An Interview with Jennifer Sherman Roberts, author of The Village Healers Book of Cures

Posted on September 30, 2023 by Ed Battistella
Email, RSS Follow

Southern Oregon writer Jennifer Sherman Roberts holds a PhD in Renaissance literature from the University of Minnesota, as well as master’s and bachelor’s degrees from Villanova University and the University of California, Berkeley. She is also a facilitator for Oregon Humanities, leading community conversations on the topic “Conspiracy Theories: Truth, Facts, and Tinfoil Hats” She has also taught at southern Oregon University and worked as the Interim Executive director of Josephine Community Libraries Inc. She lives in Grants Pass, where she is a debut novelist, fierce library advocate, occasional knitter, and aspiring mead maker.

Her debut novel, The Village Healers Book of Cures, is in seventeenth-century England, is her debut novel. Based on actual witch hunt in England, it’s a surprisingly modern tale of murder, revenge, alchemy, and evil.

Ed Battistella: I really enjoyed the Village Healer’s Book of Cures. How did you come up with the idea?

Jennifer Sherman Roberts: Oh, I’m so glad you enjoyed it!

The idea for the novel sort of crystalized when I was doing a conversation project with Oregon Humanities called “Stone Soup: How Recipes Can Preserve History and Nourish Community.” We were discussing a seventeenth-century healing recipe for “The Biting of a Mad Dogge” that required crabapple be harvested at a certain time of year, and one of the participants pointed out that it sounded sort of witchy. That gelled in my mind with a blog post I was writing about Witchfinder General Matthew Hopkins, et voila!

EB: There were several nice plot twists, including one involving the smarmy witch hunter Matthew Hopkins. That character was based on a real person, I understand.

JSR: Yes, and a horrible one at that. Though there have been many witch hunts and many witchfinders, he is probably the most notorious, having written a witchfinding manual called “The Discovery of Witches.” He began hunting witches in his hometown of Manningtree in England when, according to his own account, he overheard women talking about meeting the Devil in the forest. Witch-hunting became a profitable trade for him, as towns would levy a hefty tax for his services.

The method he used most for “discovering” witches was the pricking test. It was thought that witches had a “witch’s mark” (often considered a third nipple used to suckle the Devil) that would not bleed when pricked, so these poor women were poked all over with pins, needles, and even daggers.

By the time he ended his witchfinding career, Hopkins was responsible for the death of 300 women.

EB: Each chapter starts off with a brief recipe for curing some ailment, like dried mistletoe for convulsions or powdered goats blood mixed with ale for kidney stones. When I got to the end of the book, you answered the burning question I had, whether these were real historic cures or one’s you made up. Where did the recipes come from?

JSR: I found the recipes in digitized collections ranging from the Folger Shakespeare Library in DC to the Wellcome Library in London. They’re all open access, so anybody can read them. The handwriting can be difficult, though, so I also looked at an online research project for transcribing the recipes called “Shakespeare’s World.”

EB: Have you tried any of them? Have modern researchers looked into this?

JSR: Oh, heavens no, not by me! I have a healthy respect for the potency of herbs and would only want somebody with a whole lot of experience and training to make them. Lots of researchers have duplicated food recipes though, and the results are fun and delicious. I once made a “hedgehog pudding” with my kids—I was horrified when I saw the name of the recipe, but then I read on and realized it wasn’t made from hedgehogs but rather was a pleasant kind of vanilla pudding molded into the shape of a hedgehog with toasted almonds for the prickly bits.

EB: There were several nice turns of phrasing in the book, like the earlier use of the term “cunning woman?” Did your academic training give you an ear for the earlier language?

JSR: It’s funny you should mention that, as the book was originally titled “The Cunning Woman’s Book of Receipts” (changed because another book was recently published had too similar a name). As I hope I described well enough in the book, cunning women were healers, advice-givers, and dealers in small charms. I’ve read a lot about cunning women and how they played so many roles in the community, and yet came under such suspicion.

Having read so much from the period, I think I have an easier time replicating the cadence and rhythms of 17th century English. As a novelist, though, I have to be careful that it doesn’t sound too stilted to a modern reader. That’s why, for example, I use contractions in the novel. To be absolutely faithful to the language of the time would mean pulling the reader out of the story. It’s a fine balance and a bit of a dance doing both.

Where I think my research most affected my language–where I was able to let the formality take over–was in the trial of Agnes Shepherd. I had read so many transcripts of which trials that Hopkins’s accusations and 17th-century legalese came more naturally.

EB: More generally, what was the research like for the book?

JSR: Oh, I loved the research: The history of the English civil war, humoral medical theory, the use of medicinals and herbals, and as much as I could absorb about everyday life in a small 17th century village. I also read a ton about witches (particularly Owen Davies’s amazing work) and alchemy.

I’d written some blog posts about these recipes for the academic blog The Recipes Project. I’m fascinated by how the recipe books from that period are a jumble of food, perfume, and medical cookery. We’ve separated and codified each of those areas in the modern world, and seeing them side by side, I think, leads one to thinking of the ways these discrete areas intertwine.

I’m fascinated, too, by how the recipes seem to resemble some alchemical instructions and healing potions while presaging modern chemistry. I thought about that continuum while writing Mary, who has a deep thirst to know about the efficacy of her cures.

EB: One of the things that struck me early on was your comment that healers are motivated by wanting to understand as well as to cure. I had never though of their motivation that way. How did that realization come to you?

JSR: My take may be modern, and it may be that I’m imposing that thirst to discover the causes of things on my characters, but I don’t think so. The novel is set during the beginning of the Scientific Revolution, after all—not long after Francis Bacon famously called a new way of understanding knowledge. I think that drive to understand can’t have just been exclusive to the elite and aristocratic. I figured surely a woman hunting for herbs and cooking for long hours would want to know whether—and why—they worked.

The medical ideas that had been circulating for centuries—especially of the four humors (yellow bile, black bile, phlegm, and blood) —point to a desire to understand the fundamental working of these materials in the body, and indeed the recipes reference phlegm, blood, and bile. We have lots of evidence that men were thinking in these ways, but since almost all women were forbidden to circulate their own ideas in writing, we can’t share their thinking as easily. I guess this is my way of imagining what it must have been like.

EB: Is there a moral of the tale for today’s readers?

JSR: Oh, that’s a great question. The novel grapples with the fear of knowledge and the prejudices that are allowed to possess communities. Of charlatans and villains and cowards. But it also, I hope, explores the many varieties of love and belonging. Personally, I think there are a lot of parallels with scientific, political, and cultural controversies happening now—not least of which is a recasting of the phrase “witch hunt.”

But I leave that up to the reader.

EB: If you were casting this story as a movie, who would you get to play Mary?

JSR: Oh, I’ve had a running cast in my head since the beginning! For Mary, I’ve imagined Emilia Clarke (of Games of Thrones/ Daenerys Targaryen fame). I’ve also imagined Fiona Shaw as Agnes.

EB: Have you got plans to bring Mary Fawcett and Robert Sudbury back for another book?

JSR: I’m not sure. There’s definitely more to their story, and there are characters in the novel I’d love to explore more. We’ll have to see what the demand is, I guess!

EB: Thanks for talking with us. Best of luck with The Village Healer’s Book of Recipes?

JSR: It’s been a pleasure. Thanks so much!

 

Posted in Ideas and Opinions, Interviews, Literary Events in Southern Oregon | Comments Off on An Interview with Jennifer Sherman Roberts, author of The Village Healers Book of Cures

An Interview with Christina Ward, author of Holy Food: How Cults, Communes, and Religious Movements Influenced What We Eat—An American History

Posted on September 18, 2023 by Ed Battistella
Email, RSS Follow

Christina Ward is an independent cultural historian of food and food history, exploring what we eat and why we eat it. She is the author of American Advertising Cookbooks-How Corporations Taught Us To Love, Spam, Bananas, and Jell-O, and Preservation-The Art and Science of Canning, Fermentation, and Dehydration.

She is a contributor to Serious Eats, Edible Milwaukee, The Wall Street Journal, Food & Wine magazine and more. She also rode around town in the Oscar Meyer Wienermobile with Padma Lakshmi on the hottest day in July of 2019 for “Taste the Nation.”

Her current book is Holy Food: How Cults, Communes, and Religious Movements Influenced What We Eat—An American History (September 26, 2023).

Ed Battistella: I’ve taught courses on the language of food and on the rhetoric of cults, so Holy Food was a really interesting book to me. How did you think to combine the history of spiritual movements with the history of food?

Christina Ward: Food and religion are the twinned obsessions of my life. I remember as a young child being fascinated when I heard people saying they could or could not eat something because of their religion. I grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin—a very Catholic city—and there were kids in the neighborhood “giving up” foods for Lent. The notion that someone’s god (or gods) would care about what a person eats set me down this path. It took five years of active research and writing to get Holy Food to “book”, but I’ve been thinking about how food and religion are intertwined for decades.

EB: What does the history of food tell us about culture?

CW: Based on my research, I think humans tend to “sacralize” foods we enjoy and elevate their significance in ways that help us identify our community of like-minded people. The food itself is often inconsequential—the recipes from these groups show that many are following trends and fads—it’s the notion that specific foods have importance assigned to them that makes an item part the culture. The foods themselves are benign, it’s the meaning we give it. While not entirely a closed loop, our food reflects our culture, and our culture reflects our food. There is a built-in tension between what and how to eat and how we interact with our culture. That includes religious culture. In the US, we often view food through a judgmental lens–teasing among friends and family when someone in the group adopts a different eating pattern to the extreme of “dosing” vegetarians and vegans with meat. In mainstream America, rejecting a type of popular food is often viewed as a judgement against American culture.

EB: What was it about the Great Awakening of the nineteenth century that brought about so many food fads, I guess you could call them?

CW: The advances in tech sped everything along. A mechanized printing process allowed for an exponential increase in newspapers, books, and tracts. New religious ideas, coupled with food prohibitions and ideas for a new type of diet flooded the country. The Book of Mormon was printed in 1830 and has remained in print to this day. By early 1844, apocalyptic preacher William Miller’s tract about his divinely revealed system for calculating the end of the world had reached 500,000 people.

Access to cheap printing also allowed many groups to publish cookbooks which had the double-pronged goal of teaching new converts about a group’s diet and act as an attractant for potential new believers who were interested in the food. For groups like the Seventh Day Adventists, which was formed out of the chaos among Millerites when the world did not end in 1844, their vegetarian cookbook became a lodestone for numerous groups embracing vegetarianism.

EB: You discussed the Nation of Islam diet in Elijah Muhammed’s How to Eat Live. How did that come about?

CW: Rarely discussed is how much of a role personal taste of a group’s leader plays in their cuisine, but it happens. For the Nation of Islam, food became a core concern under the leadership of Elijah Muhammed. His philosophy was partially informed by the “Tuskegee Idea” that Blacks should form separate and self-sufficient communities and never rely on white people for anything. Muhammed felt the processed foods made by white-owned corporations and sold to the Black community were a method of poisoning and controlling Black bodies. He advocated for a spartan diet of one meal a day of mostly grains and vegetables with fish and chicken proteins as acceptable in small amounts. He imbued NoI food culture with political meaning as well by forbidding foods associated with southern enslavement of Black people. Specific beans were allowed while others prohibited. He felt that overuse of salt was making people sluggish. While not every member of the NoI followed every dictate in How to Eat to Live, enough people followed most of them. Adhering to Muhammad’s diet results in a healthy body to this day. The NoI breakdown of 50% vegetables, 30% bean proteins and grains, and about 20% meat proteins is nearly the same macro breakdown of what is recommended by USDA nutritionists.

EB: One of the fascinating things for me was hearing about how many of our common foods got their start as specialties of religious communities, things like strawberry shortcake and veggie burgers, which then made their way into the mainstream and becoming commodified. Are we still seeing that with today’s cult foods?

CW: Absolutely yes! Tofurkey was developed at The Farm Community in the 1970s and is sold throughout the US in mainstream chain grocery stores. The Kettle brand of potato chips is owned by the 3HO group founded by Yogi Bhajan. Celestial Seasonings Tea’s founder was a devoted adherent of the Urantia Book. I’m sure that there is a small group somewhere in the United States that will come up with the next big food brand in the coming decade.

EB: Holy Food has 75 historical recipes for things like Rejuvelac, Moor Salad and Dilly Bread, and you’ve updated and tested all of these. Do you have a favorite? And a least favorite?

CW: I have a sweet tooth and am partial to desserts! Shaker Apple Pie is good and surprising because it uses rosewater as its main flavoring agent instead of the now familiar cinnamon. The Apple-Corn Cookies are great. They’re gluten-free but delicious even if you’re a wheat eater. On the savory side, the House of David’s Walnut Loaf is quite good as are Tassajara’s Nut-Buttered Beans.

The misses for me are entirely about personal taste as well as food allergies. I can’t eat fish or any meat and relied on chef friends to test and refine those recipes. I know they did a good job but that will be up to folks who try those recipes out. Of the recipes I tested, the ones that were really disgusting I left out of the book. One of my goals was to include foods that modern eaters could make and potentially enjoy. Eating what these groups did helps give more insights into their lives and beliefs. The worst item tested was from the True Light Beavers who had a recipe for Mock Chopped Liver Pate made from mushrooms and other ingredients. My initial thought from analyzing the ingredients was that it would taste pretty good; it did not. One of the few foods that honestly made me gag.

EB: Holy Food is a very visual book. You’ve got photos of spiritual leaders, communes, and cookbooks and on just about every other page. How did you manage to track down all those great images?

CW: Holy Food is not an academic book (though I researched and wrote it with academic rigor) and is for general readers. I feel that images provide another form of information for readers to fully understand what people believe.

I think it’s also too easy to take the cheap shot and mock people who followed religious gurus or charlatans. As a researcher and cookbook collector, I’ve felt that there is too much great visual language lost when we don’t see contextual images. Seeing pictures of people laughing at Jonestown adds nuance to the story we think we know. Seeing George Washington Carver as a vigorous young man standing in a field of his hybrid plants communicates so much about him. Moreso when most images of Carver online and in books depict him as an old man.

I spent time (maybe too much time) in museums and libraries seeking out images. Oftentimes finding one image would lead to others. Pictures of Nation of Islam founder Wallace Farad (sometimes Fard) are notoriously rare. On an unrelated trip to Detroit, I visited the main library who holds the Detroit Free Press photo archives and within minutes—and with the invaluable assistance of the librarians—I found an image of Farad. Even the librarians were thrilled. And of course, in the case of many of the 20th century groups, they have images of their members and founders. Most groups were happy to share images. That they were willing to share was based on my approach to the material, I tried to refrain from judging any group or their beliefs unless those beliefs were coercive and destructive.

EB: If you had your own cult, what would the cuisine be like?

CW: I mentioned that I’m a vegetarian with a sweet tooth, so my cuisine would be most similar to the Hare Krishna diet but with more cakes, pies, and cookies. I would also sacralize chocolate into a ritual that gives me the authority to eat a few candy bars per day. Not a very healthy diet but when one declares themselves godhead, anything goes.

EB: Thanks for talking with us.

CW: Thank you for your interest! My hope above all else is that readers marvel at how relatively small groups and individuals have an outsized influence on our modern food.

 

Posted in Ideas and Opinions, Language, What People Are Reading | Comments Off on An Interview with Christina Ward, author of Holy Food: How Cults, Communes, and Religious Movements Influenced What We Eat—An American History

An Interview with Thomas Dodson, author of No Use Pretending

Posted on September 13, 2023 by Ed Battistella
Email, RSS Follow

Thomas Dodson is an assistant professor and librarian at Southern Oregon University.  His story collection, No Use Pretending, was selected by Gish Jen for the Iowa Short Fiction Prize and is forthcoming from University of Iowa Press.

He holds graduate degrees from the Ohio State University, Kent State University, and the University of Iowa, where he was an Iowa Arts Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in fiction.

His fiction has appeared in The Missouri Review, Gulf Coast, The Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. His short stories have been awarded the 2022 Robert and Adele Shiff Award and the 2020 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize. His story “Keeping” was selected by the editors of Best American Short Stories as a distinguished story of 2022. He has been the runner-up for the Autumn House Fiction Contest and a finalist for the WICW Fiction Fellowship, the Glimmer Train Award for New Writers, and the Hamlin Garland Award for the Short Story.

Thomas Dodson grew up in northeast Missouri and has graduate degrees in comparative cultural studies and in library science. He lives in Ashland.

No Use Pretending was praised for its “range of emotions and voices (Jess Walter, author of The Angel of Rome and Other Stories), the “complicated humanity” of its characters (Margot Livesey, author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy), and its “captivating vision of hope, regret, and resilience” (Tom Drury, author of Pacific).

Thomas Dodson will be reading from No Use Pretending at Bloomsbury Books, on October 30, at 7 pm and in the Meese Room of the Hannon Library on November 9, at 5:30 pm.

Ed Battistella: Congratulations on No Use Pretending.

Thomas Dodson: Thanks, and thanks so much for your interest in the book!

EB: This is a wide-ranging, ideas-based collection, covering everything from beekeeping, drone warfare, fracking, Buddhism, and Greek mythology. These aren’t everyday fiction topics. Can you talk a bit about the research you do—and where your expertise as a librarian fits in?

TD: I think a lot of writers begin with a character that interests them and build out from there. I do that sometimes, but just as often for me it’s an idea or a curiosity about something that’s happening in the world.

Like with the story about the drone pilot stationed just outside Las Vegas. I was interested in these two forms of American power, both of which have to do with vision—the power to see and act at a great distance with drones, and then, with Las Vegas, the bright lights, casinos, and strip clubs, the power to sort of overwhelm the senses with capitalist spectacle and sex-as-commodity.

I could try to write an essay about all this, but honestly, I’m much more interested in exploring those issues and ideas through the lived experience of a character. That experience is fascinating to me. And getting at it—what it’s like to be a drone pilot, to be fighting a war on another continent and then clocking out and helping your kids with their homework—that requires a good amount of research that goes beyond abstractions about the ethics of drone warfare or understanding the policy positions. I needed to know, for example, what slang the pilots used among themselves, what the trailers they worked in smelled like (not good), what it was like to be married to someone living that life. The work of getting that kind of information is made a lot easier because of my training as a librarian.

Also, I agree with what John Gardner says in The Art of Fiction, that a conventional story should evoke a “vivid and continuous dream” in the mind of the reader. That dream is a delicate thing and lots of things can jolt the reader out of it—bad prose or flat characters, for example. So, it really wouldn’t make sense to load down a story with a bunch of footnotes like an academic work. Still, I want to credit the work of the journalists, philosophers, and others that made it possible for me to write each story. To that end, and to give the reader interested in a topic explored in one of the stories a place to go for more, I have a page on my website dedicated to the sources I’ve drawn from: https://thomasadodson.com/sources.

EB: What goes through your mind as you are developing a character? I found myself noticing a lot of small details that shaped my understanding of the characters, like the way that you mention the cat as Kenzie’s “familiar” in “Fault Trace” or the description of Sandy’s perm as being “like a halo of dishwater foam” in “Creek People.”

TD: In developing and presenting characters, I think I’m always striving for details that are particular and feel authentic. I also try not to shy away from characters who are “difficult.” I want characters to feel real, and real people are flawed in the most interesting ways. That’s occasionally gotten me into a little trouble with readers who want characters to be “likeable” or “relatable,” which isn’t at all what I’m going for. I really like what Steve Almond has said about difficult or unappealing characters; he says he’s opposed to “a mind-set that position[s] fiction as a place we go to have our virtues affirmed rather than having the confused and wounded parts of ourselves exposed.”

I’ve always been a reader who is most drawn in by stories that render the complexity, confusion—and yes, even the darkness—in human beings and their relationships to one another. Likeable or not, I hope my characters have that complexity, that they may be messed up in some ways, behave badly in some situations, but that doesn’t exhaust who they are. The reader may not always like them, but I hope as a story progresses, the reader comes to understand them and empathize with their struggles.

EB: I’m curious about the title of the collection. For me, it seemed that many—or at least several–of the stories were about characters pretending this are one way not another—trying to skip out on reality.

TD: Yes, exactly. The title has several meanings for me. Denis Johnson, probably my favorite writer, has said: “There’s nobody who can disguise himself. Eventually we’re all outed in one way or another.” In one sense, I think the stories are about that. How we try to disguise ourselves, present an idealized or false version of ourselves, to others, but also to ourselves because facing up to our flaws is difficult and humbling. We’d rather not go there. I try in these stories to put characters in situations where they have to confront who they really are beyond those superficialities and disguises.

I also want to push back a little against the idea that art should serve some social purpose beyond itself, that it needs to be subordinated to the ends of politics or edification or whatever to be truly worthwhile. I would say that art shouldn’t have to have utility in that sense; it shouldn’t be expected to “do” something to improve society or the reader. But, of course, this is a point on which reasonable people can disagree. I just intend with the title to playfully position myself on one side of that argument.

And speaking of playfulness, a more straight-forward sense of the title is simply that this kind of storytelling is a kind of adult “pretending.” I get to pretend to be someone else writing the story and the reader gets to pretend to be someone else reading it. I try to deal with serious things in the story, but I don’t want to completely abandon that sense of being a kid and playing and making up stories.

EB: I’m curious too about the arrangement of the eleven a stories in No Use Pretending. Was it difficult to put them put them in order or did it come easily?

TD: Well, I feel like with a story collection you want to try to both start and go out with a bit of a bang. So, I’ve positioned what I think are my strongest stories first and last; they also happen to be my most recent ones, written while I wrapped up my time at Iowa. Beyond that, I think the middle section all has to do with mythology in some way—a Greek myth, a sort of Kafkaesque fairytale, and a little flash piece about the mythmaking we engage in as we try to understand our relationships with our parents. Also, addiction is a definitely a theme in the book and even though there isn’t a clear arc across the stories—like a redemption narrative or something—I did want to end with “The Watchman,” which is a story about recovery and making meaning out of life after addiction rather than just the pain of being stuck in the midst of it.

EB: Can you say something about your process as a writer. The stories in No Use Pretending seem finely polished.

TD: Thanks; I’m glad you think so. I used to have some pretty dumb ideas about genre—what was “literary” and what wasn’t, but I like to think I’m past that now. I do think the kind of fiction I enjoy reading and want to write is very concerned with the style of the prose, shows that the writer has taken great care with that, is trying to engage the reader with the language at the paragraph and sentence level.

Not all fiction aspires to do that, or needs to do that; in some genres, the readers might even find it annoying: “yes, yes, get on with the plot, would you?” I used to fit these differences into a hierarchy of “quality,” or “literary” fiction versus “commercial fiction.” I can still fall into that sometimes, but now I mostly just see this as a matter of genre conventions and personal taste—even “taste” is a loaded word; let’s say “preference.” I have my preferences and I guess I just hope to reach readers who also appreciate a good line for its own sake beyond how it functions to further plot or character or some other element.

As for process, I worked on these stories over many years, workshopping to get feedback from other writers, revising each several times, and publishing them as I went along. As for my process, it’s a mess really; I have long fallow periods, or periods when I’m mostly jotting down ideas and doing research. I’ve been researching a novel over the summer, for example, but I hope to be back to the writing desk again this fall. Writing fiction has always been a bit fraught for me. I write confidently and without much stress or doubt all the time. But fiction is different. Each time I sit down to work on a story draft, I wonder all over again if I’m still going to be able to do it. Luckily, so far at least, it’s worked out.

EB: Your website warns readers “Don’t even get him started about typography, continental philosophy, or climate fiction.” Dare I ask?

TD: Not unless you want to fire up a whole other interview. That said, I’m happy to talk to pretty much anyone anytime about those topics.

EB: What’s your backstory as a writer? Who are some of the writers who have influenced you?

TD: Really a lot. I learned a great deal from reading Mary Gaitskill, Denis Johnson, Lorrie Moore, Toni Morrison. I could go on and on.

EB: What are you currently working on writer-wise?

TD: I’m working on a novel draft called “The Tower of Abraham,” about an imagined community that forms in a vacant and half-constructed office tower in Boston’s financial district. It’s based on an actual community that occupied an office tower in Venezuela, Torre David.

EB: Thanks for talking with us.

TD: Thanks so much for having me!

Posted in Ideas and Opinions, Interviews, Literary Events in Southern Oregon | Comments Off on An Interview with Thomas Dodson, author of No Use Pretending

An Interview Jay Schroder, author of Teach from Your Best Self

Posted on September 6, 2023 by Ed Battistella
Email, RSS Follow

Jay Schroder has taught high school in both traditional and alternative education settings for 24 years. During this time, he developed approaches to teaching that allow him to thrive in the challenging profession.

In 2021, the Oregon Council of Teachers of English (OCTE) awarded Schroder the High School English Teacher of Excellence Award, and in 2022, Jay received the High School Teacher of Excellence Award from the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE).

Jay Schroder is an affiliate faculty member at Southern Oregon University and has recently begun working with Southern Oregon Regional Educator Network (SOREN) as an Implementation Coach. Jay is also a certified instructor of Social Emotional Learning and Character Development and a sixth-degree black belt in karate.

In his Teach From Your Best Self workshops, he shares the approach to teaching that changed his life. He has brought that together in his book Teach From Your Best Self: A Teacher’s Guide to Thriving in the Classroom (Routledge, 2023).

Ed Battistella: I enjoyed Teach From Your Best Self. It caused me to reflect on my own teaching over the years. Thanks for writing this.

Jay Schroder: Thank you, Ed. I wrote the book while teaching full time and leading teacher trainings during the summer and on weekends, so this has definitely been a high-effort labor of love. It means a great deal that you found the book impactful.

EB: What should prospective teachers know going into the field?

JS: First, I think it’s important that new teachers have a sense of how hard this job is. As an incoming teacher, I didn’t fully grasp the depth of difficulty involved in teaching, so once I was plunged into the reality of it, I just thought I must be uniquely bad at it. This led me to get unnecessarily down on myself, which didn’t help. I would have loved it if someone who had done the job for a while had come along and said, “teaching is one of the hardest jobs in the world—that’s why you’re struggling.” This would have kept me from being so hard on myself, so that’s the first thing I would offer.

Second, if you want to teach well, your well-being matters. Whether you show up to your job frazzled and fried or nourished and rejuvenated will have a huge impact on your ability to help your students. It’s really easy in education to let the job consume us. We tell ourselves that we’re making a worthy sacrifice for the students, but from my perspective that’s a mistake. Students thrive when their teacher is thriving. If you want your students to thrive, prioritize your own well-being.

EB: There was an impressive amount of research in your book, along with your own experiences and perspective. What should people who don’t teach know about the work of teachers?

JS: Teachers show up every day, to do a tough job under extremely difficult conditions. How difficult is it? Well, according to the results of a 2023 Gallup Poll, conditions in K-12 education are so tough that K-12 employees are the most burned-out employees in America. And, among this group of K-12 employees, teachers are the most burned out. Incidentally, the second most burned out employees in America are people who work in colleges and universities.

The burnout gap between teachers and people who work in other industries isn’t even close. For example, whereas 31% of people who work in healthcare report always or very often feeling burned out, 55% of K-12 teachers report feeling burned out all, or much of, the time.

So, the first thing I would want people to know is that the job is hard, and the people who do it need to feel supported. A kind word or a small gesture of appreciation goes a long way.

The second thing I want people to know is that teaching and learning are extremely complex processes. One of the criticisms I hear from people is that teachers should just teach academics. What they don’t realize is that before students can begin to learn academics, they need to feel safe at school (physically, emotionally, and psychologically). They need to have the social skills to interact with their classmates in productive ways. They need to have the emotional resilience to persevere with a difficult task. They need, collectively with their classmates and their teacher, to have the social skills to create a classroom environment in which everyone feels safe to share, to express, and to learn. All of these skills are important foundational pieces to learning academics. This is why telling teachers to simply teach academics is unrealistic, and frankly, wouldn’t work.

EB: What did you learn from writing Teach from Your Best Self?

JS: I wrote the first draft of the book in 4 months. Writing the book proposal and revising the book took an additional three years, and I worked on it every single day. So, the revision process actually took nine times as long as it took me to write the first draft. I kept a file that contained all of the big chunks I wrote and then cut from the book, and that file is now larger than the entire finished book. So, I learned something about the kind of labor involved in writing the best book I possibly could.

Another thing I learned had to do with what it means to be an author. Author’s typically get all the credit for writing a book, so I used to imagine that writing a book was a solitary process. In my case, however, writing this involved 15 educator beta readers, Carolyn Bond, my wonderful editor, my mentor Paul Richards who early in the process gave me the feedback I needed to get the book on a solid track, and my fabulous wife Judy (also a teacher) who gave me ongoing feedback and kept the house from falling apart while I worked on the book. So, I learned that writing a book is a team effort. Now when I read a book, I pay much closer attention to the acknowledgment section because I have a much deeper understanding of how important all the supporting people are to a successful book.

EB: I like that way you’ve applied life lessons to teaching and incorporated your karate practice. Can you tell our readers what’s mean by in shin tonkei and zanshin.

JS: In shin tonkei comes from the ninja of feudal Japan. Ninja were stealthy fighters who emerged during the warring states period of Japanese history as mercenary spies and assassins. They were hired by warlords to do the kind of dirty work that was beneath the dignity of the samurai. The ninja worked behind the scenes conducting night raids, ambushes, and assassinations. There were both male and female ninja, and rather than the brute force and swordsmanship that the Samurai relied on, the ninja would use surprise and cunning. The way of the ninja was in shin tonkei which means maximum impact with minimal effort. This means that the ninja had to be extremely patient and calculating, and in each case, know what mattered most and be able to improvise as circumstances changed.

In Teach from Your Best Self I suggest that teachers apply in shin tonkei to their jobs. Like the ninja, teachers are continually outnumbered and face seemingly insurmountable obstacles. They need to know what matters most, be patient and calculating, so they can strategically focus their efforts where it will have the most impact on student learning. Trying to do everything at the same time is a big part of what has led teachers down the path of becoming the most burned-out employees in America and applying in shin tonkei can help.

Zanshin is another concept that comes from Japan. I’ve been training in karate for the past 24 years, and learning to embody zanshin has been an important part of my training. Essentially, zanshin is a mental state of relaxed alertness—a kind of open, responsive mindset in which a person is ready to respond to whatever happens. With zanshin the mind is completely relaxed and simultaneously aware and alert. It’s a state of both effortlessness and complete involvement. I think the closest term we have for this in the west is the idea of being in the zone, or in the flow state.

For the martial artist, it isn’t enough to be in this state while meditating undisturbed; the real challenge is to maintain this state under the pressure of someone’s attack.

In my own case, learning to maintain this mental state in the dojo bled into my teaching practice. As I grew in my ability to main zanshin, my students gave up trying to get the best of me. They began telling me how much they enjoyed the relaxed vibe of my class. Teaching became more fun.

In Teach from Your Best Self, I offer approaches and understandings people can use to deepen their capacity to attain zanshin and maintain it, even under stressful circumstances.

EB: You mentioned that your black belt test involved about 4 hours of sparring and that you ended up with three cracked ribs, a broken nose, and two black eyes. I’m curious how your students reacted to your appearance.

JS: On that Monday morning, I was met with a ton of questions, “Oh my God, Mr. Schroder, what happened to you?!” They wanted to know if I had gotten into a fight. Indeed, I had—100 rounds with experienced black belts.

EB: You mentioned that negativity and anxiety can be contagious. Can you give an example or two?

JS: In the novel Don Quixote, Cervantes has Don Quixote’s wise and loyal servant Sancho say, “tell me your company and I will tell you what you are.” When someone tried to attribute the quote to Cervantes, Cervantes disclaimed it, saying it was proverbial. Indeed, the Greek philosopher Euripides, in the 4th century BC wrote “every man is like the company he is wont to keep.” And in the Old Testament book of Proverbs (13:20) there are warnings about how the people around us can either make us better or reduce us. So, this idea that the mindsets and emotions of others are contagious has been observed in human beings for a long time.

As parents, we can see the impact that our children’s friends have on them. People who served time in prison will often start their story by saying, “as a teenager, I got in with a bad crowd.”

The truth is, we are all highly influenceable by the people around us. Sometimes this can happen on a cultural scale, for instance, the way people simultaneously started panic buying toilet paper at the onset of the Covid 19 pandemic in 2020.

In 1992, scientists discovered an important part of the explanation when they discovered mirror neurons in brain research involving monkeys. Mirror neurons are neurons in our brain that mimic the firing patterns of people around us. This is a great advantage when learning a complex task. We can watch someone do something and as we do, the mirror neurons in our brain will mimic the firing pattern required to perform the task ourselves. Mirror neurons appear to be integral for babies learning language. They are why when someone smiles at us, we tend to smile back.

However, these same mirror neurons make us susceptible to embodying other people’s negativity and distressing emotional states.

This has huge repercussions in the classroom as when teachers are anxious or frustrated or overwhelmed, the mirror neurons of their students copy the firing patterns of their teacher. This leads to a situation in which the teacher’s brain isn’t firing optimally for teaching, and the students’ brains aren’t firing optimally for learning.

When teachers can maintain their best selves as they teach, the mirror neurons in their students’ brains will fire accordingly, and the students will tend toward responding to the teacher from their best selves. This simultaneously maximizes student learning while making the teacher’s job easier.

EB: You talk about “hurtspots.” What are those and how can you identify them?

JS: What I am calling hurtspots are pockets of pain left behind in our minds and bodies from unprocessed trauma. Typically, we don’t have the time, space, or support to process trauma in the immediate aftermath of a traumatic event, so we tuck the pain away to be processed later. Then, we try to forget about it and get on with our lives.

But those pockets of pain aren’t gone, so at some point we’ll face an event or circumstance that contain elements similar to the original traumatic experience. When this happens, the hurtspot awakens, flooding our systems with the unprocessed pain from the original trauma.

Because all of this is happening below our conscious awareness, we will look to the real time situation and blame it for our emotional and physiological distress. This is why we’ve all observed people having an intense emotional meltdown, or blowing up over something that looks, to an outside observer, to be pretty minor. Hurtspots lead people to react in proportion to how they feel, not in proportion to what actually happens.

Reacting out of proportion to the situation is actually one way we can learn to recognize hurtspots in ourselves. For instance, I once punched a hole through a wall because my girlfriend at the time was out later than I thought she would be.

Another tell-tale sign that I’ve been caught in the undertow of a hurtspot is if I’m obsessing or ruminating on the triggering event for hours, days, and sometimes maybe weeks after it’s happened. Usually, my rumination will be about how horrible someone else is, how right I am to feel the way I do, or what I should have done or said.

In time, the hurtspot will die down and we’ll try to put the episode behind us. But because we’ve not actually processed the underlying trauma, the hurtspot will go into hibernation, certain to ambush us the next time we face a similar experience. People can spend their whole lives cycling in and out of hurtspots, blaming the people and circumstances that trigger them into pain.

Activated hurtspots negatively affect our ability to meet circumstances in our own best way. Whether we are teaching a class, parenting a child, interacting with a friend, or dealing with an undesirable event, learning to respond from the best version of ourselves, rather than reacting from a hurtspot, will determine how things turn out—both for us, and for the people around us.

In the book, I offer Expressive Writing as a research backed approach for bringing healing and resolution to our hurtspots so they don’t continue to dog us in our lives.

EB: What’s next for you and Teach From Your Best Self?

JS: After 24 years as a classroom teacher, I’ve recently taken a job working for Southern Oregon Regional Educator Network (SOREN) where I will be available to support, coach, and mentor educators. Meanwhile, I will be continuing to grow the Teach from Your Best Self community through leading TFYBS trainings and taking advantage of opportunities to talk about Teach From Your Best Self. Ultimately, I want to be a voice in education reform, helping to steer education policy towards creating a sustainable education system in which staff and students alike are supported and inspired to bring their best every day.

EB: Thanks for talking with us. Best of luck with your work.

JS: This has been an absolute pleasure. Anyone who wants to learn more about Teach from Your Best Self and the work we are doing can go to teachfromyourbestself.org. I always love to hear from readers, so when you do read the book, feel free to reach out to me at [email protected].

 

Posted in Interviews | Comments Off on An Interview Jay Schroder, author of Teach from Your Best Self