Nina Alvarez

January 2008, Podcasts and Audio Help Students Hear the Music in Poetry

Click here for Poetry Magazine’s free audio files.

October 2007, For the Young Who Want To

Though I gave up the teaching game two years ago, I am still in contact with some of the students I felt most connected to. Recently, one of them sent me an email, asking about what jobs there are out there for English majors, besides teaching. I have done almost everything you can do with an English degree: taught, tutored, wrote for a newspaper, published my own work, worked for a publishing company, edited, copywrote, and proofread. But it has been a long haul. I graduated with no real sense of how to get my foot in the door to any of these areas. Below is my response to her. I hope it will helpful to college students with similar questions…continue reading

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July 2007, Word Love

A recent poll by the AP shows that only 1 in 4 adults have read a book in the past year. This makes my stomach hurt. Maybe it’s my heart dropping into my stomach, but either way, it isn’t a good sign for a writer, editor, and publisher.

At the same time, I feel a renewed urgency to fall more deeply in love with books and to support them. I spend most of my time writing for the web and reading on the web and this makes me think that maybe it’s not that people aren’t reading, but that they’re reading on a screen and not in a book.

In my Web 2.0 philosophy, you’ll see that I value what the Internet can uniquely provide. But, having said that, you can’t take the laptop into the bath tub with you (believe me, I’ve tried). To sit still with a book is to engage body and mind in a way that is unique and healing and there is something about the texure of pages, the smell and the lightness of a book that allows you to become one with it. It has one reason for being: to hold a story.

I’m not the first person to say these things. Jeanette Winterson advocates beautifully on her website for reading books, and in 2000, I saw Jacques Derrida speak about being a bibliophile and the many textures of the experience of loving books. It’s not something you can force on anyone, but it is something that, if you already love, you can learn to love even more deeply. And this, I think, is how it spreads to others.

I taught college-level English for three years and still feel a deep desire to create tools and spaces to discuss what can be done to reopen the domain: the difficult and demanding and truly life-changing domain of engagement with writing.

Maybe turning part of ninaalvarez.net into a sort of teacher’s resource is the key. I certainly feel like I have a lot of complaints about the types of “resources” I was offered. I would also like to start discussing some of the trials and triumphs I had as a teacher, why I eventually left it and why, some day, I will probably go back. Your thoughts and comments are encouraged.