I am heading into Week Ten, the final week, of my summer writing class and if it wasn't that I'm moving on to a whole two years of writing classes, I'd be very sad that this summer's course is over. It broke my writing open and I haven't had a chance to put it back together yet. The course was called Voice in Fiction: Style, Dialog, and Point of View, which means we focused on what writing teachers call "craft." I learned that I know very little about these things, and that it's ok, as long as I stop and think about them now and then.
Ella tried to teach Michael to knit while she's here, and his frustration at not understanding how the small movements build into a bigger whole, and our inability to describe to him how we each understand the flow of the yarn (me: it's a set of loops from top to bottom. him: what?), that's how I'm feeling about writing right now. I want to do the knitting equivalents of Fair Isle and cable and lace in my writing, but I haven't yet quite absorbed what I have to do on a word-by-word, stitch-by-stitch basis.
For the last class our teacher has asked us to answer a whole set of questions about our writing, one of which is "if it were an animal, what kind would it be." (This sounds cheesy, I know, but I trust her because all of her exercises have taken me in unexpectedly useful places). My aspiration is to cat (smooth, sleek, composed, playful, elegant, puffed up when danger approaches) but I think I'm really looking at crow (hopping around frantically in the middle of the road banging primitive tools together while making croaky noises). Which is fine. Fall semester is here and I'll be back to my daily routines and unpacking and playing with everything I've learned.
Here are two photos from my walk this week:
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| A healthily chonky woodchuck |
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| I mean, it's not not true. Not-regulated-enough capitalism got us into this mess. |
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