Derrick Jensen is an American author and environmental activist living in Crescent City, California. He has published several books questioning and critiquing contemporary society and its values, including A Language Older Than Words, The Culture of Make Believe, and Endgame. He holds a B.S. in Mineral Engineering Physics from the Colorado School of Mines and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Eastern Washington University. He has also taught creative writing at Pelican Bay State Prison and Eastern Washington University.
When I was between the ages of seven and eleven, my father was particularly ready to start a militia and secede from the union. I say "particularly" because in one way or another he's always been a little paranoid and iffy on the subject of loyalty to his citizenship (except when republicans are elected to any office, then you are guarantied to see him sporting his American flag suspenders). My parents "home schooled" me for a few years (quotation marks indicate that you could take out the word "school" and the phrase might be more accurate), when not putting me in various, sometimes experimental, private schools, so I have a colorful educational background. I always loved learning, as Derrick Jensen would say we all do, but I loathed the educational circus that was my childhood. I say all this because I have a deep mistrust of people who, like my father, are excessively suspicious or critical of civilization. Jensen is one of these people, and so I am sorry to say that I am absolutely persuaded by every argument I have heard him make. He positively has me ready to march out and overthrow the global economy.
My first exposure to Derrick Jensen was at the University of Oregon's Public Interest Environmental Law Conference last year. My vegan friend and my noble-savage friend took me to hear him as a keynote speaker. When the girl introducing him to the standing-room-only audience and said something to the effect of, "Don't stampede out of here when you hear his crazy ideas. We need extremists like Jensen to make the rest of us look normal" I sighed and braced myself for chanting and rhyming gibberish (in Eugene that kind of thing, unfortunately, is not completely uncommon). Instead, I met this hilarious, kind, thoughtful man, who I believe is truly trying to help people - and not in a patronizing, rich-American kind of way, either (pet peeve of mine). He's obviously doing the things he does because he understands that making us better helps him. To give you an idea of the lecture he gave when I saw him, this youtube clip shows a small section of the beginning of the lecture, when he gave it elsewhere. In this clip he describes the original script for the movie Star Wars: .
is primarily about Jensen's experiences as a writer and writing instructor at a prison and a university in Washington state. Those experiences are really only the frame, though, in which he presents his criticisms of the American educational system, where Jensen says we are trained to submit ourselves to a society that turns us into slaves and masters. This book is what I wished would have been. Rather than focus on the details of misinformation in textbooks and the politics of the educational system, which bogged down 's complaint against public education, Derrick Jensen tackled the larger problem of the systems in which we live. This book doesn't necessarily deal with all of the larger issues Jensen typically talks about, but I read it because it's . . . ummm . . . how shall I phrase this? It's about six hundred pages shorter than his other books. It seemed like a good place to start.
The thing that really makes me impressed with Jensen's writing and speaking is that I think he deeply believes in the destructiveness of industrialized civilization, and he is honestly fighting to save the things he loves. One of the points he made in the lecture I heard was that people used to get their food from forests and rivers, so we would fight to the death to protect forests and rivers. Now we get our food from supermarkets, so we will fight to the death to protect supermarkets and let the forests and rivers that actually provide the food be destroyed by the systems that created the supermarket. I mean, it's just true. They change the deli section at a grocery store and there's a public outcry from the same people who laugh at the major destruction of ocean mammal life. And I'm no different. The things I don't know or understand that are deeply important to the survival of the human race are staggering. I'm not willing to abandon civilization entirely, but I'm definitely a believer, if only from the arguments of Derrick Jensen, in the evils of industrialism.
This is a book about the education system with little bits of writing advice thrown in. Jensen follows the tradition of pedagogical cranks and visionaries like Ivan Illich and Jacques Ranciere in the idea that schools exist primarily to teach submission. For Jensen, of course, this is just part of the beast of Industrial Civilization destroying the liveable earth. But suddenly, in between salmon die-off statistics, you've got a helpful tip about writing dialogue. Even if Jensen isn't the best writer, his advice is clear and useful (including "The Most Important Writing Exercise," which is shaking out your hands and stretching them into double raised middle fingers to the world).
But you know when you're reading, say, Malcolm Gladwell, and you start to feel a tension in your spine, a bitterness at the back of your throat, a mild headache? I call the feeling "the Smarm Heebie-Jeebies." It happens when someone is absolutely certain they're right about the world and writes a book to prove it. Jensen's ideas are more interesting than Gladwell's, but I get the feeling nonetheless, because the SH-Js aren't ideological, they're aesthetic. All of this point-proving and self-certainty shapes writing, and I don't like that shape.
***NOTE: Derrick Jensen is publicly transphobic (for the "radical feminist" reasons). This book doesn't deal with those issues as far as I could see, but all the same I don't recommend buying any book by Jensen, or otherwise financially supporting him. I know that a lot of writers have messed up personal lives, and I'm fine with disconnecting their art from that -- but the problem for me is that Jensen's transphobia isn't personal: he's made it very public, and it hurts people I care about.
I borrowed this from the LIBRARY! at the behest of SteviePeace. I began reading it at around 1AM on a Tuesday morning. I didn't put it down until I had finished it - when the sun was high over the North End. I then wandered around my low-rent apartment mumbling to myself and hoping Derrick Jensen would stop by so I could hug him.
You get the picture. I love this book. It's a quick read and it's powerful.
Derrick Jensen shows beautifully how education, politics and writing are inextricable in the mind of the writer. I've read a dozen how-to guides on writing. This is the only one I value. I've read several dozen anarchist analyses of this commercial world. This is in my top 10.
This book is funny, honest and revolutionary. Read this book, rock your face off, and pass it on to a friend.
When I was in grad school, I taught two freshmen writing courses. Teaching those classes was a requirement, but no one bothered to teach us how to teach. Bear in mind this was a prestigious university. My students were paying thirty thousand dollars a year in tuition to sit in a room and watch me flail.
I dreaded every class.
I wish I鈥檇 read this book back then.
Derrick Jensen is like an amalgam of every Inspirational Teacher you鈥檝e ever seen in a movie. Only he鈥檚 not full of shit.
This is a book about teaching and a book about writing and a book about how to teach writing. It鈥檚 about learning how to question authority and realizing that sometimes the authority in question is you.
I received this book at our honeymoon, and years ago I read Jensen's A Language Older Than Words, which I found interesting but not entirely convincing. I suppose that's true in a certain way with Walking on Water, though I liked it much better, on the whole.
The center of this book is Jensen's experiences teaching creative writing at Eastern Washington University and at a prison--in many ways, we could see this book as primarily about teaching creative writing and about writing itself. Around this center, he critiques education as it's often executed (echoing in many ways John Taylor Gatto), and certainly that informs his views on teaching.
In short, he finds education to be a stifling exercise in beating down the creativity, individuality, and independence of students, and he reacts against this by encouraging all of these things. He implements a grading system based as simply as possible on effort, refusing to grade his students' writing. Even in his critiques of their pieces, he focuses on praising and encouraging the writer's strengths rather than criticizing the perceived faults. Much of his class, however, isn't about writing--it's about discovering the self, interrogating the self, pondering the world, as students get to know themselves and each other.
There's a good deal in this book that's challenging to conventional understandings of education, and as such it's difficult to accept it entirely, but also impossible for me to dismiss out of hand. Jensen has important things to say about education, not just about creative writing.
this is a great book. a quick read, even though it's nonfiction. i read it in just a few days, which is fast for me. it helps that it's short.
it makes me excited to become a teacher, and has given me lots of ideas. and though i'm not a writer, it makes me want to write.
it also makes me hate school even more than i already do, and question whether i really should teach.
this book uses humor and creativity to discuss the role of teachers, how fucked-up institutional education is, and some rules for writing. this is a unique approach to teaching and writing, and i expect to read it again when i am becoming a teacher. jensen also gave me other books to read about teaching.
i also want to read bell hooks' books about education.
Walking on Water is inspiring! I can now cross off another Jensen book from my to-read list.
"modern schools and universities push students into habits of depersonalized learning, alienation from nature and sexuality, obedience to hierarchy, fear of authority, self-objectification, and chilling competitiveness. these character traits are the essence of the twisted personality-type of modern industrialism. they are precisely the character traits needed to maintain a social system that is utterly out of touch with nature, sexuality, and real human needs." ~arthur evans (as quoted in the book)
writing about education, teaching, and creativity, jensen turns his scathing critique onto the industrial classroom.
Reading this is like being in a classroom with my favorite subversive teacher. It was relevant in 2004, and it will always be relevant to me, nearly twenty years later.
"It goes back to the same old questions, but with a new one at the end. Who are you? What do you love? And the new one: what do you want?" (p. 183)
and in my thirties, i feel these lines in my gut, and sure, my butt too: "I guess the first thing I wish someone would have told me is that it's okay to hate school, that it's really crazy to expect people to sit motionless and to pretend to be interested as you bore them out of their skulls, and it's even more crazy to expect them to like it." -p. 47
I lost steam during this one. I really agree with his premise. That through education we often become more like bricks in the wall (pink floyd) than creative unique humans, but not enough umph for me. There is one thing that I remember from this book though and it pops into my mind I would say at least once a week. Don't clock watch!!! Do something worthwhile with your time. Don't wake up and do something that you wish would get over faster.