Interview with Lynn Levin: Poet, Writer, Translator, Professor

Lynn Levin is well known for inspiring creativity in students and writers at all levels. Together with Valerie Fox, she has edited the widely adopted Poems for the Writing: Prompts for Poets.  In addition, she is known for her quirky, engaging writing that encourages new ways of perceiving and thinking.  Now Lynn has a new collection of poems, The Minor Virtues (2020), published by Ragged Sky Press.

Welcome to an informal chat with Lynn.

1. What is your name and your background?
My name is Lynn Levin, and I am a poet, writer, translator, and an adjunct associate professor of English at Drexel University. I teach composition, creative writing, and literature classes. Before I started teaching, I had a career in advertising.

Lynn Levin

2. How would you describe your writing practice?
I love to describe things in my poems. I think that refreshes and enhances life. I write to think through experience and capture quirky insights, many of them comic. I want to surprise and entertain my readers and myself. My view of the world is like a picture hung on a wall, then set awry by the settling of the house or a mild earthquake. I guess that’s the quirky part. And I want to be understood. Too much obscurity masks feeling and makes the reader’s job a chore.

3. Please share the name of your latest publication.
I am fortunate to have two recent publications. I just published my fifth poetry collection, The Minor Virtues (Ragged Sky Press, 2020), and I recently published, with my co-author Valerie Fox, Poems for the Writing: Prompts for Poets, Second Edition (Texture Press, 2019).

4. What is The Minor Virtues about? What are some of the main focal points?
The title section of poems, The Minor Virtues section, begins with celebrations of small everyday practices—among them, fixing broken things and buying produce from the marked-down cart—which, when fancifully contemplated, branch into deeper appreciations of life. The other poems in the book look at life from both serious and comic angles. I include a range of poems in both free and formal verse. Thematically, I like to say that my writing is dark with a funny edge or funny with a dark edge.

5. What inspired you to write The Minor Virtues? 
I wanted to aim for happier and calmer poems, poems that conveyed a love of life even as some of the poems speak of missteps or losses. Overall, I set out with good cheer in mind.

6. Any closing thoughts?
While it is vital that writers speak out against injustice and wrongdoing, I made the conscious decision in this book to tread lightly around those topics and to focus on appreciations, affection, nostalgia, bemusement, and other milder sensibilities

Creative Writing Workshop #2: Uncovering Hidden Realities, with strategies for your workplace writing

In this second of our series of workshops, we explore seeing things an a brand new way. Try out these writing prompts and worksheets, all designed to kick start your creativity and develop "flow."  As an added benefit, you will find that creative writing strategies are highly effective in developing new ideas for scientific, technical, and business problem-solving.

July 16 workshop at the Coffee House at Cherry Street, Tulsa

Pattern Recognition:
Creative writing is a lot like machine learning. The raw data is processed multiple times until patterns form, and those patterns can be assumed to have meaning. The intriguing part of poetry (and all literature) is the interpretive process in which the reader finds patterns and suggests meaning even if / when the author was not conscious of generating them. At the same time, part of the author’s craft involves creating patterns through recurring juxtapositions and repetitions. 

Generate 15 random words. You may use randomwordgenerator.com

Then, look at the 15 random words that you have generated.  Can you make any sense of them?
Arrange the words, then add 15 more words (of your own choice or also randomly generated), but place the new words in a places that make sense.

Examples: 
“The Idea of Order at Key West” by Wallace Stevens

How can I use this technique for my work?
Sometimes your message gets lost because you have too many words, especially in the case of proposals, resumes, and web presence. To help you focus on what really matters, select 15 key words. Then, work with them and make them really convey your message.  Remember that less is more. You may wish to let the words stand alone as bullet points that link to pages that have more details.

Repetition:
“There is no meaning without repetition.” – J. Hillis Miller.

The repetition can be something that approaches an incantation (as in the case of Poe’s “The Raven”) or can be a color, symbol, or set of images or characters. For example, a series of characters may appear at different times, and each is a trickster figure.

Try it out! Write a narrative and deliberately incorporate repetitions, then see how each repetition starts to affect that way that one reads and interprets the work.

Examples:
“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
White Noise by Don Delillo

How can I use this technique for my work?
As you write a report, design a report, or create marketing materials, keep in mind the following:

1. Engage your reader / audience quickly with the main idea

2. Make sure your topic sentences in your body paragraphs or pages connect to the main idea

3.  Repeat the main idea, but with each repetition, add a facet to it. (For example, the main idea can be “a great deal”, and then you can elaborate with separate pages / paragraphs on price, efficiency, return on investment, experienced team, track record, etc.)

First workshop / July 9 / Coffee  House at Cherry Street, Tulsa

Minimalist Experiments: Juxtapositions
In the first part of the 20th century, minimalists (influenced by the Futurist Manifesto by Marinetti and others), “outlawed” most poetic devices. They preferred “found art” – the equivalent of the “objets trouvees” somehow bundled together.

The same works for poetry: find everyday words and phrases, and then place them in ways that they suddenly “pop” and reveal something unexpected. In the 1980s, the “Language Poets” took the earlier minimalist fashionings of William Carlos Williams, the Dadaists, and Futurists to unfasten language from its denotative moorings.

Try it out! Select two or three words or concepts and then write a work that includes them several times. Here are a few:  QuikTrip, OXXO, feral cat, ginger smoothie

Examples:
“Complete Destruction” by William Carlos Williams
“Advent” by Rae Armantrout

How can I use this technique for my work?
Think of how you can put “found objects” together to create something completely new. Here’s “Debris Collage” by Swiss artist Jean Tinguely, in which the title in French "Débricollage" contains a nice play on the words "debris," "collage," and "bricolage"

Débricollage by Jean Tinguely

The goal is to juxtapose or bring together seemingly unrelated ideas or concepts in order to create something completely new, and to encourage people to see things from different perspectives. 
So, be sure to keep your copy spare, use lots of white space, and incorporate useful and thought-provoking images that make your readers want to ask questions.

(check out The Adventures of Tinguely Querer )

Conspiracy, Urban Legend, or a Hidden Truth?
"There is a necessary relation between the fictions by which we order our world and the increasing complexity of what we take to be the 'real' history of that world." Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending.

We quell our existential anxiety by means of telling stories, or at least putting a nice, neat beginning, middle, and end on it. Aristotle wrote in Poetics that plots must have a beginning, middle, and end, something that was echoed by the Roman, Horace, who took Aristotle’s ideas even further and insisted on the “unities” of harmony, proportion, and narrative structure.

These highly ordered ideas were revived at a time when the French were making order from chaos with Louis XIV, the Sun King. Nicolas Boileau’s  L’Art Poétique (1674) was a tremendous influence on poetry and drama in both France and England and effectively ushered in Neoclassicism in literature.

The 20th century largely abandoned the early structures, and yet the mind still seeks the “unities,” to the point that the mind will impose them even when they are left unstated or jumbled.  Some authors deliberately leave out parts, and they let the reader fill in the gaps.

Write a quick story that explains something very odd about the town you are living in now, or in which you lived earlier.

How can I use this technique for my work?
Keep in mind that our minds are structured to crave stories, and that is why a compelling story (even if a complete urban legend or conspiracy theory) will appeal to people more than simply a list of facts or statistics, even though technical details are important as evidence to back up your story.

So, include a story in your presentation.

1. Include a story – make it interesting and engaging. Think of your audience as you create the title of your story. “We beat the odds.. “ “The t-shirt that saved a thousand cats, dogs, and parrots.”

2.  Analyze your audience. What are they going to expect, and what are their competing narratives? If you’re dealing with a controversial topic,  you can expect that your audience will have a countering story which they will potentially consider to be the ultimate authority (not yours). So, be sure to refer or accommodate their story.

3. Consider using engaging graphics.

https://www.slideshare.net/beyondutopia/underpaid-royaltiesconv/1

Creative Writing Workshop #1: Seeing Things in a New Way

Once you've seen a tornado, you never look at a severe storm alert in the same way. Alerts are no longer abstractions - they have the roaring wind, blinding rain, and golf ball-size hail as their concrete objective correlatives.

It's refreshing to be able to see things in a new way, and many times, creative writing strategies can help you alter your perspective.

In a recent workshop that took place at the Coffee House on Cherry Street, a diverse group came together with the goal of building creativity and seeing how we could apply them in every day life. Organized under the auspices of Tulsa Geological Society, AAPG, and Humanities Institute, the workshop emphasized using examples from literature, especially literature that explores the sciences and psychology, to help teach oneself to re-perceive the world around us. 

Changing places:
Think about reversing activities or changing places.  You may wake up one day and find that your self and consciousness are now inhabiting the body of the white German Shepherd you teased as you walked the fenced yard it protected.

Examples: 
Heart of a Dog, by Mikhail Bulgakov
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, by Mark Twain

Write from the perspective of a different person:
Consider yourself to be another person and write as though you were that person. It can be in any form; a dramatic monologue, or simply thoughts.

Examples:
The Book of Disquiet, by Fernando Pessoa
“Cuchulain’s Fight with the Sea” by William Butler Yeats

Disjunctive modifiers:
Vivid descriptions by creating modifiers that clash and do not seem to go together, but they make you see things in a new way.

Examples:
“A Route of Evanescence” by Emily Dickinson
“Abstentions” by John Ashbery

Mangled Quotes
Find quotes from a person that is more or less famous, and first, respond to it (as though the quote were an introduction) and then modify it for your personal entertainment.

Examples:
Blow, blow, thou winter wind,
   Thou art not so unkind
      As man’s ingratitude;
        William Shakespeare

“Happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination” – Immanuel Kant
“No man's knowledge here can go beyond his experience” – John Locke
“He who thinks great thoughts, often makes great errors” – Martin Heidegger

Recommended Books: 
Levin, Lynn, and Valerie Fox (2019) Poems for the Writing: Prompts for Poets, Vol. 2. Texture Press.

Nash, Susan Smith. (2013) Writing for Human Relations. Texture Press.  (free Kindle version)

 Recommended Energy Leadership MBA (100% online, low tuition options) AACSB Accredited. Information page. Texas A&M University Texarkana.

Mind-Mapping and E-Learning: Interview with Yvonne Wu, MindMaple

Mind-mapping software has been used very successfully in courses where creativity and idea generation are critical, and where one might wish to discover (or uncover) connections and patterns. Mind-mapping can be conducted independently or collaboratively; the collaborations can be synchronous or asynchronous. Mind-mapping software is often very helpful and can be used in conjunction with elearning courses as well as in tasks and projects. MindMaple, a mind mapping software in both Windows and IOS operating systems, is unique in its flexibility and suitability for many different users, ages, and levels.

MindMaple.com Mind-Mapping Software

 Welcome to an interview with Yvonne Wu, MindMaple.

1.  What is your name and relation to e-learning?
My name is Yvonne Wu and I’m a member of the marketing team of MindMaple. I want to share my belief with all the educators and the readers of e-learning blog that the concept of mind mapping techniques can support or even enhance the education in many ways.

2.  What is MindMaple?  How does it work?
A mind map is a diagram that grows and elaborates around a central word, phrase or concept. Starting from a central topic, we add subtopics or subcategories to branch out the map; at the same time grow the ideas.

Mind map visually organizes your thoughts on the same surface. It’s like visualizing the thoughts in your brain that people can easily see and understand with one glance and be on the same page with you.

When the concept of mind mapping marries technology, voila! Here comes MindMaple! MindMaple, a mind mapping software works as a tool to optimize skill of mind mapping with technology. Teaching and learning then become more creative and interactive.

3.  Please describe three innovative uses of MindMaple in elearning for K-12, college, and professional development

in e-learning for K-12

•    Optimized the integration of left and right brain.
Our left brain majorly is in charge of tasks that are more analytic and logical; while our right brain processes most of the non-verbal tasks that require more creativity and imagination. Mind mapping is a useful technique integrating the functions of both left and right brain in the thinking process; while MindMaple, optimizes such skill with technology. It allows you to think logically; while at the same time retains or even boosts your creativity.

•    Stimulated curiosity and encouraged children to think outside of the box:
The motivation of learning starts from curiosity. Teaching and learning with mind mapping software is interactive which helps children to increase the brain activity and to remain curious.

•    Increased interest of learning for students with learning disability:
MindMaple allows teachers to add images, video clip, or to color code the map. This makes teaching lectures more interactive and can help students with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Color coding and the nature of mind map that communicate with less word but more visual material can lower the learning barrier for students who have Dyslexia problem.

elearning for college
•    Making presentation more convincing: Either the lectures in class or student performing presentations for their projects, MindMaple visualize communication, which not only make the presentation more interactive, but also more convincing.

•    Planning and scheduling with MindMaple to enhance task management: Schools and teachers can use MindMaple to design the teaching plan, syllabus or school event planning. Task manager function in MindMaple also allows students or teachers to set up deadlines, to keep tracking task progress, or to distribute the resource and budget for better task management. 

•    Organizing ideas and thoughts: Mind mapping software enables students and teachers to think outside of the box; while keeping all ideas visually organized.  MindMaple can be an incredible asset in regards to learning and teaching in a creative, more efficient way. Teachers can use MindMaple for brainstorming sessions. Students can use it for notes taking and studying.


 elearning for professional development
•    When it comes to project management, MindMaple is extremely helpful organizing ideas and tasks with the functions of scheduling and task progress tracking. Project managers and event planners use MindMaple to plan and keep track of multiple projects with deadline.

•    Visual design related professions will find MindMaple helpful in the brainstorm stage. You plant the ideas, let MindMaple help it grow!

•    Journalists can not only use MindMaple to brainstorm and generate articles, but also to plan and schedule the editorial calendar of publication.

4.  What are some of the features that make MindMaple effective in the elearning space? 
•    Real-time collaborative function enables users to work on the same mind map at the same time. It helps the teamwork aspect of learning.

•    Task manager: including human resource allocation, task progress monitoring  and deadline scheduling.

•    Usability: MindMaple simplifies but amplify the whole mind mapping concept with the ease of usability. Our user friendly interface lower the barrier to access the idea of mind mapping. For example, with touch screen interface, users can easily create a mind map on their iPad by simply tapping a topic and draw out from existing topic; just like drawing a map with your hand!

5.  How might MindMaple be used for writing courses (essays, plus creative writing)? -- I'm thinking specifically of the invention stage.
Mind mapping is a skill that grows and elaborates from one central idea or statement. This technique can seamlessly integrate with the process of writing. The central concept will be the topic or the thesis statement of an article. The next subtopic of the central topic stands for points that support the thesis statement. 

6.  Can you recommend three books?

•    The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter--And How to Make the Most of Them Now
•    Creating Magic: Enhance Your Life With Creativity
•    Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

Thanks for the interview! MindMaple strives to contribute in education by introducing this helpful mind mapping software. If there is any further questions, or if anyone would like to know more about MindMaple, feel free to reach out to me at Yvonne@mindmaple.com. Any suggestion on how we can help more in teaching and learning is appreciate as well!

MOOCs for Creative Writing: Interview with Lynn Levin

MOOCs for creative writing require innovative instructional strategies, and textbooks that combine prompts, examples, and flowcharts. Certain presses (such as Texture Press) are making innovative textbooks available, in both as a free e-book (Writing for Human Relations), and at low-cost printed format (Poems for the Writing: Prompts for Poets). Welcome to an interview with Lynn Levin, Drexel University, and co-author with Valerie Fox, with Poems for the Writing. 

  
1. What is your name and your relationship to writing and writing instruction?

My name is Lynn Levin, and I teach a variety of English classes at Drexel University and creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania. I am principally a poet and have published four collections of poems, most recently Miss Plastique (Ragged Sky Press, 2013), and a craft-of-poetry textbook, Poems for the Writing: Prompts for Poets, with co-author Valerie Fox (Texture Press, 2013). My previous poetry collections are Fair Creatures of an Hour (Loonfeather Press, 2009), Imaginarium (Loonfeather Press, 2005), and A Few Questions about Paradise (Loonfeather Press, 2000). My poems have appeared in Boulevard, Ploughshares, The Hopkins Review, and other journals. I also write creative nonfiction, fiction, and I am a literary translator of poetry (mostly from Spanish, sometimes from French).

2.  How do you view the process of writing?

I view the process of writing as a series of promising starts which often turn out to be false starts, which are hopefully followed by restarts, some of which gain purchase on the page and eventually lead to a finished poem, essay, or story. When I have a work in progress, I feel most alive...even with all those starts, false starts, and restarts.

3. What are some of the approaches that you have found yield interesting writing?

More than anything, reading the work of others leads to better writing and better thinking. I also believe in capturing random observations and turns of phrase that fly into my mind when I least expect them. Many of those airy notions may trigger poems and stories. It is also true that a majority of these ideas do not retain the charm I first saw in them, but some do blossom. I also stand guilty of failing to revisit many of my numerous jottings.

In another way, I find poetry prompts to be immensely helpful. They nudge me out of my usual ways of building poems. The prompts in Poems for the Writing do that for me, and, I hope, for other poets, too. They help me experiment with new ways of organizing, rearranging, or shopping for thoughts.

4. What do you consider to be “interesting” or “effective” in writing—and why does it matter?

I value the idea of making the familiar seem strange. It goes along with conveying a sense of wonder or marvel at the world. When it comes to making a literary work effective and interesting, I think of strangeness and wonder. But there’s also the human or moral level. A writer has to show compassion to his or her characters. Strangeness isn’t everything.

I have also become more aware of the importance of the beginning of the poem or the first sentences of a prose piece. The beginning establishes a voice that propels the rest of the work.

5. When, how, and why is creative self-expression important in today’s social media world, where almost all voices are likely to be drowned out or simply be a part of the general tsunami of texts, images, and voices?

That’s a great question. It does seem harder and harder for an individual artist of any genre to stand out in the welter.

Creative self-expression is thriving. Now that so many people are blogging, that is, publishing their own journals of opinion, there’s more to read than ever. It’s overwhelming. Twitter, Facebook, and all those other social media sites that I haven’t discovered are part of the same phenomenon. It’s like there are six billion media channels out there. Everyone’s crying, “Read me!” Yes, certainly voices will be drowned out. On the other hand, so many people are writing thoughtful, insightful, and witty pieces. I would never want anyone to quit writing just because of the huge wave of other voices. But then, whom should one read?

This brings up the phenomenon of narrow-casting or friend-casting (as opposed to broadcasting). I hear that audiences are becoming more and more compartmentalized. For example, a lot of people get their news from their Facebook and Twitter feeds, but not from general-interest news sources. That’s worrisome to me on one hand because it decreases one’s exposure to diverse points of view. On another hand, this gives independent opinion writers an appreciative and attentive audience of like-minded readers.

I think this proliferation of voices makes the role of the editor and publisher more important than ever. Someone has to be the arbiter of literary quality.
Someone has to do the hard and heartbreaking work of picking and choosing which voices to promote.

Then there are the loneliness and celebrity factors. People are lonely and they crave attention. Social media serves those needs brilliantly. Hence more voices calling out.

I don’t know how well these ruminations of mine answered your question, but you bring up one of the key issues of our time.

6.  Please describe the book that you wrote with Valerie Fox.

Poems for the Writing: Prompts for Poets (Texture Press, 2013) is a craft-of-writing textbook that presents fourteen classroom- and workshop-tested writing prompts for both beginning and experienced poets. The prompts range from simple concepts, such as the cameo cinquain and the rules poem, to more elaborate intertextual  prompts, such as the fake translation and bibliomancy. The book is very friendly and easy to use, and it is aimed at students (both high school and college), working poets, and teachers of creative writing. The first part of the book comprises the prompts and the second part of the book presents sample poems generated by the prompts. Those sample poems are written by college creative writing students and established poets alike. The incredible selection of sample poems not only proves that the prompts are effective, it shows how widely the prompts can be interpreted.

7.  What is your next step?

Right now, I am writing some short stories and new poems. And I am working my way through a stack of books and magazines I’ve promised myself I’d read. I am determined to read through my numerous notebooks of airy jottings. Maybe I’ll glean some phrases worth making into poems.

Thank you!

Free Download: Writing for Human Relations

Writing for Human Relations, a writing guide with assignments, flowcharts, exercises, and readings, is now available as a free e-book, and can be downloaded or shared with your friends and colleagues. Here is the free download. 

One of the keys to effective human relations is the ability to see different points of view and to develop empathy and understanding of others' perspectives.

Free Download! Writing for Human Relations

Writing for Human Relations takes the position that writing helps you learn about yourself, your values, and also the views and values of others.

In addition to the idea that writing is necessary for self-awareness, Writing for Human Relations champions the idea that the process of writing forces you to think, and as you do so, you have more skill in identifying social issues and proposing changes that can lead to positive social change and community development.

Chances are, you, like hundreds of other learners, will love the flowcharts in the text, and you will find them to be helpful with the task at hand, as well as with other writing occasions. You may even find yourself internalizing the approaches, which gives you a very powerful tool for all your writing, whether for school, work, or social networks.

With a full array of inventive templates, charts, diagrams, outlines, and step-by-step suggestions which have been developed and refined in both virtual and face-to-face classrooms, Writing for Human Relations triggers the flow of ideas.

With engaging templates and flowcharts, it is easy to get started and add details and evidence, to create compelling texts. Above all, Writing for Human Relations brings solid rhetorical ideas and theories of discourse into action, and facilitates the production of engaging, effective writing that improves relationships between individuals, groups, and the larger world.

You may also purchase a printed copy. 

For E-Learning Queen readers:  Try out some of the writing guide flowcharts starting on page 50. E-Learning Queen will put together a gallery of writing that was inspired by or generated by using the flow charts! 

Nominated for Most Fascinating Blog of 2012

E-Learning Queen is thrilled to announce that its sister blog, FringeJournal,  has been nominated for a 2012 Fascination Award in the Creative Writing Teacher Blog Category! The nomination was given for FringeJournal's "Iraq, American Soldiers in Iraq, Werewoves of Paraguay and War: El Luison."

Online creative writing programs are found in many online courses and programs. Ranging from autobiography, poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction, creative writing in hybrid, face-to-face, and 100% online courses is very popular. You may wish to look in collegefinder.net. 

Other creative writing examples include "Tear-Down of the Murder-Suicide House" and "The Killer of Lover's Lane, or, the Ten-Mile-Flats Murder: Transgressions of Closure."