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Spring 2011 : Fail
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Fail
Oregon Humanities: Spring 2011
Letter from the Editor
Toward Grace, Strength, and Hope
Richard Evans, president of an organization called EmcArts in Seattle, was in Portland last summer for a conference on innovation in the arts. His talk, “The Real Work of Innovation,” focused on best practices from arts organizations across the country. As he described successful projects, I was struck by how often Evans used the word fail, from a quote attributed to Winston Churchill (“Success is the ability to go from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm”) to his description of encouraging innovation through a culture of “fail fast, fail early, fail safe.” Failure doesn’t seem to be the American narrative of choice. As a culture, we prefer Horatio Alger–like tales of characters who overcome extreme adversity to embrace and then bask in well-earned glory. I was taken aback but also bewitched by the notion that failure is an integral component of success.
Writing
After the Fall
Somewhere beyond fate and reason, the real work of being human begins.
I was almost eleven years old when I first heard about the accident at Three Mile Island. It happened in 1979, near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The news that spring was grim. The country was scared. Had there been a meltdown? How much radiation had escaped? It was a good time to have a U.S. president trained as a nuclear engineer. Despite living in the atomic age and knowing that nuclear fission could be controlled and harnessed to produce energy (or devastatingly unleashed in the form of bombs and missiles), many people were unfamiliar with its mechanics.
Goal Control
An interview with Reed College professor Jennifer Henderlong Corpus about goals, praise, motivation, and coping with failure.
Jennifer Henderlong Corpus, a professor of psychology at Reed College, specializes in developmental psychology and academic motivation. She directs the college’s Children’s Motivation Project, which works with children from preschool to adolescence to learn what motivates them to learn. Failure, she thinks, cannot be understood without considering its relationship with and effect on other concepts, such as goal setting, praise, and motivation.
Where We Live Now
Abandoning the tragedy of the city for a new way of thinking and talking about place
The French historian Fernand Braudel makes the astonishing claim that any city “has to dominate an empire, however tiny, in order to exist at all.” For Braudel, the boastful preeminence of cities—a commonplace that we witness every day—served as a categorical definition. Braudel got his definition from Marx, who puts it even more sharply: “The antagonism between town and country begins with the transition from barbarism to civilization, from tribe to State, from locality to nation, and runs through the whole history of civilization to the present day.” For both Marx and Braudel, class division and domination are the origin, even the constitutive element, of urbanism.
Shooting the Lions
Two cousins try to revive the family circus with tragic results.
It had been such a long time since God had said anything, so when his cousin Ringling had an idea, Lawrence listened: Ringling’s Traveling Menagerie. That was his vision: resurrect the old family circus. Get themselves some animals—an elephant and a peacock; ponies, llamas, and black-horned billy goats; a giant iguana—train them, and take them on the road.
Drown
Two rivers; two Western tales of hubris
The child billed in history books as the first Caucasian born in the Western frontier died by drowning. On June 23, 1839, a scant three months and nine days after her second birthday, the little girl scooted out the back door of her house, away from her preoccupied parents; she walked a few yards to the edge of the Walla Walla River, intending to dip water for the family’s evening meal with silver cups clasped in each hand, and she fell in. Her name was Alice Clarissa Whitman. She was the daughter of Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, a couple who’d traveled from upstate New York to help “transform the West”—to, in their words, “convert heathen souls”—and who themselves were killed in 1847 by a group of men from the Cayuse tribe, the very people they’d come to save. The death of the Whitmans’ only child, two years after their arrival in current-day Washington State, was just one in a string of major blows that led to the bloody demise of the Northwest’s first Protestant mission.
Resume of Failures
The stories of struggle, insecurity, and loss behind a successful writer’s accomplishments.
I’d been teaching writing at Lewis & Clark College for close to thirty years when one of my students made a startling suggestion. We had been sifting our memories for stories, writing in response to a series of prompts, but we weren’t making much progress. “Could we write a résumé of our failures?” he asked.
Bright Idea
A People's History
Residents of Bosky Dell rely on volunteers, family, and bee houses to document the history of their community.
The Bosky Dell area of West Linn, a green sliver wedged between the eastern flank of Pete’s Mountain and the Tualatin River, was not easy to develop. The white settlers who displaced local Native Americans cut hundreds of conifers and dug out their stumps to eke out a living from the lush but dank environment.
Field work
Life Lessons
Oregon Humanities' Humanity in Perspective course marks its tenth year in Portland
When Julie Hommes found out about Humanity in Perspective (HIP), Oregon Humanities’ free college course for low-income adults, she had a seven-month-old baby. As a mother struggling to support her five children, she says, “My whole life was just run like I was trying to catch up. I didn’t feel like I had the freedom to say, ‘What do I want to do?’ ” Taking the HIP class, Hommes says, “completely changed the direction of the way my life was going.” Since completing the course, she has enrolled at Marylhurst University, creating an interdisciplinary degree called “healing spirituality.” She plans to pursue a Master of Divinity next year.
Happy Anniversary, Astoria
The coastal city mines its two-hundred-year history
John Jacob Astor—the millionaire fur trader and real estate tycoon—never visited Astoria, the once rough and wild frontier town named for him. Known today mostly as the setting for The Goonies, Astoria was the first U.S. settlement west of the Rocky Mountains, established as a trading outpost.
Why I Give
Betty Roberts values Oregon Humanities' community connection
Betty Roberts’s career includes many “firsts”: first woman to hold seats in the Oregon House of Representatives (1964) and in the Oregon State Senate (1968); first woman appointed to the Oregon Court of Appeals (1976); first woman appointed to the Oregon Supreme Court (1982). Even her losses were victories—she campaigned unsuccessfully to be the first woman governor of Oregon in 1974.
Beyond the Buzz
The University of Oregon's Sustainable Cities Initiative helps Oregon cities with concrete projects
Sustainable. It’s a buzzword, but what does it really mean? Robert Liberty, the new executive director of the Sustainable Cities Initiative (SCI) at the University of Oregon, prefers concrete examples to abstract terms. “It can mean improving a neighborhood or saving money,” he says. “People understand it when I say, ‘We’re figuring out how to better invest the money we have for streets and roads,’ or ‘We’re figuring out a way for me to walk to the store instead of having to get in my car.’ ”
Talking Shop
Oregon Humanities joins forces with Portland Center Stage in brown-bag discussion series
Ever wish you could peek behind the curtain to see what happens backstage at a show? Shop Talk, a new partnership between Oregon Humanities and Portland Center Stage, lets you go even further—into the minds of the playwrights, directors, and performers. The monthly brown-bag lunch series, which began in February and runs through May, pairs thespians with humanities thinkers for provocative public discussions.
Posts
Epley in Exile
In early 2008 I wrote a laudatory essay in the Oregonian about Men in Exile, an anthology of Oregon State Penitentiary inmate creative writing published by Oregon State University Press in 1973. I appealed to any contributor reading the piece to contact me. A week later I received an email from Smoky Epley. “I was paroled from the Oregon State Penitentiary [on] January 3, 1972,” Epley wrote,
A Losing Record
The Basketball Thunder were in trouble. Observing ten minutes of the first practice, I knew it was going to be a long, long season for my third-grade son and his teammates. Knew it when my son—a head smaller than other kids his age—somehow landed on the same team with the second shortest guy. Knew it when the town’s most irritating third grader also showed up and immediately began doing handstands when he wasn’t jabbing a teammate in the gut.
On Failure in America
“Failure is not an option” is a memorable line from Apollo 13, that cinematic tribute to the can-do spirit of America. The Statue of Liberty plays a similar tune in welcoming immigrants to that green breast of America where characters like Fitzgerald’s Gatsby could believe material success would secure a lost love.
Footloose
When I was twelve years old, my mother brought home one of her black students from the inner-city school where she taught. Mom had this idea that being well rounded also meant learning how to be cool. It was the early ’90s. A decade of movies such as Flashdance, Footloose, and Fame had convinced us that even smalltown tots could aspire to great feats of great feet.
Waiting for Superman
My mother says “you are only as happy as your saddest child,” and she is right. It’s not that my son is entirely sad but still searching. And I hurt for his searching, I feel pain for his confusion, I long for his triumph from the scars of addiction and for the return of his joy.
What I Think
Spare the Rod
Does punishment in the public school system really work?
On the second day of kindergarten for my eldest son, I received the first call about a problem. A conflict with another child had him acting out angrily, then running off school grounds momentarily when a teacher intervened. By the first week of October, he had been suspended once already, and, in an afterschool meeting, the principal informed me she would not allow my child to “assault” her staff any longer. Our choices were few: he could stay in the classroom and face expulsion and criminal charges if his behavior continued, or I could transfer him immediately to a school for troubled children.
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Oregon Humanities magazine examines topics of broad public interest from a variety of perspectives and approaches. Recent issues of this publication have focused on stuff, nostalgia, and civility. Through good and thoughtful writing, Oregon Humanities magazine enriches our understanding of important subjects and stimulates conversation and reflection among readers, their friends, families, colleagues, and neighbors.
Contributors
Amanda Waldroupe
Amanda Waldroupe is a freelance journalist living in Portland. Whenever she fails, she buckles down and tries, tries again.
Debra Gwartney
Debra Gwartney is the author of the 2009 memoir Live Through This, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Oregon Book Award, and the PNBA award. She is currently working on a memoir about growing up in the West and the heritage of Narcissa Whitman, a project for which she received a research grant from the American Antiquarian Society. Debra lives on the McKenzie River with her husband, Barry Lopez, and is on the nonfiction faculty at Pacific University.
John Holloran
John Holloran lives in Portland and teaches at Oregon Episcopal School, where he is the chair of the history department. His last essay for Oregon Humanities was “Under a Spell” (Summer 2009).
Kim Stafford
Kim Stafford is the founding director of the Northwest Writing Institute at Lewis & Clark College and author of a dozen books of poetry and prose, including The Muses Among Us: Elegant Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writer’s Craft. This essay is a section from his book-in-progress, 100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do.
Kristy Athens
Kristy Athens’ nonfiction and short fiction have been published in a number of magazines, newspapers, and literary journals, most recently High Desert Journal, Eclectic Flash, Diverse Voices Quarterly, and Five Fishes Journal.
Matthew Stadler
Matthew Stadler is a writer and editor in Portland. He writes about cities and urbanism for journals including Volume, Netherlands Architecture Bulletin, Domus, and Camerawork. His book about urbanism, Deventer, is forthcoming from 010 Uitgevrij, in Rotterdam. In 2009 he cofounded Publication Studio (http://www.publicationstudio.biz) in Portland.
Sarah Gilbert
Sarah Gilbert is writing a book about mothers looking for emotional healing in food. In February, she decided to begin homeschooling her eldest son.
Susan Meyers
After growing up selling corndogs and cotton candy at carnivals up and down the West Coast, Susan Meyers extended her gypsy lifestyle by spending several years in Latin American before coming home to the Pacific Northwest. Her work has recently appeared in CALYX, Dogwood, Terra Incognita, and The Minnesota Review, and it has been the recipient of several awards, including a Fulbright Fellowship. She teaches writing at Oregon State University.