Since the crush of last fall’s deadlines, I haven’t been able to post here as much as I did in the early months. But the recent quiet is not a byproduct of too much work. I’ve been reflecting on the nature of the Memory Project and wondering if it falls into the category of “hypnotic” techniques that my teaching mentor, Madison Smartt Bell, discourages.
Some background. I wrote about Bell, his wife (the poet Elizabeth Spires) and the Goucher College writing program in the fall of 2001. The program has had several high-profile successes and it was located in the burb I covered for the Baltimore Sun. About three months after the article ran, I left the Sun. Bell then approached me to teach part-time. I had taught journalism in Johns Hopkins’ Writing Seminars, but never creative writing. But Bell seemed to think I could do it, so I gave it a try.
In preparation for my next semester, I re-read Bell’s “Unconcious Mind” intro in “Narrative Design,” a text I’ve used in every class. But a passage jumped out at me this time, charged with new meaning: “Now the implications for students and teachers of writing is quite interesting. You will recognize that if the inner process of imagination involves a process of autohypnosis, the teachers who concentrate on inner process are, knowingly or not, actually functioning as hypnotists. The sorts of exercises beloved of this kind of teacher are all tools of hypnosis, really. Soothe yourself with relaxing music. Lay your head down on your desk and try real hard to _picture_ something. . . . [But] if you are a teacher who relies, knowingly or not, on hypnotic strategies, you risk drifting over the line from pedagogy into psychotherapy, and since you are unlikely to be qualified as a _therapist_ all sorts of inadvertant abuses are likely to occur . . . It’s not that a student’s inner process can’t be influenced from without. It’s that it shouldn’t be.”
Is the Memory Project an inner process exercise? It wasn’t meant to be. It was meant to be like scales or some other kind of warm-up. And, in fact, the point was to eschew emotional or intangible words, to never state how a certain story made one feel, but to see if the story, once told, conveyed the emotion. (Of everyone who posts here, I probably break the rules more than anyone.)
But even if one follows the rules — is it the finger exercise I wanted it to be, or does it attempt to unlock the unconscious part of writing? I’m still working this out for myself. I need to figure it out within a week, when class starts. Because it had been my plan to ask my students to post here, if they so desired.
For now, I think I’ll go work on the syllabus.
I can’t say that I ever knew what the rules were here but I’ve never viewed this as any sort of writing excercise, internal or otherwise. It’s been more of a social activity where the memories of others triggers some of my own memories. It’s kind of cool to remember something from ages ago but I’ve never used anything from here to spur or inspire further writing.
I would definately steer your students here. I could never manage to keep a journal going for very long even though Id start and stop again every few years, but since I started my own blog I’ve managed to update it if not every day, every few days for two months. I’ve probably written more blog posts in the last two months than I have written journal entries in my entire life.
I think, as Patrick said, it’s because of the social aspect of it. The knowledge that someone will be reading it filters out most of the tedious information yet the community aspect of it trciks the writer into revealing things in a blog they might not have revealed in any other sort of writing.
One problem I always had with being forced to use online journals or webboards in some of my English classes was because all of our posts were suppossed to be properly formatted with tip-top English and punctuation, and most of the time they were required to be in the 1-3 page length range. But I’ve used a webjournal for my developmental writing students and I’ll make formal posts to it and they’re required to respond to it but I let them do it in a free and creative way. Now students who I couldn’t have gotten to write anything creative in class are writing the most imaginative posts in response to my blog posts. It’s a riot.
I think I need to read that book, because I don’t see a problem with music or trying real hard to picture something. I’m guessing there’s some context I don’t understand.
I used to use music to distract the part of my brain that won’t shut up while I’m writing; and picturing things is how I know where my characters are sitting.
I agree that pedagogy shouldn’t be psychotherapy, but even the most purely Socratic method requires that the teacher think of the right questions for <i>this</i> student in <i>this</i> context. In order for that insight to exist, aren’t we already in psycho<i>something</i> territory?
I am put in mind of Grady Tripp, protagonist of Michael Chabon’s ‘Wonder Boys.’ Grady has crossed the one-thousand-page mark on his follow up to his one-hit-wonder debut novel. Grady repeats throughout the book that he doesn’t believe in writer’s block. I believe in writer’s block. I would challenge Grady to hang out in my head for a while and tell me what, if not that, has been living there the last few years. I’m in the singer/songwriter business myself and have friends who are novelists, short-story writers, and hugely prolific songwriters, and there is one piece of advice I have gotten that is consistent across the board from all of them, which also seems consistent with Grady Tripp’s philosophy: if you’re having a hard time writing, just write more. It doesn’t have to be writing for content, just writing to remind the brain that it knows how to complete a thought. It was best explained to me by a songwriter friend who told me that what I should be working for is a kind of muscle memory in my brain. Writing, she said, is consistent with exercises that work out other muscles in that the more one does it, the less painful it gets to try. It sounds simplistic, but it works, and this and other exercices have been my respite from the creative stuck-ness I’ve been working on for a while.
Laura, this is a great thing. It’s also, as Bryon says, a really fun social activity that has given us a bunch of great This American Life-ian stories to enjoy. Lets keep it going and not worry too much about the subconscious effects of remembering and enjoying the stories of our own, and each other’s lives.
So if we accept this as a social activity — should I steer my students here? Is there any value for them?
Some background: I’ve long tried to get my students to attempt to keep journals in which they simply note the facts of their days. Weather, what they ate, the real quotidian stuff. The problem is, it’s an experiment that pays off only over a long period of time. Years, decades.
I was never a regular journal keeper and I stopped entirely in 2001, shortly after purchasing a journal while in New Orleans for Mardi Gras and vowing to give up fear for Lent. And most of the entries are shit, stuff I would never want to see the light of day. (Memo to self: Make destruction of journals an instruction in your will.)
But then I pull one off the shelf and read a passage like this:
June 4th: “Today I went to a doctor’s office and had mole removed. It was an interesting piece of minor surgery, none of which I could observe because the mole was on my back . . . A sharp sting — the numbing needle — pricking the skin, followed by a muffled slicing noise, then a buzzing. Then no noise at all, just the painless but strange sensation of a heavy silken thread moving in and out of my back. I saw the mole floating in the bottle, looking much more malevolent than it had on my back.”
The writing is of no consequence; the incident recounted is of no import. And yet . . . this specific anecdote does a better job of reminding me that I was heartbroken on this June day then all the 20-something cauterwauling I committed to paper. I won’t go into specifics, but a wave of memories come back — sad, young, stupid memories. Whereas the places where I wrote specifically about my heartbreak are just excruciating. (Really, call about the will.)
Oh, lord, I can’t stop reading this journal. I was such an idiot. Where was chick-fic when I needed it?
I think you should definitely steer students here. It’s so much more fun than a journal, by virtue of its interactiveness. You get to see other people’s journaling, but only the best parts, the parts they filter and deem interesting/appropriate for each other’s consumption.
In my last couple years at Towson, in several courses I used Blackboard (a forum/file sharing system for colleges), through which students were regularly given assignments to discuss a question or an issue related to course material. For me, it proved very stimulating, as there were a lot of people who were far more eloquent in written conversations than spoken ones. I think this is even cooler than my Blackboard experience, because of the emphasis on factual memory rather than journaling feelings or opinions.
I got NARRATIVE DESIGN, and I’m managing to get through it in taxicabs and between feedings on my baby shift. I like it a lot. I did misunderstand the context, and I agree to a great extent with this:
<i>An ethical teacher may </i>recommend<i> devices to stimulate the process of imagination, but that is a different matter from </i>participating<i> in them.</i>
I think there’s possibly an overemphasis on the idea that creative process must remain private—but I enjoy switching between private, collaborative, and entirely public processes.
Still, that’s my choice, which probably shouldn’t be preempted by the kind of teacher he describes.