Forever In School

I am participating in this interview experiment at Citizen Of The Month blog. The way it works is that when I put my name down, the person before me gets to interview me and I interview the next person who participates. The idea behind it is that you don’t have to be ’somebody’ to be interviewed. Everyone is somebody! At the same time, it gives others a way to know you.

So I got to interview Mek from All Cheese Dinner. She is a college professor and lives with her husband and their daughter. Read her complete profile here.

And here is the interview

Hi Mek! Nice to meet you, online! Thanks for participating in this interview.

-So Mek, where did the name “All Cheese Dinner” come from?

I’ve always joked to my husband that the perfect dinner would be an all-cheese dinner – I mean, who doesn’t love cheese?!. I think the closest you can actually get is fondue – a traditional New Year’s dinner for us. There’s just something about the phrase I like. I’m not sure it would make a good band name, but I think it makes a pretty good blog name.

- How did you meet your husband in the first place?

We worked in the same independent bookstore in Santa Barbara , CA . He had just finished his undergraduate degree at UCSB and was taking a year off, and I was in my last year of my undergraduate degree. When he moved in the fall for grad school, I did too. One of my favorite things from our early dating times is that we both bought tickets to the Shakespeare film series the University was running – a Shakespeare film a month for the school year. We started going as friends, and by the spring it was a date.

- Are you in any way involved in your husband’s music writing? Does he ask your opinion about his music?

Yes – in fact, I’ve written a lot for him. His opera dissertation had a libretto that I wrote, and she’s set some of my poems to music, too. We used to try to do a new holiday song every December, but having a baby kind of derailed that.

- Do you give him honest feedback? What do you do if you don’t like his music? Is he open to negative/different feedback?

I do, from my layperson-listener’s point of view. There have definitely been pieces he’s written that I’ve liked more than others; sometimes this is because of instrumentation choice, sometimes another reason. Interestingly, it can also depend on the performance. Sometimes I’ll hear one person sing a song and I won’t like it. But then someone else sings it, and it totally works for me. It really highlights that collaborative aspect of music.

I suppose I try not to give “negative” feedback – I would never tell him something was bad or wrong in his music; I’d be more likely to say it doesn’t work for me, or I don’t understand the choices.

- What has been the hardest part of motherhood for you?

Time has been the hardest part. The way it is hard keeps changing, too. When she was an infant, it was the way time was cut up into little chunks that always changed and it seemed to take forever to get any division between night and day back. Now it is that she sleeps less – a nap in the afternoon means a later bedtime. That hour or two after lunch when I can relax and read or work instead of being constantly vigilant is still worth not having much of an evening. But, this is on the verge of changing, too. In a way, it will be nice to do away with the nap – to be able to do things after lunch or make plans with friends – but it will be another adjustment. Motherhood requires flexibility, perhaps more than almost any other quality, in my short experience so far.

- How comfortable are you with posting your daughter’s pictures on the internet? Are you concerned for her safety or your family’s privacy?

I originally started the blog partly for a place to do more writing and to record my daughter’s childhood, and partly for my parents, who live far away from us, so they could have more of a sense of their granddaughter’s daily life. I’ve thought about the safety and privacy questions. I don’t use our last names on my blog, or the names of the schools we teach at. In retrospect, if I were starting now I might choose a pseudonym for my daughter, or just use her initial. I have a friend who recently made this change on her blog. She mentioned that her main concern was that years from now high school mean girls might Google her daughter and discover a wealth of information on her potty training troubles. Yikes.

- You teach in college. How different do you think teaching college students is from high school, or graduate school?

Most of the classes I teach are also required classes that typically first-year students take. And not a lot of them want to be English majors or think they are any good at English. I like showing them what English is all about at the college level – pushing their reading, thinking, and writing skills up a level or two, and seeing that every semester a couple students get it. I love it when I see a former student a year or two later and learn they decided to add a second major in English or a minor. These students are still at a spot where they can expand their interests – their academics are really controlled in high school, and in grad school they asked to narrow down their interests. I’m more into expansion.

- What is the funniest memory that you have from inside the classroom that you teach? Or the saddest one?

Once, while giving a short lecture on a piece we’d just read and the way the structure of it mimicked the content, a young woman raised her hand. Thinking she had a sudden insight to share, I interrupted myself to call on her. Her question? “How long did it take you to grow your hair so long?” Funniest and saddest all in one.

- Please share with us the most recent books that you’ve read and the ones that are on your to-read list, fiction and non-fiction.

It’s an odd little list, because I’m in the transition month between fun summer reading and getting ready for the semester reading. So, recently read:

Tree Girl, by Ben Mikealsen, recommended by a friend, this tells the story of Gabriela, a girl from a small Quiche Indian village in Guatemala who is caught up in the war there.  We know a couple little girls who were adopted from Guatemala ; this hard and terrible history is part of their heritage.

Eye Contact, by Cammie McGovern, a murder mystery; the only witness is an autistic boy who retreats into silence. His mother and a range of other characters try to find a way to know what he knows. The mystery part is good, but it was the cast of characters that really made this book for me.

When I Was a Slave, edited by Norman Yetman; a collection of first-person slave narratives, collected as a WPA project in the 1930s, when the ex-slaves interviewed were from 83-105 years old.  The WPA collected hundreds; this is a small sampling, but it is just incredible to read.

Tender Hooks, by Beth Ann Fennelly, true, funny, heart-bursting poems on motherhood.

The “to read” list includes mainly books I am teaching this coming semester, including Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. I am really excited about my book list and can’t wait to start talking about all these stories with the students!