Utentekspachuk

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Collezioni: La tua biblioteca (14)
Formato
Gruppi: Debris, Rejoyce 5
Aggiunto: Nov 5, 2009

Nome vero: Mr. Spachuk
Informazione su di me: Writing is journaling, which is blogging, facebooking, essay writing and writing with my students. Writing comes full circle, like Joyce’s last/first sentence in Finnegans Wake: from the classroom back to the classroom. I grew up in the south, Georgia and Florida, the Spanish moss and plantations in dappled sunlight and the stickiness of summers stuck some itch to write. I wrote stories then of voodoo and the occult. My teachers fed this gothic craving with Poe, Faulkner, and John Bellairs. I was a bibliophile haunter of the library, an adolescent who a kept a notebook full of arcane scrapes and lists. O felix culpa, I had fortunate fall into poetry, mostly symbolist and modernists. I wrote poems to my favorite English teacher trying to sound nasally symbolic like T.S. Eliot and provocatively dramatic like Jim Morrison.
And then I was converted. The Apollonian and Dionysian stepped out for awhile and I started writing sermons or talks. My parents are Jehovah’s Witnesses and there was a time in my late teens and early college days when I read the Bible daily and gave talks from the pulpit and door to door. My words seemed to fork lightening with Old Testament and New Testament sturm und drang. In college I became an English major and was soon attracted to hermeneutics in all that I read and would write. The Finnegans Wake that I had found in high school soon re-emerged and like the Naked Lunch, I found it hard to pray and write sermons right again. I kept morning pages for three or four years, seeking the tao in the Artist’s Way. Forlorn, the very idea of this way of writing was not magical enough for me. My journal became a magical diary with esoteric symbols and glyphs, I tried a draught of Aleister Crowley’s strange brew in my writing and then I left America.
There was joy in all the different styles of writing that I had done before I left. I had a passion for writing about different literary theories in the essay form. Julia Cameron and Anne Lamott were writers that I read and appreciated as guides. Ultimately I was looking for something, spiritualized, lofty, grand in writing. Before I left, one of the last college classes I took was titled Men’s Literature. I found a mythopoetic tradition in the works of Robert Bly, Robert Moore, and James Hillerman that bestowed a masculine sense of mystery without the pseudo-bravado of Hemingway and his ilk. I knew I would become a teacher and with that masculine mythopoetic tradition in mind I saw a purpose to reach out to young men, young men who are often the most vulnerable to violence and early death. In Tokyo, I wrote heavily under the influence of William Gibson and Philip K. Dick. I began to systemically to write like the writers I revered. I used William Burrough’s third mind technique of cut ups and surrealist techniques on the haiku and tanka. I studied haiku as I studied Mishima and Haruki Murakami. I traveled around the world writing sketches in different voices and styles, often in haiku phrasing.
When I returned to LA and started teaching for LAUSD, I came with the hope to build a classroom tradition of writing. I wanted to use student samples instead of professional samples. I wanted that idea of deep tradition that T.S. Eliot theorized, I am working on this. Jane Hancock came to San Fernando last year I was introduced to many techniques and practices that have inspired my teaching. I now regularly write with my classes, I keep that classroom writing as part of the living tradition. With my students we write reflectively upon our work, we write our own narratives and rewrite aware of register and dialect, figurative language and sensory language. I give them some the strands of my writing journey, from my voodoo stories to the erudite allusions in Dionysian verse. The classroom is again the place that I return to replenish my writing style.