Some Advantages of Getting Up Early

So, two things people who know me might not know about me.  I choose to be a morning person when I can.  I am also 50% very heavy introvert who extremely values time alone with open space.  The reason I think these facts may surprise people a bit is because, well, if you've met me you'll likely see me as high energy, social, and this might happen at any time of the day.  Also worth noting that my work is usually done from home or area cafes and libraries.

So why early mornings?  Variety of reasons, in no conscious order:

1. Waking up while the sun wakes up.  There is something very connecting to the world beyond you that happens with that sensation.  (Wow, that sounded more hippy than I expected.)
2. Getting my emails out before people are awake/working means I can work through a bunch, stay in that zone, and then close email for a few hours, and do another wave of responses later.
3. Anything feels possible.  I have energy.  I have coffee.  I have space.  I have things I could be doing.  It's a nice blend of urgency, but also possibility, like to stop and write a blog post for ten minutes like I'm doing now, and to do my laundry like I did at intervals this morning.
4. The world is mine.  People aren't moving.  There aren't distractions.  This is very clearly time that I chose for myself, which in a world ruled by deadlines and "supposed to do," is a form of self liberation.
5. Sun light.  Sun light is great.  When I was a kid I preferred to play inside and create arts and crafts and draw and such.  I still love creating.  I just want to feel the sunlight while I do it.
6. The feel of a head start.  Hearing the neighbors come down the stairs when I've been up for four hours... well it makes me feel a wee bit bad ass.
7. When I don't have other work to do, it is gorgeous for my writing process.  Great balance of semi-fugue state, dark roast, and possibility... but that's a whole other blog post.

Take Care,
Jason Henry Simon-Bierenbaum

On the Importance of Play

(note: this was originally written as a critique for the "Teaching Creative Writing" class I am taking at UMass Boston as I pursue my MFA in poetry)

A Critique of Janet Burroway’s “Imaginative Writing”

                The element of Janet Burroway’s “Imaginative Writing” that I appreciate the most is the emphasis placed early on the value of play.  Her vignette on a class day combining choreographers and writers was inspiring.  Both groups of students are trying to create an experience for the audience to witness, feel, and engage with.  While the writers were unsure, looking for what to do “right,” the choreographers were focused on exploring what was possible, laughed off their missteps, and kept going.  This was a very, very useful metaphor for a play-centric approach to early stages of writing that suggested a lot of ways creative writing students can learn from the practice of other forms of art and make “serious” art without worrying whether we’re doing things “right” or not.  Mess around.  See what happens.  Keep fiddling.  Keep tweaking it.  Let it be what you’re focused on consciously and unconsciously, allowing it to continue to evolve.  Disappointingly, this book did not live up to that promise and could use a good dose more of play in its prompts and samples.

                While there are interesting things in a wide variety of the prompts and samples, maybe because of the sections this book is broken into, or maybe due to Burroway’s biases, the prompts and much of the model texts seem to be concentrated more on capturing what is the focus of the chapter than exploring it with/through a sense of play.  This is vital if an emphasis on the importance of play towards imaginative writing can actually be instilled. 

In this day and age, play is something that has to be retaught to students who are out of grade school.  Play is seen in our society as important to early childhood.  It is how children are often allowed to take in the world and develop the skills needed to learn.  Then around middle school we are taught that it is no longer a form of learning and engaging with the world, but a “childish way” that must be “put aside.”  This is especially true for “serious” writers in high school or college.  This is especially true for millennials and current students, many of whom grew up around television, internet, and videogames as forms of fun: a much more passive, less tactile or full body form of play.  Play is not an active or allowed element for most students in regards to creating “serious” work.

Let me share an example from my own life: I am a college junior in a theater class where there is a guest instructor leading a workshop on clowning.  I see this opportunity as giving no direct challenge to me as I am used to what I believed to be clowning around in my art and everyday life.  After some exploratory group exercises, one by one he tells us to walk across the room and let something surprise us, deal with it as a clown would, and continue on.  Halfway through, I fall down.  He tells me I planned it.  I honestly thought I surprised myself, or at least wanted to believe that.  He says no, go again.  Allow yourself to be surprised.  Before I am even halfway through a sudden noise in the room triggers me to imagine a wasp that I must swat.  By the time I finally catch it in my hands it in my hands to kill it, it stings me.  And my hand swells.  It swells so large that it is soon stuck to the ground until I can squeeze out the swell and move on my way.  Obviously, this is a much more vivid scene than falling down.  And it explores something very human.  Safe to say, it’s also a series of events that I never could have thought of if I hadn’t been forced to surprise myself and actually play.  I learned to let my inner critic go, be in the moment, and do. 

Learning and adapting the skill of play made me a more creative writer.  Instead of worrying about what was “right” and making my edits and choices relatively simple once I had come up with a concept, I learned to explore what is possible.  I began writing pieces in my notebook randomly that might go nowhere.  Or might become one of my best works for that time period.  So now how does one actually teach play?  There are two overlapping methods I would like to propose:

(1) Forcing students to have no choice but to create new and differently.

(2) Learning from the methods and products of other art forms. 

                Forcing Students to have no choice but to create means, like birds thrown out of nests so they can fly, pushing them out of their comfort zones and watching with a caring eye.  This means encouraging experimentation.  This means giving prompts that might include word banks, weird challenges, and surreal images that gives them no choice but to create.  It means using an abstract piece of art for an ekphrastic writing assignment.  It means gathering lines of imagery, being given a different context than the place they were gathered in, and forcing students to write.  If there is no way students can write something “correctly” or “incorrectly” but have challenges they must contend with, they will have almost no choice but to write something in an imaginative way that pushes new possibilities out of them.

Like the promise of working with dancers, students should learn process, value, and other skills from other arts.  Pull imagery from a painting.  Like the jazz musician, explore the value of listening and what it can give you to play off of.  Play with movement and explore what the body does to craft a walk that then becomes an improvising voice that then becomes the speaker of a monologue that once embodied is then frantically written from.  Then worry about what the monologue is doing and what bigger work it may or may not be part of.  Chances are students have at least a mild background in some other art form, the very least as an appreciator, and can explore what they value.  What are the elements they love in a painting or an album?  How can they make it happen in their work?

While doing a class or homework exercise (a “try this” as Burroway calls them) focusing on trying to capture a reality or vision are useful, an intro to imaginative writing should force more play out of its students.  If they’re choosing to take a writing class, chances are they already have at least a few things they want to write about.  And will.  Force them to play around and explore what else is possible.  Like the two minutes of clowning that have made me a better writer ever since then, forcing students to play will better prepare them to write what they really want to write.  Besides, who doesn’t like a good excuse for play?

Writing Prompt: Comic Script as poetic form (After a brief ramble about why you should read “Astro City”)

First, Your Verbose and Hopefully Trusted Narrator Talks About a Favorite Comic From Which He's Learned

So if you know me in real life, you know that in the past two years I have been getting more and more into comics. And there's a good chance that you also know over the past year I've started writing poems as/about superheroes. And that recently I've been obsessed with writing about fake superheroes. As someone who is focused writing wise on poetry, but is constantly trying to learn and play with other genres of art, it is fitting that this is a trick that I learned from a comic series: Astro City.

Part of what makes Astro City (a comic best described as often being “slice of life” in a super hero world) pack the very human, very emotional punch it does, stems from its usage of fake superheroes that will very instantly remind you of the ones you know. The Samaritan, a very clear stand in for Superman, dreams of flying as something he just did for fun and not a constant rushed act he must do to save the day. Sasha Furst, the daughter of the First Family, a clear stand in for the Fantastic Four, runs away form home so she can learn what Hopscotch is. Junkman, less a clear stand in for one specific character and more so an amalgamation of various failed inventors turned eccentric villains as necessity, narrates a whole issue from his perspective, and you can't help but cheer for him when he is about to go free. And sometimes the heroes are barely even focused on, in stories of everyday people where the heroes only appear briefly in the background, somewhat like celebrities or politicians might in ours.

While a writer working in the same medium (comics) would have more to worry about with copyright infringement, the use of stand ins allows for more artistic freedom. Specifically

• creative liberties: As the writers of Squadron Supreme, Watchmen, or almost any other classic mini-series could tell you, there's a lot you can do when you're not worried about maintaining a franchise and merchandising. This means one character whose life story might steal your heart in one issue can be killed off in less than half a panel in the next.
• archetypal nature: Sasha Furst is both a superhero, but also a sheltered little girl wanting a normal life. The story is able to jump right into that reality of her nature. A Teacher once told me that poets almost never invent characters, as it's a waste of time when there's so many pre-existing characters, and you can use them to jump right into the heart of your work. Well, Astro City does in comics what persona does in poems.
• building of a new cohesive universe: While Astro City draws from both Marvel and DC mainstays, it also draws from pulps and other pre-superhero medium. There is an interesting, welcoming, meta nature to watching a world move from one period to another, and watch them reference each other.

And Now, the Writing Prompt!

Oh, good, you're still reading this after my literattti fanboy rambles. Or, like a little kid holding a comic, you skipped ahead to where it looked like the action scene was. Either way... Here be the prompt(s).

Prompt 1: Seriously, why aren't you reading Astro City?

It can inspire so many prompts, such as:

• short piece as a sympathetic villain
• incorporating fantastical, surreal imagery for use in every day, otherwise mundane scenes
• portrait of a neighborhood
• stand alone pieces in a series that add together to make a strong, cohesive world
• and I'm sure you'll find a million other things that work for you

Prompt 2: Write a poem in the form of a comic Script.

It does not have to deal with superheroes. If it does, high five, but not needed. Anyway, for those not familiar with comic scripts, they're somewhere between a play script and a movie script, but also with more freedom, as long as your collaborating visual artist(s) will gleam what they need to from it. A brief page on how to write them: http://2012.scriptfrenzy.org/howtovformatcomicbooks and a resource for sample scripts: http://www.comicbookscriptarchive.com/archive/, and while we're at it, some fun technical terms: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_comics_terminology. Okay, now that this part is out of the way, use the form of a comic script to write a poem.

A suggestion of things to learn from includes:

• borrowed voice
• setting apart image and dialogue as two things played off each other
• using the concept of panels to force concision
• panels as a way to break apart parts in ways that jump from moment and image to moment and image, yet feel cohesive, while also working in a system of snapshots
• play with ways image and dialogue play off each other
• use of in media res
• delay defining origin, or don't explain the origin of the speaker. Trust your audience to figure out, or be interested and trusting in your world enough to not care.

But of course, break the rules. This is a poem in the form of a script, not a script you need to plan to use, just as writing a poem in the form a shopping list that unfolds into a story does not mean you need to plan to fit all of said things into your backpack.

Excelsior!

What Spiderman Can Teach Us About Privilege and What to Do with It

When I tell people I get my morality from reading Spiderman comics, I'm joking.  But not really.

There's a comic that's been making it's ways through my different Facebook circles.  Read it right below, then please feel compelled to continue reading as I a blab on about what this might have to do with Spiderman.






So remember the famous tagline that's been made a pop culture saying since the movies came out, "with great power comes great responsibility?"  Let's explore a wee bit.

Peter Parker was bit by a radioactive spider, thus privileging him with new abilities and resulting in Spiderman.  Some would say he got lucky when given this gift.  He at first thought so.  Growing up by most accounts American standard poor or barely getting by lower middle class, his first thought was put that power into being a low level pro-wrestler and getting money.  Then when he lets a robber get away because the injustice wasn't "his problem," that same robber ends up killing his Uncle Ben.  He realizes that anyone's problem is everyone's problem and he must do what he can.

And this is when Spiderman begins to learn that every privilege is not only a gift, but a responsibility.  He could have stopped a killer.  That would have helped him personally, because his uncle (the breadwinner) would still be present.  However, it became realized that this was his duty.  His powers meant that he could do things that others couldn't.  So he soon realized that meant he had to do whatever he could to help others, just as others had helped him all throughout his life, and would continue to do so.

Yes, there are times when he wonders "why him?"  Why did he have the power?  Why did he have to help others?  Why couldn't he just go on blissfully ignorant and uneffected? And always he returns to the seemingly simple truth that he must.  With great power comes great responsibility.  Yet despite being a super strong braniac with agility and web powers to boot, he never loses site that Peter Parker is just another person.  His life just turned out a little differently.  In fact, he pines for the "normal" life but accepts the moral calling to hep others.

And this is one of the many places where I think we can learn from him.  He does not deny that his privileges exist.  (Yes, he wears a costume when using them, but that's a discussion better left to psychoanalysts.)  While he regrets them from time to time, he knows he can't change the past so he puts his energy into making them useful for everyone.  What good is a gift if you don't share it with others?

So now how does that translate to white privilege?  I don't have an easy answer.  But I do have what I've learned.  I've learned that life has granted me special skills.  By growing up at many times as a member of the majority or the minority, depending on times where I was just another white person, or times where I was the token Jew, I've developed a unique experience that helps me relate empathetically to a wider range of people, helping me as an educator and artist.  Or maybe making me into an artist and educator.  So what do I do with my strengths?  Just try and use them for money such as using my understanding of human motivations and skills as a writer to advertise products made in sweatshops, or instead use those same skills to help others, such as working with youth to use writing as a means to take on the world around them?

Then there's a great moment in Avengers vs. X-Men #9 where Spiderman explains to Hope, the fledgling Avenger (former X-Men), how one part of being an Avenger is knowing that you're not always going to be the most important person to a mission, but one day you will be.  And by the end of the issue he is the wisecracking, agile one who causes the success of a rescue mission to free basically all of the Avengers from an overpowered Colossus and Magic.  Basically, he distracts the overpowered X-Men, talks a little trash, jumps around, and plays them off of each other while the rest of the Avengers sneak out the back door with their tails between their legs.  This is a fable in line with the lion and the mouse about how everyone can be important and one day is.  Or on the flipside, never assume you're more important than anyone else, even if you've often been raised to believe that.

Just as nearly all great heroes represent some form of moral or ideal, there is the character who represents the opposite.  Batman's careful logic, deduction, and stoic nature juxtaposed by the grandiose insane genius of the Joker, or the power Superman was born into vs. all that Lex Luthor has created through his intellect.  One of the other sides of the coin for Spiderman is the Green Goblin.  Here is a man who wanted power.  Born into a wealthy family, he thought very much that he deserved everything he had.  In fact, he felt it wasn't enough.  He became the Green Goblin as a result of wanting more and more power.  And once the Goblin he drove himself more and more crazy, attempting whatever he could to stop Spiderman and eliminate the one form of checks and balances between him and more power.  He is someone blinded by his powers who serves as the antithesis to the proletariat protecting Parker.

So yeah.  Go read some comics.  You might learn a few things.

Love,
Jason

p.s. Fun comic history fact - Stan Lee was ready to quit Marvel after two decades of feeling he was just doing stupid comics that catered to Westerns, Horror, and other short lived fads.  Then his wife, probably the most unsung hero of comics, told him if he was ready to quit, why not just make the comics he wants, and if he gets fired, he got to make the comics he wanted, didn't he?  So he made comics, starting with the Fantastic Four, that were grounded in the philosophy of change one or two things about their realities, but then hold everything else extra true to the human experience.  And thus birthed the Marvel comics we know and love.