Craft Notes: “Once More to the Lake” by E.B. White

a.      Techniques: immersion into the experience. He paints vivid images as soon as the piece begins, but not before he puts it in context. Summarization  - quick summaries of backstory to be developed later. He picks out the most minute details like the dragonfly and a fork and a bait box and gives special meaning to them.

b.      Voice: Open and honest. He lets us into the process of remembering and re-finding the place. He lets us into his mind and what he’s thinking and how he feels like his father.

c.       Telling: He tells at the very beginning. It is interesting enough to keep me focused for the second sentence, which contrasts the telling with vivid imagery. “I felt dizzy and didn’t know what rod I was at the end of.” He tells there, but it is such a bizarre statement that it engages us.

d.      Form: simple paragraph form, but each paragraph serves a purpose. 1-Backstory, 2,-remembering, 3-lake description, 4-I am my father, 5-Lack of passed time, 6-trusting the lake, 7-changes, 8-painting the town, 9-travel, 10-boat memories, 11-father-son adventures, 12-storm description, 13-Feeling the feels of his son. The middle to end sections give less poignant insight like deciding that he is his father, but give us more details and imageryo the entire endeavor, so by the end paragraph when he makes the final connection to being his son, we have a very vivid picture placed within a larger scene we can also place.

e.      Weird and cool stuff: He doesn’t mention that there are other campers at the camp except in passing during paragraph 6. No mention of his wife or other family members. “The waitresses were still 15,” he doesn’t specify that certain things are false or imagined. “No loud wonderful fuss about trunks.”

f.        Q’s: The piece is separated into general sections of back-story, meaning and insight, and imagery and description. Which section was your favorite? Could I have stood alone or how does it rely on the other parts?

What was the value of leaving out other family details? Leaving other campers until certain points of the text and mentioning them in passing? Do we get a greater (but false?) sense of their solitude?

g.      Write about: A time or place where/when you felt like you were living in another person’s shoes, associating your actions with someone else’s, just as White associates all his actions with either his father or his son. Think of places once dominated by someone close to you that you now dominate or fill. 

Craft Notes: ‘The American Man, Age Ten,’ by Suzanne Orlean, from “The New Kings of Nonfiction” by Ira Glass.

a.      Structure: Moves from the kid-life immersion experience writing style to a writing style that references Colin as a child, to an analysis section where Susan begins to put meaning with the way Colin lives his life, and then moves to a research based section where her research on various subjects like Street Fight II inform her points of meaning, but then she goes back to the kid-style writing again to show that kids can’t hold onto this deep stuff for too long.

b.      Voice: Mixes the voice between her own and Colin’s. There are key places (the opening parahraph) that are written from his voice, then there are analysis pieces and more reflective sections that Susan writes in her own voice, which is a voice of contemplative amusement—looking at his life quizzically.

c.       Telling: A lot of the telling she did was about statistics for boys, games, etc. It was clearly not image-provoking, but it was interesting and held my attention.

d.      Style: Some of the story seems to be written like a research paper on children and others like a personal essay and others like a journalism piece. The parts where she reports on what the teacher and the students do and includes interviews with the kids and their opinions on matters are like journalism. Whereas the parts where she uses data and knowledge that she wouldn’t know otherwise is clearly research based and even has a thesis aura to it sometimes. And then the parts where includes herself in the story seems like personal essay.

e.      I will take from this the skill of writing from a different voice. I’ve never tried that before, and now I think it might be cool to write from my Dad’s voice on a short part of my long piece.

f.        Qs: Why the reference to sex in the first paragraph? That was just bizarre to me. I didn’t want to think about a grown woman and a child having sex, even if she was negating the idea. Such a weird part of the intro. And did she use specific phrases from Colin’s repertoire to master coining his voice?

Craft Notes: ‘The Hostess Diaries: My Year at a Hotspot,’ by Coco Henson Scales from “The New Kings of Nonfiction” by Ira Glass

a.      Tone: Blunt and open. Not afraid to negatively portray herself. Tells it like a dramatic story, like casual story-talk.

b.      Images: Gives us a great image of the restaurant, the first and second floors, the outside door, the bouncer. Then when something exciting happens, she doesn’t waste time describing the places; she knows we already have the images of place in our heads.

c.       Form: Intro scene; Star Jones story; first getting the job and back-story; importance of clothes (with Naomi); the Bush Daughters; Leaving: six sections.

d.      Meaning: There doesn’t seem to be some inherent meaning or moral to the stories here. They are interesting and a good read. They keep our interest and give us insight into her life. If anything, we see a young and immature woman decide that she must move on and grow up.

e.      I will take from this the idea of writing a story as an insight into my life, not necessarily a moral or a lesson that must come out of it.

f.        Qs: What does she do now? Is she prolific and experienced as a writer, or did she stay in the pop culture scene? This would give it more meaning for me.

Freewrite: Ironing Board

Blue Folding ironing board, folded haphazardly against the wall. I would leave for the banquet soon. I needed my red dress shirt.Mom scurried downstairs with that oversized red shirt, popped open the ironing board, heated up the iron, and got to work.

            “Anyone else need something ironed while I’m down here?” she would yell up the stairs, but no one ever responded. Dad kept on his ‘Red Nose Run’ t-shirt and pulled a burgundy sweater over top. Kayla would put on all her makeup at once, and Mom would where black dress pants and a work shirt.

            She finished spraying the shirt with the purple and clear water bottle. 

Freewrite: Burgers

I was flipping burgers with the arm-length metal spatula, scooping them onto to warming grill to keep for just 2 minutes. I fried spicy and home-style chicken, six chickens to a basket, and then down into the greasy oils it went. Every hour, I placed new potatoes, wrapped in tin foil, into the industrial oven. I made six pans of bacon whenever we were running low, and helped put down fries and chicken nuggets when the fry-guy was getting slammed. No one needed to help me though; I had a system.

            That system entailed keeping the burgers on the heating grill for up to five times longer than regulation decreed, but it worked. I kept at least four junior and four single patties on the grill at all times—double that when the rush came in, and triple that when a sports team came through. But sometimes it was impossible to tell when I’d need more burgers. I’d be chilling out with my usual four-count of burgers around 2:30 (that middle time when no one comes for lunch or dinner), and some carful of teenage boys would come through the drive through and order 16 junior cheeseburgers. I didn’t like having to tell people to wait.

            When there weren’t any customers to serve or potatoes to bake or chickens to fry, I was supposed to throw water on all the grills and scrape the grease off them, but instead I just listened to people. Cassidy always seemed to have such a dramatic life for living out in the country. Once, I heard her yelling out the second drive-thru window at a customer and then ran back into the freezer bawling. Apparently someone had broken into her house and killed her dog. 

Place Prewrites: Places that are gone.

a.      I used to have teal blankets on my twin bed. I used to cuddle up under them with my Winnie the Pooh as you sat next to me. We used to read about Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever, every night. You would read. I would listen under my fuzzy teal covers.

      Sometimes after we finished the chapter, you’d stay with me in bed, and I’d curl into a ball and you’d curl around me. I always faced away from you. One night, after an especially emotional chapter, I realized that I slept turning away from you every night. I ran downstairs to find you and mom at the kitchen table doing bills. I told you both I loved you, and that when I slept turned away from you, it didn't mean I didn't want you there. You understood. But pretty soon, you stopped sleeping there anyway.

b.      We had the coolest treehouse in town. On top of a giant think tree in our backyard, stood a wooden castle, complete with a tent-style tarp roof, trapdoor leading to the metal ladder, front castle doors leading to the climbing net, and the two metal slides. The problem with the metal slides is that they were combined into one big slide—end of one to the start of another. So if you were going fast enough, you would fly off the first one and land halfway down the next, which hurt pretty bad sometimes—but we didn’t care.

      We were popular back then. If anyone wanted to come over, we just said “Our house is the one with the massive castle treehouse in the back,” and they knew where to go. We had parties in it, campouts in the rain and in the snow. We had contests and taught our dog Shiloh to climb the metal ladder into the fort. Sometimes we’d open the trap door to go down, and Shiloh would be sitting right there, waiting for us to let him in.

      One time we made a whole city of boxes underneath it. We had the coolest tree fort and ground fort too! The boxes were all duck taped together so that there were tunnels leading everywhere. It took up almost our entire backyard. Some parts even had a second floor, but the second floor didn’t last long before caving in under me. That eventually came down, but we always had our treehouse.

      I don’t even remember when it came down. I remember Dad telling us it was rotting, and that it wouldn’t last much longer. I remember getting too busy with school and sports to play in it anymore, so I must have at least been in middle school. Maybe 7^th grade. I didn’t even pay attention to it until it was gone. And then it was gone, and I felt like I’d lost part of me, but I couldn’t explain it to anyone.

c.       That basement has been everything. It used to be my hideaway. I would explore the cubby hole, conceal myself in blankets. Then it was the family room. We got the big TV and the couches and watched movies and superhero shows together. When I got older, I brought my friends down there, and it became the party room. We had Yu-Gi-Oh tournaments, air hockey games, Crash Bandicoot Playstation Marathons, Pokemon trading parties. We never left that place. We would stay up for 24 hours playing against each other, sleep for the next 18, and do it again.

      My first winter break during college, I reopened up the basement, and Brandon and I watched five seasons of “Smallville” consecutively, almost never even leaving that basement even to eat. But the next time I came home for break it was different. Kayla was graduating soon, and she wanted her own apartment. The basement was hers from then on. Sometimes I’d venture down to that old spot without thinking and get kicked out, up to my own room. My friends don’t hang out there anymore—we’ve moved off to other houses, other basements full of binge playing and sleep deprivation.

      Sometimes Kayla invites me down for a Lord of the Rings marathon. 

Craft Notes: “No Man’s Land” by Eula Biss from ‘Notes from No Man’s Land’

a.      Structure: Bolded sections (8 total). Different versions of the ‘no man’s land.’

b.      Techniques: Uses a book, her past and present interpretations (fiction!). Personal encounters turned to scenes. Insights thrown in from herself and her husband.

c.       Images: At the beginning of ‘On the Border,’ she does nothing but paint an image of her Chicago and then harshly contrasts it to Evanston.

d.      Phrases: “This is what white people do to each other, they cultivate each others’ fear.” 93% of murders are by men is “mass pathology.” “These are the murders that allow us to be afraid of who we want to be afraid of.”

e.      Themes: Fear (and its infusion in our lives as violent to others); water (used as a symbol of freedom and openness, but also of fear of the unknown and being limited); Race (the divisions of race in Chicago, but in Rodger’s park not. The idea of pioneering overtop of the black citizens. Being afraid of them, which hurts them and us.).

f.        Questions: Why Little House on the Prairie? Was saying “This land belongs to God” an attempt to generalize and tie up loose ends? It seems a little too easy that way.

Craft Notes: “Black News” by Eula Biss from ‘Notes from No Man’s Land.’

a.      Techniques: Throws the reader into the story (via another story). Abrupt scene switch. Comparison of NY to San Diego. Tons of examples. Super-short summation of entire childhood. Gun as metaphor for unimportant crime of the past.

b.      Words / Phrases: “Another.” “When I wasn’t the only white person at the events…” ‘Perhaps now that we believe nurture plays at least as much a part in child development as nature, we simply take children away from black women instead of sterilizing them.’ ‘I’m not sure at exactly what point I lost heart…”

c.       Form: Loosely chronological, story-oriented. Less obvious sections. The story about Ms. Johnson carries throughout and her interjections about things as a whole appear spread throughout.

d.      I will take from this: The power of getting angry about something. The fluidity of writing when you’re vulnerable and open about the injustice you’ve seen. We’ve all seen injustice somewhere. Some of us have lost heart because we’ve seen so much. I can talk about that.

e.      Voice: Angry. Fast paced and emotional. Honest and vulnerable. Showing the loss of heart.

f.        Questions: Did she ever seek justice on her own for these people? What were the levees?

g.      Group discussion Q’s: 1. This was a very emotional and angering piece. At what point did you feel most connected emotionally to Biss and her experience? Try to give a section and then a specific quote that stood out. 2. What did you think of the weaving structure of Ms. Johnson’s story? Was it powerful done in this way? 3. What do you think the tone and voice were like? Angry, downtrodden, rebellious, critical? 4. Here we find out more about Biss’s childhood and family past than we do in all the other essays combined, and she gives it in one page length. What about this form made the background effective? What (if anything) made it hard to follow or seem dysjunct?

The Peruvian Potato: First Draft

          I sat with perfectly erect posture at the old wooden supper table. There were two sliced palta and a bag of white bread in the center—the real food was one the way. I waited alone at that table until it came, and it was potatoes. Some other edibles were present as well—a fried egg, some white rice—but mostly just potatoes. It turns out Peru had about 5000 different types of potatoes to offer me. I would probably eat about 20 of them over the next three months, and I liked some of them. The yuca potato, for instance, is a slightly sweeter and softer form of the potato that also happens to be filled with cyanide. They’re really good once you cook out the toxins.

            Sadly, we weren’t having yuca that night. We had yellow potatoes that we peeled with our fingernails (eating the skin is bad for the stomach). As a side, my host dad gave me my choice of about 10 different types of corn he’d harvested just last week from his chakra across the field. I decided to pass up the exotic purple one for some regular choclo—a starchy (yes, like potatoes) white corn. We ate in silence that first night, except to offer me seconds, and thirds, and then dessert. I found that dessert means hot tea in Peru, and oddly enough was served to me in a massive white-plastic thermos. “Oddly” because it was placed within a house with bare cement walls above the first floor, on a table of hand-carved wood, next to eggs collected that morning, and between a family that’s main income came from Celestino’s 12-hour days in the chakra and Sundays leading the small church service. And then there was the American plastic thermos. When we didn’t have any tea bags left, we just mixed cane sugar and the hot water together for flavor. It was still called dessert.

            The flood thing was actually a crazy story. In 2010, a torrential amount of rainfall hit southern Peru, about 67% more than normal—and it didn’t stop for weeks. Eventually all the nearby rivers started overflowing, which wouldn’t be too big of a problem, except that the majority of homes in rural Peru are made of adobe, a tough mixture of clay, mud, animal poop, and straw. So when the water level rose around the houses to about the first floor, they simply melted and fell apart. Over 28,000 people lost their homes during that storm. The famous Machu Picchu attraction was shut down and the government used helicopters to rescue stranded tourists. Luckily, my host family had just finished building one of the first cement houses in the town. But water levels were rising, and they had nowhere to go when the flooded river’s new course led straight into and around their house.

            They were on the roof, praying to God for help, when the members of the village church appeared on the high ground. They made a human chain leading into the raging brown river around the house. One by one, the members of my host family had jumped to join the human chain and were pulled back to the high ground. 20 people died in that flood, but the Cutipa family survived because of the people who loved them.

            People in Huacarpay and nearby Lucre lived in donated tents for months before the government built every family a one-room cement house on the other side of the river. People migrated to the new town, rebuilt adobe houses, and tried to salvage possessions, and then I showed up and ate potatoes and choclo. They’d housed Sammy Rosario for SST before me, and they’d welcome dozens more students into their home after me. I started talking, started slouching, and had my first drink of alcohol with a family I’d come to love, but I knew I was just one potato of 5000. 

Story Ideas

                  Upon reading ‘Journalist Takes to Sledding; Brings Home Tips and Tricks,’ by Quinn Brenneke on Goshen Commons, I started thinking of looking at the snow story under a different light. My first thought: interview the guys who drive the plow trucks and clear the roads for us. What was their experience? Did they have to do overtime on the extra-snowy days? Was it dangerous?

            I read a few ‘Life After Goshen’ features like ‘To Hollywood Through Goshen: Monica Sherer’ and ‘Monkey See, Monkey Mind Controls Arm’ (which was super cool!). out of these I thought: What about a Goshen grads that stayed here? What is the “just-graduated young adults” crowd like here? How are they using (or not using) their degrees to make Goshen a better place or to just make ends meet?

            I’m leaning toward the first one. I think that would be really interesting if thy are still plowing a few weeks from now.