Research and Reminiscence

I've been busy working on my novel the past few months, so haven't had any new literary research to add here.  Recently, though, while writing about farming in north Idaho, I've needed to get hold of some information linked to phases of the moon and favorable planting dates, and through the magic of the internet I was able to track down a copy of the 1981 Old Farmer's Almanac in South Dakota and have it posted to me here in the UK for a mere $9. I've also got my hands on  a Gurney's Seed Catalog from 1967, complete with an ad, torn from some magazine or other, for fishing trips to South Dakota's Great Lakes where you can find 'Northerns up to 35 lbs., walleyes to 12 lbs., and paddlefish to 90lbs!'  Research on the internet is fine for some things, but there's something about holding a hardcopy publication in your hands that is just so...so real.  Flicking through the yellowing pages of the almanac, past ads for "Apache" Arrowheads (the use of quotation marks is a dead giveaway) and do-it-yourself tattoo removal kits, I get whiff of my youth. 


Though I grew up in the city, I was just one generation removed from the family farm, and farming was still the focus of my grandparents' lives.  I remember how there was always a Gurney's catalog lying about, somewhere close to hand, especially during the winter months when my grandparents mulled over what they would plant in the garden, come spring.  I remember the brightly-colored pictures of Hy-Top tomatoes and photographs of kids dwarfed by giant pumpkins. And I remember the gold cover of the Old Farmer's Almanac, each edition looking identical to the one before, resting on a table next to my grandfather's chair, its pages discolored and well-thumbed. 


Well-into his 80s, after he had finally - reluctantly - handed over the reins of the family farm to my uncle, my grandfather cultivated not one, but two city gardens. One was a standard kitchen garden behind my grandparents' home, but the other, located about a mile away, covered the area of three vacant city lots.  After he retired, I believe he just couldn't help himself.  Farming was in his blood.  It wasn't so much what he was, as was who he was and I can only imagine what that garden meant to him in his old age.  

My grandfather became a familiar figure in that part of town known as Normal Hill, pushing his wheelbarrow back and forth between home and the garden we all called 'the lot', unzipping the soil with his rototiller, giving away a mountain of sweet corn every summer. I remember there was a little boy who lived in an apartment house next door to the lot who used to hang around, helping out where he could, and enjoying getting his hands stuck into the soil beside my grandfather, a city boy without a piece of land of his own, learning from an expert about making things grow. I wonder where that little boy is now and if he still remembers those days. 


What was it, though, that I was writing about when I started this?  I seem to have drifted off track.  The Old Farmer's Almanac and the Gurney's Seed Catalog.  That's right. 


I can't imagine getting lost in a few moments of nostalgic reverie while clicking and scrolling my way through a website, just as I can't imagine a world in which e-readers replace real books.  Holding a book - or indeed, a seed catalog - in your hands just seems so much more 'authentic' to me.  And that will be another discussion to come from my thesis once I return to it later this spring.  

New Year Rulin's for 2012

Discussion of Woody Guthrie's 'New Year Rulin's for 1942' have been all over the internet this week with some inferring that Woody's inclusion of hygiene matters (3, 4, 5, 9, 11) as an indication that the Huntington's disease which killed him twenty-five years later, at the age of 55, was already at work.  Maybe that's so.  Maybe not.  Maybe he was just so busy spilling words onto paper (the Woody Guthrie Archives contain the lyrics to nearly 3000 songs) that some of life's more mundane tasks occasionally got forgotten.  


You can tell he's concerned about the way he's treated his family.  You can tell that, at the age of 30, he's thinking about his health - eat good, drink very scant if any - and about his spirit - don't get lonesome, stay glad, dream good, love, love, love - and about the need to take action and not waste time.  I see Woody's rulin's as a to do list, a way of taking small but meaningful steps to self improvement.  He's not making any grand promises here, but he is saying he's going to try to do better than he has done in the past.  Isn't that what we should all be doing?


Having given up making resolutions I know from the outset I won't be able to keep, I've taken inspiration from Woody's Rulin's, and drawn up a set of my own. 

A Review of 2011

This is the third annual review I’ve written since setting off on this journey.  One more should see me through to the end, at least as far as submitting my dissertation and preparing for the final viva.  The viva, the ultimate test of whether or not my work stands up to scrutiny, will come in just over a year’s time.  Not too much over, I hope, for I fear that my husband’s patience has its limits.  And so does mine.  After three years, we are both anxious to get our lives back.  Anxious to load up our bikes and find a nice quiet road to pedal down for a few months.  Route 66 sounds good, passing through abandoned Oklahoma towns on the way to the west coast.  So does the northern tier trans-America route as plotted out by the good people at the Adventure Cycling Association – from Bar Harbor, Maine all the way to Anacortes in Washington state.  Or better yet, their Lewis and Clark route which passes right through my hometown.  No detour required.  That would be appropriate, considering I’ve spent much of the last three years reading the expedition journals and pouring over maps of their route.  Though at 3,262 miles long, the ACA route is a couple of thousand miles too short for my taste, so detours would be called for.

Wherever our bikes take us, though, I feel certain that we will travel east to west, for the pull to the west, the pull towards home gets stronger with each passing year.  Like a rainbow trout that’s swallowed a nightcrawler, something is tugging at my insides. If I’m to stop from being turned inside out, I am sure that that is the direction I must go.  Or am I just imagining that’s the case?  Is it simply that I’ve been immersed in the mythologies of the American West so long now that I’ve started to believe they are true?  Have I grown nostalgic on memories from my youth, recollecting the stories of my people for the purpose of writing a book so that I believe what is over still is?  Sure enough, I’m being lured back – I’m allowing myself to be lured back.  It won’t take much for Idaho to reel me in and claim me once more.  But it’s a scary prospect, having spent half my life elsewhere.  What if I moved back and it was different?  What if I moved back and it was the same?

All of that is in the future, though, too far off for me to seriously consider right now while there’s still work to be done. 

Let me just finish what I started here, and look at what I’ve done this past year so that I can reassure myself that I am indeed moving forward (even while contemplating a step back). 

Progress on Dissertation:

•           40,000 words submitted for the M.Phil. upgrade viva to Ph.D.
•    Upgrade viva passed in September
•    Novel: 70,000 words written
•    Thesis: 16,000 words written

Conferences, Presentations and Events Attended:

•    Publishing Panel, UoC, 27 April 2011
•    Writing the Self, UoC, 1 June 2011
•    The World Through Memoir, UoC, 15 June 2011
•    Winchester Writers Conference, University of Winchester, 29 June 2011
•    Historical Fiction with Stella Duffy and Emma Darwin, 22 September 2011
•    Workshop with Stella Duffy, 25 September 2011
•    Royal Society of Literature discussion with Sebastian Faulks, 24 October 2011

Publications:

•    ‘Cowboys and Clowns’, Moonlight Mesa,  January 2011
•    Review of Eddie Chuculate’s Cheyenne Madonna, The Short Review, February 2011
•    Review of Cris Mazza’s Trickle-down Timeline, The Short Review, March 2011 
•    Review of Belle Boggs’s Mattaponi Queen, Short Fiction in Theory and Practice, vol, no 1 spring 2011
•    Review of Linwood Laughy’s Fifth Generation, Western American Literature, spring 2011

Other:

•    Peer reviewed 1 essay for Short Fiction in Theory and Practice 
•    Part-time teaching on undergraduate programme at University of Chichester 
•    Part-time employment as student mentor at University of Portsmouth
•    Editor of THRESHOLDS Short Story Forum

So, what’s left to be done?

I’m on schedule to complete the first draft of Legacy by the end of March. I’ll then return to my thesis and complete my chapters on Identity and Authenticity, hopefully by the end of June. I’m waiting to hear whether or not my proposal for the Affective Landscapes Conference at the University of Derby has been accepted, but if it has, this should spur me into getting a useable chunk of work completed by mid-May. I’ll be finished teaching, marking and mentoring around the middle of June, and will be just about finished with my work on the website, so I’ll then have a solid three months without distractions (I’ll be lucky) to redraft and polish before getting everything ready to submit in mid-October. Then the viva in January 2013, and barring any major rewrites, off on the bikes as soon as the weather starts to warm up.


How's that then?  Sound like a plan?

Ten Events That Shaped the West

Here's an article from True West Magazine, published in February 2007. It lists some of the events of the frontier era of American history which the author points to as helping to shape not only the country but also the identity of the American people.  It's disappointing, but not surprising, that the list focusses almost exclusively on events that reinforce the heroic myth of Manifest Destiny and western expansion.  The one exception is The Battle of Little Bighorn - but even here the author manages to give a sympathetic account of Custer's defeat: ‘…the weapons the soldiers were issued were single-shot Springfield trapdoors with copper casings that jammed, while many of the warriors had armed themselves with lever-action Winchesters.’  In effect what he’s saying is that the Indians, by being better armed, weren’t playing fair.  It makes a change, but I’m still not going to shed any tears over the 7^th Cavalry, I’m afraid.

Gen. George Armstrong Custer

This article got me to thinking, so I’ve put together my own list of events which, through research for my dissertation, I believe had the greatest impact on the development of the West – for better or worse:

Removal of eastern tribes to lands west of the Mississippi

1. The Louisiana Purchase in 1803 which doubled the size of United States lands overnight and gave purpose to the Lewis and Clark Expedition, 1804-1806. 

2.  The Indian Removal Act of 1830 that set in motion the Trail of Tears, opening land for white farmers and transferring the country's first inhabitants (many of whom were also farmers) into marginal lands in the West.

A Forty-Niner

3.  The arrival of Christian missionaries in the West in the 1830s, seeding internal conflicts within tribes, and helping to destroy traditional culture.

4.  The California Gold Rush of 1849 which encouraged 300,000 people to head to the west coast to seek their fortunes. In just six years, the population of San Francisco increased from 200 inhabitants to 36,000. The influx of large numbers of immigrants had a devastating impact on the Native population. It is estimated that between 1845 and 1870, as many as 120,000 Indians – or four-fifths of the population – died as a direct result of the gold rush.

5.  The Indian Appropriations Act of 1851which sought to confine Indians on reservations. 

6.  The near extermination of the buffalo in the 1870s, destroying a vital food source for Indian people throughout the central plains.

Fencing in the frontier

7.  The introduction of barbed wire in the mid-1870s. Barbed wire fencing was first marketed at farmers as an effective method for keeping cattle off of cultivated land. Cattlemen were initially opposed to its use because it stopped livestock from finding better grazing on open lands, but by the 1880s Texas ranchers used barbed wire to protect their land from overgrazing. With the arrival of the railroad, it was no longer necessary to move cattle to markets on long trail drives and by the 1890s, open ranges were a thing of the past.

Early Homesteaders

8.  The Dawes Act of 1887 further damaged traditional Indian life by allotting parcels of land to individual members of the tribe and encouraging private ownership and farming. The remaining ‘unassigned lands’ – often the majority of already reduced reservations – were then opened up to homesteaders.

9.  In 1892, the Johnson County War broke out in Wyoming after years of competition between small ranchers and 

Invaders, held at Fort D.A. Russell, 1892

wealthy cattlemen who grazed their livestock on public lands. After small ranchers were accused of cattle rustling, two dozen gunmen were brought in from Texas to protect the large ranching interests. Dubbed 'the Invaders,' the Texan mercenaries had already lynched a number of small ranchers when they and some of their supporters were trapped at the T.A. Ranch by the county sheriff and a posse of 200 men. During the ensuing stand off, the Wyoming Governor cabled President Harrison on behalf of the mercenaries, requesting he intervene to save them. Forty-five men were eventually rescued by the 6th cavalry and taken to Fort D.A. Russell to await trial. Charges were never filed against the 20 wealthy stockmen who were said to be behind the lynchings, however, and the men arrested at the T.A. Ranch were released on bail before disappearing into the woodwork. Comparisons with contemporary political and economic conflicts are easily made.

Oklahoma Land Rush 1889, by Xiang Zhang

10.  The various land runs in the West brought an influx of white farmers onto the grasslands. Good harvests over several years encouraged even more farmers onto more land, and over the years the use of modern machinery brought still more land into production. Poor farming methods, however, destroyed the soil's natural resilience, and led to severe erosion. When the drought began in 1930, crops failed and, without vegetation to hold it in place, the land was exposed to further erosion by the wind. In parts of Oklahoma, as much as 75% of the topsoil was lost in dust storms between 1930 and 1940.

South Dakota, 1936

Using creative writing to increase confidence and motivation for learning amongst adult literacy students

Rationale 

During the last few years I have taught Literacy to a variety of learners in circumstances ranging from discrete courses for those with learning difficulties to long-term unemployed adults and those engaged in training as part of the last government’s Train to Gain scheme. Regardless of the situation, I have often found motivation particularly lacking when it comes to writing tasks. Learners can easily see the value of reading as it’s a skill we use every day in tasks as unrelated as shopping, driving and cooking. The printed word is everywhere. What’s more, it has authority. When something is written down it is perceived to carry a certain amount of importance, therefore motivation to read is generally quite high. Writing, however, is easier to avoid. What’s more, because the written word is viewed as having authority, many people – even those with sound ‘literacy skills’ – feel insecure about their ability to express themselves on paper. This reluctance to write, I believe, stems from the fact that historically, the act of writing was most frequently practiced by the educated and ‘ruling’ classes. For those engaged in physical labour, where strength and manual dexterity had obvious financial benefits, writing was seen as having little practical value.

My background is in Creative Writing and my purpose in carrying out this research was to look at ways Creative Writing might be used to empower learners, increasing their self-confidence and motivating them to improve their literacy skills. I wanted to look at the ways Creative Writing has been used by other educators and to gauge its effectiveness in teaching Literacy. I also wanted to gather new ideas and teaching methods to improve my own practice.

New Visions of the Old West: Blood Meridian as a reflection of anxiety

This section carries on from Perception, Character and Mood

photo by Brian Lary

During the 1970s and 1980s, the United States military took part in a series of engagements which many Americans found morally questionable[1], shaking the previously firm belief that America was a force for good in the world.  The rise of the Red Power movement and its close associate, the American Indian Movement, and publication of books such as Vine Deloria’s Custer Died for Your Sins (1969) also encouraged the dominant American culture to question the treatment of the nation’s first inhabitants.  Growing environmental concerns, and Cold War anxieties added to the uncertainty which many Americans felt.  At the same time, American writers began to challenge received notions of Western American history, and the revised literary mythologies they created reflected the nation’s mood by offering new perceptions (Lewis, 2003) of a West without heroes.  Most notable of these anti-westerns is Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985). 

       Dan Moos describes Blood Meridian, with its scenes of unremitting violence and moral depravity, as ‘a Western in which we would rather not believe’ ([no date];23).  Set in the final days of the Old West period of American history, Blood Meridian recreates the exploits of the Glanton gang, a group of scalp-hunting mercenaries hired to remove Indians from the Southwest.  Based on historical events, the novel explores the nature of evil and man’s seemingly inherent penchant for violence.  As a reflection of that violence, the landscape against which the action is set is ‘wholly without [the] nurturing abilities’ (Holmberg 2009:172) shown in the novels previously discussed:

They rode through a region electric and wild where strange shapes of soft blue fire ran over the metal of the horses’ trappings and the wagonwheels rolled in hoops of fire and little shapes of pale blue light came to perch in the ears of the horses and in the beards of the men.  All night sheetlightning quaked sourceless to the west beyond the midnight thunderheads, making a bluish day of the distant desert, the mountains on the sudden skyline stark and black and livid like a land on some other order out there whose true geology was not stone but fear.  (47)

Holmberg describes the setting of Blood Meridian as ‘a pre-lapsarian world’ and ‘a land of light, dark, and formlessness’ (2009:172), without even the concept of morality or justice.  The West McCarthy portrays is a churning, chaotic void where ‘death seem[s] the most prevalent feature of the landscape’ (McCarthy 1985:47) and even the elements appear to be at war. 

The novel follows the sixteen-year-old boy known only as ‘the kid’ who, after surviving a barbarous attack by a Comanche war party, joins the Glanton gang’s bloody venture.  Accompanied by the mysterious Judge Holden, a demonic and apparently omnipresent figure, the gang’s exploits become increasingly violent as they progress westward through an increasingly hellish landscape:

They crossed the malpais afoot, leading the horses upon a lakebed of lava all cracked and reddish black like a pan of dried blood, threading those badlands of dark amber glass like the remnants of some dim legion scrabbling up out of a land accursed…They crossed a cinderland of caked slurry and volcanic ash imponderable as the burnedout floor of hell… (ibid:251)

         

Perception, Character and Mood: Landscape as a Reflection

In ‘Dangerous Ground,’ Annie Proulx contends that early writers considered western landscapes to be ‘hostile’ and that ‘[a]lmost never did the protagonist display any sense of belonging to or understanding of the country through which he journeyed, nor did he try to learn much about it’ (Proulx 2008:15).  While this may be true of the adversarial adventure stories featured in the later dime novels, Proulx’s statement is far too generalised and she offers no specific examples to support this claim. 

In her own work, Proulx uses landscape to explore the psychology of her characters.  External landscape reflects the internal contours and depth of vision her characters possess and, as a driving force within the plot, landscape controls their movements and influences what they can and cannot do.  Her characters are frequently outsiders, alienated in some way from the society around them, and rootless either by choice or coercion.  It is clear, however, that landscape is more than simply a mirror, reflecting and reinforcing her characters’ struggles.  The open spaces which dominate her writing have a pensive quality, arid and remote, yet geologically and historically complex, and mood, plot, action and theme are all influenced by the shape and behaviour of the land. 

Pan-Indian Landscapes in Alexie’s Reservation Blues

This section carries on from 'Environmental Indians'...

Alexie’s representations of place have also attracted criticism.  While Reservation Blues (1996) and his earliest short stories are primarily located on the Spokane Indian Reservation and are littered with authentic place names (Wellpenit, Spokane Falls, Riverfront Park, Reardon), Alexie provides few visual references to landscape which would anchor these stories to a specific geographical location.  Owens describes the reservation portrayed by Alexie as being ‘a vaguely defined place where people live in cheap federal housing while drinking, playing basketball, feuding with one another, and dying self-destructive and often violent deaths’ (1998:71-2).  Bernardin takes up this point and suggests that Alexie deliberately uses what she refers to as ‘generic signifiers of “Indianness”’ (2004:167) to build a physical world recognisable by his target audience – young Native Americans[i].  The reservation Alexie describes could be anywhere in the country, and just as there are few visual clues to identify the location of his stories, there is little to distinguish Alexie’s Spokane Indians from members of any other Native American tribe.