but I made the mistake of opening the window, and I didn't last long at the desk. Compared with our summer weather in the Middle East, and last week's weather in Texas (where we were visiting family), the weather here in Chicago is gorgeous, so today I rode the El down to the loop and then walked over to the newly revamped Sears Tower, with the intent to visit the new observation deck there. Word was, the new owners of the building built these clear glass "pods" in some of the 103rd-floor windows, so you can actually stand inside the window and gaze through the clean nothing between your feet all the way to the street below. I don't suffer much from vertigo and generally love heights (despite my back-breaking tumble from a tree two years ago), and I was looking forward to the chance for a Spider-Man view of the building, but when I arrived, the line wrapped around the block, and I decided to grab a bit of lunch instead. I think I'm going to head out early tomorrow morning and try again, when the line might be a few dozen people shorter and I can more comfortably enjoy the long wait.

Instead, I walked a few blocks west to check out a diner I'd read about, Lou Mitchell's, a 1923 diner that bills itself as the start of Route 66 and is famous for their fluffy omelets and homemade pastries. I arrived right at lunch time, and the place was jumping, but the service, mostly from delightfully cliched old women I kept wanting to call Flo and Alice, was swift, friendly, and efficient. The line was almost out the door but I was seated--at one of a series of nifty U-shaped bars--in minutes and had ordered and was eating just 10 minutes later. Though it was a bit noisy, the atmosphere was classic and the food fantastic; I ordered a simple breakfast (which they serve all day) of two scrambled eggs, with hash browns and toast. The eggs were the thickest, fluffiest eggs I've seen in my life, bigger than my two fists together, and the toast tasted like it was made not from bread but from pure butter, squared off and fried crisp. And the coffee, though nothing earth shattering, was nice and rich, the way I like it, and came in true diner style, tossed onto the table to slosh, just a few drops, over the rim of the thick mug and into the heavy saucer below. Their fresh-squeezed orange juice, by the way, tastes like liquid fruit. Amazing.

Afterward, I decided to made my trip downtown worthwhile by hoping on the Brown line and riding the El around the Loop and out into the city. I didn't go all the way to the end of the line, but I did ride across the river, through the city to North Ave, and up into Lincoln Park a ways, before I realized it was time to head back. The Brown is practically a tour train; it rolls slowly from stop to stop, easing through wide intersections, around turns, and across the river as though pausing for photographs (which I took plenty of), and it makes for a leisurely ride. When I hopped off and transferred to the Red line back into the city, we dipped underground and shot through stop after stop, making what the return trip in less than half the time.

All in all, a wonderfully satisfying afternoon. Tonight is the first of Navy Pier's twice-weekly summer fireworks, and the weather is perfect for that, too. Better still, my wife's conference schedule, unusually, is wide open this evening, so I'm looking forward to a quiet night on the beach. Tomorrow morning, it's back to Sears Tower, and then maybe, if I can resist the bright blue skies and cool breeze, I'll get back to work. Or else I'll just take a notebook and pen over to Grant Park and gaze at the Buckingham Fountain and Lake Michigan beyond, holding my pen thoughtfully and acting like a writer but, let's face, simply enjoying the view instead.

So, today I read an article in Newsweek about Paul Krugman, the liberal economist and Nobel Prize winner who has been criticizing the Obama administration's method of handling the economy. And I came across this description of Krugman:

He is, to be sure, insanely busy, producing two columns a week, teaching two courses and still writing books (his latest is "The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008"). He posts to his blog as many as six times a day.

This is almost exactly my own work-load: I am writing a column--not weekly, but it's still a job--for an online magazine, and I'm polishing up an academic article to send out soon. I am also working on and submitting fiction and poetry as I can manage it. I am teaching two courses--both writing classes, which come with a hefty grading load. And I am writing two books, one nonfiction and one fiction, as well as trying to adapt the latter as a graphic novel. And I'm posting to blogs--not six times a day or even six times a month, but between this blog and my activity on other sites, I'm doing a fair bit of writing.

And I do not feel "insanely busy"--in fact, I feel decadent, almost lazy.

Only a few months ago, I was sitting in department meetings at my former campus in Wisconsin, discussing the workload of the freshman composition teachers. To prepare for my end of the conversation, I started listing the work I did, and I figured out that, on average, I was working between 60 and 70 hours a week and reading the equivalent of 3,000 pages worth of writing, as well as writing another 1,200 pages or so, just to stay on top of the five classes--not two, five--that I was teaching. These figures did include some of the "professional development" work I was doing, reading articles related to teaching and academia, but this did not count the service work I was doing for the university, the time and effort I was volunteering to help writers who were not my students, the work I did for my position as faculty adviser for a fraternity, or the reading and writing I was doing on my own time, when the lines between pleasure and work become blurred. (I posted a similar entry on this subject back in May 2008.)

My old friends and former colleagues back in Wisconsin still work on this schedule, as do my friends in Texas, Indiana, Michigan, and Georgia. They still teach four or sometimes five classes--a semester, by the way, so we're talking about eight to ten classes a year--as well as volunteer, serve on committees, write, read, and then decide whether to sleep or try to enjoy themselves, because sometimes that's the decision they're left with.

That, Mr. Krugman, is "insanely busy."

Today my university hosted a panel discussion with the six authors who were shortlisted for this year's International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF). I've long hungered for the kind of "visiting writer" experiences I used to enjoy in grad school at University of North Texas, and with this I had a chance to meet and listen to authors from traditions, cultures and a language completely outside my own, so of course I headed to campus on my day off and strode enthusiatically--and quite early--into the auditorium.

It turned out I'd passed the authors in the campus lobby on my way in, where they were meeting department and administrative officials, and with all the attention paid to hospitality and polite conversation here, they remained in the lobby for a while and the program started late. But once on stage, the set up looked comfortably familiar--the small couches, the little coffee tables with flowers and bottles of water, the podium at the side for all the requisite introductions--I could have been on any campus anywhere, and the familiarity of the scene was very relaxing. After a while, the visiting authors filed in ahead of their hosting professor and took their couches on the stage (as they were seated, from left to right):

• Inaam Kachachi, nominated for her book The American Granddaughter


• Habib Selmi, nominated for his book The Scents of Marie-Claire


• Mohammad Al-Bisatie, nominated for his book Hunger


• Yusuf Zaydan,* nominated for his book Beelzebub


• Ibrahim Nasrallah, nominated for his book Time of White Horses


• Fawwaz Haddad, nominated for his book The Unfaithful Translator

What was different about this panel, however, was that the entire discussion was conducted in Arabic. The introductions, the requests for the students to shut off their cell phones (and the later demands for them to shush during the discussion), the initial remarks by each author, the Q&A that followed.... All of it was in Arabic, and though I am trying to pick up what little of the language I can manage, I only understood a single word: the oft-repeated shukran, "thank you."

Still, sitting there for the hour offered me an interesting opportunity to observe things I sometimes miss at English-language panels, to notice the mannerisms of the authors and the tone of the discussion and the physical reactions to audience questions. What I discovered was that, just like the setting, everything felt familiar. I recognized the authors' tones so immediately I could tell when they were speaking for each other and when they were speaking to the audience; I could guess in most cases when an author was speaking about craft in mechanical, skill-based terms and when an author was speaking about art in reverent, poetic terms; I could even predict in some instances when someone was telling a joke before the audience had a chance to laugh. It was amazing.

This became most evident during the Q&A, which consisted of only four questions because the questions and/or the answers were so lengthy. In some ways, it makes me wonder if such Q&A sessions, everywhere for all authors, are scripted, because while I couldn't understand the topics or the responses, I recognized the pattern: The questions began with a somewhat long question from a junior faculty member, who seemed a bit nervous but was thrilled to be speaking to these authors. But after her question, the authors all glanced at each other and, without waiting for a mic, announced a short, one-word answer, and the audience in turn laughed. (Tommy Franklin, I'm thinking of you at every panel you've been on, man!) The second question, by a more senior faculty member who seemed to have something to prove, went on for a good three minutes, more a speech than a question, and when he finished his comments, the panel all nodded and several said "Shukran" respectfully, making me think the faculty member had either praised their work effusively or else offered a lengthy critical analysis of some sort to which no one knew what to say other than, "Um, thanks?" The third question, also from a faculty member, was apparently more thoughtful, because while it was also long, it ellicited a very long response that took two (and a half) of the authors to answer. And, once they'd attempted to answer this question, the second guy--still with something to prove?--leaned forward in his chair and offered what sounded like a counterpoint of some sort, which in turn lauched all six authors into a lively discussion of that point and, as though to defuse the conversation, Mohammad Al-Bisatie ended with a joke. Finally, a student bravely stood and asked a question, which I assume had something to do with the nature of writers or the art of writing, because Yusuf Zaydan took the mic, leaned forward toward the audience, and began a long answer that was very different in tone from any of the previous comments--from his eye contact, his hand gestures, and the tone of his voice, I knew he was attempting to teach and to help all the young writers in the room.

But more amazing for me, personally, was the moment I realized I'd been humbled by the entire experience. I couldn't understand specifically what these authors were saying, and I cannot read their novels (translations are forthcoming and I look forward to reading them, because they sound fantastic), yet I recognized that I felt great respect for these authors simply because they are authors--not because they have published or because they were shortlisted for the Arab world's equivalent of the Booker Prize, but because they are writers, people who do what I do and value it at least as much as I do. But I wondered.... What if I do read their work and I discover they are all terrible writers? Would my respect diminish? It shouldn't. Yet I recall my recent, frequent rants about the low standards of popular fiction and my attacks on authors who do write work I don't regard as of high quality, what I have called "sloppy" or even "inexcusable," and I have to wonder, why did I denegrate those other, "lesser" authors?

Part of me wants to adhere to my own standards for fiction, even if those same standards often prevent me from sending out my own "subpar" writing, because I think art deserves to be as brilliant as it can be. But I realized today that my respect for writers stems primarily from the act, not the product, of writing. Take Stephenie Meyers Twilight series, for example, a collection of fiction I have not been shy about berating online. I have sometimes faulted Meyers herself for the poor quality of her novels, but while I stand by my assessment of the flaws in those books, I think now I have given Meyers an unfair shake. The work should have been better, and her editors and publishers should demand better writing, and the reading public should expect a higher standard, which doesn't mean all fiction must be complex but which does mean all fiction should attempt beauty as well as entertainment--in other words, we should not be entertained by art that is less than beautiful (and if you know me, you know that for me, beauty includes the horrific more often than it includes the benign, so I'm not calling for roses and happy endings here). But good or bad, trained or untrained, a writer's process is the same for all of us. Though her technique or her schedule or her imagination might be different from my own, I am sure Stephenie Meyers struggled with her stories just as I struggle with my own; I'm sure she both loves and loathes--remembers fondly and finds constant fault with--her writing just as I do my own. And a writer is a writer, whether a student, a teacher, a published author, a hack, a literary giant, a prize winner.... even in another language, they take delight in a world I recognize as my own, and I am proud to listen even when I don't understand.


* My apologies to Yusuf Zaydan, but I could not find any sites regarding his work as an author; I was only able to find sites mentioning his work as director of the Museum of Manuscripts in Egypt's Alexandria Library, but I am choosing here to focus on Mr. Yusuf's work as a writer, so I have not linked to them.

I have always enjoyed teaching English--especially freshman English--for many of the same reasons I love the English language in the first place: Students invariably introduce me to new ways of using (read: abusing) or interpreting the language. This has been true everywhere I've taught, regardless of demographic, though I admit I had more fun in Texas because Texans--who believe they live in "a whole other country"--often speak a different language than English. The regional dialects vary (linguists will tell you there are at least five distinct dialects in Texas), but the language itself is largely the same: A weird variation of English with heavy influences from the deep South, the Cajun of neighboring Louisiana, the "hillbilly" dialects from the Arkansas Ozarks, southwestern accents, and a combination of New Mexican Spanish, true Mexican Spanish, and "Tex-Mex" Spanish. Consequently, I would have students routinely and consistently swap spellings of "fill" and "feel," "sale" and "sell," or--incorrectly--"could have" and "could of," because they spell according to pronunciation; or I would see proudly intentional uses of the double conditional, as in "I might could of made it to class today if it hadn't of snowed a quarter inch."

But my favorite moments occur with genuine non-native speakers, because it is from them that I both learn more about English and discover new possibilities in English. They feel freer to experiment, and they frequently stumble across beautiful phrases. This is similar to my own experiences in a foreign language: As an undergraduate studying French, I was most praised--and won the "French student of the year" award--when writing poetry in French. I was neither a good poet nor a great French student (my conversational French was less than adequate), but turned loose in another language, I discovered a capacity for play and imagery that I found impossible in English, and my French professor adored my work.

Similarly, I have always loved the compositions of my non-native speakers, and now, teaching a class full of only non-native speakers (all are native Arabic speakers), I am delighting in the expressions and explanations of my students. For instance, the other day I learned--from my students, during a class discussion--that one of the most common grammatical errors they commit is the comma splice. They know this, yet they continue to fall into the error, because--as my students explained--they are translating from Arabic, and in Arabic, is it perfectly acceptable (perhaps necessary; I'm still learning the ins and outs of Arabic) to connect separate ideas with a phrase similar to "and, and." In Arabic, this signals a transition from one idea to another and so both connects and separates them, something akin to the semicolon in English but far more prevalent. Therefore, according to my students, the most logical translation is to link ideas with a comma, and they frequently forget about the period.

And then there are the constructions of syntax and the poetics of expression they casually drop into e-mails. Just today, for instance, a student e-mailed me a list of people she'd like to work with in small groups. One of her requests, she said, was based on her classmate's advanced understanding of the English language, but my student's means of explaining this was, "I can feel the strength of her language."

I can feel the strength of her language.

I love that she has made language into a tangible thing, something we can touch and flex, like a muscle--something we can literally "grasp." I love that she has made language into an atmosphere, something we can get a sense of, like emotion or tension filling a room, or like an odor (something else we describe as "strong"). And I love that she has an awareness of other students' grasp of language in comparison to her own. Native speakers back in the States frequently acknowledge the "good writers" in their classes as simply talented or smart, and either cleave to them in hopes of getting a better grade or distance themselves to avoid looking like "bad writers" in comparison. The same is likely true among non-native speakers as well, but it is refreshing to see in this student's e-mail an expression not only of genuine admiration (the e-mail goes on to say, "I like the way she expresses her ideas, which I recognize in class") but also of a desire to learn from her fellow student ("She is an interesting person to work with").

I think I might repeat these phrases to my students in class today: "I can feel the strength of your language. I like the way you express your ideas. You are all interesting people to work with!"