Tuesday, June 9

On our last day together we headed to John Bryan State Park to hike and share our favorite pieces of nature-writing from the course.

"Knowing Our Place" by Barbara Kingsolver

On our last day, we'll be reading Barbara Kingsolver's essay "Knowing Our Place" from her book of essays Small Wonders.  Click here to access the pdf.

Barbara Kingsolver (1955-) American essayist, novelist, and poet raised in rural Kentucky; Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Small Wonders, Poisonwood Bible, The Bean Trees. 

"Whitefoot" by Wendell Berry

Peromyscus leucopus

Today we're going to read Wendell Berry's Whitefoot: A Story from the Center of the World, a children's book about a field mouse named Whitefoot who lives in Port William, Kentucky.   Follow this link to read it on Orion Magazine's website.

"Like humans, she lived in the little world of what she knew, for there was no other world for her to live in. But she lived at the center of her world always, and of this she had no doubt."

Today you'll write your own short story or children's book personifying a creature of your choice (remember our definition of creature - it includes plants, trees, insects, etc.).  Your short story/children's book must be at least 1 page single-spaced in length and include the following:

• a creative title 
• at least 1 picture (found on the web) 
• a well-told story (beginning, middle, end - conflict/resolution) 
• vivid details (a detailed description of the creature and you might want to conduct some research about what your creature does to eat, "play," work, sleep, etc.) 
• might include dialogue
• might include other creatures 

Source: Ausable.org

Wendell Berry (1934- ) American novelist, poet, environmental activist, cultural critic, and farmer; Sabbaths: Poems; The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays; Standing on Earth: Selected Essays; Whitefoot: A Story from the Center of the World

Instructions for Photo Books

The students' completed photo books - these will be on display at Exhibition Night Tuesday!

Thursday, June 4

For today's post, please include the following:

• recipe poem about a body of water (include some of the sounds you heard today on the water)
• at least one picture from today

Today was a wonderful day out on the water at Bell Brook Canoe; here's what we did:

Morning

watched TedTalk How Can We Listen Better?
how to write a recipe poem about water
traveled to Bell Brook Canoe 

Afternoon

traveled back to DRSS to finish lunch

wrote recipe poems 

worked on blogs 

"To Make a Prairie" by Emily Dickinson

Recipe or poem? Emily Dickinson’s recipe for “Cocoa Nut” cake. 445B: courtesy of Amherst College Archives and Special Collections by permission of the Trustees of Amherst College.

To Make a Prairie 

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, 

One clover, and a bee. 

And revery. 

The revery alone will do, 

If bees are few.

Today, you'll use Emily Dickinson's poem as a model for your own recipe poem about a body of water.  Click here and follow the directions for writing a recipe poem.

Source: Illinois.English.edu

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) Amherst, Massachusetts; poet; wrote nearly 1800 poems during her lifetime

Wednesday, June 3

For today's post, please include the following:

• a brief description of a vignette 
• your practice vignette using Kris's picture during the workshop
• the picture of your creature, taken at Cox last week
• the vignette for your creature

Click here if you'd like to look at Kris's vignette workshop PPT

Today we'll be reading two chapters from Farley Mowat's Never Cry Wolf and watching the 1983 film with the same name.  In the book and movie, a biologist travels to the Canadian wilderness to investigate whether the wolves have been hunting the caribou. He discovers that the menacing wolf is not what it seems.

 

• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9

Tuesday, June 2

For today's post, choose one event from today and compose a piece of writing that includes the following components of nature-writing:

- observations (what did you see, hear, smell, feel, taste, etc.?) 
- meanings (personification, simile, metaphor, symbolism, connections/relationships, imagery) 
- delivery (poetry, prose, reflection, narrative, etc.) 

Be sure to include pictures! 

It was another chilly, cloudy day, but that didn't keep us from having a great day out in the woods and on the water:

Morning
read an excerpt from "The Ponds" by Thoreau
traveled to Eastwood MetroPark for hiking a section of the Buckeye Trail and kayaking
lunch @ Eastwood

Afternoon

worked on blogs

"The Ponds" by Henry David Thoreau

Excerpt from “The Ponds” in Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (pgs. 128-129, 131-133)

“A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature.  It is earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.  The fluviatile[a] trees next the shore are the slender eyelashes which fringe it, and the wooded hills and cliffs around are its overhanging brows.

“Standing on the smooth sandy beach at the east end of the pond, in a calm September afternoon, when a slight haze makes the opposite shore-line indistinct, I have seen whence came the expression, ‘the glassy surface of a lake.’ When you invert your head, it looks like a thread of finest gossamer stretched across the valley, and gleaming against the distant pine woods, separating one stratum of the atmosphere from another.  You would think you could walk dry under it to the opposite hills, and that the swallows which skim over might perch on it.  Indeed, they sometimes dive below the lines, as it were by mistake, and are undeceived.  As you look over the pond westward you are obliged to employ both your hands to defend your eyes against the reflected as well as the true sun, for they are equally bright; and if, between the two, you survey its surface critically, it is literally as smooth as glass, except where the skater insects, at equal intervals scattered over its whole intent, by their motions in the sun produce the finest imaginable sparkle on it, or, perchance, a duck plumes itself, or, as I have said, a swallow skims so low as to touch it.  It may be that in the distance a fish describes an arc of three or four feet in the air, and there is one bright flash where it emerges, and another where it strikes the water; sometimes the whole silvery arc is revealed; or here and there, perhaps, is a thistle-down floating on its surface, which the fishes dart at and so dimple it again.  It is like molten glass cooled but not congealed, and the few motes in it are pure and beautiful like the imperfections in glass.  You may often detect a yet smoother and darker water, separated from the rest of it by an invisible cobweb, boom of the water nymphs, resting on it.  From a hilltop you can see a fish leap in almost any part; for not a pickerel or shiner picks an insect from this smooth surface but it manifestly disturbs the equilibrium of the whole lake.  It is wonderful with what elaborateness this simple fact is advertised, -- this piscine[b] murder will out, -- and from my distant perch I distinguish the circling undulations when they are a half a dozen rods in diameter.  You can even detect a water bug (Gyrinus) ceaselessly progressing over the smooth surface a quarter of a mile off; for they furrow the water slightly, making a conspicuous ripple bounded by two diverging lines, but the skaters glide over it without rippling it perceptibly.  When the surface is considerably agitated there are no skaters nor water-bugs on it, but apparently, in calm days, they leave their havens and adventurously glide forth from the shore by short impulses till they completely cover it.   It is a shooting employment, one of those fine days in the fall when all the warmth of the sun is fully appreciated, to sit on a stump on such a height as this, over-looking the pond, and study the dimpling circles which are incessantly inscribed on its otherwise invisible surface amid the reflected skies and trees.  Over this great expanse there is no disturbance but it is thus at once gently soothed away and assuaged, as, when a vase of water is jarred, the trembling leap or an insect fall on the pond but it is thus reported in welling up of its fountain, the gently pulsing of its life, the heaving of its breast.  The thrills of joy and thrills of pain are undistinguishable.  How peaceful the phenomena of the lake! Again the works of man shine as in spring.  Ay, every leaf and twig and stone and cobweb sparkles now at mid-afternoon as when covered with dew in a spring morning.  Every motion of an oar or an insect produces a flash of light; and if an oar falls, how sweet the echo!...

“When I first paddled a boat on Walden, it was completely surrounded by thick and lofty pine and oak woods, and in some of its coves grape-vines had run over the trees next the water and formed bowers under which a boat could pass.  The hills which form its shores are so steep, and the woods on them were then so high that, as you looked down from the west end, it had the appearance of an amphitheatre for some kind of sylvan spectacle.  I have spent many an hour when I was younger, floating over its surface as the zephyr [or wind] willed, having paddled my boat to the middle, and lying on my back across the seats, in a summer forenoon, dreaming awake, until I was aroused by the boat touching the sand, and I arose to see what shore my fates had impelled me to; days when idleness was the most attractive and productive industry.  Many a forenoon have I stolen away, preferring to spend thus the most valued part of the day; for I was rich, if not in money, in sunny hours and summer days, and spent them lavishly; nor do I regret that I did not waste more of them in the workshop or the teacher’s desk.  But since I left those shores the woodchoppers have still further laid them waste, and now for many a year there will be no more rambling through the aisles of the wood, with occasional vistas through which you see the water.  My Muse may be excused if she is silent henceforth.  How can you expect the birds to sing when their groves are cut down? 

“Now the trunks of trees on the bottom, and the old log canoe, and the dark surrounding woods, are gone, and the villagers, who scarcely know where it lies, instead of going to the pond to bathe or drink, are thinking to bring its water, which should be as sacred as the Ganges[c] at least, to the village in a pipe, to wash their dishes with! – to earn their Walden by the turning of a cock or drawing a plug!  That devilish Iron Horse[d], whose ear-rending neigh is heard throughout the town, has muddied the Boiling Spring[e] with his foot, and it is that has browsed off all the woods on Walden shore, that Trojan horse, with a thousand men in his belly, introduced by mercenary Greeks![f]  Where is the country’s champion, the Moore of Moore-Hall[g], to meet him at the Deep Cut[h] and thrust an avenging lance between the ribs of the bloated pest?

“Nevertheless, of all the characters I have known, perhaps Walden wears best, and best preserves its purity.   Many men have been likened to it, but few deserve that honor.  Though the woodchoppers have laid bare first this shore and then that, and the Irish have built their sties by it, and the railroad has infringed on its border, and the ice-men have skimmed it once, it itself unchanged, the same water which my youthful eyes fell on; all the change is in me.  It has not acquired one wrinkle after all its ripples.  It is perennially young, and I may stand and see a swallow dip apparently to pick an insect from its surface as of yore.  It struck me again tonight, as if I had not see it almost daily for more than twenty years, -- Why, here is Walden, the same woodland lake that I discovered so many years ago; where a forest was cut down last winter another is springing up by its shore as lustily as ever; the same thought is welling up to its surface that was then; it is the same liquid joy and happiness to itself and its Maker, ay, and it may be to me.  It is the work of a brave man surely, in whom there was no guile! He rounded this water with his hand, deepened and clarified it, in his though, and in his will bequeathed it to Concord.  I see by its face that it is visited by the same reflection; and I can almost say, Walden, is it you?

“It is no dream of mine,

To ornament a line;

I cannot come nearer to God and Heaven

Than I live to Walden even.

I am its stony shore,

And the breeze that passes o'er;

In the hollow of my hand

Are its water and its sand,

And its deepest resort

Lies high in my thought.”

---

[a] Of, found in, or produced by the river

[b] Of or concerning, fish

[c] river in northern India, sacred to Hindus

[d] steam locomotive

[e] popular spring of Walden Woods that was sold for water rights in 1844 for the Fitchburg railroad

[f] tale from the Trojan War about the deception the Greeks used to enter the city of Troy and win the war

[g] hero of an English ballad, who killed a dragon

[h] The "Deep Cut" is the route of the Fitchburg Railroad, described by Thoreau as "about a quarter of a mile long  — and thirty or forty feet deep"

Source: Wikipedia.org

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) Concord, Massachusetts; American poet/writer, abolitionist, transcendentalist, naturalist; Wrote Walden: Life in the Woods about his year in a one-room cabin on Walden Pond