I'm preparing a syllabus for a new creative writing course that I'll be teaching in the fall (more on that later; stay tuned). One aspect of that project is a reading list of essential works of creative non-fiction. These are works, both historical and contemporary, that represent the core qualities of creative non-fiction writing. Here are ten of my picks:

• Brodkey, Harold. This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death.
• Butala, Sharon. Wild Stone Heart.
• Calvo, Cesar. The Three Halves of Ino Moxo. Translated by Kenneth Symington.
  (Those fluent in Spanish may prefer to read Las tres mitades de Ino Moxo.
  Iquitos, Peru. Proceso Editores, 1981.)
• Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts.
• Lopate, Phillip. The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present.
• Merwin, W.S. The Mays of Ventadorn.
• Ondaatje, Michael. Running in the Family.
• Saint-Exupery, Antoine de. Wind, Sand and Stars. Translated by Lewis Galantiere.
  (Those fluent in French may prefer to read Terre Des Hommes.
  Cambridge, MA. Schoenhof Foreign Books, 1999.)
• Sanders, Scott Russell. Writing from the Center.
• Terpstra, John. The Boys: Or, Waiting for the Electrician's Daughter.

Late in Heart of Darkness, after Marlow has meandered deep into the jungle but before he meets Kurtz, who utters his now-famous judgement upon human nature, The horror! The horror! -- before this, the most famous scene in twentieth century literature, Marlow finds himself making necessary repairs to the ship. He ruminates on these activities as distractions from the shadows around him, from the haunting underbelly of his own nature that he sees in the wilderness around him, in the passionate abandon of the local tribes-people. Here's the full passage:

The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there-- there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly, and the men were--No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it--this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity-- like yours--the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you--you so remote from the night of first ages--could comprehend. And why not? The mind of man is capable of anything--because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valour, rage--who can tell?-- but truth--truth stripped of its cloak of time. Let the fool gape and shudder--the man knows, and can look on without a wink. But he must at least be as much of a man as these on the shore. He must meet that truth with his own true stuff-- with his own inborn strength. Principles won't do. Acquisitions, clothes, pretty rags--rags that would fly off at the first good shake. No; you want a deliberate belief. An appeal to me in this fiendish row--is there? Very well; I hear; I admit, but I have a voice, too, and for good or evil mine is the speech that cannot be silenced. Of course, a fool, what with sheer fright and fine sentiments, is always safe. Who's that grunting? You wonder I didn't go ashore for a howl and a dance? Well, no--I didn't. Fine sentiments, you say? Fine sentiments, be hanged! I had no time. I had to mess about with white-lead and strips of woolen blanket helping to put bandages on those leaky steam-pipes--I tell you. I had to watch the steering, and circumvent those snags, and get the tin-pot along by hook or by crook. There was surface-truth enough in these things to save a wiser man.

Marlow employs seamanship as a kind of shield against the chaos, against the frightening shapes of his inner life. After all, he is a civilized man, an Englishman, for whom the shadow must be contained. Marlow is a sailor, one who traverses the waters but remains above them. Writers, conversely, are involved in plumbing those depths, in encountering their lights and shadows, in struggling with the full breadth of human propensity. But we distract ourselves too, and the most common method of doing this is to allow the electronic world to continually divert us from the blank page and blinking cursor. Email alerts, news feeds, blogs: there is enough distraction in these things to doom the wisest writer. We must go into the darkness, into the bardo, to discover our treasures. That we often have difficulty doing so is, in part, due to the persistent emphasis of our environment upon the facile and the transient and the ephemeral. Always an update, a flashing notice, a clamoring icon which seems to confirm our importance  -- but in fact belies our addiction to the inconsequential.

Writers have not been well-served by technology since about 1990, when the last console versions of WordPerfect showed us a black screen upon which a small, blinking cursor waited patiently for us to dive into the waters. Since the advent of graphical user interfaces, the blackness has been hidden, has been replaced by smilies and floral wallpaper and pastel icons. I'm not against the GUI; but for writing, it's a serious impediment, the modern equivalent of Marlow's leaky steam pipes.

The confrontation with what lies behind, or beneath, or hidden, is the essence of all good writing. And whether one perceives that hidden-ness as darkness, as Conrad did, or as a terrifying whiteness, as did Melville, the mystery is the same. Here's Melville describing the peculiar terror evoked by the whiteness of the whale:

Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a colour as the visible absence of colour; and at the same time the concrete of all colours; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows--a colourless, all-colour of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues--every stately or lovely emblazoning--the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colourless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge--pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear coloured and colouring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?

The writer approaches mystery by way of the white page or the black screen. That is our task, nothing more. Not to explain the mystery, or to resolve it, or to erase it; but to encounter it, struggle with it, allow it to enter and change us. This will not happen, cannot happen, if we are checking our emails and news feeds all day long. We must sit in silence, waiting for the mystery to descend.

Now, from the mystic to the concrete:

1. Turn off all email notification.
2. Turn off all news notification.
3. Turn off software update notification.
4. Configure all desktop panels to "auto-hide."
5. Remove all icons from the desktop (organize yourself!).
6. Choose a wallpaper that will not scream at you (I use this).
7. Close all browsers.
8. Do not use Microsoft Word (of which, much discourse elsewhere on this site).
9. Use a text-based editor such as cream, vim, or  emacs.
10. Learn to use the editor with keystrokes only (this takes time).
11. Choose a color scheme for the editor that has high contrast and, ideally, a dark background (I use Zenburn for Vim).

Since I became a Linux user four or five years ago, and in doing so discovered how much the environment of computing influences the consciousness of the user (of which I have written elsewhere), I've been a strong advocate for alternate (i.e. other than Word) word processors such as Vim. A writer should be able to choose, and to customize, the environment of their work. In a previous post on this topic I wrote:

The homogenization of word processing, whether on the Mac or PC, inevitably delivers a consistent — and therefore conformist — experience to the act of typing on screen. The method of input unquestionably influences the output. By way of subtle cues and imagery (icons, menus, procedures), word processors inculcate a particular type of consciousness. Works of writing from different authors but produced on the same word processor will be more similar than those produced using separate tools. The differences will be subtle but not inconsequential.

In keeping with my tendency to experiment with novel methods (he he) of writing, I've been doing a fair bit of writing lately on the web, using the Drupal setup on my own site but also over at Backpack. And I have to say that I've been very impressed with Backpack's Writeboard feature, which allows multiple revisions and contributors. It's an ideal environment for a writer and editor to work collaboratively.

As a practice Writeboard/Backpack project, I've created a sample creative writing tutorial for a course I'm working on. Here's the full text of the project: The Art and Craft of the Personal Essay.

Other emerging online word processors include Zoho Writer and Writely (recently purchased by Google). Together with Backpack, these products provide as much functionality as you could ever possibly want, are free to use, and offer the distinct advantage of giving you access to your documents from any computer. Neat stuff.

Early on mornings like this — when rain is falling upon the roof, and the street is gray, and damp cold pervades the air — the glowing screen is a warm and inviting refuge. It does not demand but waits, offering its aura and enclosing hum. Alive and breathing with the sound of its hidden workings, promising and almost delivering wonder, the machine is an opiate as well as a stimulant. Indeed it conveys the appeal of all the stimulants stacked together and interchangeable at the flick of the wrist: hallucinogenic reverie, alcoholic nostalgia, distance and peace to match the most rarefied bud. All our proclivities, our hidden dreams and fantasies, the knotted spine of our desires: it’s all there, splayed and displayed, laid out and waiting. Some of us are too old for this: we don’t get the appeal, the machine seems too slick and needlessly complex, the ephemeral world it offers feels cold and impersonal. We do not perceive the machine to be an extension of our own consciousness. But for the young, for those growing up immersed in the online stream, theirs is a consciousness nurtured by, and to some extent dependent upon, the technology of self-creation. The older among us are dismissive of this reality, a schism is growing between the ages, the binary web multiplies.

I read the online news, check my email, and wonder once again about the persistent ingress of this technology into my life. I think about my ever-increasing screen time, I worry about repetitive strain injuries, I ruminate on the line between healthy geekiness and Internet addiction. And I recognize that the computer has become indispensable. It is both a portal and a vast library — infinite, almost. I think of Jorge Luis Borges and his story about an endless library, a library that comprises an entire universe and is also a prison. I no longer visit the library at the university — why bother, when I can access everything I need from home — and my six hundred dollars in overdue fines remains unpaid. But I do miss the smell of slowly-moldering books, and the enforced quiet of the stacks, and the margin notes made by careless readers that I used to find in old books. Notices were posted against defacing books in this manner, yet sometimes such errant scribbles were an un-looked-for confirmation that someone — anyone — had been here before me, searching, as was I, for illumination within the books of lost ages.

The Web does not offer such accidental and imaginal histories. Its architecture is shifting and ephemeral. Nothing stays for too long, nothing remains the same. The Web evolves, which is part of its appeal. It’s always fresh, edging toward the new and the innovative. For someone like me — habitually looking forward, hungry for knowledge and change — the online world is like crack cocaine. My curiosity is nurtured there, and satisfied, and amplified again, so that I become ever more curious. I wander, and join virtual communities — of programmers and Linux freaks and conspiracy theorists — and feel that I am learning, and growing, and preserving a youthful spirit. Yet this morning, as on many mornings, I look toward the trees and the wet lawn and I trace the contour of the creek and I wonder about my sacrifices: less time spent in nature, fewer new books for our home library, decreasing effort to spend time in the shop on woodworking projects. In these moments I become certain that I am indeed an addict.

Next Tuesday I will be presenting at the Jack Hirose conference on youth and addictions. I will be offering three sessions, as follows:

Using Creative and Expressive Interventions with Adolescents
The traditional modes of counselling and therapy (sitting in chairs, talking) do not always work well for adolescents, who require more active styles of engagement such as physical activities, games for teaching and mentoring, sports, and creative practices. This is especially true for substance users, who are caught in patterns of the nervous system that cannot be addressed by talking and insight alone. This session offers participants a smorgasbord of practices and approaches that involve creativity, play, and physical expression. The emphasis is on practical tools that can be immediately applied.

Creative Mentoring for Adolescents
Healthy development in adolescence hinges upon the availability of dependable adult mentors. In today’s world, such mentors are difficult to find, and often this role falls to the social service provider. Such a role can be profoundly transformative for adolescents. Yet mentoring requires immense sensitivity and interpersonal skill. This session offers participants a set of basic mentoring skills that can be applied in the context of creative interaction (sports, the arts, teams, community involvement, etc.). The emphasis of the session is on practical tools that arise from a philosophical orientation to the important work of youth mentoring.

Designing Creative Activities for Users of Specific Substnaces
Creative and physically expressive activities can be designed to address the healing needs of adolescents who use specific substances. This session offers participants tools for designing and facilitating creative activities tailored to users of four classes of substances: hallucinogens, opiates, stimulants, and alcohol. The emphasis is on practical strategies that can be immediately applied.

I have put together a combined resource package for these sessions (attached as pdf to this post, and available by clicking on “attachment” at the top of this post). As usual, feel free to download, copy, and share.

Today, at the BC Achievement Awards, I will be introducing John Terpstra and his new book The Boys, or, Waiting for the Electrician’s Daughter. Here are my introductory comments about John and his work:

***

Storytelling is the territory of the trickster, the mythological emissary of joyful, irreverent spontaneity. The task of the trickster involves joining together things that seem distinct, or separating things falsely conjoined. The trickster articulates and redraws meaningful connections; in so doing he becomes master of all the arts. In his book The Boys, or, Waiting for the Electrician’s Daughter, (already, even in the title, we glimpse the creative connections within its pages) — John Terpstra embodies the role of the trickster with great and sensitive skill. In this gentle and yet unvarnished chronicle, Terpstra articulates and reworks the joints between things. He shows us, by way of gathered vignettes and reflections, by means of his elegant, poetic prose, the fragile balance between suffering and hope, between love and fear, between confusion and illumination, in the lives of three boys living with muscular dystrophy. We expect, in such a chronicle, to read about how hard the lives of these boys must have been. We expect of the storyteller a tone of sympathy, or spiritual rumination. Terpstra offers us neither. Craftsman that he is — woodworker, furniture maker, carpenter, poet — he reworks the joints, offering us wonder in place of horror, dignity in place of desolation. He shows us clarity and beauty where we expect to find bewilderment and pain. The brief lives of these boys — Neil, Paul, and Eric, the brothers of Terpstra’s wife — are presented to us as reflections of something larger, something we rarely see in this age dedicated to the illusion of personal empowerment: Terpstra shows us life’s fragility, its great sacredness, the many ways in which the meaning of a life is defined not by its acts but by its relationships.

John Terpstra has said that his creative process in writing The Boys was similar to the way he makes wood furniture: by piecing together various items collected over the years, by gathering fragments, allowing them to season, then delivering them into something fresh and surprising. He has been a consistent and dependable craftsman in all of his nine books, and in his furniture making as well. Joinery is a term used in woodworking to describe how closely wood surfaces meet, how finely the connections are wrought between things. In The Boys, Terpstra’s joinery is exemplary. We read of the lives of the three boys — their whole and unblemished lives, their fullness of presence and their impact on those around them. Terpstra leads us beyond their suffering, connects us to their completeness, invites us to join with the boys and the strange magic of their days.

Terpstra hinges together different realities and values and versions of his tale, he merges memory with vision, he articulates the joinery of his chronicle with adept and caring hands. The words “art” and “articulate” derive from the same root, artus, which means to join together. Indeed, The Boys is a book of joining and joinery, of coming together as family, of finding the diverse threads of human experience and unifying them into a single bright strand of meaning and feeling. And finally, The Boys is a book of wonder. Like all the mythological tricksters, who trespass between this world and the next — Raven, Coyote, Krishna, Hermes – who force a crack between the worlds so that a great light might shine through, Terpstra cuts away the breach, carefully, gently, so that we might be illuminated.

The Union Institute seminar was fun, and quite informative as well. I enjoy teaching most when the participants and I both have something to teach one another. But I was also saddened to learn that the Union Institute as it once was — the place where I earned my doctorate, where an integrative and interdisciplinary learning environment served a student body of very diverse and interesting people — will, within the next couple of years, be replaced by a more or less traditional distance education program.

The Union was once called “the Harvard of the lunatic fringe.” I liked that moniker very much. The atmosphere was unlike other institutions — intense, a bit scattered at times, but also very engaging and appealing for someone such as myself. I was able to achieve there what would have been impossible elsewhere, and what now will be impossible, at least for the time being, at any institution I am aware of in North America: a self-directed, learner-centered, rigorous and flexible interdisciplinary doctoral program.

I am confident that a new version of the Union system will develop elsewhere over the next few years. But I can’t shake the feeling, in this ever-growing corporatized environment of education as business, in this environment where education simply for the joy of learning (and not as career strategy) is a scarce commodity, where ever greater numbers of interdisciplinary students go hungry in their quest for truly nurturing learning communities — I can’t shake the feeling that we are in a dry spell, perhaps for some time to come, and that the Union’s radical departure from its original mission (for reasons having to do with economy and not with authentic learning) is the end of a long and illuminated road for which we have not yet found other paths.

I will be in Miami from May 16th to 22nd co-facilitating a Union Institute seminar on doctoral research in Creative Process and the Arts. One of the challenges faced by scholars in this area is that it’s generally difficult to convey the rigor of creative process research to an academic community that is trained to understand the constrained forms of the traditional scientific method. Essentially, Creative Process research is new and different; sometimes it’s hard to sell to a traditional academic audience.

The conversation between Creative Process research and traditional academia plays itself out in many ways. The doctoral dissertation that became my first book is an example of that conversation. Another example (and one that seems to be in the news with increasing frequency) involves the controversial question of whether creativity can be inherited by way of organ transplant.