Best of OWP: I Loved the Noise

I thought I'd post the pieces of my portfolio for the Oregon Writing Project Summer Institute at Willamette University here, one piece per day, until I've shared them all. Some were already posted as I wrote them, and I won't republish them with their minor revisions. I hope someone enjoys these, gets a flavor for just how valuable the Oregon Writing Project was for me, and decides to check out their own local chapter of the National Writing Project.

I Loved the Noise

I loved the belted-out answers
Students abandoning raised hands
The wide grins because their thinking was good
It was good!
And someone finally told them so.
I loved the side conversation
The speed of the cellphones whipped out and hidden again
when I scowled
The kid who wrote down things I said out-of-context
and read the list at the end of the year.
I loved the groans about reading Shakespeare
The laughter about the innuendo
The lust for violence
The heartbreak at all the right places
The gnashing of teeth when we had to close the book for the day.
I loved the writing
And the writing
And the begging for a little more time to write,
The desperation to share
The feigned reluctance to do so
Which, when overcome, melted like wax
Remolded into something obviously rehearsed
Beloved, approved of by all.
But mostly I loved the noise
The energy expressed in an increasing buzz of volume
And the challenge of giving directions
Without making that urge to noise
That will to think out loud
Go away completely.
“But” they said.

“Everyone seemed to be on task
Interested, engaged, invested

But
It was too loud in your class.”

From the OWP: The Better Teacher

Here's a little piece I wrote today at the Oregon Writing Project. Now I just need to figure out how to track down this former teacher to share it with her.

The Better Teacher

Mrs. Green was a better teacher than I’ll ever be. Only a few years from retirement, she’d watched Withrow High School change from the segregated, all white, highest quality school in Cincinnati Public, to the low-income, all-black school of middling quality, to its current renaissance as the IB magnet serving the now upper-middle class black neighborhood and the few white kids being bussed in by parents who’d white-flighted out a generation before. She commanded the room with utmost authority but always made us all feel valued. A lot of this power came from her ability to recognize our individual needs. Some students needed, more than anything, to break free from the use of double negatives. Others needed to expand their vocabularies with the lists she gave us each Monday and the tests each Friday. I needed a dose of humility.

Mrs. Green could have broken me down. She could have told me, in front of everyone, that I wasn’t as great as I thought I was, that I wasn’t all that and a bag of chips, that I ought to get over myself. I can imagine her remonstrance mimicked in the halls by students who, despite my best efforts to despise them, were right to look askance at the weirdo white kid in the trench coat with the spikes in the epaulets, hiding in his earphones and a paperback novel from the library. He was a freak, angry and scared and full of himself. Mrs. Green could see all of that. She was able to look beyond the arrogance that manifested most fully in her class, where I felt most comfortable with my abilities, and see the kid who was terrified of everything else.

One day she asked me to stay after class. I don’t think I’d been acting out that day. Maybe I’d rolled my eyes one time too many, maybe answered too many questions. More likely, I’d checked out, complete with the slouch that advertised my withdrawal. I don’t remember students “oooo”ing when she asked me to wait, which inclines me to believe she did it in a careful, subtle way.

“Ben,” she said, “I can’t teach you how to be a better writer. You’re already a better writer than I am. But I know some people who can.” And she marched me down to the library and explained how our class would work for the rest of the school year. It was the fall, so this seemed like an eternity. Her plan was simple. Every few days she’d assign me another book to read. When I finished, I had to write her a paper on each one. She knew I could tear through them in a couple days. She didn’t know that I was not, and still am not, a fast reader, and that I kept up this pace by reading on the bus (an hour long ride each way), at home where I hid from the comfortable, overly-perfect suburban life I hated, and yes, in my other classes, where the subjects didn’t come as easily. What she did know was that I would chafe at the idea that the writers she exposed me to were better than me. I would fight back. She wanted me to fight back, to criticize their work, to argue that I could do a better job. I think she had this plan from the beginning.

When I told her I didn’t like a book, she had me read another by the same author. I didn’t like The Scarlet Letter. “Six pages and six years pass with no dialogue,” I whined.

“You didn’t like it? Read The House of the Seven Gables.”

I didn’t like the first book she gave me by Thomas Hardy. So she made me read Far From the Maddening Crowd. I read Turgenev. I read Camus. The more I criticized, the more I read, and now I see that she subtly directed my criticisms, not only pushing me to look deeper but also guiding me to examine the skills she wanted me to work on. Hardy and Hawthorne didn’t make me a better writer. Mrs. Green did. But she never said so.

I don’t think I could tell a student they are a better writer than I am, so I’m not sure I’ll ever be as good a teacher as Mrs. Green. But I can admit that she taught me more than writing. She taught me about teaching.

New Poem: The Prodigy

Here's a new one about (and by) Noah.

The Prodigy

“Hey Dad!” he says
“I call this one ‘Headless Dragon’!”
He aims the squirt gun into the air
Waving it back and forth.
I see it.
The decapitated beast
Serpentine neck
Coiling through the sky
Flailing back and forth
Defeated and enraged
One last lashing
Until it fades.
And I know my son is a poet.
I am proud.

New Poem from OWP about Noah: "Keeping the Fire"

Today, at the Oregon Writing Project, we were asked to read "The Lightkeeper" by Carloyn Forché and write about who keeps the light on for us. I wrote this poem about my son.

Keeping the Fire

We’re the good guys.
We’re keeping the fire.
The man and the boy used this sacred mantra
To carry them down McCarthy’s Road
And when I put down the book
I hugged Noah fiercely
Then waited till he slept
Kissed his forehead
And thanked him.
He once needed me
To change his diapers
To keep him warm
To feed him
To sing, sometimes for hours, until he slept
To wake in the middle of the night to make sure his chest rose and fell
But I always needed him more.
I will always need him more.
He makes me keep the fire.

New Poem: "Strange Defense"

This is a product of a guys-only camping trip my friend Paul invited me to. Paul is the friend in the poem who tried to stick up for me. The antagonist was very drunk when this incident took place. I know that's no excuse, but in vino veritas. I was equally compromised when I wrote this, but I'm pretty satisfied with it the next day, at least enough to post it.

Strange Defense

Don't jew me, the guy says.
My friend points a thumb in my direction
Jew at the table, it says.
Oh, no, I mean like the Jews back in Jesus times.
I see.
He's not an anti-Semite
'Cause he only hates the Jews
Responsible for killing Christ.
I'm not cheap.
They were.
What a relief.

Assignment for OWP: Artist's Statement

Today we went to the art museum on the Willamette University campus. Our assignment was to read an "Artist's Statement" on a plaque on the wall, then find a painting and write a fictional variation by a different artist. Here's mine. I should say that I not only made up much of the biographical information about the painter, but also shifted the date of the painting itself from 1949 back to 1944.

Artist’s Statement
Based on “Driftage” by William Givler



Five years into my position as the dean of the Museum Art School in Portland, I suppose I was getting something of an itch. I’d been teaching there since ’31, so, after 13 years, academia had not only lost some of its luster, but it had begun to rub some of the sheen off of my love for art itself. This bled into my personal life, or perhaps my failing marriage soured my attitude towards work, but by the summer of ’44 I needed a break. Plus, the war was going on. It seemed like the world was going to hell on every level.

A friend let me borrow his beach house that summer, and I set up my easel, prepared my paints, then found myself taking long walks on the beach by day and having one scotch more than I should each evening. I’d listen to swing music and think about how those happy sounds reached the ears of former students of mine stationed in England or Hawaii, or in the bellies of steel leviathans swimming through the Pacific toward Japanese artillery nests. The happier the song, the more bitter the static sounded, like the hissing and popping of great distance, and the whispers of the hollow nature of words about love.

One day I started to paint a pleasant sunset, and I could hear the tinny voices and forced rhymes of love songs in every crashing wave in the painting. Out of frustration, I splattered dark brown-gray paint over the sun, then swirled the thick spots into a giant piece of driftwood on the beach. The soft pink clouds became bloodstained harbingers of a coming storm. I added my wife in the foreground, her back to me, hair whipping in the wind. Exceeding the impressionism of the rest of the painting, her hand looks particularly unfinished. That’s because I stopped there, stepped back, and looked at what I’d done. Not only had I eclipsed the sun, but I’d filled the world with horror. I wanted to reach into the painting, to take my wife’s hand, to finish it with my own.

The painting itself went on to win awards, to find fancy homes for itself, first in galleries, then in private collections, then museums. But it did me a greater service. The painting sent me home from the beach, back to the job I’d forgotten I enjoyed, back to the art I’d committed to, back to the wife I love.

And I left the scotch behind to warm my friend’s cold beach house. I didn’t need it anymore.

From OWP: "The Gift"

As a part of our classes for the Oregon Writing Project, we model lessons for one another which we can perform in our own classes for our students during the year. Today (yesterday, technically), one of our excellent lessons, by Teri Daniels, focused on writing memoirs. This piece really surprised me. Teri had us write a list of some formative events during our lives, and thanks to her instruction I avoided some that seemed more important, but were cliches or lacked surprise or conflict. I'm glad she guided me to this one. I had no idea it would have any emotional resonance for me at all, but when I shared it I found I was almost crying in front of these people I've known for four days.

This is dedicated to my mom, as it was written on her birthday.


The Gift

Home movies make legends of seemingly innocuous events. Seeing myself on tape warps the memory, so that I remember myself from the outside as much as from the inside. On the screen, the restaurant’s dark lighting makes my skin look even more pale. I’m opening my birthday gifts, so my head is turned down, my dark hair obscuring my face. I pull the items out of the box one by one. My mother, who is behind the camera, is so excited she can barely contain herself. I part the tissue paper and pull out the first item, a travel journal.

“Okay?” I say.

Then I pull out a small, round piece of fabric. I unfold it. It’s black, circular, and about as big as my hand. It’s slightly domed. Since I’m not a practicing Jew, it takes me a second to recognize a Yarmulke. I still don’t get it.

“Keep going,” Mom says. “There’s something else.”

I pull out a small, thin, blue book. I still don’t get it. I open it and see my own picture. Now the camera is watching me look into a book at myself.

Then I put it all together. On the camera, my head pops up. My mom nearly screams. My dad’s laugh starts out low, then gets higher as he shifts from his joy at the gift to amusement at my response.

Only, this part I can remember without the camera. The shock of the moment, of realizing I’ll be going with my dad on the tour he’s leading to Israel and Greece, fires up a highway in my 33-year-old brain that was paved so deeply in that eleven-year-old’s that it has weathered all the traffic in between.

“I get to go?” I look at Dad. Then Mom. Only she’s holding the camera, so on the screen I’m looking right out and all my wonder is visible, even in the dim light.

“You’re going with me,” Dad says.

I have no idea the trip will change my life, will alter the way I see the world, the way I associate previously compartmentalized pieces of information. Jerusalem will do that; link family and ancestors, war and faith, God and dusty stones, history and emotion. But I haven’t been there yet. I’m eleven, and I just know I’m special. I’m lucky. I’m going.

Oregon Writing Project: What Color Are You? Poem

As I do my homework to prepare for the Summer Institute of the Oregon Writing Project at Willamette University, I thought I'd post my attempts here. I'm pretty pleased with this one. Today's prompt:

Assignment #12
What color are you? Write a poem using similes and metaphors to compare you to colors.

What Color Am I?

“The thoroughly well-informed man--that is the modern ideal. And the mind of the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-a-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value.”

-Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray


There is a small bookshop in my town,
Where tall shelves, eight feet high
Stand shoulder to shoulder, leaning over thin aisles
And each is nine months and two weeks pregnant with books.

Used, tattered, their spines lined from over-reading
Pages dog-eared, dust jackets missing,
Cardboard peeking through the corners of the covers
Or paperbacks, bent by back pockets
Their artwork lined and faded.

In this shop a book is hiding.
From some Paleozoic era before glossy jackets
It’s covered in fabric.
Most was once bright red, now sickly pink
But the spine was gray, is gray, shall be gray.
The pages were once white, now yellowed.

Outside, I am the colors of that book
Pale pink and yellowed-white and gray
But inside, in the darkness of the closed cover
I am monsters and romance and heroes and tragedy
Or a biography of a forgotten poet,
Or do-it-yourself carpentry projects,
Or a collection of essays on semiotics and post-modernism.
Perhaps there are full color photographs.

A cover does not know the colors of its pages
And when I think I am black and white
Symbols ordered into words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters
I fear
A rainbow of Greek and Sanskrit
Straining to describe colors that have not been named.

Oregon Writing Project: Brainstorm about Nicknames

As I do my homework to prepare for the Summer Institute of the Oregon Writing Project at Willamette University, I thought I'd post my attempts here. Today's prompt:

Brainstorm- a list of all the nicknames you’ve ever had, thinking back to childhood, camp, sports and family get-togethers. Try for a baker’s dozen or so and word process the list. Any patterns revealed? Focus on a particular nickname that you loved or hated. When you say it, where does it carry you?

Ben
Benjamin Douglas Gorman (when in trouble)
Benji
Ben Kenobi
Benedict Arnold
Gorman
Ninjaben
Moby-Wan
Pelón

I’m not sure if it’s something intrinsic to my name, or to my personality, but based on the list of nicknames I can remember, it seems I don’t earn many. The story of how I shot down “Benji” as a young child has become a legend in my family; though I don’t remember the incident I have heard it recounted many times. Some older person in my mother’s congregation in a small town in Michigan called me Benji during the coffee hour one Sunday morning, and I spun on the person and shouted “Benji’s for dogs!” The nickname wasn’t used again, and I guess I decided this strategy might work for other things, because the next time I was served re-fried beans (which I hate) I shouted, “Beans are for dogs!” and wasn’t forced to eat them again. Missing from the story is the fact that my parents must have laid down the law about these outbursts at some point after that. Otherwise, I’d be going around yelling that my pet-peeves are “for dogs” and wondering why that doesn’t make them go away.

Ben Kenobi and Benedict Arnold were attempts at insults when I was in the early years of elementary school. Of course, no one really knew who Benedict Arnold was, and as a Star Wars geek I probably wasn’t properly offended by the Ben Kenobi reference, so they didn’t stick.

My favorite of the bunch was coined by my wife. Back in college, my now-wife, then-girlfriend Paige would often come over and hang out in my dorm room, where a group would gather to watch TV, eat Ramen noodles, and even occasionally do homework. I have a tendency to hover. Rather than simply sitting down, I pace when on the phone, and sometimes I prefer to stand behind the couch to watch TV. I also move quietly, especially when barefoot. Once, while watching TV, Paige looked up and found me standing behind her, watching over her shoulder. I startled her pretty badly, and she shouted that I was like a “Ninjaben”. That stuck, and she still calls me that sometimes out of nowhere.

The next on the list was an attempt at an insult which failed marvelously. While walking across the courtyard at Newberg High School, where I worked as an Ed. Assistant before becoming a teacher, a student I didn’t know shouted it at me. I think it was an attempt to make fun of me for being bald by associating me with the singer Moby, but I was instantly reminded of the kids in first grade trying to get a rise out of me by calling me Ben Kenobi, and my face lit up with delight. The student didn’t know that my first name was Ben (even the students in our classes rarely know we have first names) so his joke was more clever than he could imagine. I beamed at him and told him I liked that one, and he looked crushed. After that I used it as a password for my email for a while.

To some extent, the same thing happened with Pelón. My Spanish speakers called me that, first sheepishly, waiting to see if I’d be offended. I had to ask around to find out that it means “baldy” and is slightly derogatory, but I like the sound of it. Unlike “baldy”, the strong emphasis on the accented last syllable makes it sound like a particularly powerful title, like the nickname people might be forced to use for a mustachioed South American dictator to express feigned affection. I loved introducing myself as Pelón on parent-teacher conference nights; the parents would be shocked that their kids called me that, and when I told them that I didn’t mind it immediately made them more comfortable with me, since, despite the sound to my gringo ears, it made me less of an authority figure. After introducing myself as “Mr. Gorman, the one your kids call Pelón,” to a room full of parents, most were instantly on my side, though a few did come up to me and tell me I should not let them call me that, as it isn’t respectful enough. I’d then tell them that their particular child didn’t actually use that nickname for me, as he or she had obviously been raised better, and those parents would like me, too.

I heard my full name a lot, as a kid, when I’d misbehave. Apparently that didn’t work, because, in college, my then-girlfriend (now-wife) would use it the same way when I’d cross the line and say something tactless in public. As I do that a lot, my friends heard it all the time. One friend, Phil, confided in me that I was the only person in the whole school whose middle name he knew, for precisely that reason.

Ultimately, I suppose that makes my full name the nickname that suits me best. Ninjaben might sound cooler, Pelón might be useful, and Moby-Wan might be the most clever, but I have to concede that my full name is the one most often demanded by my words and actions. So when I inevitably cross the line and make some crass joke, feel free to scowl and hiss, “Benjamin Douglas Gorman!”

But don’t call me Benji. Benji is for dogs.

Oregon Writing Project: Song

As I do my homework to prepare for the Summer Institute of the Oregon Writing Project at Willamette University, I thought I'd post my attempts here. Today's prompt:

Song: Choose a song that has your name in it and tell the story of how it was written for you, or make up a song with your name in it.

(With apologies to Layli, Neil, Teri, Mariko, Jim, and Mari who have the misfortune to happen to be in the class for which this is written.)

How Do You Write a Song About Benjamin?

(Sung to the tune of (How Do You Solve a Problem Like) "Maria" from The Sound of Music)

The emphasis is on the first,
It has syllables three.
Try to find it in lyrics on Google,
And you will quickly see
No one writes songs about Benjamin.
I guess it will have to be me.
I have a feeling this will come out badly!

It doesn’t sound like English.
We don’t mix our “n” and “j”.
Try to think of some examples
You’ll ponder it all day
Shoe-horning it into a chorus?
I don’t think there’s a way.
I have a feeling this will come out badly!

I’m not trying to be cynical.
My detachment is clinical… oh!

How do you write a song about Benjamin?
The name doesn’t fit in any rhyme.
How do you write a song about Benjamin?
And who would think that it was worth the time?

Many a name you know would fit in better.
Many a name could fit into a song.
Try Layli or Neil or Teri
Mariko or Jim or Mari
But Benjamin will always come out wrong.

How do you write a song about Benjamin?
This Sound of Music rip-off is so long!

And the man with such a name?
He is not the one to blame.
Nor are his parents who thought for the best
But their son takes on this job
And comes off like a snob
He’s a show-off, and a braggart, and a pest.

He knows what folks will think
It makes him want to drink
When he thinks of the way this song will bore us.
But he likes this prompt a day
His wife says, “No F---ing way.”
She thinks he’s crazy. Oh no! Not the chorus!

How do you write a song about Benjamin?
The name doesn’t fit in any rhyme.
How do you write a song about Benjamin?
And who would think that it was worth the time?

Many a name you know would fit in better.
Many a name could fit into a song.
Try Layli or Neil or Teri
Mariko or Jim or Mari
But Benjamin will always come out wrong.

How do you write a song about Benjamin?
This Sound of Music rip-off is so long!