Philosophy and Bio
Photo Credit Kim Klein
BIOGRAPHY
I am delighted to have returned to the area to teach in your graduate program at Mount Mary College...
I taught in the Boston area for four years, at Lesley University and at the New England Institute of Art, where I was a finalist for the student-nominated Ina Beth Miller Teacher of the Year award. I began my teaching career in North Carolina, and I have taught Literature and Writing for ten wonderful years at the college level.
I earned my MFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington in 2004, where I received the Philip Gerard Fellowship for most promising first year writer. My work has appeared in Passages North, Poet Lore, and Potomac Review. My portfolio has earned me generous fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, and the Willard Espy Foundation.
In December 2011, I finished a polished and slimmed revision of my historical novel, The Pirate's Brand, which is based on the lives of Anne Bonny and Mary Read, who were pirates on the eighteenth century Caribbean. I will keep you posted on the process of finding the right editor's hands for this novel, and further revising the novel, as I learn new and exciting things about this process of getting our work published and out in the world.
**Also, I am just beginning my second novel and will be experiencing the creative process along with you.** I will be making use of the handouts as well as the insights we discover together in workshop, just as I hope you are. Of course, we will not be workshopping my work, but the classroom atmosphere we create together will contribute to my progress on my own newly planted book. In my ten years in academia, I have found that teaching, while it can at times be exhausting, keeps me intellectually fresh and feeds my creative process. When all of us are invested in the workshop process, in the work of other writers in workshops, and in the readings and discussions, we will come away with the energy and inspiration necessary to the marathon experience of creating a novel and a creative thesis.
PHILOSOPHY
On Novel Writing and Workshop
GETTING STARTED: GROWING SOMETHING FROM RIGHT INSIDE YOUR OWN MIND!
My philosophy of writing the novel in its initial stages is somewhat organic. As a student of Carl Jung's work on the unconscious, I believe that writers today rarely tap into that great creative well that we all have inside us: My goal is for you to write as no one but you could write, by drawing on the unique processes of your own mind and also by keenly observing the world around you. Unfortunately, we are so often imitating the formulaic things we see on television or in hollywood movies, and if this is where your inventions begin then they will not be fresh or engaging. So, when you are generating material early on in this process, you are doing so with the goal of getting down to the heart of why you want to write the particular book you have set out to write. Though there will never be an easy answer to the *Why am I writing this?* question, you are chasing down what excites you at a human level about writing this particular story: As a result, you are writing solid scenes that are rooted in authentic human experience.
BUT WHAT ABOUT STRUCTURE?: LAYING THE GROUNDWORK
So perhaps the above paragraph sounds a bit mystical in its thinking. It sort of is. I am a proponent of a mythic and organic approach to generating material, and mainly this is because it is the mystery of human experience that drives me to read or to write a book. And though many of you will deny it, you can trace the topic of your novel back to some event, longing, or even a curiosity that began within your own life. But once you've generated a uniquely brainstormed collection of thoughts, images, dialogue, etc. then you will need Structure.
In the interest of laying out a mind map of how this book will be structured, you will create a working, overall arc for the story. As you create your overall outline, you may draw on the work of Joseph Campbell, whose essential work The Hero with a Thousand Faces can help you to understand and reinforce your own instincts about structure. (One of the most fierce proponents of Campbell's work is George Lucas, who drew on this work when creating the initial Star Wars trilogy. Not the more recent installments of Star Wars, which don't exhibit any Campbell influence to my mind, but that is another story ;)
The readings and handouts of the course are designed to challenge you, to displace you from your usual way of making things. In the end, you may come back around to your own way of structuring something, or your own way of generating material. But in my experience as a teacher, knocking even the most skilled writer off his or her usual course is really and truly productive. For example, a student may do the brainstorming exercises and in the end has only gleaned one or two sentences that go into the chapter itself, or just one insight into a character's way of being. I consider this a victory! Additionally, if a student is making his or her outline and only includes or subtracts one additional scene after considering Campbell's Hero's Journey, then this is also a victory.
We are attempting to displace our instincts to write about the contemporary world in formulaic ways. We are trying to reverse the damage done by television—yes, even good television—to our senses, which are no longer keen to the world around us, due to how attuned we are to the media-driven formulas of existence we are force-fed every day. That is not to say that we cannot learn anything, about suspense for example, from a compelling mini-series, but rather that we must acknowledge that television is not delving into the truly unique stuff of life that exists within you and the stories already at work somewhere in your mind.
By these means, we are generating the initial creative material which is at the soul or heart of the story, and which is why you want to tell it. And then, with this insight in mind, we will take a giant step back and look at that grand journey and story you are laying out. I do promise that our first steps together will be bolder and wiser if we have all made our attempts at both aspects of this process: the creative generation of the subconscious, as well as the structural foundation for a work as large as the novel.
THE SUPPORTIVE & CHALLENGING WORKSHOP: 10 WAYS TO MAKE IT HAPPEN!
Let's make this a very clear set of understandings we have as we embark on this process together. I have compiled these from the many workshops in which I have been a a student as well as those I have facilitated.
1) We all come to workshop prepared. You arrive to class on time and with a hard copy of those pieces we all workshopped, and your hard copy is full of markings throughout. What do you mark? You provide a running commentary of your experience of the piece--in the margins and within the text--since the goal is to relay the experience you are having on a first read. You are writing questions in the margins, bracketing awkward phrases, questioning word or punctuation choices, and you are engaged with the material as a whole. At the end, you will make a list entitled "Things to Think About" or something like that, in which you number a few key sentences that capture what you think the piece accomplished or did well, as well as what confused or distracted you. Remember that you are basing this upon what John Gardner called "the vivid and continuous dream." Also, if possible, put a box around or mark the place or places in the work where the author has a *gold star* moment, when something is transcended or achieved or a mystery is heightened, and very adeptly. This will give the author something to work toward...
2) We don't want everyone to write like we do. Although we all have our preferences as to style and approach, or even to voice or point of view, we must come to the work with the hope that we can make it the best version of this kind of writing it can be. I remember that I once bashed a poem in workshop simply because it was written in that sharply cadenced, very stream of consciousness style favored by the beat poets and Ginsberg. I look back now and recognize that I could have got down to the level of language, or punctuation, or even the strength of the images or the structure of the poem, despite the fact that this is not the sort of thing I like to read. So, we put ourselves inside the piece itself, and attempt to identify what is done well and what isn't, whether we would pick up this kind of writing to read for pleasure or not.
3) We are supportive and constructive in our criticism. I have experienced both ends of the spectrum in workshops--either a workshop is so supportive that glaring problems in the writing are not addressed, or workshops in which students are harshly critical of other students' work without offering any alternative ways of looking at the work (often to impress the instructor with his or her "toughness." I understand this is a difficult balance to strike. But what we aim for is to offer constructive comments that offer what one professor at UNCW used to call "opportunities." A piece of work is written in a very limiting first person point of view, but one of the critiques offered by a student is to say, "It would be interesting to try putting the camera behind the eyes of this other character, and in third person." Then we go on to discuss how it would change our experience of the work. A poor alternative to this would be to say, "The voice of this 12 year old narrator is so affected and frustrating and I couldn't even get through it for workshop. So frustrating!" Okay, so maybe that is what you're feeling, but what you transform your frustration into is how you can free the other writer of the constraint. My guess is, the writer was frustrated too in some way and is hoping someone will trigger something new in workshop.
4) We laugh together at times. And are willing to laugh at ourselves. This one is pretty self-explanatory.
5) We do the readings so that we can bring in the ideas of other writers and scholars when the moment is right. Yeah, keep up with the reading. You don't want me to call on you and ask you what you think of how you "defamiliarized" in this piece and you have no idea what I'm talking about. It will be awkward.
6) When we revise, we take the opinions of our readers into account. So, if everyone in the class makes it clear that an entire paragraph is completely confusing, or includes a shift in tone that is inexplicable, or that the paragraph should possibly even be cut, then you have considered these reader responses and revised accordingly. This is a delicate balance, to include or exclude the thoughts of others as you revise, but it is important to honor the time others have put into considering your work. Think of it this way: In my experience, other students/readers often can tell something is wrong with something I wrote, but only *I* know how to fix it. You can take the ideas/opinions of others to far into consideration when revising as well...see #7.
7) After you have considered and processed the ideas as to revision, you make up your own mind but most often you change something. When other students take the time to point out that they lost their way in certain places, or that there was an unnecessary interruption in the work, you should make a change that you consider appropriate. If there is someone who was particularly hard on you in workshop, or a person whose aesthetic differs significantly from yours, you need to parse out what is useful and what is not.
8) When you are being workshopped, you take notes throughout. I don't mean so many notes that it's like a stenography course. I mean that you write down the main points that the group discovers together. *Particularly you will be graded on how you make use of the time others have spent on your work.* So, if we are talking about the tone in a particular paragraph, and one student states that it sounds more juvenile than the character's way of thinking, and another student makes a reference to something E.M. Forster said about tone, then you write down both things. Never assume that the critic made himself or herself understood in the comments. Bad handwriting and unclear wording can sabotage the help other writers are offering you. So, take charge of your own workshop experience. Even if you think the person is wrong, you may return to the comments weeks later and decide he or she was onto something! You will especially write down something when I signal that you should, because often this means that we made a discovery collectively, or I am in agreement with the observation and you should give it special consideration.
9) We are all engaged, no matter how tired or distracted we are, and we are enjoying ourselves. This is partly my responsibility, and in fact I take much of the responsibility for the atmosphere of a workshop. At best, it should feel like a scholarly party! A scholarly party at which we are celebrating the work of others who are struggling to make things. It is wonderful. It is often the time we have for ourselves, a forum for our ideas and our passions, apart from the demands placed on us in the outside world.
10) You are safe here. This is also my promise to you: As the instructor, I'm the safety net. The comments you make, the writing you submit, and you personally, will all be treated with the utmost respect. And you must understand as well, if you disrespect or belittle someone in my classroom, if you are unimaginatively critical or unfairly harsh, I will call you on it. This doesn't mean we don't challenge one another, and invest in the progress we all must make together. No, this means that we are compassionate even as we are delivering our thoughts, and in the end we are all on the same team.
So, I hope this gives you a clear sense of what workshops will be like...we will make extensive notes before we arrive, and then we will make *magic* in that room together.
I hope you are all looking forward to this as much as I am.
Prof Deets