This is the greeting email I sent to my students at Rutgers-Newark in January 2021 before the start of the spring semester — all on Zoom.
Welcome to class and the relax to survive approach to writing
I'm Professor John Straus, here to help you develop your reading and writing. Most of all, though, I want this to be fun for you.
I get that it's a required class, but you can enjoy yourself if you have an open mind.
I'm interested in what you think about what we read. But you should know that if you engage with the texts. Take the time to REALLY read them, your brain will get stronger.
If you like to work out physically, you know how good it can feel.
Mental exercise feels just as good.
I chose readings that would connect with you. Check them out to see if I'm right. Browse through the modules on Canvas.
And you can read all the official stuff reprinted in part of my syllabus. That includes essays and due dates and percentages. I'm letting you know in clear terms that THE SYLLABUS IS FLEXIBLE.
So relax to survive, and I'll see you on Tuesday, Zoom style.
JS
Freeing Ourselves from Writing Rules
John Straus
Newark Library Session Free Write, July 24, 2019
Writing this for whoever reads it as a way to show that rules come in forms that can help us and hurt as writers. So I start this sentence with so which breaks some rules that teachers give us along with not starting sentences with “and” or ending them with prepositions. The only rule is to understand your audience as best you can and put words together that affect them the way you hope they will.
To explain this to you, I’ll talk to myself about Tai Chi, the exercise I started to practice in 1982 when Susanna DeRosa and her husband Guy taught it to me. Flow with the motions that you see the master do. Imitate them any way you can, not worrying about going as low as they are or competing with some imaginary or real example of what you should be doing. Bend your knees slightly, so you can put very little stress on them. Breathe deeply and relax like the water flowing in a gentle stream. Think of whatever helps you understand that you are perfect as you try to straighten your back and feel the energy flowing through your arms and legs and everything else as your center radiates the chi outward and inward at the same time. Al Huang wrote Embrace Tiger , Return to Mountain, but he didn’t write it really. He talked in his classes, and someone transcribed what he said and put it down in a book.
Is the rule of writing that you actually have to write? No. But the words on the page are written, and if you generated them, you wrote the book.
Semantics is the branch of philosophy that addresses the meaning of things and ideas. What do words stand for? So in Tai Chi, the different moves have names like snake creeps down, wave hands like clouds, white crane stands on one leg, step back and repulse monkey, single whip, grasp sparrow’s tail, high pat on horse, strike to the ears with both fists, needle at sea bottom, right heel kick, left heel kick and….
What does it matter what you call the moves as long as your body continues to move?
The process continues indefinitely. As you practice, your technique can refine itself. Your curiosity can lead you to watch other masters and begin to imitate them. You can do so unconsciously or consciously, but if you call what you’re doing a matter of following rules, you’ll miss the chance to free yourself from them, to make new patterns, to improvise variations.
If the finished version of what you write must be encapsulated in a permanent form, in a text, then ask yourself what you can do to make it easier for the reader to understand it. They have to do the work to understand the words, and you can do only what you can control: the words you choose.
As I write this, the most important rule is that I don’t stop writing. And in 15 minutes at the café on the first floor of the Newark Library on Washington Street, I’ll invite the people who come to write about whatever they’ve done that has asked them to follow rules, but which they’ve found they’ve had to discover, bend, and break, to be themselves, the works in progress they can choose to be.
“My own words, when I am at work on a story, I hear too as they go, in the same voice that I hear when I read in books. When I write and the sound of it comes back to my ears, then I act to make my changes. I have always trusted this voice.”
– Eudora Welty
“It is well known that humor, more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds.” – Viktor Frankl
“Don’t think; just write!” —Ray Bradbury
Mayhem free write, August 12, 2020 an hour and a half after the online writing class that started on July 6.
Daniel’s bedroom is my office with a bookshelf dragged up in two pieces from the basement.
The pandemic has left my organization unchanged, the bed covered with papers from now and 40 years ago. Some don’t have dates.
Abby Sher visited us on July 28 and told us about her compost pile, writing that hasn’t found its way into something longer.
At the Maplewood Library, Linda at the door stopped me to talk, then a text from Aliza about Max’s drum lesson, a Zoom job at 11. He hasn’t had a lesson since February. Beautiful 3, 3 clave sing strokes that throw him at first but as he sings it , all comes back. Then, leading with the left.
The last reading was Tim Egan writing “Trump, please resign before you’re fired. “I thought about showing them some of my own writing , but the focus stays on them. Reading Egan’s muscular, passionate, informative detailed red-hot language is what they paid for.
The free write at ten of two asked them to write about what they thought was the most valuable thing they learned in the course.
We looked at the end of Pam Belluck’s article, “To Tug at the Heart, You must First Tickle the Neurons.”
The kicker quotes Rosanne Cash who says about music that you can break down some things, but there’s a lot that’s ineffable when it comes to the effect that it has on us. The word picture ends the piece. She says that music is like an ever changing blob of mercury. How do you learn to write?
We started the class by reading Peter Elbow’s piece that starts by saying that the most effective way of improving one’s writing is by freewriting. Damn, I’m doing that now in the Maplewood library, THE MAGICKAL MOMENT OF TIME AT The Maplewood library computer. My blue mask fogs my glasses, but pulled down below my nose, in an illegal maskhole way, I can see what I’m doing. Since the shutdown, Mardi Gras time and beyond, I haven’t felt like putting words on the page because it would take away from time spent practicing the drums, the time besides teaching drums and writing and even gigging . Not stopping for another ten minutes will get words onto the page and remind me of how chaotic the mind is, but not really. The patterns reveal themselves, every day a paisley, zebra –striped pajama party while I’m awake.
The semester started on July 6 with the quote from Benjamin Spock: “You know more than you think you do. “ So it is with writing. Pat Schneider reminds us that we learned to speak perfectly. So get back to the power you have, like Dorothy who finally understands that she had the power to go home any time she wanted . The house landed on the witch , and Dorothy happened to be in it. But do I want to write only about my class? I’ll write about everything and nothing until it’s something. Walking with Phyllis, eating with Phyllis, loving with Phyllis, fighting with Phyllis, laughing with Phyllis, crossword puzzling with Phyllis, making love with Phyllis, dreaming with Phyllis, parenting with Phyllis, being with Phyllis, sleeping with Phyllis, learning about Phyllis, Phyllis learning about me. Still loving each other , more and more and more again. Parents are we. It’s simple to see that to be free with desire of our children (now grown ups) to fire on the cylinders of their passion and goodness brings us joy. The word “joy” is simple and perfectly perfect.
The Crow’s Nest house waits for us a week from today. The infinity modem installation was a labor and delivery with another nurse, like Angie, from the Philippines , who talked us through the birth of mega Cable. The old password. A variation of Anna’s birthday with extra stuff, now simplified to Anna 0813, her birthday coming tomorrow , 25 years later. Phyllis and I will go the Crow’s Nest in Main where we were with Daniel and Anna 4 years ago. The internet’s off there. So sweet and quiet and all in itself. We’re there already.
Typing this on a PLASTIC COVERED KEYBOARD IN THE QUIET LATE AFTERNOON, I THINK OF Kate Newman, Tina Kelley’s daughter flying to Seattle to live her student life. The kaleidoscope continues, 6 hits of Orange Sunshine at Strawberry Fields in Mossport explain the crystal, the evergreen, the waterfall. Reading Crime and Punishment, The Nature of Things, and The History of Love. Dostoyevsky, Lucretius, Nicole Kraus.
And I sent out Please Don’t Protect me , the piece about The Death of Klinghoffer. Saw the rough drafts and smiled.
Abby Sher, author of books and performer of comedy, writes on paper unaware of my presence.