LY #119 Presidential Candidate Visit #2

Dr. Sheila Ortego at opening of Unicopia*

Oh, I liked this one much better!  First of all, Dr. Sheila Ortego had a much better handshake then Monday's presenter.  (My Dad taught me about handshakes when I was in sixth grade and I have a habit of judging people by the strength and tone of that haptic message.)  It was firm and warm.


Here are the other reasons I both enjoyed her presentation and think she'd be a good fit for the institution.

1. Like Monday's speaker, she spoke without notes and had strong immediacy behaviors, including eye contact and ready smiles for the questions.
2. She sold herself well with a clear articulation of her background and appropriate flattery for the audience.  Her background includes working her way up from English teacher to college president at Santa Fe Community College where she spent 30 years as well as some time as an accreditation "fixer" at Pima Community College.  During her years at SFCC she also toured the country learning about accreditation as she lead the college through several important upgrades in status, quality and Moody's bond ratings.  In other words, I found her background and her straightforward presentation of it quite impressive.  While selling her own accomplishments, she also spoke about COCC as a "gem" that didn't seem to need "fixing."  She emphasized how the college was recognized as a high-quality institution.
3. She believes in an open-door policy and pointed toward the many times she's worked with students on college initiatives.
4. She also had the courage to be honest about approaching challenges.  When asked about what she saw as the problems in the community or college, she talked about OSU leaving the COCC campus, saying that she would want to learn more about why that happened.  Then she said that one possible change to COCC might be a de-emphasis of the transfer side and a growth of the professional technical area.  I thought this courageous because there are many people here invested in transfer.  In fact, back in the day, that was why Boyle and his coterie were so obsessed with everyone having a PhD.
5. Her vita and her discussion shows her strong commitment to expanding opportunity for underrepresented populations as well a concern about income inequality.  She noted that the outlying campuses have some of the same issues as Santa Fe with the division between the very poor and very wealthy.
6. She thought COCC could do better in adapting to the need for Green Energy.
7. She shared that she left SFCC for two reasons:  a) she was at the top of her game and height of her popularity and success and believes that's the time to leave and b)  her mother was old and sick and living on her own and the sister who had been watching the mom was also ill.
8. She drives a Prius and has a black lab, so she'd fit into Central Oregon.

Concern

Now I hadn't done any web research on Ortego until just now, this morning, as I am writing this post.  And of course, now that I've googled around I feel like I need to share something.  Santa Fe Community College is currently embroiled in a huge flap about the termination of  Ana “Cha” Guzmán, hired as SFCC president after Oretego retired in 2012.  Guzman claims she was terminated because she blew the whistle on a culture of financial mismanagement and insider deals and those fighting her claim she was a bully who made racist remarks and created a negative climate on campus.  I think that the largest issue for our current candidate would be Guzman's claims that there was a history of financial mismanagement at SFCC. 


* Also in picture, on left, is Randy Grissom, Director of the Sustainable Technologies Center, and on right is Bill Althouse, Althouse, Inc., Energy Specialist.  Scene is opening of Unicopia, Emerald Center, A National Educational Center of Excellence for Renewable Energy and Sustainability.    Grissom is currently interim president of Santa Fe Community College while the Guzman issue is moving through the courts.

LY #118 The Joe Louis Chapter

Back in the early 90s I spent a year working with an organization that is now known as Oregon Humanities  as what was then called an Oregon Chautauqua speaker.   During that time I went on five or six jaunts to various colleges around the state talking about the second boxing match between Joe Louis, the Brown Bomber, and the German Heavyweight Champion, Max Schmeling.   Of course I did most of my traveling in February, Black History Month.  I remember the biggest paycheck I got for this activity was around $800 (paid by the Humanities Association) for a trip to Rogue Community College where I wound up giving a formal speech to a very small audience (fewer than 10 people, as I remember).

I was not a very good speaker in those days.  I read too much and didn't make enough eye contact.  But it was a good experience and helpful in my development as a teacher of public speaking because I learned a lot more about what not to do.  At the time I also had a very poor copy of film images of Louis on videotape.  The vast storage house I'm typing onto would make a presentation given today so much more lively!

 My presentation was based on the largest chapter in my doctoral dissertation, the one that focused on "The Fight of the Century."    It's not my intention here to review the history of the fight.  If you want to know more about it, follow the links.   I just wanted to say a little bit here about the chapter, the challenges of writing it, and the good it did me.

As I mentioned, a major part of the good was that I was able to turn the chapter into a public presentation which, though usually ill attended, brought in some extra money and built my own public speaking skills.  (Didn't hurt my Report of Service, either!)

Though the speech was a relatively simple historical presentation, the chapter on which it was based was a very difficult one to write.  It finally wound up coming in at 80 out of a dissertation total of 388 pages -- indeed a heavyweight chunk of a chapter.   It was one of the three chapters I wrote that focused on "social dramas" or public events that engaged the focus both the national and the African-American press.  For each of these events (the Fight, the Detroit Riots of '43, and the Texas Primary Decision of '46) I reviewed stories written for both white and black audiences and compared them, focusing most closely on the voice of Life magazine.  I called these the "horizontal" or "longitudinal" analyses.  The "vertical" or "latitudinal" analysis was the chronological page by page coding of every African or African-American face in every issue Life magazine printed between 1938 and 1946.  I wound up looking at over 40 thousand pages and coding every image in a variety of ways. 

Oh, yes, if I had to do it all again I would have chosen some single photographer who wasn't very well known and focused in on his or her images.  But I didn't, Blanche.

But back to the Joe Louis chapter.  Not only did I have the history itself and my analysis of a few dozen articles to review.  I also gave myself a thorough grounding in the ideological analysis of sports and read everything I could find on the meaning of boxing.  I had stacks of quotes from Joyce Carol Oates!  I had so much stuff and I couldn't figure out how it all went together.   For three hours one morning I kept trying to figure out what the weather had been like on the day of the match!  I wanted to start with that.  Or perhaps I was avoiding actually trying to write anything substantial because I was just stuck.

Then I was saved by a dream.  One night, after a few days of struggling with the material, I dreamt that I saw myself sitting down and writing an outline for the chapter.  In the dream I looked over my own shoulder and realized, "Hey, that will work!"  When I woke up in the morning, I immediately sat down and recreated the structure I'd "seen" in my sleep.  After gift from my unconscious, it just took me a few weeks actual conscious labor to write the chapter out.

Thinking back to that experience is a good reminder to me that a Muse (in this case Clio, the muse of History) is always waiting in the wings of the unconscious for that particularly desperate moment when her help will be most appreciated.

LY #117 Presidential Candidate Visit #1

Monday I walked in a bit late for the all-school meeting with Dana Young, current president at Treasure Valley Community College.  I wound up standing in the back (avoiding the seats left in the front row) and eating a nice, warm fruit treat I found on the table outside the meeting room. 

TVCC Prez Dana Young, right *

Perhaps it was the snack that got me into a good mood, but my first impressions of Ms. Young were quite positive.  Here is what I liked about her presentation.

• Directness.  She was clearly making a personal sales pitch about her skills and how what she'd learned on the job at Treasure Valley would help her at COCC.  I was relieved to hear no flattery about the beauties of Central Oregon and the perfection of the lifestyle here.  Also, although I didn't myself listen closely enough to know if I'd agree, another listener noted that she had "no metaphors," by which I think that person meant she didn't represent the college as either a triangle of meaning (Jim Middleton's favorite) or a boat (Bob Barber's choice).
• Delivery style.  She spoke without notes, made lots of eye contact, used gestures, stood up straight.  In other words, she used plenty of immediacy behaviors.  These, of course, are positively correlated with positive teacher evaluations as well as positive responses from speech teachers like myself.
• Owning her history.  During the QnA, she herself brought up what Ron Hoff calls, "the burning issue."  She said, "Well, I'm surprised no one asked about the vote of no confidence."  And she told her version of the story which, if I interpreted her response correctly, was largely an issue of communication ineffectiveness.  Faculty members thought that an administrative restructuring decision had been made without their input when, in her story, the decision was simply being talked about.  
• She's not actively looking for another job.  She said that a friend had suggested that she apply for the COCC job and that this is the only place she's interviewing.   Of course this fact was part of her pitch ("Hey, you guys are special!").  Nevertheless, it does weigh in her favor.

One aspect of her current life that is problematic is that she thinks she can research and write a doctoral dissertation while on her first year of the job.  She was honest enough to share that her first proposal had been rejected.  Perhaps this was because she is a quantoid who decided to give herself the extra burden of writing a qualitative dissertation.

Oh.  Come.  On!  That is just nuckin' futz.  Qualitative is so much more work!  Unless, of course, she could propose a first person participant observation of "The First Year of a Community College President."  Now that might a rara avis among dissertations -- one that is both fun to write and to read!


*  Picture:  From left, Britney Meza-Turner, Alex Plaza, TVCC Foundation president Cathy Yasuda, Ashley Whittaker and TVCC president Dana Young.

LY #116 Post-Show Downs

I broke my own rules last week and skipped two scheduled posting days.

I was tired and sad from having such a wonderful trip.  I think of this kind of energy drop as the post-show downs, the blues that arrive after a planned-for performance is over.  I've recognized this experience ever since being in my high school production of Midsummer Night's Dream.  I didn't realize I'd experience it so deeply simply from an eight minute speech.

But it wasn't just my presentation, of course.  Nor was it my nine happy hours in Walt's World.  I think my low energy flow signaled an acknowledgement that I've come to the end of my life as an academic who goes to conventions.  

Now, there may be more conferences in my future but they will be the sort where I have an "elevator pitch" that I cram into the ears of tired literary agents who will note my wrinkles and lack of Botox and wonder why they're listening to someone so aged  (Actually, there are plenty of folks my age writing in the genre I hope to pursue, so the age-thing shouldn't be a problem.)

But, I'm getting back into the swing of things as my last winter quarter rushes to a close.  February, where is thy sting?  Tomorrow we talk about gender stereotypes in Visual Rhetoric, starting with John Berger's knitting together of artistic nudes and advertising.   Also tomorrow I will be giving my last lecture in my last week-day public speaking class.  And the interpersonal class is focusing in on conflict management.

I tried something new in the live interpersonal this quarter.  Instead of requiring a journal I've had them taking the same quizzes as those taken by the online classes.  And here's what I don't understand.  How is it that students can take open-book objective tests after viewing a slide show telling them the exact concepts that are going to be on the test and still get Fs?  I don't understand how that's possible.  I myself would need to work quite hard to avoid studying at that level.  Yet, it clearly can be done.

LY #115 Conventional This and That

Kake at the lecture she didn't actually use

Kake falling for the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror

Here are some observations of the convention at Anaheim.

It was held in a resort area.  This was great for folks with kids and others like myself who really wanted to go to Disneyland and Disney's California Adventure.  It wasn't so great for graduate students traveling on a budget.  There were no real grocery stores within walking distance.  Food at the Hilton was overpriced. 

Ah, food at the Hilton.  The convention lunch was terrific -- a small Romaine heart with tomato and grapes, a main dish of very nice salmon over a risotto and a totally scrumptious dessert of chocolate moose with raspberries and a raspberry drizzle.  Someone sent pictures of the dessert to her Instagram site but I forget who.

On the other hand, I had one of the worst breakfasts ever at the Hilton -- $20 for coffee, two eggs, 2 slices bacon, and a handful of Sysco systems reconstituted potato forms overcooked in burnt grease.  Yuck. 

The keynote speaker, George Lakoff, was a smart man who kept talking about how smart he was and quoting himself but what was more annoying was his unquestioned assumption that everyone at the convention was a liberal.  His presentation was more like an off the cuff lecture than a keynote speech.  He also made a Jewish joke. He also went over time, even though he was given an hour.

This convention seemed to have many more people of color than I remember of conventions past.  I appreciated the growth of "diversity."  The service staff of the hotel, as of almost all hotels in which past conventions have taken place, was largely made up of people of color.  It always seemed somewhat amusing to me to hear white middle class (usually) male leftie academics spouting off about race, class, gender while being waited on by servers of a different color, sex, and class.

The Hilton bar only had three single malt whiskies and none of them from Islay or the Islands.

Some folks expressed trouble believing that I would really retire and assumed they'd see me next year in Spokane:  "You don't have to retire from WSCA just because you stop teaching."  Well, I made it a point to register for the convention as a non-member.  And the funny thing was that it cost me $10 to be a non-member (and NOT get the journal) than it would have cost me to register as a member.  But you know what?  I really don't want the journal.  It's a good one and sometimes a great one but it's still an academic journal and not The New Yorker.

I did not attend one panel that had everyone on it who was supposed to be there.  This absenteeism would not have happened "back in the day."  My buddy Alexis thinks this started happening after the downturn in 2008.  Not enough money now.  And perhaps the newer generation just doesn't think that it's important to be where you say you're going to be.  Or maybe convention papers don't count anymore.

LY #114 Conventional Purposes

(Written in the Portland airport on the way home.)

I was happy at WSCA this year because most of the papers I heard were given as presentations instead of being read.  I attribute this to the fact that most of the panels I attended were sponsored by the Community College Interest Group.  My favorites, as always, were the Great Ideas for Teaching Students panels.  Of course I liked the presenters shared the panel with me the best. The always dynamic Amy Edwards of Oxnard College chaired and panel and also took the lovely photo I’m sharing here.  We were missing one panelist which meant that we could take 15 minutes rather than 10 to talk about our ideas. My chin-wag about the interpersonal communication course project that involves creativity (making a short movie), analysis (writing a critique of the relational message), and understanding (students need to know the six steps of constructive conflict management and use them to explain to the characters in the movie how to problem solve) took only 8 minutes.  I believe that shorter is better when it comes to public communication.  

The other panelists took more time but were very energized and interesting. Linda Carvalho Cooley of Reedley College offered a GIFT in which she used “What do you want to be when you grow up” as a topic to teach students the parts of the Toulmin Model of argumentation.  (From her I learned another way of explaining “warrants,” a concept I always struggle to clarify in the classroom.)  I also appreciated another argument-oriented presentation by Anthony Ongyod, of Mira Costa College, that required students to teach certain principles of fair argument to someone “important” to them (relational partner, parent, child, friend) through the 18 weeks of the semester.  He said one problem that he faced was making sure students didn’t choose their most recent love-forever as the focus of the teaching project.  And Christine Burke of CSU Channel Islands talked about how in her public speaking courses she required students to do some public performance of a more artistic type to sell their view on an issue of “social justice.”

Besides my own panel and a few other G.I.F.T.S., I also enjoyed some of the more academic research presentations.  One favorite was “Disaster!  Imperialism in Crisis,” an analysis of four environmental disaster movies by Jenna Hanchey of the University of Texas at Austin.  She looked at two movies from the nineties and compared them to two movies in the oughts and found in the latter a greater sense of anxiety about the ability of both science and the American government to solve problems.  The imperialism comes in with the idea that some cultures and countries (notably in Africa) don’t matter when it comes to saving people from disaster.  

Speaking on a panel sponsored by the Health Communication Division, Mary-Jo Losso-Engle of CSU Northridge offered a fascinating analysis of the way in which breast cancer survivors either deploy or reject the images presented of them by the media.  What I liked in this presentation was hearing about all those who reject the “battle” and “hero” metaphor, adopting instead a view, “well, what other choice did I have?”  Her paper was called, “Warriors in Pink:  The Negotiation of Mediated Breast Cancer Rhetoric by Long Term Survivors.”

But as an old (in all ways) fan of Kenneth Burke, my favorite presentation was the one given by Scott Church of Brigham Young University:  “Perspective by Congruity, Possession by Misnomer, and the Rhetoric of Girl Talks Mash-ups.”  He managed to speak with energy and wit as he reviewed Burke’s concepts and link them to his text.  I also liked the texts on which he focused.  I enjoyed the return to Burke as well as the bits of video he showed on his own laptop.

And of course I enjoyed the panel on assessment in which my colleague Jon Bouknight participated.  It taught me that there are no perfect methods of assessment and that colleges differ monumentally when it comes to the ways in which they measure, test, review, etc etc student and program learning outcomes.  Knowing the vast diversity in the universe of assessment just made me feel a little bit better about the known world.

LY #113 Conventional Behavior: Old Friends

I was looking over the history of the convention at the WSCA website to try and figure out how many I've attended.  The first thing I noticed is that my memory of going to a snowy Denver WSCA was incorrect -- it was a snowy SCA (Speech Communication Association convention) in Denver in fall of 1985.  Then I figured out that I've been to over 16 WSCA conventions.  Why do I go?  Well, a convention paper looks good on one's vita.  Hearing about new developments in teaching or hearing interesting research in one's field can regenerate interest in subjects grow stale.  And then there are the people.

One of the great pleasures of attending the Western States Communication Association conventions over the past 29 years has been catching up with old professors and the folks with whom I attended the graduate program at the University of Utah.   But time and fortune happeneth to them all.  This year I saw very few.  My profs are mostly retired, too old to travel, or deceased.  Many of the Utah folks with whom I went to school are now scattered around the country and not settled in the West.  But I did have brief interactions with a few old faces.

Of my old profs, I saw only Dr. Robert Avery, phasing toward retirement at age 72.  Bob is still tall, slender, handsome, and given to obsessive boosterism.  He met folks at the door of last night's Utah reception, wearing the customary bright red Ute sweater and handing out the bright red on white U badge stickers.  I chatted with Bob a bit, finding him still cheery.  As long as I can remember Bob's been the man in charge of the party.  Back in the day, he would sneak booze or champagne into whatever hotel was hosting the conference for the Utah party.  But now, perhaps having been caught once too often (or perhaps because the University coughed up some funds) there's now a no-host bar (though Utah Alumni get tickets with their invitations).


Way back in MY day, graduate students who attended the convention were rounded up to act as servers at the party and actually poured champagne for everyone in attendance.  I enjoyed this activity.  First, because it made for a nice change from listening to panel presentations and doing coursework.  Second, because it underlined our role as servants to the department.  We were the ones who did the scutwork for major professors and who taught the "weed" classes.  We were the cheap labor who taught the highly popular basic courses that supported the graduate school.  Acting as a servant, towel over my arm, enacted the "truth" of our relationship to the department in ways that turning in papers never could.

I spoke VERY briefly (2 minutes) to Dr. Jeanine Congalton, of Cal State Fullerton.  Jeanine was at Utah when I arrived and was one of those deeply dedicated forensic types, focused on speech and debate.  I also spoke with Dr. Michael Salvador of Cal State San Bernardino.  I knew almost from the first year we were at Utah that Mike would become a department chair.  He had the proper mix of force and subservience that makes for a good faculstrator.  Mike was a department chair at Washington State University for many years and has recently been hired in as a chair further south in the land of his youth.

My only vital link to my graduate student days is Dr. Professor Alexis Olds of the University of La Verne and Cuesta College.  In the mid 90s Alexis encouraged me to be active in the Media Studies division of WSCA and convinced me that I wanted to be Vice-Chair and program planner one year, an experience that taught me a lot about organizational structures and event planning.  (Mostly what it taught me about event planning is that I hate event planning.)

A story that Alexis told me that she has told her children about me is about the night that she drove me home from a giant celebratory party and I was so drunk I upchucked on the outside of the car.  She claims now that it froze on the outside of her car and that it was horrible all winter.  The last time I heard the story she told me my cathartic upheaval was so corrosive it took the paint off her car.  I remember the upheaval but I never actually got word from her about any damage at a time when I could have done something about it.  I don't remember the actual celebratory purpose of this party.  I do remember that I got sick from drinking ouzo straight out of the bottle.

A person I was worried about seeing, of course, was Professor Fox.  I'd actually done some work with my therapist around the possibility of such an event.  But he was absent and so that problem didn't need to be managed.

Tomorrow night I'll offer a few notes about my favorites among this year's presentations.

LY #112 Here we are now, entertain us . . .

Writing in a very quiet room at the Hilton Anaheim after a lovely flat iron steak and a Beefeater's martini, eaten all by myself while perusing the program for the Western States Communication Association convention.

I remember the first Western I ever attended.  It was in the winter of 1985.  I didn't have a convention paper so the school didn't send me down.  (Utah was always very good about paying for graduate students to attend conventions when they had papers accepted.)  A gang of us drove from Salt Lake City to Denver to see what the convention was like.  I remember absolutely nothing of the convention itself.  I remember just two things:  1)  taking a long walk through Denver and stumbling upon a gay leather shop and suddenly feeling at home in a way I hadn't since beginning the doctoral program at Utah and 2) getting snowed in on the drive home and having to stay overnight in a single room with five other graduate students when I had a paper on Kenneth Burke due the morning after the day we returned and no one was going to sleep.  I remember raging against them as I walked around the halls of the hotel in the early morning hours because it seemed like I was the only one who wanted to sleep instead of drink and talk.*

The next convention I attended I DID have a paper.  The department sent me to the Popular Culture Association convention in Atlanta in 1985.  I was thinking about that today as I dragged my backpack and carry-on through the John Wayne airport.  I carried so much less baggage to this week's convention than I took to Atlanta almost 30 years ago.  Then I was hauling my overstuffed suitbag AND a smaller suitcase.  I carried I don't know how many copies of my paper to hand out. 

Oh, that paper.  It wound up being published, don'tchaknow.  It was a Foucauldian analysis of three short cartoon books by gay porn  icon Tom of Finland.  I'd kinda scandalized the Utah communication department when I wrote the paper for our "Introduction to Graduate Studies" course in fall, 1984.  I thought I was just doing what people did in the academy.  Turned out that my use of terms like "fisting" as though they were known by everyone was a bit outre for the department.  But back to my suitcase (although not my closet, which has pretty much always had very little in it).  I remember how heavy the suitbag and carry on were, filled with papers. 

Fortunately, some friends from Utah also had papers.  My now deceased friend Mike Swan and his friend from his college days, Scott Schamp.  I delivered the speech based on my essay to a room with over 50 people in it (folks at Pop Culture always turn out for the porn sessions.).  Did I throw out all the copies people didn't collect?  I certainly hope I did, though I don't remember.

For the short presentation I'm giving on Monday, I've brought 20 copies of only 4 pages.  It's part of a G. I. F. T. S. panel.  These used to be "Great Ideas for Teaching Speech."  But now the word speech has become "students," probably because so many programs have adapted the term "communication" rather that "speech."  Also, interpersonal, group, and the basic "overview" course are all part of the focus of these panels now and they are not as easily understood as fitting under the umbrella term "speech."

Turns out that my buddy and sometime boss (and sometime underling) Jon B. is also here to be part of a panel on assessment.  Fond as I am of the guy, I think I'm too close to escape time to sit down and listen to one more thing about SLOs. 

Sadly, the tour of the Queen Mary, scheduled for tomorrow, was cancelled.  Oh, as I registered for the convention tonight, I found out that it cost me $10 more to NOT get the journal (to register as a non-member) than it would to revive my membership and get the journal.  I decided to spend the extra money so that I would not receive the journal. 

Sunday night is the Utah Party and the Sock Hop.  Much more on those two events later.  Now I think I'll go down to the fancy bar and get some Drambuie.

  *  It just occurred to me that almost the same thing happened to me in fourth or fifth grade when a group of girls went out with the parents of one of the girls on a boat on the Sacramento River and come 9:00 pm I wanted to go to sleep but all the other girls wanted to stay up giggling and talking.  Gosh, I am stick-in-the-mud!  Lifelong, it would seem.

LY #111 In my end is my beginning, in my beginning . . .

Nothing like a little T. S. Eliot to sound the gong of literary snobbery, which is just the note I shouldn't be sounding for tonight's post.

John Berger in Ways of Seeing (BBC)

Today we started talking about Ways of Seeing in my visual rhetoric class.   The first time I refereed discussions between this book and a class of freshmen and sophomores was in the first new prep of my teaching assistantship at Utah.  Now I'll be teaching it as part of my last new prep in my last year of teaching.

Some of those students who actually read chapter one for today were not that happy about it.  The pictures are badly reproduced, the language uses the old sexist "he" and "man" and the writing is a mix of academic clot and Marxist rhetoric.  Nevertheless, I believe that Berger, et al, make some terrific points about the way we look at pictures and how "fine art" gets managed in this age that is now WAY past "mechanical" reproduction.  He notes that our human, class-based responses to what is actually represented in works of "fine art" is mystified by the engines of art history as it pays more attention to the provenance and cost of certain works than it does to what they actually show us of the way the artist saw the world.

I remember a Humanities department picnic here in Bend during my first year when I was attempting to argue Berger's points about art history with the woman who taught it, the wife of a high level administrator of the time.  She disagreed with me but chose not to back up her argument so she just said, "Kake, shut up!"  And I did.

My students and I didn't get that far this afternoon because we took some time work-shopping ways to help the folks who got really low grades on the midterm earn back some points.  Part of the reason for the low grades was the fuzziness of the new questions I created.  Part of the reason was that they just didn't study.  I think they all came up with some good plans which I'll get into practice on my return from the Western States Communication Association convention where I'll be presenting on a G.I.F.T.S. panel.

The next post will be written from Anaheim, California.

LY #110 More local tragedy

Next year my replacement might have a student who talks about losing his friend in last Friday's suicide at Bend High.  Certainly there will be more students in all of the speech classes giving presentations about suicide prevention.  Like these kids in a Mayo Clinic video on Teen Suicide.

Like many of the lost, I too made suicide attempts in high school but fortunately was spared from success by God and my own incompetence.  Kristin Tone has written a beautiful blog post on the ineffability of this recent tragedy.

My friend Lilli Ann posted her daughter Kit Foreman's thoughts on Facebook and Kit has given me permission to quote her:

"I've been thinking a lot about last week's tragedy.

I'm hurting. Along with many, many other people. Because that "doesn't happen here." This is Bend. That kind of thing doesn't happen here.

But obviously it does. It does happen here. And I think that shakes our community's foundation. And I think that's good.

I think this is a chance to have a positive, open dialogue about suicide. And about the things that lead people to it. About the warning signs, and how sometimes it's impossible to know who is at risk.

Asking for help is the hardest, bravest thing you can do.

I intern with the local Medical Examiner. The sheer amount of suicides that happen in Bend is astonishing. The media doesn't usually report on suicides, because they're generally a quiet, private affair. The only evidence that they occurred is a human-sized hole in the hearts of the people who knew them.

1-800-273-8255 is the number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.

You are loved. You are loved. You are loved."

 
Kit's final words above were put into visual rhetoric at COCC  on Tuesday as some staff participated in Blue/Gold Day in support of Bend High. 

LY #109 Summary paragraphs

"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there."
-- L. P Hartley, The Go-Between

So the past is past and not necessarily prologue and yet its structures and interactional patterns continue to impact the present unless and even when made visible.

Last week I burrowed into and through the old wounds for a couple of reasons.  First because I felt "called" to do so.  My relationship with my muse is a perverse and tricky one and sometimes s/he insists that I write about particular topics without letting me in on the reasons.  Because this blog is a spontaneous and time-pressed text, I pretty much respond to what that "still, quiet" and, thankfully, no longer "still quiet" voice requests of me.

Second, so that my friends would have a deeper understanding of me through learning about two shaping two foundational events that occurred when I was turning into what might be thought of as an adult.  If it had not been for those two events there's a good chance I would neither have stayed in Idaho nor married.  I might also not have carried with me for so long that mix of rage and its covering craving for connection which have, at times, gotten me into trouble.  (Thanks going out now to the doctors and therapists who've helped me manage or at least understand each over the decades.)

Third, I posted The Family Tragedy stories for members of Sally's high school class who might still be wondering "whatever happened to . . ." and search for her online.


The Amazing Criswell used to say, "The stars do not compel, the stars impel."  The same is true of the past.  It sends us back to the future with the collection of attitudes and communication tools it has available.  New patterns and means are available to us along our path but only if we see them and only if we choose to pick them up and use them.

LY #108 Impact of Reality on Discursive Practice

So what was the impact of The Family Tragedy and The Rape on my life as a teacher?

This is a difficult question to answer.  By the time each event occurred, I was already pretty troubled due to a variety of other childhood experiences.  Thus, it's difficult to point to some of my experiences and attitudes as a teacher and say, "Oh, I am this way because of these two events."

I suppose that I am both softer and harder because of this past trauma.  I have empathy rather than merely sympathy for others who have had experiences of family tragedy and violence.  I understand the compulsion to speak these stories and am not frightened of them.  I can hear pretty much any story without turning away.  On the other hand, I'm also harder because I know that tragedy is everywhere, that it's a normal aspect of human life, and I am not seduced to lower my expectations by stories of victimage.

It's also "useful" to have PTSD and to understand the experience of hypervigilance, especially with so many others in our classrooms experiencing that disorder.  I remember the first time I realized that I wasn't "over" the rape in spite of so many years passing.  It was my first year teaching here at COCC.  My friend Lilli Ann Linford had directed and staged the play Extremities in Hitchcock Auditorium.  The play begins with a rape scene.  As I watched I became light headed and nauseous, putting my head between my knees and gasping for air as quietly as possible.  It was all I could do to stay in my seat. In the 25 years since then, I've gotten much better, though there are still scenes in plays, films and television shows I find difficult to tolerate.

Probably the most obvious impact of having my world exploded twice in that year of February 1971 - February, 1972, is that I came to value safety, stability, and predictability far more than I thought an "artistic" person should.  I am deeply risk averse.  But not about every risk.  Experiences with violence can teach us that discursive failings aren't all that important.   As a Bend police detective said in one of my classes years ago, "I used to be afraid of public speaking until I got into a firefight with a bad guy.  At least when you're giving a speech, no one is shooting at you."

Perspective.  It's a gift of the dark.

LY #107 My Other Trauma

Buckskin Road, Pocatello, today

A year after my sister killed her child I was raped.  This post contains my memory of that event. 

Pocatello, Idaho.   A snowy night in February, 1972.   I'd walked in the early dark from Frazier Hall on the campus down 6th street to the Albertsons between Center and Clark.  There I purchased a helium balloon and attached a note to it.  The note was for Will Huck, a teacher with whom I was involved.  Then I started to walk back to my Aunt Huldah Bell's house on 9th street where I was living.   I would drop off the note at Will's apartment on 7th and then continue home.  Will wasn't home when I knocked (he was at the movies).

When I started to cross 8th I saw a couple of men coming toward me on the sidewalk.  I began to dig in my purse for a small knife I carried there.  I stopped paying attention.  This was my mistake.  I should have gone in a different direction or kept my eyes on them and crossed back to the other side or run or something other than what I did.  While my head was down they grabbed me as I walked past the alley between 8th and 9th just off E. Bonneville, 1/2 block from my aunt's house.  I tried to scream but a hand was over my mouth and on my throat.  I was crying hysterically.  I saw a knife and I was told that if I stopped struggling I wouldn't get hurt.  The strongest memory of that moment is the sound of a dog who coughed.  It was trying to bark but it's old throat couldn't make enough noise.

And then I was in a car being taken into the hills up Buckskin Road.  Something in me clicked into some kind of autopilot.  I stopped crying and started making conversation with them.  I looked out at the lights of the city below.   There was a moment when they let me out of the car when I might have tried to escape by running into the night, into the scrub brush.  I look back and think, "These men were fat and out of shape.  I might have escaped."  And they were fat -- one of the two was obese.  But some part of me chose not to run.  I don't know why.  I stayed and let them do what they did for a couple of hours, including kiss me on the mouth.  In some ways that was the worst thing.

When they were done we drove back down the mountain.   My mind was clear and bright like a diamond.  I asked them why they were rapists.  One of them, the one who talked to me (the other was silent) said that it was like hunting, that it was a thrill, but that they didn't like to hunt animals because killing animals was cruel.  I remember telling them, "It's a good thing you captured me and not some poor virgin Mormon girl.  She might have been really damaged."  Did I think I had sustained no damage just because they didn't cut or beat me?

They dropped me off around the same place they'd picked me up, warning me not to go to the police or they would track me down and kill me.  I walked to my aunt's house.

When I walked in the door I said something like, "I've just experienced what Robin Morgan called a political crime."  This was a reference to the speech made in the Idaho State University Student Union Ballroom four weeks earlier by the feminist author of Sisterhood is Powerful.  Then I started crying.   I knew I shouldn't go to the police because Morgan, in her speech, had talked about what the police did with rape victims, calling it a second rape.  I was not a virgin.  I was a pot-smoking college student with an older man for a lover and a history of promiscuity.  I didn't want to be brutalized by more men.

I don't remember what my Huldah said to me. I do remember that my other older sister, then living with her, told me not to call my parents because "it would kill them."

So I took a bath and then I called Will and said I needed to come over to his house.  I don't remember how I got there.  Did he walk to Huldah's to get me?  Did Huldah drive me over?  I don't know.  I remember that when I got there we got stoned on some hashish I'd been given and had sex.  I wanted to drive the experience of the rapists from my body.

For a week after that I was someplace else.  I would find myself walking somewhere in town without realizing how I got there.  I didn't go to classes.  I stayed at Will's apartment.  The following week was midterms and I flunked all of my tests.  I didn't drop out, however, and I did wind up passing all my courses that semester.

Later, at ISU, I gave short speeches on being raped and I would have to explain that I was not "asking for it," that with my short hair, hat, and the heavy winter coat and pants I was wearing at the time I was kidnapped, I was barely distinguishable as female.  I've written poems about this event and even wrote an essay in a college writing class, an essay the professor later said that he assumed was about someone else, not me.  That was a far less confessional time than our present era, when everyone tells their story, as I am doing here.

In my first post of next week I'll talk a bit about the impact of both The Rape and The Family Tragedy on my way of being in the world, including my life in the classroom.  Then I'll be able to put both back in their their respective boxes.

LY #106 Jumper

(c)Justin Sullivan Getty Images from Slate

In mid-February 1976 I was thinking about calling Sally and asking her how she was doing.  I was living in Pocatello at the time, had been married for three years, and was in the last semester of my undergraduate career.  I'd heard, I'm not sure from where, probably in a letter from Mom, that my oldest was feeling down again.  But I'd been putting contacting her because I hate talking on the phone.  I had written to her.  I preferred and still prefer writing letters to live non-f2f communication because the phone doesn't offer enough nonverbal cues to the Other's meaning.   I also found interactions with my older sister difficult because her state of mind wasn't predictable.  Sometimes her thought processes weren't completely intelligible to me.  Even when she was completely lucid her conversations could fly around multiple topics, mixing theories of psychology and metaphysics at a far higher level of understanding than I possessed.  And most important she, like other members of my family, could evoke deeply uncomfortable shame response in me even without trying.

So I thought, "Well, I'll call her on Valentines Day.  That would be a good time."  But I didn't. 

Two days later, on February 16, 1976, I got a call from my mother.  She began the conversation as usual.  "Hi, dear.  How are you?  And how's Will?"  But there was something wrong with her voice, some flatness, in spite of her attempt at normality.

"It's Sally, isn't it?"  I asked.

And it was.  She had finally succeeded in her five year attempt to kiss death.  She had jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge.  My father had been required to identify the body.  She had already been cremated.  There would be no funeral.  No need for me to drive home.

No funeral.  Who made that decision?  Was it Dad, afraid of what the neighbors and his colleagues would say?  Or Mom?  She always hated funerals, saying in a disgusted voice that they were for the living.  I think I actually heard her mourn my sister only once, and that was almost 15 years later just before her own death.  I believe that one of the reasons for the burst blood vessels that killed her was my mother's generational commitment to repressing the terrible.

But I could not be silent.  I did go back to Los Gatos where I held a couple of private ceremonies of my own.  I walked on the beach twenty miles from our home and poured wine into the sand and water.  I also contacted an old friend of hers and we mourned her together.  Then I returned to Idaho where I spent two weeks wearing a black armband.  I also told the story to anyone who would listen and wrote poems and essays.  Like my Dad, I am someone who usually manages the dark by bringing it into the open, saying "Look at this ball of darkness I hold -- consider its weight and size."

But it's small, was always small, considering the heavy ball of darkness carried by my parents,  Mom until her death at 73 in January, 1991, and Dad until 2004 when he passed into the elsewhere at age 90.

Sally Jane Hanson Death Certificate 1976

LY #105 The Endless Mirage of Explanations

These are the explanations for my sister's murder of her child.

1.  The LSD made her do it.

In the weeks preceding the terrible event my father was writing a series of stories about the drug menace in the Bay Area, especially in the schools.  The mainstream press in those days was filled with stories of young people jumping out of windows thinking they could fly.  Early on Dad blamed Sally's behaviors on the mind altering drugs she and those in her milieu were taking.

2.  She was a biologically a paranoid-schizophrenic.  (Nature did it.)

Who made this diagnosis?  I don't know.  Maybe a jailhouse shrink or someone in Agnews State Mental Hospital in Santa Clara (now Sun Microsystems/Agnews Developmental Center).

Someone, probably Mom, told me that Sally had heard voices telling her that she herself was evil, that her child was evil, and that she should kill them both.  Over the next five years until her death she certainly behaved in some of the ways typical of people given that diagnosis.  She would be institutionalized for awhile, put on anti-psychotics, get stable, get released, get tired of the terrible side-effects, go off the drugs, and wind up doing something extreme, like starving herself and then showing up on my parents doorstep screaming at them and talking word salad.  Her self-hurting included more suicide attempts.  Often these attempts seemed to be about sending a message to my parents, like the time when she drove off the cliff near Monterey when my Mom was up in Idaho visiting me. 

Certainly, there was some madness in Dad's family -- the great aunt who occasionally tore her clothes off and went wandering through the streets and the 19th Century religious obsessives.  One might also interrogate the alcohol and cigarettes consumed constantly by both parents during pregnancy as well as an almost killing fever she experienced as a baby.  And knowing where they were living in my sister's baby years (with my cat-loving aunt Huldah in Pocatello), Toxoplasma gondii might also be part of the witches brew.

Then again, I was once told by a psychologist that in the seventies, paranoid-schizophrenia was something of a catch-all and often meaningless label.

3.  The psychiatric establishment did it.

The was an explanation Mom gave me a few times.  She blamed a psychiatrist for telling Sally to "express all her emotions."  In other words, Mom thought psychiatry was to blame for Sally acting on her rage.  Mom didn't believe in expressing anger or sadness openly.

4.  Dad and Mom's behavior toward her in childhood made her crazy.  (Nurture did it.)

In the late seventies and early eighties I blamed my Dad.  At the time I was under the influence of a variety of Sixties psychologists, including Jules Henry (Pathways to Madness) and R. D. Laing (Knots).  Both men believed that environmental stressors within families were at the heart of schizophrenia.   According to Professor Emeritus Victor Daniels, R. D. Laing considered schizophrenia "A sane response to an insane situation. This is Laing's comment about what 'going crazy' entailed."

What behaviors?  Well, Dad was a drunk in my early childhood so there was all that chaos around the time of Sally's adolescence.  He pushed her toward perfection and didn't recognize her unless she was doing big things and succeeding and being special.  And she was special and perfect and high functioning.  Until she wasn't. 

My Mom was great at setting up double-bind situations in which the other person, often one of her children, was punished whichever decision that person made.  She had trouble letting go of her kids, letting them go out on their own.  I remember one Christmas before her breakdown when Sally gave Mom a copy of Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet and called attention to the section on Children: 

Your children are not your children. 
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

5.  Sally experienced a virulent form of postpartum depression.

This was suggested to me by a member of the close family and it makes some sense.

6.  Cultural variables acting through my parents and later through my sister's social system in a devil's dance with genetic inheritance and early brain damage overdetermined the tragedy.

This is my explanation now.  Everything did it.  And because her story is like a Greek tragedy -- my sister was a brilliant star whose secret vulnerability brought her down - I'll say it was the Moira - spinning, weaving, and cutting her as they cut all of us to fit the form that god requires. 

LY #104 Not News

Sally-High School

Search term:  Sally Jane Hanson

As far as I know the deaths of my oldest sister and her daughter were never reported in a newspaper.  I would actually have to do some research, however, to be sure.  Visit the morgues of the Oakland Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, and San Jose Mercury News.  Or get access to their databases, if they have them.  A quick search of Newspapers.com under her maiden and married names revealed nothing.

This lack of information was made clear to me twice in the years afterwords.  In the summer of 1988, at the 100th Anniversary Celebration of Los Gatos High School, I ran into the man who taught her French back when she was in school in the early 60s.  I casually mentioned her passing.  He looked like I'd slapped him.  There in the midst of the celebration he sat down and began weeping.  Then, in 1991 after my mother's death I wrote in Mom's obituary that she was "preceded in death" by her daughter, Sally Jane Hanson.  A woman showed up late to the reception after my Mom's funeral mass and said that she had just driven an hour to be there not because she knew my mother but because she'd known Sally and was shocked that she was dead.

Why the lack of news about what, these days, would be considered content worthy?  Perhaps the old time professional courtesy that bound reporters and their police contacts were responsible for this lack of public information.  So I always assumed.  There's so much of this story that I "assumed" because I found it so difficult to talk with my parents about it.  And when I was able to talk with them the information they gave was limited both by their positions and by the ideology of their generation.

Here is what I remember about my first knowledge of this story.

The date is Sunday, February 28.   (I know this now because it was just before dress rehearsals of the LGHS senior play, Midsummer Night's Dream.  I have all my high school newspapers so I know the exact date of that show.)  I have just returned from meeting across town with the woman who is doing hair and make-up for the show.  She has set and styled my hair and taught my Mom and me how to get the pancake, blush and eyeliner on.  Since I rarely did anything with my hair or face, I am feeling giggly and goofy when I get home.   In my memory we arrive at almost the same time that my sister's husband, A--- and another man arrive at the house.

I notice that A--- has cut off both his beard and the hair that once touched his shoulders and make some loud laughing comment about his changed appearance.  The face he turns to me is that of a ghost.  It's empty of everything except darkness.  I feel afraid and know that something is wrong.  I am sent to my room for a short time.

A few minutes later Dad and Mom call me into the living room.  Is my younger sister there?  It seems so but frankly, I'm not sure.  What I remember is looking at A--- and the gray light of late afternoon streaming in through the venetian blinds.  There is something big now sitting inside my chest pressing hard my breastbone.  I already want to be somewhere else.

Then someone, probably my mother, told me, told us, that my oldest sister had attempted suicide and succeeded in killing her 18 month old child.

What words were used?  I don't remember.  For years I remembered hearing that my sister had used a broken bottle on herself and her child.  But this wasn't the case.  In the early part of this Century I met again with my ex-brother-in-law and found out that Sally had indeed slit her wrists.  Then she smothered her child to death.  Also, while bleeding, she made a phone call to my mother during which she had the usual "how's-your-day-going-just-fine-thanks" conversation.

This first suicide attempt was not successful.  Her husband found her and she survived, saving him from being charged with the deaths of his wife and child, though not from a long night of police interrogation.  His release marked one small escape from the collateral damage resulting from her terrible actions.

LY #103 American Tragedies

Tragedy is ubiquitous.

"He maketh his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and the unjust."  Matthew 5:45

Every human being will experience a deep loss.  Some experience many.  Some survive these losses and some don't. 

Every quarter I have students who choose or are driven to share a dark loss.  Just last week a young woman gave an evocative speech with a verbal portrait of her brother wrapped within the story of the hour of the day a Marine detail came to the door of her home with news of her his death in Afghanistan.  She told the story well, with foreshadowing and poetic use of parallel structures.  Her words were chosen for their sound and potency.  It was a poetically written tribute.

I don't know that I've ever asked a student, "Why did you choose to share this deep pain with us?"  I think I don't ask because I think I know.  I believe I know.   This is called "social projection:"  "the tendency to expect similarities between oneself and others."  In the past I felt driven, compelled to perform catharsis, compelled to share with teachers and other students (whether they wanted to hear or not) the stuff I was thinking. So I often assume that my students share their stories for the same reason -- because they can't not share them.
  
When I was an undergraduate, the two dark stories I needed to share were The Rape and The Family Tragedy.   The purpose of the memoirs written over the next few days (or however long it takes) is to revisit these darknesses and look at them in terms of what is now called "the healing process."   But I will only be able to talk about that process and about those events from my own point of view.  This position makes sense for the act of violence I personally experienced.  

But The Family Tragedy impacted many people other than myself.  They have stories too.   Yes, but it's not my place to tell those stories.  If anyone reading these pages is a family member or friend they are welcome to add their comments.

Certainly I have thought about the impact of The Family Tragedy on other family members.   If I am someday compelled by my muse or daemon to construct a fiction based on this time, I would try my best to speak as Others, if not the actual others (family and friends) who were involved in the fallout.  But when writing a supposedly true story, or at least true to me, I can speak for no one but myself.

No two people experience any event in exactly the same way.  No two children experience their parents in the same way.  No two people involved in a traumatic event experience it in the same way.

A member of Skyhooks, my poetry writing group, recently held a poetic conversation with a line from Robert Frost's A Servant to Servants, "the best way out is always through."  I assume there are many earlier sources for that thought, as well as it's zen'sque parallel, "the way out is the way in." 

This way to the egress.