By Melissa Favara, Contributing Columnist
I love teaching 20th Century American Literature in the
Pacific Northwest in the spring. Spring term generally is great because it
starts off gray and murky, and the students seem kind of draggy, and everyone
gets more cheery and ebullient as the weather improves. But the best part is
watching the students quail in terror when they find out what we’re reading
because all that 1914-1950 modernist stuff seems so bizarre and
incomprehensible before they try it, then watching them all warm up to William
Faulkner and T.S. Eliot and Gertrude Stein and all those people and feel pretty
clever by the end.
We just started reading Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying” —
definitely a weird one — a book in which each chapter is told from the mind of
a different character, stream of consciousness style. Today a young woman named
Jane got a good chunk of what modernism in general is about — “So, we’re
confused because we’re just hearing what they’re actually thinking, and people
think in messy ways, right? That’s why we’re confused?”
Indeed. No friendly omniscient narrator to connect all the
dots and tell you what everything means in that novel—more a record of life the
way we experience it, which is as a messy mash of sensory input, wants,
memories, associations, interruptions.
“Mama, what are you doing?”
“I’m working on my Street Roots column, Ramona. I’m writing
about teaching.”
“You’ve been lazy about Street Roots! You haven’t written it
in a long time! You should write about how I went on the submarine at OMSI.”
“Okay. Maybe in a little while.”
The other thing about teaching in spring is that the turn to
the season of new growth tends to inspire me to make more resolutions than New
Year’s does; usually my resolutions are sweeping and unrealistic vows to be a
better and more productive and more punctual and more complete person in every
imaginable way, or to at least really, finally, fully weed the front yard so
that it doesn’t look like the Munsters live here. Typically, whether in lawn
care or more cerebral pursuits, I get overwhelmed contemplating how
weedy/disorganized/overbooked/stacked with ungraded essays, etc., life has been
up to this moment: freeze staring backward like Lot’s wife, open a bottle of
wine, and toss up my hands. This year, I’m keeping it simple and
forward-focused: keep my journal again. Notice more, make a record of noticing.
“Mama, did you know that the men in the submarine could only
take one shower one time a week for like about only two minutes in cold water?
And they couldn’t open the windows? Did you know it’s still stinky in there and
plus also you have to hunch down if you’re bigger than like about five feet
tall and the teacher had to hunch down and it smelled like sweaty men?”
“No, I really didn’t know any of that at all.”
I started by digging up my old journals from the last time I
kept one regularly, before having young Ramona 6.75 years ago, and having a
look. It’s interesting how the entries, sometimes lengthy and lyrical,
sometimes fragments of conversations I wanted to remember, interspersed with
grocery and to-do lists and phone numbers for people erased from memory now,
add up to a sense of the times they covered. I stopped keeping a regular journal
partly out of being in the kind of triage-based space a new and then not-so-new
parent is in, but it was also partly philosophical — so much time keeping a
record of every moment was taking up the time that I should be spending having
new moments, I said, with Life and Experience and my New Kid. Maybe that was
healthy at the time. But as I’ve kind of gotten on top of raising a kid and
teaching full time, that record’s been missing completely, not counting
Facebook and the pictures on my phone, and I expect that it might be pretty
neat for Ramona, at some point, to read my journal and connect the dots of my
life that is now our life and get a sense of what all the moving parts were.
“Ramona, I’m almost done. Be careful with that paint! Don’t
get it on the tablecloth.”
“I’m not. Look. I’m not. Did you put in there that also they
still have actual real torpedoes on the submarine? There’s not like actual
bombs in them anymore. But the torpedoes are there for real.”
“That is awesome. Thank you. I’ll mention it.”
I’ve been meaning to start the journal again for a while —
about as long as I’ve been meaning to do many, many things (see resolutions).
It’s hard to prioritize what to do with my time; when I make time to write,
it’s hard to know what bears writing down. But I do know that when I think too
hard or to critically of myself and my plans, I’m paralyzed. And with 39 coming
in about 10 minutes, I’m statistically halfway through my life. Getting the
stream of consciousness written down, whether it initially makes sense or seems
valuable or not, is maybe its own worthwhile experience, especially if it gives
Ramona a breadcrumb trail back through her ever-accelerating childhood.
“Are you doing bath or is Dad doing bath? I want you to do
bath and Dad to do bed. Dad’s reading me Prince Caspian and he knows how to do
the voices.”
“I’ll do bath. Stop biting your nails.”
“I’m not — I’m biting the skin, see?”
“Gross. Stop.”
Tomorrow my class will dig back into “As I Lay Dying.” My
main angle with them will be that it’s completely OK if they don’t get it yet,
or if their expectations of what a novel is supposed to be like are frustrated,
that it’s important that they assure themselves they’re OK even if they feel
like they’re doing it wrong. If they just let the experience of reading it wash
over them, they’ll get the hang of it. The text will actually teach them how it
wants to be read, how to put it all together and get a sense of the story. They
just have to show up. Take notes. Make a record of noticing.
Melissa Favara teaches
English in Vancouver and lives and writes in North Portland, where she parents
Ramona, age 6, hosts a bi-monthly reading series, and counts her husband and
her city as the two great loves of her life.
This article appears in 2013-04-26.