Looking back, or ahead: opening day assignment

The 13th week of class is the time to harangue now-familiar students to get cracking on those research-paper rough drafts, most definitely not the time for recapping the semester's beginning assignment. And yet, as always, I find myself about this time looking ahead (my own procrastination strategy), looking forward to the fresh start that January will bring with its rosters of strangers' names.

Classmate snapshot (original version). Pick a representative moment in yr life, a tiny slice no more than a minute or two that captures some aspect of yr life or personality that you'd like to share. Maybe you were driving through Dunkin Donuts this morning for yr daily French vanilla iced coffee, singing along to whoever-it-is on yr car stereo, as you drove up to the window momentarily embarrassed at the mound of crumpled McDonald's bags on the floor of yr car. Maybe you were sitting on yr new overstuffed couch at 2 am,  watching Casablanca for the thirty-eighth time, with a tub of pistachio ice cream on yr lap. Maybe you were standing at the kitchen stove trying to cook, with yr two-year-old clinging to yr knees and yr preschoolers tearing lettuce at the kitchen table. (Contrary to my own obsessions, food need not be involved.) Maybe you were at work. What were you doing? Who else was there? What do yr surroundings look like? Or maybe you're involved in one of yr many hobbies. Imagine this moment as a snapshot (or a very short clip of film).

Now pair up with another student. Introduce yourselves. Each of you must interview the other, asking about his/her snapshot moment. If the snapshot is not clear in yr mind, ask questions to sharpen the picture. Take notes. Remember the tools of the fiction writer: setting, character, action, dialogue (a line or two can "snap" a character into life). For homework, write one paragraph that gives the reader this snapshot of yr classmate in words. (If you get home and find that yr paragraph is thin and skimpy, make something up.)

Goals.

• to get students talking to each other
• to get an initial portrait gallery of the class (for semesters when I'm using a CMS or blogs, I ask students to post these paragraphs--so useful for orientation to technology involved as well)
• to obtain initial writing sample for informal assessment of writing "levels"
• to talk about specific details (evaluating which details are "best," i.e., most revealing) , showing not telling, revision, and all that beginning-of-semester jazz (to be reprised throughout)

Classmate snapshot (most recent version): Same as above, except now you must be engaged in the writing process. This need not be in school (in fact, I'd encourage you to think of any personally meaningful writing you've done, recently or from sometime in yr childhood, or you may choose some writing that's a routine part of yr life): text-messages on yr cell phone, letters to yr brother or sister in Iraq, IMs on computer, grocery lists, journal entries or song lyrics, notes during study hall (or class), writing assignments that were especially challenging or rewarding or successful, orders jotted down during yr shift at the diner or some other work-related writing, letters to Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. Be sure to include details about the medium and/or writing utensils involved, the occasion for the writing, the intended audience, yr feelings while writing, something of yr process as you composed, yr surroundings, perhaps a snippet or two of quotation as you remember or imagine.

In the midst of my stacks of essays to grade, I need to remember that I too write, wrote, have written, and I assign myself the snapshot-of-writer assignment:

At Hollins I would sit in the dim Rathskellar, at one of the widely spaced square pine tables, kitty-cornered from my friend Ellen. She was working on short stories about a woman I took to be her mother, of aristocratic Kentucky horse-people stock but married now to a wealthy Chicago lawyer, the type of woman who posed on the plantation porch in billowing, white nightgown, sipping mint juleps for breakfast (or at least that's what how I remember it), a woman fragile and unstable in some mysterious way her character-daughter couldn't understand. I was writing thinly disguised family history about my great-grandfather who immigrated from Sweden, a carpenter and poet and state legislator, who in the days before WWII brought home an entire German band for my great-grandmother to feed; my great-aunt, married in late middle-age to a man who fondled my mother's teenaged breasts and eventually committed suicide; my flapper-grandmother, who got pregnant, then married, at eighteen and divorced by twenty-two, who worked in an office to buy the fashionable clothes and costume jewelry her second husband said they couldn't afford, who delighted her grandchildren with her handmade angel and tomte Christmas ornaments, her spun-sugar Easter eggs filled with woodland scenes, her off-key voice husky from vodka singing Swedish songs that lilted something about hey hop min lilla socker top. We wrote on yellow legal pads, Ellen with a pencil, me with a black cartridge pen that stained my fingers after a few minutes' use. We didn't talk much, but found each other's presence helpful in keeping us writing. Occasionally the same image would pop up in each of our stories. The one I remember is a blue pin made from a butterfly's wing.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *

Leaning carefully over the hot radiator in the kitchen, I pull off a scroll of shopping-list paper from my mother's wooden spool. The next night will be my mother's Brownie night, and it is my turn to cook supper. The battered Betty Crocker's cookbook lies open on the kitchen table. The blank shopping list curls up, frustratingly, until I slid the top edge under the cookbook. I sit cross-legged on my mother's chair, the one closest to the sink and the stove in our cramped kitchen, and write down a list of ingredients: ground beef (to be ordered from a real-life butcher, who will weigh it out and wrap it in waxy, white paper), cheese (a block of Monterey Jack--these are the days before shredded cheese and all the other immoral shortcuts that fill today's supermarkets), tomato sauce. I have never tasted a taco or a burrito or a chalupa, but seduced by cosmopolitan Betty Crocker, I will attempt to make enchilladas.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *

My Form and Theory of Poetry teacher has told us to write a sonnet. I am sitting in my forest-green study on a bright blue kitchen chair at my favorite desk of all time, an unfinished door set up on two short file-cabinets. Behind me is the olive-green-and-yellow floral pull-out couch where I've started sleeping, rather than my bedroom upstairs furnished only with by Sears mattress on the bare floor, my clothes folded on the bricks-and-boards bookcase: graduate student living in all its rag-tag freedom. In front of me are blank paper, a rhyming dictionary bought for the assignment, and the stack of computer punchcards that I use to track my calorie count for the day, the number of miles I swim and walk, and, now, the time spent on this assignment, which will finally total, for fourteen lines, forty hours. For the first time I understand how the form of the poem gives me ideas and shapes what I can say. I fall into a concentration where time seems to pass magically as I puzzle out my poem:

THE NATURALIST OFFERS A DEFENSE
Though knowledge may console, I've found that, lit
by sorrow, real or conured neon scars,
it doesn't help to know the way things fit
together: double helix, patterned stars,
or urban grid of cells, their elegance
beyond belief. Better I find to seek
the maudlin, crazed connectives: somber dance
of insect caught in web, syrupy reek
of rotting lily, sudden swoop of hawk
against the bricks. It seems, as ruin arrives,
we manage to find, mute as weather rock,
an emblem for our frail and ciphered lives.

     For this we need to know of natural things:
     hollow bones of birds, easily broken wings.

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