Reading as Method

My sabbatical project has me doing a lot of things, including a lot of reading. As described in my proposal, the aim of the project is to engage in reading several different discourses and to put them in conversation--including but not limited to the discourses surrounding information literacy, critical pedagogies, ethics of technology, and Christian anthropology.

This morning saw me reflecting about this practice of reading, and its connection as a method to the way I engage, move through, and exist in the world. I asked myself the question:

What is my method of being in the world? 

I'm sure the answer to that question is actually a multiplicity of methods, but there is one in particular I want to free-write on in this post, and that is the method of reading the world (and all the things in it) as text(s).

What follows is an exercise in articulating what I mean.

 ***

The book I was reading this morning is a text.
The notebook I was scribbling my notes and quotes in, using color-coded pens, is a text.
The project I am pursuing this summer is a text.
The communities I am a part of, and with whom I am in dialogue, are texts.
My individual and communal relationships with people in my personal and professional life are texts.
My daughter is a (beautiful) text.
My marriage is a text.
My sabbatical experience is a text.
My anxiety is a text.
My faith (and the theology it's rooted in) is a text.
The Christian liturgy is a text.
The pain experienced daily by those I love and care about is a text.
My own pain is a text
My family is a text.
My 'professional learning network' is a text.
My 'digital footprint' is a text.
This blog post is a text.
The public personal-professional identity this post helps construct is a text.
The Twitter interface is a text.
#critlib (both the hashtag and the concept it signifies) is/are a text(s).
Professional documents are texts.
Library catalogs and databases are texts. And they make accessible (or not) texts.
The books on our library shelves are texts, but so is the configuration of space in which those books are made available.
Library space is a text.
A garden is a text.
Histories are texts.
Data sets are texts.
Bodies of work are texts.
Bodies are texts.
Thought processes are texts.
Memories are texts.
Lived experience is a text.

When all of these things (and more--the list could go on, of course) are understood as texts, it means they can be read. Reading in this sense is dynamic participation in meaning-making with and in relationship to texts.

Seeing the world as a text made up of infinite yet particular texts (and beautiful in their particularity) does not reify the world and its parts, but instead invites meaning-making out of and within the world (and its parts!), because it means I as a subject can read these texts and grow my own understanding from that reading act. And so can you.

***

As I was having these reflective thoughts earlier today, it led me to look up textuality in Wikipedia, in an effort to better remember ideas I learned about in the undergraduate literary criticism course that was part of my English and American Literature major. Here is a small excerpt that almost poetically gets at what I'm referring to in this post as my method of being in the world:

Textuality is a practice. Through a text’s textuality, it makes itself mean, makes itself be, and makes itself come about in a particular way. Through its textuality, the text relinquishes its status as identity and affirms its condition as pure difference. In indifference, the text "dedefines" itself, etches itself in a texture or network of meaning which is not limited to the text itself. (Source)

***

My thoughts on this are still developing--in the process of being written as a text, if you will. But this method connects my faith, my developing understanding of social justice, my information literacy and library work (including the pedagogies I aim to use in that work), and my engagement with technology. And these are all the things I have set out to read during my sabbatical.

I'm a week and a half into my sabbatical part two, which lasts twelve weeks in total. I'm looking forward to seeing where reading as method leads me in the coming months.

This is a picture of my daughter making something out of string.

Zinemaking My Burnout [Librarian Burnout]

This piece was orginally written for and is cross-posted at Librarian Burnout. Special thanks to Maria Accardi for encouraging me to write this! And thank you also to Kelly McElroy and Jenna Freedman, two of my zine librarian pals, for your encouragement and guidance in both creating and making available my first zine. 

---

Under this blog’s title is a tagline and an invitation: “what we talk about when we talk about burnout”. 

So, let’s talk.

I’m burnt out on assessment. 

Many who read this particular blog will likely see that statement and say, “Oh yes, indeed, been there (and maybe still am).” This helps me, because believe it or not, I am not in the mood to use words to analyze why I’m burnt out on assessment. Most of it feels too self-evident for me to do that productively. 

But even for the parts that aren’t self-evident, writing words about why assessment, as it is structurally and institutionally handed down to librarians like me (which may not be the ‘ideal’ of what assessment could be, but is still my present reality)...writing words about this isn’t going to help me right now, because at the end of all those potential words, I still need to do assessment.

Words can be powerful. The act of naming things helps us understand them better. And by understanding them, we may* have the capability of doing something about them (i.e., reflection into action).

But the words I have inside me, in reference to assessment, are a mess that I’m not ready to shape into something fit for public consumption.

So I made a zine instead.

This is the part I’m excited to talk about in this post about what we talk about when we talk about burnout. (Try saying that three times fast!)

I took a thing I feel, in ways that are pretty big and overwhelming, and I turned it into a tangible thing that tells a small part of the story of what’s happening inside me in reference to assessment. And it helped.

There are of course words in my zine--including what can only be described as bad (but satisfying!) poetry, written by yours truly. So words certainly helped me along here. But zinemaking also involved cutting with scissors, writing things out in pen, drawing pictures with highlighters, and shaping the space that falls between the boundaries of the zine template I chose to use to tell the story I need it to tell.

The specific aspect of assessment I'm burnt out on right now is rubrics--writing them, teaching with them, and scoring them.

So I turned my burnout about rubrics into a zine.

This process challenged me to shape my burnout into something others can see and engage with, and my feelings about this one part of assessment have now been named, not through a detailed text-based analysis, but through and in a zine. Which I made out of my burnout.

It’s the best act of self care I’ve done this summer (with a close second going to taking up coloring). And Maria has encouraged me to share it with all of you.

My zine is called Outside the Lines, and over in my little corner of the internet you can access it, trade for it, or buy it at cost. Here’s the tagline I wrote for it:

A zine about the liminal spots on the page where learning / understanding / living / loving / making / doing / being must sprawl outside the lines in order to actually happen.

And here’s a sneak peak at the cover (scanned in color for digital viewing):

Using that red highlighter was sooooo satisfying.

There are so many things in my life, both professional and personal, to which this idea--this tension between order and sprawl--applies. Rubrics are the topic of volume 1, issue 1. I’m hoping to create a new issue twice a year on a different topic each time.

I want to make zinemaking a part of my praxis as an academic instruction librarian (to bring this back around to the project of this blog). I learned this summer that taking my burnout, and turning it into something material that tells at least a small part of the story going on inside me, helps me see it clearer, understand it better, and shifts my feelings toward it from burneverythingdownrightnowrageragerage, to “hey, look at this rad thing I made out of that crappy feeling”.

It’s hard to explain why this shift matters, but it does. It makes it so I can face fall semester, during which I know I will have to write, teach with, or score at least one new rubric. It also makes it so I can go through fall semester keeping an eye out for other things about which I have that ragey feeling, so I can target those things as topics for future zines, transforming my feelings about them into something satisfying and tangible to share with others.

It’s like I have a new twice-a-year therapist, made out of paper, post-its, pens, scissors, glue, and highlighters. So even when I can’t write out in detailed language what my burnout is like, I’ll now be able to talk about my burnout through the regular act of zinemaking.

And knowing this makes facing my next task involving (effing) rubrics palatable.

*I say “may” because, even if analysis leads to deeper understanding about a problem, and even if that in turn leads to ideas for how to change the situation to make it better, so often there are structural barriers in place that make putting these ideas into action impossible or close to it.

Christology of Good Storytelling

My new blog-friend Jenna St. Hilaire, who blogs about writing and other cool stuff at A Light Inside, is in the midst of a discussion via blog posts with another writer-blogger called Mr. Pond at The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond, all about, of course, writing. More specifically, their discussion tries to get at what makes good writing exactly that: good. Since I do not write fiction myself (in an alternate version of my life, I might have, but...), I do not feel able to participate in the discussion at the level of detail they are. However, Jenna's most recent post, "Rules and Real," sparked in me a bit of a theological (and geek-tastic) response. I left her a long-winded comment along these lines, and I decided to repost it here, edited a bit for clarity. I encourage you to go read her original post in full, but since I quote the bits that matter to my point in my response (below), you may also simply read on to find out what Christology might have to do with good storytelling, according to lil ol' me:

Ok, here I need to comment on the following quote from Jenna's post, particularly on the quote's the first sentence:

"And the trick, for those of us aiming at the stars, is to write a tale that is both within our time and transcendent of it.

That is a resolution of contraries if ever there was one. Our hot, passionate, fleeting time, caught up in fad after fashion after fling, disrespectful of history and therefore unable to learn from it, busy trying to immortalize itself in 140 characters or less per idea--this we must unite, somehow, to the calm, unmoving, deeply resonant truths that were true ten thousand years ago and ever shall be."

So, maybe it's because I'm a graduate theology student at the moment and so I'm immersed in early Church writings about the nature of Christ, but this passage, especially its first sentence, immediately brought to mind for me the nature of Jesus Christ, the Word of God. The Word of God is exactly as Jenna has described a good tale to be: "both within our time and transcendent of it." He is both within the time He lived on earth (2000 years ago) and transcendent of it. (He is of course also present in our current time as well--He is in all times, both before and after His earthly sojourn--but that's another theological discussion separate from this point I wish to make right now.) I included the whole of Jenna's quote above because later on she uses the word "unite" and, again, that is theological, Christological language right there, and it was awesome to see that appear in this dialogue about good storytelling, storytelling that both speaks to us today and also taps into the greatest Story of all.

I wonder if, in a way, the Christological analogy can be taken a step further: if Christ can only save what He has assumed (i.e., our fallen condition, including death itself), I wonder if this means the good writer (in synergy with God and His grace) can take that which is fleeting and nailed down in the here and now (i.e., "Our hot, passionate, fleeting time, caught up in fad after fashion after fling") and transfigure it from the inside out (as Christ does with us) by filling it with true Story (i.e., "the calm, unmoving, deeply resonant truths that were true ten thousand years ago and ever shall be").

I'm not a fiction writer myself, but as an avid fiction reader I can confidently say I've encountered this kind of transfiguration of our time, our world, and our very selves (as reflected in full, rich characters) in great stories. It is like C.S. Lewis's statement in... one of his essays about this sort of thing (lol I read it years ago, sorry I don't have the citation handy). To paraphrase Lewis, he said something like: When we eat an ordinary piece of meat, it is exactly and only that: a piece of meat. But when we imagine that someone has hunted for this meat, encountered dangers while doing so, emerged triumphant, and because of that struggle and victory this meat is now before us, waiting to be eaten... suddenly the meat tastes so much better than it would have when it was just "ordinary meat." Story makes this transformation happen.

***

One follow-up: I just spent about twenty minutes skimming Lewis's essay "Of Other Worlds," from which I am sure I first encountered the idea about story transforming meat to the point where it tastes delicious because of the sense of story that accompanies it... But, I could not find exactly the image I thought was in that essay. I must have extrapolated the above (I guess I was in the mood for meat when I first read that essay years ago, ha) from the following quote of Lewis's, which is the closest I could find:

"The happiness which [a story where the characters are animals who talk and live like us] presents to us is in fact full of the simplest and most attainable things--food, sleep, exercise, friendship, the face of nature, even (in a sense) religion. That 'simple but sustaining meal' of 'bacon and broad beans and a macaroni pudding' which Rat gave to his friends has, I doubt not, helped down many a real nursery dinner. And in the same way the whole story, paradoxically enough, strengthens our relish for real life. This excursion into the preposterous sends us back with renewed pleasure to the actual." (pp. 14-15 of the Harcourt edition of Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories by C.S. Lewis)

I think, since his essay begins by addressing the sense of danger often found in good stories, I must have combined the danger-discussion with this little snippet about food tasting better for having passed through story (with a little of Gary Paulsen's Hatchet thrown in). Regardless, both discussions are talking about the same thing: at the beginning of his essay Lewis discusses a sense of danger (think Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans), and in this quote above his discussion has moved to a sense of preposterousness and absurdity, where he uses a story where animals talk and share fellowship as an example. (Since I'm currently reading as my de-stress reading Martin the Warrior, a novel of Redwall by Brian Jacques, I can relate to this about talking animals even now.) Each of these qualities (danger or absurdity) is what the essay's title refers to as, simply, "other." It is this otherness, or as Jenna puts it, this transcendence, which makes the ordinary meat (or Lewis's "real nursery dinner") taste better.

***

To conclude, the crux of my above response to Jenna's post is this: a good story has the ability to transfigure, by God's grace, the fallenness of our world and our selves, from the inside out--made possible because of Christ having done this very same thing for us on the cross. I think this, for me, is the measure of a truly "good" story--one that achieves this great feat.

Is this a tall order for the writers and storytellers out there? Perhaps. But, it's what I'm seeking when I devour book after book after book--a reader's quest, if you will. And of course I have found it (Thank God!), time and time again, and these are the books and stories that get at the core of me. They tell my story of brokenness and redemption back to me. A story that can do this, without of course preaching or "teaching a lesson" (none of my above discussion has anything remotely to do with didactic, moralistic writing), is what I would call good storytelling.

Revisiting Stories

I learned something remarkable this week. Or rather, I have been learning it, and will continue to learn it, but this week it crystallized for me.

It is about ingesting stories through art... As a person's time on this earth lengthens, and more and more life experiences accumulate, such stories only deepen.

This may seem obvious, and if you had told me this as an 18 year-old, I would have said, "Well of course, that only makes sense." But there is a big difference between knowing it superficially, and experiencing it in a way that takes one's breath away, as this 26 year-old recently did.

This happened to me twice within the past week. And both times, the experience drew upon the same moment -- from my past, but also in my present and future, since it will forever be a part of me and make me who I am at any given time since it happened. The moment is the death of my father.

Without dwelling too much on the moment itself, for the purposes of the remarkable thing I learned and experienced this week, I will just say this: My father's death was very hard, for myriad reasons, all very complex. It happened two and a half years ago, and involved three very difficult weeks in which my dad was in and out of the ICU. He is the closest person to me who has died, thus far in my life. Who I am, and the life I live, has not been the same since.

That being said, I now want to share about two bits of artistic storytelling which, for extended periods of my life during my teen years, were stories that worked on me. They are completely unrelated to each other, and they are also both stories I had not revisited since my dad died -- not for any noteworthy reason in particular, but simply because there are new and different stories (as told through art) that fill my days today. But both of these stories, I had cause to revisit within this past week.

The first is the HBO series Six Feet Under. I grew up in a home that, for better or worse, had HBO. When this show started, created by the writer of American Beauty (one of my favorite films as a teen), I knew this would be something I would like. And it was, for the first few years at least. The premise was quirky, the characters real. The story, as told every week in each new episode, did to me what it did to millions of viewers: it let me relate to characters who struggled with the hardness of life. And it told their stories in strange and wonderful ways. I confess, though, that after several years, and once my schedule in college became very full, I fell out of touch with the Fisher family. In the interim, I became aware that the series ended, but I did not participate in this in any meaningful way, other than nostalgic thoughts of the years of my life spent watching it.

The second is the Stephen Sondheim musical Into the Woods. Being both a theatre and fairy tale junkie, it is no surprise this show was incredibly important to me as a teen. I owned the VHS recording of the original Broadway production, as well as the cast recordings for both the Broadway and London productions. I knew the musical score inside and out. During my musical theatre days, I sang songs from the show. All of the stories told in it, and the bigger story they all unite to become, beat out a rhythm in my life for many years. But, as is wont to happen, my musical tastes expanded after college, and between folk music and Orthodox Christian chant, in recent years I have not found much time for the music of shows like Into the Woods. By not listening to the recordings any more, the stories drifted from the front of my mind and settled like a dusting of snow into the back recesses of who I am. I may not have been consciously aware they were still there, gently lingering, but they were, and thank God for it. They just needed to be woken up.

And so, I bring us to this past week. Last week my friend and colleague Teresa posted on her Facebook wall a link to the final scene and montage of the series finale of Six Feet Under. I thought, "Oh, yes, I remember really liking that show for several years. Let me give this a watch." (It is a 9:51 minute video clip.) And boy, as I watched the final montage, in which we are shown how each of these characters ends his or her life here on earth, and particularly how those who had gone before are waiting to greet each one as he or she passed... I felt like the breath had been knocked out of me. The images and sounds I was seeing and hearing penetrated a depth in me that did not exist when I watched the first episode of the series almost ten years ago. I know, of course, that this depth in me was created by suffering, and grace. But the entire thing was remarkable, that these characters and this storytelling, about death and loss, could have such an effect on me now, when nine years ago my experience can only have been superficial in comparison.

Then, yesterday, my other friend Beth began "Showtunes Week" on Facebook, where she will post a video with a fabulous showtune each day this week. I thought this was fun and decided to join her, and chose as my first video Bernadette Peters singing "No One is Alone" from Into the Woods. I watched the video of Miss Peters sing the song, which I have heard and seen many times (having owned the CD and VHS of the live performance in question; did I mention I was a big fan of hers?). She paints pictures with her voice, and it was lovely (and, of course, nostalgic) to behold. It caused me to decide to dig up the CD that had this recording on it, and I am currently revisiting it in my car. "No One is Alone" is the second song on the CD. So, on my way to work today I listened to the song again in the private world I enter when I am alone in my car. And a curious thing occurred: instead of stretching my voice in order to sing along with Miss Peters, as I would have done and always did as a younger person, I decided to simply listen. When she reached the words, "Sometimes people leave you halfway through the wood," again this deep, deep place inside of me was pierced -- a place that did not, could not have existed the last time I listened closely to this song. (And I'm not counting having watched the video the evening before, because I did not listen closely but encountered only nostalgia at that point.) This song, about forgiving people you love for their mistakes, and also about recognizing that they are still with you and love you as best they can amidst those mistakes... Again, it took my breath away. And again, there is no way I could have truly understood this meaning in the song all those years ago, when I would listen to it on repeat and attempt to let it work on me as deeply as it could. It is clear that, whatever depth it may have reached in me as a teen, was nothing compared to what happened this week.

And so, this week I learned:

There is beauty and depth in stories told in artistic media. If the story is well-told, that will be evident the moment one encounters it. However: Never, ever think you have completely mined the depths of a story, even if you ingest it over and over and over again in a short space of time. (I was an obsessive kid, in case you didn't pick up on this yet.)

And also, and more importantly: Never, ever think that story has finished mining the depths of you. If it is a story worth telling, there is always something new and surprising (sometimes breathtaking) to encounter in it and in yourself.

And I suppose a third thing I learned is this: There is joy to be found in suffering. This joy comes when an encountered story manages to absorb your suffering into itself and tell it back to you. In this encounter, healing and grace are to be found.

***

Here are the two videos described above:

First encounter with The Glass Menagerie

There once was a girl who thought she knew a lot. Her mind was quick. She reveled in learning, and was not shy about expressing her thoughts and ideas as they came to her.

One day she was sitting at the front of her high school English class, watching her teacher as he prepared to start the lesson. That day they were beginning The Glass Menagerie, a play by Tennessee Williams. The girl was in her element. The teacher only had a small handful of copies of the play, stating they would rotate who would read parts during each class period, while the rest of the class listened. This meant there would be many opportunities to volunteer to read, which was one of the girl's favorite things to do.


There were three characters in the first scene of the play: Amanda, and her two children, Tom and Laura. Amanda had the most lines, followed closely by Tom. Laura did not have many lines at all. To begin the lesson, the teacher asked who would like to read, and assigned three readers to the three parts. The girl was selected to read Amanda.

The scene began, and the readers read with clarity and enthusiasm, even as they were encountering this story for the first time. The rest of the class listened politely. The teacher alone would notice the glazed stares of most of his students during this exercise as they tried in vain to grasp the meaning of the text, being recited enthusiastically but somewhat robotically as the readers sat at their desks and read.

The scene ended, and the teacher thanked the readers. He asked the class who they thought the main character of the scene was. Someone answered, "Amanda," owing to the fact that she talked the most. The teacher nodded, accepting the answer and its explanation without comment.

The teacher then arranged the front of the room into a makeshift dinner table using three desks. He asked the readers, including the girl, to take their places around the table, with Amanda and Tom sitting across from each other, and Laura between her mother and brother, facing the audience. They then read the scene again.

After the scene ended for the second time, the teacher asked the class again who they thought the main character of the scene was. The students considered the previous answer given -- Amanda -- and the brighter members of the class assumed this meant the correct answer was someone else. The girl was enthralled, and held her tongue, curious to see how this would play out.

One student tentatively answered into the silence, "Laura?"

The teacher asked, "Why do you think the scene is about Laura?"

"Well... she seemed to be pretty affected by her brother and mother and how they were bickering. She's also really quiet. Probably because her family is so talkative. So, that's why I thought maybe she was the main character of the scene. Plus, she was sitting between the other two, kind of in the line of fire, ya know?"

And then the teacher played his trump card: "And you would never have noticed that if we hadn't have seen the scene played in front of us, with simple blocking. This is why, whenever we read plays in my class, we will only have enough copies for the characters in the scene, and we will 'perform' the scene in front of the class. The point is not to 'act' the scene, but to see how the story is told through more than just the spoken lines. There is nothing that kills a good play more than reading it from our seats and following along in the book."

The girl was blown away by this revelation. The teacher went on to say that, in fact, the scene told us a lot about all three characters, so there really wasn't a wrong answer to his original question. But the girl disagreed. He was right. The scene was Laura's. The girl had learned something new, and was quietly humbled in the process. She had thought she knew a lot. Maybe she didn't know quite as much as she thought. And rather than be annoyed by this, she was very excited at the prospect of the new knowledge this teacher had to offer them.

The girl was sure of one thing: this would be a great year in English.

***

This is a true story. The girl was me, and the teacher was my greatest mentor during my high school years, Mr. MacLean. He was my director for four wonderful years of shows (four musicals and two plays), and he was my teacher for two rigorous years of English (English 11 and AP English).

I found out this week that Mr. MacLean will be retiring from my high school alma mater at the end of next year. He changed the way I ingest stories and texts, allowing them to change me as I read them. The above anecdote is one example of how he did this, but there were so many more. I can only imagine that he will be sorely missed at Woodlands High School.

(Photo courtesy of Tojosan under a Creative Commons license.)