When You’re a Teacher

You think you’re going to reminisce about how you imparted all this great knowledge of Homeric similes, couplets, prepositions, rising action and political satire, but here’s what you actually end up remembering:

1. When April writes you her concerns: “Hi, sorry I’ve been skipping your class so much, but I can’t do all the side work that we’ve been doing, and I can’t deal with all the morons in the class.”
2. When Alex leaves a note on your desk: “In your face, ha ha I got my reading log done BEFORE you went on that field trip. HA!”
3. When you find a note someone passed in class that says: “I always thought Ms. Carleton was a guy cause of her voice!”
4. When you find another note someone passed in class that says: “Look at wat Ms. Carleton is wearing,” and you really wish you could remember what you were in fact wearing that day.
5. When a student turns in a final with the response:
Q: What 2 things can we learn from Romeo and Juliet?
A: 1. Love can come and go as it pleases.
2. Love can do weird things to the body.

6. When a student tells it like it is in his class notes:
The stages of life:
1) child/toddler
2) 5 to 9
3) 10/13
4) 14/18
5) 18/25
6) 25/32
7) 32 to your last days

7. When the classroom comment box tells you what they really think:

1. Less grammar notes
2. Less grammar notes because the first 45 min of this class make me HATE school
3. Your Hott
4. This is Ian and your cute

8. When you realize that today during second period Senior English you had armpit sweat visible on your t-shirt.

9. When you are asked to be the advisor of the Role-playing Game club, a surprise, as you have zero knowledge of role-playing. But you soon find the eavesdropping during club meetings is worth it:

Q: “Can I be chaotic evil?”
A: “No.”

“You don’t see anything but rats gnawing on corpses.”
“Yay for corpses!”

“I have a question: Can I fall out of a tree and land on a weasel?”

“I’m speaking Druidian.”
“Well, he doesn’t understand you.”

“I’m not going to play Magic either—it’s not my thing—too much pansy.”

“The funniest thing is when I took a badger out and it gnawed Jeff’s character’s face off.”

“What’s wrong with you? First you thought placenta was a food and now you don’t even know what 4:20 is.”

I recently submitted this to a zine to be published by the Independent Publishing Resource Center (IPRC), a great place for writers, teachers, and creators in Portland.

I Love Being Name-Checked

Review from the Willamette Week:

VoiceCatcher

When casting a wide net for women writers, this anthology catches a few great finds and dead fish.

BY PAIGE RICHMOND 503-243-2122

[November 21st, 2007]

Let’s be clear about one thing: VoiceCatcher (Lulu Press, $17.25, 244 pages) deserves to be read. This anthology is a labor of love—the 10-woman editorial board sifted through 300 submissions from Portland’s female writers before settling on 60 or so poems, stories and essays. Since publishing the first anthology last year, VoiceCatcher has created a supportive community for female writers. In addition to holding the Portland Women Writer’s workshops, the organization funds two annual scholarships at Write Around Portland, a nonprofit that provides writing workshops for recovering addicts, abused spouses and other disadvantaged Portlanders.

No doubt about it, VoiceCatcher is doing good work by encouraging women to write openly about themselves. That being said, the actual artistic work these writers are producing is, well, not that great. Some stories and poems in VoiceCatcher have their moments, but the complete collection is inconsistent, ranging from overly sentimental short stories about Athena-like mothers (“One Goddess”) to utterly compelling poems about a child’s tragic death (“Interment”).

Take the anthology’s two introductions, each written by a member of VoiceCatcher ’s editorial collective, as an example. “The Origins of VoiceCatcher. ” by Diane English, comes first, and is about the Mother Earth-loving, touchy-feely part of womanhood that makes men cringe. In one particularly mystical sentence, English writes, “Meditating one day to music with a steady drumbeat and the repetitive phrase, she who hears the cries of the world, voicecatcher enters my view and refuses to leave.” But the other introduction, written by Jennifer Lalime, is smart and simple: She quotes Victorian novelist and proto-feminist George Eliot while discussing the challenges and satisfaction of publishing a female-only anthology.

But it’s writers like Stacy Carleton who make VoiceCatcher worth reading. Her essay “Txt mg+tech+BF=OMG modrn luv” humorously documents how technology changes modern relationships. When Carleton divulges that her boyfriend first professed his love via text message and then admits “there was something about that [she] just couldn’t take seriously,” it feels honest. The best stories and poems in VoiceCatcher don’t use flowery language and loom-weaving main characters to embrace femininity; instead, they simply tell a story from a woman’s perspective.

Anything written by a woman, in some way, is about womanhood. Even though Eliot (real name: Mary Ann Evans) chose a male pseudonym to publish Middlemarch a century ago, the book became popular because it realistically—and in plain language—addressed the position of women in Victorian society. Thankfully, women no longer need fake names to get their writing published, but sticking to “I am woman, hear me roar” poetry and Earth-mama fiction isn’t getting women anywhere. VoiceCatcher would do much better to step away from the loom and embrace a simpler, more modern, idea of womanhood.

READ: Editor Sara Guest and contributors Paulann Peterson, Amy Minato, Sage Cohen, Kristin Berger, Jo Barney, Amanda Sledz and Cynthia Richardson read from VoiceCatcher at Powell’s City of Books, 1005 W Burnside St., 228-4651. 7:30 pm Tuesday, Nov. 27. Free.

My Evening with Ira Glass (And a Few Other People)

Technorati Tags: ira glass, this american life, willamette week, chatterati, hipsters, chicago public radio, npr

An Evening with Ira Glass and the Ministry of Love: October 7, 2007

3:43 PM October 9th, 2007 by Jim Sandberg

This review of Ira Glass' Portland appearance on Sunday was offered up by Stacy Carleton, a local high school teacher and WW reader. (Psst: We’re really happy she used the term “chatterati.”)

Sunday, Oct. 7, 2007

“I wanted to go all Christopher Hitchens on this event,” Ira Glass proclaims to the overwhelmingly bespectacled, fleece-and-cable-knit-clad crowd that has gathered at the Convention Center on a rainy Sunday night. NPR-nerd-friendly, cheekily subversive humor catering to the predictably white, middle class audience further ensues (Emcee: “Now that Ira is not presenting at a church [as originally scheduled], tonight will not be all about atheism and gay sex”), along with OPB inside jokes (Ira to local host April Baer: “There’s something poetic about what you say every day: ‘It’s stop and go from the tunnel to the Banfield.’ It’s like the story of our lives. Oh, and then sometimes there’s some business with ‘the curves.’” Here I let out a whoop of appreciation, quickly realize that I’m getting a little too raucous for the backdrop of polite applause, and shut up).

For someone who, in his words, “talk[s] really quickly and [doesn’t] enunciate, and really has no particular talent for anything having to do with radio,” the This American Life host has been getting something right during his career that spans almost 30 years. TAL is currently the most popular podcast in the country, and if NPR chatterati has a reigning celebrity, it is undoubtedly Glass.

TAL’s success hinges on its unparalleled approach to the human story. With the over-saturation of irony seemingly poisoning every media well these days, TAL maintains a childlike curiosity and endangered sincerity as, week after week, it seeks to uncover profundities in the mundane. Its philosophy dictates that there is always something still worth investigating, whether it be the secret inner life of a tyrant (Glass explains Saddam Hussein’s penchant for penning trashy novels) or the fact that after thousands of years, scientists still do not understand why leaves on trees turn red (Glass: “It’s one of those things that makes you realize, ‘If we don’t know that, what do we know?’”)

This particular sensibility has prompted naysayers such as the Atlantic Monthly’s Michael Hirschorn to relegate Glass and TAL to a “quirk culture” populated by the likes of Wes Anderson, Miranda July and Napoleon Dynamite. (Hirschorn’s entire treatise is available here.) When questioned about this categorization by an audience member, Glass replies, “I hate things that are quirky. That’s taking the show to be the opposite of what it is. Ours is a Ministry of Love.”

Glass in person is reassuringly consistent with his radio persona. Like the words he uses to describe the stories on TAL, he is truly “human-sized,” and proves he deserves every ounce of his indie cred as my friend and I wait in line for 45 minutes to meet him. To pass the time, we debate an accurate description of Glass’ voice (Rule One: “hipster” is not allowed) and compromise with “East-Village-queen-meets-intellectual-but-unpretentious-Jew-meets-Valley-Girl.” As we finally get close to the front, I understand why the line has moved so slowly: Glass has genuinely talked to each and every person offering up books to sign and cameras to pose for. I’m glad he’s gone all “Ministry of Love” on this event.

[Post-script bragging rights]: Glass has been gathering contact information for an upcoming segment he is working on, and my friend and I fit the bill for the kind of stories he is scouting. After introductions, he asks for our phone numbers. But my brain is too flooded with celebrity-encounter-induced dopamine that I go all deer-in-the-headlights and forget to write it down. I do remember to include my email and an “I love the O.C. too!!” shout-out. Afterward, I’m just an insecure schoolgirl in the throes of post- “Do you like me? Check yes or no” note-passing anxiety, hoping I might somehow fit into the grand, yet human-sized, narrative.

 

http://blogs.wweek.com/news/2007/10/09/an-evening-with-ira-glass-and-the-ministry-of-love-october-7-2007/

In the Name of Humility

A few months ago, a friend googled me and came upon some of my earliest published work.

You can find one of my columns for the 20Below section (created by local teenagers) of the Eugene Register-Guard here. A few dislcaimers: it's a Valentine's Day article dedicated to the subject of stalking (as in me obsessing over unattainable boys, not the adult restraining order kind), it's from 1997 and thus scanned on the page (how archaically quaint!), I was 17 when I wrote it, and it prompted my first grumbling feedback from the public which made me both mortified and proud: several letters from readers who were disturbed and offended by my facetious use of the word "stalking." Those were the days.