How do you make the most an author’s campus visit? How do you lay the groundwork?
I’ve pondered these questions since I started teaching at Mount Mercy 26 years ago, back when my friend and colleague, the poet and essayist Jim McKean, directed our Visiting Writers Series. The questions have become more important to me over the past decade when it has been my privilege to serve as Director.
This November 7, Mount Mercy University will host novelist Patricia Park, so I’m sharing my plans for teaching her work and promoting her visit. But before I get to nuts and bolts, I want to share my love for Park’s novel, Re Jane (2015).
Love and passion. They are what fuel most of my undertakings, especially my teaching. Not just love for teaching, not just love for my students, but love for each literary text I offer them.
So, why do I love Patricia Park’s Re Jane?
First of all, Park brilliantly updates one of my all-time favorite novels, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Why do I love that novel?
Charlotte Bronte’s Jane
The voice, Jane’s glorious voice! It works its magic from the opening sentence: “There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.”
Then there is the character behind that voice. Jane herself. She refuses to believe the many people who claim that her life holds “no possibility.” Instead, she immerses herself in books that show her anything is possible. For someone like yours truly, who believes that reading is everything, Jane is an irresistible heroine.
She is a compelling, relatable heroine, period. Like Harry Potter, Jane Eyre moves past her lonely, traumatic childhood to become a courageous adult. She insists on following her own moral compass AND her own heart—even when following her heart doesn’t make much sense. The heart wants what it wants.
And yet…
As much as I love Bronte’s heroine, I also find her novel deeply unsettling. Jane Eyre is for me, a midway text; my feelings for it hover between deep admiration and deep dismay.
My dismay has three main sources.
One, for Jane to have her “happy ending” with her beloved Rochester, another character—a racially “othered” character—must die. And I’ve got to be honest: the novel encourages the reader to hope for this death. The novel treats this character, Bertha Mason, as a mere thing, an impediment to the protagonist’s happiness. This objectification sparked Jean Rhys’s own reimagining of Jane Eyre, the magnificent novel, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), which places “Bertha” at its center.
Two, even discounting the Bertha issue, it’s hard to feel great good about Jane’s marriage to Rochester. Yes, Jane offers a lovely description of their marriage ten years in:
I know what it is to live entirely for and with what I love best on earth. I hold myself supremely blest—blest beyond what language can express; because I am my husband’s life as fully as he is mine. No woman was ever nearer to her mate than I am: ever more absolutely bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. I know no weariness of my Edward’s society: he knows none of mine, any more than we each do of the pulsation of the heart that beats in our separate bosoms; consequently, we are ever together. To be together is for us to be at once as free as in solitude, as gay as in company. We talk, I believe, all day long: to talk to each other is but a more animated and an audible thinking. All my confidence is bestowed on him, all his confidence is devoted to me; we are precisely suited in character—perfect concord is the result.
What’s not to like as far as heteronormative happy endings go? Well, there is the fact that Rochester is a chronic liar and manipulator. He almost makes Jane an unwitting bigamist; he risks her happiness and peace of mind to ensure his own. Jane forgives him, but she knows her readers will not.
Consider the novel’s most famous line: “Reader, I married him.” Novelist Tracy Chevalier uses this line as the title of a short-story anthology she published in 2016. (Park is one of the 21 authors featured in this collection). As Chevalier observes in the foreward, Jane’s renowned line is pure defiance:
It is not, “Reader, he married me” – as you would expect in a Victorian society where women were supposed to be passive; or even, “Reader, we married.’”Instead Jane asserts herself; she is the driving force of her narrative, and it is she who chooses to be with Rochester.”
Like Chevalier, I admire Jane’s insistence on her own autonomy. I admire her defiance. But I sure wish it had been put to better use.
The third reason Bronte’s novel dismays me also relates to the ending. As Bronte reduces Jane’s choices to Inappropriate Husband A (the cold St. John) and Inappropriate Husband B (the manipulative Rochester), the women in Jane’s life all but vanish.
In her childhood, Jane’s best friend, Helen, dies in bed with her. Jane’s beloved teacher, Miss Temple, marries and is never heard from again. And after Jane marries Rochester, her cousins Diana and Mary Rivers also marry. Then the three women who once loved living together see each other only once a year.
Can we say compulsory heterosexuality? Except for Rochester, Jane ends the novel as friendless as she began it. With no gal pals!
Patricia Park’s Jane
In refreshing contrast, Patricia Park’s Jane has many enduring bonds with other women. Park’s novel takes its heroine’s friendships with women as seriously — if not more seriously — than her romantic relationships with men. This celebration of female friendship helped me better understand my resistance to Bronte’s novel.
Park’s Re Jane has also helped me realize one of the reasons why I’ve long been drawn to literary reimaginings. Even though Park seems to share my objections to Jane Eyre, and even though she seems to have many objections of her own, it’s clear that she values Bronte’s text. In an essay about why she reimagined Bronte’s novel, Park herself says, “We can still treasure a beloved novel but take issue with it.”
How could you not treasure a novel that you devote time and effort to re-envisioning? Literary reimaginings like Re Jane are born of intense admiration coupled with deep dismay.
Park’s novel helped me connect two of my passions—literary reimaginings and all things midway.
Park’s Re Jane highlights its fascination with midway points. It’s a coming of age story, hence a transition story. Its titular character makes her way between college graduation and the rest of her life. It’s also an immigrant story, set in New York City and Korea. Jane Re (pronounced Jane Eee) is a mixed-race Korean American who came to the U.S. with her aunt and uncle when she was an infant. “It was tiring,” Jane says, “straddling the two cultures.”
The tonal shifts in Re Jane also make it a midway text. For instance, in a comic yet poignant moment after Jane has a sexual encounter with a man who can’t keep it up, she wonders if she is still a virgin:
Did that count? Wasn’t it always all in or nothing—or was there such a thing as being half a virgin? Might as well toss that into the bin of other odds and ends: half Korean, half white, half orphan.
In this passage, as in Park’s novel, the middle ground is a place of humor and creativity—and pain and loneliness.
Choosing a Visiting Writer
I love Re Jane, but in creating a successful author event on your campus, it’s not enough for you to love the author’s work. It must also be a good fit for your students and campus culture.
At Mount Mercy—and likely at many small universities—that means an author whose work is both accessible and challenging. It means an author who has published at least some short-form work because many professors, especially those not teaching literature or writing, can’t take the time to teach long-form work. And it means an author who enjoys interacting with students and whose work explores topics that are important to them.
At Mount Mercy, founded by the Sisters of Mercy, we also try to host authors whose work relates to some of the Mercy Critical Concerns:
- anti-racism
- justice for immigrants
- justice for women and children
- nonviolence
- and care of the Earth.
Patricia Park’s novel fits this bill perfectly.
Jane and most of her family are immigrants, and much of their story is set in a Korean grocery store her Uncle Sang runs in Queens. Jane struggles with what it means to be both Korean and American. Asian and white. A dutiful daughter and an independent adult. Jane tries to balance family obligations with her own dreams. She tries to figure out where she belongs. She wonders what it means to follow her heart. She is a recent college graduate trying to build a career. In other words, Jane Re is a character that college students can relate to.
Despite the fact that Park’s novel brilliantly updates Bronte’s, Re Jane stands on its own. Students who haven’t yet read Bronte’s novel can still savor Park’s.
Park has also published several short works that explore gender, race, and the immigrant experience.
Teaching a Visiting Writer
To generate excitement for an author’s campus visit, I first determine how I’ll teach the visitor’s work in as many of my own courses as possible.
This fall I’m teaching three: an Honors section of a composition course called Writing and Social Issues, Creative Writing, and Shakespeare.
I love these courses, but unfortunately, none of them allow me to teach Park’s novel along with Bronte’s. So I needed to let go of that pairing. I told myself I’d return to it some other semester with an upper-level course about reimagining literary classics. I focused on what I could do with Park’s wonderful work.
In my two writing courses, I’m teaching Park’s novel and some of her shorter works. Such a combo allows students to marvel at a writer’s versatility. It encourages them to expand their own range, to try new forms and styles. Because most writers have themes and concerns they revisit, students observe how differently a single topic can be treated, depending on the writer’s form and audience.
In Writing and Social Issues, students will write their second major essay, a literary analysis, about Park’s novel. Their first essay is a personal essay about a value, place, or object that helps define them. As one of their mentor texts, they’ll read Park’s personal essay, “How to Run a Supermarket.” Scott Russell Sanders (who has himself visited Mount Mercy) described Park’s essay when he selected it to win the Fourth Genre Steinberg Essay Prize:
What begins as a wry how-to manual on running a supermarket opens into a study in immigrant-family dynamics, a sketch of social change in a Brooklyn neighborhood, a lament about the poor fit between formal education and retail work, and a coming-of-age story, all deftly braided together by a thoroughly engaging narrator.
Later, when students begin reading Park’s novel, they’ll encounter Food, the supermarket where Jane Re works with her family, and they’ll see how Park’s life inspired part of her novel.
We’ll also discuss Park’s writing in conjunction with the intro to Mary Pipher’s Writing to Change the World. We’ll consider how fiction works to change the world before we turn to two nonfiction pieces that aim to make the world a better place: My Two Moms by Zach Wahls and Angry Tias: Compassion and Cruelty on the U.S.-Mexican Border by Daniel Blue Tyx. (Both Wahls and Tyx grew up in Iowa City, half an hour south of Mount Mercy. Wahls has visited our campus, and I plan to invite Tyx, who currently lives and works in Costa Rica, for a Skype “visit.”)
Park’s depiction of immigrant experience is vastly different than Tyx’s journalistic account of the child-separation policy. Together, their writing will help students explore the diversity of immigrant experience. To further this exploration, students will also read a powerful opinion piece Park wrote for the Guardian, “My Least Favorite Question: Where are you from?”.
I’ve created a Re Jane study guide for use in both my composition and my creative writing courses. The guide encourages creative writers to mine Park’s novel for techniques to try in their own fiction. For instance, I ask students to examine the first times we or the narrator encounter a setting or character. I urge students to note Jane’s comparisons, decisions, epiphanies: the ways Park depicts her growth. These moments are also key to the literary analysis my composition students write.
(Park’s publisher has posted a readers guide, but as with many such guides, it seems aimed not at students, but at book clubs.)
Those of you who don’t teach creative writing might think that it’s easy to include a novel in a creative writing course. Not necessarily. It would be easy in my spring class, Creating Characters. But my fall course, like many introductory creative writing courses, is multi-genre. There is a lot of ground to cover, so we focus on the short form: flash fiction, flash essays, brief poems. My textbook, David Starkey’s Creative Writing: Four Genres in Brief, is devoted to the short form.
So how will I manage to teach Re Jane, a 340-page novel?
I started semester with flash fiction. As far as I know, Park hasn’t published any short-shorts, but she has published a magnificent traditional length story, “The China from Buenos Aires” in Chevalier’s anthology. I’m using that story to help students see the differences between short-shorts and traditional length stories. Because Park’s story and novel are both rewritings of Jane Eyre, but tonally very different, they’ll also enable my students to compare stories and novels and to consider how tone is created.
After fiction, we’ll tackle flash essays. Park has published one of those, “Cheekbones,” which appeared in Brevity: A Journal of Concise Creative Nonfiction. I’ll pair “Cheekbones” with Alice Walker’s “Dreads,” which Starkey includes in his text.
I’ll also teach Park’s longer essay, “How to Run a Supermarket.” One of its sections, “Learn to Multitask,” functions like a flash essay. In it, Park vividly depicts her many actions and thoughts within seven minutes of working at the store. I’ll lead students through some exercises that will help them create their own seven-minute portrait.
And when we get to Park’s novel, I’ll continue to teach students to read as writers, to find ways to discover their own mentor passages. I’ll use the novel to revisit narrative techniques we’ve already covered and to explore concepts from Heather Sellers’ The Practice of Creative Writing.
What about Shakespeare?
I’m not assigning any of Park’s writing in that course because even without it, I’ve already made painful omissions. But I will seize Park’s campus visit as an opportunity to explore Ben Jonson’s famous tribute to the Bard: “He was not of an age but for all time.” I’ll tell my students why some thinkers have trouble with the concept of universality. In its place, I’ll suggest they ponder adaptability:
What qualities of a literary text invite others to reinvent it, to reimagine it again and again?
All semester long, I’ll give my students samples of Shakespearean adaptations, and as Park’s November 7 visit draws near, I’ll introduce the World Shakespeare Festival. Shakespeare, I’ll remind students, is the most adaptable, adapted writer, and Jane Eyre is one of the most adaptable, adapted novels.
I’ll urge my students to attend Park’s Q&A and to ask her how and why she reimagined Jane Eyre. What does she think it takes to make a text highly adaptable?
I’ll also remind students that Shakespeare, like Park, was himself an adapter, reshaping others’ stories.
Promoting a Visiting Writer
So many ways to teach Patricia Park’s work!
I hope my own pedagogical excitement inspired my colleagues when I emailed them about Park’s November 7 campus visit. I first emailed them last spring, when book orders were due, and I included PDFs and links to some of her shorter works.
I started with group messages to all full- and part-time teachers. Then I sent targeted emails, with suggestions about how specific professors might use Park’s work.
To entice my colleagues outside the English department, I highlighted the fact that Park’s novel and story feature lavish depictions of food, the topic of this year’s Fall Faculty Series. And I attached a New York Times article about Park’s wedding, which featured a Korean tea ceremony.
Then I emailed English professors at nearby Kirkwood Community College, and soon I plan to contact other colleges and high schools in the area. When I reach out to high schools, I’ll target AP courses or other courses that include Jane Eyre—and student clubs devoted to diversity or Asian culture. I’ll also reach out to local Asian organizations—especially Korean ones—including churches, restaurants, and grocery stores (all featured in Park’s novel).
Now that the fall semester is under way, I’ll also email my Mount Mercy colleagues again, sharing my discussion guide, and reminding them about Park’s visit.
That, dear readers, is how I’m laying the groundwork for Patricia Park’s November 7 visit to Mount Mercy. As for her visit itself, I’ll save that for a future post in which I’ll also reflect on my love for author events and on the role they’ve played in my own life.
For now, those of you who live in Iowa’s Cultural Corridor, mark your calendar for Patricia Park’s visit: Thursday November 7. Her Q&A will be at 3:30 and her reading at 7:00, both in 204 Basile on Mount Mercy’s main campus. She’ll sign books after each event.
How do others prepare for an author’s campus visit? How have others taught Patrica Park’s Re Jane? What makes a literary text hyper-adaptable? What works of literature have filled you with both deep admiration and deep dismay?