Grad School: An Interview with Tara Thomas

Posted on April 30, 2015 by Ed Battistella
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Tara Thomas received her B.A. in English from Southern Oregon University in 2012. She is a second year Ph.D. student in the Department of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she studies Victorian-Edwardian literature and queer cultural studies.

EB: What is your graduate program like? What courses do you take and what sorts of things are you reading?

TT: The Department of Literature at Santa Cruz encourages us to do innovative, interdisciplinary, and comparative research. This results in cross-disciplinary collaborative research clusters and cutting-edge dissertation projects that usually develop as a result of our coursework. We all start out doing about two years of coursework and teaching in order to introduce ourselves to new theories and literature. I’ve taken an eclectic mix of courses: “Worlding Marco Polo,” “Greek History and Tragedy,” “Feminism and Posthumanism, and “Poetics of Empire,” to name a few. These seminars tend to focus on theoretical texts, which we sometimes read alongside primary texts. For example, I’ve read Bhanu Kapil Rider’s Humanimal with Donna Haraway’s When Species Meet and Gustave Flaubert’s Bouvard et Péchuchet with Frederic Jameson’s The Political Unconscious. Aside from our coursework, the program gives us plenty of pedagogical training. I am a teacher’s assistant for one class per quarter and have taught Jewish literature, Shakespeare, nineteenth-century British, and writing intensive introductions to literature. Each term, I take two seminars and work as a teacher’s assistant, so between attending lectures, grading, reading, and the occasional conference or guest lecture, grad school is a full-time job.

EB: How has your experience so far shaped your career goals?

TT: I have always wanted to teach—I studied English Education at SOU and taught ESL in Ecuador before pursuing a Ph.D. in literature UC Santa Cruz—so it was a matter of figuring out what kind of teacher I would be. Working as a TA has helped me to confirm that I want to teach at the university level. Getting students excited about learning is really rewarding. Today, I helped them understand how Herodotus’s Histories can help us to see the relationship between literature and ideology. Although my students arrived disgruntled for having to read ‘some old history book,’ they left chattering about the essays they now want to write. Graduate school has helped me to confirm that I want to be an academic, because of the emphasis on research and academic service, as well as pedagogy. Developing my research interests into both a short-term and career length research trajectory has also helped me envision making the jump from Ph.D. student to professor. Also, academic involvement in Senate subcommittees and associations in my field, like the Dickens Project, has made me realize that academia is my career choice. I have come to view my career goal—becoming a professor—as not only a career goal but also a lifestyle: vacations now become time to work on fun research projects.

EB: What is/was the most rewarding part and the most challenging?

TT: The first years of graduate school seem difficult: I remember weekly reading lists consisting of a thousand pages of dense texts, gigantic seminar papers, and professors asking questions that challenge my preconceived ideas. At times, it can feel like the plethora of knowledge you’re learning is washing over you without much retention. For me, the epiphany that all of your hard work is developing into a substantial project makes the moments of struggle worth it. For me, the realization happens while conducting and presenting research. Last summer I spent three weeks at the Bodleian Library and afterward attended a few conferences. It was exciting meeting some of the scholars whose ideas has informed my own, and who were interested in the research I was in the early stages of working on. These trips are one of the best parts of graduate school because not only am I researching and presenting, but I’m also meeting and making friends with scholars in my field. Although I haven’t officially started, I expect the process of writing the dissertation will be rewarding as well.

EB: What’s been your focus and how has grad school changed you?

TT: I entered grad school with a focus on British women authors and a vague interest in post-colonialism and queer theory. The faculty and theoretical texts I have been working with at UC Santa Cruz have helped me think more intellectually about the literature with which I work. I began grad school wanting to work on late-Victorian to Modern women authors but not knowing what my intervention would be. Now I am working on queer theory and culture in relation to British women writers. After two years at Santa Cruz, I have discovered my niche, although I am still constantly developing it—last month a read a transformative book, this month I decided to learn Latin, both of which I expect to play a substantial role in my dissertation.

EB: Any advice for students considering going on for more school?

TT: Start talking to your faculty mentors about graduate school now. They will be able to give you advice on how and where to apply, and will be the ones writing your recommendations. My undergrad advisor helped me revise my application essays. Research the schools you’re applying to as thoroughly as possible, and take note of what interests you (Is it the professors? The program? Funding or research opportunities? Their library?). Establish relationships with faculty before you go so that they can advocate for you during the admissions process. It is helpful to know with whom you want to work before you arrive. You might also email current graduate students more candid questions to get a sense of what their experiences have been like so far. When you are accepted, go to the prospective student visiting days. I didn’t decide to choose Santa Cruz until I’d visited campuses and met with faculty.

Once you’re there, remember to be confident and stay focused. Even if you don’t feel ready early on, make commitments: apply for conferences and fellowships, so that you can start forming your project early. Setting short-term goals for yourself (finishing coursework, presenting at a graduate student conference, visiting the nearest archive, forming a writing group) will assist you in achieving long-term goals. Also, come prepared but be ready to change. Coursework is a transformational experience, and I have a lot of friends who changed their research track after taking an inspiring course. Use seminar courses as a way to experiment with your research and as a way to forge relationships with faculty with whom you’d like to work. Take as many seminars and independent studies with them as possible, and don’t feel shy about having them read drafts of your writing.

EB: What’s next for you?

TT: After this term, I am planning on spending the summer in the U.K. I received the Anne and Jim Bay Fellowship in Victorian Studies to present my current project at the “Victorian Modernities” conference in Canterbury and to conduct archival work at the British Library in June and July. Afterward, I plan to enroll in a summer Latin intensive course at King’s College, University of London. I will be writing a journal article based on this work and reading a lot of Victorian-Edwardian literature for my Qualifying Exam, and attending the Long-Wide Nineteenth Century and Dickens Universe conference in Santa Cruz this August. After my Qualifying Exam in April, I’ll begin writing my dissertation.

EB: Thanks for talking with us.

TT: You’re welcome.

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Grad School: An Interview with Jayla Rae Ardelean

Posted on April 27, 2015 by Ed Battistella
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EB: What was your graduate program like? What courses did you take and what sorts of things were you reading?

JA: My graduate program was amazing because I was constantly challenged, whether that was academically, mentally, or emotionally. I think about 99% of grad school is keeping your shit together, and the other 1% is where the learning happens.

I took a lot of reading courses where we studied nonfiction pieces ranging from micro essay length (750 words) to typical essay length to entire book length works. Often, 250-400 page books would be assigned to read over the course of one week, in multiple classes. Get ready.

I also took a workshop course every semester where we reviewed and critiqued each other’s work. This is where the emotional challenge often occurred.

EB: How has your experience so far shaped your career goals?

JA: My program absolutely shaped my career goals. I had the opportunity to work for the literary journal affiliated with CSU, Colorado Review, where I gained the skills necessary to work in a career related to publishing. If I had not had this opportunity, I don’t know if I would have left this masters program with a tangible career goal (other than—of course—to continue writing my ass off).

EB: What is/was the most rewarding part and the most challenging?

JA: The most rewarding part was to have my thesis accepted by the graduate school because they rejected it three times due to “marginal errors.” I also found it rewarding to read my work aloud at several events. One of them was in a dimly lit bar.

The most challenging aspects were revising my thesis (a collection of essays) and keeping sane for the last two years while working, taking classes, and writing my thesis all at once. Picking yourself back up after breaking points is not always easy, but when you do move on after having significant moments of stress, you can pat yourself on the back.

EB: What’s been your focus and how has grad school changed you?

JA: My focus was to write in and learn about the genre, creative nonfiction—which was not always an easy exchange: “Do you like, write about facts… creatively?” Grad school has solidified my disinterest in a life of perpetual academia. I think I am finally done being a student.

EB: Any advice for students considering going on for more school?

JA: Understanding what you’re committing to is essential. But sometimes hearing that “grad school is really difficult” won’t fully sink in until you’re in it yourself—and that is totally okay. Know that the challenges you experience may not be the same challenges others have experienced, and making it all your own can be just as rewarding as earning the degree.

EB: What’s next for you?

JA: I am pursuing a career in publishing, hopefully in a literary journal venue. I will continue to submit essays to literary journals for publication, get rejected, get rejected some more, and then hopefully eventually get published. More than once, please.


EB: Thanks for talking with us.

JA: Thanks for that letter of recommendation for grad school, Ed!

Jayla Rae Ardelean holds an MA in creative nonfiction from Colorado State University. Her two dachshunds are the loves of her life, but literary geniuses are welcome.

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An Interview with John Hough, Jr.

Posted on April 20, 2015 by Ed Battistella
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John Hough, Jr. is a graduate of Haverford College. He has been a VISTA volunteer, a speech writer for Senator Charles Mathias of Maryland, and assistant to James Reston at the Washington Bureau of the New York Times.

Hough is the author of six novels, including Seen the Glory: A Novel of the Battle of Gettysburg, winner of the American Library Association’s 2010 W. Y. Boyd Award, and three works of nonfiction. He lives in West Tisbury, Massachusetts.

We talked about his latest book, The Fiction Writer’s Guide to Dialogue: A Fresh Look at an Essential Ingredient of the Craft, recently released from Allworth Press.

EB: Tell us a bit more about your background as a writer and teacher.

JH: Writing is the only thing I’ve ever wanted to do, unless you count my boyhood ambition to be a big league baseball player. I published my first book when I was 22, a nonfiction account of my year as a VISTA volunteer in Detroit, and the books came at fairly regular intervals from then on, though I tend to be longer between books, having suffered some terrible dry spells, than many writers. I had married and settled on Martha’s Vineyard when a successful writers workshop here on the island came to my attention. I was between books, and to help make ends meet, I began offering classes in creative writing in our living room. Later I was recruited to teach plot, character and dialogue at seminars in Chicago and on Cape Cod for doctors and lawyers who wanted to write novels, put on by an organization called SEAK. I’ve also taught frequently in the adult education program here on the Vineyard.

EB: What prompted you to write this book? Were there things you wished you had known when you began writing?

JH: I was asked to write the book. A SEAK client who had attended a seminar I gave on dialogue later published a book of his own, and he recommended me for the job to his editor. I’d been teaching dialogue for years and thought a book on it would be easy. It was harder than I thought; I knew bad dialogue when I saw it, but I didn’t always know why it was bad. Writing the book forced me to discover why, and explain it—to present the writing of good dialogue as a technique, which I think it is.

EB: I had always thought that fiction writers got their best dialogue from listening to people talk. But it’s more complicated than that, isn’t it?

JH: When I teach dialogue, the first thing I say is, dialogue in fiction is not at all like dialogue in real life. In real life we digress, we ramble, we elaborate needlessly, we use three or four words, three or four sentences, where one would do. Dialogue in fiction has to be tight and to the point—relentlessly so. The trick is to make it sound real, sound natural. Having said that, I would never tell a writer not to listen to people talk. It’s where we get idioms, everyday usage, the interesting turn of phrase. It’s where we get the feel of how people talk. But we aren’t, as I say in the book, stenographers. We’re rewrite men—we take what we hear and condense it, make it compact. We give it shape and cohesion.

EB: You talk about bits of dialogue from all sorts of writers. How did you go about collecting the dialogue you wanted to use? Are you a dialect hoarder?

JH: Collecting examples for the book was the most fun part. Naturally I chose books and short stories that I love, and I was careful to keep a gender and ethnic balance among authors, which was easy. I went for what I hope is a delightful variety, from Melville and Twain to Elmore Leonard.

EB: You seemed to be having a lot of fun writing this book—not in a jokey sense, but in the sense of sharing an enjoyment in good writing. Should writing be fun?

JH: It certainly can be. There’s all the difference, though, between “fun” and “easy.” I’m suspicious of writers who write 10 or 15 pages a day; I think they’re having too much fun. Hemingway wrote two and a half hours a day and said he was “empty” when he’d finished. I know that William Styron, who composed in longhand, wrote three or four pages of legal tablet a day, never more. Graham Greene never wrote more than 500 words at a sitting. “There is nothing to writing,” Hemingway famously said. “All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” But no writer ever took more pleasure in his or her work than he did.

EB: I was fascinated by your discussion of voice as physical description. What did you mean by that?

JH: No character in literature is more alive and vivid than Huckleberry Finn, and yet Huck never tells us what he looks like. Students are surprised when I tell them that there’s no physical description of Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird, because they can see Atticus so clearly. Why? Because there’s character in his speaking voice, as there is in Huck Finn’s–a ton of character–and it prompts an image in our imagination. It’s a vivid image—face, bearing, even body type. There’s a brightness in Huck’s face of intelligence and slyness. He’s agile, mentally and physically. Atticus’s face can only be gentle, wise, touched faintly by melancholy. How much physical description to provide, or how little, is of course up to the writer—do you want to direct the reader, or leave it mostly, or entirely, to the reader’s imagination? The more I think about it, the more I suspect that there’s no better way than dialogue to create a character in the mind’s eye of the reader. Faulkner almost never describes his characters physically. Nor do Joan Didion and Cormac McCarthy.

EB: Is there a single most common problem with fictional dialogue?

JH: Yes: the absence of tension. Overt hostility aside, it’s difficult to define what comprises tension in dialogue. In the book I hit on the idea of suspense: neither the reader nor the characters should know, exactly, what is going to be said next. If you can anticipate the gist of a speech, then the tone or wording of it should be somehow unexpected. The idea of tension in a scene between friends or lovers who aren’t quarreling seems counterintuitive, but without tension, any narrative goes slack. It becomes uninteresting. Your characters, if only in some small way, have to keep each other, and the reader, off balance. Keep the reader wondering what will be said next. Keep your dialogue direct and economical. Dispense with the pleasantries we use all the time in real life. Nothing kills tension like “please” and “thank you.”

EB: As a linguist, I was fascinated by the discussion of dialects, accents and vernacular language. You describe it as setting speech to music. Can you elaborate for our readers?

JH: It didn’t occur to me until I was writing the chapter on accents and the vernacular that the only regional American accent that is regularly evoked in our literature is the southern. In print, Didion’s Californians don’t sound any different from John Cheever’s New Yorkers, or Anne Tyler’s Baltimoreans. A southern accent, of course, is more pronounced and distinctive than any other, and southern writers from Faulkner to Lee Smith color their dialogue with it, so that we never forget, linguistically, where we are. The “music” I spoke of resides not so much in pronunciation—Lena Grove says “sour-deens” for “sardines” and “fur” for “far” in Light in August—as in the arrangement of words along the line, which I compare to musical notes. Smith never alters the spelling of a word, as Faulkner does occasionally, but you can hear the elongate vowels and softened consonants of her Virginia hill people in the construction of their dialogue—the way Smith puts their words together, the way the words play out. Throw in a dash of vernacular and the occasional syntactical oddity, and there’s country music in every line.

EB: You list some great lines of dialogue in your book. Do you have an all-time favorite? Or a couple of favorites?

JH: In the book I listed the line from To Kill A Mockingbird that gives the novel its title, but there’s another line in the book that moves me even more. Tom Robinson has just been convicted, and Atticus has tried to comfort him and is now making his slow way down the aisle of the courthouse. His children, Jem and Scout, have watched the trial from the balcony, where African Americans are required to sit. This is from the novel, narrated by 12-year-old Jean Louise, or “Scout”:

    “Someone was punching me, but I was reluctant to take my eyes from the people below us, and from the image of Atticus’s lonely walk down the aisle.

    “Miss Jean Louise?”

    I looked around. They were standing. All around us and in the balcony on the opposite wall, the Negroes were getting to their feet. Reverend Sykes’s voice was as distant as Judge Taylor’s:

    “Miss Jean Louise, stand up. Your father’s passing.”


EB: Thanks for talking with us.

JH: A pleasure.

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An Interview with Ray Rhamey

Posted on April 13, 2015 by Ed Battistella
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Born and raised in Dallas, Ray Rhamey studied at the University of Texas-Austin before embarking on a decades-long career in advertising and marketing communications and a stint as a scriptwriter in Hollywood. Today he lives in Ashland where he devotes his energy to book editing and book design (crrreative.com) and writing (rayrhamey.com).

Rhamey is the author of three novels The Summer Boy, a novel of Texas; Finding Magic, contemporary fantasy; and The Vampire Kitty-cat Chronicles, a humorous spoof of the vampire myth as told by a cat. He has also recently published a guide to writing fiction and we sat down on the internet to talk about Mastering the Craft of Compelling Storytelling.

EB: Tell us a bit about your background in writing and editing.

RR: Even though my major in college was psychology, my first job was writing programmed learning training materials (about insurance policies—what a thrill!). I moved from that to a long career in advertising as a copywriter and creative director. Advertising is a great place to learn the discipline of using language in the most effective—and concise—ways possible. But my nature is that of a storyteller, so I left that to try screenwriting. There was a learning curve, though—screenplays target 120 pages, a page a minute in movie time. When writing my first script I found I was almost halfway through the story on page 6. Oops.

Then I moved on to long-form fiction, and have written a few novels. I was in a critique group in Seattle when the members started asking me to edit their novels. I moved from that to freelance editing, and now have clients all across the world thanks to the Internet. I still work on my own fiction, though.

EB: Who is the book for? What readers did you have in mind?

RR: Mastering the Craft of Compelling Storytelling is based on material I created for my blog on the craft of writing, so it was intended for all writers of fiction. I’ve found that the book works for many levels of skill. The focus on craft is good for giving beginning writers tools to use and grow familiar with—a number of editors have recommended it to their clients. But experienced writers also gain insights and stimulation that helps their writing. I know one author who reviews the book before self-editing to be reminded of the things that are so easy to overlook. I must say that I’ve read some bestselling authors that would have benefited from applying a few of the lessons.

EB: What skills does a good editor need?

RR: I don’t think of skills so much as talents, or affinities, plus knowledge—an eye/ear for language is first and foremost, but editors differ in how they can best apply that ability, and that’s why there are several “kinds” of editors. Here are the three basic types as defined by the Northwest Independent Editors Guild:

    Developmental Editing
    Developmental editors help you develop your project from an initial concept or draft, and can consult with you before the writing even begins. Developmental editors can help plan the organization and features of your project. They may make suggestions about content and presentation, write or rewrite text, do research, and suggest additional topics for you to consider.

    Substantive Editing
    Substantive editors work with you once you have a full text. They will help you get it into its final form, which may involve reordering or rewriting segments of it to improve readability, clarity, or accuracy. If you’re a fiction writer, a substantive editor can alert you to inconsistent character behavior or speech, help you adjust your language to your desired audience, and make sure your story has believable dialogue and a plausible plotline.

    Copyediting
    Copyeditors work with your text when it is in final or nearly final form. They read each sentence carefully, seeking to fix all errors of spelling, punctuation, capitalization, grammar, and word usage while preserving your meaning and voice. With your permission, they may rewrite tangled sentences or suggest alternative wordings. They can ensure that your text conforms to a certain style; if your project includes elements such as captions, tables, or footnotes, they can check those against the text.

    Basically, I’m a substantive editor, although I do intensive line editing and am a pretty good copyeditor. For all of my life I’ve had a talent for language and how to use it for the best effect.

EB: What’s the hardest part of editorial work?

RR: For me it’s maintaining a tight-enough focus to spot the tiny shortcomings (comma faults, verb tense, point of view shifts, etc.) as well as the gross, and this is especially difficult if the writing is good. I’m a reader first, and a clean, smooth narrative just pulls me into the story. In my Seattle critique group I never saw anything wrong with the first read of Lynn’s writing. I soon learned that I had to read it a second time before I could see weaknesses. That wasn’t true with the other writers in the group, although they were talented.

And there are times when a writer produces what Elmore Leonard calls “the parts you skip.” I’ll know I’ve hit a patch of that when my eyes start to glaze and my attention wanders. I have to stop for a while and build up enough energy to stay with it. Long flashbacks and detailed description can do that to me. It would help if authors read their work aloud—at a reading in Jacksonville recently an author read a section heavy on description out loud. Moments later she commented that as she was reading she was wishing it would get on with what was happening in the story. She should have done that before publishing the book—or used me as her editor.

Another challenge is to get enough distance to see the story and its paths as a whole in order to understand where it strays or where it’s weak. I read each manuscript three times, and then let it sit in my mind for a few days. It can take a period of “back-burner” reflection to put my mental finger on where the story itself needs work. Sometimes I see structural problems, but primarily it’s where a story deviates from course for a little side trip into material that doesn’t impact the story and slows pace. I exercise the delete key a lot.

EB: What should writers expect from an editor?

RR: First of all, honesty. I try for a pleasant keyboard-side manner, but I don’t pull punches. And a professional writer should be able to handle constructive criticism. An editor also needs to respect the writer’s voice—the biggest sin is to rewrite to make a narrative read as the editor would like it to. Expectations also depend on the type of editing being done—non-fiction is quite different from fiction. Because I also write novels, my edits of fiction are informed by having had to solve some of the problems my clients face, and I can bring that kind of creativity to the coaching and suggestions I make. I have restructured novels and sometimes suggested new endings (which were adopted). The goal is to help the writer make the best of her story.

EB: Is there a single most common problem with fiction manuscripts?

RR: What I see most often are stories that take way too long to get going. Opening pages and chapters are weighted down and slowed by backstory, set-up, and exposition. I deal with that every week on my blog, Flogging the Quill, where I and my readers critique opening pages. Fiction, in my view, needs to begin with something happening. You can weave in backstory and other information as the story takes place; never stop it for what is commonly called an “info dump.”

EB: You mention that it’s important for a writer to inhabit a character’s point of view. Why is that?

RR: I think a writer’s goal is to give the reader the experience of the character. How are you going to understand—and then show—a character’s experience unless you see what’s happening from the inside? The inside of a character—the hopes, goals, fears, flaws—is what drives the action, the plot. In the book I talk about how to use “experiential description,” which is description of place, people, things, or action that is colored or flavored by the character’s personal filters. For example, an objective description might be: The peanut butter sandwich was slathered with a thick layer of grape jelly. A diabetic allergic to peanuts might see it as: Globs of deadly grape jelly smothered a layer of poisonous peanut butter that lurked, ready to attack.

EB: I enjoyed the examples you used to illustrate the importance not just of precise language but of the right kind of precision. For example, your opening discussion of adverbs was very illuminating. Can you encapsulate that for our readers?

RR: There is a meme amongst fiction writers that adverbs are “bad.” A number of bestselling writers preach to avoid them. In considering the use of adverbs in my own fiction, I saw that there were times when they were weak and to be avoided, but there were also times when they strengthened the narrative. The weak use is when adverbs modify a weak verb in a feeble attempt at description. For example, “walked slowly” is poor description when a strong verb can do much better, eg. strolled, or sauntered, or ambled.

On the other hand, I’ve found that adverbs can add nuance and flavor to description when they are used in conjunction with adjectives—they can contribute to the characterization of a character.

For example, this description is clear: He found Emmaline to be cheerful and proficient.

But a couple of adverbs can characterize the person who thinks this: He found Emmaline to be annoyingly cheerful but pleasingly proficient.

Now we can see the person considering Emmaline as a bit of a curmudgeon yet an appreciative perfectionist, all due to the inclusion of those adverbs. In short, avoid adverbs that modify verbs, consider using them to modify adjectives.

EB: You also do book design. What makes a good cover design?

RR: I look at the primary objective for a book cover as being to help the title give the potential customer a sense of the story. It should add emotion, meaning, or intrigue to the words. Of course, as it does that it also has to be eye-catching. It needs to signal what genre the story is. And, in these days of tiny thumbnails on web pages, be understandable at small sizes—what works on a bookstore table often doesn’t on a web page. Book design also includes the design of the interior pages as well.

EB: Are there differences between book designing for ebooks and print books?

RR: Regarding the cover, not in my view. Pretty much all book covers are now presented on web pages, so they need to past that thumbnail test. The design of the interior of the book, however, differs from print to ebook. Most of my clients do both, so I start with the print version and distill the e-versions out of that.

EB: Thanks for talking with us.

RR: My pleasure. There’s nothing I like to talk about more than writing.

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