Many graduate programs have a colloquium course – a required course intended to prepare students for professional life, usually taken near the end of the student’s graduate experience.
At the University of Denver we have such a colloquium – a combined course for PhD candidates in Literary Studies and Creative Writing. Each week for several hours faculty from the English department (two per week) speak to the colloquium about professional concerns focusing on conferences, publication (scholarly and creative), and going on the job market (resources, cover letters, interviews, the discernment process at large).
I have participated in such colloquiums at almost every institution I have taught in. Though they differ in terms of degree level and focus, what I have noticed is that – almost across the board – the atmosphere in such spaces is tense.
For all kinds of reasons. The reason that interests me in this moment is the one having to do with the pressure and/or expectation that graduate students (in particular PhD in creative writing students) will, in some form, be recycled back into the institutional machine. One hopes in the form of a professor.
Feelings about this among creative writing graduate students (as far as I have experienced it) are, not surprisingly, mixed: securing a good university teaching position is often desired, and at the same time students have become familiar with problematic issues associated with academic institutions; it is nerve-racking to find work in an over-saturated market; moving into one’s “career” touches a whole set of private, at times raw personal narratives: what it personally means to have - or not have - visibility through publication, a “good” job, and being networked into certain aesthetic communities. To this list I would add that there is also the simple fact of wanting to be able to craft some sort of life that is close to the act of writing, that can possibly deepen and expand that act, and can support that act financially so it can keep happening.
By the time most PhD students take the colloquium at DU, most have an idea of “how it works” – they have participated in conferences and many are actively publishing or are seeking publication. Most already adjunct teach – either at DU or at other local colleges, universities, or community colleges. Most graduate students have been collecting this kind of logistical information for years – they talk to one another about such things and are eager to make their lives as teaching-writers work. Still, the logistical information offered through colloquiums – like the one at DU – is helpful. Perhaps mainly because it shows different models of how to do and be.
After talking last year with some graduate students (at DU and elsewhere) about their colloquium experiences, the sense I got was not that they were concerned with gathering helpful professional tips, but that they were sharply observing the professors themselves. They were searching for a model – one in which a writer/artist can work in an institution without becoming depleted or jaded. A model which embodies professional security (and perhaps “integrity”) while not encroaching on the flexibility that being a subversive dreamer requires.
I would not want to do away with making available any and all logistical information that can, in whatever way, help writers position themselves for every blessing in terms of their careers. And I also see, as a teacher, that there is desire and need for this kind of information (something I have seen at the MFA level). However, I have wished that there was an additional component included in such colloquiums, one along side the logistical information, one which focuses on anxiety & the academic institution. That and the whole notion of “careerism.” And in a way that recalls Mike Bal’s notion that, rather than avoiding those places of tension and discomfort - it is more generative to actively pursue those places (gaps, breaks, inconsistencies, all fields of uncertainty) as sources of information and energy. In this case, the generative energy working towards deepening our questions around our anxiety or hatching, as a result of our engagement with our anxiety, more poignant versions of our questions.
I like the thought of a colloquium, in addition to covering logistical concerns, having a component where, for example, Mike Nichol’s Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf is shown in tandem with reading Dodie Bellamy’s Academonia. (There are other texts/films that come to mind too of course...for example, the work of Chris Kraus...)
Which is what I meant to talk about, Dodie Bellamy’s Academonia, which I've just been re-reading. In particular her essay, Body Language. Perhaps because, despite the fact I am on mini-sabbatical so that I can write, my body knows it is the time when the academic teaching year begins. But my body is also willing to forget this - and so I find I am starting to write through the nights.
In addition to all that is great about Dodie Bellamy's writing, I'd add that Body Language is an extremely useful essay to read in a workshop or contemporary literature class. Below are some excerpts from Body Language taken from my notebook.
& here is Dodie Bellamy's blog.
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From Body Language (in Academonia)
on the notion that experimental poets use collage as a way to put emotion back into poetry
I don’t want to downplay the lyric vapidity that inspired, and continues to inspire, a formalist turning away from emotion, but collaging in emotion makes experimental poetry sound sociopathic. (pg 74)
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The language that I collage in often is the language of critical theory or abstraction, language with hard edges that violates and endangers desire. In Cunt-Ups lovers babble, using multiple voices and personalities.
“Can I pull down my pants and push it gently through your skin, my tongue in your ear for just as second, discharge like a small river? Can I take the knife my father gave me and peel your scrotum into an ancient parchment? Can we do this in Florida for approximately one year?”
Some of this is taken from serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer’s confession…I wanted to invade my lovers’ frenzy with the awkward temporality of police confession, to bring in the foreign voice of the state, to create an aura of cultural alienation. By abutting Dahmer’s confession against my lovers’ pornographic rantings, I’m also paying tribute to Burrough’s original purpose for the cut-up, which was to lay bare the mechanics of capitalism’s linguistic whitewash. (pg 75)
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on “good old fashioned caring” about characters
“There is really no difference between memory and sight, fantasy and actual vision,” writes Wojnarowicz. Fantasy shapes our world. Our challenge as writers is to reframe the state-sanctioned fantasy, to work towards a new fantasy where it’s not okay to oppress queers, minorities, the ever-widening category of Other. (pg 79)
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We need to prick our fingers, summon its disruptive spectre to loom up strong and ravenous, to work from what Bordowitz calls a place of “passion” rather than “responsibility.” We need passion because a sense of responsibility simply does not have enough juice to get anybody up off their ass. (pg 80)
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Emotional vulnerability and engagement are too precious to be banished to the realms of rightwing manipulation… (pg 81)
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When the ground shifts beneath the reader’s feet, even the teeniest bit, this is good. The ground is already shifting. We need to start feeling it. (pg 81)
