Why Natalee Caple teaches brand-new CanLit (and why you should, too!)

In case you missed it, novelist and English professor Natalee Caple contributed a brilliant guest post to the QWF Writes blog called "Why I teach Brand-New CanLit." 

I urge you to read the original post, but I am going to quote at length from it here about her excellent reasons for teaching new Canadian books, even when it makes her job as a professor (in terms of constantly redesigning her syllabi and lecture notes, etc.) harder:

• The books are never out of print.
• Pre-ordering books helps to let the publisher and the bookstore know that the titles are desired.
• The material is often quite relevant to students’ daily lives. This allows students to identify better with the settings, characters and scenarios.
• Authors are accessible, alive and often available to Skype into the classroom so that students can ask them questions directly.
• Student presentations are much better. Instead of Googling a biography and retyping a handful of academic quotes they have to read the whole book (they do complain about this).
• Student essays are much better. Their close reading skills really improve because that is all they have to rely on.
• Student confidence in their own readings improves. Because they don’t have to compete with the scholarly opinions of experts they learn that it is okay to rely on and develop faith in their own readings. This causes them to engage more deeply and so…
• Students get better marks. When they see this they start to appreciate the work they did.
• Students become more willing to take risks in thinking.
• Plagiarism is greatly reduced. In fact, because a brand new book is so unlikely to have essays on it in circulation, to plagiarize really means paying someone to create an essay. Far fewer students are willing to take this extra step as it requires more planning and seems somehow more actively dishonest.
• Canadian culture is reinforced as real and ongoing, lively, diverse and present.
• Book sales show up in a timely fashion for authors. Titles get circulating at a time when it is most beneficial. We all know that numbers have become incredibly important to the sale of future books and that there is some self-fulfilling prophesy there.
• I get to stay engaged with my peers in the writing community. I am giving them my support and staying on top of my field.
• I get to read all the books I wanted to anyway and call it work! Did I say that it is my dream job?

Isn't this amazing? I can say that as an aspiring writer in university, it was completely life-changing (and ambition-fueling) to read contemporary Canadian Literature in the classroom. One professor assigned Strange Heaven as an extra-credit assignment in an Atlantic Fiction course and mentioned how Lynn Coady had been a student in his classroom not that many years earlier. (And I felt affirmed, somehow, to hear that she was quiet in class, like me.) I can only imagine how much more galvanized I would have been if I had had the opportunity to meet or Skype in class with one of the writers whose work I had read and studied. 

I also strongly agree that close reading develops crucial critical faculties. Education shouldn't be all about research and organizational skills, important as those are. When students begin grappling with texts on their own and developing their own arguments, learning becomes more profound and, I think, more rewarding. But Natalee has already covered all this more succinctly in her original post....

...so I'll just add that as a published writer, it has truly been a privilege to be invited into several classrooms where students have read and studied my work. The experience has been incredibly positive -- and instructive, too. Students actively engaged in trying to make sense of a text will ask very incisive questions. And of course it is intensely rewarding to know that students are reading and engaging with your work at that level. I might even go so far as to say there is almost nothing MORE rewarding for me as a writer. This is the kind of knowledge that gets you through the occasional long bad days of struggling to finish the next story or novel, slogging away at the day job unjamming another photocopier, or thinking about people with business degrees who make eight zillion times more money, etc.

So all of you wonderful, lovely, gorgeous Canadian Literature professors out there: please consider teaching brand-new CanLit!

Alma Mater Matters and a trip to Ottawa

You know when something is so perfect that you don’t know how to write about it without somehow diminishing it?

Even two three four weeks out from the event I did at the College of the Humanities at Carleton University, I’m not sure what I can say about it that would do it justice. I really had the nicest time!

Before I went to Ottawa, I thought a lot about what I remembered from my university classes as part of my Humanities degree, and I realized it's hard to predict what will stick with you. I jotted down a few of the random facts that have lingered in my mind in the dozen or so years since I graduated. I listed a few of them at the beginning of my reading, and I'm sharing a couple of them here upon request: 

• Paradise is shaped like a multifoliate rose 


• Flatterers are found in the 8th circle of hell 


• Ezekiel cut his beard into three parts (which, respectively, were burned, chopped, and  thrown to the wind)   

So basically the recesses of my mind belong mostly to Dante and the Old Testament. 

I also dug out some of my old notebooks from university and flipped through them to see what I'd frantically underlined or highlighted in my notes as critically important knowledge from our Humanities lectures. 

Pack rat or archivist: you decide.

Here are some of the choice phrases I’d highlighted in my notes:

• Socratic speech is always adapted to suit the interlocutor.


• The experience of transcendence also involves the experience of immanence.


• Happiness is contemplation.


• There is an erotic compulsion to intellectual virtue.

Yep.

After my random reminiscing, I did a reading from Bone & Bread and a Q & A with Ottawa poet David O’Meara. David did some one-on-one feedback sessions with aspiring College writers back in the day and very helpfully stopped me from writing like a Victorian. So it was fun to be able to thank him in person and chat about writing, too. 

Everyone was incredibly generous with their questions and comments, and it was lovely to see old friends and former professors in the audience. I never imagined speaking in that lecture hall and having my (revered!) profs ask me questions about the creative process. It was humbling and thrilling all at once.

There were old friends from Carleton, former classmates and teachers...even a girl I used to babysit! But one of the most exciting reunions was with B., my dearest and very best friend from Grade 1/2, and her mom, who was my fourth grade teacher...and my first serious editor. (The editing is another post for another time.)

B, me, and Mrs. D

I wish I'd taken more photos, but my phone was in danger of powering down all day. I popped back into the seminar room before we headed out to dinner to snap this one: 

A different perspective on my old lecture hall...the front!

After the talk and the reception, there was an alumni reunion dinner. It was so wonderful to catch up with everyone and find out what they’re doing now. There were also old issues of our College literary journal, including some poems of mine I'd completely forgotten about! I was happy both to be reminded of them (okay, of some of them) and to have them restored to me with just a couple of quick photos.

Catching up with former profs/old friends

My friend K came to get me (after a complicated series of back and forth texts in which we realized that even though both of us went to Carleton, neither of us could remember any meeting place accessible by car well enough to describe it to the other person), and after I changed into pyjamas and took a couple of Tylenols (some kind of strange stress headache had taken hold the minute the talk was over) and actually gotten into bed and turned the light out, I managed to touch base with my Winnipeg writer friends and ended up having a long-distance meeting until about midnight Ottawa time. So fun! I keep forgetting about the magic of Skype.

The magic of Skype: illustrated! 

And if all that wasn't already an absurd amount fun to pack into 36 hours, the next day friend K gave me a private cross-country skiing lesson.  Maybe next time I'll fully graduate to poles. And her lovely parents cooked a delicious early supper so we could eat together before I had to catch my train home. 

K said I was a natural, and I almost believe her!

Coffee badgers, Chinese New Year, and Carleton University

• This morning I made coffee for the first time in a couple of weeks, and unfortunately it was crazy strong!  Now I have the shakes and a burrowing anxiety badger in my chest.  Not to mention an upset stomach. Eeeep.  If anyone has a sure-fire method for combating this unruly animal, let me know. My techniques so far include exercise (best), drinking hot water (pretty good), eating something carb-y to send myself into a sugar crash (untrackable but probably terrible), and complaining about it on the internet (acceptable).


• K came for a fun visit for a few days this week, which means we have now officially had our first overnight houseguest! Another milestone for our new home. 


• We had a wonderful Chinese New Year celebration on Saturday, with singing and dancing and glitter and new slippers and tons of delicious food. Thanks to the hosts and the cooks and the fellow attendees for a great evening. Happy Year of the Horse! 


• I started reading A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki, which I’m really enjoying so far. A friend of mine listened to the audiobook, and I have to remember to ask her how on earth they handled the footnotes in that format. 


• I was so sad to hear about Philip Seymour Hoffmann and I’ve been growing sadder by the day as my original disbelief has faded.  Knowing he was in a movie was enough to make me watch anything, and it’s terrible to think of all the performances the world will be missing out on now.  His death is another tragic reminder that addiction is an indiscriminate killer.     


• It was lovely to see a review of Bone & Bread in Room Magazine here! And even more jaw-dropping to see my upcoming event at the College of the Humanities plugged yesterday on the front page of the Carleton University website (as one of a rotating series of pictures…click through if you don’t see it at first). Seeing it was a pretty gratifying moment for me. 


• Speaking of which, I’m not sure how to approach taking the podium at my old lecture hall. It’s a little bit intimidating to think about! However, I feel really honoured to have been asked, and the honour is outweighing the nerves at this point. If you’re going to be in Ottawa on Saturday, why don’t you stop by? I’m looking forward to the alumni dinner that will follow --- I wonder if any other graduates of 2002 will be there?