Hannah Hecht's Blog

I just realized that I can still do one more campus event journal, so here goes. Earlier in the semester, I went to the International Writing Centers Association conference in Orlando, Florida to present a project on our Morningside Writing Center’s collaboration with the local Sioux City high schools. While we were there, we attended a bunch of sessions educational and writing center theory that pretty much taught us how to better serve our clients. The most useful ones, for me, were a couple of sessions that were dedicated to teaching tutors how to better serve ESL (or ELL, or whatever the politically-correct term is) students. One of the sessions talked about how tutors and educators ought to view ESL students’ writing as “writing with an accent.” As long as it makes sense, we ought to make sure to spend more time on higher-order concerns such as organization and content rather than word-by-word construction. The presentation kind of reminded me of some of the stories that we read that were written by writers whose first language was not English. For example, Zitkala-Sa’s writing read with a bit of an “accent,” both because of her sentence construction and the content and metaphors that most Caucasian Americans would not have thought to come up with.

1. Last week, we spent time working on our final paper, especially our thesis for our final paper. From the exercise, I gleaned that my thesis wasn’t quite specific enough, but I think that I’ll be able to fix it after I’ve completely finished the researching and writing process. That way I’ll know exactly where my paper went before I have to use the thesis to say where it is going. I’ve spent a lot of time (and plan to spend a lot more time) on my paper this week, and I feel like I’ll have a pretty solid draft by the due date on Sunday.

We also spent some time talking about our senior portfolios and the objectives for the department. Looking back at some of my essays from my freshman year, I can see a vast improvement in both the style and content of my writing. Considering that I’m planning on going into a very writing-heavy field, I think that the skills I’ve learned through our English department should serve me well. I think that the Language and Grammar course alongside my creative writing classes, work in the Writing Center, and work on the Kiosk will prove especially helpful when I go into the field of publishing.

Last month, I went to the MAC event where we hosted a couple of slam poets. I absolutely loved it. It was very apparent that as the poets were performing (because it was a lot more than just reciting) their pieces, the audience was completely engrossed in the performance. Their poems were emotionally moving in a way that I rarely find poetry to be moving. I think that a lot of their effectiveness has to do with their medium. In Capstone, we talk a little bit about how different mediums of writing go in and out of style. Back in the era that we’re studying, the pathway to becoming a successful writer was through short fiction published in popular magazines. Nowadays, the demand for short fiction is much lower than the demand for novels. In the same way, the college student audience probably wouldn’t have responded to someone standing up and reading Walt Whitman-style poetry as well as we responded to the slam poetry. Part of the poets’ success, I think, came from knowing their audience and being able to talk about issues that we care about in a way that was exciting and interesting.

One of the Friday is Writing Day events that I attended this semester was the marathon reading of Maze Runner. Honestly, I wasn’t a huge fan of the book, even after I borrowed a copy from a friend and tried to read through it from the beginning. Some of what we talk about in our class is the difference between more “literary” and more “popular” fiction. Millions (and I just made this number up) of stories were published in magazines in the time period that we’re studying, and part of a literary recoverist’s (now making words up) job is to separate the high-quality, groundbreaking fiction from the more formulaic popular fiction. Personally, I thought that Maze Runner was definitely a lower-quality work, even for a children’s book. Last month, SNL did a skit (linked here) that exploited a lot of the tropes that exist in today’s popular adolescent fiction (especially Maze Runner, Divergent, The Giver, Harry Potter, and The Hunger Games). Although there may be good arguments for some of these titles’ literary merit, I thought the skit did a pretty good job of uncovering the formula for a successful, if sometimes empty, modern work of adolescent fiction.

A while back, I went to the noon Bill Russell event for FIWD (although I believe it was on a Tuesday rather than a Friday). Having never heard from someone who writes plays, I found it to be pretty interesting and informative. The event that I went to focused mainly on the writing of the musical “Side Show.” The whole endeavor of writing the original play, rather than the revival, reminded me of a lot of the stuff we talk about with literary recovery. However, instead of recovering literature, Russell and his co-writers were recovering history: the lives of the Hilton twins. They had to dig through all sorts of old documents so that they could stay as true to the actual twins lives as possible. At one point, he talked about how a friend found an old pamphlet in a flee market in Texas or something that led to a huge breakthrough in historical information. Were it not for that pamphlet, they wouldn’t have been able to know near as much about the twins’ lives as they ended up knowing. When we spoke with Dr. Page at UNL, he had a very similar experience with the library book with Breuer’s writing in it. I guess that the methods of research in literary recovery can be applied to other fields as well, especially historical fiction.

At the beginning of the semester, I went to the FIWD event where Dr. Coyne read his newest short story, “Taken In.” The event was interesting to me as a writer, since it went to show that all writers go through the same stages of writing, sharing, and revising that I’ve been through with my own work. I also had never heard any of Dr. Coyne’s writing before, so that was an interesting experience as well. I really enjoyed the story.

Looking back on the event, the story kind of reminds me how ignorant people can be about oppression and injustice when it doesn’t directly affect them. In the story, the main character’s female friends are persuaded (or maybe forced) to do the police sexual favors in order to get the main character and the other boys out of trouble. The main character doesn’t even realize what his female friends went through until decades later when someone tells him. Looking back, he realizes that there were hints, but the signs and signals went over his head.

I guess that that whole idea relates pretty well to a lot of the things that we’ve read for this semester. Zitkala-Sa directed her work toward rich white women because she knew that many of them were unaware of (or unwilling to open their eyes to) the injustices that her people had suffered, and she knew that they, in their position of power, could help with the problem. In the same way, the main character, with his relatively affluent background, could have had his parents come down and sort out the whole thing, but he didn’t even see the signs that the girls were being abused.

Sooo, I already wrote a lot of stuff about last week’s trip to UNL in my Bread Givers journal, but I did that journal on Tuesday before the assignment changed, so I’ll expand upon it some more. I wrote a lot earlier about listening to Kristen speak at the University of Nebraska Press, and, as a student looking to go into publishing, I found our conversation to be useful and informative. Sooo, let’s answer some questions.

• Did you have any “a-ha!” moments during these conversations? Did you find yourself making connections to academic or professional debates and issues we’ve touched on in class this semester?

One of the things that really surprised me from the conversations is the amount of sheer luck that goes into literary recovery. A person just happens to have an anthology in their home growing up, and just happens to find the only printed work of a little-known author and fall in love with it, which sparks the only true act of recovery for that author. When Dr. Page talked about his research on Miles Breuer, it reminded me of the foreword of Bread Givers, where the author talked about falling in love with Anzia Yezierska and wanting to find out more about her. Then, I was pretty amazed that Dr. Page was able to find that book with Breuer’s handwriting in the cover. If he had never found that, his work may have ended up fizzling out.

On a different subject, I thought it was interesting that Dr. Jewell said that it wasn’t his business to care whether Cather’s work ends up buried again or whether it ever ends up being part of the core canon. That idea went against a lot of the readings about the canon that we read earlier this semester. The readings seemed to imply that we ought to inject women’s and minority writings from earlier time periods into the canon to better exemplify the human experience of the time period. Dr. Jewell thought that you can’t control what people read, but you can make sure that certain works of inspiring literature and secondary texts are available to the public (through the Cather archives) and then see if the readership will come to it.

• What have you observed about the relationships between the various areas of academic research, writing, and publishing we learned about? How does one area inform the other? What economic, cultural, theoretical, or other factors seem to be shaping the present and future academic research, scholarship, and publishing?

From our experience last week, it seems as if the different areas of academic work, research, writing, and publishing, seem to have a lot of pull on each other. If you’re not going to write down and publish your research findings, then they are essentially irrelevant beyond adding to your personal knowledge. But, it’s hardly worth writing research (aside from in the pursuit of a degree) unless you can find a publisher for it. And then, once your stuff has been written, the publisher needs to contact other scholars to make sure that the research is viable. This is just a hypothesis, but I bet that it is a lot easier for scholars at UNL to find a publisher for their stuff since the press is connected to the university. However, I was astounded with the number of books the press puts out each year and the diversity of works that they publish. From the things that we heard, it sounds like new technology is making it possible for the press to put out a lot more books than they previously could, just because of things like word processing, email, and easy (or easier) online research.

• What questions are you left with? (Or, put another way, is there a question that has come to you since our trip that you now wish you had asked one of our speakers?)

As of right now, not really. Kristen answered most of the questions that I had about her job at the press.

• What are you most hopeful about when it comes to the future of academic publishing and/or digital humanities? What do you feel less optimistic about?

People often like to decry that publishing is dead, or at least, that seems to be the reaction that I get every time that I say that I’d like to work in editing, a reaction that promptly follows “Oh, you’re an English major, so you want to teach, right?” However, Kristen seemed to think that publishing, at least academic publishing, isn’t going anywhere. If anything, it seems as if new technology had helped them to increase their business and streamline it to make it more effective. As long as people are writing, they are going to have a need for someone to edit and fact-check their work, along with someone to work on advertising and marketing it, and (at least for the time being) someone to print and distribute it. I was really interested to hear that they only sell about 10 (or maybe it was 18) percent of their stuff in digital form. I would have expected the numbers to be a lot higher.  The thing that I’m least optimistic about is probably the ability of the lesser-known authors of the past to jump into the canon of today. Dr. Page even said that he only made like $250 on his book, which makes me wonder whether there really is a market for literary recovery. However, Dr. Jewell mentioned that Hollywood can be a big help with that. If a big name director decides to make a movie out of some lesser known piece of literature, that author’s work will skyrocket into the public eye. So, I guess that’s pretty cool.

1. Last week we didn’t have class, but instead, we went to the University of Nebraska Lincoln and visited the Love Library and the University of Nebraska Press. The meeting with Kristen at the university press proved very informative, and I’m really glad that we went. I’ve wanted to go into publishing for a while now, and, living in the Midwest, there really aren’t very many opportunities to visit a publishing company and know what they are all about. First, we got a tour of the offices and kind of learned about the process that a book and an author go through before the book hits the shelves. I thought that part was interesting because I was able to learn about all the different people who work in publishing. Then, Kristen talked to us for a while about the press and her specific job as acquisitions editor. For a while now, I’ve said that I’d like to be an editor eventually after college, but I’ve never really known what that job would entail or exactly what type of editor I’d like to be. Her description of the acquisitions editor job was really enticing. It sounds like the type of job where you do a lot more than just working with words (which I absolutely love anyway), and it sounds like you get to do a pretty big variety of things every day. Acquisitions editors have the opportunity to travel, and they spend a lot of time in communication with the authors, experts in the field, and the other people within the company. In addition, it sounded like she got to work with a large variety of different texts and that the edits that she did were broader and more contextual, rather than word-by-word and punctuation edits. She also spoke to the state of the modern publishing industry. A lot of times when I tell people that I want to go into publishing, they lament that it is a dying (or dead) industry. Kristen said that publishing really hasn’t changed all that much with new technology, nor has the press’s output. However, she did say that the industry is very competitive, and that you can’t be in it for the money.

After the University of Nebraska Press, we went to the Love Library and did some research into our final papers. I got access to some resources that I wouldn’t have been able to access at Morningside, so that was nice. Then we talked to a couple of people about their literary recovery projects. Both were very passionate, although I enjoyed the talk with the man who was working in the Cather archives the most. He made me want to read more Cather stories.

2. I’ve used up maybe more of my word count than I should have on the first point, but here goes. The novel that we read for this week was Bread Givers by Anzia Yezierska. I absolutely loved this book. It kind of reminded me of Ann Petry’s The Street, which we read in Women and Literature, and Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible. The father characters in Bread Givers and The Poisonwood Bible are honestly almost the same character. Both are religiously devout and self-righteous way past the point of practicality and both mistreat their daughters and wives without realizing that they are doing it. I hate them both. One of the sister characters in The Poisonwood Bible is very similar to Mashah, as well. Both use precious family resources to feed into their own vanity. Mashah ends up getting pulled into reality as she gets older, however, while Rachel Price just grows into an even more terrible human being. The book was like The Street in that the main character can never really catch a break. Every time that you start to think that things are going well for the main character or her relatives, something awful happens. But, I guess Bread Givers ends up with a semi-happier ending, as Sara is able to break free of the awful cycle of marrying terrible men, and she’s even able to be successful (if not happy) in college.

3. The secondary texts for this week were the foreword and introduction to the book. I found the foreword the most interesting since it talked about how Alice Kessler-Harris did her literary recovery project. The foreword reminded me of a lot of the same things that the sci-fi guy (I can’t remember his name) at UNL talked about with his literary recovery project. It sounds like literary recovery projects usually begin when someone stumbles across a little-known work that they love, and then they put years and years of work into bringing the author into a brighter light. Literary recovery sounds like a bit of a thankless endeavor. The introduction paints the life of Sara Smolinsky as a semi-autobiography of Anzia Yezierska’s life.

This past week, I attended the Sigma Tau Delta Spoken Word Slam as one of my campus events. It ended up being a great chance to listen to a lot of really talented writers on campus. Many of the poems read dealt with injustice of some form, which is one of the things that many of our capstone readings seem to have in common. For example, one of the poems read by the winning competitor dealt with feminism. He emphasized the importance of the male feminist, something that many of our female authors back in the early 20th century wouldn’t have been very familiar with. Many of our texts (I’m especially thinking of Bread Givers, since I just finished it) feature heroines who wouldn’t be able to imagine that a young man would get up on stage to talk about the injustices that women have to go through. Another poem, one read in between the competition sessions, emphasized the importance of women’s bodies in our modern society. She talked about how appearance is perceived as more important than ideas, something that Mashah definitely recognizes and uses to her advantage (at least at the beginning of the novel). A lot of the poems pointed out that though we have come a long way in terms of race and gender relations since the era of the literature we study, there is still a long way to go.

1. Last week, we talked about The Collected Stories of Maria Cristina Mena, and I thought that we had a really riveting discussion. One of our main focuses was on the stories as literary tourism. We came to the conclusion that Mena was a lot more successful at producing a realistic and in-depth analysis of Mexican culture than some our previous authors of literary tourism. We especially found it more culturally accurate than Madame Butterfly and The Japanese Nightingale, which we hated with a passion.

One point that I thought was pretty interesting was the idea that in the age of the Harlem Renaissance, art took on a political agenda that it may have previously lacked. I guess that I had always thought of the Harlem Renaissance as something that solely involved black artists in New York, but it actually was more of a state of mind in which minority and women artists across the United States began to create art that could actually make a difference in society. Through art (whether music, writing, painting, or whatever) women and minorities had a safe outlet to push the envelope and to advertise their struggle.

2. Our primary reading for today was “A Jury of Her Peers” by Susan Glaspell. This was my second time reading this story, having read it in Women and Literature, but the first time I must have been in a bad mood or something because I absolutely hated it, and it went completely over my head. My opinion of the story has done a complete 360 since my second (and third) reading. The story kind of has a Hemingway “iceberg” quality, in that it doesn’t completely explain everything that is happening, and it leaves a lot of gaps for the reader to fill in.

I especially enjoyed perusing both versions of the story (the original published in Every Week magazine and the one that is most heavily anthologized). Honestly, I think that I liked the original better. The original ends with Mrs. Hale’s low reply of “Knot it” and that he wasn’t able to see her eyes. The anthologized version ends with “We call it—knot it, Mr. Henderson.” To me, his not being able to see her eyes implies that there was something there. Tears of sympathy for Minnie? Malice? The second ending is more resigned to Minnie’s fate; it seems to imply more that Mrs. Hale understands that men run the world. It does not seem in either one as if Mrs. Hale or Mrs. Peters are going to give them the bird as evidence, which is good, since it be the solid piece of evidence that would have given Minnie a motive to kill her husband.

This story was probably the most overtly feminist out of all the stories that we have read by female authors this semester. Even the title, “A Jury of Her Peers,” drips with sarcasm which continues throughout the publication. The male characters treat the female ones as if they are good for nothing but keeping house, but the female characters ultimately find the source of motive that the detectives are searching for. The story also speaks to the relationships that women have with each other in a subtle way. Both Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters understand that Minnie lived in an abusive household, and they hide the biggest piece of evidence in the murder case (in Mrs. Peters’s case from her own husband).

3. The secondary texts for this week concerned the publication in which this week’s story was originally published, Every Week magazine. It was really interesting to read about the publication during the high point of the magazine and of serialized fiction. It sounds as if the magazine would have been an incredible place to work at the time. In addition, I think that I probably would have been much more of a magazine reader had I lived in the early 20th century because short stories appeared right alongside feature stories, human interest stories, and serialized novels.