"orange"

Flashing my Halloween smile to Chris across the cafeteria table, I win  …orange you glad.

“On Reading On Writing Well”

                I live in the world of fiction and I don’t ever apologize about finding fiction truer than non-fiction.  Truly, I have never seen the human condition as adequately detailed in a memoir as I have in A Light in August or The Awakening.  But this book by William Zinsser has me wondering if William Faulkner and Kate Chopin pulled back the curtain for me to see such beautiful and disgusting truth because they understood and applied many of Zinsser’s rules for writing non-fiction to their works.  I read The Awakening for the first time during a summer in the Swiss Alps and, after five minutes of reading Chopin’s book, the mountains disappeared from my porch view.  I heard crickets.  I felt  mosquitoes nibbling around my neck.  I was in south Louisiana.  Zinsser dedicates Chapter 13 to writing about a place.  My favorite advice of his is “[I]f a phrase comes to you easily, look at it with deep suspicion; it’s probably one of the countless clichés that have woven their way so tightly into the fabric of travel writing that you have to make a special effort not to use them” (118).  Too many towns tend to be “nestled” and villages are too often “quaint.”  Have we ever seen an unnestled town in the hills?  There are neither quaint villages nor nestled towns in The Awakening, but Grand Isle, the beach village where Edna learns to swim and, hence, gain her independence is “delicious.”  Chopin uses “delicious” many times and because of that I often perceive independence and locations that foster independence as “delicious” too.  “Find details that are significant,” explains Zinsser.  I believe Chopin did and now I think I better understand why I so love her book.  She knows how to write about place.

                I would suggest placing On Writing Well next to your bed, under the novel you’re currently reading.   It serves me best when it is a 15 minute nightly read.  One topic to adequately digest is perfect for me.  Too much more and it becomes a textbook  read.  My all time favorite section?  Page 119 when Zinsser offers us two haunting paragraphs about place, specifically Banyan Street, written by Joan Didion.  After reading it, I realize I could never write with her fearless confidence with the written word.   Magic.  Delicious magic.

Fan letter to Dr. Vandiver

July 24, 2011

Dear Dr. Vandiver,

My students asked to read a comedy and, without flinching, I smiled and suggested Frogs—my personal favorite.  I purred the word “personal” just like you did in Lecture 23 on Greek Tragedy.  Never mind that I’d never read a comedy, never studied Aristophanes, never led a group of freshman through Ancient Literature, you dedicated five paragraphs and almost minutes to the topic.  With your voice in my head and your course guidebook on my desk, I knew my students and I would enjoy our journey to Hades as Dionysus sought a great tragedian to save Athens.  Dionysus needed Aeschylus to save his beleaguered, war weary city; I needed you.

I needed you from October to June, from The Iliad to the The Aeneid with months of The Odyssey, Greek Tragedies, and a touch of comedy in between.  During this time I possessed rare moments of original thought; surprisingly though, I could not only recite key passages in Greek, but I would shake my head with distress over poorly translated key passages.  Mênin aeide, thea, the first three words of The Iliad, introduced my maiden lecture on the text.  I had heard you say those three words on lecture three entitled “Glory, Honor, and the Wrath of Achilles” so often that my car’s CD player sometimes skipped at that point; I always wanted it to be repeated so that I might say with you, say it as you.  

As long as you provided a lecture for the day’s topic, we often sounded wonderful.  Your words, my flying hands, your organized outline.  Our success continued with The Odyssey, particularly in Book IX when I challenged the students to decide whether or not Penelope knew that the beggar was indeed her missing husband of 10 years, her beloved Odysseus.  We dedicated an entire class to a textual debate on the subject.  Surely you remember Lecture Nine, “Odysseus and Penelope,” where Penelope shares her dream of an eagle killing her pet geese and then asks the beggar for his interpretation of the dream.  Some swore this proved she knew and she was speaking code, asking him if he planned to kill the gaggle of suitors.  But vehement students pointed to her weeping over Odysseus that evening in her room to prove she didn’t know.  The “she didn’t knows” won.  I fretted over this decision; there were right, weren’t they?

Your students at the University of Maryland acted out one scene from a Greek tragedy; my students at Coeur d’Alene Charter Academy recreated an entire tragedy of their choice.  I should have followed your lead more closely.  After one week of three Medeas murdering Barbie dolls, baby dolls, or doll-faced freshman girls we all needed occasion to hear Aristophanes poke fun of tragedy. 

Alas, I was hired two years ago with the primary directive of creating a French program.  It was fated that French instruction would someday supplant my English classes.   Our French program has grown to the point where, this September, I will no longer be teaching Ancient Lit.   Please know that I will miss our daily diatribe on ancient literature as “an enduring form of dramatic literature that remains powerful today.”  I will miss your polumêtis; Dr. Vandiver, I will miss you.  In our daily travels from Spokane to Coeur d’Alene, I followed you from Troy to Ithaca to Hades to Thebes to Hades to Carthage to Hades to Rome.  Thank you for the ride.

Your xenos,

Lynda LeBlanc, D.A.

English and French

Coeur d’Alene Charter Academy

Top 10 Takeaways for the Act of Revision

1.     Students profit best from writing when teachers emphasize more than one writing strategy, and consequently more than one way to revise.

2.    Model asking questions about a text.  This encourages the student to ask him/herself questions about his/her text.  This effectively guides the student to revise his own work before asking help of others.

3.    Conferencing between the students and teacher is at the heart of the writing workshop and necessary to help students become critical readers of their own texts.

4.    There are different kinds of conferences, each with its own goal:  content conference (What do you think of the protagonist?) design conferences (Why did you decide to start your draft this way?), process conference (What problems did you run into while you were gathering entries?), evaluation conferences (What do you think of your essay?)

5.    One step of writing steps does not lead to everyone’s best writing.

6.    The process model is still helpful, for it gives teacher and student a common way of looking at writing, a logical procedure which can be adapted to the needs of the student once it is understood.

7.    Students like writing notes when someone answers.

8.    The spoken word cannot be revised.

9.    The four revision operations include:  deletion, substitution, addition, and reordering.

10.  The four levels of revision include:  words, phrases, sentences, and theme (idea).

"What She Can Do"

Listens completely.

Learns best from others’ words. 

Supports her community in listening too

Questions, many questions

Grandma, were you a good student in school?

What did you want to be?

When Grandpa dies, where do you want to live?

 in the car, at the table, on the phone

Smiles gently, sincerely

Hugs generously

Loves completely

Flowers daily

Camille

Response to Linda Rief's article, "What's Right with Writing"

                At this stage in our writing program, I finally feel I’m not learning new information and am much delighted to recognize the oft stated necessary components for a successful writer’s workshop.   My program is literature heavy, my one area of genuine competency in cultivating a writing friendly environment.  Otherwise, I’ve developed a woefully dry program.  The students write academic essays and poems and short stories, but only the final product is graded.  As one who advocates therapeutic writing, I’ve experienced the understanding that accompanies writing.  I’ve often given writing activities that haven’t been graded, so I suppose I also know at some level the value of process.  Rief addresses the necessity for all these components.  What Rief doesn’t mention in her article that Calkins does and what I consider a clinch to a successful program is predictability and consistency.  Truly I have dedicated the last two years to understanding my population, studying how they think, and addressing what they lack.  I have also been busy learning my curriculum.  Like so many at Charter, I have been an exciting force in my students’ academic career and many tell me they love literature.  Too few have told me they love to write.  I should have heard what was not being said, but I was so constantly and often overwhelmingly busy that I didn’t make room for listening to that void.  It is indeed a treat to hear such diverse and valuable workshops; they become the lollipops in the store window.  I want this one and that one.  I also find it valuable to read the research that supports Reid’s perfect writing program.  I wonder.  I am slowly gaining mastery in recognizing key components of a writing program.  Recognition only.  How might I best hone what I consider the two key ingredients in a writer’s workshop, consistency  and predictability?  Quiet preparation.  Unfortunately, that must come after our workshop has concluded. 

poem "I am"

I am from Tony Chachere’s: black, white, and cayenne pepper mixed with salt,

settled near the greasy stove and a simmering smothered steak

and a black iron skillet on the back burner and chilly beers inside the fridge.

I am from that meager Cajun cottage kindly cooled by father water oak,

last house on the left of Broussard Street; only we not Broussard’s brood.

But I am also from Mama Cates’ carefully pruned camellia bushes

and her magnolia tree, like my grandmother herself, sharp fragrance like a brown liquided Estee Lauder .

Tree limbs remain for those who live at her house on Sunny Lane, though my Mama Cates’s are long gone

as are her Sunday dinners on fine white china we women washed by hand

 and the senior Quoyesers’ Sunday visits, their two olive martinis.  

I’m from “my dance card was always full” and “I wasn’t a wallflower.”

I danced too, Mama Cates, and I flowered from your love

but I’m no Nawlins girl.

I’m from sweating and two stepping and swilling beer at Grant Street Dance Hall,

swirling to Chenier, to Buckwheat, Beausoleil and T.K Hulin.

I love your crawfish bisque in china gumbo bowls, but my soul needs boiled crawfish on my baby brother’s cool carport.

Folding tables dressed with yesterday’s Daily Advertiser

He feeds us as you did.

One streetlight Maurice and civilized southside Lafayette; two sides, one Cajun girl, I am.