word

Rethinking the red pen

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Grace promised to loan me a fine point pen with which to mark a stack of summaries. I opened her pencil case and found only a red one.

“I need a black one. All you have is red?”

“Yeah.” Grace, who sat across a table piled high with her homework and mine, looked at me quizzically.

“I can’t write on my students’ work with red ink.”

“Sure you can,” said Grace. “And, why not?”

“Well, because the red pen is perceived as… harsh, um, kind of censoring. A pencil, or even a green pen, seems kinder.”

Grace got that Mom, You’re a Lunatic look on her face. “I wouldn’t mind the red pen.”

“You wouldn’t?”

She sighed. “If I used perfect penmanship to write something, and then the teacher wrote on it with red pen and messy handwriting, that would be bad and probably hurt my feelings. But if the teacher has nice handwriting like you, Mom, and wrote carefully with a red pen on top of a student’s nice work, I wouldn’t mind.” Continue reading →

Friend of the author

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On Monday night, September 13, I was a guest and volunteer at my friend Jan Donley‘s book-signing event at Lineage.

Weeks ago on Facebook I posted this status message: “[Jane Kokernak] is not an event ‘mingler.’ Give her a job to do — coat check, for example — and she’ll knock your socks off.” The message captured my feeling after I attended an MIT event at which I had a job to do. I wasn’t hanging out, self-consciously chatting people up and trying to penetrate small-group conversations. Instead, I was there, by request, to examine student work and ask questions. At other events, I have distributed name badges, guarded doors, and cleared the dinner detritus. In each case, the assigned role made me comfortable enough to do well and have a great time.

Back to my status message. On it, Jan commented, “Hmmm… we might have a job for you at the book launch.” She and her spouse, Diane Felicio, invited me to handle proceeds at the book-signing table. “Of course!,” I practically bleated.

On Monday night, I showed up. I talked to my mysterious friend T. and others, drank wine, ate little crab cakes and figs with bleu cheese, listened to Jan read, saw Diane in her far out dress, clapped for Greater Boston PFLAG (the event’s beneficiary), and played cashier as the author signed books. Of course, I enjoyed it.

And a couple of weeks before, when I read The Side Door, Jan’s first novel, I thoroughly enjoyed that, too.

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Event photograph by Diane Hammer.

Wintry thoughts

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Today in Boston it’s the same kind of beautiful weather we had 9 years ago, when we spent much of our day looking up at the sky, flooded by what we could not absorb or understand.

It was not a skating day. Still, a year later it was hope for winter weather that made me reflect on September 11, 2001 in my 650-word essay, “A Hunger for Ice.” Link.

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Photograph, “Ice Skating,” by prudencebrown121 on Flickr via creativecommons.org

Unpretty potatoes and their lessons

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There are beautiful ideas, and there is reality.

I learned this from a tutor I was training, several years ago, when I worked in the Simmons College writing program. Her name was Kristin, and she told our group about a time she absolutely could not write a paper, although she had “written it in her head,” and it was perfect. So she went to her professor, and she told him about this perfect, imagined paper and how she was unable to write it. He said to her, “All you have now is a beautiful idea. And beautiful ideas are not writing.” He handed her a lined, yellow pad of paper and looked at the clock. “I’ll be back in two hours. Write,” he said. Kristin sat at a desk in the hallway and wrote. And what she produced was less perfect than what she imagined producing, and yet it was real. The words existed in the world and did not merely float in her head. “There,” the professor said. And the paper turned out to be neither good nor bad, Kristin told us.

If a creative person has high hopes for her work, she must learn to tolerate the gap between the idea and its manifestation.

Harvest done. Things arranged.

Yesterday I completely harvested my first crop of potatoes. I waited for the soil to dry from a previous rain, and then I clawed around each plant, exposing the stalks to the first potato. One at a time I grasped the plant down near the exposed soil line and pulled gently and with a little vibration, as though wiggling a tooth out. I piled up the stalks on the driveway. I piled up the potatoes — gold, red, and purple — on dry newspaper. My dark shirt absorbed the sun and my scapula were like hot wings. Continue reading →

Plunge into illness

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My short essay, “Diabetes Diagnosis, Before and After,” appears today in ASweetLife. Link.

Excerpt:

More than 18 years have passed since my diagnosis day; in that time, I’ve injected or bolused insulin at least 26,280 times, and never mind how many units. I’ve pricked my finger and tested my blood almost 40,000 times and counted and eaten more than 900,000 grams of carbohydrates. There have been many moments when the immensity of my task has been so overwhelming that I have stood at my kitchen counter with a syringe or insertion set poised in my uncooperative hand and said to myself, “Jane, just do this one.”

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Image of syringes & insulin by DeathByBokeh at Flickr via Creative Commons.

Road not taken

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While a junior at Wellesley College, I developed a crush on my not-young history professor. These things happen all the time in education — students falling for professors, and sometimes the inverse too — and perhaps even more so in single-sex environments.

It turns out I was more comfortable with my fantasies of conducting a romance with him than I was with the reality. During a moment in his office, it seemed as though Professor Zimmer (a pseudonym) was offering me an invitation, and I, out of good sense or fear or both, turned away.

That was the end of our story, but not the end of the story for me. The crush and the offer and his later, early death have taken root in my imagination, and again and again in my life I have pulled them out to consider them. About the place of this memory in my life I wrote an essay, “Dead and Gone.” The moment when the flimsiness of the crush encounters the cold fist of reality is described here:

The room was still, my body pinned in the chair and in space. Without moving my eyes, I watched the dust sparkle again in the air between us, and I looked at him and I did not look away. This was a test, and I wanted to pass it.

The office was his, and the silence was his to disrupt. “You know, if you ever want to talk about your major, or the class, we could meet again. In the afternoon, or later. We could even go get a beer.” There was a pause. “Sometimes I’m free in the evening.” And he looked at me without looking away.

I felt as though I was being dared: dared to be the object of attention, dared to interpret his offer, dared to say, Yes, I’d love to. I sat there, pinned and thinking. And the big billboard of my romantic fantasy gave way and fell into pieces. I saw us meeting in the parking lot near the town grocery store after dark, and him pulling up in the kind of old Volvo that all the professors drove and pushing open the passenger side door and me getting in, and me ducking down below the dash so nobody could see me as we drove and drove and drove away from town to somewhere he would take us. And on the floor of this car I saw all the crap that’s always on the floor of these cars, because as a babysitter for other professors and their children I had driven these cars and ferried children not my own around town in them, and I recognized the bits of cereal and plastic lunch baggies and receipts and the discarded envelopes of mail opened in the car and the gloves and winter grit and the floor mats askew. And I had plenty of time to study this stuff on the floor because my head was tucked down, and there was no view out the window for me, because I was hiding — he was hiding me — and this, I suddenly saw, is how our time together outside of school would be.

“Thank you,” was all I could say out loud. I had no words for whether I would consider history or not, meeting or not, because suddenly I knew that all I wanted was to remove myself from what would only, it seemed then, become sordid. Old car, old motel room in some other town, old dirt.

A few of my readers have seen this essay in draft, and their feedback and encouragement helped shape it. Thank you again.

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Photograph, “Volvo Dashboard,” by Jean Pichot on flickr via creativecommons.org

Scourge of the season

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We are well into summer, so it must be time for a head lice outbreak. More and more people searching for “head lice” and “lice treatments” and “nitpicker” and so on have found their way to my blog recently because I have commented on this topic before. And WBUR recently did a story on the parasites.

While lice, at first, are appalling, they are not so disgusting after you get used to them. I describe my fascination with head lice, and the physical closeness they prompted between me and Eli, Lydia, and Grace, in my researched essay “Little Creatures,” which was originally published in P•M•S poemmemoirstory 9. Here’s a taste:

I dip the fine-toothed louse comb into a container of burning hot water and swirl. Captured ones float for a few moments before sinking. The lice are dark enough in the container of water that I can count them. Occasionally the count seems not to add up so I hold the comb up near my eyes to look for bodies trapped like seeds in human teeth and find them there, suspended sideways between the plastic teeth. Their lash-like legs, scurrying in air, seem always to move in this workmanlike way, regardless of footing, unable to take me in as a threat, not afraid of me as a predator in the way that mice are afraid. I make my thumb and forefinger into pliers and close over the head and tail of each and drag it down the space between tines. I feel the substance, like nut meat, and I imagine eating them. I do this enough times so I think always of eating them when they are pinched in my fingers like this. It would be so easy to eat them that I feel drawn to doing it in the way I feel drawn to letting my body go over the barrier at the edge of the falls or on the upper level of an open air parking garage. It’s that close.

I do not eat them. It’s not something that I would do.

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Image credit: wikimedia commons.

Be still, my research heart.

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At least twice a week, I walk down the long hallway that is glassed on one side with giant windows that look out on the courtyard outside Hayden Library. I look, and I imagine sitting out at one of the tables and reading in the roofless room, enclosed on four sides and open to the sky. Sheltered/exposed. I look, but I don’t go through the door. And no one else seems to. We’re busy.

Finally, though, it’s a beautiful day, and I have an errand taking me to Hayden. Through Google Scholar I have found citations to three published articles relevant to my Elizabeth White project. I get coffee at the Clover truck. I head to the library and go through the door. Others have the same idea: there are two young women, with an open laptop, sitting at one table and talking, and there is another young woman at a smaller table, reading. I choose the steps, sit half in sun and half in shade, read a reprint of a pamphlet written by White, and drink the coffee. Already I am happy, like a bee among daisies.

Coffee done, pamphlet read, I head down to the library basement, where the old bound journals cohabitate on those movable shelves. Down there I whiff the minerals of concrete and dust. The air seems to hum, but only because it’s so quiet, and I know that fluorescent lights are supposed to hum. The semester is over; I am alone.

I find the call number for the citations in National Geographic Magazine. Frederick Coville, the USDA botanist to whom Elizabeth White offered her family farm, Whitesbog, as an experimental agricultural station in the 1910s, published three articles in that decade that will help me with my project. Two are on blueberries: one published before White discovered Coville, and one after White and Coville bred a cultivated blueberry that could be farmed. Another article is on the first World War and the U.S. government’s concerns with the food supply in Europe.

Old books have a sour smell, not unlike the tang of expired milk or the acid of bile. When I was a girl and I would open a book with this particular smell in the library and breathe it in, I would consider it mildly vomit-y. I love this smell, and as I open each heavy book I drink it.

Facing the National Geos are a stack of skinny newspapers. I slide one off the top; it’s Harper’s from 1869. Amazing, I think, that this treasure is out on the shelf and I am trusted to put my human hand on it. It flakes along the fold when I open it wide. Carefully, as though it’s a sheet of glass, I close and arrange it back into place.

My friend Rosemary, doing her own research this summer, offhandedly described her surroundings as “musty old archives,” and reported that our mutual friend, Susan, herself an archivist, first took umbrage at the characterization and then softened: “Perhaps we [archivists] should embrace it.”

Ah, friends, yes. For those of us whose pulse quickens as our steps shuffle down to the library basement, hands open leather-covered and cool pages, eyes delight in the accumulated dust, and noses inhale the sour cloud of old ink while eardrums vibrate with the hum of what is surely our own heart: embrace it all.

Rejection is impractical.

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I recognized the handwriting on the envelope as my own. A SASE, returned to me by the editors of a literary journal. More like the interns of a literary journal.

I opened it and found a flyer for next year’s literary contest. Over and over I flipped this one-page flyer, looking for a handwritten note, saying something like, “Thanks, Jane, but no.” Wordprocessed and photocopied text is all I found.

At last I actually read the photocopy. I studied it even. Ah ha! After the announcement of next year’s contest are listed the winners of this year’s competition, which I had entered. I am not among those listed, and so I deduced that — although no text is actually addressed to me — I did not place in the contest and, furthermore, I will not be published by this journal.

Hmm, thanks a lot for the completely impersonal and oblique reply, oh literary journal. It would have been a step up, you know, to receive a form letter: “Dear Writer, We have read work. It is not right for our publication. Good luck elsewhere. Sincerely, The Editors.” In fact, I would have preferred such a direct form letter. Photocopied notices of next year’s contest are not very good communicators of the “no, thanks.”

“You know what I want?” I said to Jimmy, as we stood in our kitchen, with this blue piece of paper in my hand. “I want to learn something about my writing from the rejection letter.” Here are what might be good responses. I could even imagine a literary journal creating a form letter with check boxes. Even one of these items, checked, would teach me something about my work:

  • No thank you. This still feels like a draft to us.
  • No thank you. This doesn’t fit with our editorial vision or sensibility.
  • No thank you. Honestly, we are overloaded with stuff right now, and your essay did not grab us on the first page, so we didn’t keep reading.
  • No thank you. This is potentially really interesting, but it’s too long for what it is.
  • No thank you. We really prefer to publish the Under 40 and Fabulous Crowd, and this is not that.

While I do see the benefits of preparing one’s work for submission, this kind of rejection is totally impractical. It’s like hitting a tennis ball against the back of the school wall, again, and again, and again. Sure, it’s activity, and it seems relevant to the actual playing of tennis, but it’s not deliberate practice and it won’t get ya nowhere in the game. There’s return, but no feedback.

Jimmy said two things. “You know, you have the platform to publish the essay yourself.” He’s right, and I will.

Then he handed me a 4 x 6″ postcard he got in the mail from Starbucks. “Have this,” he said.

Congratulations

FREE
DRINK

We’ll make you any drink you like.

I’ll take the free coffee. It’ll end up being more personalized than the blue flyer I got from the journal.

Potato farmer’s progress

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new potato plant, June 11

I have been wanting to report on the progress of my first attempt at potato growing, and I have been wanting to try Vuvox, a multi-media slide and collage making tool on the web. Two-for-one: I composed a story, with pictures and video, of the first weeks with my potato patch.

Note: My potatoes and Vuvox are still in beta. If you go to the Vuvox potato show, click on the play arrow and let it run through. (If you hold the cursor arrow in the collage field, you can control the speed and direction of the show, but the slide bar is clunky and to be avoided.) When you see the arrow for the video of rototilling, you can click on that, too. It all won’t take very long: 1 minute or so.

Where did I get the instructions for how to grow potatoes? The Maine Potato Lady, of course. Go to her site, and click on “Growing Potatoes Successfully” for a one-page PDF. And because she was out of seed potatoes by the time I was ready to order them, I got them instead from the Gerritsens of Wood Prairie Farm in Maine.