Ross A. Laird

Please join Ross this Fall for courses in creativity, culture, and writing at Kwantlen Polytechnic University:

Interdisciplinary Expressive Arts 3100
Begins September 10, 2009
Thursdays, 11:00am to 1:50pm
See details below.

Mythological Narratives 3301
Begins September 8, 2009
Tuesdays, 11:00am to 1:50pm
See details below.

Interdisciplinary Arts 3100

This course is about creativity, about making a claim for the fundamental right of intentional creative action. Within that context, we will explore the ancient and modern practices of creative endeavor (particularly as regards family and culture), the hurdles of creativity (as they involve craft and precision and clarity) and the great gifts we might receive from others of our creative kin (that is to say, the long tradition of writers, poets, sculptors, dancers, craftspeople of all stripes, musicians, myth-makers, and so on). Throughout this process, our guiding archetype will be that of the trickster.

In this course we stake out the territory of the creative, inspecting the geology of its forms and ideals, finding our own individual places to homestead. Creativity involves the search for truth, yet also an awareness that truth and fact are often provisional, and mythological; they are shapeshifters on the wide-open plain of creativity. We will explore what this means, and what to do about it.

And, finally, the goal of the course is to have fun: to preserve and nurture the creative and imaginative spirit that is the foundation of all the arts and sciences.

Begins September 10, 2009 (ends December 10)
Thursdays, 11:00am to 1:50pm
Prerequisites: 30 undergraduate credits, or permission from Ross.
Website: http://www.kwantlen.ca/calendar/courses/Interdisiciplinary_Expressive_Arts.html

Mythological Narratives 3301

Creative writing is a powerful, ancient, and yet delicate practice. We write — quietly, often in isolation, in tentative and mercurial moods. We revise, and turn back upon our own narratives, and wonder about the reception our work might meet in the world. Sometimes we hide manuscripts in drawers, or take deliberate action — as did Franz Kafka and Mahatma Gandhi — to prevent our words from making their way to an audience. Kafka and Gandhi were both unsuccessful in preventing their writings from being destroyed; but their impulse to do so, to keep hooded the hawk of their creativity, is common among writers of all stripes.

We’re not sure that we have, really, anything to say; or we are afraid that if our words are not well met we might ourselves be wounded. Or we believe, as did the ancient Egyptians, that words have their own life, for good or for ill, and that writing is a means of seizing the power of the gods. This course attempts to explore this conversation — between the writer and the wider world — and to find ways of bringing our writing safely out of hiding.

We will be exploring myth, and writing craft, and method, and the strategic practices every writer must learn in wrestling with narrative. Each of us will examine our strengths — the ways in which the natural mood and flavour of our writing makes itself known — and our vulnerabilities as well: how we get stuck, or lazy, how we lost confidence and gain doubt. How we learn to shut down and hope the whole thing will go away.

This course is about writing, and reading, and making a claim for the fundamental right of storytelling. Within that context, we will explore the ancient practices of myth-making (particularly as regards family and culture), the hurdles of writing (as they involve craft and precision and clarity) and the great gifts we might receive from others of our creative kin (that is to say, the long tradition of writers of writers and myth-makers).

The threshold between fact and fiction (which is not the same as that between truth and lie) is one of the territories of myth. In this course we stake out that territory, inspecting the geology of its forms and ideals, finding our own individual places to homestead. Myth involves the search for truth, and fidelity to fact, yet also an awareness that truth and fact are often provisional, and mythological; they are shapeshifters on the wide-open plain of creativity. We will explore what this means, and what to do about it.

Begins September 8, 2009 (ends December 8)
Tuesdays, 11:00am to 1:50pm
Prerequisites: 30 undergraduate credits, or permission from Ross.
Website: http://www.kwantlen.ca/calendar/courses/crwrcrs.html

Anyone who has spent time in a classroom will know that traditional teaching methods -- authorial, minimally interactive, focused on individual effort as opposed to collaborative experience -- are not the best way to learn what we need to know. Accordingly, we forget much of what we learn in school and remember most of what we derive from life experience. This makes sense; after all, life is immersive, and engaging, and consistently packed with challenges that are enormously relevant to our personal and professional development. Shouldn't school be like this?

 Here's my short list for how improve the purposefulness, meaning, and efficiency of education:

Various new and updated items, to wit:

Understanding and Dealing with Technology Addictions

Tips and Suggestions for Parents Worried about Childhood and Adolescent Computer Use

Mentorship: The Core of Leadership and Development

Principles and Practices for Working with Disabilities

The landscape of what we have chosen to call disability changes rapidly, and for many reasons. Parents, educators, social service providers and others who work with the disabled (especially children) should be familiar with the scope of these changes and how they might affect the individuals with whom they work. Here are a few core principles that derive from our current understanding of disability:

• Demonstrate curiosity about the cultures of technology that children and adolescents join. Let them show you the games they play. Participate with them in online activities. Assist them in developing awareness of the risks and benefits of online cultures.
• Educate yourself about the evolving and complex worlds of online cultures. Spend time developing healthy online habits for yourself (this includes paying attention to parental cell phone use and television watching habits, which are both technology cultures).
• Keep all computers and televisions in public, family spaces (no computers in bedrooms except under direct supervision and collaboration).
• Limit recreational screen time (ages 1-5, roughly 5 minutes daily; ages 5-12, roughly 20 minutes daily; ages 13-16, roughly 30 minutes daily).
• Model and encourage physical exercise practices (sports) for kids and physical activity (exercise) for adults. The ideal is one hour daily for everyone.
• Explore the emotional benefits that kids derive from online cultures and find ways of meeting those emotional needs also in the non-online world (through sports, for example, or community involvement, or reading, or any number of healthy activities).
• Recognize that kids will find ways around all types of computer surveillance strategies implemented by parents. Focus on education and awareness of risks.
• Recognize that some type of access control (to prevent viewing inappropriate content, for example) may be required and that kids are not fully capable of self-control (they are kids...). Use access control transparently. Involve kids in developing an access control system and assist them in learning self-management skills.
• Avoid hypocrisy whenever possible. If you view inappropriate content, or involve yourself in online activities that are not healthy, your kids will very likely find out about it. Try to avoid this credibility disaster. Practice good mentorship.
• Recognize that the psychological development of anyone born after 1990 is different from those born prior. Technology cultures are foundational to childhood and adolescent development today. The solution is not to avoid technologies but rather to understand them. Be an informed consumer and parent.

I routinely travel long distances for my work. This typically involves a ride on an airplane and the concomitant long lines waiting for services that seem inefficient and unnecessary. The delays, the small but important details of gates and boarding passes and acceptable identification; the subliminal anxiety behind ground travel in shuttle buses and taxis; the moment of panic when they can’t find your name on the reservation list at the hotel lobby: all of these things contribute to a generalized disorientation and fatigue.

Which is why airport lobbies are so disappointing. The weary traveler looks forward to them as refuges, as places of predictably expensive yet decent food, as niches for finding news, for napping, for catching up on the inevitably delayed tasks of business traveling. The airport lobby is the hoped-for oasis, the place to make phone calls, to check email, to catch up on all the forum messages posted by creative writing students.

The essential task of a teacher — whether in the school system, the family, or the community — is not to impart information. A teacher’s knowledge of a given subject area is almost incidental. A teacher does not, in fact, teach.

Instead, a good teacher attempts to engage students with their own learning. In the ideal learning environment, students teach themselves. In this context, the role of the teacher is to provide support and mentorship, to offer resources and perspectives, to mediate conversations, and to contribute the odd bit of professional lore. That’s all.

Students learn best through personal engagement, not through the delivery of content by an authority. An authentic teacher facilitates the ground of learning, brings the students together, then gets out of the way.

In the best learning environments, the teacher is invisible.

My creative writing students will be familiar with my fondness for the pared-down philosophical prose of Cormac McCarthy. The December 2008 issue of Vanity Fair includes a parody of McCarthy’s style, written by Craig Brown. To wit:

Cooking with Cormac McCarthy

Pasta. Plain. But Good.

INGREDIENTS:
Pasta.
And salt.
And water.
And Fire.

DIRECTIONS:
Place the pasta in the water and the salt in the water and the water in the pot and the pot on the fire.
In the pot? The fire in the pot?
No. The water in the pot. The pot on the fire.
The pasta in the water?
Yes, in the water.
And the salt in the fire?
No. The salt in the water.
And the water on the fire?
No. The water in the pot and the pot on the fire. Not the water on the fire. For then the fire will die and dying be dead.
Nor will the water boil and the pasta will drain dry and not cooked and hard to the teeth.

The salt falls nor does it cease to fall.
The water boils. So be it.
Cease from placing your hand in the boiling water. Place your hand in the boiling water and it will cause you pain.
Much pain?
Very much pain.

In the pot the bubbles bubble up and bubble some more. The bubbles are bubbly. Never more bubbly bubbles bubbling bubbliest. And having bubbled the bubbles still bubbly.
Or bubblier?
Or bubblier.
Across the kitchen a board intended for chopping. Here. Take it. Chop.
What will I chop? There are no ingredients to chop.
Just chop. Don’t cease from chopping. To chop is to become a man.

After 10 minutes. The pasta stiff and dry and upright no more. The pasta lank and wet and soft. In the eternal damp of water.
Pour water free like some ancient anointing. The pasta left alone in the pot. Alone and naked.
The salt? Where’s the salt?
The salt is gone. Lost to the water and gone forever.
I grieve for the salt.
It is the salt for which I grieve.

Tip the pasta out.
The pasta?
Yes. Tip it out. Onto.
A plate?
Yes. And stop.
Finishing your sentences?
Yes.
Why?
Because it’s so.
 Irritating?

Nothing in your memory anywhere of anything so good. Now the pasta is eaten. Disappeared. The pasta disappeared as everything disappeared. As the comma disappears and the semicolon disappears and the inverted comma disappears and the apostrophe disappears and the adjectives and the pronouns all disappear.
Leaving just full stops and And.
And And?
And And.
And And.