Note: The Concurrent Enrollment English class I'm teaching is writing a personal essay about their literary journey. We're using Fahrenheit 451 as our text, but writing our own stories as we go along. Personal narratives are kind of my jam, so I decided that I would draft my own example essays/approaches to the topic. Fortunately for me, I won't be graded on what I write. Instead, I can simply let the story take me where it will. Here's what I wrote.
Naked trees. Kniving winds. The too-early setting of an October sun. A strange street. A dripping nose. In my cold-chapped hands, I held a flyer for Jim Ferrin, a guy in our ward who was using the youth to help canvas Orem neighborhoods with his candidacy. I did not much care about him--aside from being politically ignorant, I was twelve years old and completely uninterested in doing this bit of service. Besides, I wasn’t friends with any of his kids. Add to that the injury of having had to give up a perfectly good book-reading evening, and my pre-teen angst about the job becomes clearer. I walked to the next house, numb fingers fumbling with the slender elastic, wrapping the half-sheet of paper (hunting-orange in my memory, though who now knows what it really was) around the screendoor’s black handle. As the leaves gossiped past me, I shrugged deeper into my thick leather coat. “I don’t want this,” I said to myself. “I want to be at home, with Lessa, F’lar, and Jaxom.” Lessa, F’lar, and Jaxom, of course, aren’t real. They’re characters from the Dragonriders of Pern series by Anne McCaffery. Set on a faraway planet, the book series revolves around the men and women who have become selected to ride massive, fire-breathing dragons, all in defense of their planet from a mindless mycorrhizal threat. The world is a rare feat in secondary-world creation, second only to Tolkien’s Middle Earth in the complexity, interaction of disparate parts, and world-building. (The late Anne McCaffery didn’t build her own unique languages for her world--something that will likely always put Tolkien at the top of the list for most detailed secondary-world creation in literature.) To a twelve year old whose primary experiences were imaginative, having such a wonderfully wrought world--even if it was fictional--was where I wished to spend as much time as I possibly could. What I didn’t understand then but can see more clearly now is that Lessa, F’lar, and Jaxom--and Robinton, Menoly, and the rest of the entrancing cast--came into my life as permanent residents, people who became real to me through the viral act of writing and reading. They felt almost tangible, with problems that were large-yet-solvable, a type of bravery that I could only aspire to, and beneficiaries of a world in which dragons weren’t terrible beasts to slay but instead gentle companions, loyal and true. I grew up in the late eighties and early nineties: Ronald Reagan’s deregulation of what constituted advertisements to children meant that my Saturday mornings were twenty-three minute long commercials with a plot, interrupted by seven minutes of actual commercials. I knew very well how a child could pine for something. After all, watching an entire episode of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles--during which time there were a half dozen reminders that I could actually play with the Technodrome or get that Donatello action figure to round out my collection--was an injection of desire coming straight into my eyeballs. There was a yearning for the toys on the TV (to say nothing of the jealousy I felt toward the child actors who got to play with the toys during the commercial) that can be difficult to fully understand. I would ache for what I saw on TV, almost as if I could physically feel it. That’s what I felt that blustery October day as I hawked flyers for Jim-Ferrin-in-our-ward. But it wasn’t an ache for the action figures and playsets. It was a desire to return to a written world, a place where these fictitious people lived. I wanted to return to Pern, not suffer through the bad weather of Utah in late-autumn. I couldn’t say that this was the first time that I felt such a pining for the fictitious, but it’s certainly one of the strongest. The pull of characters--a concern for them that was akin to caring about my real life friends and their problems--was so intense that I almost cried. (Being freezing cold and miserable probably only added to that emotional response.) This, of course, is a different sort of experience than when I finally “got” what Shakespeare was saying in Hamlet or could “see” Milton’s brilliance. This was a more tangible, more from-the-gut experience. I found myself wanting to be in a place that I had never seen with people I had never met more than I wanted almost anything else in that moment. I did, unsurprisingly, get to go home when my service was complete. I don’t remember if Brother Ferrin ended up winning that election a couple of weeks later; I do remember, however, that Pern has--ever since that time--been a part of me, a place that I happily return to. And though I don’t ache to return there anymore (at least, not to the same degree), I know the keenness of such yearning. I now look forward to the next time an author’s words can so fully enrapture me--I look forward to being teleported again. It has been two full weeks since I last saw all of my students. I said goodbye to them, expecting to see them again the following Tuesday, with some tentative ideas and plans for what to do if the COVID-19 community isolation were to go into effect.
It very well could be the last time that I get to see them all as their teacher. It has been almost two full weeks of online teaching and learning. On the parenting side, it's going…well enough. Since I have three boys, all of whom are in school, and both my wife and I are teachers--meaning we are online throughout a good chunk of the day--I'm not able to say that it's going flawlessly. We created a specific "bell schedule" that the kids follow pretty well (there are slip ups every day, but nothing like outright rejection of it), complete with wakeup times, family meals, and segments of the day set aside for practicing their respective instruments. I, too, make sure to put some time into drumming and guitaring. Our evenings are what they ever were, though there isn't really homework per se; the school work is, for the most part, worked on during our "school hours". So we're still working through the Marvel Cinematic Universe and I'm still playing video games and watching anime with my wife as the sky darkens. What's been hardest for me has, most definitely, been the online teaching. It isn't about generating lesson plans--I think (I hope? Maybe I'm deluding myself) that my familiarity with the content, the way I organized everything, and the way I've paced the unit on World War I has worked pretty well. If students are diligent and actually do what I provide for them when I sent it out, they probably spend about an hour--maximum--of work for me each day. But there are plenty of students who haven't even looked at their assignments--at least, from what I can tell. Some of them have dropped in for a history lecture (where I discuss some of what I would have told them in person, save I do it on the computer and they video-conference in); most of them are pretty much AWOL. This is frustrating to me because I do still care about my students and their well-being, but I have no tools for learning these things unless I see/interact with them somehow. I recognize that there's a lot going on; I also know that simply dropping everything will make it that much harder to pick everything up again later. And, let's be honest: That "later" is what makes this so difficult. We surely would all feel better if this had a deadline. Holding out until "when it's better" is much harder than "Holding out until June 15". The first one is so nebulous, and there are enough predictions and projections leading out for multiple months that it becomes overwhelming. At least if we had a deadline… Alas, that's not the case. In many ways, that's why I want my students engaging with the content. There are due dates, things to do, stuff that--in my opinion--matters and can help take their minds off of the weirdness of being inside for so long. And for me? Well, since 2008, I've never felt less like a teacher than I do now. In fact, when I was first interviewed for the job that I'm still going with, I told the group of people who were deciding my fate that I didn't want to be a "teaching vending machine, where kids can just get information from." My purpose has always been to use history and literature to get kids to think more deeply about what they think, how they see the world, and the correct way to behave in different situations. And while writing and reading work really well for me personally, fifteen- and sixteen year-olds tend to need a different approach. The in-class, in-person experience is really crucial to how I teach (which is not a surprise; I've believed that basically from the beginning), and it's the component of my job that is most damaged by the current crisis. I have, thanks to a necessary public health move, turned into a teaching vending machine. I enjoy the video conferences with my students that I have almost every day, but it doesn't really compare to what I'm used to. It lacks the dynamism of an in-class experience, if only because the students' microphones are muted or their cameras are off, so how can I hear and see them laugh at my comments and jokes? I can't have them converse with a neighbor, stand up and investigate something with their hands, or play some of the games that students enjoy. In other words, I'm not teaching how I want to--and best am able to--teach. There's little fulfillment in this, and without fulfillment, a job like teaching is not really worth the effort. I'm not alone in this. I would argue that the vast majority of teachers feel the same way. Yes, there are a handful for whom this is a break--they send out an assignment once a week or once a day or whatever and let it be while they binge Netflix and lounge about. I know this, because that's the at-home equivalent of how they run their classes. (None of the teachers with whom I work are that way, I believe; they do exist, however.) For the most part, however, teachers didn't sign up as online-content-coordinators. I'm grateful we have this much--I don't know what we'd do without the digital tools we have--but I'm also keen on not doing this for any longer than is necessary. So, how am I doing? In terms of productivity and work, I think I'm doing well. I feel I've struck a worthwhile balance on that front. But my own mental health and well-being? Not so much. No, I don't miss my commute. I don't miss wearing a tie. I don't miss having to bellow at students to get in uniform or to get to class. I don't miss the cramped hallways and the slaloming of middleschoolers down the stairs. But I do miss school. I miss doing my job. And I wish I knew when it would end. In response to the COVID-19 outbreak and the dismissal of schools, I've been working at home this past week. It's been quite a strain to figure out how to create a viable and valuable experience for my students with events moving so quickly. One area that I'm trying to keep going is my Shakespeare class, which is an elective and isn't really designed for circumstances like this. One of my students, however, passed on a suggestion from her dad: Write about how Shakespeare responded to the plague. It was partly in jest, but it sent me down a rabbit-hole of research and made me think more about how lucky we are to have Shakespeare at all. So, without further ado (and a special welcome to my students whom I've sent here as this week's assignment), here are some of my thoughts on Shakespeare and disease. Shakespeare Shouldn't Have Lived The bubonic plague was one of two major plagues that ravaged Europe throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance. This plague has been studied a lot, with many different hypotheses about its source, its transmission, and much more. Rather than wade into the controversy, it's clear that bubonic plague came from bacteria, probably thanks to ticks that lived on rats and thereby spread. (Hygiene is important, folks; wash your hands and don't keep pet ticks, I guess.) Bubonic plague caused a swelling of the lymph nodes (buboes is the word used to describe this process; hence the name) that led to harsh, darkly colored splotches on the skin. Sometimes the buboes would get so large that treatment involved lancing and draining the swollen areas. Needless to say (but I'll say it anyway), this often led to a painful death. Pneumonic plague was highly contagious from person to person via sputum (y'know, what one expels during a cough or sneeze) and tended to be highly contagious for the same reasons that we're concerned about the novel coronavirus. In both cases, people didn't know what was the cause of the diseases, nor how to combat it. They did find that keeping their windows closed and fires stoked seemed to reduce the risk--probably because the homes were too hot for the rats to visit and so they left more people uninfected. The Shakespeare home on Henley Street in Stratford-upon-Avon (which still stands to this day, is cared for by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, and, humble bragging here, I've visited twice) was near an outbreak of bubonic plague in 1564--the year that William Shakespeare was born. Park Honan, a biographer of the Bard, imagines a terrified Mary Arden Shakespeare doing everything she could to keep her first-born son, William, safe from an invisible, insidious disease. Having buried children already, it's safe to assume that Honan isn't too far off. In all honesty, William should have died in his cradle and been buried in the graveyard of the Holy Trinity Church. With plague being essentially everywhere, it's a miracle that he survived long enough to write anything at all. Outbreaks of plague varied in intensity and lethality (the worst, of course, was the Black Death between 1347 and 1351 where approximately one-third of Europe ended up dead…maybe as many as 200 million by the end of it, though the numbers are disputable), but was always an issue. There's a reason that mortality rates are often quoted as being so low in the past: Infant mortality was incredibly high, which drags down the overall mortality rate. In the case of John and Mary Shakespeare, their family would eventually number eight, though only one of their four daughters (the second Joan) survived to adulthood. (If you care to know, the birth order was Joan, Margaret, William, Gilbert, Joan, Anne, Richard, and Edmund. There are more details in Park Honan's Shakespeare: A Life if you're interested.) A Plague on Both Your Houses Shakespeare's adult life was predominantly spent in London. Countless hours of his life were spent on the boards of different theaters, mostly the Globe, where he enacted his own plays while writing new dramas that would fundamentally change the Western Canon. However, plague continued to, well, plague the City, which meant that there were major disruptions to his life because of the disease. On an almost week-to-week basis, the theaters could be closed if plague-deaths rose too sharply--say, thirty or forty deaths in the previous seven days--the playhouses would be closed. While there wasn't anything like advanced ticket sales to worry about reimbursing, Shakespeare and his troupe definitely lost money during times of public health emergencies. There were three different times when he had to close up the theater for a protracted amount of time, though: once in 1592, again in 1603 (with an outbreak so bad that the newly-crowned James I was unable to greet his English subjects), and lastly in 1607. The last one happened shortly after Lent, which was the only time that Shakespeare was steadily away from the theater anyway. So following a forced religious vacation, he then had a forced health hiatus. How long were these? Well, they varied: the Elizabethan closure saw him away from the stage for nearly twenty months, though there were a couple of brief seasons there. He spent almost a full year out of London in the 1603 outbreak, and something like sixteen months for the one four years later. Now, Shakespeare didn't rest during this time. Much like our shifting of habitual gears during our voluntary quarantine, there was still plenty to do. He just needed a place to do it. Many troupes would use this time as an excuse to get out of the packed city and out into the midlands of England, and Shakespeare's was no exception. In a way, it was a type of social distancing--rather than remaining in the cramped quarters of London, they would travel out into the countryside where they could tour from village to village, gaining a few shillings or so at each stop. For Shakespeare, he believed with the rest of the people of his time that it was the air--a miasma--that caused the sicknesses. Country air, it was believed, was more healthful and beneficial to the body. That fewer people were close together, a natural social distancing, is the more likely explanation as to why the country was, overall, less likely to be plague-afflicted. To go from place to place required money, of course, but it also required special permissions. A group of people couldn't simply travel through Yorkshire and put on plays at every town. If they tried, they could get in huge trouble. Not only that, but more puritanically-minded city-, town-, or village councils could reject the players before they even set up their portable stage. To overcome that, a troupe would need a patron. In the days of Queen Elizabeth, the players at the Globe were called the Lord Chamberlain's Men--they had the permission of the nobility to perform. This was a pass, as it were, to showcase their stories in many places throughout the realm. It was not, however, carte blanche, and there were ways of being overruled if a person of power took a disliking to them. With the advent of the Stuart king, the Lord Chamberlain's Men became the King's Men, with a royal dispensation to be allowed to perform. This allowed the company to continue on, despite the health problems besetting the country. Lessons Learned? As I researched and refreshed myself on this aspect of Shakespeare's life, I'm surprised by some of the things that are similar--and different--between our experience now and his. The social distancing was a natural consequence of being an agrarian society, one that we're far removed from. However, the government frequently took away the free exercise of market-behaviors from its people whenever the threat to the public's overall health was high. We haven't seen a lot of rebellion against this quarantine yet, and though it could very much be considered legal, there's always a possibility that the police powers that are being lightly used in our situation may turn into some nasty lawsuits later on. America isn't England--for obvious reasons--but we still have a tendency to do what we're asked when an existential threat like a disease threatens us. I'm also struck by the ingenuity of Shakespeare's work. He took the time to write additional plays--indeed, this may be one ingredient into why he was able to produce the staggering number of plays that he crafted--and diversified his skills by selling his pen to write some of his 154 sonnets. Like us, he surely got to spend more time at home and get to know his family a bit better. And, like us, that probably was a double-edged sword. I would be remiss if I didn't point out that disease stole away his only son, Hamnet, in 1596. There's not a lot to go on--a burial registry--but it's a stark reminder of the fragility of youth in the face of an invisible invader. Hamnet was 11; my second child turns 10 today. The idea that he would only have one year remaining him is too painful to entertain. I have no proof of this--after all, King John was written sometime in the 1590s, and perhaps even in 1596--but this speech given by Constance, a grieving mother, strikes me as reverberating with a greater depth of emotion than an imagination (even one as prodigious as Shakespeare's) would be unable to convey. I feel that these lines speak from experience: Grief fills the room up of my absent child, And there's also this to consider: Despite the dangers of living through these plague years, Shakespeare did survive. He gifted us the unparalleled endowment of his writing--another miracle, as is the fact that the writing was preserved--and changed the world as a result. Maybe, in a smaller way surely, we, too, will get through this difficult time with great gifts for the future.
Like most people, the news of the spreading corona virus has led me to some serious life reflections and considerations. What is essential? What am I prepared for? What do I view my life to be in the short term? How can I keep my family safe? For all of the unanswered questions, there's one that seems to nag at me the most, waiting in the wings: Is this it? For quite some time now, I've abandoned any millenarian theological interpretations about world events. My study of history--especially within the last hundred years--has shown me that as bad as things are, there have been times in the past where things were significantly worse than now. As a Mormon, I'm part of a millenarian church, but one that's been rather cagey about the end of the world, for the most part. After all, plenty of people--inside and, of course, outside--the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have made predictions about the pending apocalypse. My favorite would have to be the Great Fire of London in 1666. England, which had long thought of itself as God's Chosen Land™, was on edge about the whole year "666" thing. (I say "England", but really it was the more puritanically-inclined people; those who were less religiously devout/superstitious likely didn't mind it as much.) What better year to really show his demonic power off than in Satan's own year? Dire warnings about God's judgment were rife, particularly since the monarchy had only been restored six years prior and was still a sore spot for the revolutionaries who had believed in Cromwell's dictatorship. With a plague outbreak happening a year before, London was feeling like…well, that it was the end of the world. On 2 September 1666, in the King's bakery on Pudding Lane, a fire broke out. Due to a long, hot, dry summer, London was ripe for the roasting and soon half of the City was on fire. Attempts to detonate buildings with gunpowder to provide a fire break occurred (which is, in hindsight, rather an amusing picture), and despite their best efforts, by 4 September 1666, only a fifth of London remained standing. Even St. Paul's Cathedral was destroyed--the one that we all know and love today, that survived the Nazi blitz of World War II, was erected on the same spot in the aftermath of the Great Fire--and though only a handful of people died in the blaze, hundreds of thousands were left homeless and destitute. It was a catastrophe by every mark. (If you want to read more, here's a nifty article.) Who of that time wouldn't look at the great city of London succumbing to flames and think, "This is the end of the world"? On the first day of July 1916, the British launched a bloody and ill-fated attack on German positions near the Somme in France. The battle turned into a lengthy bloodbath, the likes of which have but rarely been seen since then. When I think of how we're behaving now, how convinced we are at the prospect of facing the End Times, I think of this footage. Filmed at 0720 on 1 July 1916 by Geoffrey Malins, this explosion at the Hawthorn Redoubt saw 40,000 pounds of explosive detonate underground. Watch this short clip and ask yourself: What does the end of the world look like? Surely seeing an 80 foot-deep crater, longer than a football field would be part of it? I see an image like this, and I'm reminded of Book 6 of Paradise Lost, when the rebel angels' cannon-fire pushes the loyal angels' ingenuity, and they begin to hurl entire mountains at one another: Forthwith (behold the excellence, the power When I think of the End of Days, I consider how, in the years between Hitler's rise and fall, human beings were turned into purses and riding pants, how Japan's Unit 731 experimented on Chinese prisoners with anthrax and vivisection, how Turkey yet denies having slaughtered a million Armenians…
…if that's not enough to spur Christ's return, why would a twenty-first century flu be sufficient? There's an entire cottage industry of predicting (thus far, wrongly) the end of the world, the Rapture, whatever one wishes to call it, up to and including the creation of a pet-service website for after the apocalypse comes. Mayans were believed to have predicted the end of the world in 2012, of course, and there's hardly a Sunday-gone-by where I haven't heard someone lament about how much more wicked the world is than in those idyllic yesteryears of yore. But I just don't know if that's true. Yes, the world is different, but it's been in a perpetual evolution since Day One. But more wicked than the wholesale enslavement of 16 million human beings from Africa? More wicked than systemic exploitations that led to children dying in mines and factories? History is replete with heinous behavior; why should this be it? The Mormon in me wants to believe that the end is nigh because there are many promised blessings. But the humanist in me wants to believe that we could have chosen differently; we could have aimed to save people, save our planet, save our future--that Christ would come not as a deus ex machina to prevent us from self-annihilation, but because we'd made the world safer, kinder, more loving, more caring, less violent, more equal…more heavenly. When I think of all the despicable things I know from my small store of historical knowledge, I can't believe that twenty-first century problems are what St. John the Beloved was looking at in his great uncovering of the end of the world. Maybe what really worries me is that if the Holocaust isn't sufficiently evil enough to trigger the Second Coming, what will be? I've written precious little this year. We've all just arrived at the beginning of the third month and, though I've written more than 70,000 words for the first two, almost none of it is how I expected (or wanted) it to be. The reason for this is two-fold: I'm out of the writing habit, and I'm doing lots of worldbuilding.
Hardly a Habit The first of these problems is a clear one: I need to carve out more time to write. It's always as simple--and complicated--as that. I live within the perpetual "spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" problem when it comes to my art, and I do really believe that it stems--at least in part--from my own feelings of disappointment, frustration, and disillusionment about a writing career. Wanting to be a writer is a feeling that I'm so familiar with that it's more of a habit than a genuine sentiment. I am fully aware of the need for thick skin, resiliency, and a disconnected-from-reality worldview in order to accomplish this goal. But I've been striving toward the goal for so long that it's almost impossible to think of what it would be like to achieve it. Would I even gain satisfaction if I no longer had to strive for that desire? Of course I would--I'd find new things to write, challenge myself again with my writing. I think. But it's certain that I don't know how I'd feel to be a writer without the addendum, aspiring. Because of this way of thinking, I believe that I'm self-sabotaging my own impulses to write. I've written about how I stopped writing daily essays in part because I was refining my non-fiction chops when I really wanted to be working on my fiction. Unfortunately, the ease of sitting down and simply writing fiction has not come toward me much at all. Yes, I've a handful of short stories. Some of them are even okay. But there's no consistency, and without that consistency, I don't know how I'm supposed to improve. And, since I'm not improving, I'm losing the will to want to pursue it. Vicious cycle, my friends. Having lost the writing habit of any sort, I find myself spending a lot more time doing other pastimes, including playing on my new drum set, watching more TV, playing more videogames, and going to bed later than is healthy. I can't pretend that writing would solve these problems…but at least I'd be adding "writing a lot" in there. There are worse habits to have than writing. New Worlds and New Stories Back when I talked about the death of my grandmother, I mentioned that I was planning on a writing retreat with my writer group when the funeral happened, forcing us to reschedule. This has been a positive thing--the rescheduling, not the death of my grandmother--because I'm not actually ready for a writing retreat. At least, I wasn't. Now, with the reschedule retreat less than a week away, I have to focus on telling the story I most want to tell… …and that's a problem. See, I had a sudden attack of an interesting idea about a witch-based urban fantasy--something that I've been wanting to do for a long time but couldn't figure out a fresh way of doing it. I happened upon a fantastic piece of art from Skiorh. (In fact, I went ahead and did my own version of the drawing, which is the one at the top of the post.) The mixture of skateboarding culture and a witch was exactly what I wanted (without knowing it), so I spent a good chunk of the past week or so throwing together the pieces of the world. In fact, I probably spent a bit too much time thinking about it--hence the reason I spent time drawing a drawing that was already drawn. But, at the same time, I've been thinking up a new story in one of my most frequently-used settings, the world of Taralys. (I have two novels set there--Conduits and Ash and Fire--as well as my NaNoWriMo 2017 novella.) This new one would be using the English Civil Wars as an inspiration point, which means that not only have I been worldbuilding a lot of this new world's history, I'm also doing a lot of research into a time period that I'm interested in but haven't yet done the requisite leg-work to truly know well. I've really enjoyed what I've dipped into so far, and look forward to doing more of it. But, at the same same time, I've been looking over my notes for the huge novella project. Last year, I wrote three of the five novellas in my Shadowed World series--two of them during my two separate retreats, and the third during the remainder of my summer. I wrote just over three chapters of the next one, then haven't been back to it since. However, I have a lot of outlines, notes, and ideas for this story. It would be a perfect project to work on my short writing retreat day. So, in other words, despite having been in a dearth of writing inspiration for quite some time, I'm now suddenly overwhelmed with different options and possibilities for what this next weekend will hold. It's a pleasant problem to have, and it goes a long way to motivating me to regain a new habit of more steady fiction work. With them being broader kinds of potential stories, I may even be able to crack the NaNoWriMo problem--the fact that being with a story every single day makes me not love it very much anymore--and could be the way that I rectify problem number one with problem number two. I'm hopeful that, regardless of if I get a lot of additional writing done in the near-term, the possibility of multiple projects might actually be the thing that I've been looking for, and I can become as prolific a writer as I am a yearner. |
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