Words Words Words Words!

A friend studying the indigenous people of the Chiapas region in Mexico reports that in the  Tzotzil language there, the word for word is the same as the word for struggle. Hmm.

     What writer doesn’t struggle each day to unearth the good word, the right word, the sculpted or edgy;  tufted or twangling; the flawless gem to take its place in the mosaic we see in our minds?

       We trawl for the perfect verb. Scour horizons for the dead-on noun. Beat our feet on the mud hoping the adjective we’ve been stalking will bubble up from the goo. Bubble, burble, bauble, bosh, scrim, scram, scrum, flapdoodle, flummoxed, umber, ululate. Acres of choices, the misfits, or almost fits so many, the perfect fits, so few.   

            “Word: (n.) …A single distinct conceptual unit of language, comprising inflected and variant forms.”

            “Struggle :( n.) …a determined effort under difficulties…a very difficult task.”

            Difficult indeed.

            Is our hero sizzled, soused, blotto or shickered?

             Did he drink from a flask, a flagon, or a stein?

            Is he an oaf, or a galoot?

            In a 2013 New Yorker piece, the nonfiction stylist John McPhee (In Suspect Terrain; Coming into the Country) describes his system for finding “le mot juste,” that elusive word:    “You draw a box not only around any word that does not seem quite right but also around words that fulfill their assignment but seem to present opportunity. While the word inside the box may be perfectly O.K., there is likely to be an even better word for this situation, a word right smack on the button, and why don’t you try to find such a word?”  This is the crux of the struggle: The “better word.”  Scamper, scurry; scuttle, or scud?  McPhee warns against leaning on “the scattershot wad from a thesaurus.” Go to the dictionary, instead, he advises (my own favorite, the Online Etymology Dictionary).

       Indeed, words can be similar, synonymous, meaning “having the same or nearly the same meaning as another word.” The differences, however, can be epic. Each word, no matter how small or remote, comes with its own root system, reaching down to Latin or Old Norse, Middle English or Creole or Old German and more, tangles of associations breathing life into how our word will resonate on the page. “Oaf,” for example (this from the Online Etymology Dictionary), dates from the 17^th Century, “originally ‘a changeling; a foolish child left by the fairies’…from a Scandinavian source such as Norwegian alfrr ‘silly person,” in old Norse “elft.” Hence, ‘a misbegotten, deformed idiot.’”

            “Galoot” (also from Online Etymology)  means “‘awkward or boorish man,’ 1812, nautical, ‘raw recruit, green hand,’ apparently originally a sailor’s contemptuous word for soldiers or marines… Dictionary of American Slang proposes galut, Sierra Leone Creole form of galeoto, ‘galley slave.’”

        Is the right-word struggle harder for eco-writers than it is for others? Probably not.  Unless you consider the eco-writer’s need to wrestle with science and the habits of the natural world.  In other words, we have to overthrow the science, replacing it with the poetic. Again, from eco-poet McPhee, in Annals of the Former World:  

            “When the climbers in 1953 planted their flags on the highest mountain, they set them in   snow over the             skeletons of creatures that had lived in the warm clear ocean that India,      moving north, blanked out. Possibly as much as twenty thousand feet below the             seafloor, the skeletal remains had turned into rock. His one fact is a treatise in itself on                     the movements of the surface of the earth.”

        Not a jot of science. Just words, boxes drawn around them, dictionaries consulted, and the end, a journalistic flambé.

          William Carlos Williams, in his opus “Paterson,” has the last word on words:

            “It is dangerous to leave written that which is badly written. A chance word, upon paper,             may destroy the world. Watch carefully and erase, while the power is still yours, I say to          myself, for all that is put down, once it escapes, may rot its way into a thousand minds,         the corn becomes a black smut, and all libraries, of necessity, be burned to the ground as        a consequence.”

       Corn becomes a “black smut?”  What is he talking  about …? -- but wait. The second definition of  smut is  “a fungal disease of grains in which parts of the ear change to black powder.”  

            Bejabbers!

Mary Ann Hogan received her MFA in Creative Nonfiction from FAU in 2013. She currently teaches writing at Palm Beach State College, Boca Raton campus. She is also nonfiction editor at Little Curlew Press. This blog post was originally published at Little Curlew Press.

Digging It: A Dispatch from the Eula Biss Workshop by Mary Ann Hogan

Did I have time for the Sanders Writer-in-Residence workshop with Eula Biss? No.

            Are my other classes suffering because of the workshop? Well… yes.

            Am I glad I'm taking the workshop? No question. In the first two days, I felt my brain matter expanding vis-à-vis my own writing, ideas gelling in fresh ways, moving in more resonant directions, into side trips I hadn’t even considered.  Mostly because of what Eula (“Hello, everyone, I’m Eula”) is teaching us about the wisdom of research:

            Newspaper research.

             Database research.

             Different kinds of databases.  (“You might want to try that same thing, with say, LexisNexis.”)  

             Immersion research.

             Go there. Find stuff out. Soak it in.

             Dig it.

             Key, here, she tells us, is don’t let the research shout, “I’m here!” Keep it invisible. Allow it to inform, to play itself out, on the page. Research is the stuff behind the writing, the invisible mortar that gives depth to a text, informing, rather than directing, how the writing manifests itself on the page. “The page,” what appears there, is what matters, in the end. The poet David Trinidad, Biss tells us, is an avid object-based researcher, finding objects on eBay, including Barbie dolls, various colors of Slicker lip gloss (for the poem “Slicker.”) and even, for his work on Sylvia Plath, a phone just like the one in Plath’s office, wallpaper just like hers -- in the end, a kind of totemic recreation of her writing space.  

             For Biss, nonfiction artist extraordinaire, author of The Balloonists and Notes From No Man’s Land: American Essays, professor at Northwestern, and hero to many of us who write creative nonfiction, genre doesn’t matter. Whether you write fiction, nonfiction or poetry, immersing yourself in research can “move you into whole new territories to explore.” Don’t forget the research that can take you in some other direction – the counter-intuitive, the thing you’re not writing about. It just might lead to a passage on the page that you weren’t expecting.

        I have to go read now for Biss’s workshop today. And then go digging. 

Mary Ann Hogan is working on her MFA in nonfiction at Florida Atlantic University.

Positively Crustaceous by Mary Ann Hogan

I was reading my final student compositions, laughing so hard I nearly spit out my coffee. Not for the reason you might think. I liked them. They were funny.

My students had become lobsters.

Example:

“My claws are tied together, and there are more lobsters around me here then I have ever seen in one spot (even more than when I went to the LMAs – the Lobster Music Awards) … Before all this, I lived in the Atlantic Ocean off of the coast of Maine where I was a professional singer. I have no idea where I am being held captive now, though if I do recall, the last sign I read said ‘Red Lobster’ (whatever that is).”

The text was David Foster Wallace’s “Consider the Lobster.” Students had a choice: either a regular ENC 1102 essay arguing this or that, or, a creative piece, inventing the persona of lobster or hungry human, maybe writing a dialogue, maybe a combo plate.

The results as rich as melted butter:

“Seafood Department: Oh boy! It looks like we have a talker on our hands.

“Lobster: Put me down, you jerk! First my ‘claws are pegged and banded’ to keep me from beating up the other lobsters. And now you are sending me away to get eaten (Wallace 8)? Put me back I say!

“Mrs. Brown: A talking lobster? Umm is that…

“Lobster: Of course it’s possible! This isn’t a dream, lady. I would pinch you to prove it but I have a bit of an issue with my claws.

“Seafood Department: Shut it, Lobster!

“Lobster: It’s Homarus americanus to you, Dude.”

Of 20 students, four chose the usual essay. Eighty percent went lobster. They chose the creative path, choosing excellent words, writing well, producing superior text-author citations and cogent (sometimes side-splitting) arguments. When the students came in for their final send-offs, I asked, What’s going on? Each offered a version of, “I felt like I got to be myself/ use my own voice/ didn’t have to worry about sounding ‘academic.’ ”

This means boatloads for us as Composition instructors. There is ample evidence that creativity and composition can co-exist, from Randall R. Freisinger’s 1978 “Creative Writing and Creative Composition” to Wendy Bishop’s more recent declaration that adding creative writing to Composition ignites the writing fire. When that happens, Bishop says, the switched-on students can see “the flexibility of the essay in all its permutations.”

So, why don’t we let more students become lobsters? Comfort with the old? Fear of the new? Both? Something else? The answers might depend on how one defines composition. In my orderly dictionary, one must travel down to item number ten to get to “An essay, esp. one written by a school or college student.” More precisely, composition is “the nature of something's ingredients or constituents; the way in which the whole or mixture is made up.” In our Rhet-Comp classes, our student compositions are made up of a hopeful jumble of paragraphs with a title and a works-cited page inching (we pray) toward academic acceptance.

As David Bartholomae put it in “Inventing the University,” Comp students are “trying on the discourse” even though they don’t “have the knowledge.” Too often this leads them to flat assemblages with all the character of a composition floor than to the word’s best definition – “the act of producing a work of art.” Such art can excite, dare to be different, use creative language and ideas beyond the bland purpose of being “correct.” It can have claws. It can be fun.

I, for one, have been chastened by the crustacean. I plan to sprinkle creative writing throughout the semester, in responses, in-class writing, or a bit of flexibility in essay assignments. The writing is better, the students are more excited and it feels so good to laugh.

Mary Ann Hogan is frantically working on her MFA in creative nonfiction at Florida Atlantic University. She cooks and raises ducks. She doesn't cook the ducks. She has axed lobster from her diet.