8/4/2023 0 Comments Stand by me narrator![]() ![]() ![]() Though I hadn’t taught this class before, I had learned that more of teaching is making it up as you go than I would have thought. Either option seemed to present opportunity, as did whether or not the novella held up to classroom discussion. Maybe it was also the favorite movie of some of my students, or maybe, as it belonged to my generation and not theirs, none of them had yet even seen it. I hadn’t read The Body since I was maybe thirteen, give or take, but I remembered liking it, and Stand By Me was one of my favorite movies. As soon as he said “coming of age,” I knew that would be my theme and as soon as he said he’d included a movie as one of his texts, I knew we’d watch Stand By Me and read the novella it was based on, Stephen King’s The Body. One such friend gave me a handful of ideas for themes he knew various teachers had used in the past he told me he’d once themed his lit-based class around “coming of age.” He’d used Goodbye, Columbus and something more contemporary, and they’d watched The Squid and the Whale. I asked friends for sample syllabi, asked for suggestions, recommendations, advice. I teach two similar but different Intro English classes: “regular” sections and “literature-based” “Writing and Academic Inquiry” and “Writing in Literature.” As a graduate student, I only taught Intro to Fiction and Business and Technical Writing, so although comp is the most common English class to teach, I wasn’t sure what to prepare for. Then, once we start thinking of writing as a process rather than just the result, we work on trying to allow something not just to get better, but to change, to maybe become something different than what we’d originally intended. They almost all think you either are a good writer or you aren’t they don’t think of it as a skill, as something to work on, to train, to exercise, to get better at. In Creative Writing, they think of poems as one certain kind of thing, the same for short stories. The essays they write are only “homework,” not in any way connected to anything they read. Many of my English students have been taught to think about audience, but haven’t really ever thought of their audience as anyone other than their teacher. ![]() One of my biggest goals across both jobs is to shake up some of my students’ expectations for writing. Because, while working on that novel, I’d had a collection of stories come out, in which a good number of the stories are about guys hanging out-two guys go to a driving range together a group of teenage boys skateboard together a group of thirty-something guys reconvene, for one of their weddings, and set off fireworks together.įor the last few years, I’ve mostly taught Intro English at one university and Intro to Creative Writing at another. Because, before that, I’d spent at least a couple of years writing a novel about two guys on a road trip together. Because I’d just spent a year writing about Stand By Me. ![]() What is the singular topic (or two) we write about most frequently, what do we come back to again and again? What do we find sneaking its way into our writing whether we intend it to or not, sometimes whether we even realize it or not? “Male friendship,” I answered, without having to think about it. I was trying to write about my life by way of Stand By Me, by way of The Body, all so I could try to write a book about male friendship.Ī few months ago, I was out with a couple of (writer) friends and one asked the other two of us what our writer fascinations were. I was trying to write about The Body by writing about my life. I was trying to write about Stand By Me by writing about Stephen King’s novella The Body. ![]()
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