Results of Ruminations

In 2014, I was accepted to a BYU-sponsored teacher training in Cedar City. There, I was to attend day-long workshops with Utah Shakespeare Festival. Before we went, we were tasked with reading the three plays that we would see performed that season ( Measure for Measure, The Comedy of Errors, and Twelfth Night ). I went with Gayle, letting her prowl around Cedar City (mostly at the fabric shops) while I attended the classes, then she came with me to the different plays. It was a delightful summer. The interesting thing for me was that I was in a very foreign situation. I was surrounded by drama teachers--almost no one there was, like I, an English teacher. And while a number of them liked Shakespeare in that squishy, "He's good so I have to like him" way, there were only a couple of actual Bardolators in the mix. That's been an interesting aspect to my experience with the Bard, and it's not a unique one. Shakespeare is adored in the academy because of the ...

I've mentioned Harold Bloom before. As the first serious literary critic I read of my own volition (having studied some of the postmodern theorists in college), I've found a lot of my early interpretations of Shakespeare heavily influenced by him. There's an irony there: One of Bloom's primary theses is what he terms "the anxiety of influence", a consciousness on the part of an author of where inspiration comes from. In this case, my early critical voice was influenced by Bloom, but, being young, I didn't sense--or care--that I was so emulative. It didn't become a large 'anxiety' until I started to reread some of my earlier work. Now I see that there is definitely something to his point. I won't deny that I'm still a little anxious about how much influence Shakespeare has had on me as a writer. As I mentioned while discussing Writ in Blood , I'm nervous about how the story comes across as an homage of the Bard. But the love of ...

I fully acknowledge that Shakespeare's religion is one of two things: Unknowably opaque, or allusively scripted. To consider him as secular Scripture would be considered blasphemous if it weren't for the fact that it's true. Only the Bible competes with Shakespeare in terms of quotes and penetration of social and linguistic ubiquity. While Shakespeare's personal religion, I think, falls into the first of those abovementioned categories, it makes no sense to argue about a man's universality and then insist he had nothing to say that couldn't be a part of religion. Of course, when I say "religion" I pretty much mean Christian--though that's a troubled phrase that I won't deal with now--in the limited sense of that's what I'm most familiar with. It's patent that Shakespeare lived in a tumultuously Christian time (more stable than much of Europe, though) and probably had limited exposure to other ideas of faith. His few passing ref...

Chronology here is getting a little twisted as I put this most-crucial moment down. I've tried to write in such a way that each experience informs the next, but I've taken my time to get to this point. Part of that comes from my own poor use of time--it's been the better part of a year since I last tried carving out anything else about the Bard. I've been a negligent disciple in many ways and to many of my passions. At any rate, I repeat here what I've written elsewhere in an extended quote of myself. I will provide some small context before launching into this, however, as I'm approaching the anniversary of my trip to London. At school, we devote the first three weeks of January to a special type of class called Winterim. I have, over the years, taught classes on video games, short film, garage bands, Harry Potter, and comic books. In January 2014, I went with a handful of students on a 10 day trip to England. Ostensibly, we were there to get a feel for En...

Drama is a natural part of life, and I don't mean the time spent on stage. Plans are laid and, like those mice and men, often go awry. We soldier on, of course, feeling as though there's some catharsis somewhere, though the curtain seems to have dropped acts ago. It can be difficult to tell if we're living a sequel, prequel, or the main event. I felt the curtain drop on a cherished aspiration when Justin was fired from his job at Maeser. He and I were planning on working together on a Concurrent Enrollment Shakespeare class that would give college credit to the seniors who participated. We wanted to tackle three or four plays, plus some other, contemporary works, all within a framework of improving the writing. I'm not privy to the reasons why Justin was let go, but with his departure--and the degree he had--the class had to be cancelled. I was bothered by it, in part because I'd lost a mentor and a friend, and also because a dream of being able to focus exclus...

I always wanted a baby girl. I don't know why--maybe it's because I grew up with two brothers, and was already seven when my sister finally came. Maybe it's because I am a self-proclaimed feminist (which is convenient, because it means I get to be a feminist on my own terms--a very feminist thing to do, I'd say) and would like to raise a girl who understands her value comes less from her chromosomes and more from her humanity. Maybe it's because the only names I like are female names. With my first born, because of his heart condition, we had to decide quickly on a name. It wasn't required; we just couldn't keep referring to "the baby" without our throats sticking. Picking a name simplified an already too-complicated experience. Since Gayle and I have been together since our junior year in high school, we'd often joked that we'd name any kid we had "Peter Bruce Dowdle", after our two favorite superheroes (Peter Parker as Spider...

I love to write. Of non-school related writings, I've poured more than a million words into different keyboards throughout my life, and the number certainly increases if we look back at all I've done in high school and college. One of my earliest memories, in fact, is hammering on a typewriter in my grandmother's basement, cranking out a poor excuse for a story on a single sheet of crayoned-over paper. I wrote novels throughout high school--mostly Spider-Man fan-fic--and so I have to divide my writing 'career' as pre- and post-graduation. Since I left high school, I have written one Spider-Man novel and four fantasy novels: Impetus, Words of the Silenced, Tales of the Flame, and Writ in Blood . The Spider-Man book feels legitimate to me, if only because actual novels are published in the Marvel Universe all of the time, so I was only writing in the market I wanted to publish in. Or something like that. The four fantasy novels, however, are all responses to ...

Ever since Hamlet had become my favorite play, I didn't want to teach it. I feared that I could never express what the play has come to mean to me, how brilliantly it works, and how strongly I feel about it. I also worried that, by exposing myself too much to one play, some of its magic would be lost. I ended up being right about all of that. When I started at Maeser, my co-worker--who taught the same curricula as I--let me know that we would teach Hamlet as part of the year's study. I was happy, for despite my misgivings, it was an exciting thing for me to experience again. It had been a couple of years since I'd seen Brian Vaughn's version, and rereading it for the class made me excited. Not two or three months earlier, I had received an email from the now-defunct bookseller Borders. It let me know that Kenneth Branagh's four-hour film version was now available on DVD. I closed my computer, told Gayle I was going out for a bit, and got in the car. After bu...

Before I got a chance to even teach Shakespeare again in school, I was asked to be a dramaturge and acting coach as Maeser prepared to go down to Cedar City for the annual high school Shakespeare Competition. The Competition ran during the first weekend of October and involved the high school students giving different renditions of monologues, duo- and trio-scenes, and an ensemble. The drama teacher, Cam Cahoon, always asked Justin for additional insights and help to get the students ready for the Competition. This year, I was asked to help. I had heard about the Competition before; my in-laws had gone to see Merchant of Venice the year before and had mentioned it. The idea of going down to see a play and help the students was exciting for me, and, since my wife could go down with me, I decided to start helping out. The two or so weeks before we left, I spent hours after school working with one of the students on her speech as Hermione from The Winter's Tale . We discussed pr...

My firstborn child came to us with half of a heart, suffering from a condition known as hypoplastic right heart syndrome. Through the course of the first six months of his life, we spent countless hours in the hospital, running tests, and carrying about a wired baby--plugged into his oxygen, his pulseoxymeter, or both. He nearly slid away from us on a couple of different occasions during those early months. He was born on an auspicious week, as it were. I had finished my student teaching a month or so before and had lost my potential career by this point. Despite that, I had finished college, and commencement ceremonies were to be held the last full week of April 2007. Also, my birthday was coming, and I love my birthday. I just like having the attention, I think. So, on 25 April, two days after Shakespeare's (alleged) birthday, my little boy Peter was born. I didn't get to hold him until the next day, my own birthday. The day after that, I was sitting in the McKay Events ...

Love leads to emulation. When I first started playing the guitar, I learned exclusively from a guitar/piano/vocal book of Dave Matthews Band's Under the Table and Dreaming . It gave me the rudiments of barre chords, open chords, and rhythm. I pored over that book with obsessive focus, breaking the G-string on my dad's guitar a couple of times in a single week with my enthusiastic strumming. Soon I became proficient at the simple things, moving on to more advanced fingerings, different genres of music, and--eventually--my own compositions. Those early ones, so heavily engrained in my brain, still can spring to my fingertips with precious little coaxing. And almost all of those original tunes are heavily Dave Matthews Band derivatives. The strumming patterns, the chord voicings, the tempos--they all branched out from beneath the leaves of that first book. While Shakespeare was by no means the first of my writing that became emulative (I had written my fair share of Spider-Ma...

During the time of anchorless living when my dreams of a career in writing seemed as far away as my hopes of a career in the classroom, I stumbled upon the idea of the authorship question. As I've already pointed out my major gripes with the whole bag of malarkey, let me say instead what I wish we'd focus on, rather than pointless drivel about conspiracies and centuries' old secrets. I have to fast-forward chronologically to get to this point, but I think it's a crucial one. Back in the summer of '09, the local NPR affiliate, KUER, did an hour long segment on the Antistratfordian position, citing heavy hitters like Supreme Court Justices and Mark Twain as skeptics when it came to the authenticity of Shakespeare of Stratford. In it, they interviewed for a few brief minutes Ace G. Pilkington, a frequent facilitator of conversations at the post-show discussions at the Utah Shakespeare Festival. Gayle and I had recently learned about these conversations, nestled in...

The turbulent time of 2006-07 included losing a child to a miscarriage, expecting another child a couple of months later, then learning that the new child had a potentially fatal heart defect. I was in my senior year at college and had too much going on as it was, yet I had to soldier on. January 2007 saw me in the classrooms of my youth, student teaching with two of the people who inspired me to be a teacher in the first place. When I first sat down with Greg Park to take over his sophomore English class, he pointed out the areas that were tied up with his requirements (book reports, standardized testing, and so on), then gestured to one block of time in the middle of the quarter. "You can do whatever you want here," he said. "Writing unit, another book. Whatever you want." "Do you have copies of Shakespeare?" I asked with (probably too much) enthusiasm. "Let's go look." He didn't sound thrilled, but took me anyway to where the bo...