Mike Rose on Creativity, Mixing Genres, & Lives on the Boundary

00:08 [Mike Rose] Let me talk a little bit about the genesis of Lives on the Boundary, this book that mixes personal vignette, personal story, personal history, with, oh my gosh, educational history and educational theory and learning theory and psychology and sociology and all of that. Here's what happened.

00:30 This was quite a while back, and at the time I was writing a lot of poetry. And some of it was okay and some of it was not so good. But as I got a little bit better at it, the poems were more and more about my family history, these immigrant Italians coming to this country and settling in the Rust Belt, the kind of work they did. Some of these poems were like prose poems, sort of sketches of my old neighborhood, growing up

01:00 in south L.A. But I was also at that time doing a lot of reading. I was in a doctoral program and I was doing a lot of reading in cognitive psychology, learning a lot about memory and attention and information processing and the way we solve problems and creativity, all of this sort of thing. And I loved both of these strands of my life, and I was writing school papers and then eventually starting to write some articles

01:30 for publication, drawing on this cognitive psychology and educational theory work. So here I was, this sort of two-track writer. There were these poems, these sketches, these vignettes, and there was this stuff on cognition and language and learning and education. One day, I just started to think, I started to wonder, is there any way to combine these kinds of writing?

02:00 And I took a big piece of butcher paper, and I pasted onto it a couple of these poems and these sketches about my old neighborhood and that. So these were memories. And then I photocopied these excerpts from a cognitive psychology textbook on memory, on the cognitive processes of memory. And I put these things on a single piece of paper and I asked myself, is there any way that these two very different kinds of writing about memory could come together? And that, then,

02:30 led me down the road of trying to write a book in which memory, personal history, accounts of schooling, vignette, dialogue, scenes from playground, scenes from neighborhoods, could oscillate back and forth with discussion of memory and development and childhood and intelligence. And through this, to create a kind of hybrid text that both tells a story

03:00 but also makes some claims and tries to in fact make some counter-arguments about the way we tend to think about intelligence and achievement.