Brian Bedard Named SDCTE Author of the Year for 2008
Sue Morrell presents Dr. Brian Bedard with the SDCTE's Author of the Year Award for 2008
Skip to Dr. Bedard's acceptance speech >
Brian Bedard is an imaginative and accomplished writer and teacher. As Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at USD, he teaches creative writing and seminars in Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O'Connor. He also edits the South Dakota Review and writes its “Literary or Not” feature. His recent collection of short stories, Grieving on the Run, won the Serena McDonald Kennedy Fiction Award and was nominated for the National Book Award in 2007. Numerous other stories and essays have appeared in The Alaska Quarterly Review, The Chariton Review, The Cimarron Review, and other literary journals.
His writing blends regional detail, subtle humor, and memorable characters. His characters and places come from observations of his own life. Sometimes, as in Grieving on the Run’s “Curse of the Corn Borer,” set in rural Vermillion, he names or loosely disguises names of real people and places, making especially fascinating reading for area residents. Characters and plot, however, are only vehicles for images and universal truths that linger long after a selection’s last word.
Brian’s compassionate and expert teaching has led him beyond USD to guest-teach and read at Dakota State, Black Hills State, Mount Marty, SD School of Mines, Morningside, the Dakota Writing Project, and the Sorcerer’s Apprentice Young Writers Camp.
Brian will be the banquet speaker at SDCTE’s 2009 Spring Conference.
He holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Utah and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Montana.
-text by Nancy Zurcher
Dr. Bedard's Acceptance Speech
Writing the World at Hand
Anne Moege suggested that I speak to the question of what South Dakota’s middle and high school English teachers can do to nurture and inspire a passion for writing in their students. To that end, I want to offer some ideas based on the theme of Writing the World at Hand. I should say at the start that these suggestions and recommendations will not make inspired writers out of all your students, any more than writing research papers will make committed scholars out of all of them. As English teachers in a science-driven, mass communication society, we play the percentages. My aim is to improve your odds for opening some doors and sparking some discoveries which, without conscious mentoring, might never see the light of day.
As contemporary English teachers, we all operate under two main teaching mandates when it comes to teaching writing. The first mandate—academic writing—takes precedent over the second mandate, personal writing. Academic, or expository, writing involves the explanatory, the analytical, the interpretive, and the argumentative. This writing has the broadest base and the greatest amount of relevance for the future of your students as a whole. It prepares students to meet the demands of college level writing, business communication, and information processing. It is primary because it involves social and cultural survival and economic success. But it does not strengthen the heart or feed the spirit.
Personal writing—the personal narrative, the descriptive paragraph, the journal entry, the short story, the poem, the memoir, the interview—is the writing activity wherein lies self enlargement, spiritual growth, and the development of an expressive voice. And while it cannot occupy center stage in your writing classes, working it into your semester-long teaching agenda is well worth the effort. The assignments do not have to be lengthy or burdened with rules; nor do they all have to be graded. The 100-word descriptive paragraph can be enormously instructive just as a pressure cooker, provided the student is held to the word limit.
Your mentoring/directing of students in personal writing projects (How about a small, 3-ring binder of writings called “Self Portrait”?) should be predicated on two creative principles. One: No creativity without identity. Two: No identity without physical and emotional connection to place. The underlying concept on the latter is that localism is the key to meaningful personal writing. To put it another way, let me codify these ideas in a single contemporary self-help slogan: BLOSSOM WHERE YOU’RE PLANTED.
The question then becomes, how do you coax the blossoms out of your students? The best answer I could find to that question is Nebraska poet Ted Kooser’s poem, “Abandoned Farmhouse.” Here is the poem in its entirety.
Abandoned Farmhouse
He was a big man, says the size of his shoes
on a pile of broken dishes by the house;
a tall man too, says the length of the bed
in an upstairs room; and a God-fearing man,
says the Bible with a broken back
on the floor below the window, dusty with sun;
but not a man for farming, say the fields
cluttered with boulders and the leaky barn.
A woman lived with him, says the bedroom wall
papered with lilacs and the kitchen shelves
covered with oilcloth, and they had a child,
says the sandbox made from a tractor tire.
Money was scarce, say the jars of plum preserves
and canned tomatoes sealed in the cellar hole.
And the winters cold, say the rags in the window frames.
It was lonely here, says the narrow country road.
Something went wrong, says the empty house
in the weed-choked yard. Stones in the fields
say he was not a farmer; the still-sealed jars
in the cellar say she left in a nervous haste.
And the child? Its toys are strewn in the yard
like branches after a storm—a rubber cow,
a rusty tractor with a broken plow,
a doll in overalls. Something went wrong, they say.
Of extreme importance here is Kooser’s embrace of the world at hand, his trust in the intrinsic value of the visible world he finds himself in. Of equal importance is the curiosity motivating the speaker of the poem. The speaker’s sensibility is a detective’s sensibility—the desire to know more, to look closer, to apprehend. The password is CURIOSITY. If there is a crisis in American education from K-12 to college, it isn’t connected with test scores for No Child Left Behind but rather with a crisis of curiosity—intellectual, physical, spiritual. At the college level many of my colleagues bemoan the lack of curiosity in today’s university students. Some would argue that such curiosity has simply disappeared. Where it has gone, and why, are endlessly debatable questions. I vacillate on this issue but can’t ignore some disturbing signs of it in my classes. I suspect that apathy and the absence of curiosity are clearly present in the middle and high school arenas also. So if you make a dent in this armor, you are doing your students a huge favor as people, whether or not they become accomplished writers.
Your personal writing assignments can be thought of, then, as a kind of scavenger hunt in the students’ own towns and locales. You are prompting a synthesis of local image and personal truth. The images can be found in countless places: a business district’s architecture, farm fields and orchards, bridges, grain elevators, barns, silos, swimming holes, duck blinds, shelter belts, wrecking yards, cafes, baseball diamonds, cemeteries.
Here are some examples from my own experience.
1. Traveling I-29 from Vermillion to Sioux Falls with my wife one Saturday morning in mid February, we passed a farmhouse sitting between the highway and a sweep of corn and soybean fields. It was a bright, clear sunny day, but the wind was bitter cold and sharp as a scythe. The place we passed a few miles south of Beresford was reminiscent of Kooser’s “Abandoned Farmhouse,” except that it was still occupied. In the yard: rusting pick-up shells, lumber piles, discarded oil cans, tractor seats, car bumpers, bicycle tires, and a dozen dirty sheep grazing at the edge of the front lawn. The house itself was a simple, two-story frame house, badly in need of paint and roof repair. Around the foundation, bales of hay. On the back of the house, a pantry or maybe a bedroom had been added on with its own peaked roof. On the south side of the addition was a regular sized door, but without a porch or steps. If you were to step outside without thinking, you’d likely fall on your face. If you’d been drinking , you’d fall on your face for sure.
2. The most important aspect of the door, however, was not the missing steps; it was the presence of two fat barn cats—one marmalade, one calico—scrunched into the corners of the door frame and facing each other while soaking up the morning sun. I couldn’t tell if they were sleeping or just staring at their doppelganger in a Zen transcendence of a South Dakota winter. But the image of them fitted so cleverly and fully into the protective corners of that door was worth a thousand words. It was an image that Ted Kooser would pounce on; he’d be all over it.
3. Crossing South Dakota in August of 2007 on a blazing August afternoon, Sharon and I took an exit for gas at what I realize now was the Kimball exit. Just to the right of the exit ramp, an old-time cemetery was spread from the top to the bottom of a fairly steep slope—a layout reminiscent of “Boot Hill.” Perhaps it was the time of day or the mix of granite markers, stone crosses, and flat bronze plaques, but the cemetery flashed into view in an arresting sweep of fire. The hillside looked like the end of the world. Its juxtaposition to Interstate 90 added profound irony to the visual impact of the moment, but more than anything else, it erased objective time and flared like a torchlight ceremony celebrating the history of the Northern Plains and maybe even the American West. I can still see the blazing stones.
4. In October of 1998, my USD colleague, Nancy Zuercher, and I were traveling west from Vermillion to Rapid City. Approaching Wall, we decided to make a quick pass through Wall Drug—a scavenger hunt for my fiction. Wall Drug yielded no gems, but on the way back to the car we heard band music coming from a side street. When we turned the corner where our car was parked, we saw a section of the Wall High School Homecoming parade stalled momentarily in an intersection two blocks south of Wall’s main street. In the lead were some cars and pick-ups covered with streamers, followed by some horses and ponies, followed by the homecoming float. At the top of the float sat a 17 or 18 year old girl in long white gloves and a strapless chiffon formal, waving stiffly in the blowing sleet and turning purple blue. I stored that image deep in the vault of memory and in my story writing notebook for nine years. Then in the fall of 2007, I wrote the title story for my new collection of stories, Girl on a Float. Whoever that girl was and wherever she is, I am indebted to her forever, and I hope I have paid adequate tribute to her in an imaginative rendition of her life from the age of 17 to the age of 32.
A fourth area of the personal writing venture I don’t have a specific example for involves not what is seen but what is heard—a seeking of the stories beneath the surface of every South Dakota community. Here I am speaking of legends, rumors, town characters, historical monuments/markers, recent or distant crimes, unsolved mysteries. Searching in local libraries and courthouses, interviews with the elderly members of one’s family, doing detective work can be fun and challenging adventures. Such seeking is one of the surest pathways to acquiring a sense of mystery and to cultivating curiosity.
In my Introduction to Creative Writing course, I assign the reading of 35-40 poems in the course text each semester, and I ask on two different occasions for a 1-page reaction paper on one of the poems. Invariably, “Abandoned Farmhouse” is the poem of choice, the poem that draws them in. 80% of the students at USD are from South Dakota; many of the remaining 20% are from Minnesota, Nebraska, and northwest Iowa. What are they seeing in “Abandoned Farmhouse”? They are seeing themselves, a reflection of themselves. Orchestrating this discovery, then, is your goal—getting students to look with hunger and awe into the mirror of place. Peering deep enough to see themselves and the world they are part of with keener eyes. With a writer’s eyes.
Previous SDCTE Authors of the Year
2007 — Jean Patrick
2006 — Joseph Marshall III
2005 — Bernie Hunhoff
2004 — David Allan Evans
2003 — Elizabeth Cook-lynn
2002 — No Award Given
2001 — Dan O'Brien
2000 — Paul Higbee
1999 — Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve
1998 — Kent Meyers
1997 — Linda Hasselstrom
1996 — Kathleen Norris