Summer '10

Summer?

Welcome to Summer term 2010, and English 268, creative non-fiction. The picture doesn't look much like Summer, but that's the idea. Keats spoke about the concept of negative capability: It's being able to hold two contradictory ideas in our heads at the same time and still have the ability to function. I like to think of it as the willing suspension of belief. If we can entertain two seemingly opposing thoughts, and have them bounce around and be perfectly content interacting with each other, for long periods of time, then we're on the way to negative capability.  Here's an example of how this could work in reality as opposed to fiction. As I write this, a good friend is visiting her daughter at school in New Zealand. Here in Columbus yesterday the high temperature reached about 85 degrees F. Where Barbara is, the high was 40 degrees F. give or take. Not exactly snowy and blizzarding like the picture above, but not shirtsleeves weather either. So the two opposing ideas concept isn't so difficult if we expand our vision just a bit.

Summer term is going to be like that; I look forward to writing as much as I can in a very short time, bypassing my usual requirement to tweak, rewrite, edit, rephrase and redo any and all manuscripts. Rewriting has always been a necessity, but it appears my system, if you can call it that, may be considered a luxury in this class. English 268 started yesterday. Our first assignment was a free write lasting nearly ten minutes. One parcel of some value emanating from that exercise was the realization that writing in such a way drives out some of the fear of failing to write any other way, or in patching words together in a way that makes sense to me. One of the main fears in life, certainly for a writer, is that the product makes no sense. John Ciardi mentioned this fear concerning his poetic works. He said his fear was that he'd left part of the poem in his head. If we get away leaving even a part of the story in our heads, or still in the pen, then we've not fully succeeded. So perhaps the free write is always the way to go, at least at first. Then, after a bit of incautious scrambling and/or parsing of the words and meanings and expressions, we put the work out there fully and forlornly half-dressed, and see who gets it? Stay tuned. It will be an interesting Summer.