In Defense of Valley Girl English, a guest post by Reilly Nycum

Posted on April 19, 2017 by Ed Battistella
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Reilly Nycum is an English and History double major in the Honors College at SOU.

In Defense of Valley Girl English: I’m, like, so totally gonna ace this paper.

When one hears Valley girl English, the eyerolls almost become audible. Images of skinny girls prancing around in short skirts at the mall are instantly conjured. In the early 1980s, musical artist Frank Zappa released “Valley Girl,” a song depicting stereotypical Valley girl English, thus forever immortalizing the term for users and listeners alike. In the song, Zappa chants “She’s a Valley Girl / And there is no cure” as a high-pitched voice whines about her superficial life in the Valley: “Like, OH MY GOD! / Like-TOTALLY / Encino is like SO BITCHEN” (Zappa). Zappa’s easily recognizable depiction of Valley girl English, the term specifically prescribed to the dialect spoken by those living in and around the San Fernando Valley, resonates with listeners in several ways. People attach a stigma to Valley girl English to such an extent that most seem to revile the dialect and label its distinctions as bad habits. Many fail listen past the parodies and satire to pay attention to what is being said. However, the characteristics of Valley girl English, such as vowel shifting, the quotative and non-quotative like, slang, and uptalk demonstrate the assets of a legitimate dialect that is spreading throughout the nation.

The vowel shifting observed in Valley girl English represents a change in language observed in many other American dialects. In a study conducted at the University of California, Berkeley, linguists noted that back vowels are shifting forward in Valley girl English, “front vowels have raised variants in some phonological environments and lowered variants elsewhere” (Bucholtz et. al 125). This vowel shifting has also been observed in dialects in Philadelphia and Detroit (125). Though other dialects are experiencing a vowel shift, people connect the change with Valley girl English. For instance, in “Valley Girl” Zappa satirizes the vowel shift in words such as “super” or “totally,” pronouncing them by fronting the /o/ sound. Do You Speak American?, a book studying various dialect trends across the United States, expands on the UC Berkeley findings by explaining how this vowel shift and other vowel shifts are a part of a larger trend in the United States: “These linguists also found some chain-shifting of vowels resembling William Labov’s Northern Cities Shift around the Great Lakes—black sounding like block” (MacNeil and Cran 161). Characteristics of the Northern Cities Shift, first defined by linguist William Labov, began far before the creation of the Valley girl dialect (38). When characterizing Valley girl English, it remains important to recognize that the vernacular borrows from the vowel shift but does not represent a completely new change in the language. Vowel-shifting, while an important trait in the Valley girl dialect, is not unique to the vernacular despite its cultural association.

The term like, often looked down upon as a meaningless interjection used by the younger generations, also did not originate from Valley girl English. In an article titled “Like and Language Ideology: Disentangling Fact From Fiction,” Alexandra D’Arcy, a professor at the University of Canterbury, calls attention to the myths surrounding like and concentrates on its tangible usage in the language (D’Arcy 386). D’Arcy systematically breaks down various stereotypes surrounding like, including the erroneous belief that the practice began with Valley girls (391). By analyzing many different speech patterns, D’Arcy gathered that the frequency of like usage does not correlate with the beginning of Valley girl English but only heightens with the advent of the dialect (405). Moreover, she points out that the term “Valley Girl” did not even come into existence until the 1980s: “Stated differently, outside its local milieu, “Valley Girl” was not an active model for association, linguistic or otherwise, until after 1980” (404). The assumption that like began with the Valley girls contradicts the fact that the use of like as “discourse marker, a discourse particle, and an adverb of approximation” came into existence far before the creation of the Valley girl dialect (405). In addition, D’Arcy’s identification of like as containing much more meaning than an empty conversation filler or a verbal tic shows the true range of expressions like has in the language. Her analyses also reveal that like has set significations that set out rules of when to use like or not (395). Instead of viewing like as a signal of uncertainty D’Arcy calls to mind that linguistic trends almost always have hidden rules that outsiders do not understand. Although the myths surrounding like attach original usage and a pointless meaning to Valley girl English, there is no logical basis for that assumption.

The use of quotatives such as be like, say, and go, carry a similar connotation as like but have a different purpose. Three scholars from Cornell University studied the phenomenon of be like as a way for speakers to introduce both “inner monologue or direct speech” to add a certain level of emphasis depending on usage (Blyth, et. al 215). After leading a study examining the dialects of a diverse group of people, the researchers came to the conclusion that “be like is functionally versatile and therefore may have more staying power in the lexicon” (225). Without an understanding of the intricacies of quotatives such as be like, listeners misunderstand the intention behind them. They only hear phrases unfamiliar to their vernacular and associate the change with a degradation of the language by younger generations. As with like, the quotatives be like, say, and go do not correlate with the advent of Valley girl English. In fact, some scholars classify the usage of be like as a convergence between Black English Vernacular and White English Vernacular (216). Additionally, say and go offer a much more complex range of expressions than outsiders generally apprehend. Outside listeners often think that go is a synonym for say and fail to see the difference between the two. Scholars notice that “the use of go correlates with only the dramatic use of historical present and direct speech” (216). Although many non-speakers identify the uses of these quotatives as a demeaned and illogical use of the language, the quotatives signify far more to speakers who comprehend the particulars of their vernacular.

Slang also plays a large role in distinguishing Valley girl English. Terms such as those used in the influential 1995 film Clueless characterize the vernacular in the eyes of those who hear and speak it (MacNeil and Cran 157). Although movies and television do not change people’s speech, Clueless does seem to influence Valley girl English, especially in relation to slang, and may act as an exception to this rule (157). Linguists Robert MacNeil and William Cran endeavored to catalog Valley girl slang by conducting a study on teenagers from Irvine (159). After giving the teenagers cameras to record their speech for several days in both personal and formal environments, MacNeil and Cran asked the teens to help them compile a dictionary of the terms they used throughout the footage (159). In this dictionary, MacNeil and Cran notice “Ten of the twenty-two expressions listed above are borrowed from black talk, or, as a student called it, ‘the ghetto fab vernacular that many teens use today’” (161). Just as with the quotative be like, slang terms get appropriated in the Valley girl dialect. This carrying over of linguistic characteristics complicates the current opinion on Valley girl English. Much of the vernacular does not show any original movements in language; however, the dialect does call to attention the changes that are happening. While many correlate slang terms and other linguistic trends to the creation of Valley girl English, this may only be due to the massive media coverage of the dialect.

Uptalk, much like other language developments related to Valley girl English, tends to be overexaggerated by the media and thus labelled as yet another horrible trend led by the younger generations. James Gorman coined the term uptalk in a 1993 New York Times article titled ON LANGUAGE; Like, uptalk? (Warren 6). According to Gorman, uptalk is defined by a rising intonation at the end of a sentence that transforms the sentence into a question (Gorman). Although Gorman correctly defines uptalk, his further account of the trend reveals his bias against the tonal shift: “Nobody knows exactly where uptalk came from. It might have come from California, from Valley Girl talk … Some twentysomethings say uptalk is part of their attitude: cool, ironic, uncommitted” (Gorman). While it seems extremely doubtful that “young twentysomethings” consider uptalk as a part of their “cool, ironic, and uncommitted” attitude, Gorman’s comments certainly reflect the popular perception of uptalk. People interpret uptalk as an act of doubt and stupidity, characteristics also imbued onto Valley girl English. Gorman states later in his article the idea that “Uptalk won’t be uptalk anymore. It will be, like, American English?” (Gorman). While Gorman does not condone the spread of uptalk, he hits on an interesting aspect of the trend. Uptalk is spreading amongst all genders, ages, and areas. While people regularly connect uptalk with Valley girl English, uptalk extends into many other dialects and languages.

People tend to instill negative implications on uptalk, in part due to portrayals in the media and articles like Gorman’s; however, it remains a lasting and prevalent trend. In a book titled Uptalk by Paul Warren, an Associate Professor at Victoria University, Warren thoroughly investigates the mechanics behind uptalk as well as the media’s depiction of the shift. In a sample examining 182 media portrayals of uptalk, Warren noted “a sizable minority (78) were clearly negative or condemning of uptalk … If speaker sex was mentioned, then it was almost always to indicate that uptalk was a typical female trait” (Warren 129). The way the media depicts uptalk creates a general distaste for the intonation which fosters an unhealthy view of the quickly spreading trend. The misrepresentation of uptalk as being a feature only found in young, female speakers shows misrepresentation of a trend that is used by many different types of people, including men and the older generations. While Warren did notice that females and younger people tend to use uptalk with a higher frequency, men and older people use uptalk far more than most people acknowledge (111). Furthermore, rather than defining uptalk as a feature of indecisiveness, Warren suggests that it may indicate “openness, only in this case they are inviting the listener to participate in the conversation, or to indicate their understanding of what has been said. It is used to share information rather than to tell (or to question)” (188). Warren’s findings on the intentions of uptalk challenges negative views on the trend and give a less biased perspective on uptalk as a whole. The confusion around the purpose of uptalk and its association with a small subset of speakers severely understates the real impact of uptalk on modern dialects and people.

Despite the fact that the California dialect finds representation in many songs, movies, and television shows, relatively few scholars have studied the range of dialects in the area. Carmen Fought, a professor of linguistics at Pitzer University, was the first to conduct a study in 2002 to help gain clarity on the dialectology of California (Fought 113). In her study, Fought handed 122 respondents, 112 of them from California and therefore included in the analysis, a blank map of the United States (114). She told the respondents, students in an undergraduate linguistics class, to mark the boundaries between where they thought people starting speaking distinct dialects (114). The methodology that Fought utilizes in her study acts as tool for linguists to help them understand not only how people distinguish different dialects but also how they perceive their own dialect. After examining the maps she received, Fought noticed that “California is associated with good English, but never proper … It seems that California is a state caught between a general aura of desirability and a specific association with negative linguistic stereotypes” (133). The slight distinction between ‘good’ and ‘proper’ reveals the confusion Californians feel about their dialect. Additionally, in perceptual dialectology it has been found that people rate California very highly in respect to ‘correctness’ or ‘politeness’ but rate the Valley Girl dialect as a signal of low intelligence (127). While Californians have the same “local preference factor” as others, they do not see their dialect as something that could be considered ‘correct.’ Although Fought’s study operates under the constraints of a small sample size, the results reveal a significant aspect about the biases Californians hold about their own speech patterns.

Other studies have been conducted since Fought’s that reveal information about the way Californians and non-Californians view dialects. In a study published in the Journal of English Linguistics titled “Hella Nor Cal or Totally So Cal? The Perceptual Dialectology of California,” undergraduate field workers at UC Santa Barbara used the blank map methodology with an included survey to help distinguish how people see their home state’s dialect as well other dialects (Bucholtz et. al 329). The survey also asked respondents to identify the places they thought spoke the best and worst English (329). The results generally showed a high degree of salience in the Los Angeles region, most likely due to the fact that the largest group of respondents identified the Los Angeles area as their home state (338). Researchers also documented that while nonresidents thought they had a greater degree of confidence when labelling California, their responses reflect biases found in the media: “Nevertheless, this higher degree of salience does not necessarily lead to a higher degree of accuracy in the perceptions of nonresidents, which focus on the most stereotypical and highly visible aspects of California’s language and culture” (349). Even if people live and grow up around those who speak Valley girl English or other well publicized California dialects, they still carry the prejudice reflected in popular media about the dialect. Still, despite this data people are still inclined to rate California as speaking ‘good’ English (348). This study and others reveals the role of perceptual dialectology in revealing the perceptions people hold due to the vast influence of media and other cultural phenomena.

The way people think about Valley girl English finds a basis in many facets of popular culture. Popular culture, however, tends to overstate the qualities of Valley girl English and transform the vernacular into something inexorably linked to materialism and superficiality. This presents many issues when attempting to understand the dialect because it fosters an inherent predisposition against its characteristics. In addition, this prejudice causes people to understand Valley girl English as a dialect only spoken by a certain type of person, the Valley girl. This simply does not account for the wide usage of the facets of Valley girl English, such as the quotative be like and uptalk. While one may feel that Valley girl English sounds ‘dumb’ or ‘air-headed,’ its features are not unusual and may even be appropriated from other vernaculars. Furthermore, the changes observed in Valley girl English are growing increasingly apparent in other dialects across the United States. When people dismiss dialect patterns as purposeless and annoying, they fail to recognize the ways in which people utilize the patterns as a valid way of communication. Studies on Valley girl English offer a glimpse into an important dialect trend and call attention to the generally one-sided view of the vernacular in popular media.

Works Cited

    Blyth, Carl, Sigrid Recktenwald, and Jenny Wang. “‘I’m Like, ‘Say What?!’: A New Quotative in American Oral Narrative.” American Speech, 65.3, (1990): 215–227. JSTOR. 19 Feb. 2017.

    Bucholtz, Mary, Nancy Bermudez, Victor Fung, Lisa Edwards, and Rosalva Vargas. “Hella Nor Cal or Totally So Cal? The Perceptual Dialectology of California.” Journal of English Linguistics 35.4 (2007): 325-352. Web. 19 Feb. 2017.

    D’Arcy, Alexandra “Like and Language Ideology: Disentangling Fact From Fiction” American Speech, 82. 4 (2007): 386-418. Web. 20 Feb. 2017.

    Gorman, James. “ON LANGUAGE; Like, Uptalk?” The New York Times. The New York Times, 15 Aug. 1993. Web. 19 Feb. 2017.

    Fought, Carmen. “California Students Perceptions of, You Know, Regions and Dialects?” Handbook of Perceptual Dialectology, Volume 2, edited by Daniel Long and Dennis Preston, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2002, pp. 113-134.

    Hinton, Leanne, Birch Moonwomon, Sue Bremner, Herb Luthin, Mary Van Clay, Jean Lerner, and Hazel Corcoran. “It’s Not Just the Valley Girls: A Study of California English.” Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society [Online], 13 (1987): 117-128. Web. 28 Feb. 2017.

    MacNeil, Robert, and William Cran. Do You Speak American? Harcourt, Inc, 2005.

    Warren, Paul. Uptalk. Cambridge University Press, 2016.

    Zappa, Frank. “Valley Girl.” Ship Arriving too late to save a drowning witch, Barking Pumpkin Records, 1982.

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It’s All about Class, a guest post by Laura Payne

Posted on April 10, 2017 by Ed Battistella
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Laura Payne is a senior at Southern Oregon University, majoring in English Education, minoring in creative writing, and studying Japanese independently.

It’s All about Class: The Americanization Movement’s English Education

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries cultivated a boom in English as a second language teaching methods throughout the United States. Various institutions hoped that the learning of a single language and ideology would promote a sense of unity and national identity among the country’s increasingly diverse population. However, the methods employed to teach non-native English speakers at this time defined the English language not simply as a form of communication, but as a tool for imperialism and a justification for extreme nativism. At this point in history, the Americanization Movement transformed English education and the language itself into a controversy that helped to shape ethics in language education.

Education, like any tool, garners different connotations depending on its vision and use. According to author, Tim William Machan, English education “has been among the most consequential and controversial of the domains that define English in the language’s original and expanding homelands” (Machan 213). This statement especially applies to the education of Native American children during the Americanization Movement because the reasons behind their English education transcended straightforward language learning. For Native American students, mastery of English defined their level of civilization in the eyes of the United States (235). In 1880, the Board of Indian Commissioners asked, “If the common school is the glory and boast of our American civilization, why not extend its blessings to the 50,000 benighted children of the red men of our country that they…may…speedily emerge from the ignorance of centuries?” (222). Additionally, after an 1887 report mandated that English be the only language spoken in Native American boarding schools, Commissioner John Atkins commented that learning English was the first step towards “teaching the Indians the mischief and folly of continuing their barbarous practices” (224). In other words, a Native American child speaking their own language in the late nineteenth century was associated with inferiority and savagery because this was how white Americans in the late nineteenth century viewed Native culture. However, because white Americans spoke English and viewed themselves as civilized, they reasoned that an ability to speak English was a marker of a civilized person.

Attitudes similar to those towards educating Native American children in English persisted in the education of immigrant children. Immigrants newly arrived to big cities were often stuck in low-paying jobs that offered little chance for social advancement and lived in poor, linguistically isolated neighborhoods where exposure to English was rare (Machan 242-243). As a consequence, early twentieth century Americans judged immigrants’ living standards and language ability as indicators of flawed character and genetic inferiority rather than results of various social structures (242-243). Therefore, teaching American ideologies and the English language to both adults and children was considered a patriotic duty because it would protect the United States’ supposed “purity” (Kraver) and prevent immigrants from changing the United States (Kraver). The main goal of immigrant education at the turn of the century was homogeneity; specifically a homogeneity based around the values of the Protestant Anglo-Saxon middle class (Kraver).

However, despite its widely acknowledged importance, English as a second language teaching methods severely lacked the innovation necessary to fully grant students a mastery of English. In some cases, teachers in ESL programs were not career teachers but housewives, factory mechanics, and other U.S. citizens who became ESL teachers to fulfill what was considered a patriotic duty. Also, teachers in ESL programs, especially those meant for immigrants, were discouraged from developing their own lesson plans and pedagogy in favor of subscribing to scripted, standardized lesson plans (Ray 15-16). A series of ESL teaching manuals published in the early twentieth century required teachers to recite lesson plans scripted “down to the sentence” (22). Classes scripted through such manuals might assume a teacher’s inexperience and dictate a lesson consisting of no more than ten different sentences with accompanying body language. For example, a lesson plan might instruct a teacher to say, “I walk to the door,” and “I turn the knob,” while performing the action the sentence refers to (24). One manual in particular only encouraged teachers to adapt their lessons to their students’ needs towards the end of ten different units (24-25). Linguists and historians speculate that, while intentions may have been good, the effect of lessons such as these were created to the end that students could perform domestic and technical duties while largely remaining in subservient social positions.

Indian boarding schools especially demonstrate language education that ultimately ensured students would remain subservient. For example, one grammar written specifically for the teaching of Native students emphasized vocabulary more than syntax or any other aspect of English. Also, boarding school English lessons at large relied heavily on rote memorization and recitation. While such methods can help to improve the English of a student who is already familiar with the language, evidence suggests that Native students who were completely unfamiliar with English developed gaps in their knowledge because of their schooling. Several late nineteenth century students of Indian boarding schools have been quoted writing letters with sentences such as, “I suppose you think I ought very good English speak by this time, but I cannot very well yet. I know a great many words, but not how together to put them,” (Machan 230). In addition, while standard American common schools at the time centered English lessons around topics such as civic duty and morality, Indian boarding school lessons tended to focus more heavily on manual labor (236). A spelling lesson for a first grade girl, for example, consisted of words such as, “clothes, soak, wash, rinse, tubs, iron,” and “starch,” (237). Ultimately, though, the greatest disservice done to Native students through boarding school English lessons was the isolation they suffered after leaving school. In some areas, the only people students knew who they could speak English with were teachers from boarding schools and other students (237). As Machan writes, this invited students to “join a group that didn’t exist” (237) and marginalized them when the purpose of their education had been a promise for elevation. In the case of Indian boarding schools, English was a marker of isolation rather than civilization.

In contrast to the effects of the Indian boarding schools, the Americanization of immigrant children and their families through English was somewhat successful because immigrant communities were allowed to participate in their own education. Whereas Native children were forced to leave home and attend segregated boarding schools, immigrants in large cities had slightly more options; particularly where the education of adults was concerned. In 1890, college-educated middle class Protestant reformers helped to establish settlement houses; facilities in poorer immigrant communities that attempted to bridge the gap between immigrants and the larger society through education (Salomone 28-29). Granted, settlement house education possessed flaws such as patronizing lessons that reminded adult students, “In America “We sit down at the table. We take our napkins. We eat slowly,” (Kraver). However, from a linguistics perspective, the fact that settlement houses offered certain classes specifically for adult women greatly increased the likelihood that immigrant children and the immigrant community at large would eventually master English.

According to Robert MacNeil and William Cran in their book, Do You Speak American?, when and how a language changes is driven by women. MacNeil and Cran write, “Young women are always alert to novelty in fashion, but certain young women are willing to embrace it sooner, and some have the natural authority to induce others to follow,” (Cran, MacNeil, 42). In other words, because women are more likely than men to be aware of and accept social trends, they are the most likely candidates to be the first to expand a trend to other people; especially if a woman is in a position of some influence. For example, mothers have a position of influence over their families. Reformers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century feared it would be impossible to fully educate immigrant children in American customs and language “if in the evening they returned to an ethnically isolated community and a home where the heard no English,” (Salomone, 28). Providing classes for women in settlement houses theoretically puts the immigrant community in a better position to learn English as a whole because influential women learning English will impart the language to others outside of ESL classes.

In addition to success through including influential women in the Americanization process, immigrant communities found success in Americanization by participating in the process as communities. In her book, True American: Language, Identity, and the Education of Immigrant Children, Rosemary C. Salomone writes, “Immigrant middle-class organizers…established community centers staffed by foreign-born social workers and educators. The idea was that those who shared the immigrants’ language and culture could best be entrusted with brokering and implementing…assimilation,” (29). In other words, even though immigrants were forced to assimilate in custom and language to survive in the United States, the construction of exclusive community centers allowed them to dictate the best methods for assimilation while maintaining their ethnic identities. Whereas Native students in boarding schools became physically and linguistically isolated from their communities, immigrant communities were allowed to grow stronger together both in English and their unique ethnic identities.

It is difficult to draw ethical lines around the enforcement of language education. Often, language is a tool for enforcing a colonizing power and the best-intended pedagogies for language education may strongly perpetuate the oppression of a people. However, based on the history of immigrant and Native American education in English, it appears methods exist in which communities of people truly can be elevated through language education rather than suppressed. The history of the Americanization Movement stands as a lesson that in order to effectively integrate a community through language, that community must have its own agency; agent powers must allow target groups their own spaces and their own decisions in language learning. Only then can language define itself as a uniting force.

Works Cited

    Cran, William and MacNeil, Robert. “Changing Dialects: Dingbatters Versus Hoi-Toiders.”Do You Speak American? Orlando, Fl: Harcourt, 2005. 40-43. Print.

    Kraver, Jeraldine R. “Restocking the Melting Pot: Americanization as CulturalImperialism.”Race, Gender & Class; New Orleans 6.4 (1999): n. pag. Race,Gender & Class, 31 Oct. 1999. Web. 18 Mar. 2017.

    Machan, Tim William. “English in the Classroom I and II.” What Is English?: And Why Should We Care? Oxford: Oxford UP, 2016. 212-68. Print.

    Ray, Brian. “ESL Droids: Teacher Training and the Americanization Movement, 1919-1924.”Composition Studies 41.2 (2013): 15-39. Web. 18 Mar. 2017.

    Salomone, Rosemary C. “Education for Americanization.” True American: Language, Identity, and the Education of Immigrant Children. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 2010. 23-30. Web. 18 Mar. 2017.

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An Interview with Lance Olsen, author of Dreamlives of Debris

Posted on March 28, 2017 by Ed Battistella
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photo credit: andi olsen

Lance Olsen is the author of more than 20 books including eleven novels, one hypertext, critical studies, short-story collections, a poetry chapbook, and two anti-textbooks. His work has appeared in such places as Conjunctions, Black Warrior Review, Fiction International, Iowa Review, Hotel Amerika, Village Voice, Time Out New York, BOMB, Gulf Coast, McSweeney’s, and Best American Non-Required Reading.

He is a Guggenheim and an N.E.A. fellowship recipient and teaches at the University of Utah.

We recently talked about his forthcoming book Dreamlives of Debris.

EB: Dreamlives of Debris seems to me to be in part a book about bodies. What prompted you to write this particular retelling of the story of Theseus and the Minotaur?

LO: The central point of view in Dreamlives of Debris lies with the Minotaur. We’re not talking about a monster with a bull’s head and human’s body here, though, but rather a little deformed girl whose parents hide her away at birth from public view in the labyrinth below Knossos.

She calls herself Debris, and possesses the ability to hear/see/feel the thoughts, memories, desires, pasts and futures of others throughout history, from Herodotus to Silk route traders to Borges, Derrida, and Edward Snowden. In fact, she can’t stop herself from channeling those voices. That’s the problem.

Her body, then, becomes a kind of living instrument through which time and others travel. That may sound like a science-fiction trope. But her state is also a metaphor for our Heraclitean bodies, how they are portals through which we are in good part constructed by temporality and the voices of strangers.

I’m also deeply interested in our culture’s notions of monstrosity: What does such an idea mean, and what does it reveal about what our society must repress to remain whole?

EB: It seems to me that there is a special value to retelling myths in that it both challenges the myths themselves and challenges contemporary mythologies. Is that part of what you had in mind here?

LO: Absolutely. Rewriting is a form of re-righting, bringing essential narratives into a contemporary key, because through retellings we un-tell, compose our present rather than perpetuating someone else’s past, interrogate the assumptions behind received narratives, recast them so they continue to mean for us.

By doing so, we remind ourselves that there are always other ways to narrativize our lives, which is to say other ways to live them, than the ones we’ve been taught.

EB: In Dreamlives of Debris you seem to be defying the reader to keep up, and the text sent me to Wikipedia more than once. How should readers approach the book?

LO: When I begin composing a work, I often ask myself what its central metaphor is, then follow that down through overall structure all the way to word choice. Here that metaphor is the labyrinth.

I laid out Dreamlives myself in InDesign, as interested in building a novel as in writing one. Every page is a perfect square loud with white space. Each represents a different room in Debris’ labyrinth. And each arrives without a page number, so it’s easy to become disoriented, lost, as a reader, just as Debris and her victims become disoriented, lost at the level of narrative.

Because the novel arrives with no conventional location markers, the reader may feel a bit freer to jump around, begin to think of reading as a mode of choreography, a way of being in the world, taking various paths as the mood strikes, for as long as the mood strikes, and then perhaps wandering off in a different direction.

Another way of saying this: Dreamlives is, I hope, both an estrangement of the reading process and an invitation to read widely, freely, wildly, thinking of the novel as one part of a larger textual constellation (including, say, Wikipedia, other tellings of the Minotaur myth, a dictionary), whose dots one can join in a multitude of ways.

EB: Can you tell us a little about how you balance the experimentation and the quest for revelation — or truth — in your work?

LO: I’m a subscriber to Roland Barthes’ observation: “Literature is the question minus the answer.” So the kind of writing that excites me most isn’t that which presents a truth (I might call that propaganda) so much as that which presents a problematics, both at the stratum of form and theme, meant to challenge us to see and feel and think in unusual, complex, and — all going well — illuminating ways.

Truth suggests a telos, an end, a point of arrival, a product. I guess I’m more interested in the journey through the unending labyrinth.

EB: In Dreamlives of Debris you comment on grammar and language quite a bit, saying for example that “grammar is by nature a category of error,” that “people put too much faith in grammar” and that “language is a proliferation of distance,” and at one point referring to a chamber that “stank language. Vowels, mostly.” How do you feel about grammar and language?

LO: We started off talking about Dreamlives as an investigation of bodies, of embodiment, which is definitely the case, yet in my mind the novel is equally an investigation into the problem of language —a problem that has dogged theory for the last hundred years plus. The more philosophers and writers have tried to tackle that idea, whether Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, or Derrida, the more language has come to seem slippery and gorgeous and a system that is both profoundly flawed and beyond which we cannot think.

The question only gets more fascinatingly complicated when we ask precisely what the relationship between language and the body is. These days theory tends to privilege the latter, but of course we can’t think the body without language, nor can we think language without the body.

Debris understands this at a cellular level.

EB: I was struck by the name Debris, so I did a little googling and found that there are people named Debris. What do you make of that?

LO: I had no idea! I’m without words.

EB: Your work is known for rebelling or resisting the concept of genre. What do you think of genre?

LO: Genres are a series of reading codes we’ve been taught to recognize. They allow us to have relatively predictable, comfortable relationships with texts. But those that I respond to most are the ones that destabilize our reading experience in various ways, including by fusing and confusing genres, or trying to work outside them altogether.

Experimental narrative isn’t just another genre like, say, detective fiction or romance, in other words. Rather, I think of it as a possibility space that invites us to move beyond categorical thinking.

EB: You’ve been a writer for some time now. How has your notion of innovation evolved?

LO: I guess a good way to put it is this: none of us are the same readers at forty we were at fourteen, or at sixty we were at six. So what constitutes the concept of innovation will change for each of us over time, depending on what we’ve read, how we’ve lived, how we’ve changed (I wouldn’t quite say “evolved,” which might connote progress for some), how we’ve been educated, even where we’ve inhabited. So one person’s mind-bending experimentation may be another’s ho-hum status quo.

I suppose, given my own set of circumstances, my tolerance for what some might call extreme texts has gone up.

I’ve grown immune, perhaps, to many species of the infection.

EB: How does your approach to writing affect you as a reader? What do you think about when you read other people’s work? And who do you read?

LO: I think of writing as a mode of reading, reading as a mode of writing. Both are extraordinarily active practices, interactive ones, ones that are continuously in motion. That’s what’s tremendously exciting for me about sitting down with a book or before my laptop.

Samuel R. Delany once observed your writing is only as good as the best book you’ve read within the last six months or so. I like that thought. It motivates one to read widely, both across time and space.

So, let’s see, how to comment on who I read. Well, maybe emblematically. In the last week I’ve read a couple really amazing books: for fun, China Miéville’s The Last Days of New Paris and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts; for teaching Anne Carson’s Nox and David Clark’s hypermedial piece 88 Constellations for Wittgenstein. I’ve just started Carlos Fuentes’ Nietzsche on His Balcony.

And I find the ongoing conversation with my students continually energizing. This week in my graduate Experimental Forms workshop, for instance, one of them has produced a digital interactive fiction that keeps unwriting itself, while another has built an art book, based on a Mayan creation myth, that opens up, page by page, into a colorful three-dimensional flower as you read it.

That’s the kind of work that makes me want to get back to my desk as soon as possible and start writing — like our lives and aesthetics depended on it, which they do.

EB: Thanks for talking with us.

LO: Thank you! What a pleasure.

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An Interview with John Enders

Posted on March 21, 2017 by Ed Battistella
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John Enders is a freelance writer, photographer, and journalist with interests in blue-water sailing. international business, foreign policy, wine and exotic travel. He worked as a reporter and editor for the Associated Press, and served as the editor of the Ashland Daily Tidings and as the executive director of the Southern Oregon Historical Society.

In honor of the centennial of Ashland’s Lithia Park, Enders has released his book Lithia Park: The Heart and Soul of Ashland. Enders’ great-grandfather, Henry G. Enders was on the first Parks Commission.

EB: What prompted you to write this book on Ashland’s Lithia Park?

JE: In a conversation two years ago with Bruce Dickens, then-superintendent of Lithia Park, it became clear that a history of the park had never been written. When I started looking at it, I realized it was very timely, with the 100th anniversary of the park’s dedication coming up in 2016.

EB: How did you go about researching the history of the park? Did you run into any difficulties?

JE: First, I read everything I could find about the park. Marjorie Lutz O’Hara, Ashland’s longtime resident historian, wrote a pamphlet on the park’s history a number of years ago, and there were a couple of other short pieces published in various places. The biggest difficulty I had was convincing the Ashland Parks Foundation board members that it was a worthy project. That was difficult to understand, frankly. It is a fundraiser for the foundation.

EB: What does the park’s history have to say about the values of Ashland, then and now?

JE: The park is the centerpiece of the town. It says, very clearly, we value and appreciate open spaces, natural beauty, and conservation.

EB: What was the most surprising thing that you learned?

JE: That a group of 60 Ashland women were instrumental in convincing the men who ran the town that creation of the park must happen.

EB: I understand that the park’s design was innovative for its time. How so?

JE: The central portion of the park was designed by John Hays McLaren, the long-time superintendent of Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. And he was heavily influenced by his mentor, Frederick Law Olmstead, who had been instrumental in creating New York’s Central Park. The central idea of their park philosophy was simple: parks should be made for and accessible to all people, and should bring nature into the city. Throughout history, parks had largely been for the rich.

EB: How has the park shaped present downtown Ashland, good and bad?

JE: I see no downside. The park has been a central part of the town since it first was dedicated in 1906. The Ashland plaza is immediately adjacent to the entrance to the park, and visitors and locals alike use the park heavily for all sorts of activities. The idea that the city should have an permanent tax levy to fund parks, and that an elected parks commission should be in charge – independent of the city council – was a revolutionary concept.

EB: If things had gone differently with the park, what would Ashland be like today?

JE: A huge political struggle surrounded the first years of the park’s formation. The commercial club, the predecessor to the Chamber of Commerce, and others wanted to build a large, privately-operated “resort” in the middle of the park. Another faction, including my great-grandfather Henry Enders Sr., insisted that the park should remain in public hands and that private, for-profit activities in the park should be severely limited. The 100-acre park would not exist today if the first group had won the day. It was a brutal battle. One of the reasons I loved doing this book was the role my ancestor played as one of the first park commissioners.

EB: What other projects are you working on?

JE: I am a bit of a fanatic regarding the history and politics of Latin America, and as a journalist I lived and worked in South America for several years. I’m working on a book on the last days of Ché Guevara, who was killed in Bolivia in October 1967. It’s a collaboration with a Bolivian colleague and the Bolivian army officer who captured Ché. I’ve also got a couple of fiction projects underway.

EB: Thanks for talking with us.

JE: My pleasure, Ed.

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