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The February 14/21 issue of
The New Yorker is full of interesting things (not to mention a very funny/poignant guest piece by Tina Fey; don't miss it), but for this morning's blog I choose to focus on Malcolm Gladwell's essays, "The Order of Things: What College Rankings Really Tell Us." I'll spare you most of the details (though they alarm and intrigue). I'll focus here on one that had a nearly physical impact on me. Gladwell is talking here about the yearly
U.S. News college ranking and the algorithms that support it. He has turned his gaze on a category named "faculty resources," which determines twenty percent of an institution's score. Quoting from the College Guide, Gladwell reports, "Research shows that the more satisfied students are about their contact with professors the more they will learn and the more likely it is they will graduate," a conclusion reinforced by student engagement studies and a conclusion nearly any parent will make after watching their children lean toward certain classes and teachers.
What troubles Gladwell (and what troubles me, not just Gladwell's reader but a faculty member at an Ivy League University who seeks and values student engagement above all else) is how
U.S. News has elected to measure this elusive quality. Apparently engagement is determined by the following factors: class size, faculty salary, professors with the highest degree in their fields, the student-faculty ratio, and the proportion of faculty who are full-time. All of which, with the exception of class size (and mine is currently oversubscribed) just about kicks me out of having any shot at all at having a positive statistical impact on the University of Pennsylvania's 'faculty resources' score.
This offends me deeply, and it especially offended me yesterday, having just spent the better part of three days writing notes to my beautiful and (it seems to me) engaged students—notes inspired by the glean of their talents and the nature of their writerly ambitions and the ways in which they work (so hard) toward amplified versions of themselves. I teach because it is an honor to work with those who stand on the verge. I spend the time I spend because I recognize the depth of my responsibility and the abject importance of never rushing past a student who wants more or who struggles for more or could be even more.
Maybe you can't really measure that. But I suspect that my salary and my degree and my part-time status should not, in some machine somewhere, be diminishing the ranking for Penn.
A week or so ago, Colleen Mondor, Chasing Ray blogger and Bookslut reviewer (among other things), wrote to say that she would soon be able to share big news. And so I waited, knowing, as I did, that Colleen had been at work for several years on a book she'd called THE MAP OF DEAD PILOTS. It was a book inspired, in part by her work as co-owner of an aircraft leasing company, her knowledge of Alaska, her love for boundary-stretching literature, and her passion for melding fact and the imagination. And it was a book agented by one Michele Rubin of Writers House, whose belief in this project Colleen has described in posts spanning several years.
This was an author and agent who would not give up. Not in the face of so many almosts. Not in the face of a rapidly changing industry. Not in the face of so much that can feel so bleak when you are on the waiting side of a coin.
And so, this week, I waited for Colleen's news.
It came yesterday—news that this book, described in Publishers Marketplace as being "about Alaskan pilots navigating a world that demands close communion with extreme physical danger and emotional toughness" has been sold to Holly Rubino at Lyons Press. It will go on the fall 2011 list.
I could not be happier for Colleen, who has cheered so many of the rest of us on, has gotten us talking about important book issues (diversity in storytelling, honesty in jacket design, the value of nonfiction for the young), and has never bowed to envy or bitterness. Colleen Mondor has sold her first book, and she'll tell you more about it
here.
If the titles designating the four parts of this slender paperback seem, at first, daunting—"Evocations of Consciousness," "Evocations of Personality," "Personae and Culture," and "Personae and Personal Experience"�there's nothing but good stuff in between. Delightful ruminations on the poetics of self, the possibility/impossibility of tracking the mind at work, the grand seductions and sometimes promise of what Klaus, the founding director of the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program, calls "The literature of interiority. The story of thought. The drama of mind in action." etc. We get satisfying reflections on Montaigne reflecting on Montaigne, pithy quotes from nonfiction masters, mind teases that force us to conclude (again and again) that writing (and reading) the personal essay is both a mine field and an irresistible enterprise.
Every time I teach memoir or essay, I yearn to be writing it again. This happened to me during the online book club ("Literature of Bearing Witness") that I was recently leading for the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania. Memories leak. Assertions are disproven. The mind set free veers, trembles, and ultimately discovers something that might have been, something that might still mean something. If only we knew for certain what about any of it were true.
Reading Klaus put me right back into that danger zone—that thirst for trying to write the personal all over again (and yes, dear readers, I do realize that I write the personal every day on this blog). Klaus gave me new essays to read (note to self: read more Didion; get a copy of David Foster Wallace's "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," get Anatole Broyard's
Intoxicated by My Illness). He gave me experiments to try out on myself. He gave me cause to think, and he made smile, and it was all delivered with the kind of companionable prose that made me feel like I was in a classroom, which is where, so often, I want to be.
I have said this a few times this year; I grow redundant: We have entered, I believe, a new era of memoir making and personal essay writing. An era in which the forms feel noble again—better explicated, more sound, more open to new possibilities. I grow increasingly tempted to write toward the true.
By:
Beth Kephart ,
on 10/29/2010
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The University of Pennsylvania has been extraordinarily good to me—inviting me to contribute to the pages of
The Pennsylvania Gazette and
Peregrine; trusting me to teach a small class of brilliant undergrads; putting me at the helm of an online book group; asking me to read with Alice Elliott Dark, or to sit on panels with Buzz Bissinger, or to join David Remnick for a Kelly Writers House dinner; and to come to know, even better, the likes of fellow teachers Jay Kirk and Karen Rile.
Earlier this summer, John Prendergast, the editor of
The Pennsylvania Gazette, wrote to say that he'd read
Dangerous Neighbors and that he looked forward to having a conversation. We had that conversation on a sunny day sitting on a row of skinny benches while a tennis match played out before us. I was my breathless, enthused, and sleep-starved self (as you'll read) and John was the thoughtful man he is. Several weeks later, the photographer Chris Crisman and his team met me at Memorial Hall and put up with me long enough to take my picture.
It is an
extraordinarily generous story, accompanied by one of my favorite scenes from the book. It will always be cherished. And Chris, thanks for pulling your camera lens back. You know what that means to me.
This is the season during which the work days never end, and the skies darken for long stretches, and the rains come, and the tree limbs scratch their chaos into the tired stucco walls of this house.
This is that season, again.
But last night, through what was cold and what was dark, I made my way by train and collapsed umbrella to the University of Pennsylvania campus, which Al Filreis and Greg Djanikian have turned into a second home for me. I traveled there to hear
New Yorker editor David Remnick speak of journalism—then and now. I traveled to sit with my dear student Kim, and to hear of her life, how it unfolding. I traveled for the chance to chat with the great fiction writer and teacher, Max Apple. I traveled to sit among students intent on learning all they can—there, here, now—and among teachers and working writer/editors (Dick Pohlman, Avery Rome, more) who are generous with their own stories.
A gift, all of it.
The fearless and fabulous Al Filreis, who (with his finely chosen cohorts) makes the world of the Kelly Writers House (at the University of Pennsylvania) turn, has recently posted this year's roster of online book discussion groups, which are conducted for Penn alumni and the parents of Penn students. Those of you who might fall into either category should take a look at what is being offered here, which, in Al's words, "include a month-long group led by English professor Jim English on Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, Never Let Me Go; Emily Steiner, distinguished medievalist, leading a discussion of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; a 10-day group on Nabokov's Lolita; others on writing about food, Edward Albee's plays, on anonymity and the internet, and the literature of bearing witness led by an award-winning Penn alumna writer."I happen to be the Penn alumna writer conducting the discussion group on the literature of bearing witness, a full description of which is here:
In "Accident and Its Scene: Reflections on the Death of John Gardner," (Writing into the World), the exquisite essayist Terrence Des Pres reconstructs the death of John Gardner—a motorcycle accident, or was it an accident?—along a lonesome road (or was it lonesome?). In "Memory and Imagination" (I Could Tell You Stories), Patricia Hampl tells a story, several times, about learning to play the piano. The facts keep changing because Hampl's memory does, because memory is a tortuous bend; it is never, in Hampl's words, "just memory."
The past is loaded. Memory shifts. Yet we live in a world in which honesty matters. We want to believe the stories we tell ourselves. We want to believe one another. In this on-line discussion, we'll be exploring the perils of bearing witness with Des Pres and Hampl as our guide.
I hope those of you who may be Penn folk and interested in any of the groups will get involved. We're going to have fun.
By:
Beth Kephart ,
on 5/20/2010
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I'm headed into the Big Apple today (though not by way of clydesdales, sadly) to talk about the power of the Kelly Writers House program at Penn, to read with Kimberly Eisler, one of my truly talented students, and to witness the indomitable Al Filreis teach a poem (that should be something; hope he doesn't call on me). Two days later, I'll head back down into Philadelphia to see my first Penn student, Moira Moody, say I do to the man she loves. I'm banking on Dr. Filreis showing off some highly ecclesiastical moves at Moira's wedding. I'll take hip hop, too. Or even the cha cha.
By mid-week next week, I'll be spending the day at Chanticleer (the site of
Ghosts in the Garden and
Nothing but Ghosts)—teaching memoir to the aspiring writers of Agnes Irwin, thanks to the invitation of Julie Diana, who is not just the head librarian at Agnes Irwin, but the wife of the fabulous writer, Jay Kirk. Thursday and Friday, back in New York, I'll spend some time with editor Laura Geringer and the glorious Egmont team; the book bloggers I have come to love; Amanda King, Gussie Lewis, and Jennifer Laughran, booksellers extraordinaires; and maybe even grab a few moments with Amy Rennert, my west-coast based agent with whom I often speak but whom I rarely see.
I am not, by nature, a sustainably social person, and so, when I return home next Friday evening, I'll be grateful that one of my very favorite events of the entire year—the Devon Horse Show—will have rolled into town. We moved here in large part because the fairgrounds are just down the road, because these horses do trot by just after dawn, because I like few things more than walking through the shadows of stables, fitting my hand to a sweet mare's nose. I like the sound of clop and whinny, the tinny music that accompanies balloon dart games and Ferris wheels.
There are, it sometimes seems, not even six degrees of separation in the writing world. Today, during Alumni Day at Kelly Writers House (University of Pennsylvania), I shared this moment with the tremendous KWH deputy in charge Al Filreis (I would take one of his extraordinary classes, but I'm afraid I'm not quite smart enough), Alice Elliott Dark (whose short story, "In the Gloaming," was selected by John Updike as one of the best of the last century, and who read from it beautifully today), and Moira Moody, a writer and almost bride, who was Al's student before she was mine, and, after Al and I sent her on her way, a student of Alice's at the Rutgers-Newark Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program created by none other than our mutual friend, Jayne Anne Phillips.
But that's not at all. Dear Moira was also the inspiration for "Moira" (is inspiration too broad a word for such a flat-out stealing of a name and persona?)—the star of the zany corporate fable, Zenobia, that I penned with then-Shire CEO, Matt Emmens.
Altogether, then, on a gorgeous meander of a day.
By:
Beth Kephart ,
on 5/7/2010
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I walk the campus every Monday before class—always a new direction, always some memory that I am stalking. Yesterday I went the length of Locust Walk and out toward West Philadelphia, where a mod-looking bowling alley has been slipped inside a residential street and the Dental School where I once worked has the face of new authority. At the corner of 42nd and Spruce I was besieged by memories of a friend with whom I shared a passion for Russian history. The room where he kept his books. The pea soup that he made from his mother's recipe. His fascination with Tolstoy.
By the time I reached the Writers House, I was feeling melancholy. J met me downstairs. S met me upstairs. K arrived with a tiny, days-old kitten tucked into the collar beneath her chin. "They call him Wild Bill," she told me, "and I think he likes my bling," for this found refugee from the streets of West Philly had dug his claw in deep to her necklace chain and was, it seemed, intent on staying.
The past is gone, except that it leans upon our present day, except that we write it into our stories, except that it tangles into our imaginations and hovers near. The past is a yearning, and now is the bowling alley, the cleaned-up Spruce, the Writers House, the stairs, the room, Wild Bill in K's collar, and the email that arrives from J, in the evening after class. It includes a bit of found memoir that, he says, he thinks I might like. It includes the line, "most unlonely teacher."
Yes. Certainly.
I have problems with those college rankings in so many ways, I don't even know where to begin. One of the things that really bothers me is that colleges "court" students they know they'll never accept, hoping they'll apply, just so they can reject them. That way, they appear more selective. We could talk for days about this.
Youve compelled me to buy this issue; I love Tina Fey so. Everything she writes is so wonderfully and sharply witty.
What a bizarre method of measurement--and another example of trying to make a quick and easy sellable report out of that which is neither quick, easy, nor measurable.
A better measure would be time spent teaching and preparing to teach per student versus time spent doing research or personal projects.