Making Connections

One reason I'm an advocate for the use of research blogs by professional writers is because I've concluded that the notion of writing as a solitary activity, and the image of writers and researchers working quietly in their garret (attic room, watchtower, or refuge-Webster’s Ninth) is damaging to writers.

The classic image of this is the poet Robinson Jeffers, who built his tower Tor House, on a spit of land overlooking the Pacific Ocean near Carmel, California. He built the house alone, hauling rocks from the beach, using mortar he mixed himself. Jeffers himself both promoted this romantic vision of the artist working alone against the forces of nature, even as he mocked the impermanence of everything human in his poem, “To the Stone Cutters.”

Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems. (17)

Yet writers are not rocks, or even lonely poets. Even Jeffers was a creature who inhabited many social webs: his beloved Una, his sons and descendents, a few fellow writers, the producers of his compelling Medea which was a success, if not a sensation, during the Broadway season in 1948.

Knowledge is not produced in the garret. It may be polished there, and Virginia Woolf was correct in proclaiming that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write” (A Room of One’s Own 4). But knowledge does not emerge from solitude, but from the web of social relations which the writer inhabits. Woolf’s novels, stories, and diaries are a critical example of how knowledge emerges from such a web of connections. In a critical scene from her brilliant (and critically neglected!) novel The Years, Nicholas in a dialogue with to Eleanor, exposes the sterility of the romantic view of the writer/researcher/human living in isolation:

“The soul—the whole being,” he explained. He hollowed his hands as if to enclose a circle. “It wishes to expand; to adventure; to form—new combinations?”

“Yes, yes,” she said, as if to assure him that his words were right.

“Whereas now,”—he drew himself together; put his feet together; he looked like an old lady who is afraid of mice—“this is how we live, screwed up into one hard little, tight little—knot?”

“Knot, knot—yes that’s right,” she nodded.

“Each is his own little cubicle; each with his won cross or holy books; each with his fire, his wife…” (296)

The weblog is a genre of writing which enables those connections. And I think such connections can be very helpful in writing research.

For example, yesterday I was reading Eric Alterman’s MSNBC weblog, “Altercation.” Alterman noted that the GOP convention press releases indicated that a number of delegates were active duty military. He also pointed out that both Federal Law and Military Regulations prohibit military personnel serving in such positions.

Alterman’s claim was consistent with my own knowledge of military regulations, and curiously enough got me thinking about a stalled writing project of my own. Last year I received a small grant from the Center for the Study of Sexual Minorities in the Military (CSSMM), at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The grant was to write an auto-ethnography describing my experiences as a career submariner who was called to testify before the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee during the “Gays-in-the-Military” debate in 1993. I had written a draft of the piece, but two reviewers had pointed out that it seemed to be two separate prices of writing: (1) an analysis of how power allocations of space and time affected my development as a writer and speaker aboard submarines; and (2) the story of my testimony before the Senate. Yet when I tried to separate the two pieces, the second piece, the story of my testimony lacked a beginning, a place from which to launch the story which would connect it to the experiences of the audience at CSSMM, who I think are interested in how I overcame the military’s historical tendency to suppress diversity and debate. After all, they aren’t called the “uniform services” for nothing. Reading Alterman gave me that connection—the legal authority the military has over its members to prevent their participation in political debate, and the way in which they sometimes “relax” those restrictions when it serves the political agenda of the generals and admirals. That will be the real starting point for my piece.

Some other connections, noted in passing:

One interesting feature of these blogs is that your words are in cyberspace, and
Strangers may come upon them. The blogger software allows readers to comment in response to your pages (you can also turn off this feature). My first entry attracted the attention of a writer in Oklahoma http://juscuz.blogspot.com/2004/08/yummy-tax-cuts-part-2.html, who writes a political blog focused on the working class.

My students are also beginning to impress me with their use of the blog as a way to pursue and shape knowledge. I will single out two of their blogs today: Gina http://stiltnergl.blogspot.com, who has done a nice job of reading the Bizarro article and using his ideas in a very practical way. And Robin http://robzat.blogspot.com, whose blog I think nicely demonstrates the way we can use the blog genre to work our way towards the knowledge and subject matter which most interests us.




Works Cited

Jeffers, Robinson. Selected Poems. Ed. Colin Falck. Manchester, UK: Carcanet, 1987.
Mish, Frederick C. et al., eds. Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary. Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster, 1984.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. San Diego: Harcourt, 1929.
Woolf, Virginia. The Years. San Diego: Harcourt, 1937

A Beginning

Like many writers, I will begin by telling a story. Recently I met a high-school classmate for the first time in nearly 30 years. Now when meeting an old classmate, my mind invariable turns to the high school yearbook which often would list a person’s name, along with the phrase: “most likely to ______.” When my classmates and I would talk about this old friend, who I will call Marie, back in high school, many of us would frequently express the opinion that she was the person in our class “most likely to write the great American novel.” We said this because she was verbose, a great prose stylist, intellectually brilliant, and full of ideas. Yet when I met Marie, I learned that she was working as a high-powered, government lawyer, and had never done any serious writing. When I asked her why, she responded: “I tried, but I discovered I didn’t have anything to say.”

Her answer troubled me, and I began asking myself why it troubled me. As I thought about her answer, I began to realize that Marie’s situation was one which not only afflicts people like her, people who showed great promise as writers, but who never actually wrote; but also afflicts many successful professional writers. In the latter case, it has been called “writer’s block.”

While thinking about this “block,” this situation where the writer “doesn’t have anything to say,” I’ve come to the conclusion that this condition is simply a case of writers asking themselves the wrong question. Instead of asking themselves “what do I have to say?” writers should be asking, “what do I want to know?” I say this because my own experience as a creative writer, journalist, technical writer, and academic writer has helped me see that writing is less about “expressing yourself” than it is about “searching for knowledge.” To speak metaphorically, what I am arguing is that writing and research are two sides of the same coin.

Now when it comes to many kinds of writing, that point seems self-evident. No one will argue that writing a scholarly article, a business plan, or a scientific lab report can be done without research. Even something as routine as writing a grocery list might require research—for example, scanning the sales in the local newspaper, or searching through a file of coupons. Yet, as Patrick Bizzaro has argued, creative writing (by the way, I’ve always hated that term. What are other kinds of writing? Uncreative?) presents us with a special case.

Bizarro points out that many writers adopt an attitude about research famously expressed in Edgar Allen Poe’s early sonnet, “To Science” http://eserver.org/books/poe/sonnet-science.html. In that poem, Poe seems to be claiming that the act of scientific observation seems to drain the life out of experience. And while Poe’s later works treat science much more favorably, this view that scientific research methods and creative writing exist in a state of opposition is still widely held by many writers. And while I obviously don’t hold to that view myself, I have come to learn that Poe’s romantic view of poetic writing does contain a measure of truth, an idea I will return to another blogday.

Bizarro disagrees with Poe’s romantic view, and convincingly argues that “at least three kinds of research: classroom-based research, ethnographic research, and historical research” demand the same sort of “skills valued by creative writing teachers in teaching students how to write” (303). I am convinced that Bizarro is on the right track here, and I believe that both the creative writing community and the community of writers doing “scholarly” or “scientific” research would gain from a dialogue. And by dialogue, I mean a search for common ground, rather than two sides shouting their positions at each other. Fortunately, what is considered as “scientific research” today is a much broader category of knowledge-making processes than those that were considered to be acceptable in Poe’s time. It is my hope that this dialogue might begin to influence all kinds of writing research, as we begin to answer a question I pose in my own research methods syllabus http://users.ipfw.edu/amidons/W462-03Fall%202004.htm: “How can we study the world of creatures and things in a way which is consensual rather than conquering, participatory rather than detached, and action-oriented, rather than separating the worlds of theory and practice?”


Works Cited

Bizarro, Patrick. “Research and Reflection in English Studies: The Special Case of Creative Writing.” College English 66 (2004): 294-309.