Everything Comes From Seed

I'm not quite halfway through The Best American Essays of the Century, a book that I bought at Bookman's for nine dollars in trade credit over a year ago, maybe more. I bought it because I teach people how to write essays, and I have a philosophy of learning that involves learning from examples, and examples labeled "the best" by Joyce Carol Oates and Robert Atwan are worth learning from. I gave myself permission to read an essay a day or so. I have not kept that pace, but I do find the time to read here and there, so I'm slowly making my way through.

I have made discoveries while reading this book--really, while piling the readings up in my head, one essay by one essay, each a few years down the road from the one I read before it, each a record of how ideas are moving along the century.

1. Race Relations and Civil Rights permeate much deeper into the soil of American History than I realized (or was taught, really). It seems like one of every three or four essays tackles some varied perspective on minorities and majorities in our nation. The four that stick in my head are W.E.B. Du Bois's "On the Coming of John" (education, black/white, poverty), John Jay Chapman's "Coatesville" (repentence of racial crimes whose perpetrators were acquitted), Richard Wright's "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow: An Autobiographical Sketch" (education of a different, social, everyday sort), and Langston Hughes's "Bop" (pop culture's roots in dark dark things)

2. Writing that is worth reading is the process of a careful mind exploring simple moments, questions, or ideas. The ideas themselves do not need to be complicated. Hughes lays out a conversation between two black men about bebop music. James Agee, in "Knoxville: Summer of 1915," puts the evenings in his boyhood neighborhood under the poetic miscroscope. E.B. White writes about revisiting a lake, a place that he visited with his father, as a father himself in "Once More to the Lake." These are not complicated things, but the essays are beautiful, exact, detailed, and careful.

3. Organization is any structure an author uses to prop up his ideas; there are no rules--only control. I've told students before that, while teachers may ask for certain parts of particular structures, in the real world, all that readers ask is that the author seem like he is in control, that he knows where the writing is going. However an author can do that is okay by the public. These essays are examples of that. Wright goes so far as to build his essay in sections marked by roman numerals. They are conversational in tone and include dialect in dialogue, and are of varied length, but the roman numerals shows the reader that Wright knows where he's starting and stopping. He knows the limits of each story, and he lets each one live fully within those limits.

I think these discoveries could work to benefit a class full of learning writers.

The fact that race relations is such an integral thread to American life could spur a class to write about their own experiences living in multicultural environments, about their own life-lessons about "how it is" in terms of stereotypes and racial interactions and what can be done to move "how it is" toward "how it could be."

The idea of growing an essay from a simple idea could be important to the direction given. The work a student should do is not the work of diciphering an assigment; instead, it should be the work of taking a simple question or idea (either given by a teacher or unearthed from life) and mapping it, dissecting it, exploring it, and recording what is found.

Organization and control may be the most difficult to grade, but may also be fun to teach. It would allow a conversation between teacher and student in which the student is the owner of the idea--and of the presentation of the idea--and the teacher is the mentor+audience. In this mode, the student can discover and attempt to record, and the teacher can react, ask questions, and give gentle suggestions to mold people who can control the wild ideas in their heads that sneak around like mice or flail like loosed fire hoses. The only rule is: learn to control the idea, to package it so it can be unpacked and understood.