Placing the Academy: Essays on Landscape, Work, and Identity
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Utah State University DigitalCommons@USU All USU Press Publications USU Press 2007 Placing the Academy: Essays on Landscape, Work, and Identity Jennifer Sinor Rona Kaufman Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs Part of the Rhetoric and Composition Commons Recommended Citation Sinor, J., & Kaufman, R. (2007). Placing the academy: Essays on landscape, work, and identity. Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press. This Book is brought to you for free and open access by the USU Press at DigitalCommons@USU. It has been accepted for inclusion in All USU Press Publications by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@USU. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Placing theAcademy essays on landscape, work, and identity Edited by Jennifer Sinor & Rona Kaufman Placing the Academy Placing the Academy Essays on Landscape, Work, and Identity Edited by Jennifer Sinor and Rona Kaufman Utah State University Press Logan, Utah Copyright © 2007 Utah State University Press All rights reserved Utah State University Press Logan, UT 84322-7800 ISBN-13: 978-0-87421-657-8 ISBN: 978-0-87421-549-6 (e-book) ISBN-10: 0-87421-657-5 Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid-free, recycled paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Placing the academy : essays on landscape, work, and identity / edited by Jennifer Sinor and Rona Kaufman. p. cm. ISBN-13: 978-0-87421-657-8 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. College teaching--Philosophy. 2. College teachers--United States. 3. Identity (Psychology) 4. Place (Philosophy) 5. Creative writing. I. Sinor, Jennifer, 1969- II. Kaufman, Rona, 1970- LB2331.P57 2007 378.1’2--dc22 2006038145 For Michael, For Tim, my bedrock who keeps me rooted J. S. R. K. Table of Contents I. Introduction 1 1. Writing Place Jennifer Sinor 3 II. Here 25 2. Six Kinds of Rain: Searching for a Place in the Academy Kathleen Dean Moore and Erin E. Moore 27 3. The Work the Landscape Calls Us To Michael Sowder 39 4. Valley Language Diana Garcia 52 5. What I Learned from the Campus Plumber Charles Bergman 65 6. M-I-Crooked Letter-Crooked Letter Katherine Fischer 83 7. On Frogs, Poems, and Teaching at a Rural Community College Seán W. Henne 98 III. There 107 8. Levittown Breeds Anarchists! Film at 11 Kathryn T. Flannery 109 9. Living in a Transformed Desert Mitsuye Yamada 125 10. A More Fortunate Destiny Jayne Brim Box 139 vi 11. Imagined Vietnams Charles Waugh 152 IV. Everywhere 166 12. Teaching on Stolen Ground Deborah A. Miranda 169 13. The Blind Teaching the Blind: The Academic as Naturalist, or Not Robert Michael Pyle 188 14. Where Are You From? Lee Torda 202 V. In Between 215 15. Going Away to Think Scott Slovic 217 16. Fronteriza Consciousness: The Site and Language of the Academy and of Life Norma Elia Cantú 233 17. Bones of Summer Mary Clearman Blew 243 18. Singing, Speaking, and Seeing a World Janice M. Gould 254 19. Making Places Work: Felt Sense, Identity, and Teaching Jeffrey M. Buchanan 269 VI. Coda 285 20. Running in Place: The Personal at Work, in Motion, on Campus, and in the Neighborhood Rona Kaufman 287 Contributors 303 vii I Introduction 1 Writing Place Jennifer Sinor My way of fi nding a place in this world is to write one. Barbara Kingsolver hen I was nine, my family moved from Seattle where we W had lived less than a year. It rained almost daily those nine months, causing mildew to grow on the bathroom tiles and in shoes that were not worn every day. The morning we left, the car was packed tightly, the last-minute pile of possessions having grown immeasurably overnight. While my parents worried about where my brothers and I were going to sit for the long drive, my babysitter stood with me in the driveway saying good-bye. I cannot see her face and no longer know her name, but she gave me a terrarium to remember her by, a miniature ecosystem housed in a Sanka jar. Requiring neither water, nor air, nor fertilizer, it was complete, like an egg. Even though I was moving, I thought, a tiny part of the earth would be coming with me. Though I cared for my piece of the planet as if my livelihood depended on what it produced, the plants died. Two weeks in a hot car were too much for their tiny green limbs. Writing about the experience now, I fi nd myself wondering if I am not confused in my memories. After all, we were moving to Hawaii, so why would we be driving? A plane seems much more likely. Perhaps it was my babysitter in Virginia who gave me the terrarium and I was seven. Perhaps it was in Seattle, but maybe it was a birthday present. Perhaps I only dreamed the terrarium. Casting, casting, casting back, I work to remember the car we owned, how many siblings I had, the way my mother wore her hair, any detail 3 4 Placing the Academy that will help me to attach this memory to a particular place, in hopes my past travels better than the plants. In the end, there is only the image of a short-lived terrarium sweating in a jar with an orange lid. For me, the loss of those tiny plants has become metaphorical for the tenuous connection I have to the land. I remain envious of those I know who have lived their entire lives in one place, who can hail neighbors by name, and who recall the feel of the air when the gold- fi nches return. I know so little about the places I have lived; so many of my memories are unplaced, as if the box of family photos were upturned and pictures scattered underneath the table and the bed. I cannot even tell you for sure where I was standing when I lost the earth. When Scott Russell Sanders suggests in Writing from the Center that “we need a richer vocabulary of place,” he does not explicitly name the need for ways to talk about how the work being done in the academy is shaped by where we, as academics, live (18). Instead he is asking for a “literature of . inhabitation,” a broad call for writing that examines who we are by detailing where we are (50). Having recently moved to new landscapes and new jobs, Rona and I realize that literature would be incomplete if it did not explore how place shapes our professional identities. We know intimately that who we are as teachers, writers, and scholars is intricately connected to where we live and have lived. Part of our awareness of the shaping force of place comes from moving west, to landscapes that with their extremities of weather and geology demand conversation. We have begun to understand how our teaching and our writing have changed in response. Even though Rona knows that Mount Rainier is always there, on those clear bright mornings when it dominates the Tacoma skyline, she is reminded that this volcanic landscape is unfamiliar, and she re- lies on that sense of displacement to understand the distances her students must travel as they learn the discourse of the university. In similar ways, I drive along the fl oor of Cache Valley to work every morning, descending into the bed of Lake Bonneville, an ancient sea that beat its retreat fi fty thousand years ago. Its absence and the literal loss of land it carved out inform the way I think about the possibilities found in writing to revise the traumatic into a narrative that heals. Encountering new places brought into sharp relief how the two of us teach, how we write, and how we continue Writing Place 5 to learn the channeled ways of academic life. In paying attention to the new places we fi nd ourselves—both as new professors in academic departments and new residents of western states—we fi nd it important to develop not just any vocabulary of place, but one capacious enough to place the academy. This collection begins such a conversation. It fi lls a gap in the fi elds of place writing and academic memoir. While place writers have learned to talk about the connections between landscape and self, they are rarely concerned with occupation and more rarely with the academy. Academic memoirists like Alice Kaplan, Jane Tomp- kins, Eva Hoffman, and Marianna Torgovnick, in turn, refl ect on their professional lives but rarely on the landscapes that surround them as they move between classes, ideas, or meetings. Who we are is dependent on where we are, and the infl uence of landscape does not end with our habits or customs as residents and citizens but extends to how we read, write, think, learn, and teach. Because, as Wayne Franklin writes, “it is in our stories that we locate place most powerfully,” this is a collection of personal essays (xi). In their efforts to make legible the land that lies within, here teachers and scholars tell stories of growing up and growing older, of moving and remaining, of working and playing, and of being placed. We learn what the campus plumber can teach us about the classroom, how one might continue to work on fragile ecosystems knowing that you are responsible for killing the last of an endan- gered species, what the Mississippi has to say to the teaching of writing, as well as the diffi culty of imagining places like Vietnam for your students. Their diverse answers to how geography shapes their academic identities mirror the diversity of the authors’ back- grounds.