Some of you have written to ask how I, a writing teacher, feel about the creative writing connection in the Virginia Tech killings. I have many things to say but want to be very careful not to use this disaster to point fingers or advance a cause.

Fact is, there’s no connection between the killer and creative writing. It’s as inconsequential to what happened as his ethnicity. The usual media scramble for something to say after an event leads to a kind of implied causality. With his writing, the issue is culpability—if no one said anything after they read his words, then people died needlessly. But at least two writing teachers did voice their concerns, and the department head took what action she felt possible within the law. The police, a judge, and a mental health facility apparently all knew of this man. And people still died.

I’ve read his “plays” online. Any writing teacher used to reading amateurs’ writing by the ream could tell they represented a brainsick person, especially when combined with his classroom behavior. They do not look or sound like anything straining to be art, drama, or story. Without stupidly doing a poetics of pathological prose, I can say they remind me of the multiple raging voices that a schizophrenic cousin used to do alone in her kitchen, in the days before better medicines.

I’ll write more later on reacting to student writing that’s off, odd, or disturbing in less obvious and therefore more complicated ways. I’ve mentioned it before, in “Voice and View,” below, and I’m happy to elaborate. But discussion of the Virginia Tech disaster will be about policies for intervention when everyone knows there’s a problem, not about the creative writing classroom.

Our deepest sympathies go to those at Virginia Tech and their families. Violence on any campus is an attack on our own learning communities and a betrayal of the underlying hope that education represents. Please join us in offering condolences.

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This is the second interview in a series.

Two years ago I had an e-mail from another adjunct on campus. He wanted to audit a creative-writing class I was teaching, and I said if he could stand it, I could too.

Tom (not his name) turned out to be freshly retired, for the second time, and wanted to work on stories about his boyhood in the depression. My undergraduate students liked having him in class because he was feisty, funny, and took their work as seriously as his own. I liked having him there for his perspective, and because he made me work just a little harder to explain myself to his satisfaction. Once, he brought a friend along, a nearly-retired professor from another department. Neither had ever seen a writing workshop before, and they couldn’t have been more fascinated with me than if they’d found a coelacanth flopping in the grass on the quad. I had hopes for a while that it might become my thing, amusing older beginning writers.

When the semester ended, Tom published two of his stories. He tried to flatter me by saying I had something to do with that, but all I did was ask for work and get out of his way. We became friends that semester, and recently I joined him and his wife, Mildred, for lunch in a dorm cafeteria. I wanted to ask about his life as an adjunct, since his experience was so different from mine, but all I had to do was get out of his way and let him talk.

My dad had a liquor store. I started working with him when I was 14. I went to Korea, came back and got my BA in advertising here. The school offered me a tenure-track job in advertising, which was in the journalism department. But I was running the business, which had expanded to a chain. I was 24 years old and had a child on the way. I knew I’d like to teach, would be good at it, but it wasn’t possible, and I didn’t moon about it. I ran my business 34 years, and when I sold it, I became rich.

About five years before I sold it—I was 50 then—I got to know a professor in Commerce and went to work with one of his classes in business policy. He became department head and said, “Why don’t you come over and teach for free, give something back to the university?” I had to know whether I could teach. It’s not a skill readily available to everybody. If I couldn’t teach, I knew I had no business doing it.

So I did. I taught free for three years, two classes a semester, and after five years, I was making $3000 a year. Then I sold my chain and asked for a full-time job. They said “yeah.” They said, “You have to take a salary,” and I took the salary to get health benefits.

They abused me a little bit…I don’t get abused very often. [Mildred speaks up: “They took advantage a little.”]

I taught case studies and told the department I needed classes with 25 students in order to get around a room in one-and-a-half hours. They kept their word for a while then went to 30 students, then 35. I walked into a class with 55 and said, Deal’s off. [Mildred says, “You were also doing one in the summers for MBA students. Six a year.”]

I went in and told them, I love teaching. Love it. But I can’t get around 55. They dropped it again. And I taught for 24 years. Every few years they kicked up my title—adjunct lecturer, to adjunct associate professor, to adjunct professor. Finally I made $18,000 a year.

I had a very touchy relationship with other teachers—academics. Not two whits of common sense about them. I had thought of my business as between me and my customers, with me and my employees a close second. Academics think you’re supposed to leave, let somebody else run it. They look for a formula to plug numbers into, come up with the right answers. Or they want to make it mythical, complicated. It’s not. Ninety percent common sense. Customers first.

The professors treated me with kid gloves. My saving grace was, I was older, and they may have realized my low salary let them make more money. I taught so long, some of it became spite. Mine was a required course for commerce students, and I wanted to teach them the right way, as many as possible.

One time there was a presentation on a failing brewery. They brought in some expert academic who had a model for saving it. Students want to save all things, and they all loved the idea. I said it was stupid: Look at the 16 breweries that used to be in Wisconsin. Now there are two. Fold it, I said. The academic said, “I did my master’s at UCLA.” He said the business would move from 20th to 11th place. That’s real progress, I told him, considering numbers 20 to 12 went out of business!

The college should train teachers to what they want. I had no training, no class visits, no observations. They say, “We get feedback on the job you do.” Feedback—bullshit.

I wanted to set up a teaching program for retired CEOs—these people 57 years old, not dead yet. Give ‘em a parking spot, a low salary, football tickets. They’re great communicators, else they wouldn’t be CEOs.

Never happened.

I’m interested in profiling other adjuncts—doctors, lawyers, businesspeople, retirees, and so on—who teach or have taught after success in another field, or who don’t fit the usual profile of contingent labor. If you know someone like that, please tell me about them, at OChurm@aol.com.

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Robert Olen Butler’s recent writing-advice book, From Where You Dream, warns of the difficulties of being a literary artist instead of, say, a basketball player:

Now, there’s one big difference between the athlete’s zone and the artist’s zone. [T]o make [Michael Jordan’s] zone exactly analogous to the art zone, you have to add this: every time he shoots… Michael Jordan would have to confront, without flinching, the moment when his father’s chest was blown apart by the shotgun held by his kidnapper. You know that happened in Michael Jordan’s life. Well, Michael would have to confront that in order to make a basket every time. Without flinching. Now his zone is equal to the artist’s zone. And now you understand the challenge of being an artist.

When I realized how awfully Professor Butler suffers—with his 15 books, a Pulitzer, a Guggenheim, an NEA grant, and an annual salary of $138,756—I decided to go be a corn creamer down at the Del Monte plant, where I’ll have no basis for self-pity.

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My wife and I will soon open part of our home as Churm House, an inn for wayward academics.

When the chimney gave way two nights ago with a rumble and crash, I woke thinking it was an earthquake or that the life-flight chopper that passes over the house had finally fallen through our roof. I jumped up to check on Starbuck and Wolfie, who were safe and still asleep in their rooms, then ran downstairs to find out where the tons of brick had landed. There was only a little mortar and brick dust leaking from behind the cast-iron cover on the downstairs fireplace, and nothing at all visible in the basement.

“I don’t see any damage,” the mason said when I got him out the next morning. He’d insisted I go up on the roof with him. The lowest edge is 28 feet off the ground, and my ladder reached it with two inches to spare. Now we stood clinging to the chimney as we looked down into it with his flashlight.

“Oh, I’m not doubting you heard something,” he said, doubting me. “But you’ve got three courses of brick in this thing, and even if some of it fell away, it’s still structurally sound. I can’t see past this shoulder, though,” he said, pointing to where the inside narrowed. “Let’s check further down.”

The ceilings on the second floor are too high to reach by stepladder, so I had to pull out a special collapsible ladder I keep for the purpose in an upstairs closet. Some previous owner built a heavy, insulated trapdoor to the attic, but it’s not on hinges, and you have to military-press the thing over your head, catch it on a joist and hope it rests there, then squeeze past. We reconvened where the chimney rose from the attic floor and grew into the roof.

“Your problem is that rain falls into the chimney and hits the soot and furnace emissions. That turns into acid that eats away the mortar and brick. You should have had it capped years ago. You know, brick this old is hard as can be on the outside, but when you scratch it or chip it”—he did both with a screwdriver to pristine bricks—“why it’s just as soft as talcum inside.” Sure enough, the newly damaged brick began to leak powder, and I wished he hadn’t done that.

“After the Great Fire in Chicago, they saved tons of brick from the rubble and shipped it all over the Midwest to build things. Some of it was probably damaged by the heat. Luck of the draw, you know?” He put the tip of his screwdriver against another brick and slammed the handle with the heel of his hand. The brick exploded inward and pieces clattered down the hole. I cried out. He laughed.

When we opened the little door at the base of the chimney in the basement, fallen bricks blocked the hole, and he said that I must have been wakened by one of the flues in the chimney collapsing. It wasn’t dangerous, but if we wanted the fireplaces to work, we’d need to drop a liner down the inside of the chimney and surround it with special concrete poured from the top. The resulting system would be fireproof.

“In the meantime, though, you’re going to have to open up a wall and get all this old brick out of there. I can do it, but it’ll cost you, because my outdoor work is starting. You could do it yourself. Know anybody who’ll work for cheap?”

“Tell me again why I’m hauling brick and you’re sitting down to blog?” Mrs. Churm said.

It had been easy to rap the ancient plaster off the face of the chimney in the sitting area off our living room, though it was reinforced with horse hair, and when I rapped and pulled against the fibers, spider webs of cracks began their delicate tracery in every direction. I’ll need to fix that, I noted, then spent several hours knocking a hole through the side of the chimney with a cold chisel and a claw hammer.

There’s an art to the application of force. It’s the same with writing prose as with removing brick or waging war. One needs to plan for the steps and make contingencies for the unexpected. But eventually the work must get done, and those who know how get it done in the least time, with the least effort. Those who don’t know what they’re doing fritter time away with frippery, and often have to re-do that work because it should have come later in the process. It’s why there are framing carpenters and finish carpenters, and why I break into a cold sweat when a cautious hair stylist takes a pair of scissors to my nearly bald head and begins to snippy-snip. I know I’ll be there too long, and the haircut won’t be nearly as good as when some brute runs electric shears over my head roughly, painfully even, and has me out in 60 seconds.

My dentist knows how to apply force; it’s why I like him. He replaced a filling last year, and I could feel his whole weight in the drilling, which he made sure was in line with my skeletal structure and the chair, so I couldn’t slump. He was relaxed. “Some snow we had, huh?” he said. “Irrigation. I’ve got a plow for my truck but I just drive up and over all the snow in my driveway. Burr tip.” I pictured him in a monster truck with “The Extractor” painted on the sides, riding up and over his buried mailbox, the kids’ toys, his wife’s car.

In my caution, I made the hole in the chimney too small, and I had to spend several more hours enlarging it. From that point, it didn’t take more than half an hour and three mangled fingers to pull out enough bricks to make a stack taller than Starbuck next to our dining table. I was a little worried about the weight on the floor joists.

“I can’t go any further until you get that pile of bricks out of the way,” I told my wife.

“Why don’t you move them?” she said.

“You’re always saying we should do more as a family,” I said weakly. I knew by the look on her face I should stop, but one doesn’t stop being a humorist; it’s one’s vital being. “Darling, look. You have great wide Celtic shoulders. They’re one of the things I love about you. Back when my people were poets and presidents of universities, yours were haulers of nets, mongers of cod, cutters of sod, carriers of hod. You were bred for this sort of thing.”

“Give me a break. Your grandfather was a coal miner.”

“He was the voice of his constituents’ political will.”

“He helped lay siege to a non-union mine, and when the scab workers surrendered, your town tortured and murdered 22 of them. It’s all in your novel.”

“That was a long time ago. Besides, Grandpa didn’t take part in the death march; he and John Lewis just gave the orders. Come on, baby. Remember how my cousin said the test of any relationship was moving a couch to a new house? You don’t want to be one of those couples that can’t labor together. And think how nice it’ll be for our paying guests to have a cup of tea by the fire. It’s integral to our vision.”

She started to pick up an armload of the filthy bricks.

“Careful you don’t scratch the floor,” I said. She shot me a look with her green Scots eyes that my English forefathers, huddling behind Hadrian’s Wall, must have known when the savages swept down on them from the north.

I helped as I could, but there was mind work to be done. By dinnertime, Mrs. Churm estimated that half the fallen brick had been removed and stacked neatly in the side yard. We’re half-done with several other projects that also must be completed before we open, but I can feel the energy and momentum.

“Don’t you feel like you accomplished something today?” I said. She didn’t hear me.

After feeding and bathing the kids and getting them to bed, Mrs. Churm and I watched a show on PBS. (I suggested to Mrs. Churm that she sit on a towel so as not to dirty the couch.) Some international couple was living in a shack on a windswept pampas, surrounded by high inaccessible mountains and the iron sea. The woman said that all they had to do down there was read, fish, and be with each other. “It sounds heavenly,” the documentarian behind the lens said.

“Sounds like hell,” Mrs. Churm snarled.

To be continued….

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We have a brilliant young scholar friend whose critical mind won’t rest. Last summer he performed a Marxist critique of Thomas the Tank Engine while our kids watched the videos at our feet. (“’They’re the really useful crew?’” he said as the theme song began. “It’s a lesson in class identity. Relations of production!”) He’s also written about James Bond and told me how Bond’s capitalist fetish for commodities went hand-in-hand with an empire’s “license to kill.”

Mrs. Churm and I don’t get out much, so I’ve only just seen the “re-boot” of the Bond franchise, Casino Royale, released last November. Since I’ve been laid up, I also re-read the novel. (Warning: Spoilers ahead.)

For a very brief time in my life, I loved Fleming. If I peer back, I can see it: My plans to attend a university had fallen through due to money problems. I was going to a community college, taking classes in English, philosophy, calculus, and the like, on a campus primarily for future welders. One afternoon I stuck around to discuss Heisenberg with my physics professor and was shocked when he suddenly sighed and told me it was a lie, a fraud—my classes would never transfer to a four-year school and I was wasting my time. A few months later I was in basic training.

Fleming wrote the Bond books for that person, because Bond’s whole thing is disaffection. Well, disaffection and everything I didn’t have, like sex with lewdly-named women. Since I’d seen Connery in the films first, something of him went into my readings of the novels too, by reverse osmosis. I read them all.

As I took up the novel Casino Royale again, I thought I remembered a back story that a boy from a coal town, bound for the army, would have liked, something consistent with my impression of the Connery Bond—a rough Glaswegian boyhood, time in the service (enlisted ranks), a crash course in telemark skiing and proper vintages so he could pass at Gstaad.

None of that is in the first novel in the series, and that’s not really the bio, anyway. Bond’s parents were killed in a mountain-climbing accident, for instance. None of my friends’ parents were killed in mountain-climbing accidents. And Bond was schooled in Edinburgh, Geneva, and maybe Cambridge. (It’s difficult to parse the difference between the world of the novels and of the films.) His dad was Scots, but mum was Swiss. And so on.

What the book really is, is a very strange mix of lurid pulp creepiness and Modernist alienation, which work together to make Bond flat and humorless to the point of psychopathy. He’s Camus’s Stranger, without an existential gripe. In this, I’m happy to report, the new film gets it right. When M (Judi Dench) and Bond (Daniel Craig) are viewing the corpse of a woman Bond recently seduced, M says, “I would ask you if you can remain emotionally detached, but I don’t think that’s your problem, is it, Bond?” He replies as flatly as an automaton, “No.”

Fleming’s prose is often the equivalent of the true-crime mags my state trooper uncle used to leave lying around, front covers showing women being strangled out of their torpedo-shaped bras. Bond thinks, of his female co-worker, that “the conquest of her body, because of the central privacy in her, would each time have the tang of rape.” Yeesh. The misogyny is replete to the last line, “The bitch is dead now.”

Part of what’s disturbing about Fleming’s prose is that it is can be good. He has F. Scott Fitzgerald’s love of the places and secret knowledge of the rich, and sounds a bit like him at times. This is Fitz in Tender is the Night:

On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about half way between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose-colored hotel. Deferential palms cools its flushed façade, and before it stretches a short dazzling beach. Lately it has become a summer resort of notable and fashionable people; a decade ago it was almost deserted after its English clientele went north in April.

Here’s Fleming:

He lit his first cigarette…and watched the small waves lick the long seashore and the fishing fleet from Dieppe string out towards the June heat-haze followed by a paper-chase of herring-gulls. [T]here was something splendid about the Negresco baroque of the Casino Royale, a strong whiff of Victorian elegance and luxury….

But where Fitzgerald uses his setting to get at the tragic psychology of a couple’s long relationship, one person rising-then-falling, the other falling-then-rising, Fleming goes on for pages with instructions for baccarat (“The object of the game is to hold two, or three cards which together count nine points, or as nearly nine as possible. Court cards and tens count nothing; aces one each….”) or willfully insists on not developing character: “[H]is features relapsed into a taciturn mask, ironical, brutal, and cold.” This cannot be held against Fleming; it’s what the genre does.

What can be held against him is writing very badly. With a single dangling modifier, he turns Bond into a lesbian: “As a woman, he wanted to sleep with her….” Then he has a villain get shot, whereupon his “whole face seemed to slip and go down on one knee.”

Fleming’s Bond is oddly naïve, for a man of the world, but Fleming thinks he’s on it. Bond imagines that an evil-doer’s “inhumanity would not come from infantilism but from drugs. Marihuana, decided Bond.” Bond never thinks of “the bitch” as much more than sex partner and hindrance to his work, so when he suddenly declares, after they have sex the first time, that he’s gonna stride right off that beach and ask her to marry him, he sounds like some sentimental man-child. The guy falls in love like a sixth-grade boy at a girl’s volleyball game. And what’s the big deal with becoming a Double O? Bond only shot one guy from the next building over and then botched a second hit. My cousin Billy Joe capped more guys at Friday night poker.

There are too many examples of unintentional humor in the novel to mention here, but they include the time Bond is dragged into a torture chamber and condemns the interior decoration as tacky (“a flimsy-looking mirrored sideboard…contradicted the faded pink sofa….”) and the time “Bond guessed that hair covered most of [a bad guy’s] squat body. Naked, Bond supposed, he would be an obscene object.” Dude, don’t imagine him naked, then.

Interestingly, I had a hard time finding the novel in Inner Station. Only a residence hall with a small library of magazines, mysteries, and CliffsNotes owned it. It doesn’t appear to be venerated as the book that started it all. The back cover reads, oddly enough, “BOND IS BACK!” and a fake sticker on the front cover says, “FREE with purchase of NO DEALS MR. BOND.” It’s as if Fleming has become déclassé in the world he created—and with good reason.

The new film with Daniel Craig is very good. After Connery and before Craig, there were only negative definitions of the role. Roger Moore’s problem, for instance, was that he was a fop. Nothing against fops, but I like my fops dangerous, like this guy. Pierce Brosnan’s problem was that one of my old girlfriends told me that he was at the top of her list of celebrities she’d sleep with if they’d give her the chance. And so on.

The movie manages to imbue Bond’s character with Fleming’s humorless, flat tone, while improving the plot, complexifying relationships among characters, and letting Bond become increasingly more human as the film develops. This is the opposite of what usually happens in film adaptations. When he says that line about his would-be wife, “The bitch is dead,” we hear it much differently than we do in the novel. But Bond is Bond, and it’s a relief, even a thrill, to see him return from personal tragedy with even more evil in his face because he can smile, dressed in the high-style suit that Connery wore in Goldfinger.

This scene isn’t in the novel. The filmmakers skillfully use the addition to place viewers in the same position that the book’s Bond is in after being tortured, when he inquires into morality so confusedly that “he looked up at Mathis to see how bored he was….” “When one’s young,” Bond says, “it seems very easy to distinguish between right and wrong; but as one gets older it becomes more difficult. At school it’s easy to pick out one’s own villains and heroes, and one grows up wanting to be a hero and kill the villains.”

Most of us grow out of wanting to kill the villains and into wanting to be the hero that pays the mortgage. Villain identification is indeed difficult. But when the film Bond machine-guns the legs off the chief evil-doer, supposedly to get the Queen’s money back, but with the added benefit of revenging his fiancée, the adult version of my community-college self cheers and thinks, There’s a psychopath we can appreciate.

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Mrs. Churm was on Capitol Hill last week with NAFSA: Association for International Educators to help raise congressional awareness of the importance of cultural exchange and to give another award to a senator. I stayed home with 60 students, one pile of ungraded essays, two little boys, and a highly infectious strain of stomach flu.

I was cheered when Mrs. Churm convinced me our martyrdom was not in vain by bringing home photographic evidence that National Treasure II is in production. Here is her snapshot of the backs of Nick Cage and Harvey Keitel, who are plotting something. Or arguing. Or reciting love sonnets to one another.

I have to admit I have no idea what they might be up to, since I never saw the first National Treasure. Going by trailers and glimpses of talk-show appearances, I gather that the film was, to paraphrase the infamous Vietnam War statement, about destroying one of our country’s founding documents in order to save that founding document.

That sounds about right for the times we live in.

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I planned at the start of this blog to have occasional guest writers, and today I’m pleased to bring you a dispatch from the first one, a young English teacher currently in South Korea. Enjoy! —Churm

My name is Daniel Yoo, and I’m a conversational English teacher at a small language Hagwon in Gwangju, South Korea. A Hagwon is a specialized institution that prepares students to meet particular goals, especially related to specific civil service examinations, in a variety of subject areas. I’m delighted to be writing here and wanted to take this opportunity to explain how I got to Korea and what my life is like.

In the summer after I graduated college in the States, I belonged to a reading group that met in a university building. In the halls I always bumped into a woman who introduced herself as Barbara. As we began to talk, I discovered she was a Dean Emerita there, and eventually she became my mentor and friend. I opened up to her.

Despite—or perhaps due to—being the first college graduate in my family, I had begun to question my identity. I’ve always been described as “that kind of Asian-looking guy.” I’ll use the phrase Pan-Asianism (a derivative of Pan-Indianism) to describe the process by which a number of Asian Americans are losing their specific cultural identities and developing a general Asian culture, and I was/am interested in the subtleties contained within language and how they can help us understand emotions and cultures.

My college friends were curious about the mind, about words and art, and especially about human rights. But senior year rolled around and moneyed stability became a higher priority. Law school anyone? I wanted to learn more about my heritage, to study Korean and speak it to relatives, to teach and travel. Barbara suggested I apply for a Fulbright. She wouldn’t take modesty for an answer. In less than a week, I was at work on a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship (ETA) for South Korea.

For six months I wrote, tinkered with, and punched-up my essays. Then there were interviews, and finally I submitted the tedious online application. The first of two letters I received from the Director of U.S. Student Programs said my application had been forwarded to the supervising agency abroad for final review.

So I waited, continuing my work as a personal tutor for a privately owned “Academic Coaching” company in Orange County. My boss, a Korean Jew and mother of two young daughters, was a passionate woman, who, like many privileged women her age, wanted to prepare her children, from infancy, to emerge as the leaders of tomorrow. Most of my students were elementary and middle school boys—the cool and smart ones I used to resent and secretly envy when I was their age. I took a second job shelving and selling books at a corporate bookstore to pay off school loans. Many of my co-workers and bosses seemed to be thinking the same thing: “This is a detour from my road to a three-book deal or a doctorate in English Lit.”

Three months later, the second Fulbright letter came. It said I had not been selected for an award, and it occurred to me that I had to reapply the next year, or walk away. I did neither. I researched teaching jobs in the ROK and got in touch with Nathan, a Korean American who had been teaching in Gwangju for two years. We chatted several times over the phone, and he painted a quaint picture of the life of an English teacher in Korea, talking at length about the quality of food, the culture, and the women. I sent over my vita and other necessary documents. He called a week later to tell me that I got the job and that the boss would call the next night to close the deal.

Like most foreigners who travel to Korea to teach English, I signed a one-year contract. According to my cohort, most Westerners complete a year then return home, but all of my Western counterparts in Gwangju have renewed their contracts. Contract renewal depends on how much the students and the management like you. It’s too early for me to say with any certainty whether I will stay here, move to another city (or country) to find a teaching job, or head back to the States. Salaries vary from place to place but my monthly paycheck comes to about 2,000,000 won per month (a little under $2000) for 120 teaching hours—nice, considering all I have to pay for is food, fare, and minor monthly bills, such as internet, phone, electricity and water. BCM paid 1,200,000 won for my round-trip airfare (half upon arrival and the remaining half paid upon completion of my contract). After paying my Korean bills, I wire money back to the States to pay for school loans and to help my mom with car payments. What’s left goes for dining or drinks, when my students or fellow teachers want to hang, and cultural events.

So, for the past four months I’ve been teaching conversational English and TOEFL classes in one of the 41 BCM Language Centers in major cities throughout Korea. Located in the middle of a busy Hagwon district, BCM’s Gwangju headquarters is home to five “foreigners” (i.e., Westerners), who teach conversational English classes, and two native Koreans responsible for introductory English classes. Together, we seven, along with a couple of secretaries, are in charge of more than 200 students: doctors, nurses, college professors, other professionals, and stay-at-home mothers (ajimas). It’s not unusual for students to attend several Hagwons after normal school hours, returning home around midnight.

Teaching English to Koreans requires us to adjust our vocabulary, slow the speed of our speech, and try not to speak at our students. We are asked to talk about our respective nations and, to a larger extent, teach conversational skills in a variety of contexts. Listening to Koreans’ English—or to see it written—is wonderful. It’s often clumsy but pure, soft yet sharp. It’s what a coworker at BCM, speaking specifically of lower-level students, calls “cute English.”

Cuteness, I think, is part of the aesthetic culture here, especially for women. Sometimes, their physical cuteness borders on the hyperbolic, with the wide prevalence of plastic surgery and the homogeneity of clothing and hairstyles and all. Many Korean women enjoy fitting the description of nice and innocent. Westerners seem to fetishize the cuteness and sometimes talk about women as if they’re shopping for clothing. For their part, Koreans seem to lionize all things Western in general (Tommy Hilfiger and Ralph Lauren are popular because they both employ the U.S. flag, and Koreans go nuts for all things Disney) and Western white men in particular. (They are always “handsome,” within reason.) There aren’t many taboos about dating foreigners, but there are when it comes to marriage. It’s sort of a “you can browse and try on but can’t buy” sort of a system.

For the past two months, I’ve taught four morning classes and two to three night classes, each 50 minutes. The split schedule affords me time in the afternoon to eat lunch, prepare lesson plans, read, nap, jog, and take Korean language classes. I live in a rent-free studio apartment in a wealthy neighborhood called Dong-Myung Dong. It’s small and simple, a box with windows, with a bathroom, bed, desk and kitchen equipped with a small fridge and stove. Blue wallpaper with white daffodils spans the walls.

Living in Gwangju has led me to new discoveries. My physiognomy is not noticeably different from a native Korean’s, so the assumption is often that I’m one of them, though I was born American. As a result, I’m able to blend in and observe. My free-talking students translated my Korean name 영 호 (young hoh) into “shadow tiger.”

I was sitting in a Burger King the other night, reading a pile of poems my classes composed, and waiting for my mushroom steak burger glazed with Korean barbecue sauce, fries, and Coke. When the order was called, I approached the counter and overheard a clutter of high school girls whispering from their seats in broken English, “Oh, foreigner, eet-da. Kkkkk!” (Oh look, foreigners! Giggle). It took a second to realize they weren’t talking about me but about two Anglos next to me, wearing gray beanies and practiced hard scowls, flexing their muscles beneath black leather bomber jackets.

One of the guys, counting perhaps on the language barrier to permit him to speak freely, said, “That one right there’s the best one I’ve seen yet.” He nodded at a sylph-like customer at the counter.

“Yeah, I like that one. That’s nice. Too bad you got a wife, yo,” the other replied.

“Yeah. But I’d really like to bang her dry,” the first said.

They continued in this vein, and I returned to my seat, where I dined well, Konglish poetry dancing by my side.

And that’s how I got to 대한민국 (“Daehan Min-guk = Great Han People’s Nation”). I live among Koreans, and sometimes I do my best imitation of the Jeolla dialect (country bumpkin speech of Southwest Korea) wondering if maybe, just maybe, I can feel like I belong.

Daniel Yoo has his own blog here. Write him at daniel.y.me@gmail.com.

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University English departments have splintered into literature, film studies, cultural studies, linguistics, rhetoric/writing studies, and business/technical writing divisions, each with its own course rubric and catalog, and each with its assigned seat at the academic feast. Creative Writing is the red-headed stepchild eating scraps on the hearth.

Nobody really knows how it got in the house. Even Creative Writing (CW) doesn’t know. It’s not that theory scholars, sitting at the head of the table, aren’t so cruel as to toss it out in the snow; it’s that they rather like to look up from their deconstructions and see CW huddled under its shawl over there in the cold ashes. They let it stay to pick up whatever students it can to fill its classrooms, as long as it can do so on a pittance, and quietly, quietly.

(The exception is made when a newly-arrived school has money but lacks prestige. Becoming a critical Michigan is not easy, so instead it buys one writer with a recognizable name and rents several little-knowns and—poof!—a CW program a chancellor can write her mother about.)

One of the problems of perception of CW in the academy is that CW often doesn’t define itself adequately, so it can’t be seen clearly by the rest of the university. What is it for?

Even the teacher-writers who say no one can teach anybody to be a real writer say they teach craft and instill devotion and work ethic, which is why the words of the guilds are used to describe the field—workshops, apprentice writers, masters. It’s a bit flattering, this craft notion. Working class, honest, and physical, in ways that the dons will never know. CW builds walls, stone by stone, and many-windowed houses of fiction. But try telling a writer he or she has the cultural panache of a plumber—minus the pay—and see what happens.

(As much as it will be resisted, the metaphor is probably sound. I was just on the verge of finding the etymological connection between “drawing up” something in writing and “drawing up” water from a well. Unfortunately I’ve gone blind peering through a magnifying glass at my Compact OED. I’ll dictate to Mrs. Churm from here on.)

Truth is, most CW teachers don’t believe instruction should begin and end with trussing dangling modifiers and staying on point. The proof: They’ll teach intro classes in fiction or even creative nonfiction, but not freshman rhet sections, if they can help it. If they’re worth anything as writers themselves, they have ambitions to get at something beyond craft; call it finding and sharing emotionally-significant human moments. That some CW classes fail to say the important things beyond craft is evidenced by everyone’s fear of the “workshop story,” a technically proficient but soulless thing. To say that we can’t begin to discuss why these attempts fail is to say students might as well scribble another research paper on gun control—it’s all writing and therefore good. And this is where it gets tricky.

After all, teachers in corporate bureaucracies—especially those of us without tenure—do not have the freedom to say what’s really wrong with the writing. The real problem with most writing is the writer’s worldview. With much undergraduate writing, immature worldview restricts what can be seen and therefore said. This appears to be a bigger problem in prose than in poetry. There will be exceptional young prose writers, such as the miraculous James Joyce, but many will also never mature, no matter how old they get. And we do not have the freedom to say, as Gertrude Stein in her own salon could say to a young Hemingway, “After all, you are 90 percent Rotarian.” (This is the best insult of the twentieth century.)

I used to think voice was the thing in writing, beyond even character, plot, or theme. But voice in writing is merely a handbag that accessorizes worldview. A writer’s worldview will always out, like murder. If a student’s been thinking of suicide, even in ways he doesn’t understand, it will be apparent in his story in my workshop. If he thinks foreigners smell bad, or women are inferior, or fat people are jolly, or that the black helicopters are on the way, I’ll see it in his text as clearly as if he’d written it in purple crayon.

Which accounts for a cowardly, sly pedagogy in the CW classroom. We don’t talk about worldview, or how mom screwed them up. We discuss motivations of characters, their speech and actions, how the narrative voice itself perceives, judges, and portrays its own fictional world. By pretending this has nothing to do with the authors themselves, we hope to create the distance to make students feel safe (“the story is morally insane, not me”) while making them realize that their personal convictions are worth another look. For instance:

Why’s the story so admiring of the protagonist, she of the belly-ring and hip-huggers and darling southern accent and perfect blond hair that she flips at “boys” every paragraph, when she doesn’t seem all that aware or even interesting? [Subtext: Don’t flatter yourself, hon.]

Is this woman in a corset, bound to a chair and verbally humiliated by the antagonist, a character we’ve seen before? [Subtext: Why did you bring to workshop a soft-core bondage fantasy that doesn’t even rise to the basic Lara Croft genre?]

Why does the story not make more explicit, in the service of dramatic irony, that the teen narrator is allowed to give her successful, kind father endless advice simply because he loves her so selflessly? [Subtext: You are not as smart or good as you think—dad is.]

Where else in the academy could this happen? It’s the dangerous utility of Creative Writing, the stepchild in the corner.

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My Dear Mrs. Churm,

On your birthday, I looked long and hard for something to convey my feelings anew, after all these years. Something for my partner, wife, the mother of our beautiful boys. Something tender and poetic.

Here you go.

Your ever-loving,

Oronte