The Fall 2019 Anthology of Hellfire Cross Country Speeches

Being my final year on cross country, I tried to make things special by giving a hellfire speech at every meet. Here’s how it went:

Central Dutch Invitational:

[Slowly growing passion and volume as it goes along.]

Men, what did we come here to do? [Pause.] We came here to win! But what is that, even? What is winning? Webster’s Dictionary defines it as “Successful in competition.” But what competition? Webster’s tells us that it is “A contest between rivals.” But who are our rivals? Well, first we must ask, what are our rivals? Webster’s defines rivals as “One of two or more striving to reach or obtain something only one may possess.” But what is this something that we both want? Webster’s defines something as “an indeterminate or unspecified thing!” And what does indeterminate mean? You want to know what it means? Well, there are two definitions actually: “Not precisely determined” or “characterized by a sequential flowering from the lateral or basal buds!” And you better be damn sure Webster knows what a bud is: “An incompletely opened flower!”

[Suddenly quiet.]

And that, gentlemen, is just about all that you need to know.

Les Duke Invitational

At the Central Meet I announced to the team that I’d give a hellfire speech at every meet, but I’d actually given up on that goal by our second meet when I couldn’t think of any decent concept. That didn’t stop a couple team members from pushing me forward when people were giving pump-up speeches and cheers. Keep in mind that this wasn’t just the team: at least fifty alumni and parents were also watching. What follows was completely improvised.

Hey, yeah. So I’m giving a speech! I’m giving a speech on a very important day. A very important speech and I haven’t prepared at all. But, even if it’s all just incoherent and stalling for time, I’m sure you’ll are read something profound into it. And isn’t that the great thing about the human mind, that we can- no, that is so damn clichéd. And now I just swore in front of a bunch of alumni and parents. Crap. No, that’s it, I’m done.

Loyola University Edward Kelly Memorial Lakefront Run

Men, none of us would be here at this race today had it not been for Edward Kelly, a monumental figure in the field of biology, a man who changed so many of our lives forever, the man for whom this race is named. In 1936, Edward Reginald Kelly, or Eddy as he would soon be known, was born in a small Wisconsin town on December 23rd. In 1956, at only twenty years old, he graduated from Loyola University with a major in biology. In 1960, his graduate degree already complete, he patented a series of new techniques and medicines that saved millions of lives as soon as they were released into the world. In 1959, God appeared to Edward in a whirlwind, roaring, “Pitiful man, why have you seen fit to question of my judgement? Did I not punish Adam and Eve, the first of your kind, with pain death for their transgression in the Garden of Eden? For your arrogance, not only will you suffer all the torment that lurks beneath the earth, but your alma mater and other nearby division three schools shall offer tributes of both men and women every year, to toil and weep as they run across the ground!” Then the earth opened up and Edward was thrown into the abyss.

So remember Edward Kelly, and why our pain is the cost of his hubris, so that none shall ever defy the will of God again!

Agustana College Invitational

Me: Give me a G!

Team: G!

Me: Give me an R!

Team: R!

Me: Give me an I!

Team: I!

Me: Give me an M!

Team: M!

Me: Give me a Q!

Team: Q!

Me: Give me a 2!

Team: 2!

Me: Give me an uppercase L!

Team: Uppercase L!

Me: Give me a question mark!

Team: Question mark!

Me: And what’s that spell?

Team: I don’t know!

Me: The wifi password!

University of Wisconsin Lacrosse Invitational

There is a dragon before us, men! It is a beast with five heads: fear, weakness, not trying hard enough, St. Norbert college, and hills! And it has a tail called fatigue, and it breathes a fire called running-induced iron deficiency. We cannot run away from the beast, men, we can only run towards it. But do not be afraid, for we are armed with the mightiest weapons in all the land! We have a sword, a sword named teamwork! And an ax, an ax named confidence! Our bow is named support, and it shoots arrows of cheers crafted by the women’s team and coaches and family members! And our hammer is named lifting and our armor is named shoes! Now let’s go and slay this overdone allegory!

Midwest Conference Championship

The course was very muddy, so we had been instructed not to run on the course itself, but on the outside, so that it wouldn’t be torn up before the race even began. We followed the rules, but none of the other teams did.

We are destined to conquer this course, men! Our victory is written in providence as surely as if it were already history. And this is why: yesterday, the Midwest Conference Championship authorities proclaimed that any may run on either side of the course, but none may touch the sacred soil of the path until the race has begun. The other teams scoffed at this warning and flaunted the decree. For this they shall be condemned. But we alone respected the law! Except for Kody, he’s doomed. But the rest of us are guaranteed to run over happy pastures while our impure opponents shall be given up to the earth’s maw, to join their companion in sin, Edward Kelly. This is not to say there will be no sacrifice or suffering for us, as the land takes arrogance as tenfold more insulting than disobedience. But if we humble ourselves and respect our course, victory is already assured!

NCAA Division III Regional Championship

We were not favorites to win this meet.

People say that we have no chance at all of winning. But I say, you can do anything if you put your mind to it! Seriously, I really mean it, you can do absolutely anything, all you have to do is believe in yourself. You could win regionals, you could win nationals, you could go to the olympics with no effort at all, if only you believe in yourself! And it’s not just running, if you believe in yourself you could be famous! You could be president! You could dismantle our democracy, seize power, and lock up your opponents! The power of your self-belief could conquer the world, oppress billions just for your own fame and wealth, and torture anyone who stands in your way!

So yeah, you can do anything if you believe in yourself, but it’s probably best for everyone if you don’t do it that often. Just use it to win regionals. Or don’t, we don’t need it that bad.

Crying

I cried for the first time in a while today. My girlfriend Mica and I were watching a TV show* we’ve been following for a long time. The main character’s goal for the entire show up to this point was to be a published writer, and she’d finally done it, but the manuscript she sold was an autobiographical story about the death of someone she loved. She’d finally gotten what she wanted, through incredible pain, but then she almost decided not to publish the book because it would feel too much like giving up the memory of the one she loved. I didn’t realize I was crying until Mica said something tenderly to me, (telling me it was okay, I think). After that I wiped the tear away and we went on watching the show. For most people getting watery eyes over an emotional TV show episode wouldn’t be such a big deal, but it’s been a long time since I cried, so it stuck on my mind.

I’ve been thinking of crying a lot these days, actually. I’m writing an essay on the short story “Protozoa” by Ellen Martinsen Gorham, which is about an eighth grade girl who, among other things, secretly videochats an older girl she met online for daily crying rituals. It sounds absurd, but it makes a sort of emotional sense. The older girl says that “sharing tears is a high and a release,” and I get it so much that it almost makes me want to give it a try. I was a real crier in elementary school, up until my family’s move to Minnesota in sixth grade, and the things I cried over were so trivial (poor skills at Pillow Polo, hearing a death metal song in a babysitter’s car) that I must have only done it for the endorphins. Because there is a wonderful feeling in crying, especially when it dries up and you realize you’ve crested whatever feeling you were on and things can only get better from here.

After the move to Minnesota I stopped crying quite so much. I grew up a lot around that time, physically at least, and probably felt that it wasn’t appropriate any more. By ninth grade, I think I went the whole school year without crying, which I noted as something of an accomplishment at the time. But it became a problem in midsummer of that year, when I woke up to the news that my eight-year-old cousin Stephen had died. That’s when I should have cried, right? What the hell else was I supposed to do? But I didn’t. When I thought about, I didn’t feel sad, just confused. People didn’t just disappear, certainly not little kids like Stephen. So I lied, pretending to feel some monumental grief when I really just felt blank. Sometimes I worried that someone would figure out it was all an act and expose me for the psychopath I was, not even crying at my own cousin’s death.

I finally cried at the memorial service. We held it at on an island in the Detroit river, a local tourist destination with a water park and ice cream trucks and screaming kids running everywhere. It was the way my uncle said, “I’ll miss you, buddy” as we threw yellow flowers into the river that broke me down. It was just such a simple way to put it: missing someone.

I’ve never trusted crying since then. When the tears cleared, nothing was better, really. Any happy rush that came fled quick. It hadn’t changed anything.

Sometimes I feel guilty that I could cry about a Pillow Polo game in elementary school, cry about a TV show now, but that I took almost a full week to cry over my own dead cousin. It makes me feel selfish, or at least like someone with very skewed priorities. I know that’s not true. I know that there’s no one-to-one correlation between how you feel and what you express. I still mourned Stephen for that week before the memorial, the feeling was just so new that I didn’t know I was doing it. Crying is still useful, though. Maybe we shouldn’t make a self-help cult around it like the characters in “Protozoa,” but it also couldn’t hurt to be a little less ashamed.

_________________

* I won’t say which to avoid spoilers.

Guilty Pleasure

When I started this blog, I thought that reviews would be easy filler content. I read a lot, I watch movies pretty often, and I tend to have a lot of ideas about how stories work (or don’t). But aside from two posts early in the blog, I’ve mostly stayed away from reviews. It has often occurred to me to write more, but I never go through with it, no matter how much I have to say on a given story, because I never know how I’d end it. Reviews almost always have some kind of verdict, usually stated at the start and reiterated at the end like a thesis statement. The finality of that judgement always scared me, because I never knew which question to answer: should I say whether or not it’s good, or whether or not I liked it. It’s rare that I have a clear answer on either one of those, and when I do, it’s rarer that they’re the same.

To explain this point, I’m going to compare two pieces of media that have no business being discussed in the same post: the hyper-violent neo-noir film Drive and the children’s fantasy cartoon The Dragon Prince. These two really don’t have anything in common aside from being a series of still images shown in quick succession so as to create the illusion of motion: one is animated and the other is live action, one is a TV series and the other is a movie, one has mostly bloodless violence and the other shows a human head crushed flat by the heel of a man’s shoe. But I’ve seen them both recently and had opposite reactions to each. If there were some perfect formula for determining the quality of cinema, I suspect Drive would rank high and The Dragon Prince would be mid-to-low. But I didn’t enjoy Drive at all, and I loved The Dragon Prince. 

Drive is about a nameless and almost entirely silent getaway driver who falls in love with a woman, tries to help her unlucky husband get out of debt with a gang, and reacts poorly once things go wrong. The film is a wonder to look at, with a kind of enormity even its dingy settings. The action scenes all have just the right number of elements: never cluttered, always clear, and very memorable. As art, you have to say it’s well crafted. But, when the credits rolled and I closed the laptop, all I felt was that I should be feeling more. There wasn’t any symbol that I wanted to dwell on, no character relationship that I wanted to imagine further. What happened happened, it was beautiful and terrifying, but I couldn’t find any more of it to hold onto at the end.

The Dragon Prince only came on my radar because it was created by the writers from some of the all-time best episodes of Avatar: The Last Airbender, which was my favorite show growing up. The mythology isn’t exactly complicated, but it’s a lot to summarize, so suffice it to say that it’s a journey story set in a pretty generic fantasy world (magic, elves, dragons, monarchy, etc.). There isn’t any part I can fasten myself onto as something that I really like. The characters display a racial and sexual diversity not often seen in children’s shows, but while that’s a good thing societally, it doesn’t automatically make for good storytelling. The animation is a weird 3D-2D hybrid, and the best you can say about it is that you get used to it. The setting is something we’ve all seen a thousand times since Tolkien. And the writing reveals that this really is a show aimed for kids: humor that’s mostly fart jokes and sarcasm and dialogue that states every theme or plot development over and over, always in the clearest possible terms, never giving the audience the satisfaction for figuring something out for themselves. It’s that last point that really bugs me, actually, how the writers never trust the viewer enough to let something stay unstated. 

But maybe ambiguity is overrated. Drive never spells anything emotionally meaningful out too clearly, especially since the characters hardly ever talk. There’s no dialogue in the scene where the hero falls in love, just some beautiful shots and pretty good music of two people hanging out by a stream. With every character left an enigma, though, you start to wonder if there really is anything to them at all, or if they’re just vehicles for all these wonderful shots that don’t come together into an actual story worth caring about.

And maybe that explains what it is about The Dragon Prince that I like, actually. It says what it wants to say: when characters are friends or rivals or enemies, you can always tell right away. When they feel something, they don’t hide it, and even if it gets a little overplayed, at least it’s there. And with that kind of openness right from the first episode, it’s hard not to care about the characters and feel whatever they do, even if what they feel is inordinate joy at some stupid fart joke. Maybe that’s why Drive needs to trade in cool detachment, actually: it’s hard enough watching anyone get shot or stabbed to pieces, it’s just too much to watch that happen to someone you like.

I don’t mean to say that nuance or subtlety are always bad for storytelling. But these two examples show a larger point, I think: that maybe it’s best to trust your instincts on what you think is or isn’t good. Drive just seemed like it was good because it had legitimately great visuals and sophisticated pretensions, but neither of these make for a good storytelling. And if that means I like a stupid (but not that stupid) children’s show more than a film festival award-winning movie, then fine, I’ll take it.

Trailers

There was a time when I watched movies and didn’t really bother following the story. It all just kind of washed over me, disconnected names and characters and images, and none of it made sense. I didn’t really care. Somewhere in the back of my mind there was an idea that it should be making sense, that there was a reason for why that purple lizard was kidnapping Mike Wazowski and I was probably doing a bad thing by not trying to figure it out. But the pictures on the screen looked cool and changed often enough that I didn’t get bored, so I was happy enough that comprehension didn’t bother me all that much. I think I started actually understanding stories sometime in early elementary school, but it was never something I totally mastered. Up until middle school, I think, I’d sometimes be content to let movies stay bright and pretty pictures that kept my mind moving, albeit in no particular direction.

This has been bothering me for two reasons. For one, we’re learning about dependent readers in my education class, the kinds of kid who can decipher words but can’t or won’t take the time to understand what they mean. It makes me wonder if I’m really fit to be a teacher if I’m not too far removed from being that kind of reader myself and, worse yet, that kind of movie-watcher.

The other reason is that I’ve been on a kick of watching movie trailers during study breaks these past few days, and it’s made me remember that, even back when I couldn’t decipher movies, I loved trailers. In the theater I used to keep hoping there would be one more trailer. I’d rejoice at the green “Appropriate Audiences” screen and dread the opening credits. And I think that’s because trailers gave me exactly what I wanted. There’s plot, sure, but only for maybe thirty seconds, and only the barest kind, mostly serving to hype up the disconnected moments of spectacle that follow. Even in trailers for slow and artsy movies, they make sure to show the only gun, the only half-nude shot that appears in the entire film. It’s pure awe and pleasure, disappearing before you even understand it, with a pretense of story to give it the mystique of something whole but hidden. This probably sounds like Marxist analysis of why everything in our society is barren and meaningless. If it does, I’m sorry. Because I love trailers, even though I know I really shouldn’t.

It occurred to me the other day, though, that when I visualize the ideal form of something I want to write, it doesn’t come as a novel. That’s understandable, maybe; 80,000 words can be pretty hard to visualize all at once. But it doesn’t come as a movie, either. It comes as a movie trailer. Enough set-up plot and character to justify its existence, then a barrage of high-emotion moments, orderless and simple. And, in case it’s not clear, that’s a bad thing to want if you want your writing to be taken seriously. Or if you want to take seriously yourself. Or if you want to believe what you’ve been saying all these years, about empathy for characters being an essential human function or stories revealing the complex truths of life, rather than dismissing it all as an excuse for sixty second of catharsis.

I feel like I’ve reached too far in this post for how simple the resolution is: simply that I should plot my stories out all the way before starting to write them. I go in too often with a movie-trailer mindset, that once I plot out the basics the rest will be pure and joyous flow. And as for my other fears, that I’m a dependent reader, that I’m addicted to trailers and don’t actually want to understand movies, I think that every artistically inclined person worries that they aren’t serious enough. Either that or they worry that they’re too serious (or they should be worrying that, anyway), and I think the latter is worse.

My Bad History With Pets

My history as a pet-owner was one of affectionate torture and accidental murder. First there were the pillbugs I found in the backyard when I was five, who I housed in the elaborate pillbug playground I’d made out of string, construction paper, and sticks. For a little while I was angry at them for being so ungrateful for the wonderland I’d built: most only explored it for a few seconds before freezing in place. Then I realized that I’d set them free on the playground before waiting for the glue to dry. 

Next came the fish. Micah got a whole school of tiny orange fish and I got a big one with visible organs under translucent scales. While our fish were about equal in mass (and mine was undoubtedly cooler), I was still kind of resentful that Micah still had a majority, so I was happy when mine started chasing those little orange guys. Overnight, Micah’s fish started disappearing while mine became unusually bloated and, though I think just about everyone knew what had happened, my mom still humored us by putting my fish in time out in a separate container for playing “a mean game of tag.” But, wanting to pull one over on Micah, I snuck down to the tank late one night, took my fish out of time out, and gleefully watched him gobble up the rest of Micah’s. But, as soon as he’d finished, my fish collapsed to the ground, layers of see-through skin peeling off and organs bursting out as his overstuffed gut exploded.

Finally, there are the class hamsters from fourth grade, all three of them, who died one after the other in the space of a few months. One got hypothermia after a student decided he looked dirty and gave him a cold bath in the sink, another escaped our classroom in his hamster-ball and fell down two flights of stairs, and the last escaped his cage and chewed through almost an entire pencil before succumbing to lead poisoning. We never assigned blame for these deaths, but there were only six of us in the class, so we were all guilty in a way.

The only family pet who’s lasted more than a few weeks is Micah’s lizard, who has probably only made it so long (seventeen years, I think) because I knew well enough to stay away. Back in Waco we had him by the TV and he used to look up every time it turned on, but these days he just sleeps, eats crickets, and licks his eyeballs. Mom thinks he’s depressed.

All this is to say that I’ve never had much luck with pets and I’ve never understood people who do. I’m so scared of dogs that the sight or sound of one makes me tense up visibly, which I know is socially inappropriate but I’ve never been able to hide very well. I avoid cats too, considering them smaller, calmer dogs who could nevertheless do a lot of damage if I let them. Birds used to be okay, but they’ve terrified me ever since some breed vicious in its nesting season started chasing me around Grinnell over the summer, and bunnies are the enemy of my mom’s garden, so I’ve never trusted them either. Most people who learn about my fear of animals assume it comes from some childhood trauma, and while I think they’re right, I don’t think it’s the sort they’re thinking of. So many kids movies are about animals talking, thinking animals with inner lives well-developed enough to hold grudges. Around second grade I realized, if they ever share not on what I’ve done, I’m far past due for payback.

Despite my fears, though, there’s always been something appealing about the idea of a pet: to live with something not human, but that recognizes you and communicates with you and cares about you all the same. Part of what scares me about animals is that they operate on a different level of logic, that they could bite or claw me for some threat I didn’t know I was making. But that inhumanness is also what makes keeping a pet so fascinating. I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of being around humans, but living on a planet with such wonderful biodiversity, it seems like a waste to go my whole life only ever interacting with the same sort of species.

This week, my girlfriend Mica said she might keep a flying squirrel in her dorm next year. The idea seemed absurd to me at first: squirrels are okay in my books since they so rarely reach out to humans, but I wouldn’t want to see what one would do if you got it trapped in a cage. Flying squirrels, though, are apparently docile, happy in captivity, and form close bonds with their owners (they’re also super cute, by the way). I’ll have graduated by the time she gets it, but I’ll visit her so often that I’m sure I’ll get close to her new pet. And maybe this can be where my bad luck with animal care turns around.

The Conference Meet: An Extended Boast

Here’s a story: Except for illness, injury, Nordic ski season, a couple ennui-riddled winter months in middle school, and very few other exceptions, I’ve run every single day for the past ten years. From the start it was just a way to make friends and kill time and maybe get a little ego boost when I made a personal best, so no real team commitment. The uncomplicated individualism was part of the sport’s draw, actually: it was everyone for themself, whatever colors you wore were incidental. Things changed when I came to Grinnell, when the team table became my home base in the dining hall and the cross country house was my relief from campus-bound stress every weekend. Slowly, the score we got as a group began to matter to me. At around the same time, I became a potential person to change that score: first as a spare part if someone more competent fell back, then as one of the scorers myself. Going into the end of my first decade of running, I knew I could make a difference, and I knew that it really mattered this time. Will and Evelyn Freeman were retiring from their forty year tenure as the men’s and women’s cross country coaches, with a thirty year winning streak at the conference championship on the men’s side, nearly unbroken save for the past two years. Will claimed that it didn’t matter, but I knew that another loss would end things bitterly, that he left the team in decline. Fear for conference had been a nearly constant background whine since the summer, adding urgency to my recovery when I got hurt and adding stress whenever I didn’t have anything better to worry about. But in the week leading up to it, it rose to nearly consume my life. I couldn’t sleep well the night before, I couldn’t breath evenly, I couldn’t help from shaking. We all knew that the race would be a fiasco:  a good layer of snow had collected over the past few days. It had mostly melted by race time, but that just left the ground swampy, with wide, ice floe-filled puddles. To make it worse, the wind was cold, and strong enough to push you off your feet if you didn’t have both of them on the ground (which you rarely do when running). But once the gun went off I hardly felt the wind, and running through puddles didn’t feel much different than solid ground. Adrenaline took over, I guess, replacing logic with a blind impulse to pass as many people as I could before my legs gave out. They gave out in the last kilometer, but by then I was in tenth place, and I only fell back one spot. As soon as I stopped moving I collapsed, immobilized by how cold I just realized I was. Luckily my parents and girlfriend were right there and offered me spare coats and snowpants as I shuffled off to the golf club, which had a strict no-runners policy, but they seemed okay looking the other way when they realized how hypothermic I was. Once inside, I asked my parents if we’d won, and they said they didn’t know. We had a tight top four, but a long gap after that. Worry heated me up again, as I realized that we might just lose by a single point, a point I could’ve caught if I’d held on a little while longer. But, when I was unfrozen and steady enough on my feet to go back outside and watch the women’s race, I asked the first teammate I saw who won, and learned that we did. Content, I watched the women demolish the competition much more handily than the men had.

I planned on writing about disappointment, on how victory passes so quickly and then you need to move on to the next shiny hope. But, writing this, I don’t think that’s really true anymore. Yes, I was struck with an intense “Now what?” feeling as soon as I heard we’d won, a feeling of drifting pointlessness now that we’d gotten what we’d wanted. But, writing those 619 words above, I don’t think I need to philosophize about what to do after winning. It’s fine just to enjoy it, even to gloat a little bit, and to rest up. Of course, I can’t rest just yet, we’ve still got regionals, which we’d be on track to win if this were really a story worth bragging about, but we don’t have a prayer. Which I guess is the real truth of these sports stories: neither victory or success are really lasting, and neither do the glory or shame that come with them. But you can feel these things and perseverate on them, for a time. Not necessary, but highly encouraged.

Originality

My girlfriend, Mica, and I have a game where we try to lay out the influences of stories that we like, or stories that we’ve written, as a sort of ingredient list. Take Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, for example: it centers on the kinds of questions about what makes someone a human that you get from science fiction, but instead of getting there through spaceships and robots, the first half seems more like an uptight English bildungsroman from the Victorian era. That’s one of the great things about dating another writer: we get free reign to talk about all these esoteric questions with limited appeal to anyone else. Because I don’t think I’ve seen another writer who doesn’t obsess over what inspired them.

Often, that obsession is self-affirming. There’s the same thrill of sorting yourself into a genre or claiming your writing tradition from some master of the craft as there is in getting your Myers-Briggs Type Indicator score. It affirms your authenticity in the craft, your uniqueness, but without leaving you entirely out on your own. It turns your writing from something you do in private, scribbling bits that might not ever be read again, into something part of a larger tradition, something with weight behind it. I’ve been saying “you” a lot here, but mostly I’m just listing my own experience, gaining confidence as a writer by imitating who I knew were respected and admired. In general, I don’t think there should be any shame in this sort of imitation. Walk through any art museum on a busy day and you’ll see students on benches with sketchbooks on their laps, copying the greats. Why shouldn’t writers do the same?

Sometimes, though, I get scared that this imitation is all that there is. I’ve gotten hooked on the website TV Tropes over the past month, which defines common elements (character archetypes, plots, settings, etc.) and lists works that use them. It’s mostly fun to look around at different stories I recognize and see how they all sprout from the same structure, like pulling back the curtain to reveal the mechanisms of my favorite stories. But pulling back the curtain can be disappointing too, especially when so many stories seem the same. Spend too long in that way of thinking, and it begins to feel like nothing can really be unique. If a character seems new, it isn’t something entirely original, but rather a subversion of a trope, or two tropes melded together. From the TV Tropes perspective, writing begins to look like building with Legos: maybe what you make is original, but it’s never really true art because the pieces were made by someone else. My first day at the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio my class read the short story “Bullet in the Brain” by Tobias Wolff. At first it confused me: a hodgepodge of clichés, none of which mixed quite right. But, as we discussed it, I realized that this was the point, that Wolff was arguing that nothing was original anymore, but you can still find beauty by combining what no one else has thought to combine yet. I was proud of myself at first, but as soon as I shared my theory and got an approving nod from the teacher, I felt suddenly disappointed. The secret to being a great writer, it seemed, was to quit trying and settle for being a plagiarizer with a unique talent for hiding who you stole from.

I don’t think it’s that extreme anymore, but the problem is still with me. Over fall break I’ve tried to come up with a plan to revise a novel I’ve been working on since Junior year of high school. All my past drafts were disappointing, so I tried to cut without mercy and replace it with new parts that I thought were sure to work. But that turned out disappointing too, because I ended up cutting what was most original in the story, and everything that I replaced it with, I’d stolen from somewhere else.

I think that knowing how much writers borrow from their colleagues is pretty important, especially for new writers. For one thing, it underlines the importance of reading widely, and it cuts through blanket respect of mythic writers too. But it only goes so far. Because we have other sources to draw from, sources that are never as simple as tropes. There’s non-fiction history for one, and your own life for another. That was Mica’s big innovation in our game: when talking about her own stories, she listed memories with her family as ingredients alongside her favorite books and films. And this injection of the personal, I think, is what keeps fiction from becoming repetitive. Take high fantasy, for instance, maybe the genre that borrows the most from others because it’s completely separate from our own world. At it’s worst it’s nothing but mimicry: the dungeons and elves and orcs and taverns that Tolkien codified and imitators and Dungeons & Dragons and video games reinforced over and over and over again. But in any decent game of D&D you’ll see characters drawn from personal experience and flourishing webs of inside jokes that could only have come from real life. Oddly, some Dungeon Masters try to keep their game-worlds pure by banning anything that doesn’t jive with the pre-established gameworld. But, in my view, the personal and new cutting through the caked-on layers of tradition is what fiction is really about.

Lesson Plan

I’ve got no time and less energy right now, it being the day before fall break, so instead of writing a post, enjoy this lesson plan I wrote for Americorps this summer!

• Start the lesson by telling the kids, “raise your hand if you have a good memory.” (Probably a lot of them will jump up, raising their hands and rattling off things they remember. Let this go on for a little bit, but then quiet them down.) Then tell them, “Okay, it’s good that so many of you have good memories, because something very important is about to happen, and I need all of you to remember it exactly.”
• Someone walks into the room with a pink flowerpot on their head. They have socks on their hands and a blue shirt on backwards. They walk to the floor, do a push-up and a jumping jack, and walk around the room counter-clockwise while saying, “I don’t want to eat plant food! My mom says I have to, even though it makes me sick and gassy and I’m pretty sure the little white bits are poisonous. But I don’t want to! I’d rather eat spaghetti, which I used to call noodles until my English teacher in fourteenth grade told me that it’s always best to use the least silly word for everything, so that everyone knows you’re a dull and pretentious person.” I’ll provide all the props, and hopefully we’ll have a printout of the script so whoever does it doesn’t have to memorize it. The actual details aren’t that important, so long as it’s all extremely specific and random.
• Ask the kids to describe what they just saw, and write what they say on the board. After establishing the broad details, ask for specifics. Ask what he said he didn’t want to eat, or what exercise he did when he walked in, or what color the pot on his head was.
• After we have a comprehensive list, have the person who did the random walking rant come in and go over what exactly the kids got right or wrong. Probably, they’ll have the broad strokes right but the specifics wrong.
• Explain to the kids that no one can remember everything. And if they had so much trouble remembering so soon after something so memorable had happened, imagine how much they would forget for things that happened days or weeks or years ago. That’s why it’s important to keep a journal: because, inevitably, you forget what you thought or how you felt. But a journal, which is a book you write in every day about your feelings, is sort of like a better memory, a memory that can’t forget or misremember. Tell them, “Of course, it’s not so important if you don’t remember what costume [SLICK member] was wearing today. But what if you forgot something really important, or found out something about yourself that you can only find by looking back? To show this, we’ve come up with a couple scenarios for you.”
• For each scenario:

1. Read the scenario out loud.
2. Ask what the person might be forgetting.
3. Ask what they would learn by reading their older journal entries.
4. Ask what the person in the scenario should do.

(Also, clarify that it’s okay to feel angry or sad sometimes, a journal isn’t supposed to fix your emotions. Rather, it’s supposed to help you look at the big picture and learn more about yourself).

Scenario 1

Curt keeps a journal. One day, he writes down, “Wow, I can’t believe I saw Minecraft: The Movie on its midnight premiere! They managed to capture the fun of spending all day and night mining, and made it into a movie that was only five hours long! I sure will be tired when I get to school tomorrow, but it sure was worth it!” The next day, he writes, “Ugh. I totally failed my math test today. I could barely keep my eyes open, and the numbers didn’t make any sense. Mom said she’d unplug the computer and throw it into the gorge if I brought back one more bad grade, so I guess that Minecraft I saw last night will be the last I’ll see of it for a while.” One year later, he writes, “I can’t wait to see Minecraft: The Movie II: Quest for More Wood tomorrow! I’ve missed Minecraft so much ever since mom threw my computer into the gorge! Of course, I have a history test tomorrow, but I’ll be fine. I don’t need much sleep, and I’m really great at winging tests.”

Scenario 2

Angelina keeps a journal. One day, she writes, “I’m so sad! Julie’s dad got a new job spying on the Amish, and now her dad has to move all the way to Ohio! I won’t see her at school or on soccer team anymore, and I can’t even text or call or email her, because if they catch her using modern technology, her dad’s cover will be blown and she might get shunned! Julie is my best friend, what will I do?” A month later, she writes, “Writing letters with Julie is great! It’s so fun keeping her up to date on the drama at school, and she’s been telling me all about the barn raisings she’s gone to! In some ways, it’s almost better than having her around, because it feels so special every time I get a letter from her.” Two years later, she writes, “Today has been the worst day of my life! This morning, mom said that we have to move to Florida, and I only have a week to say goodbye to all of my friends here at school! What will I do? I won’t know anyone there, and I’ll never get to see any of my old friends ever again!”

Scenario 3

Amanda keeps a journal. One day, she writes, “I’m really lucky to have a family as good as mine. Dad always lets me play with his scuba gear, Mom has the best stories from her detective agency, and my brother Garrett makes the best fajitas in the world! Yesterday, the kids at the lunch table were talking about how they hoped they were long-lost princes and princesses who had real royal families looking for them. I told them all that I wouldn’t choose any other family in the world but my own.” A week later, she writes, “I just found out that I’m adopted! And my fake mom and dad weren’t even planning on telling me until I turned eighteen! They only told me because there’s a viral video of my real mom getting way too emotional when hugging a mascot at Disneyland going around, and if I saw it I might realize that I look just like her. Garrett knew, of course. They tell him everything, because he’s their real son. How can they even love me, if I’m not their real daughter? That’s a trick question, because they don’t.”

Scenario 4 

(Skip if time is short, it’s even more jokey than the rest)

Thomas keeps a journal. One day, he writes, “Looking through old boxes of Christmas ornaments in the attic, I found an ancient prophecy scroll about me. Apparently, on my tenth birthday a demon will appear in the form of an enormous bull-headed serpent and tempt me to open a magical door that appears in my wall. If I do, apparently I’ll be transported to a land of nightmares where I’ll suffer in eternal agony. Pretty cool what you find in the attic sometimes.” On his tenth birthday, he writes, “This has been the best birthday ever! All my friends and I went to Adventureland, then I came home and opened my presents. I got a ton of great Lego sets! And then, when I thought the day couldn’t get any better, a giant snake with the head of a bull appeared in my bedroom and told me that I’d live forever in bliss and happiness if I opened a new door in my wall. This is so great! I’m just taking a moment to write this before I turn the handle.”

• After the scenarios, make little journals by stapling together half-sheets of paper (I’ll bring them). If there’s time, color the front covers with their happiest memory.

Archiving

I just spent twenty minutes turning my collected notes from the middle school English classroom observation into a really terrible scrapbook. It’s a mess of scraps and staples and tape. The handwritten bits are nearly indecipherable and the printed pages are ordered 1-3-2-4. I could’ve done a cleaner job of it, and if I were doing this for a grade I’m sure I would. But compiling all these notes into one journal is just something I did for fun, and I decided against taking an extra five minutes to make it look halfway decent because I want it to look like something the middle schoolers I’m observing will scoff at. Ancient and important texts rarely come in neatly stacked 12-point-font pages with one-inch-margins and page numbers, after all. They’ve got texture, stains, damage, missing parts. And, even though I know that it’s arrogant, that it distracts me from getting my words themselves to be the best that they can be, I always want my writing to have that wonderful feeling of decay.

My classes have accidentally hit on a bit of an archival motif, all at the same time, that has gotten me thinking about this more than usual lately. In Humanities we’re reading most of Sappho’s work, which isn’t hard because only 650 of the 10,000 lines she wrote survived. Much of our discussion is guesswork, imagining what might have filled the missing lines, which gives her writing a half-cloaked majesty that Homer never had. 

Meanwhile, in my fiction seminar, we’re reading Valeria Luiselli’s novel Lost Children Archive. A little ways past the halfway point, I’m not sure what I think about the book yet. It’s about a woman and her family who drive to Arizona to document the lives of migrant children held in detention centers, focusing on an important issue, but in a removed and philosophical way that seems as distanced from the horror as any newspaper article. Still, in that emphasis on archiving there’s a bit that appeals to me. The story is regularly interrupted to catalogue the various boxes of the archivist family. Maybe it’s just me, but there’s a thrill in the simple action of turning a page to open a box, the same sort of thrill as unwrapping a present. I guess that’s what I want my writing to be to some reader: mysterious, somehow, like lost documents or buried treasure, something to be uncovered and explored. That’s why so many of my drafts are marked-up print-outs and lined pages in my terrible handwriting taped together, even though it means I have to go through the long and dubiously helpful process of typing it all up: because opening a box of messy pages is a lot more fun than opening a computer file.

A couple weeks ago I posted about a student film that I’d officially abandoned. Once I was finished, I printed that post out, put it in with the marked-up script drafts, notes, and revision flowcharts. Then I put it in a shoebox, taped the whole thing up, and decided to bury it under mounds of other forgotten crap in the basement when I go home for fall break, hoping it will someday be excavated, that it will have meaning to someone later that it doesn’t to anyone now.

There’s a problem with writing for future historians, though. A lot of problems, but one specific to our time: there’s just so much information. The preciousness of a few tattered pages depends on most other pages being lost or decomposed by the time anyone bothers to look. But, barring some apocalyptic world-wide hard drive wipe, future generations are liable to know way too much about us. It feels like everyone is writing more and more, and there are more and more people to begin with, so what are the odds that anything I make will stick around and be remembered?

I’m starting to sound like some fringe academic sect my dad told me about once, people who thought public education had gone too far and a perfect world would go back to having literacy be a rare commodity. I dismissed them back then a little more easily than I can dismiss them now, because that sort of arrogance is more compelling now that I know how hard it is to have your writing read. But I need to realize that more things being saved also gives everyone better odds of being remembered. So I’ll fantasize about being archived like I always do, hoping it’ll someday come true. And I’ll keep up my ridiculous education scrapbook, because it’s fun and mostly harmless.

Autumnal Madness

It’s October. I’m consistently exhausted by cross country practices, but the end of the season is close enough in sight to hold in. I’m coming down with something, not anything to keep me out of class, but a little runny nose or cough or sore throat, accompanied by the stuffy head and slight disorientation and vivid dreams that tend to accompany these little illnesses. It’s getting colder without ever getting cold, lots of rainy or windy or foggy days. I’m watching something nostalgic, maybe that Ghibli movie that I saw at a birthday party in fourth grade and loved so much without ever quite knowing what was going on. And I have a powerful urge to write fantasy. It’s like this every year.

I’m not sure if that makes sense to anyone but me. Reading drafts for a literary magazine, I know well that there’s a real danger in assuming what is meaningful for you is meaningful for everyone. So maybe I should unpack that a little bit. October always feels a little haunted for me, and not just because of Halloween. (I’d actually bet that the feeling of October makes Halloween feel haunted, not the other way around). I’m always in these altered states: a little delirious from a subtle illness, exhausted from running, confused by how fast I’ve settled into a school routine and how the summer I thought had just arrived slipped out from under me. It’s an in-between time, not fully grim or lively. In that moment of disorientation between seasons I feel like I can see into some other world, and it’s a world that I really want to write about. 

And, like I said, this feeling comes every year. And it goes, usually before Thanksgiving. Which is a shame, because I feel like I could do a lot with this half-conscious creative energy. It’s odd describing fall as a manic period when most people are settling in for winter, but that’s usually what it is for me: my imagination soars and I spend my long runs crafting fantastical stories that I don’t think I’d have the courage to try any other time of the year. I’m prone to bouts of obsession on certain ideas any time of the year, but fall seems especially bad, maybe because it only properly feels like fall for such a short time. 

I spent all the time to lay out this vague dilemma because I have a very specific one facing me right now. There’s a novel, the one I posted about finishing last summer, that I’m just now returning to. It’s bad, worse than I expected, rambling and aimless and full of tangled subplots that don’t last two scenes and never add up to much of anything. Refining it into something that matches my original vision for it would take long, careful work, the sort that builds character in a writer but doesn’t seem like much fun. Or I could take the story in a bizarre new direction, one that seems brilliant, but might end up just as rambling and aimless and tangled as what came before, only now less inhibited. I think it’s a good idea now, but I’ve been caught up in swells of inspiration often enough to know that the route to the end goal is never as straight or clear as it appears.

So what will I do? I’m not entirely sure yet, but I think I’ll go with the new idea. Because I have the rest of my life for the slow, careful work of a writer, but spur-of-the-moment kicks like this only come around in this liminal season. I won’t say that it’s good advice for anyone, but I think I’ve laid out plenty of reasons in this post why I’m not the best advisor anyway: I’m exhausted and sick and drunk on some kind of fall-season madness that I don’t think anyone else actually gets. But it won’t last long, so why not take it for all it’s worth.

Stories and Theory

Despite it’s unenviable timeslot of seven-to-ten on Monday nights, my fiction seminar is quickly becoming my favorite class in my time at Grinnell. That shouldn’t be surprising, given my interests, but what it surprising is that one of my highest level classes at Grinnell is also the least pretentious, the most welcoming. We read a novel every week and spend the class discussing it, no theory besides what people come up with on their own, no oneupmanship over who’s the best read, just people sharing their experiences with fiction. Maybe that casual vibe isn’t an anomaly, but more of a reward for getting through the denser classes. We’ve proven that we love this stuff, now they’ve finally given us free reign to just love it without stamping in some arbitrary quote from Foucault in every paragraph of our essays.

My love for the fiction seminar becomes all the clearer when I realize how hard it can be to get through the theory for my Gender, Sex, and Critical Theory class this semester. Unlike my fiction professor, whose course selection was basically just his all-time favorite novels, my critical theory professor assigns articles that he knows we’ll hate, that he personally hates, but that we need to know anyway because these are the works of the scholars that academia has decided to deify for some reason. Most of the time the prose is needlessly dense but the ideas are good, if a little hard to apply to actual human living. But sometimes it’s so bad that I just can’t help but rant. For example, the chapter “The Future is Kids Stuff” by Lee Edelman, the introduction to his book No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. 

Basically, he thinks that we should stop caring about the future so much. That making a better world for our children is stupid. That, because gay people cannot reproduce (totally ignoring that a gay relationship where one person is trans can reproduce, and that gay people can raise children and should have more opportunities to adopt) all queer people should be part of a death drive and tear down the dominant culture in some highly abstract and functionally useless form of revolution. Maybe I, a straight cisgender person, shouldn’t comment on a piece intended for a queer audience, but so many queer people in my class were enraged by this article that I feel like I’m free to give Edelman a piece of my mind. He says that he wants the queer to represent everything that the worst fundamental preachers fears that it is, to destroy the very idea of building a better future for future generations. Building a better future is a tool of the dominant discourse, according to him, and therefore it should be completely annihilated, without a thought for what should replace it. That’s what gets me the angriest: that he wants to destroy our societal love for children without replacing anything with it. “I do not intend to propose some ‘good’ that will thereby be assured,” he writes. “To the contrary, I mean to insist that nothing, and certainly not what we call the ‘good,’ can ever have any assurance at all in the order of the Symbolic.” Never mind making a world where children feel free to express their own gender identity and love whoever they want; just burn it all. That’s what I really hate about theory: these scholars complain and problematize back and forth, then problematize each other’s complaints. It’s not their job to fix it, apparently, wallowing in it is a day’s work in itself.

But maybe I should pull back. Because I’m not sure I’d be much happier if Edelman did propose some kind of good to come out of all this. When these theories promise some good at the end of all the criticism, the good never feels real. Marxist endgame, for example, never holds much appeal. If our work, our entertainment, our families, and nearly everything else is all based on capitalism, and therefore must be destroyed, then what does that leave in the utopia, exactly? If you structure your worldview out of the problems you see in it, then there’s not much world left for you if you ever get around to fixing it.

I don’t want to dismiss theory out of hand, because it’s done a lot of good for a lot of people, particularly those less privileged than me. But it gets hard not to, when the problems it presents are unfixable, and the best hope for a happy future hardly seems worth achieving. But the one time when theory feels real to me (and the reason why I’m enjoying my Critical Theory class, despite all my whining) is when it’s coupled with some kind of narrative. Because then it’s not just floating in the mind of some author, held up by long words and quotes from a couple deified scholars. With stories it’s real, it’s personal. It’s connected with characters who feel real, or with people who are. That’s theory’s place, I think: not to replace stories, but to come up against them, to allow for deeper understandings, even if the importance of the stories can never be reduced to something so general. 

I don’t want to say that stories need theory like theory needs stories, mostly because I like believing that the stories I write stand on their own, or at least with a little support from genre trappings and good fiction teaching. But maybe the reason why the fiction seminar is so good in the first place is because we all made it through the theory classes. We’ve learned the stuff until it’s a paradigm, a way to filter and reconstruct stories without even thinking. I won’t say so definitively because, again, I don’t want to give theory any more credit than it’s worth. But here it is, you can take it or leave it.