![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
In a presumably ‘post-material’ digital age, the turn to materialism has been unmistakeably pronounced in recent years. Renewed critical attention to ‘thing theory’ and material culture also points to fertile ground for writers and teachers of writing. This paper offers an exploration of how writing about ‘things' – in this case, a ‘garbage land' full of discarded things – can teach students to engage with the world in innovative, alert, and ethical ways. It considers such sites as rich repositories for creative research and embodied observation that can help beginning writers move beyond the ‘radical subjectivist expressionism' (in D. G. Myer's phrase) often associated with ‘creative writing’. From a case study in material ecology, the paper ultimately progresses to a consideration of the cultural ecology of the workshop environment itself, and the value of ‘situated learning.' Ultimately, I argue that thinking through material culture at the local level can help clarify – for us, no less than for our students – the value of a convergent mental and physical presence, of a critically honed sense of emplacement, or a sense of creative residency in its fullest reach.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Christine Wiesenthal is a biographer, nonfiction writer, poet and editor based in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Her books include Instruments of Surrender (Buschek Books, 2001); The Collected Works of Pat Lowther (Newest 2010) and The Half-Lives of Pat Lowther (U of Toronto P, 2005), shortlisted for the Canadian Governor General's Award for Nonfiction. She teaches creative writing and contemporary women's and Canadian literature at the University of Alberta.
Notes
1 Similarly, the word through: while used primarily as an adjective or preposition to signal a passage, a motion across space or time, sometimes indicating medium, agency, or ‘by instrumentality of’, through has also functioned as both a verb (‘throughed’) and a noun in the history of our language. In Old English, it could designate a ‘hollow receptacle’ (such as a coffin or tomb) or a ‘trough, a pipe or channel for water to flow’ (OED).
2 The issue of attention emerged as a theme in several papers at the 2012 Canadian Creative Writers and Writing Programs conference; these discussions included Aislinn Hunter, ‘Look, and Then Look Again’; Martha Baillie, ‘The Novel as Core Sample’; Catherine Bush, ‘Looking as a Writer: Ethics and Attentiveness’; and Michael Helm, ‘Teaching the Uses of Blur’ (CCWWP, Toronto, ON, May 10–13, 2012.) To the extent that ‘chronic distraction’ now seems to be ‘the defining condition of [our] age’ (Lorinc 2007, 50), my own concern has been how ‘changes in attentional control’ (Rekart 2011, 62) due to this habitually divided state of consciousness matter to our craft and our pedagogy, and how powers of concentration and focus might be developed through the use of material culture. To be clear, then, it is not technology per se that I am positing as ‘a problem’ which needs to be addressed: it is, rather, the effects of technology on behaviour and cognition, or habits of mind, that were my original aim in integrating ‘object lessons’ to my teaching practice. As noted by Paul Seabright and others, technology can facilitate close observation as much any ‘thing’; it can focus as well as distract us. For an overview of recent studies on the effects of students’ immersion in various digital environments, however, see Rekart. While it is true that people may be paying attention in different ways – divided ways – that can't simply be dismissed as ‘entirely negative’, studies have shown that ‘changes in attentional control’ correlate to the under-use of ‘brain structures that … facilitate deep learning’ (Rekart 2011, 63, 62).Trips to the ‘experiential archive’ encourage students to realise how a writer's conscious presence of mind (as informed by eyes, ears, nose, mouth and hands), enables precision of vision, originality of insight. In paying disciplined attention to the objects in a given environment, students, as Flannery O'Connor argued, discover the beginnings of craft.
3 The exhibits in such spaces can prompt students to ‘ … new thoughts about how inanimate objects constitute human subjects, how they move them, how they threaten them, how they facilitate or threaten their relationship to other subjects’ (Brown 2015, 7). I use ‘object’ and ‘thing’ interchangeably, while such theorists as Brown make methodological distinctions between the two. For Brown, ‘we look through objects’, while ‘we confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us: when the drill breaks, when the car stalls … when their flow within the circuits of production and distribution, consumption and exhibition, has been arrested, however momentarily’ (4).
4 E.g. Flannery O'Connor in ‘The Nature and Aim of Fiction’: ‘The writer begins where human perception begins’; ‘the beginning of human knowledge is through the senses’ (1969, 67). Or, Wallace Stegner: ‘Ultimately, what one looks for [in writing students] is sensibility – which need not be as effete as it sounds – … sensibility is essentially senses’ (1988, 16, emphasis original).
5 See Philip Gerard's excellent work on integrating resourceful research in creative writing, where he differentiates between seven different types of ‘archives’ (paper, living, electronic, visual, audio, experiential and mnemonic).
6 In some cases, such narrow self-interestedness may actually be inadvertently reinforced by instructors who promote the old adage to ‘write what you know’. Whatever the cause, studies have documented the extent to which ‘too often, it is the case that for creative writing students, there is nothing outside the self’: ‘students take it as a betrayal to their métier to be asked to do basic research or handle abstract ideas’, Myers notes, citing one study which found that
The general assumption … is that … creative writing is an opportunity which permits students to tap into a much more private, personal, and emotional reality for their ideas and material. It is characterized by freedom from the non-personal, external demands of facts and other people's ideas, comments and forms … [F]eelings that can be discovered by the self … provide the basis for [such] material (1996, 174–175).
7 Transportation and time constraints make off-campus field trips more difficult – but not impossible – to arrange. Obviously, all such field trips do require a bit of advance legwork: curators need to be contacted and collections pre-viewed to assess any logistical difficulties (some collection spaces, for instance, necessitate splitting larger class groups into two); site-specific writing exercises based on the exhibits or collections need to be planned; and students also need to be notified in advance of any regulations or restrictions (no food or drink, backpacks, ink, etc.). Otherwise, it suffices that they arrive armed with only notebooks (whether digital or paper), and the set of writing exercise options that I distribute in advance. It's productive to require that students have the exercise completed for submission by the end of the class trip, unless they are taken on a guided tour – in which case, I allow them to simply take notes and observe during the visit, and to submit their exercise the following class period. Advance distribution of writing prompts is key to ensuring that students arrive with the expectation of a purposeful aim: to gather enough details, impressions, facts and information to produce some original writing from their encounters with the objects on exhibit. It can be useful to participate in note-taking and writing alongside students (aside from the example it sets, the results can be surprising, for better or worse, when you complete one of your own writing exercises). The exercises I've developed could certainly be applied in other public settings, museum or otherwise. Most of these are also easily adapted for genres other than creative nonfiction, and/or re-calibrated for advanced undergraduates/graduate students.
8 I would add that the quality of the writing produced by these exercises has consistently struck me as stronger than the work students often produce in class, both for their workshops and for informal in-class exercises. Samples of the most inventive and incisive field trip exercises usually accompany me back to the next class session, where everyone benefits from large-group consideration of these. The surprise of unfamiliar ‘things’, or of things de-familiarised by close, sustained examination, combined with the perception of such non-graded activities as low risk, encourage students to take risks. As one explained it, ‘the field trips are a nice break from the editing and writing that we do in class, but also to refresh our minds. It's like a little quiz, but … there's no pressure to be this “great writer” when we do them.’ Some students will go on to incorporate or develop their exercises as seeds for later, graded essay assignments. Later debriefings on our collective experience of a particular museum or collection have also proven extremely productive for the opportunities they offer for class discussion and debate. What was it like being there? What role(s) did the curator or guide play in organising our experience of the space? Why should it matter to us how some of these ‘things’ ended up at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada?
9 That is to say, beyond the role of vision that theorists such as O'Connor and John Berger tend to stress, and even more so than the Zoology museum and teaching lab, which is also powerful for its olfactory impression.
10 The Basel Action Network's film documents a specific instance of environmental racism/environmental injustice: namely, the hazardous exportation of most e-waste to impoverished communities in places such as Guiyu, China, and underscores the function of most North American ‘recycling’ depots as little more than profit-driven re-distribution centres, where ‘the effluent of the affluent’ is merely shipped out of sight. Our other advance readings and screenings in garbology and eco-poetics include not only Wong, but Lucy Walker's excellent documentary film, Waste Land, which focuses on the Brazilian activist-artist Vik Muniz, and his creative work with the catadores of Rio de Janerio's Jardim Gramacho landfill (Muniz both integrates pieces of garbage directly into his visual art, and collaborates with the catadores to produce it, selling his work at auction and returning the proceeds to the pickers). We consider also the visual aesthetics of trash (e.g. Julian Stallabrass's ‘Trash’, an essay on photography and street litter that raises questions similar to those evoked by the work of photographers and film makers like Edward Burtinsky in Manufactured Landscapes – work that is, which raises questions about aestheticising ecological devastation, or which blurs the distinctions between documentary, critical irony, and epicurean perspectives).
11 Neil Burkart, personal communication, May 21, 2015.
12 This is to say, that while the EWM site overflows with evidence of an affluent oil economy, an industry actively enabled and abetted (until very recently) by 44 years of Conservative Party provincial rule, the physical fact of the recycling site itself is the legacy of Edmonton's first female mayor, Jan Reimer, a leftist typical of the city's more progressive mix of urban politics. (It's no coincidence that, within Alberta, Edmonton is often referred to – affectionately or not – as ‘Redmonton’). On municipal-level environmental initiatives, we may note also that the Thames Water Utility plans to build a ‘super sewer’ set to remove 96% of the sewage currently flowing into the river. It may be at the local level that the most critical environmental steps are taken.
13 Although some commercial clients such as Ikea have struck agreements to participate in the City's recycling efforts, most corporate and industry waste still ends up in private landfills – often farmland converted for this purpose.
14 In his keynote address to the Canadian Creative Writers and Writing Programs 2012 conference, David Fenza, head of the AWP, reinforced his association's endorsement of a residency component as one of its ‘hallmarks of a successful … program in creative writing’: ‘Although the AWP recognizes the effectiveness of electronic learning and web-based classrooms, face-to face mentorship is crucial to an artist's education. . . .[R]esidential learning … foster[s] best retention and graduation rates’ (http://www.awpwriters.org/library/guidelines_hallmarks_quality ).
15 ‘Why Defend University? And How.’ Times Literary Supplement, March, 9, 2012. Accessed May 17, 2013. www.the-tls.couk/tls/public/article988625.ece.
16 See Losh, Chap. 5, for an incisive critique of the ‘open courseware movement’ as, in effect, a neoliberal corporate recruiting drive, much more concerned with marketing and high-tech investment capital than with democraticisation or the ‘missionary mentality’ of ‘helping the disadvantaged excluded from higher education’ (‘Over 80% of Coursera students already hold undergraduate degrees’, many of whom ‘were already employed in high technology companies or who were planning to enrol in graduate school in computer-science related fields’ [Citation2014, 122, 116]). She cites Ian Bogost, who observes that MOOCs also function in effect as ‘a financial policy for higher education’ in a time of ‘“disaster capitalism” that leaves universities unable to find alternatives in times of crisis, and … as “an academic labor policy” intent on deskilling the work of instructors who have lost the power of faculty governance in increasingly more entrepreneurial schemes’ (122–123).
17 See Brown (Citation2015); Hollister (Citation2014) and Evans (Citation2004). Google employees have grown from less than 50 in 1999 to over 11,000 in 2013 (the largest employer in the North Bay Shore region); ‘it hopes to add 3.7 million square feet of new development under the city's latest zoning plan – enough to eventually double its workers to 24,000 (Hollister). Aside from such facilities as the aforementioned ‘dorm-like buildings for interns’, the campus enclave model of high tech centres in Silicon Valley includes office space, cafes, and even an airport (Google). As of February 2015, the City Council of Mountain View received proposals from tech giants for an additional 5.7 million square feet of corporate office space – in area zoned to allow only 2.2 million square feet of additional growth in the next 20 years (Brown). ‘Silicon Valley has, unfortunately, followed a development pattern that suggests a “grow first, reflect later” approach’, according to sustainability theorist Tom Evans. ‘The auto-dominated low-density campus model of Silicon Valley’ makes land consumption and space only one important factor in assessing the complex ‘ecological costs of high-tech production processes’, which also include high volumes of toxic waste that are difficult to regulate; of ‘over 3,000 facilities in Santa Clara county that generate hazardous waste, only 141 … are required to provide toxic release inventories’ (126, 117). More disturbingly still, the US remains an outlier in its refusal to ratify the international Basel convention regulations for the disposal of post-consumer e-waste and electroscrap.
18 Felman, 92, 82–83. In her chapter on ‘Psychoanalysis and Education’, in Jacques Lacan and The Adventure of Insight, Felman underscores Lacan's message that teaching is not about ‘the transmission of ready made knowledge’ so much as it is about ‘the creation of a new condition of knowledge’ in the ‘structural dynamic’ between subjects: ‘dialogue is thus the radical condition of learning and knowledge’ (1987, 83). Seabright, in his review of Collini, argues similarly: ‘intellectual enquiry is hard and demands a commitment … that often needs the close proximity of others similarly engaged’; ‘the virtues of proximity’ include the obligation to ‘engage with … critics under common standards of intelligent and courteous debate’ (Citation2012, n.p.).
19 At the EWMC e-waste recycling facility, it is estimated that 80% of the material dumped is still functional. Neil Burkart, personal communication, May 21, 2015.