Today my ENG 102 students made group presentations on their casting, setting, and envisioned scenes from chapters of DeLillo's White Noise. While I knew the groups had been enjoying their discussions, the presentations to the whole class generated little discussion. "How did you arrive at casting Russell Crowe (or George Clooney) as Jack Gladney?" I'd ask, or "What made you decide to set White Noise in 2050?", and I didn't get much feedback. But when I said, "Okay, pick one element that you suggested or your group decided on, and write about why you chose to do it that way," the keyboards clack-clack-clacked steadily. They had a lot to say, individually, in writing--more, surprisingly, than they'd had to say in their group presentations and follow-up whole-class discussion.
Any activity that stimulates a copious flow of writing--especially writing with some element of analyzing or interpreting--is worth the time it has taken in class, far better than equal time spent in my lecturing about analyzing fiction and writing argumentative essays embodying that analysis. So I'm really looking forward to reading what came pouring out when I told them to write.
Monday, February 25, 2008
I Get My Best Ideas While Driving
One of the questions that people often ask professional writers is "Where do you get your ideas?" I'm not at all sure I could answer that question myself, but I certainly could tell anyone "when" I get ideas--driving, especially driving distances. I put this into practice in an intentional fashion when I was working on my PhD in the mid-1990s and driving 60-70 miles each way to my community college part-time teaching job from the town where I was living and getting my graduate degree. I often laid out my time at the beginning of the trip like this: I'll spend 1/3 of my travel time thinking about the dissertation, 1/3 of my time working on the paper I'm going to present at a conference, and 1/3 of my time preparing what I'm going to say in my class. This worked out pretty well for a 1-1/2-hour commute on back roads followed by stop-and-go traffic into the city.
Now I don't get so many opportunities to brainstorm or draft while I'm driving, unless I'm making a special trip, because I commute under 10 miles to work. But it seems as if every time I'm on my way somewhere, I start to tell myself a story or craft a poem or plan some professional writing project. Yesterday, the urge to record some of my planning was so strong that I started writing myself notes in my cell phone, which doesn't offer a whole lot of space, but can be adequate for jotting down 3 chapter titles for a book, for example.
I think the stimulus of car time comes from the fact that I don't have a working CD player in the car, and I often find myself in areas in the mountains where I can't pick up much of NPR. But it's also been my quiet thinking time during many years of running around from campus to another when I was patching together part-time jobs and going home to a couple little kids and, later, patching together part-time jobs and getting a PhD and going home to a couple middle schoolers. So I turned off the radio and reflected.
This reflective time paid off when I'd sit down later to write--or when I'd walk into the classroom and start to address my class--because I'd really been writing and planning in the car, trying out ways of saying things, and the drafting experience seemed to work, even though those drafts never made it onto paper.
Over time, I came to expect to be flooded with great new ideas every time I got into the car and started off for an hour or more of driving time.
But that didn't come till I'd trained myself to use that time well--by promising myself I'd work on a particular writing problem and setting limits to the time I'd spend on it and making sure that I got to a notebook or computer sometime shortly after completing my drive so that I'd enjoy the fruits of my labor by actually producing the texts I'd been thinking about.
I think any activity would do. My daughter, a knitter, showed me an article about novelists who knit, who say that they can work their way through writing problems while they're knitting and that sitting down to knit can focus them on the problem-solving.
On one level this practice troubles me. I believe there's a great deal to be gained from mindfulness, from living in the moment and paying attention to the activity one is engaged in, and it is certain that I drive mechanically while I am in the throes of writing. On the other hand, I've been driving for 40 years, and it isn't something I have to pay full attention to in order to accomplish the task efficiently. I am happy to be mindful about kneading bread or even mowing the lawn, rather than off in the stratosphere with my thoughts.
And although I'd like to associate this kind of thinking with what William Golding called "grade-one thinking" in his often-anthologized essay, "Thinking as a Hobby," I have to admit that the quality of my thought isn't particularly earth-shattering, either when I'm mindful of mowing or I'm absent-mindedly driving: I'm usually just writing--just clothing some of the ideas I've held into a useful form for sharing with others, or even making up a story that will likely never make it to the computer screen. (I've started two different fantasy novels that I revisit mentally from time to time, feeling almost as if I were reading them--which seems to make writing them down superfluous.)
Most of all, I simply enjoy the activity of putting thoughts into words. I think of myself as being much like Dr. Johnson's "harmless drudge" of a lexicographer: what I do with words gives me mental exercise, hurts no one else, and garners no fame.
But since it has worked for me, I highly recommend it, especially when you are hard pressed for time to complete a writing task by deadline. Set yourself a goal and a time limit, get in your car, and think about your writing task while you drive through the countryside. Then, once you've reached your destination, sit down and get as much down on paper as you can. Let me know if it works!
Now I don't get so many opportunities to brainstorm or draft while I'm driving, unless I'm making a special trip, because I commute under 10 miles to work. But it seems as if every time I'm on my way somewhere, I start to tell myself a story or craft a poem or plan some professional writing project. Yesterday, the urge to record some of my planning was so strong that I started writing myself notes in my cell phone, which doesn't offer a whole lot of space, but can be adequate for jotting down 3 chapter titles for a book, for example.
I think the stimulus of car time comes from the fact that I don't have a working CD player in the car, and I often find myself in areas in the mountains where I can't pick up much of NPR. But it's also been my quiet thinking time during many years of running around from campus to another when I was patching together part-time jobs and going home to a couple little kids and, later, patching together part-time jobs and getting a PhD and going home to a couple middle schoolers. So I turned off the radio and reflected.
This reflective time paid off when I'd sit down later to write--or when I'd walk into the classroom and start to address my class--because I'd really been writing and planning in the car, trying out ways of saying things, and the drafting experience seemed to work, even though those drafts never made it onto paper.
Over time, I came to expect to be flooded with great new ideas every time I got into the car and started off for an hour or more of driving time.
But that didn't come till I'd trained myself to use that time well--by promising myself I'd work on a particular writing problem and setting limits to the time I'd spend on it and making sure that I got to a notebook or computer sometime shortly after completing my drive so that I'd enjoy the fruits of my labor by actually producing the texts I'd been thinking about.
I think any activity would do. My daughter, a knitter, showed me an article about novelists who knit, who say that they can work their way through writing problems while they're knitting and that sitting down to knit can focus them on the problem-solving.
On one level this practice troubles me. I believe there's a great deal to be gained from mindfulness, from living in the moment and paying attention to the activity one is engaged in, and it is certain that I drive mechanically while I am in the throes of writing. On the other hand, I've been driving for 40 years, and it isn't something I have to pay full attention to in order to accomplish the task efficiently. I am happy to be mindful about kneading bread or even mowing the lawn, rather than off in the stratosphere with my thoughts.
And although I'd like to associate this kind of thinking with what William Golding called "grade-one thinking" in his often-anthologized essay, "Thinking as a Hobby," I have to admit that the quality of my thought isn't particularly earth-shattering, either when I'm mindful of mowing or I'm absent-mindedly driving: I'm usually just writing--just clothing some of the ideas I've held into a useful form for sharing with others, or even making up a story that will likely never make it to the computer screen. (I've started two different fantasy novels that I revisit mentally from time to time, feeling almost as if I were reading them--which seems to make writing them down superfluous.)
Most of all, I simply enjoy the activity of putting thoughts into words. I think of myself as being much like Dr. Johnson's "harmless drudge" of a lexicographer: what I do with words gives me mental exercise, hurts no one else, and garners no fame.
But since it has worked for me, I highly recommend it, especially when you are hard pressed for time to complete a writing task by deadline. Set yourself a goal and a time limit, get in your car, and think about your writing task while you drive through the countryside. Then, once you've reached your destination, sit down and get as much down on paper as you can. Let me know if it works!
Friday, February 22, 2008
Reflecting on the Read-Around
In my Teaching Writing class, we had two read-around presentations this morning. The read-around is a variation on the choral reading recommendations that Katie Wood Ray makes in Wondrous Words: Writers and Writing in the Elementary Classroom. In my assignment, students bring to class the texts they'd choose to read aloud in a classroom, and then, in groups, they use these texts to create a new text, collaborating in the writing of their new creation and then performing their text for the rest of the class. Typically, students take bits of different books and put them together, adding some text as necessary, to create a new story. Sometimes they use one of the texts as an anchor and incorporate elements of other texts into the story based on that single text.
I am always impressed with my students' creativity with this assignment. They combine the texts they've brought in interesting and usually humorous ways. They get quite involved in writing their text, and they often comment to me, while they're crafting it, on how good their group's text is and how much we are going to enjoy hearing it.
They are usually quite good performers, too, and the rest of the class enjoys hearing each group's story.
I have several goals for this assignment. One is to illustrate in a concrete way the bridge between reading and writing: when we write our first stories, we are more or less consciously making use of the elements of story we have learned from hearing stories and, eventually, reading stories ourselves. We often echo the style of the writers we've heard read to us. This assignment explicitly calls for such echoing. Another goal is to involve students in a collaborative writing project. Despite the clear need that students have for collaborative skills, many college students go through class after class without having an opportunity to work together to craft a text. I believe that teachers-in-training need to experience the kinds of activities that I recommend they implement in their own classrooms, so this experience prepares them, in a small way, to use collaborative writing assignments themselves. My third goal is to illustrate the performative dimension of literacy. Too often, reading aloud is something that teachers do well; children's reading aloud, in contrast, is not practiced beforehand and may be painful in its exposure of inadequacies. When students have worked together on making a new text and have planned how they will present it, they've had enough practice to perform it well. This performative element, the sharing of one's own take on a reading experience and one's own writing, requires real involvement with the text.
And really, the tendency of authors to write stories in response to stories has been rewarded in recent years with publication of books such as March by Geraldine Brooks, a novel that takes Louisa May Alcott's Mr. March of Little Women and gives him a past, and Finn by Jon Clinch, a novel that creates a past for Huckleberry Finn's Pap. The phenomenon has less formal expression in the world of fan fiction and in some gaming communities, where users make up narratives for their characters and even suggest modifications of the games. These are all illustrations of interactive, communal literacy, extensions of Frank Smith's "literacy club"--activities that exhibit and stimulate excitement about literacy.
I am always impressed with my students' creativity with this assignment. They combine the texts they've brought in interesting and usually humorous ways. They get quite involved in writing their text, and they often comment to me, while they're crafting it, on how good their group's text is and how much we are going to enjoy hearing it.
They are usually quite good performers, too, and the rest of the class enjoys hearing each group's story.
I have several goals for this assignment. One is to illustrate in a concrete way the bridge between reading and writing: when we write our first stories, we are more or less consciously making use of the elements of story we have learned from hearing stories and, eventually, reading stories ourselves. We often echo the style of the writers we've heard read to us. This assignment explicitly calls for such echoing. Another goal is to involve students in a collaborative writing project. Despite the clear need that students have for collaborative skills, many college students go through class after class without having an opportunity to work together to craft a text. I believe that teachers-in-training need to experience the kinds of activities that I recommend they implement in their own classrooms, so this experience prepares them, in a small way, to use collaborative writing assignments themselves. My third goal is to illustrate the performative dimension of literacy. Too often, reading aloud is something that teachers do well; children's reading aloud, in contrast, is not practiced beforehand and may be painful in its exposure of inadequacies. When students have worked together on making a new text and have planned how they will present it, they've had enough practice to perform it well. This performative element, the sharing of one's own take on a reading experience and one's own writing, requires real involvement with the text.
And really, the tendency of authors to write stories in response to stories has been rewarded in recent years with publication of books such as March by Geraldine Brooks, a novel that takes Louisa May Alcott's Mr. March of Little Women and gives him a past, and Finn by Jon Clinch, a novel that creates a past for Huckleberry Finn's Pap. The phenomenon has less formal expression in the world of fan fiction and in some gaming communities, where users make up narratives for their characters and even suggest modifications of the games. These are all illustrations of interactive, communal literacy, extensions of Frank Smith's "literacy club"--activities that exhibit and stimulate excitement about literacy.
Thursday, February 21, 2008
Writing Along with My Students
One of the best practices for writing teachers is to write with their students, to write on the topics they assign, and yet it's surprising how many do not. One of the assignments I regularly give is a journaling or notebook assignment--so many pages a week, or reflections on readings, or reflections on writing practices, etc. Last semester I kept a writer's notebook with one of my classes (not one for each of the three writing classes, which I couldn't possibly have made time for), and I found it relaxing and rewarding.
Similarly, I resumed this blog because I assigned blogging to a student who is taking a writing class with me by appointment. In addition to her blogging, she is conducting a campus survey to find out who reads blogs and who writes blogs on our campus. I am very interested to see what she finds out.
I have been reluctant to assign blogs because I sometimes feel discomfort myself about posting my opinions out here where anybody can find them. I know that my students' relation to the public realm of discourse is very different from my own. I am sometimes inhibited from writing in particular venues by a fear of sounding stupid. My students are more comfortable with risk-taking in a public discussion forum.
So one motive in my keeping a writer's log in a folder on the network so my students can read it, my keeping this blog, and my working on a revising assignment in front of my Teaching Writing class yesterday (projecting my efforts to the screen at the front of the room) is to take some of the risks I ask my students to take regularly in their writing, to move out of my comfort zone. I am also interested to see whether I can make a true commitment to the same kind of regular reflective writing that I ask of them--or will I make excuses for not keeping up? "I'm too busy" is my usual litany. Writing takes time, writing takes concentration. In addition to writing myself, I'm rereading the assignments I make (I do try to reread along with students each time I use a text, even if I've read it several times previously), and I'm commenting briefly on students' logs and writing exercises and commenting fully on formal papers, and I am involved in three time-consuming committees this semester. I also direct the Writing Center, and I work with individual students. I need to reread Brave New World so I can be a better help to an international student as he writes his paper on that book for a colleague's ENG 101 class. I need to write my paper for the Conference on College Composition and Communication. I'm on my church's Board of Directors, and I play the organ for almost every Sunday service. Etc., etc.
But then . . . I don't expect my students to tell me that they don't have time to do the reading and writing I assign them. I feel that I have more credibility with them if I can do the same work I'm asking them to do.
So . . . I guess it's time for me to start thinking about whom I'd cast as Jack and Babette Gladney, their children, their friend Murray, since the ENG 102 students are working on their White Noise: The Movie assignment.
Similarly, I resumed this blog because I assigned blogging to a student who is taking a writing class with me by appointment. In addition to her blogging, she is conducting a campus survey to find out who reads blogs and who writes blogs on our campus. I am very interested to see what she finds out.
I have been reluctant to assign blogs because I sometimes feel discomfort myself about posting my opinions out here where anybody can find them. I know that my students' relation to the public realm of discourse is very different from my own. I am sometimes inhibited from writing in particular venues by a fear of sounding stupid. My students are more comfortable with risk-taking in a public discussion forum.
So one motive in my keeping a writer's log in a folder on the network so my students can read it, my keeping this blog, and my working on a revising assignment in front of my Teaching Writing class yesterday (projecting my efforts to the screen at the front of the room) is to take some of the risks I ask my students to take regularly in their writing, to move out of my comfort zone. I am also interested to see whether I can make a true commitment to the same kind of regular reflective writing that I ask of them--or will I make excuses for not keeping up? "I'm too busy" is my usual litany. Writing takes time, writing takes concentration. In addition to writing myself, I'm rereading the assignments I make (I do try to reread along with students each time I use a text, even if I've read it several times previously), and I'm commenting briefly on students' logs and writing exercises and commenting fully on formal papers, and I am involved in three time-consuming committees this semester. I also direct the Writing Center, and I work with individual students. I need to reread Brave New World so I can be a better help to an international student as he writes his paper on that book for a colleague's ENG 101 class. I need to write my paper for the Conference on College Composition and Communication. I'm on my church's Board of Directors, and I play the organ for almost every Sunday service. Etc., etc.
But then . . . I don't expect my students to tell me that they don't have time to do the reading and writing I assign them. I feel that I have more credibility with them if I can do the same work I'm asking them to do.
So . . . I guess it's time for me to start thinking about whom I'd cast as Jack and Babette Gladney, their children, their friend Murray, since the ENG 102 students are working on their White Noise: The Movie assignment.
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Writing Activities to Aid Critical Thinking about Prose Fiction
In ENG 102: Effective Writing II, I have introduced one of two activities that I have planned to promote my students' critical interpretation of White Noise by Don DeLillo. I asked them to imagine themselves making a movie based on the book--to cast the movie, to decide whether to set it in the 1980s or give it a contemporary setting, to envision the town, the college, and the Gladneys' home; and to select 2-3 chapters to make into scenes in the movie, imagining camera angles, dialogue, and visual images to convey symbols and themes. Students are working on the project in small groups.
My goals for this assignment are to encourage students to visualize the characters and setting; to select particularly significant plot points; to identify symbols and themes; and to become more involved with the text. It is my hope that the attention they bring to seeing the characters and the events of the novel, and endowing them with significance in the imagined movie, will help them read the rest of the novel more critically and write analytically about the novel. If such is not the case, at least I know they've been having fun today.
The other activity that I hope to incorporate either over the weekend or early next week is an imitation exercise. I am interested in having students "try on" DeLillo's style, with the goal of focusing their attention on his style and on stylistic options available to them. For this I've chosen a passage on shopping in a mall, an experience that we all have had. DeLillo names and briefly describes the mall and does his typical listing--of the foods they purchase, the smells, the products, synonyms ("gifts, bonuses, bribes, baksheesh"). I ask students to follow DeLillo's sentence and paragraph structure as much as possible, using details from their own shopping experiences.
I am quite sure this writing exercise will generate less enthusiasm than the movie-making activity is generating, but I am confident that it will help them identify their experiences with his and I hope it will help them see their own experiences through the eyes of his narrator. I also want to use this as a route into discussing why it is that DeLillo does so much listing of things.
My goals for this assignment are to encourage students to visualize the characters and setting; to select particularly significant plot points; to identify symbols and themes; and to become more involved with the text. It is my hope that the attention they bring to seeing the characters and the events of the novel, and endowing them with significance in the imagined movie, will help them read the rest of the novel more critically and write analytically about the novel. If such is not the case, at least I know they've been having fun today.
The other activity that I hope to incorporate either over the weekend or early next week is an imitation exercise. I am interested in having students "try on" DeLillo's style, with the goal of focusing their attention on his style and on stylistic options available to them. For this I've chosen a passage on shopping in a mall, an experience that we all have had. DeLillo names and briefly describes the mall and does his typical listing--of the foods they purchase, the smells, the products, synonyms ("gifts, bonuses, bribes, baksheesh"). I ask students to follow DeLillo's sentence and paragraph structure as much as possible, using details from their own shopping experiences.
I am quite sure this writing exercise will generate less enthusiasm than the movie-making activity is generating, but I am confident that it will help them identify their experiences with his and I hope it will help them see their own experiences through the eyes of his narrator. I also want to use this as a route into discussing why it is that DeLillo does so much listing of things.
Review of Ashes of Roses by Mary Jane Auch
I teach a class in Young Adult literature and have written a Thematic Guide to Young Adult Literature, published by Greenwood Press. So I read a lot of YA literature, and my current reading is guided mostly by the ALA's Best Books for Young Adults list.
Ashes of Roses is a historical novel, set in New York City in 1911, chronicling the immigrant experience from the perspective of a 16-year-old Irish girl who finds a job in the infamous Triangle Waist Company, the sweatshop where a fire killed almost 150 immigrant workers, mostly women, because they were locked into the shop on the ninth floor. The title grimly puns on the popular pastel fabric shade, "ashes of roses," and the deaths of protagonist Rose Nolan's two friends, Rose Klein and Rose Bellini. Their ethnic identities are typical of the majority of the women employed there. In an Afterword, Auch writes that she used her immigrant grandmother's name, Margaret Rose Nolan, for the protagonist, having learned that the company employed at least one Irish immigrant, and her research revealed that seventeen of the young women employed there were named Rose. While many of the victims died in the fire, as on 9/11, many leaped to their deaths rather than burn, some of them hoping against hope that the firefighters would be able to catch them.
In Auch's story, the tragic fire is linked explicitly with the union movement, as the young woman, Gussie, who gets Rose her job in the factory is an active labor organizer. In the novel we see only the labor issues prior to the disaster, since the novel ends almost immediately after the fire, somewhat abruptly. In actuality, the Triangle fire stirred public sympathy and advanced the union cause of more humane conditions for garment industry workers.
Auch's story shows clearly why so many immigrant women were willing to accept the exploitative conditions in which they worked. Young Margaret Rose, who sheds the first name she shares with her mother in her effort to forge a new identity for herself in America, experiences the breakup of her family when, first, her baby brother is turned away at Ellis Island and her father accompanies him back to Ireland and, later, her demoralized mother follows him back to Ireland because she is made to feel unwelcome, ignorant, and indigent in her brother-in-law's home. Rose and her twelve-year-old sister Maureen balk at being taken back to Ireland, where they know the limited and limiting future that awaits them, lying to their mother so that she will leave them behind and then trying to support themselves, first with piecework at home, then with factory work. Rose's encounters with the disdainful prejudice against the greenhorn make her desperate to be self-supporting, at the same time that she is ignorant of the dangers that lurk not only in the alleys but in the exploitative businesses that offer work to young women with limited skills.
Rose's hope for her future rests on the skills she has begun to learn from her mother, a seamstress and maker of fine dresses in Limerick. She owns a lovely dress made in the fashionable "ashes of roses" fabric because her mother was given a damaged length of fabric rejected by the Limerick shop, fabric from which she designed a fashionable dress for her oldest daughter. Significantly, Rose is wearing the dress on the day of the fire, because she plans to go out to a movie with her friends after work.
Auch is at her best in portraying the challenges of finding one's way in a new country, fresh from Ellis Island, challenges that are exacerbated by the forcible splitting up of families. The hopes and fears, the confidence and strength of determination that turned immigrants into American citizens are sympathetically depicted in the naive Rose and her feisty little sister. She also provides a sympathetic portrait of Rose's uncle, a man transformed by his years in America who treasures his youthful memories of home and family but who has adapted to his new home by becoming just a little less Irish, a little more Irish-American.
One feature I found a bit annoying was the author's substitution of an apostrophe for the g in present participles/gerunds. I probably wouldn't have minded it in dialogue, but it was also used consistently in the first-person narration.
This novel would be an excellent text to use in conjunction with social studies lessons on the immigrant experience and the union movement. Cornell University hosts an excellent documentary exhibit on the fire at http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/trianglefire/. Scholastic maintains an interactive teaching site on Ellis Island at http://teacher.scholastic.com/activities/immigration/tour/index.htm, and several immigrants' stories are featured at the Ellis Island.org site (http://www.ellisisland.org/).
Ashes of Roses is a historical novel, set in New York City in 1911, chronicling the immigrant experience from the perspective of a 16-year-old Irish girl who finds a job in the infamous Triangle Waist Company, the sweatshop where a fire killed almost 150 immigrant workers, mostly women, because they were locked into the shop on the ninth floor. The title grimly puns on the popular pastel fabric shade, "ashes of roses," and the deaths of protagonist Rose Nolan's two friends, Rose Klein and Rose Bellini. Their ethnic identities are typical of the majority of the women employed there. In an Afterword, Auch writes that she used her immigrant grandmother's name, Margaret Rose Nolan, for the protagonist, having learned that the company employed at least one Irish immigrant, and her research revealed that seventeen of the young women employed there were named Rose. While many of the victims died in the fire, as on 9/11, many leaped to their deaths rather than burn, some of them hoping against hope that the firefighters would be able to catch them.
In Auch's story, the tragic fire is linked explicitly with the union movement, as the young woman, Gussie, who gets Rose her job in the factory is an active labor organizer. In the novel we see only the labor issues prior to the disaster, since the novel ends almost immediately after the fire, somewhat abruptly. In actuality, the Triangle fire stirred public sympathy and advanced the union cause of more humane conditions for garment industry workers.
Auch's story shows clearly why so many immigrant women were willing to accept the exploitative conditions in which they worked. Young Margaret Rose, who sheds the first name she shares with her mother in her effort to forge a new identity for herself in America, experiences the breakup of her family when, first, her baby brother is turned away at Ellis Island and her father accompanies him back to Ireland and, later, her demoralized mother follows him back to Ireland because she is made to feel unwelcome, ignorant, and indigent in her brother-in-law's home. Rose and her twelve-year-old sister Maureen balk at being taken back to Ireland, where they know the limited and limiting future that awaits them, lying to their mother so that she will leave them behind and then trying to support themselves, first with piecework at home, then with factory work. Rose's encounters with the disdainful prejudice against the greenhorn make her desperate to be self-supporting, at the same time that she is ignorant of the dangers that lurk not only in the alleys but in the exploitative businesses that offer work to young women with limited skills.
Rose's hope for her future rests on the skills she has begun to learn from her mother, a seamstress and maker of fine dresses in Limerick. She owns a lovely dress made in the fashionable "ashes of roses" fabric because her mother was given a damaged length of fabric rejected by the Limerick shop, fabric from which she designed a fashionable dress for her oldest daughter. Significantly, Rose is wearing the dress on the day of the fire, because she plans to go out to a movie with her friends after work.
Auch is at her best in portraying the challenges of finding one's way in a new country, fresh from Ellis Island, challenges that are exacerbated by the forcible splitting up of families. The hopes and fears, the confidence and strength of determination that turned immigrants into American citizens are sympathetically depicted in the naive Rose and her feisty little sister. She also provides a sympathetic portrait of Rose's uncle, a man transformed by his years in America who treasures his youthful memories of home and family but who has adapted to his new home by becoming just a little less Irish, a little more Irish-American.
One feature I found a bit annoying was the author's substitution of an apostrophe for the g in present participles/gerunds. I probably wouldn't have minded it in dialogue, but it was also used consistently in the first-person narration.
This novel would be an excellent text to use in conjunction with social studies lessons on the immigrant experience and the union movement. Cornell University hosts an excellent documentary exhibit on the fire at http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/trianglefire/. Scholastic maintains an interactive teaching site on Ellis Island at http://teacher.scholastic.com/activities/immigration/tour/index.htm, and several immigrants' stories are featured at the Ellis Island.org site (http://www.ellisisland.org/).
Starting Over: An English Professor Writes
I guess I didn't have all that much to say last year, when I started the blog, since I posted only once last March. Or maybe the issue was getting the time for writing. It isn't easy for a fifty-something-year-old woman to change her writing habits. I keep a personal journal, handwritten, in a handmade blank book. And I write a lot of instructional materials for my classes. I even kept a writer's notebook on the College's network last semester, a notebook that my students had access to. I figured that if I asked them to write 6 pages/week, I should keep pace with them. So that was significantly more public than my usual journal-keeping.
But I find it difficult to get into the habit of writing regularly in a public forum. I don't even post often to the listservs I join. I ask myself, "Who cares what I think?" and that's my excuse for not writing.
But I'm going to take the plunge once more. This is where I'll post some of my thoughts about teaching, about writing, and about the reading I'm doing. And maybe I'll get some of my students to do the same, to move their writing from their classroom logs to the blogosphere.
But I find it difficult to get into the habit of writing regularly in a public forum. I don't even post often to the listservs I join. I ask myself, "Who cares what I think?" and that's my excuse for not writing.
But I'm going to take the plunge once more. This is where I'll post some of my thoughts about teaching, about writing, and about the reading I'm doing. And maybe I'll get some of my students to do the same, to move their writing from their classroom logs to the blogosphere.
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