On Writing: Penning Permission

Joanna Penn, a writer, author and blogger you must find if you do not currently follow her, got mad recently, reacting to “an article that came out this week on one literary agent’s blog about whether your publisher will let you self-publish,” (http://bit.ly/10cXnvu). From the perspective of a Bronx-born writer, her pleasant, positively-toned “anger” was adorable, but her elegant eloquence inspired me to comment on her blog and then expand those thoughts here.

The question explored in these blogs concern whether a writer needs someone else’s okie doke to write and publish. If being “given permission” to write or publish works for some, fantastic, but I would suggest that another way of looking at this is that we have been given an imperative in today’s publishing world.

The last agent who was interested merely in a writer’s novel died alone and forgotten long ago. Today, agents and publishers look at platform, platform, platform. What has a writer already written? Where has that writer been published? (Yeah, they want you to have been published before they consider publishing you; that’s some catch that catch-22.) From this perspective, “permission” may be implied, insisted, demanded. Writers must write, must publish, must build their platform, so waiting for permission, or allowing someone else to hold us back is no longer really a viable option.

We must put ourselves out there with our best work, with the best writing we can muster, and once we or they hit the “publish” button we must take that as the starting pistol for what we are going to write next. From this perspective, I would suggest self-publishing in some form is now required of writers.

We must also be wary of the “What will happen if I publish this?” trap. I understand we must go through this line of questioning as part of the writing process: will what I write hurt someone’s feelings; will what I write damage my career? However, this path can lead us to self-censuring, to procrastinating, to not hitting the publish button. This is the exact opposite of the result we want. So I would suggest the Truth Test.

A writer must ask her/himself whether what is written expresses an essential truth as honestly and successfully as that person can manage, and if that essential truth is being written because the writer needs to express this essential truth and not because sex sells or controversy sells or it’s a hot genre, etc. If a writer is honestly comfortable that what as been written is an accurate reflection of an essential truth that writer believes in, I say there is always room on a writer’s platform to publish that truth.

Can a biography writer a sci-fi piece? Yes, just market it as such. Can a writer write literary genre novels? Of course. Will they be accepted as such? Not your problem. Look at Walter Mosley. His readers love his work, be it detective story, sci-fi, YA, social criticism, or literary, but literary reviewers have at times dismissed his work as genre while genre reviewers have said the same work is too literary to be genre writing. Frustrating? Yes. But Mosley has found an audience and it continues to grow not because he found a comfortable niche to hide in but because his readers recognize an artist being faithful to expressing his essential truths.

I believe all writers can take strength from this on their own creative journey.

Christopher Ryan is author of City of Woe, available on Kindle and Nook, and in print. For more info, click here.

After Eleven Years, Dad, What Can I Say?

Eleven years ago today, my father passed away. I’ve missed him every day since then. We didn’t always get along (hey, we’re Irish), but eventually that settled, especially after the kids were born. Once that happened, I called him just about every day, to tell him something one of the boys did, said, or accomplished. And then we’d talk current events, disagreeing on just about everything. It seems appropriate to talk with you today.

Pop, we used to be on opposite sides of the political argument; I was hopeful, you knew better. Today, I am on your side of that debate, beyond hoping in leaders elected by and for the People, beyond expecting they will step up and do the right thing. Both political parties now seem beyond redemption. Both sides now contribute so little to progressing this potentially great nation; instead, they point fingers at each other like five-year-olds and bicker about spin and position rather than leading. And I know you’d smirk and suggest that this is same as it ever was, but we’re three trillion dollars in debt now, Pop, and nowhere near turning that around.

Boston got bombed last week, by two brothers. The older one had a chip on his shoulder, the younger idolized his big brother as far as I can tell. That’s it. Government agencies are trying their best to connect these two with a terrorist organization, a movement, a cause, but it looks more and more like one guy and his hero-worshipping little brother accomplished all the pain with just the Internet and a fireworks store to help them. The recipe for death and maiming was available online, for free, to everyone. Even freedom of speech gets tainted in that scenario. And why did big brother do it? All we’ve really found out so far is that he didn’t have a single friend in America, didn’t understand us. And that leads a person to blow up the Boston Marathon?

Since you’ve been gone, guys like him have shot a congress member, shot up a movie theatre, and massacred an elementary school, just to name a few. Even with all that, Congress voted down a change to gun laws that 90 percent of America wanted. Can’t make this stuff up.

And the split in this country is worse than ever, Pop. Democrats and Republicans condemn each other unilaterally. People mock Catholics for their perverted priests, distrust Muslims, want to wall off Mexicans, and make becoming a citizen virtually impossible. Oh say can you see, huh Pop?

And just like you had to do for me after Vietnam and Watergate and Son of Sam, I have to make sense of this world for my sons. In that, I still find guidance and hope from you. Throughout the 70′s and 80′s when I was getting my view of the world, when our home borough, The Bronx, was burning, then changing, then snorting everything in sight, you remained solid, a book in hand, a mostly calm demeanor in the face of the swirling chaos. You didn’t sugar coat and didn’t let us off the hook. You were a responsible, moral person, and worked to make us the same. That was your answer in the face of all of it, to be the very best person you could be, one day at a time. I didn’t always appreciate that then, I do now.

Today I do my best to do the same for my sons. And when it all gets too insane, I think of you, paperback nearby, dish towel over one shoulder, looking at me with eyes tired from a life lived on the front line of this country’s ongoing moral struggle, charged with the care of the next batch of Americans, and telling me the best truth you knew, and I take a deep breath, turn to my sons, or my class, and do the same.

Here’s to a good man, eleven years gone and with me every day.

Christopher Ryan is author of City of Woe, available on Kindle and Nook, and in print. For more info, click here.

Tables Turned: someone else writes about me

So today, a very good article about me arrived. I believe in local journalism, and in utilizing it to build your base. Here’s hoping you find this article interesting. http://fb.me/2mLGXmJ5i

Christopher Ryan is author of City of Woe, available on Kindle and Nook, and in print. For more info, click here.

What Message the Boston Marathon Bombing Really Sends

I have been struggling with what to say to my junior and senior students about the Boston Marathon bombings. I hate that this is the “latest terror attack” – the phrase delivers the twin defeats of acknowledging we now have a history of these and suggests more to come.

But the more I read and watched coverage, the more I saw the truth: we won, again.

The dominant images and accounts I absorbed were those of giving and caring and sacrifice in the face of fear, at the bombing site, amid the death and maiming. Once again, people didn’t just run to save themselves, didn’t all lose their minds to terror. An impressive and inspirational number of these ran into the carnage, into the danger, to help others they didn’t know.

This bombing is a tragedy and our hearts go out to the dead and wounded and their families, but to the terrorists, the message is clear: our humanity defeated your cowardice. Again.

Education Reform Shouldn’t Get The Bum’s Rush

When is Spring Break not a vacation?

When teachers spend it stressed about the future of their profession, their careers, tenure, pension, health benefits, ability to pay their mortgages, send their kids to college, feed them.

Yeah, it is that serious, because a storm is gathering, the elements are coming together, and when it really hits, it will already be too late.

And too many teachers are not doing a thing about it.

From a perspective of a former journalist turned New Jersey teacher, that storm looks ominous indeed. Let’s start with the weakening of tenure laws. On their own, many teachers will agree that truly bad teachers exist, and they tarnish our own hard work. Improving the process of weeding out the demonstratively poor employee is a reasonable course of action. But, in the wrong hands, this becomes a way for an ambitious administrator to prove his/her mettle, to make an impression, to strengthen his/her resume, to rule through fear. It can become too easy to go from weeding out the few bad apples to staging a witch hunt. And then a good thing for education, for our kids, becomes a weapon of terror.

Next, let’s consider the so-called approved teacher evaluation tools. There are suddenly many in existence. All of them seek to do some good. All of them go off the rails at some point. In an effort to be all things to all people, these tools continue expanding expectations for teacher performance until the tool cannot possibly work in reality.

Essentially, these evaluation tools profess to ensure student progress and improvement. Basically, teachers will be evaluated on student growth; students will be measured at the beginning of the year to estimate what they know, then again at mid-year, and once more at year’s end, to measure what they have learned. The expectation is that students should grow significantly each year. Most teachers applaud this as a concept, goal, and idea. The problem again comes in execution.

How exactly will students be measured? In many cases, we don’t know yet, but implementation is moving forward. Who will create these evaluations and what kind of time will be allotted to make sure they are of quality and effective? Again, we don’t exactly know yet, but are expected to move forward. Will the measure be a sliding scale? Will Special Ed kids be expected to grow as much as and in the exact same way as mainstream kids, or Non-English speaking kids, or emotionally disturbed kids, or kids battling a severe illness, or gifted kids who score really high right out of the gate? How much growth will be considered effective for each of these groups? Supposedly, the average will be measured. Which one? One size does not fit all, so, are we planning for all these individual testing needs? How? Once more, we don’t really know yet, but are expected to move ahead.

Further, at least one of these evaluation method calls on all teachers to know each students’ cultural background (admirable), reflect it in the classroom (alongside student work and messages of positive support and best practices, that’s a daunting task), and incorporate it all into lessons every day (awkward at best), while incorporating dozens of other demands in an attempt to create classroom nirvana at all times in all classrooms everywhere.

Again, admirable, again awkward to impossible to achieve while engaging students in a dynamic lesson (asking Joe how his Mexican heritage can be reflected in Act II ofHamlet is going to create more uneasy silences than it will generate progressive conversation any day). Teachers are expected, under this evaluation tool, to engage all students in this way, every class – how weird is that going to be? Worse, educators are going to be evaluated based in part on such elements.

This reveals an uneven playing field for which these tools fail to compensate. An elementary school teacher with 20-30 students will be able to know much more about her/his students than a high school teacher with 90-120 students. Yet, the evaluation tools lay out the same expectations for each. How is that a fair assessment?

While again an admirable concept, this is another unrealistic expectation. In the right hands, an administrator will note a teacher’s ongoing effort to make each classroom reflect the students’ world, but in the wrong hands such over-the-top requirements all but guarantee no teacher will be given a highly effective assessment. Again, this becomes a temptation for the career climber, a way to show strength and expertise, whether denigrating teacher performance actually gives evidence of their administrative skills or not.

And examples of such unrealistic, unfair, and possibly illegal requirements abound in these evaluation tools. One such tool requires teachers to stay for events after contractual hours without overtime compensation (even if they have kids who need them at home), pay to belong to professional associations (at upwards of $100 or more per year) out of pocket without reimbursement, anticipate every question students can possibly ask for each lesson, and reflect that anticipation in all lesson plans, and generate emails, progress reports, newsletters, and website updates for parents often, all just to be considered effective. When does teaching come into the equation?

One more time, these are all beautiful ideas for a perfect world, but taken together they collapse under their own well-meaning weight. And, again, in the wrong hands, become lethal weapons, especially when combined with weakened tenure laws, and ever-tighter education budgets. Put the three of them together and the wrong administrator can find any teacher anywhere with any track record and assess them as suddenly suspect, ineffective, in need of losing tenure, and ultimately, their livelihood.

And none of it is clearly delineated yet, but progress toward making it policy, forcing it to become part of past practices, eventually making it all law and the new reality, continues.

Here is where the sky darkens. How can teachers, or any set of professionals, be expected to sign off on a work agreement that has not been clearly defined? Would you order off a menu that failed to clearly explain what you could expect to be eating? Would you buy a ticket for a movie with an advertising campaign of darkness and silence? Would anyone agree to work a job with a description of responsibilities that is significantly incomplete, especially when job security is tied to performance of those undefined duties? No one in their right mind would. But teachers are expected to do so freely, and quickly, before adequate planning and reflection can occur.

The storm clouds gather and the kids have been left outside…

Christopher Ryan is author of City of Woe, available on Kindle and Nook, and in print. For more info, click here.

Class Warfare Should be a War on Ignorance

I would like to comment a bit on a fascinating book I read entitled Class Warfare by Stephen Brill. This nonfiction work chronicles the last few decades in American education battles, focusing on efforts to radically change how American students are educated. Brill’s work here is a fascinating and in some ways horrifying read. Here are a few thoughts on why I am so split about this book:

I am both a writer and a teacher. I teach in New Jersey, where repeated efforts by the NJEA to cooperate and move forward with our Governor have been shot down, where tenure laws have been weakened and the LIFO (last in, first out) law is next on the chopping block. This creates an environment where it would make business sense for any top administrator wrestling with the two percent budget cap to cut from the top, eliminating veteran teachers who earn top salaries. But this addresses education as a business, not a craft, and robs students, districts, and communities of master teachers.

So, why should we seek to support veterans teachers? I have seen too many promising young teachers collapse in the face of a particularly unruly or challenged class that no training save actual experience can prepare them to handle. Focusing the attention, cooperation, and efforts of any group of people requires a strength of will, a mastery of dynamics, a performance ability, and mastery of subject craft that cannot be gained without true effort and experience. Brill himself makes several passing comments about young, ambitious TFA teachers learning from masterful veterans. These key passing-of-the-torch moments will be lost if we continue to look at education as merely a business (kids are not developed on an assembly line) instead of the multifaceted craft it is.

Another aspect of Brill’s thesis is that teachers do not care, are burned out, and useless. I have worked with, met and/or observed hundreds of teachers in my career, and can think of only a handful who fit that description. The rest are dedicated professions, even fifteen, twenty, thirty years into their careers. The most heartbreaking aspect of this attempt to privatize education, to have business run schools, is that these dedicated veterans are suffering real, observable stress because of this. I spoke with a school psychologist this year who diagnosed his school’s staff to be “one hundred percent under stress” saying he had never seen such complete saturation in one place. How can this be what is best for our children?

Brill also glosses over the major differences between charter and public schools: public schools are more crowded, cannot choose their students, and cannot dismiss or toss out misbehaving students like charters can. Public schools do not have the express written commitment from parents that charters obtain, agreements on discipline, dress code, homework, etc., and cannot require it. Yes, there is an implied agreement, but even a tiny percentage of noncompliant students can disrupt and slow forward progress on all these fronts. Public schools embrace and work with these students as best we can within evermore restrictive budgets and laws. Charter schools send such challenges back to the public schools. So we are really comparing apples and oranges here.

The bottom line is that all of this is smoke and mirrors. If the government was actually interested in improving education, in creating a truly well-educated populace, politicians would declare a War on Ignorance, and commit real money to the effort, reducing class size, upgrading technology, and developing strategies to polish teacher skills, not force them to always look over their shoulder. But a truly educated populace is a very scary prospect for politicians. So maybe they are who we should be hunting…

Christopher Ryan is author of City of Woe, available on Kindle and Nook, and in print. For more info, click here.

On Writing: A Phone Call Writers Dream of

You can’t wait for it, will it, pay for it, or do it yourself, but every once in awhile, a blessing comes to writers. Something that re-energizes, that affirms beliefs, keeps the writing going. When it comes, embrace it, live in that moment as it is presented to you, and accept what it gives you; there is no guarantee it will be coming around again any time soon.

For me, it was a call from a long lost friend. There had been 25 years or more since the last time I had seen him, and when he was brought back into my life, it was a fantastic surprise. But not a story book ending. The guy works two jobs, but can’t hold on to them because corporate America keeps shipping those jobs overseas. He’s working 16-hour days working jobs at a pay rate lower than he deserves, and too low to buy the comfort he wants for his family. He deserves better, as do so many other good, hard-working Americans. At the very least, he should be able to find some happiness every once in awhile.

Last night he called to thank me for providing that for him. You see, my old, overworked friend had ordered my debut novel City of Woe from Amazon.com. He called to say he was on page 160 and needed to say thanks. This has never happened to me. This guy who works two-thirds of the day took the time to give my work a chance. That in itself is astounding. And once he got going, he went to his bookmarks and read me lines he loved, passages he appreciated, jokes and music references he completely understood, and, in the process, completely convinced me I had done something right with my life.

So, what am I doing here, bragging? I hope you don’t see it that way. I believe I am sharing a truth too often hidden to creative people; we almost never know whom we have an impact on, whom we thrill, or help escape, or give some form of relaxation to, or where, or when it happens. So I offer this wonderful experience to all of you. Share it with me because odds are, there is someone, somewhere, somewhen experiencing similar appreciation for your work.

Drink it in with me, feel it fuel you, and write on.

Christopher Ryan is author of City of Woe, available on Kindle and Nook, and in print. For more info, click here.