Bootjack Available!

 I'm happy to note that my first real book of poems--Bootjack--is available for purchase from me or from the South Dakota State Poetry Society.  You can order it here:  https://sdpoetry.org/product/bootjack/

It was published in 2023, but I got copies only after the turn of the year, and some of them were badly printed, so the printer ran an entirely new batch, so I have lots of copies, and so does SDSPS.  Contact me if you'd like a copy and I'll send you one, signed if you want!  

The book includes poetry about my family, my mom and dad, who appear on the cover, and about growing up in the little town of Ft. Pierre, SD.  I also write about my travels in China, Europe, and the US, and about literature and literary figures who saturated my thinking as I taught American Literature for over 30 years.  

You can read below from the fine comments that I got from readers who appreciate my work.  

I would love to send you a copy, dear reader!  

 

Kent Meyers and "The Quietest Place in the Universe"

Congratulations to my fellow writer and long-time friend Kent Meyers, who teaches at Black Hills State University and has written several novels and other books. His essay, "The Quietest Place in the Universe," appears in the new issue of Harper's magazine. It's an amazing piece that wrestles with the complex issues of astrophysics and renders them poetic and compelling. Kudos Kent!

Kent Meyers (photo by Kent's wife Zindie Meyers)

My sense of Kent's writing goes as far back as seeing him reluctantly draw from the bottom of an office desk drawer his first publication--a poem in a book of poems collected by one of those "poetry contests" that profit from selling the collection to the proud recipients of letters of approval.  

I've seen Kent struggle through writing essays, stories, poems and trying to publish even romance stories of the sort you might read in Woman's Day.  But his persistence paid off, slowly, incrementally, until, suddenly, in 1998 and 1999, he had two books in print--The Witness of Combines, a collection of essays that he wrote over a period of 20 years or more, and The River Warren, a novel that describes horrific acts in a small town.  He hasn't looked back.  

Since then he has continued his writing and teaching career, winning awards and publishing consistently.  Congratulations to Kent.    

Sirje Kiin and Marie Under, Poets, Writers, and Estonians

After a day at home it was nice to get out and have a meal with my mom and the wife and go see our Madisonian Sirje Kiin tell about the subject of her book:  Marie Under, an Estonian poet whose work hasn't had the attention it deserves.  Her poetry is almost all written in Estonian, a language that only about 1.5 million people speak in the world.  Sirje has written (in Estonian) a critical biography of the poet.  
The biography is now being translated into English, along with some new translations of the poetry.  It's a remarkable thing to hear about a person who lives just up the street who is working on such good, important things.  Marie Under's Wikipedia page needs editing!

Our speaker pointed out that one of the problems with getting Under the attention she deserves is that good translations of the poetry can be difficult, since the language they're written in is so unlike English or many other major languages.  

Nanocon and Writing for Game Designers

Panelists at Nanocon, including Rich Graham, far left, Jeff Howard, far right, and Seth Hudson, in tie.

Here are my summary notes on "Writing through Games:  Merging the Writing Classroom with Game Design" by Seth Hudson 11/10/13, a part of Nanocon 2013 at Dakota State University.

Hudson, who teaches writing for games at George Mason University in the Computer Game Design Program, gave a talk to prospective game designers on making writing a component of their quest for success in the industry.  His talk, lively, interesting, full of references to games, movies, and books, prompted laughs, recognition, and questions at the conclusion.  

My notes on his talk are as follows. 

Stop writing the same thing

Respect yourself (and your audience) enough to edit

“Tell me something, then tell me why I should care.”  Kamholtz  (It’s the “so what?” question)

3-act structure

context, goals conflict resolution

Volder’s Hero’s Journey

“It’s theory, not a formula.” 

Academic paper:  Specific, Contextualized, Useful

Observing conventions

Realize that audience is the real key (audience and user)

Writing classroom

Audience driven:  if it’s not written down, it doesn’t count.  Both academic papers and creative ones need to keep audience in mind. 

Collaborative:  learn to give criticism; you get to be a better judge of your own work (always be reading other people’s work).  Criticism as a series of questions—why did you give that character that dialect.  Digital feedback as an extension of critical commentary.  Everyone gets better in collaboration.

Iterative:  Developing voice.  A long process.  “Writing is revision.”  Shitty first drafts.  Writing a shitty first draft is easier than writing a good one. 

Portfolio-centric:  focus on collective work.  NP (not proficient) grades.  Formative assessment vs. summative.  Formative is how you are developing; summative is what’s at the end of the process.  The identity comes from a lifetime of experience, not just their collective course content.  Passions beyond technical skill set students apart from others in their field. Studios look for people who have higher order skills that are hard to display on a resume.  (Swacha et al 2010).  Communicate a lifetime of experience. 

Writing classroom as a preparation for collaborative game projects.  Power of reflection and criticism. 

Find out what works, establish a voice, overcome your fears. 

Judge the work, not the person.  Avoid the “you suck.” Teach responding. 

Back to School Again

Here we are at the end of the first day of classes for the fall semester.  I reminded my students on this hot August day that they should think of the person they will be in December, someone who will appreciate the good work that their past self did in August, September, and the months to follow.  Wednesday they'll show me what writing they can do in 50 minutes, responding to a standard assignment and trying to provide an overview, launch into a discussion, and bring in some resources to support and develop their ideas.

This semester I'm looking at some additional work, including a major campus committee, serving on a search committee, and finding time to (perhaps) jump out of an airplane.   I hope to do better with my own writing, and contributing to this blog.

The blog helps me pay attention to what's going on around me, from the reaction of students to their new situations, to seeing the leaves in our yard begin to dry and curl and fall into the yard.  So, here we go again.

How to Edit

A great e-book shared by one of my students shows how to kill a word.  Not just one--many.  Watch them fall.
 

How to Kill a Word from Patrick McLean

How to Kill a Snowman (and other helpful tips)

My students in Composition II at Dakota State University have completed their final project, a slam-bam project they completed in about a week.  It's a video essay with a pretty open subject.  Many of them, because of time restraints, choose to do a segment of their longer paper as a video, but some are ready to turn to more fun projects, like one student, whose "Ways to Kill a Snowman" sounds mighty interesting.  She was, perhaps, inspired by my mention of "How to Kill a Mustache " included here. Another student tells how to make orange chicken.  Yum!

My student's efforts are included on our blog here:  http://compdsu.blogspot.com/.  They include essays on securing a network, building a man-made brain, driving the car of the future, and other wide-ranging subjects.

GPACW and the Future of Computers and Writing

Word is that the next Great Plains Alliance for Computers and Writing Conference will go big next year, being hosted by none other than the University of Minnesota at their main campus in downtown St. Paul (or Minneapolis--stay tuned).  After the success of the event yesterday at Mankato, it's sure to be a conference that brings in even more people curious and willing to share about the work that people are doing in this field.

My own session had a small but interested group that heard from Matt Barton of St. Cloud about what we could learn from Kickstarter and similar crowd-funding opportunities.   They heard me talk about our growing English for New Media program at Dakota State University, and they heard Danica Stith of Iowa State talk about using political ads in a swing state for doing rhetorical analysis.  That group lingered and talked and shared more ideas as the conference wound down to a close.

Kudos to Lee Tesdell and his crew at Mankato State University for a job well done.  I look forward to next year!

Putting On The Hat and Animation

Interesting recording of the singer John Reuben confronting his animators about a change he has in mind for an animated video they've been working on for several months.  Having taken to wearing hats, Reuben suggests that the cartoon character of him wear a hat.  "It's just semantics," he says, thinking that putting a hat on the thousands of frames of him is as simple as putting on and taking off his hat, which he demonstrates for the animators.  Hat on, hat off.  Easy.  So, here's the interview as the video is in progress (which I can't help thinking is a bit of a setup), and then the music video "Word of Mouth."  Hat? No hat?  See for yourself. The confrontation: The resulting video:

A Bad Case of Writer's Camp

Having never been to camp as a kid, I didn't know what it might do to a person, but as I described my symptoms to the wife, who spent several summers learning camp songs and tying knots, she said that's what camp does to you--bonding, escape, reverie, general yearning to go back after the end of it all.

That's my case after having returned from Shadowcliff Lodge, in Grand Lake, Colorado, just south of Rocky  Mountain National Park, where the air is fine and the sky is clear, and where the Lighthouse Writers Workshop holds its annual Writers Retreat.  I'd never been on a writer's retreat, either, so it was all new and wonderful and I dived in and felt like a duck IN water.

For six days, from July 15 to July 20, I had an infusion of what writers in South Dakota don't seem to have found the formula for, a few days of learning, sharing, and writing that would lift the top of your skull, make you cry laugh and cry at the same time, and help you realize once again that writing is what people do, and it may seem like magic, but it's work, and craft, and imagination, all stewing in a mental pot.

My circle of friends has grown, and my circle of writer friends has exploded.  Thank you, Lighthouse people.  You rock.

Here's a happy little tidbit from the "top-secret" Lighthouse Blog:

This year the quality of the work was incredible. Each reader wowed and moved the audience. Each piece deserves to be published.

I do not exaggerate here.

Our emcee for the readings is J. Diego Frey, who should go on his own comedy tour. Or maybe fill in for David Letterman next time he’s on vacation. He’s witty and strange and odd and hilarious. (Last year he wore inflatable moose antlers. This year he was costumeless.) The copious humor was needed, as several of the readers—Laurie Sleeper, Martha Scherzer, Meg Nix, John Holley, Jo Harkins, John Nelson, and Laura Bond in particular—left us wrung out. The weeping was prodigious and unrepentant. (Pass the Kleenex people!) Yet each was a story that needs to be told, and we were given a gift in hearing them.

That’s the power of literature and writing, isn’t it? To bring us joy, to bring us to our knees, to bring us together.

I'm happy to be mentioned in such fine company.

Critiquing Work With a Multimedia Tool

I'm intrigued by the possibilities evident in a tool that I just discovered called CritiqueIt.  It seems to be a useful and intuitive tool for collaborative work, allowing for providing input on documents like word documents or images, maybe even videos, without leaving your browser.  I'm embedding the introductory video here, but if you're interested, you'll have to let me know how it goes.  I may have to try this with my students in the fall.

Birth of a Book

Our DSU librarians shared this beautiful video of a book being printed and bound in traditional fashion.  Beautiful!

Fictions in Your Brain

A talk yesterday with some budding creative writers, followed by reading an article about scientists looking at the brain on fiction has prompted some thinking about fiction.  It appears that a brain reading good fiction (see--good fiction) reacts to the text in a way similar to its reaction to events occurring in real life.  So says a recent article in the NY Times. 

I was saying as much to a small audience of Dr. Blessinger's creative writing class.  Young writers always struggle, perhaps knowing that their work is not up to the standards of good fiction or poetry or non-fiction writers, but knowing too that they need to work through those weaknesses, that not everyone gets to reach the top echelons with ease, or at all.

So we all struggle, boats against the current.

Proust and Family Memories

No, the title doesn't refer specifically to the author of one of the most interesting novel/memoir works in the 20th century.  Proust a website that prompts the user to gather information about themselves and from others to tell their life story.  Looks interesting.


Introduction To Proust.com from Proust on Vimeo.

Characters in a Pinon Tree

Our tan-clad hero cooks up some new kind of trouble every episode, and the wife and I are Breaking Bad fans, following the troubled twosome of Walter White and Jesse Pinkman, unlikely allies in making meth for Albuquerque.  Sure, we came to the party late, but that doesn't make us any less enthusiastic.  

The wife reminded me that each episode is a reminder of what I tell my creative writing students about how they should put their characters up a tree (or any difficulty) and then keep pelting them with trouble until something happens.  Trouble seems to be at their elbows at every turn.  That's what keeps us coming back.  

Emotional "Spell Check" and other Curious Inventions

Suppose you get that bone-headed email from an angry student who's unhappy with the result of their decision to skip studying, go party, and sleep through the final.  Perhaps written with a lingering hangover.  You might be tempted to fire back with force, venting your irritation with the students' apparent sense of entitlement.  You know you can't send that ranting email!  So, here's a remedy, a gentle reminder, much like spell check, that watches for tone in your email messages in Outlook.  It's ToneCheck, one of the concepts featured in the NYTimes Magazine's review of some of the most interesting ideas from 2010.  The list includes such things as the "bra mask" and a guitar that stays in tune.

I'm Trying Out Twine

My colleage DW mentioned an electronic storytelling tool, Twine, that allows for building simple interactive stories, poems, or whatever, using their easy-to use software.  I'm trying it out.

Getting Those Gourds to Shine

We took a bit more leisurely approach to our day today, after the activities of the past week, culminating in our prize-winning float and a trip last night to Sioux Falls to see Dave Eggers, the writer, and Valentino Achak Deng, the subject of Eggers' "autobiography" of him.  It was the highlight of the South Dakota Festival of Books.  

The wife zipped over to Winfred to her folks' place while yours truly spent some time grading papers, and she came back with this sign of fall--a collection of gourds that her dad found hidden in the cow lot.  A little veggie oil, and these things look ready for the hearth!

I also entertained some folks who knew our old house as children, when their grandmother, Christina Coppersmith (if I remember rightly) lived here back in the 1930's and 40's.  They brought some pictures and offered some comments on how the place has changed since they knew it.

I Write Like

I write like
Stephen King

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Righto. Thanks, I Write Like. Don't I wish? Meanwhile, my brain is Cujo brain.

Middle School Slamming

Today we showed up at Madison Middle School and led students through a quick, slam-bang poetry slam in an hour and a half, with a few minutes of training and examples, some writing and revising time, and mostly time for performing.  

I wasn't sure how it would go, but it was part of "May Madness," on the second to last day of school, and they got into it, cheering and booing and having a great time.  It rocked; it slammed.  

Poems ranged from curses on family members to odes to shoes.  The champion won with one poem on a peanut and another cursing someone for not sharing their pizza.  For that performance, he got to raise the slam belt pictured here.