 |
The writing challenge that
knows you have a life
|
Shame was the main game we played in my home, in my church, in my classrooms, on my playgrounds. I learned that game so well. I learned to self-shame as a way to avoid the worst of the shaming because self-shame looks like the remorse and surrender that most authority figures and bullies needed to see to believe they'd won the game.
I've been doing a deep dive on this theme in my life for most of the past month. I suggested in a previous post that I would share that journey here but I'm not ready to share much of what has been on my mind yet. It is too amorphous and/or triggering. But I can share the one story I hinted at before. The story of an encounter between myself at age 12 with my sixth grade teacher that was suffused with shame and had a direct impact on my relationship to my writing that has me in its thrall to this day.
As I wrote a week ago Sunday:
I thought I'd already unpacked all the baggage around this incident. I even wrote a flash fiction piece and devoted a NaNo to developing a YA novel expanding on that. But apparently I left some seriously stinky laundry in the bag because as I started thinking about what I planned to say in the post while I was working the stuff shuffle in my room, I found myself reliving that moment in emotional technicolor and then I was weeping. And I couldn't stop for four hours.
The fictional piece I linked above stays fairly true to the exchange between me and my teacher. I changed the topic of the term paper to Flannery O'Connor who became my favorite author for years after I encountered her in high school. So at least 4 to 5 years after this incident. I did this so I could make that play on a title of one of Flannery's stories. Hers was Everything That Rises Must Converge and I, in my cynicism at the time wanted to argue that no, Everything that Rises Must Submerge because that had been my basic experience in my family in the school system and in my marriage.
In my family and Church, 'rising' was too closely related to 'pride' for their comfort and all signs of pride must be quashed. Usually by shaming. As for the school system... They just didn't have the eyes to see anyone who colored outside the lines. So to speak. Unless it was disruptive to others. But when it came to a quiet-as-a-mouse girl who took home all of her textbooks the first week of the school year and had read them all cover-to-cover by her birthday mid-November and had written out all the questions and answers for every single chapter into a notebook she kept at home? Nothing in their training prepared them for noticing anomalies like that let alone for how to respond in a way that was in the child's best interest.
The go-to programing for these young twenty-something teachers was to insist that all the rules be followed all the time by all individuals involved. So when the teacher would patrol the class after giving a reading assignment and walk by my desk and find me with a library book open on top of my text book, he didn't even ask if I'd finished the reading assignment, he just confiscated my book and put it in his desk drawer and the rule was that I could not have it back until the due date or the end of term whichever came first. And I would have to remember to ask for the book on the correct due date.
It didn't make any difference to him whether the book was a novel or a reference book related to the big semester-long term paper project. He never noticed or at least never commented on the fact that many of these books were upwards of 400 pages and the NF were heavily footnoted and indexed. In other words most of the books confiscated from me at age 12 were college level.
This is where my sentiment of 'rising gets you squashed' came from. I'd watched my brother, one grade behind me, get pushed back down in other ways but since he was a boy with a temper and a 'Mr. know-it-all attitude who'd started lecturing every ear in range from playmates to parents from the moment he could speak complete sentences, he didn't fly under the radar as I did and earned one creative punishment after another--as many from the bullies as from the teachers and principals.
Until, that is, I had another encounter with a teacher in high-school. My 10th grade typing teacher gave an inspired motivational lecture to the class about the perks of learning to type. (If you've read the flash fiction linked above you know the irony of that) He rhapsodized on all the doors it would open and how merit and hard work was rewarded by the system and all the ways you would find it useful in your personal life.
As he spoke, I started weeping. He noticed. I noticed he noticed and began an intense examination of the wood grain on my desk top. He didn't speak to me until the bell rang and the chaos of the class leaving began but then he quietly asked if I would stay and speak to him. I did. He asked why his words had so upset me. Tho I'd had flashes of my own stories I did not share any of them. I shared what I'd observed about my brother including the current crisis in which his 9th grade teacher was threatening to fail him in history.
This was because he refused to take notes in class as required and instead doodled and handed that in for a fail every week. He was even able to explain that he was unable to listen to spoken words and write them at the same time but when he doodled he could remember everything that was said by just looking at the doodles. But the teacher wasn't interested in that nor in the corroborating facts that he aced the tests and quizzes and wrote cogent essays, he cared only about the rules.
My brother was stubborn and insisted they couldn't make him do what he couldn't do and if they made him repeat the class he would just fold his hands and sit in class and do none of the work for if he was going to fail anyway what was the point? Our Mom had been up on campus for a conference with the teacher, our Dad had lectured him at the dinner table and there were angry stalemates at school and at home.
In my mind, of course, I was drawing parallels between what was happening to him and what had happened to me four years earlier. I was now wishing I'd made a stink like he was doing. I was wishing I'd at least told my Mom so she might have advocated for me since she was a witness that at least 3/4 of what he accused me of was untrue. But for some reason I'd internalized the shame of the failure and was too mortified to tell anyone.
That male typing teacher who was a retired Marine Corp Sargent, in an effort to prove to me that the system works if you light a fire under the right butt, pulled some strings in the school system and got my brother a full blown IQ test. The kind administered one-on-one by a psychologist instead of the multiple choice, color-the-dot-by-your-answer test administered in Junior High. He tested over 160 which was 30 points higher than he tested on the standard one. He'd beat me by three points on that one, I think tho I can't really trust my memory's precision. I just remember wondering if I would also have gained 30 points by having it administered one-on-one and would I have still been just a few points behind.
A few years after the fact, I wondered why my typing teacher did not have me tested also just based on the fact that I'd been the one to see the issue and correctly diagnose it. Coupled with the evidence of the books he watched me carrying into class and how based on them he directed me to our school library's set of the Britannica Great Books, introducing me to its syntopicon, the index to ideas, which has become an integral part of my life and of my work on my Fruits of the Spirit storyworld. He would point at a book sitting on my desk and say "If you're reading that, you're ready for Plato or William James or one of the other philosophers that aren't such lazy thinkers."
So here is my story unfictionalized: In sixth grade in the late sixties we were presented with a semester length project directly after the Christmas holidays. The Term Paper. It was broken down into manageable tasks to be completed in order and checked over by the teacher over the course of the project. It began with field trips to the school and the public library where we were taught all the intricacies of finding sources and recording them on bibliography slips. How to use the card catalog to find books and how to find references to magazine articles in the Reader's Guide on our topic and then fill out the slip for the librarian to take back into the magazine and newspaper archives. Our bibliography needed to include two of each kind of resource: encyclopedia, periodical, full length book.
The moment I comprehended the assignment I was in love. And since I just happened to be in the middle of a 500 page footnoted tome about Jenny Lind the singer whose popularity in her era might be comparable to Celine Dion in ours that was the topic I settled on. The whole project from start to finish was a joy. I loved it. Even with Mr. T. confiscating my books as fast as I could check them out. I just patiently waited for them to be due and took them back and checked them out again.
Except the first book had belonged to my grandmother and so I didn't get it back until after the assignment due date. And that was the one that created the crisis in my mind that prevented me from confronting the teacher or asking my Mom to advocate for me or even telling her what had happened. Because I was so sure I was guilty as charged. After all it had been a teacher accusing me and a male at that and men in authority held ten times the weight of women because of the training of the cult I was raised in.
So this was Mr T's accusation: No sixth grader can write with this sophistication so either you plagiarized or your mother or big sister wrote this for you. The fact that it is typed just reinforces my theory. I warned the class at the beginning not to submit a typed paper unless you typed every character yourself and you cannot convince me that a sixth grader can type with this proficiency. If you make me prove my theory by going back to examine all your resources to find the material you copied then I will make sure you fail sixth grade and do it over again next year and spend the entire summer in summer school.
Then he handed me my paper with zero markings on it other than the c/-c grade which reflected form over content or visa versa. I just took the paper from him silently with burning red cheeks and returned to my desk swallowed up by shame. I had done a rapid calculation of all the existing proof against his claims and of my witnesses but there was one sticking point. That fat book that had kindled my interest in Jenny Lind that I'd started reading during the Christmas holidays and which had spent the last couple months in his desk drawer.
I'd finished the read through but I'd not finished going back through to copy out the marked passages on my note cards. And because I was a proficient memorizer having been started on Bible verses before I could read and memorizing chapters at a time by the time I was 9, I knew how easy it was for me to hold onto chunks of text. And because I'd read the memoir of Helen Keller not all that long ago I also knew that she had fallen into that trap as an adult and got charged with plagiarism after using some phrases belonging to someone else as her own because she had not kept good enough notes and since I had not been able to keep good enough notes on that one book it was quite possible he would find the evidence he was so sure was there if I challenged him.
I chose silence over taking that risk.
Despite knowing that my parents could vouch for the fact I'd typed every word and that I'd been typing for several years or maybe let me bring Mom's typewriter to demonstrate, and despite the fact the evidence I had been doing the work was in the outlines and notecards and drafts in my own hand that he had signed off on over the weeks and in the existence of the books he kept in his drawer. Which books could explain the sophistication of my writing style without being proof of plagiarism. Despite knowing for a fact that I was not guilty of conscious copying directly from the sources without quotations, just that small chance that he would find evidence of unconscious plagiarism which would be impossible to prove was unintentional was all it took to squash me.
And apparently I am still struggling with the loss of my self-confidence with my writing that was created in me that day. And there is still a part of me that is willing to believe in the face of evidence to the contrary that a male teacher knows the truth and mustn't be challenged. And in my mind, formed in the sixties and seventies, all editors are male. Could this be why I've submitted a short story only once, in my early twenties, and nothing since?
ROW80 Round 3 Goals:- Morning pages daily. Average 40 minutes (ala Julia Cameron The Artist Way and Writing For Life) YES Started May 20. Probably would not have jumped into NaNo and ROW80 without having had a month of morning pages behind me. Must must must watch my posture. No hunching over. No leaning on elbows. But the very fact that I've hung on to this YES throughout the crisis' is PROOF that I am committed to the writing and still belong in ROW80
- Storydreaming with notebook for noting ideas for characters or scenes. (ala Robert Owen Butler From Where You Dream)
30 10 minutes per day NO for over two weeks. (The notebook is the key to this goal as without it the storydreams go to the same place night dreams go an hour after waking.) Note: I've adjusted the goal for the duration of the round to ten minutes a day with the caveat that as long as I'm sitting with notebook and pen it counts even if I don't write anything new. - Working on the Fruits of the Spirit (aka FOS) Storyworld Bible at least
30 10 minutes per day at least 5 days per week. I'm sure this will expand as I get involved but I need to set a minimum for that jumpstart. NO for over two weeks (still hoping to make this and storydreaming my ROW80 main project for the remainder of this round as I need a substantial start on it in time to use it for Preptober and NaNo next Round.) Note: I've adjusted the goal to 10 minutes 5 days a week with the caveat that I don't need to work into the pristine spiral notebook I bought for this project yet. The first task is to get a feel for how that notebook needs to be organized and to figure that out I will start re-reading my files with loose scratch paper or note cards at hand to note down every 'fact' I encounter as I read: names, dates, descriptions, titles of books and chapters and stories, character quirks, symbolism associated with a character...etc. It occurred to me that my resistance to this task was at least partially related to not wanting to make a mess in that pretty notebook. So now I have permission to make a mess with scratch pads and note cards. Let's see if that makes any difference. Also there is a trick I'm playing on myself here. I almost never do a thing for only ten minutes but if I think I must do 30 minutes I balk at starting thinking of all the ways I'm likely to get interrupted or not fulfill my expectations in some unexpected way. I realized this has to do with not being able to visualize exactly what is expected. But I know what it means to 'read' and 'take notes' I've been doing it with other people's stories every day for weeks and weeks. For most of a year in fact. - Weekly Artist Date (ala Julia Cameron) This is about doing something to recharge your creative battery. I'll go into more detail in one of the check-ins. YES I did several things that could qualify under my new rules as described last check-in. I have found several more 24/7 cameras on interesting or exotic locals. Two of them in Africa but their ambience is so different they could be two different planets and I've seen animas I can't even name. Like an 'ox' with a zebra face and horns that look like upside down elephant tusks except black. I've also been exploring the old type of screensaver I used to storydream while watching. They are variations on color or image in flowing motion. Think lava lamp or kaleidoscope. I've also gone for walks in the villa cul-de-sac with my caregiver.
- A minimum of 5 minutes of physical activity daily. Either a walk outside with my caregiver or a session on my mini-tramp, or pacing the floor between front and back door. YES (may need to look at upping the expectation soon. this is getting too easy.)
- I want to reengage with my blog so:
Two One blog post per week besides the two check-ins. Either about encountering other people's stories via print, video or audio which can include formal reviews or about a current fiber art WIP or about one of my personal challenges: widowhood, independent living with visual impairment and autism and issues related to health and aging among them. NOPE Note: I've adjusted my expectations here for the duration of the round. I removed the theme of personal challenge from the options as it turns out that has been the theme of my check-in posts and those take a lot out of me and a third one would be overloading my readers as well as me.
Read more...
