(the new) bgblogging

To start preparing for my spring semester creative writing course, I’ve been reading two new books (in addition to Vikram Seth’s Two Lives and Anne Carson’s Decreation), that have nothing ostensibly to do with the evolution of my teaching with Web technologies: John Berger’s Here Is Where We Meet and Robert Coover’s A Child Again. I journeyed into these books not just for the pleasure of it all, but to remind myself that teaching creative writing is mostly an offline experience. I wanted to pay deliberate attention to words on pages; after all, my office is dominated not by computer equipment but by books and paper:

I know how to keep my online writing/reading/thinking self separate from my I-love-the-feel-of-page-in-my-hands self. Or so I thought. The deeper I find myself within the marvelous holds of these fictions, essays and inventions, the more I realize how much I’m looking for a dose of art, of experiment, of play to bring into the classroom blogs, podcasts et al. Indeed, as I read post after post by bloggers I routinely turn to, recounting this uneasy present we’re in as edubloggers looking at what needs to be be done, what can be done, but how far we have to go to get there (is it the moment when we stand atop the cliff, mesmerized by the dazzling lagoon beneath us, afraid to dive?) I find the wild, irreverent inversions of Coover and the marvelous threading and blurring of time in Berger calming me down, showing me how ridiculous it was even to contemplate a separation.

In my struggle to piece together the fragments, conversations, discoveries and shifts in my classroom and blogging, I’ve for a moment forgotten the importance of story itself–and that is what these books are reminding me: to enjoy this process, the telling of the story of this wild moment and not worry so much about getting my head around the changes. I’ve got to keep in mind what Flannery O’Connor said: “If a writer is any good, what he makes will have its source in a realm much larger than that which his conscious mind can encompass and will always be a greater surprise to him than it can ever be to his reader.”

From the bookflap of Berger comes this description:

And from the slipcover of A Child Again:

These writers remind me to make connections, to make fun, to invert and make new–to draw upon the past intentionally as I move headlong into this future, and to learn from writers who have managed to keep language bristling and new as they tell the stories of our time. I am reminded of the playful language inventions of Patricia Eakins and the essays-and-novels of Carole Maso. These writers have much to teach me as I urge my students to work with and in this transparent, collaborative, connected Web medium to push language and our notion of what language is and how we write and how we create worlds with our readers/interacters. Ah, I’m not saying this well.

Back I go, then, to Roy Ascott’s brilliant Telematic Embrace, to an essay he wrote in 1966, in which he wrote:

So here I am, back to the blog, drawn here to puzzle out the unfolding story, how we’re trying on this language of connection, this new writing, remembering to look to the artists, those who write books and those who play within the Web, such as dispatx art collective (artists collaborating on theme-based projects in the transparent world of the Web, and now adding blogs for ongoing process reflection and viewer feedback), which is embarking on a new project, the description of which ends with this explanation:

We’ll follow this project, commenting and participating with artists outside the classroom as we muck about with words, sounds and images inside the classroom–and with layered, conscious connectedness.

We’ll also follow the January writing adventure of fellow student, Remy, from his initial about-this-blogging post and a response he received through the coming month. Remy explains:

And Jeff comments:

This is something I haven’t yet done much in my teaching with social software–look into the unfolding process of Web writers and artists beyond ourselves as a way to understand our own writing–both process and goals. We now have so much rich material to bring into our classrooms, to talk about, to play with, to extend. Artists feel overwhelmed, at a loss, at some point in the creative process. My student writers need to get used to the feeling of freefalling. Why shouldn’t we be feeling this way, too as teachers? Especially now? And so as I feel overwhelmed by the amount of information and applications bombarding me, and frustrated by my shortcomings and an educational system unshaken from its inertia, I will remember how I feel this way every time I try to write. Artists have always been at the edge, looking back over their shoulders, commenting, provoking and distilling as they leap into the unknown .

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