"AHA" Said the Writer, and Kept On Writing

Writers are introspective by nature. Since our one constant resource is ourselves, we spend countless hours contemplating that source. Even nonfiction writers, dealing in areas outside themselves, see everything through the lens of their senses and experiences. So when the Aha Moment people contacted me, I immediately wondered when I had my greatest inspiration.

My blog first attracted their attention. I had no idea the production company toured the country, soliciting opinions from everybody they can find; I’d never thought about where those ads came from. Ads are ads, and they enter my house hoping to part me from my money. Why should they care what a writing teacher from the provinces thinks?

Although I get consistently positive marks from my students, and many express the desire to keep working with me, I’ve never gotten past the “pretender syndrome,” a common shortcoming among teachers. We often feel we don’t belong in front of the class. We don’t know enough—about our subject, classroom management, psychology, or whatever—to really count as working teachers.

And that’s when I remembered James (not his real name).

Four semesters ago, I thought James wasn’t paying attention in class. I tried to persuade him to take writing seriously, to respect himself enough to invest in his education. I did everything short of begging to engage him with the class. Though he showed up consistently, he sat quietly, staring at me, and repeatedly got papers in late.

At the end of the semester, after I’d distributed the student evaluations and retired to my office, James sauntered into the room. Most students are glad to be well quit of the class, and often never say so much as “hello” to me once they’re done, not even the ones who did well in class. I’m an imposition on their lives, one which ends after only a few months. So I was surprised to see James there.

He walked over, hands in his pockets, studying his shoes. I wondered if he felt bad about something. After a moment, James finally opened his mouth. “Mr. Nenstiel, I just wanted you to know, I went to a small rural high school. The teachers all figured we’d go to community college, get jobs, and never pay any attention to education again. So they never made us write just about anything.

“So I want you to know,” he continued, “that you’ve made me write more in one semester than all my teachers put together made me write all through high school. I think I only wrote two full-length papers in four years.”

James went quiet again. I assumed, as who wouldn’t, that he was about to tell me what a son of a bitch I was for working him so hard. I’d made him write three times as much, in one class in one semester, as he’d written throughout high school. No one likes being forced to do anything.

Finally, James lifted his head to face me and finish his thought.

“I wanted to thank you for that, Mr. Nenstiel. Because I always thought I was kind of stupid. I’d always been treated like I was stupid, and my parents and my teachers never encouraged me to set my sights high. But when you required me to dig down inside so I could keep coming up with something to say, I realized how much I actually had going on. I think, maybe, I’m kind of a smart guy.”

I blinked. I never expected to hear anything like that. I shook his outstretched hand, and he turned and left my office. I haven’t seen him since.

That was my Aha Moment. I couldn’t compress that into a sound bite, but in that moment, I realized what an effect I have long after I leave my students’ lives. For good or for ill, I’m now a part of them, and they’re now a part of me.

I still feel adrift when I try to anticipate and meet my students’ needs. Jargon like “lesson plan” and “pedagogy” only conceals that teaching is a stunt performed without a net. But while I still struggle, I no longer despair. Despite my doubts, despite my struggles, I realized, this was the legacy I was leaving my students. This was the mark I was leaving on the world. I was a teacher, and this was my lesson.

So now I keep writing, and keep talking, because that was my Aha. And you have become part of what I leave behind.

Jessa Pruit's Jams and Preserves

As I write this, we’re in the final stretch to complete the full production of Jessa Pruit’s Jams and Preserves, a debut comedy organized as a fundraiser for First Lutheran Church, in Kearney, Nebraska.  By the time you read it, the whole process may well be over.  Nearly two months’ effort went into only three showings on a makeshift stage with a shoestring budget.  And no one has more on the line than me.

Though this is neither the first play I’ve written to receive a full staging, nor the first play I’ve directed, the magnitude of firsts remains nevertheless significant.  This is my first full-length staging as a writer, my first full-length comedy, my first play longer than a one-act as a director, the first play I’ve directed in nine years.  This experience has hit me with uncounted lessons in quick succession.

Most importantly, this is the first time I’ve directed my own work.  I once swore I would never do that, because I read a newspaper report on a cast that grew frustrated with Edward Albee’s inability to direct his own classic, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?  Because Albee focused on the language to the exclusion of action, the actors had to push against their own director to create a dynamic stage picture.  I didn’t want to be that guy.

But, when I was offered the opportunity to direct a play as a fundraiser for the church, I have to admit, my first loyalties showed their faces.  I write; that’s what I do, that’s who I am.  So I made my directing conditional upon permission to write my own play.  And that’s what I did— though, without any audition process, I had to accept every actor who wanted to participate.

The learning curve in this process has been constant.  For instance, I’ve had to work to deadline pressure like I’ve never had before.  I had barely a week before knowing who my cast would be, and needing to present them with a script.  I’ve had to write with the rehearsal already in process, giving my actors their scripts in dribs and drabs.  They’ve been remarkably accommodating, too, especially since my cast received their final rewrites only a week before they were scheduled to act off book.

Because of the volunteer nature of the process, I’ve scrambled to compromise in the most productive ways.  As a director, I see my role not as a dictator, but as a surrogate audience, and my job as helping my actors achieve the best show they can put on.  Because most of my cast has very limited acting experience, and some are acting for the first time, that process has meant me fining new ways to communicate that don’t apply with seasoned actors.

But I’ve enjoyed the trade-off that, as playwright, I could help my actors put on their best show by showcasing their greatest strengths.  Because this is a church activity, and because I already know most of the performers on stage, I’ve been able to write roles that reflect their speech rhythms and natural mannerisms.  Not that I have my actors playing themselves; just that they don’t have to wrap their tongues around somebody else’s style of speaking.

The writer-director finds himself in a strange position.  Those roles are usually separated, and even when the writer is present to fine-tune a world debut production, the writer is usually expected to sit in the back of the auditorium, taking notes, and only communicating with the actors through the director.  The writer, even in this public art, is a private role, while the director is more external, communicative, and public.

Mingling the two roles means I need to wear two hats at once, which is never easy for anyone.  I must trust to the artistic vision of the words, and stand fast where I believe changes would weaken the show, even as I must cater to my actors by giving them what they need.  The writer and director can usually avoid cast pressures by blaming limits on one another.  Not so when you fill both roles.

Yet I’d recommend the experience to any writer, director, or theatre professional.  I have the joy of seeing the skeleton of my writing, which is always just a guidepost for someone else’s imagination, augmented by my actors.  So many times I’ve watched my cast, realize they’ve done something I never even dreamed, and felt simple joy.  They’ve taken my work so much further than I ever could.

Can Hank Hanegraaff Close the God Debate?

We in the logic-chopping business have a name for discussions which seem unending and unable to reveal a final conclusion. We call these “essentially contested” debates. That means that the positions in the debate gain their definition from the controversy, not from their ability to erase opposing positions. These discussions cannot, and indeed must not, end, because if they end, the positions lose their compass.

Of all the essentially contested debates, none looms higher than God’s nature and existence. Radio personality Hank Hanegraaff, in Has God Spoken?: Proof of the Bible’s Divine Inspiration, weighs in on the question, providing reasons why, at the very least, scriptural evidence is internally consistent and reliable, if you accept that God has any validity. What he doesn’t provide, notwithstanding his subtitle, is any actual proof.

Clearly an experienced arguer, Hanegraaff structures his systematic apologetics not just by the facts, but according to an approach that will make his concepts memorable. He relies on clever mnemonics to make abstruse concepts, like typological prophecy and Assyriology, seem straightforward. As religiously literate as I am, he introduces concepts I’ve never seen before, and makes them stick in my head.

But as he writes, Hanegraaff reveals his own limitations. Time and again, he feels the need to answer his opponents, especially Bart Ehrman, with whom Hanegraaff has an apparent ax to grind. I admit, Ehrman’s pedantic sophistry bores me, too. But Hanegraaff returns to him so often that he reveals how dependent he is from those he would refute.

At various times, Hanegraaff characterizes Ehrman as “benighted,” “a fool in his folly,” and “the shock doc.” He also turns his disdain onto Christopher Hitchens, John Dominic Crossan, the Jesus Seminar, and Barack Obama, among others. He spends so much time and effort on dismantling others’ claims and disparaging his opponents’ presuppositions that, without anyone to oppose, he would clearly run out of anything to say.

Hank Hanegraaff

Thus he can never really provide “proof” of divine inspiration. Even laying aside God’s abstract nature, which resists scientific scrutiny and therefore cannot be either proved or disproved, Hanegraaff’s core claims rely on refuting others’ claims. This does not mean that Hanegraaff is a weak arguer or that his claims are hollow, but it means that the heart of his book lies outside its covers.

The concept of proof innately assumes that we can close a debate. By providing sufficient evidence to construct an airtight case—say, that the accused really did murder the victim—we preclude all other options, and have nothing more to say. While a few ornery revisionists may try to exonerate John Wilkes Booth, most people consider the evidence, concur that it yields only one conclusion, and call the case proved.

The Bible cannot yield such proof. It can offer copious evidence, and many great minds have spent twenty centuries examining, collating, and bolstering such evidence. Yet it relies on the central premise that a transcendent force called “God” caused the entire universe, and continues to take an active interest in human affairs. All the evidence Scripture offers stands or falls on that central premise.

And that’s where Hanegraaff stumbles. He constructs an admirable network of evidence, one that I find highly persuasive, and even a pleasure to read. But when he approaches that core premise, he turns circular. We can regard Scripture as authoritative, he says, because it was inspired by God. We can assume God’s existence because it is attested in Scripture.

To his credit, Hanegraaff is not dogmatic. He has no more interest in millenarian alarmists than in secular hair-splitters. He scorches Harold Camping in a manner both witty and just. He demands that you don’t take his word for anything, but examine Scripture and earthly evidence, because understanding comes holistically. Despite his acceptance of the core God premise, he expects readers to take an active hand in their own inquiries.

But he tries to close the case, and that’s where he fumbles. He refutes others, and now others will refute him. As American philosopher Eric Hoffer observes in The True Believer, mass movements rely on opponents to give themselves shape. Hanegraaff could not have written this book without an Ehrman to oppose. Why should he think he gets the last word?

As a Christian, I find Hanegraaff’s web of evidence persuasive. But my friend Roger, agnostic from an early age, would not, because he doesn’t share that core premise. And that’s why, good as this book is, it falls short of its promise of proof.

Tracy Seeley's Private Prairie Fire

We who live in America’s “flyover country” struggle with outsiders’ broad stereotypes. We’re regularly disparaged as uncultured, uneducated, and backward. I’ve had Californians ask me point blank if Nebraska has electricity and indoor plumbing. Seriously. And few people mock the Heartland more than people who have left the area themselves. Which is why I struggle to decide what to make of Tracy Seeley’s My Ruby Slippers: The Road Back to Kansas.

Diagnosed with cancer and fresh out of a relationship just after 9/11, Seeley decided to investigate the baker’s dozen addresses listed in her baby book. Why did her family relocate four times in less than two years, and relocate relentlessly before Seeley was old enough to understand? Though she begins in Colorado, her search focuses mostly on the state she tried hardest to expunge from her history: Kansas.

When she left for graduate school in Texas and an academic career on both coasts, Seeley worked hard to suppress her Midland vowels and prairie mannerisms. Texas may have hick mythology, but it has panache that left Kansas with the Dust Bowl. So Seeley is as surprised as anyone when the state she denied for decades proves more of her home than the San Francisco where she’s immersed herself for decades.

Or so she says. Her subtext doesn’t correspond with her thesis. She talks, for instance, about rediscovering houses and neighborhoods which, lingering at the fringes of her consciousness, continue to mold her identity. Each new discovery places a new piece in the jigsaw puzzle of her conflicted childhood, colored by her father’s vague ambitions, her mother’s long-suffering perseverance, and a history of permanent impermanence.

Yet even while embracing her heritage, she describes the Kansas and Colorado landscape as nothing but “wheat, wheat, wheat, wheat, corn,” and calls the ambitious German Lutherans who built cathedrals on the gamble of future population infusions “mad.” She says she finally sees how the Great Plains has produced true culture, even if unrecognized, then characterizes her childhood neighbors by their “beige carpets and plastic hall runners.”

I can’t blame Seeley for this ambivalence. I’ve scarcely met a prairie dweller who doesn’t praise small town life in one breath and cuss the lack of amenities in the next. We openly embrace city slickers’ characterizations of us as hillbillies with the same aggression workers use in slapping back at bosses, yet when people ask where we’re from, we act embarrassed and evade.

Every fall, my regional university receives an infusion of ranchers’ children from rural western Nebraska. Many of them, especially men, insist religiously on wearing their boots, Stetsons, and Wrangler shirts just like home... until they realize that, even in Kearney, Nebraska, we pretend to greater worldliness. By the end of October, farm and ranch wear largely disappears from campus as students race to not be seen as “countrified.”

But while I can’t fault Seeley’s ambivalence, I question why she put it on paper. She yearns to be equally at home in Kansas and California, yet insists on bringing arugula salads and organic tahini to the plains, resisting the beefy diet favored by laborers. Her attitude remains colonial, wanting others to conform to her expectations and making little effort to speak the language of the people she claims as neighbors.

In describing “Children of the Corn,” Stephen King recounts getting lost near Thedford, Nebraska, amid miles of interchangeable, oppresive cornfields. Surely, he says, nothing good comes from such expanses. Notably, he never mentions meeting or speaking with even one Nebraskan. Other horror writers, from Lovecraft and Lord Dunsany to Peter Straub and Clive Barker, bewail the menace urbanites find inherent in the countryside.

On a less horrific note, the British film Cold Comfort Farm features Kate Beckinsale as Flora, a posh Londoner who remakes her country kin in her image. Though intended satirically, Cold Comfort Farm reflects very real attitudes, on both sides of the Atlantic: if them hicks could be as urbane as us, they’d know to leave the farm. No more provincial attitude can I imagine.

Reading this, I may appear to dislike Seeley’s narrative. Not so: it has its redeeming qualities, in its author’s journey of self-discovery, and the struggles she undertakes to rebuild herself after cancer. Yet in achieving these goals, she relies on the same creaky coastal self-infatuation that has kept the Heartland embarrassed by itself for generations.

We who live in the Great Plains deserve to be taken seriously. And we deserve it as much from ourselves as from outsiders.

In the interest of full disclosure, this book is published by a University of Nebraska Press imprint. I teach at a University of Nebraska campus. I received a copy of this book to review, at the publisher's expense, which has not influenced my opinion in any way, and has nothing to do with my professional academic standing.

All Work and All Play

When I recently met a factory executive where I work, I cannot pretend I was shocked that he didn’t know my name. Thousands of workers labor around the clock in a facility as large as a minor-league sports arena, and I haven’t been there long enough to distinguish myself yet. But I was shocked when I mentioned my job title, and he not only knew who I was, but could quote from my employee file.

In a modern condensed industrial environment, where people work elbow to elbow and often get identified in company files according to what they do, work becomes an intensely impersonal endeavor. Humans love work, and define ourselves by our labor, as I’ve said before. When we meet new people, we ask: “So what do you do for a living?” Yet industrial and post-industrial society hampers work’s simple joy.

Barbara Garson’s All the Livelong Day observes the gap between workers’ and managers’ expectations. A Socialist, Garson began her research considering work an unfair imposition by a lopsided economy. But she discovered how much people treasure consequential work. As she writes, “The crime of modern industry is not forcing us to work, but denying us real work. For no matter what tricks people play on themselves to make the day's work meaningful, management seems determined to remind them, ‘You are just tools for our use.’”

If my assembly line runs a standard 45 units per minute, then each unit sits before me for one and one-half seconds. During that time I must evaluate the unit’s quality, decide if it meets standards, and fit it for the next station in line. This often means only attaching one part; a filter that costs $12.95 may have fourteen people involved just in assembly, to say nothing of components before I see them or after they leave me.

In such an environment, we must re-evaluate “pride of craftsmanship.” I cannot claim to make the 18,000 filters rolling off my line nightly, any more than any individual can. Thus, I find pride in, for instance, being able to outpace the machine, or maintain a steady rhythm, or perform two tasks at once. My peers and I often do one job with the left hand and another with the right.

But not every trick we perfect improves our work. Especially in the most tedious areas, workers often play games intended to establish themselves apart from their jobs. Like the manager who knew me only by my title, many supervisors identify workers by their assigned machines: Forklift Driver. Paint Line Maintenance. Can Press Operator.

In attempting to separate their identities from their jobs, such workers frequently earn supervisors’ ire. Because the company exists to turn low-valued raw materials into high-valued commodities, workers’ games and playfulness seem extraneous and, if workers spent more time working and less noodling, they’d earn more profit.

Some managers regard anything less than working flat out for eight straight hours as theft of company time, attested in Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed. One manager (I won’t name names) reprimanded me for pausing to crack my back, a necessary time investment since the assembly line is built for someone six inches shorter than me. Back pain is part of my work routine; thus, so is back pain relief.

Whenever somebody mentions unions in America today, nay-sayers claim that workers don’t need representation; they’re paid according to their work, and if they want better pay and benefits, they should work harder. But, as Joshua Holland notes in The Fifteen Biggest Lies about the Economy, there is not now, and arguably never has been, any relationship between the hardest work and the highest pay.

My factory sometimes runs so fast that seasoned workers can’t match the pace. Work orders require such high output that really doing the work would cause repetitive stress injuries. I work two jobs and can’t afford to change the oil in my truck, but I’ve been called on the carpet for mistakes I could avoid if the machines ran at a marginally slower pace.

As managers disparage workers, workers retrench into their identities. Mutual resentment builds, and the gulf between management and labor gets reinforced. It’s a vicious cycle, created by the fact that individuals don’t own the product of their labors, and nourished because we don’t really know each other.

I love work. I enjoy my job. But I am not my job. And that makes me a threat to a system that thrives on anonymity.