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Yesterday, on my way to teaching at Penn, I took a small detour to see a Paul Strand exhibit in the Fine Arts building. Then climbed the steps. Took out my phone. And snapped this shot through the window.

Damn, I thought. How lucky am I to be a spring semester adjunct here. This campus. This place. This Creative Writing arm of an English Department USA Today just ranked second in the nation.

Last year, Avery Rome and I joined forces and hosted Michael Sokolove (Drama High) as a special guest. Michael thrilled our students, taught us many things. This year, I'm enormously blessed to be hosting Daniel Menaker, who edited fiction for The New Yorker for 25 years and served as the Executive Editor in Chief of Random House, acquiring books by some of my favorite writers. In his various editorial capacities, Daniel has worked with Alice Munro, Elizabeth Strout, George Saunders, Charles McGrath, William Trevor, Norman Rush, Katha Pollitt, Colum McCann, Amy Bloom, Antonya Nelson, Salman Rushdie—and many others. He has also written a memoir I loved, My Mistake. I wrote about that here—a blog post that initiated an unexpected conversation.

Daniel will be at the Kelly Writers House on February 24, beginning at noon, when he and I will be talking about the vagaries of the publishing industry. The larger community is welcome. At 1:30, my class will join with Lorene Carey's class to talk in private about My Mistake.

After Daniel was in touch regarding my words about his book, Jeff Hobbs, the wholly compassionate and deep-seeing author of The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace, got in touch about this blog post, in which I spoke of how I was incorporating his book into my teaching plan. Jeff, who lives in California, offered to come visit my class as part of a larger east coast tour. When the dates weren't quite working out as we had hoped, a Skype visit was planned instead.

And so my students will have the opportunity to meet two authors whose books and lives inspire. My students—who are teaching me words like "jawn" and authors like Maira Kalman, teaching me narrative photography and the nuance of talk, the pronunciation of complex cloud forms and the Black Scholes equation. We are learning memoir new, and we are learning it together, and I am beyond delighted that the neon lyric of our conversation will be further radicalized by Daniel and Jeff.

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David Grossman's elegiac Falling Out of Time is not a memoir. It is not a memoir even though it comes from such a deeply personal place—the loss of the author's own son, an inconsolable grief. The book is, instead, a Greek chorus of a book—a concussion of voices, of grieving parents, of thoughts that wander through the dark night of loss. A Town Chronicler and a Centaur, a Duke and a Midwife, a Woman in the Belfry, an Elderly Math Teacher, a Woman in Net—each character spiraling down upon the empty place where a child no longer is. The "noneness."

They walk the night. They look for signs. They ask their wives or their husbands how they will ever again love each other "when/in deep love/he was/conceived."

They rehearse their history:

Two human specks,
a mother and her child,
we glided through the world
for six whole years,
which were unto me
but a few days
and we were
a nursery rhyme
threaded with tales
and miracles–

Until ever so lightly
a breeze
a breath
a flutter
a zephyr
rustled
the leaves—

And sealed our fates:
you here
he there
over and done with,
shattered
to pieces.

 I read the book late last night and this morning, in preparation for my Tuesday class at Penn, where I will be talking about (among many other things) the various forms of memoir. The graphic memoir. The second person memoir. The third person memoir. The photographic memoir. The poem as memoir.

Grossman's book is not a memoir, as I have said. But it is a suggestion of a form that memoirists might use—a place where truth might be put and rallied after. I'm exploring that idea as I prepare for Tuesday. I put it here, to share with you.

And in the meantime, I step away from my studies today and prepare for a bit of a party in New York. We have been celebrating, this week, my father's special birthday. May the festivities continue.

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In my memoir class at the University of Pennsylvania, we're focusing on failure/mistake memoirs, and what they teach us. To get my own self into a teaching place, I spent considerable time during Christmas and the first weeks of the new year, studying the books that I am teaching—and thinking.

The Chicago Tribune kindly gave me room to put that thinking on its pages.

I'm thrilled to also be able to share that Daniel Menaker, the author of My Mistake and an esteemed editor in his own right, will be visiting Kelly Writers House for a publishers lunch and then my class on February 24th, at Penn.

The Tribune essay can be found here.

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As I prepare to teach memoir again at Penn, I think about the hardest lesson of all—how we make the thing that has happened to us matter to others. The details alone—their accumulation—are but a record, a report. They will not tremble the hearts of perfect and imperfect strangers until they, as Saint-Exupery says here, are reconceived as transcendent matter.

Every week men sit comfortably at the cinema and look on at the bombardment of some Shanghai or other, some Guernica, and marvel without a trace of horror at the long fringes of ash and soot that twist their slow way into the sky from those man-made volcanoes. Yet we all know that together with the grain in the granaries, with the heritage of generations of men, with the treasures of families, it is the burning flesh of children and their elders that, dissipated in smoke, is slowly fertilizing those black cumuli.

The physical drama itself cannot touch us until some one points out its spiritual sense.

Antoine De Saint-Exupery, Wind, Sand and Stars

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I leave in an hour for five days away with my father—a trip we've been looking forward to for quite some time. I thought that maybe I'd try to write while gone. I won't. I'll be riding my bike through the pine paths of Hilton Head Island instead. Walking the beach. Reading a book or two.

I need not to work for awhile.

I will return in time for the Alumni Authors Panel for Homecoming Weekend—with Lorene Carey, Jordan Sonnenblick, Kathy DeMarco Van Cleve, and Liz Van Doren—at the University of Pennsylvania. I hope to see some of you, perhaps some of my former students, there.

Happiness and peace to you in the meantime. I'm signing off of the blog for a spell.

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I have a single copy of ONE THING STOLEN, my novel about an impossible obsession set against the backdrop of Florence, Italy, available to a U.S. reader.

I invite those who are interested to leave a comment indicating one thing you most associate with Florence—a building, a landscape feature, an icon, a dish, a way of walking, a kind of weather, anything. I will then attempt to write a blog post referencing every single comment.

(I anticipate a mean mind twister.)

The winner will be randomly chosen on November 15th.

Perhaps you wonder why I have just one copy to give away? The answer is that I've been busy creating packages for the many people who helped make this book a reality.

Dr. Bruce Miller, for example, of the University of California-San Francisco Memory and Aging Center, who shed light on the disease that my young Nadia faces.

Emily Rosner and Maurizio Panichi, whom I met in the Florence bookstore, Paperback Exchange, and who helped me understand the 1966 flooding of the Arno and the Mud Angels who came to the rescue; Maurizio's own experiences are woven through this story.

Laura Gori, who directs the Scuola del Cuoio, and where I learned the art of leather working from a master.

Mike Cola, a dear friend and Renaissance man, who talked to me about birds.

Kathy Coffey, who sent, through the mail, the book that I needed, following her own trip to Florence.

My brother-in-law, Mario, who helped me with translations.

Wendy Robards, who read early on and kept me grounded.

My students Katie Goldrath and Maggie Ercolani, who deeply inspired me.

And a few others.

Leaving me with one galley for posterity's sake and one for one of you.

I hope you'll let me know of your interest.

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Daniel Menaker's memoir My Mistake fills me with a desire for confession.

I'll keep this unnaturally brief: Once, aged twenty-five, attempting to strike out on my own as a writing consultant, I misspelled the word "renown" in my proposal. I did not get the job. Once, after the publication of one of those Kephart memoirs, I discovered a mistake or maybe even two; I barely left the house for the next three months, afraid that any perceived movement on my part would lead to the discovery of my crime. Once, dead tired after a transatlantic flight, I picked up the wrong suitcase from the Heathrow carousel (see, even here, I am giving myself an excuse). Once, a few posts ago, on this very blog, I misspelled the last name of Eula Biss. I have been wrong and failed to apologize. I have apologized for mistakes I never made, also typically a mistake, for the gesture rarely silences the accuser. I have forgotten the lady's name at church. I have intuited incorrectly. I have supposed and I have suspected. I have given bad advice. I have been impatient. I fell on the double axle in my last skating competition while floating to a West Side Story number.

My Mistake. Singular. What a brilliant title for a brilliant book by a former fact checker and fiction editor for The New Yorker, former Random House executive editor in chief (he worked with Colum McCann, people), and still and always author. I have dog-earred one thousand of its 234 pages. I have felt a certain bliss just sitting and reading this personal and publishing history, gossip and innuendo. These stories about William Maxwell and Michael Cunningham, Alice Munro and Tina Brown, Anonymous and an MRI nurse with a ripe sense of humor. These explications of New Yorker style. These truths about the a death of a brother, the terror of anxiety, the budding of a new spring.

My Mistake is musical and funny, heartbreaking and consoling. It is insanely readable. It is the sort of thing I would have read aloud, except that I was on the SEPTA Quiet Car while turning many of its pages, and the rules were being strictly enforced.

Let me read out loud, then, on this blog.

On the cult of The New Yorker:

However consciously or un-, The New Yorker, a kind of Jonestown of the literary/journalistic realm, encourages in its employees an ethos of superiority, essentialness, and disregard for fad and fashion. Shawn himself, in his words and demeanor, appears to disavow any self-importance. He wants to be taken as a quiet, modest man who puts the greatness of the institution he runs above all else. This faux-modest version of occupational vanity, in combination with native timidity, keeps very intelligent people in the same, often dead-end, jobs for years, simply because they can say, in this modestly quiet voice, that they work for The New Yorker. Great institutions, so long as they are small, will often (a) eventually take themselves too seriously and (b) try to camouflage their pride with self-effacement.

On panic, a condition with which I am much too intimately familiar:

But for pity's sake don't dismiss this affliction as a chimera or a ruse or a plea for attention or any of the other at least implicitly condemnatory assessments that so many so often make of it. It is all too real, itself and nothing else, and it can be disabling. It came close to disabling me for life. The prospect of lunch with a colleague was torture. Flying was a sentence. Social life an ordeal. It's no wonder that with Valium always on my person and the need to lose myself in something that would take my mind off this dread, I throw my energy into fact-checking so violently. I start psychoanalysis and keep the Valium in the shirt pocket over my heart. This goes on, gradually abating, for many years.

On publishing:

It's my strong impression that most of the really profitable books for most publishers still come from the mid-list—"surprise" big hits bought with small or medium advances, such as that memoir by a self-described racial "mutt" of a junior senator from Chicago. Somehow, by luck or word of mouth, these books navigate around the rocks and reefs upon which most of their fleet—even sturdy vessels—founder. This is an old story but one that media giants have not yet heard, or at least not heeded, or so it seems.

Okay, obviously, I am a fan. Such a fan that I decided, mid-course or maybe sooner, to assign My Mistake to my Penn students in the spring. I can't think of a more complete introduction to life and forgiveness, facts and foibles, literary thinking.

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The great privilege of teaching extraordinary students is that the semester of writing, reflection, and talk marks only the start of an involving conversation.

Last evening, Leah Apple, the hip-hop dancing Fulbright winner who enrolled in my second nonfiction class at Penn and whom you met here in a Philadelphia Inquirer story, came for dinner, bringing with her tales of her time in Kinmen, near the People's Republic of China. In a remote niche of that island, Leah met and taught English to children with whom she soon fell in love. Inevitably, they fell in love with her. Dance, "the universal language," became core to Leah's curriculum as she and her fellow Fulbright scholars prepared the children for a first-ever island flash mob.

This short film, shot and produced by Leah's friend Jonah Stern, tells the story of remote classrooms, willing children, and a young woman with a boundless soul.

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By Paul Cobb

Recently the jihadist insurgent group formerly known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) underwent a re-branding of sorts when one of its leaders, known by the sobriquet Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was proclaimed caliph by the group’s members. In keeping with the horizonless pretentions that such a title theoretically conveys, the group dropped their geographical focus and embraced a more universalist outlook, settling for the name of the ‘Islamic State’.

As a few observers have noted, the title of caliph comes freighted with a long and complicated history. That history begins in the seventh century AD, when the title was adopted to denote those leaders of the Muslim community who were recognized as the Prophet Muhammad’s “successors”— not prophets themselves of course, but men who were expected, in the Prophet’s absence, to know how to guide the community spiritually as well as politically. Later in the medieval period, classical Islamic political theory sought to carefully define the pool from which caliphs might be drawn and to stipulate specific criteria that a caliph must possess, such as lineage, probity, moral standing and so on. Save for his most ardent followers, Muslims have found al-Baghdadi — with his penchant for Rolex watches and theatrical career reinventions — sorely wanting in such caliphal credentials.

He’s not the only one of course. Over the span of Islamic history, the title of caliph has been adopted by numerous (and sometimes competing) dynasties, rebels, and pretenders. The last ruler to bear the title in any significant way was the Ottoman Abdülmecid II, who lost the title when he was exiled in 1924. And even then it was an honorific supported only by myths of Ottoman legitimacy. But it’s doubtful that al-Baghdadi gives the Ottomans much thought. For he is really tapping into a much more recent dream of reviving the caliphate embraced by various Islamist groups since the early 20^th century, who saw it as a precondition for reviving the Muslim community or to combat Western imperialism. Al-Baghdadi’s caliphate is thus a modern confection, despite its medieval trappings.

That an Islamic fundamentalist (to use a contested term of its own) like al-Baghdadi should make an appeal to the past to legitimate himself, and that he should do so without any thoughtful reference to Islamic history, is of course the most banal of observations to make about his activities, or about those of any fundamentalist. And perhaps that is the most interesting point about this episode. For the utterly commonplace nature of examples like al-Baghdadi’s clumsy claim to be caliph suggest that Islamic history today is in danger of becoming irrelevant.

This is not because Islamic history has no bearing upon the present Islamic world, but because present-day agendas that make use of that history prefer to cherry-pick, deform, and obliterate the complicated bits to provide easy narratives for their own ends. Al-Baghdadi’s claim, for example, leaps over 1400 years of more nuanced Islamic history in which the institution of the caliphate shaped Muslim lives in diverse ways, and in which regional upstarts had little legitimate claim. But he is hardly alone in avoiding inconvenient truths — contemporary comment on Middle Eastern affairs routinely employs the same strategy.

We can see just such a history-shy approach in coverage of the sectarian conflicts between Shi’i and Sunni Muslims in Iraq, Syria, Bahrain, Pakistan, and elsewhere. The struggle between Sunnis and Shi’ites, we are usually told, has its origins in a contest over religious authority in the seventh century between the partisans of the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law ‘Ali and those Muslims who believed the incumbent caliphs of the day were better guides and leaders for the community. And so Shi’ites and Sunnis, we are led to believe, have been fighting ever since. It is as if the past fourteen centuries of history, with its record of coexistence, migrations, imperial designs, and nation-building have no part in the matter, to say nothing of the past century or less of authoritarian regimes, identity-politics, and colonial mischief.

We see the inconvenient truths of Islamic history also being ignored in the widespread discourse of crusading and counter-crusading that occasionally infects comment on contemporary conflicts, as if holy war is the default mode for Muslims fighting non-Muslims or vice-versa. When Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi can wrap himself in black robes and proclaim himself Caliph Ibrahim of the Islamic State, when seventh-century conflicts seem like thorough explanations for twenty-first century struggles, or when a terrorist and mass-murderer like the Norwegian Anders Breivik can see himself as a latter-day Knight Templar, then we are sadly living in a world in which the medieval is allowed to seep uncritically into the contemporary as a way to provide easy answers to very complicated problems.

But we should be wary of such easy answers. Syria and Iraq will not be saved by a caliph. And crusaders would have found the motivations of today’s empire-builders sickening. History properly appreciated should instead lead us to acknowledge the specificity, and indeed oddness, of our modern contexts and the complexity of our contemporary motivations. It should, one hopes, lead to that conclusion reached famously by Mark Twain: that history doesn’t repeat itself, even if sometimes it rhymes.

Paul M. Cobb is Chair and Professor of Islamic History in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania.  He is the translator of The Book of Contemplation: Islam and the Crusades and has written a number of other works, most recently The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades.

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Image credit: Caliph Abdulmecid II, by the Library of Congress. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The post Is Islamic history in danger of becoming irrelevant? appeared first on OUPblog.

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My love affair with Philadelphia began long before I settled on the University of Pennsylvania as my undergraduate home. I was my mother's daughter, already convinced. I believed in that city.

As a student at Penn, I left the campus alone, prowled the streets of West Philadelphia, wrote poems upon my return. As a new graduate I took a job as a marketing coordinator for an architecture firm, where I, in part, researched and wrote history-rich installation placards for projects at Penn's Landing and elsewhere.

But it wasn't until I was selected, in the mid-1980s, by the team at Center City District to write a series of "permanent" installations about Philadelphia's history that I felt fully fledged and entrenched as a Philly girl. Those permanent installations, created with the graphic designer Lynda Cloud Weber, hung block by block, east by west on Walnut Street until they were not visible any longer.

The permanent installations had disappeared permanently.

Yesterday, however, while researching a series of new stories for the Philadelphia Inquirer, I discovered one of the long-lost  panels—came upon it quite unexpectedly. It was as if a story I'd written had been lost and then returned to me. I waited to be alone with the panel. Read it while no one was watching. Shook my head.

I haven't changed much, all these years later. Not in what I write about, nor in how I write it.

For good and for bad, I am still me.

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A little more than a week ago I said goodbye to my Penn students.

It wasn't easy.

When we take risks as teachers, when we allow ourselves to get involved, when we are willing to care, to get hurt, to go out on a limb, to push the student who doesn't want to be pushed, the goodbye-ing is hard and heartbreaking.

And yet is clear, at least to me, to a certain Gallup/Purdue University team, and to the writer of this recent New York Times op-ed, that that kind of caring—invisible to most—can make a long-term difference. Engagement. Well-being. Those are the factors on the table.

Here is the Times' Charles Blow:

I was surrounded by professors who were almost parentally protective and proud of me — encouraging me to follow my passions (Yes, start that magazine, Charles), helping me win internships, encouraging me to go away and work for a semester, and cheering me on as I became a member of a fraternity and editor of the student newspaper. And, because of them, I emerged from college brimming with confidence — too much at times, depending on whom you ask — and utterly convinced that there was nothing beyond my ability to achieve, if only I was willing to work, hard, for it.

As it turns out, these are the kinds of college experiences that predict whether a person will later be engaged in work and have a high level of well-being after graduation.

 The Gallup and Purdue University research underscores what seems intuitively obvious but is also, often, institutionally ignored. That it matters, for example, that professors get students excited about learning. That it matters that professors care about the students. That it matters that shed some light and some encouragement on the dimensions of their dreams.

Common sense? Absolutely.

But how many times have I been told by a student that I am one of the only professors who knew his name? His name. How many times have I (excited, too) watched a student discover some new part of her soul, some new crazy ambition, and been told: I didn't know this was okay? My classroom is small, and that is my first good fortune. Many writing professors' classrooms are. But I'd be kidding myself if I thought the first order of business there was to churn out 15 capable bloggers or five new memoirists. My job is to assign the right texts, announce the right exercises, distribute the right critiques, build trust, strengthen community—and pay attention to the students as they each arrive. Look up into their faces, take note of their splinted fingers, read their moods, address the temperature of their days, make room for diversions and tangents that can matter right in that moment, and forever.

My job is to know them, to care about them, to nurture.

It isn't hard. It's merely human.

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Last evening, following a full afternoon of extraordinary conversations with my students, I missed the 5:38 PM train by, well—let's just say I got there right as the doors were closing.

All, however, was not lost, for there's always Faber books at 30th Street Station—always the chance to acquire something new.

I had thirty minutes. I bought, at last, Kevin Powers' The Yellow Birds. It's the book of the year here in Philadelphia, and it's about time that I get with the program. I'll read it. Soon.

But I also bought a copy of Vaclav and Lena, a debut novel by Haley Tanner. It is one of those books I'd always been meaning to buy, then forgot I'd wanted to buy, then had forgotten altogether as I pursued the next new many things. If I hadn't missed the train, I'd have not met these two immigrant Brooklyn children who want, when we first meet them, to be the best magicians alive.

I'm not finished reading yet, so I can't deliver a full report. I can, however, give you this fragment of the first single wow opening sentence, which I share in honor of one of my students who has captivated us with her voice this year, and who could, I have not a single doubt, cast an instant spell like this one:

"Here I practice, and you practice. Ahem. AH-em. I am Vaclav the Magnificent, with birthday on the sixth of May, the famous day for the generations to celebrate and rejoice, a day in the future years eclipsing Christmas and Hanukkah and Ramadan and all pagan festivals, born in a land far, far, far, far, far, far, far distance from here, a land of ancient and magnificent secrets, a land of enchanted knowledge passed down from the ages and from the ancients, a land of illusion (Russia!), born there in Russia and reappearing here, in America, in New York, in Brooklyn (which is a borough), near Coney Island, which is a famous place of magic in the great land of opportunity (which is, of course, America!), where anyone can become anything, where a hobo today is tomorrow a businessman in a three-piece-suit, and a businessman yesterday is later this afternoon a hobo, Vaclav the Magnificent, who shall, without a doubt, be ask to perform his mighty feats of enchantment for dukes and presidents and czars and ayatollahs, uniting them all in awestruck and dumbstruck, and.....

You get the point? The books we pay attention to are the ones that leap from the page. Vaclav and Lena leaps from mile-long sentence number one.

Voice. Some people have it.

You know who I'm talking about.

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I offered my students the opportunity to revise their memoirs for an additional five points.

No requirement. No insistence. Just a chance, if they wanted to take it.

The points themselves—they hardly meant a thing to this talented bunch. The chance to return to their work, to their selves—that was the thing. We find the heart of our stories not the first time we write them, not the second time or third. We find the heart of our stories when we begin again, or look again, when we say, Maybe this.

After a long day, after an afternoon of such crushing corporate pressures that I could not go, as I had wanted to, to church, I have read the work of the four students who chose to revise their memoirs.

Two wrote newly, from scratch.

Two amended from within.

Each of them soared. Each of them soars.

I am the proudest prof alive. This is God's goodness to me, on this Good Friday.

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Someday I will find a way to express the (what is the word?) (joy?) that I experienced yesterday as Michael Sokolove, the phenomenally gifted author of Drama High, among other books, and the equally gifted editor, Avery Rome, joined my class and Avery's class at Kelly Writers House on the Penn campus.

Michael read, we talked, we learned, we appreciated.

My students wrote and asked and listened.

It may have been raining like the world was ending yesterday.

But inside our room, we were all just getting a good, fresh start.

Thank you.

In a week or so, a video tape of our conversation and mini workshop will be available. I'll post that link when I have it. Then, at last, you can see for yourself how lucky I am to adjunct at Penn, to work with editors like Avery, and to invite a big-hearted, super writer like Michael into the midst.

Wait until you see.

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We could not take photographs until after the show. We simply had to take it in, to be there for it, in the present now.

It was the Pan-Asian Dance Troupe's presentation of "Spirit: The Four Elements." It was Christine Wu, my former student, who had once written, memoiristically, of choreography and dance, and who now stood as troupe president on that stage in all her gorgeous tendernessfiercenessjoyfulnesstalent. In a show that was surprisingly wide-ranging, elevated, clever, classic, and contemporary, Christine and more than two dozen others gave us the world according to movement.

They drove a raucous audience toward congratulatory crazy.

There was "Ti Cao! Morning Exercise," inspired, as the program tells us, "by the early morning fitness routines of Chinese school children." There was the wildly inventive and rhythmic "What Does the Nut Say?," a piece featuring "nuts, coconut bras, and half-naked dudes." There was "Road to a Geisha," which began with the flicker of paper umbrellas and ended with loose hair and Korean hip-hop. There was a stunning water dance that quieted the crowd—water in cups on heads, in cups in hands, in transporting stillness.

In between these and so many other pieces were glorious film fragments—the big steaming earth, in some footage, flickers of the dancers themselves in the rain, on a bridge, near a pond, by the big doors, even at the ice rink of the Penn campus, in others. There the dancers were, doing martial art. There they were stomping on puddles. There they were doing wickedly fast scratch spins.There they were—costumed and smiling.

To my right, in the pews of Iron Gate Theater, sat the ever-gorgeous Chang, also a former student—an intensely intelligent straight A (so far, she says) engineering student, who once brought me hot chocolate, drew me pictures, and this week remembered my birthday with a gift. To my left sat poet-bio-engineer-er Eric, whose gentle nature belies the brilliance of his academic career. Elsewhere in the pews sat our beautiful, talented, headed-for-a big-writing career Angela. We were there for Christine, we were there for the troupe, we came to see, and oh did we ever.

Christine, the intelligence and quality of your show was not unexpected, coming from you and your troupe, but it was so fully rewarding. Chang, Eric, Angela—thank you for being you. And Katie Goldrath, my Katie of an earlier year, my Katie of the Pennsylvania Gazette story—how wonderful it was to walk with you through the Penn campus and up to Manakeesh, before the show. You are going to make such a huge difference in the lives of others when you graduate with your medical degree. Indeed, you already are.

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Over the past many days, in a quiet house, I have been reading and re-reading my students' memoirs. Turning their considered pages with care. Filling the margins with notes. Reminding the students' of their own aspirations for themselves. Saying yes, or how about this, or what if, or ....

There could be no higher privilege.

What stretches me, fulfills me, energizes me? Teaching. What campus feels like home? My alma mater, my employer, the great and glorious University of Pennsylvania. I am lucky to teach and lucky to teach there. But I am an adjunct, plain and simple, and as an adjunct I am aware of the concerning status of the job.

Yesterday a friend pointed the way to this story in Salon.com, about the challenges faced by adjuncts. Becky Tuch wrote the piece. It was titled: "Professors in homeless shelters: It is time to talk seriously about adjuncts." It presented a conversation Tuch hoped to have with AWP, which did not (apparently) address the adjunct crisis that has thrummed for many years across American campuses during AWP's recent Seattle gathering. From the story:

Here’s the thing, AWP. The percentage of teaching positions occupied by non-tenure-track faculty has more than tripled in the past four decades. According to the Adjunct Project, “Two-thirds of the faculty standing in front of college classrooms each day aren’t full-time or permanent professors.” The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that “the shadowy world of would-be academia is filled with people cobbling together five or six such teaching gigs at once. That’s possible because some 70 percent of college courses offered are now taught by adjuncts — part-timers who are paid a pittance and have no job security.”

Dig deeper into the adjunct story (as I often do) and you will discover stories of heartache—stories about teachers who changed the lives of students but who lived, and died, as paupers. Stories about teachers who must drive and drive and drive—from one post to another—just to bring a sustaining wage home to a small room. The job of a teacher is to give—the right lessons, the right hope, the right instructions, a listening ear. It is so very difficult to be a giver—to have the energy to care—under grueling circumstances.

I am lucky. I work—as an author, as a consultant—so that I might teach one course one semester each year. I go to a campus that I love in a city that I love and work among colleagues for whom I have great respect. I meet students who change my life. I learn from them.

I am hardly alone in loving this job. But I am cognizant, as we all must be cognizant, that others who love this work as much as I do are struggling, mightily, to be able to do it. Struggling to afford to be able to do it. Struggling to buy the gas for the car, the ticket for the train, the cup of coffee for the student who needs to talk.

If all the underpaid teachers in this nation just one day up and quit, what would happen then? What would become of our students, our campuses, our planet? Sure, there are new ways of learning—online courses that get some of the teaching done. But what matters, too—what adjunct teaching can and often does provide—is that  teacher who knows your name, that teacher who sees if you've gone missing, that teacher who searches for you and says, Are you okay?, that teacher who says, Do I have a book for you.

We need our teachers—it's obvious, I think.

And we need our teachers to be okay.

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Memoir. There are no rules. There are only the books that we learn from, the writing that shapes us, the mistakes we are willing to make, the unmasking. Each semester, I teach memoir new because it is always new, because there is always more to read, to try, to consider.

And then I sit, as my students head off for their spring break, their memoirs in my lap. And I am stunned by the hard work, the right risks, the bold tangents, the questions raised and sometimes answered. They are off. I am here. Their lives on paper.



How they have walked deep among the trees. How they have honored the form, themselves, one another. How deeply privileged I am. Always.

This rare teaching life.

These vast and lovely spring semesters.

Them.

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Life: It gets all tangled up. Those of us who want to write about it have to separate the skeins.

The students of English 135.302 (University of Pennsylvania) are now hard at work on their memoirs, and I cannot wait to read them. While I wait, I look back and honor the work of my former students—excerpted in Handling the Truth.

Speaking of former students—Daniel Blas, whose fine memoir was adapted for the Pennsylvania Gazette last year, will be returning to class today to speak with Trey Popp, one of the Gazette editors, about the process. If you didn't get a chance to read Dan's work the first time around, here's your chance.

Now from Handling the Truth:

Sometimes you can get at [the life questions] obliquely, through structure and white space. Sometimes you do it by rubbing the now against the then. Sometimes we accentuate the terrible discrepancy. Sometimes we are writing toward forgiveness—of ourselves, of others. This is the beauty of memoir. If all your memoir does is deliver story—no sediments, no tidewater, no ambiguity—we have no reason to return. If you cannot embrace the messy tug of yourself, the inescapable contradictions, the ugly and the lovely, then you are not ready yet. If you can’t make room for a reader, then please don’t expect a reader to start making room for you.

Kim, my dark-haired student with the Cleopatra eyes, chose to write her memoir about luckiness, unluckiness, and love. My favorite paragraph:

Love makes you dependent; pain pushes you to the breaking point of self-actualization. My parents’ support and the stability they provided for me is something I’m still trying to justify by replacing their hands with my own, finger by finger. Every day I lift a barricade to get through hermitage and extroversion, harmony and entropy, my mother’s love and my mother’s illness, innovation and inundation. I was lucky, I was born an American, I was born healthy, I was born into a loving home. I was unlucky, I was born judgmental, I have seen terror, I have seen desperate cries for life. So we continue: surprised, derisive, and awake by intuition.

Jonathan wrote about prayer as hobby, and about religious fanaticism:

Prayer was my new hobby, easily eating up an hour of every morning. My religious observance became systematic: I had to make sure experimental conditions were optimal. Experiments fail if they aren’t perfectly calibrated—perhaps my prayer was similarly ineffective because I was ignoring some ritualistic detail. Scientific precision was giving way to religious fanaticism. I was too skeptical of reality to reject superstition so quickly—and I had so much to lose. For two years, I was blinded by minutiae. Then I found academic biblical analysis.

Gabe wrote about surviving a heart condition; more than that, though, he wrote to imagine what a son’s illness means to a mother:

This was also probably what she begged for when, after I had gone unconscious in the hospital that day in February, the doctor spoke with her and told her that her son was very sick and that every effort was being made to save him. She had flown to Peru the night before to be with her father who was on his deathbed. She must have hung up the phone, heard the echo of the handset hitting the cradle resounding in her head, and felt her knees buckling beneath her. She somehow gathered strength, said what she thought was a last goodbye to her dying father, and boarded a plane towards Philadelphia. Those eight hours of flight must have been claustrophobically helpless. No jet plane could have flown fast enough to make this trip bearably short. No altitude could have brought her close enough to God so that she could scream loud enough in his ear to please save her son.

Responsibility—to one’s self and to others—was the theme that engaged Stephanie.

How much of your life, the life you know, is actually your own? We all do things for others, stretching out limbs like a thigmotropic plant clinging to the structure of another to both give and receive life-sustaining supplements. But what do we do for ourselves that we do not do for others? What moments are we robbed of, what people do we give too much to? And when, if ever, are we truly independent?

No one can or should tell you what to write about. But if you don’t know where the memoir impulse is coming from, if you can’t trace it, can’t defend it, can’t articulate an answer when somebody asks “Why’d you want to write a memoir anyway?”—stop. Hold those memoir horses. Either the mind has been teased for years upon years, or there’s that small thing that won’t be refused, or there’s something else genuine and worthy. But nobody wants to hear that you’re writing memoir because you need some quick cash, or because you think it will make you famous, or because your boyfriend said there’s a movie in this, or because you’re just so mad and it’s about time you get to tell your version.

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I had all sorts of prospects for my class at Penn yesterday. Just two classes to go, and I had a plan in place, some thoughts about teaching the art of putting another's gestures, postures, cheekbones, eyes on the page. I had things to read, photographs to study, Annie Dillard, Anton Chekhov, Francine Prose, and Cynthia Kaplan in my back pocket. But before we would get to that, we would hear from the students themselves, who had been interviewing each other and writing "practice" profiles.

Except. These were no practice profiles. These were fully developed, deeply moving, vastly important gifts crafted scrupulously for one another. It became important to simply dwell with these pieces, to slow things down, to take note of all the progress my students have made this semester, to honor the insights and the care embedded in their most recent work. There were students who had entered my classroom in winter proclaiming that they couldn't write; how wrong they were. There have been those who have worried about getting things wrong; time and again they got so much right. There were those who cautioned that they might not come to every class, and would probably be late with the assignments. Okay, so. There was only one of those, and he lied. He came. He wrote. Not just extremely well, but also (he amazed us) on time (give or take three minutes).

Soon I'll be able to share one of my student's works, for it will be published in an esteemed magazine. Someday I'll be able to tell you about the others—their gains, their triumphs, their stories.

But for now, in the midst of what has become the busiest season in my life, I want to take a minute and thank my institution, the University of Pennsylvania, for giving me the chance, again, to fall in love (thank you, Greg Djanikian, and thank you, Al Filreis). This is a great privilege, spending time with these students, watching them grow. And it is a great privilege to work at my alma mater. The final project my students will produce is a profile of an individual who inspires. Many of my students have chosen a university professor, and in reading through the profile proposals this morning, I am awed by the many professors I've never met who are radically changing student lives.

If you walk through life looking for the good, you find students like my students. You find an institution like my own.

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Susannah Cahalan tells a terrifying true story in Brain on Fire about losing control, slipping away from a "true" (happy, ambitious, newly in love, well-employed) self, and coming far too close to forfeiting everything she was to a mysterious affliction. It all happened quickly. It all seemed, at first, to be viral or perhaps anxiety induced. Crowds overwhelmed her. Work (her life as a journalist) made no sense. She grew paranoid and raging, impossible to calm, numb or tingling, migraine prone, on the verge, always of running away, dangerous to herself, "barbaric." Soon she would find herself labeled a flight risk in the epilepsy ward of a New York City hospital—her father and mother vigilant at her side, her new boyfriend determined to find the Susannah he sensed was still inside. One doctor after another misread the scant clues. The electrodes glued to Susannah's head would not reveal the secret.

It took a neurologist named Souhel Najjar, a simple test (draw a clock, he said), and the quick cooperation of a University of Pennsylvania physician, Dr. Josep Dalmau, to finally discover what had happened to Susannah's brain—and to treat the rare autoimmune disorder that had attacked her so virulently. Many months would go by before Susannah would recover. This book, her first, maps that journey.

It is a memoir of sorts—an investigation into the author's own life assisted by medical records and the observations of those who were near through the ordeal. It's a generous book—and story—that has already helped others, and it is important for that reason. As literature, as memoir, I worried about the liberal use of dialogue that had been clearly recreated by those whom Susannah interviewed. I wished, as well, for something less strictly documentary and more (in places) transcendent.

But I honor the achievement of this narrative, the intelligence of the doctors, the kindness of Susannah's family and boyfriend, and the marvel of the brain itself. I am proud, as well, to be a University of Pennsylvania alum and adjunct. It's a school where important work gets done.

For more on the memoirs I read (and sometimes teach), please visit the Handling the Truth  page.

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They have huge hearts and great talent. They make me laugh and they work hard. They pay attention to one another. They let the learning in.

Today they surprised me with a birthday celebration and magnificent card (you guys!) and made me cry (again). Forever and ever, 135.302. Forever and ever and ever.

Thank you, my students, and thank you dear provocateur, remembering friends Karen Rile and Jamie-Lee Josselyn. And thank you Trey Popp and Maggie Ercolani and Nabil Mehta, who joined us in our final hour and made the party finer.

I will sleep well tonight.

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Yesterday at Kelly Writers House I spoke briefly with Janet Malcolm, who had spent two days with the students and faculty of Penn. She was being hosted by Al Filreis, that brilliant teacher and interviewer who knows a frightening amount about a chosen writer's work—and closes in on a surprising number of mysteries. My conversation with Janet quickly turned to passions, and where we find them—how we stay urgent with our work. Janet began to talk about her collage work, her forays into the visual arts, the way the mind works when hands are busy making. It was a lovely, unforgettable moment in time.

I came home with Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice in my bag and a great curiosity about Janet's art, which I showcase above. Perhaps you are interested, too, and if so, here's Casey Schwartz on Malcolm's art and Katie Rophie on Janet herself, a marvelous, Al Filreis-worthy Paris Review interview.

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I spent most of this weekend reading a hefty book for review, then running to catch up on corporate work and student papers. Then, for about a half hour, I calmed down and read The New York Times. I found the interview everyone else has likely read by now—the one in which A.L. Kennedy talks to John Williams about The Blue Book, and other such matters.

I found this particular exchange quite nicely juicy. I juxtapose it with a photo I took of my own classroom chalkboard, when I was prepping for the conversation my students and I were about to have about Caroline Knapp's memoir, Drinking: A Love Story. 

You can teach reading. You can teach critique. But you should not, as Kennedy points out here, tell someone, especially an author, what to think.


Have you ever learned anything specific about your craft from reading a critic’s reaction to your work?

From a professional critic, no. I’ve never expected to. In the U.K., the critical culture can be fairly moribund and dominated by an oddly ill-informed set of academic assumptions. There’s less and less space or money for serious criticism. From critics — which is to say, people who look closely at my work and are true and wide-ranging readers — yes, I have. But paying too much attention to external opinion — fashions, theories, trends, friends — puts you a couple of years behind your own timeline, because critics only ever follow. That whole scene can take you away from your center and your voice, while making you self-conscious. It’s a toxic combination. And an adult writer can’t always be expecting this little fantasy undergraduate workshop to tell them what to think. If you’re the author, it’s your decision to find out what you think and what you want to say and then get on with it. If it were a group effort, your name wouldn’t be the only one on the title.

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Okay, so call this a Beth loves her students blog-athon day, but I am not going to let the moon get any higher in tonight's sky without celebrating Maggie Ercolani, a student from two years ago, who has her first published piece in the current issue of the Pennsylvania Gazette. She joins my students Moira Moody, Joe Polin, and Nabil Mehta on these pages, and her story is a triumph—a telling triumph and a living triumph.

Let me explain.

Toward the end of this past summer I received an email from Maggie who I knew, from an earlier exchange, had been looking forward to a summer internship at Macy's with Maggie-style enthusiasm. I saw her name in my in-box, opened her note, then recoiled. It wasn't the story I'd expected. Indeed, Maggie was writing to tell me that she had suffered a stroke in the first hour of the first day of that internship. That she had spent the summer in hospitals and rehab. That she had a new understanding of the father about whom she had written in my class—a father who had experienced a traumatic brain injury when he tumbled from a bike. Maggie wanted to write about what had happened so that she might understand. Would I help her? Of course I would. But oh, Maggie, I said. Oh. Maggie.

But the reason Maggie's piece is in the Gazette is because Trey Popp, an editor there, took Maggie's story on and worked with her to develop it more fully. They went back and forth, Trey and Maggie, until the piece is what it is today. I am so grateful to Trey, and I am so proud of Maggie—for her perseverance, for her attitude, for the textures in her life.

Please click on this link to read Maggie's story for yourself.

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