Another Glorious Return

Hello faithful readers!

As you might guess from my lengthy absence from cyber-space, the fall semester is in full swing, so much so that my students and I have just about reached the mid-way point. I am therefore taking advantage of a forty-eight hour hiatus from grading and other work to get reacquainted with you, the readers. There’s lots to cover, so let’s get to it!

The Other Love of My Life

One reason I’ve been absent from blogging is that my barbershop group just finished its fall contest entry in Peoria, and preparations for this competition took a large amount of time—almost twenty hours of official rehearsal one week, in fact! Now before everyone drops into the closest cliche, I should specify that barbershop in this context does not mean four guys in dapper shirts with garters on their arms singing on a street-corner in Disneyland. The group I sing with—The New Tradition Chorus, out of Northbrook, IL (currently ranked fifth in the world)—took seventy guys to Peoria, and some of the larger choruses feature almost one-hundred and fifty. The more elaborate contest packages include costumes, choreography, and sets, and function as self-contained show pieces as much as music. Our scores for contest were good enough to win, but not as good as we wanted them to be (we got an 85, which is “A” level but not impressively so). I should mention, by the way, that our contest set was a medley of Gershwin music, and for the closing “Show of Champions” we debuted a piece by our own arranger and director, Jay Giallombardo.

There are many reasons I sing barbershop—the camaraderie, for one, and the need to be involved with something other than work, church, and home—but the primary ones are a basic love of music, as well as the effect rehearsals have on me as a teacher. Music has always been part of who I am. My mother is an elementary school music teacher, and I grew up on a steady summer diet of outdoor musicals at the Muny theater in St. Louis. I simply feel better when this is a part of my life. The other reason, the effect singing has on my teaching, was more unexpected to me. I’m good at singing, you see, but not naturally good at it. I don’t know the theory as well as I should, and I don’t pick up on key concepts or executions nearly as quickly as I do with writing. When I’m in rehearsal—playing the role of a student—I become reacquainted with how long it can take to new absorb concepts and unaccustomed ways, as well as how frustrating it can be to try your hardest but not quite get it, and how many times some groups need to be told something before it fully sinks in . . . in short, I feel the way many of my students, who are intelligent, willing people not always gifted at writing specifically, must feel when taking freshman composition. This is a healthy thing to be reminded of, and it makes me more patient, clearer with my instructions, and more understanding of students’ lives. That itself is more than worth a few hours a week.

The Story Workshop Approach

This one is just a quick recommendation that doesn’t entirely fit with the more fiction-oriented Bookshelf page. As part of my year-long resolution to become more familiar with the Chicago literary scene, I recently discovered a book called “Writing From Start to Finish”, which outlines the teaching philosophies employed by Columbia College-Chicago, located just up the road from where I teach at DePaul. The book, I’m glad to say, was a surprisingly comprehensive reader drawing from such seemingly disparate realms as argumentative compositions, journal writing, short fiction, and even some business writing thrown in. The overall theoretical construct was a bit more expressivist than I’m used to, and there were a fair degree of Donald Murrayesque exercises whose focus seemed to be on accessing the writing and voice that innately exists within a writer, as opposed to drawing from theories that are reliant on writing and thought as existing somewhere outside of the writer themselves. Writing, in this model, seems to about internal excavation as much as it is external collection, but it never went so far as to claim that everything needed for writing can be naturally found within the writer (an idea that has always struck me as incomplete at best). The expressivist bent was grounded, in fact, by a more cognitivist emphasis on problem solving, and revising (though not decimating) existing drafts through the lens of audience and authorial intention—revision as a process of re-asking what you want to say, and who you envision to be listening. There are some form study sections that focus on critical reading, even though I’ll probably emphasize this a bit more than some of the other elements if I ever teach from the text, but overall it was a remarkably holistic primer. Fair warning, though: the structure of the book can get a bit meandering in patches. If you can muddle through this, though, there’s lots of food for thought.

Now Appearing In . . .

And finally, the issue of Clackamas Literary Review containing my short story “Sequels” is now available for purchase, as is the issue of Relief: A Quarterly Christian Expression that contains my story “Swimmers into Cleanness Leaping”. Sometime next week I’ll throw my hat into the ring for the fall submission season, and here’s hoping it brings some luck!

Until next time . . .

Posted by Alan Ackmann - Oct 10, 05:26 PM.
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