Tuesday, June 29, 2010

The First Ruler: Part 1

Alice C. Linsley



Dear Grandchildren,

I promised to tell you the story of the first ruler and so I shall. It is a strange tale about a time so far in the past that there may be parts that can’t be told, at least not until we learn more about the Firstlings. You mustn’t think that I actually lived in those days. Really I’m not THAT old, though doubtless I seem ancient to you.

One day you’ll recognize that this story is more than a great adventure. It is a window through which you will glimpse a world that only the best science – the study of Mankind – is capable of describing. That study is called Anthropology and perhaps one day you will take it up and make a great contribution to our store of knowledge. Until then, let us simply enjoy looking through the window at the Firstling who was called Ra, the father of the first ruler.

You probably are wondering where he lived. It wasn’t a place like where you live. It was more like a very big garden. There were trees of many kinds and flowers such as we’ve never seen with huge fragrant blossoms. There were lakes, rivers, streams, marshlands, ponds, springs and salt water inlets. The mountains were very high in those days and the peaks were covered with snow and often wreathed with swirling fog.

Ra lived not far from the sea, well above the inlet since he knew that water ways overflow their banks after heavy rains. A craggy mountain towered over his pleasant valley, but he never ventured there. That was a place of great mystery and too close to the high heaven, a place where one might intrude upon the High God, and Ra was a cautious man. That is not to say that he was a coward or a fearful man. When faced with danger he had shown himself quite capable of self-defense. He had killed cobras and driven away lions. He had explored unknown lands beyond his valley,  even land belonging to the Southlanders. He had saved himself from the great river beast with sharp teeth. He had even fought and won in combat against a man who had entered his cave to steal his wife.

Ra was very protective of his wife. Her name was Ha. She was also his half-sister and the only remaining member of their family. Their father and his two wives had been attacked by Firstlings from Southland. Ra and his wife had scarcely escaped. They ran and ran until they reached the cave where they now lived and they hid themselves there for days. The Southlanders had never come after them.

When Ra returned to where his family had lived, he found his father dead with his face in the dirt. One of his wives, Ha’s mother, sat beside her dead husband. Her eyes were blank as if she were dead too, but she was alive. Ra spoke to her, urging her to get up. He would take her to live with him, but she never moved and never spoke. He brought her water, but she never drank. Finally, he left her alone and buried his father.

When he had finished with that sad job, he returned to Ha’s mother and lifted her from the ground. He began to carry her to a safer place, away from the scent of blood which was attracting the fierce beasts. Ra could see that she didn’t want to go on living and he didn’t know what to say to her, so he prayed:

“Father, here sits the wife of my father and she will not move. Breathe your life into her so she will return to the land of the living. If not, I will have to abandon her for I can’t leave Ha alone now that her time is near.”

Then Ra sat down and waited. He knew that just because he asked for something to be done that didn’t mean that the High God would do it just like that. No, Ra knew that the High God did everything the right way, and Ra didn’t always know what was the right way to do things. So he waited, and while he waited he spoke to Ha’s mother, telling her how Ha was soon to have a child. This would surely rouse the woman, but it did not. So Ra began to build a small platform in one of the trees close to the nearby cliffs. The cliff gave protection from the wind and rain. Then he gathered fruits, berries and roots and wrapped them in leaves. He found an ostrich egg and placed it on the platform with the fruit. He wove banana leaves together to create a pouch and filled the pouch with water. Then he lifted Ha’s mother and put her on the platform. That’s were he left her. Two days had passed and he could wait no more.

“Goodbye, wife of my father. May the High God be with you. I must go back to Ha. She is going to have a child.”

So it was that Ra returned to his wife with news of her mother. When Ha heard how her mother had not spoken, eaten or taken any water, she told her husband that her mother’s spirit was going to leave. Then she cried and after she cried, she thanked her husband for making her mother safe until the time when she would die.

Now Ra had a son and he was determined that his son would help him to re-establish his people in this very valley which Ra and his father believed had been given to them by the High God. Ra’s son was named Ka and he would become the first ruler. He’s the one I’m going to tell you about, and you must think long and hard about what I’m going to tell you. There are many good lessons here that are never taught in school.

Your loving Grandmother


Part 2

Thursday, June 24, 2010

Naming Fictional Characters

Much thought must go into finding just the right name for a fictional character. Naming a character is like naming the new baby.

Names are more important than one might think. An ideal name will fit a character like a shoe fits a foot, a wrong name is like an off-note on the music scale. What if Scarlet O’Hara had been called Myrtle O’Hara, or Huckleberry Finn had been called Strawberry Jones? Names carry with them a specific history and connotations about a character’s personality.

Read more at Suite101: Naming Fictional Characters: Finding the Best First Name and Surname for your Characters http://writingfiction.suite101.com/article.cfm/naming_fictional_characters#ixzz0rpMIOm9R

I'm working on a piece of fiction in which all the characters have one syllable names and no surnames. It is about the first people on Earth who I call the Firstlings. I wouldn't have guessed the challenge of coming up with meaningful one-syllable names!

Monday, June 21, 2010

To Kill a Mockingbird: 50 years of Magic

To Kill a Mockingbird is a magical book. That is the word. From the moment of its publication 50 years ago it radiated magic. To this day you may with confidence place it in the hands of anyone, anywhere, of any age, race or gender and know that if they do not love it, they have missed something transcendent.

The first thing to be said to clarify the magic is that its portrayal of childhood is wonderful. I mean this not as a stock word of praise from an author afraid of blundering stylistically if he writes “magical” again. I mean it literally: Mockingbird captures the wonder of childhood.

Once Scout and Jem befriend the visiting Dill, their familiar world cracks open with a series of delightful fissures caused not by the shattering impact of evil, though it surrounds them, but because it is expanding wonderfully and must do so. They are able to have a series of new adventures undreamed of before it all started yet somehow perfectly natural once they are happening. And this, to me, is one of the outstanding features of a good childhood.

I should interject autobiographically that I was fortunate enough to have a happy childhood including reading many books whose spell never entirely faded. Mockingbird was not among them, and when I first read it in my early 30s I was inclined to add to my very short list of regrets about my life that I didn’t read it as a kid. Try as we might to become again as little children, almost nothing that happens to us as adults seems to have that luminous quality of immanence that pervades a happy childhood, where every day or week may bring some new, unexpected wonder larger and richer than we have yet experienced.

On reflection I’ve changed my mind on that point. Part of the magic of the book for me when I did read it was its uncanny capacity to conjure up overpowering flashes of childhood (including the plan to lay out lemon drops that Boo Radley would follow “like an ant”). I believe I relished these far more for being an adult.

If all the book did was remind you of what childhood excitement felt like it might be at best a minor classic. But it did far more. It made sense of that excitement.

Mockingbird has had its share of detractors. Not just racists who objected to its obvious and compelling refutation of their position but critics and other authors who found it childish, naive, unworthy of study. At the risk of seeming all these things myself, I would suggest that their real problem is that the book is hopeful.

When a Virginia school board was considering banning it as “immoral literature” in 1966, Harper Lee wrote a stinging letter to the editor whose key passage was “Surely it is plain to the simplest intelligence that ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ spells out in words of seldom more than two syllables a code of honor and conduct, Christian in its ethic, that is the heritage of all Southerners.”

That response underlines the two key reasons the book is so important. From an American, and especially southern American perspective, the book is an act of statesmanship. Not some Yankee ridiculing of mean rednecks, it was a key part of the redemption of the South, a reminder that however deep the currents of racism might run, there were other currents deeper still (a magic from before the beginning of time, one might even say) that were incompatible with it.

Generations of southerners, including Confederate soldiers, might have been at once honorable and Christian and bigoted. But it was an unnatural combination and in their hearts they knew it. Indeed, the civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s depended upon finally getting white southerners to admit to themselves that they did know it.

This deep magic is not limited to time and place. In reminding white southerners of this thing they always knew about their particular situation, Mockingbird reminds all of us of the things we always know about our situation whatever it may be, knowledge we cannot evade but struggle to heed. Atticus Finch is not just a man who knows what he must do. Almost anyone can manage that. Atticus Finch is a man who knows he must do it, and does it, and we wish we were more certain that we were like him.

Atticus stands for truth against the mob. He faces down his own fears and therefore other men’s viciousness. He meets with triumph and disaster and treats these two imposters both the same, and so shows his children what the meaning is of a world that keeps opening new and marvelous vistas for them. And again I use “marvelous” with etymology aforethought: The world is full of marvels and Mockingbird knows it.

Its particular and often dark marvels make it to some extent a “coming of age” book. Within its pages we see Scout growing up a little; three years is a long time when you’re six and her childish conceits about “hants” and so forth become a bit more mature within its pages. Outside its pages, in part because of the flashback narrative technique, we sense what sort of adult she will become, in large part through the influence of her father and other adults, both good and evil. And thus we know that “coming of age” is not just a matter of growing bigger and more self-aware, or self-absorbed, while eventually discovering girls or boys.

The transition from childhood to adulthood is above all about morality, about becoming one of those who does take responsibility for what is right and wrong. In this context it has been suggested that Mockingbird’s “coming of age” theme is tragic, as the characters come to grips with failure. Such critics clearly missed the magic. What Harper Lee tells us in this story is that success and failure cast lights and shadows in this world but take place within us. Atticus is never a failure even when he fails. Nor will his daughter be.

If like Han Solo we explore the world around us we’re bound to see “a lot of strange stuff”. But that’s not the marvel. Nor is it real growing up. The magic, the expansion from childish wonder to the adult kind, is realizing that life means something, something incredibly important and boundlessly joyful: The fundamental structure of the universe is moral not material.

That is the magic at the core of To Kill a Mockingbird. And it has only gained in brilliance in the last half century.

From hereJohn Robson is a writer and broadcaster living in Ottawa, Canada.

Friday, June 18, 2010

Creative Writing with Middle School Students

Alice C. Linsley


I recently finished an 8-week writing skills class for middle school students and we had a blast!  They were asked to build their vocabularies by reading great literature and using unfamiliar words in sentences.  We then discussed their sentences in class and sometimes found we needed to clarify the word's meaning.

We started all our sessions with each student reading aloud the opening paragraph of a classic. We then discussed what made that paragraph great. Some of the books we discussed include:

Sir Walter Scott
Ivanhoe

R. L Stevenson
Treasure Island
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Charlotte Bronte
Wuthering Heights
Jane Eyre

Fyodor Dostoevsky
Crime and Punishement

Jack London
The Call of the Wild

Harriet Beecher Stowe
Uncles Tom's Cabin

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes
The Hound of the Baskervilles
The Valley of Fear

Charles Dickens
Oliver Twist
Great Expectations
A Tale of Two Cities by

Herman Melville
Moby Dick

J.F. Cooper
The Last of the Mohicans

Alexandre Dumas
The Count of Monte Cristo
Three Three Musketeers

Stephen Crane
The Red Badge of Courage

Jonathan Swift
Gulliver's Travels

I found that middle school students aren't ready for the content of many of these great works, but they are able to read, understand and appreciate the book's opening paragraphs.

We also read and discussed some short creative essays since each student was required to produce an essay of publishable quality.  I selected the essays for brevity, humor, insight and as samples from a range of centuries. Here are some of the essays we discussed:

G. K. Chestertown (1874-1936)
"A Defense of Penny Dreadfuls"

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
"A Meditation Upon a Broom-Stick"

Jeremy Taylor (1613-1667)
"Of Charity, or the Love of God"

Before discussing the essays, we identified the main ideas.  We then evaluated how the writer was able to take what may be mundane and explore it's glorious side.  Or how something as glorious as the love of God can be brought down to earth and yet remain untarnished.

I had forgotten how much fun it is to teach middle school students!  They are eager to explore ideas and they want to please.  That made it possible for me to accomplish a great deal with them.  All five of the students had at least 2 published works by the end of the eight weeks.

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

The Dying Christian to His Soul

THE DYING CHRISTIAN TO HIS SOUL

Vital spark of heav'nly flame!
Quit, O quit this mortal frame:
Trembling, hoping, ling'ring, flying,
O the pain, the bliss of dying!
Cease, fond Nature, cease thy strife,
And let me languish into life.

Hark! they whisper; angels say,
Sister Spirit, come away!
What is this absorbs me quite?
Steals my senses, shuts my sight,
Drowns my spirit, draws my breath?
Tell me, my soul, can this be death?

The world recedes; it disappears!
Heav'n opens my eyes! my ears
With sounds seraphic ring!
Lend, lend your wings! I mount! I fly!
O Grave! where is thy victory?
O Death! where is thy sting?

--Alexander Pope (1688-1744)

Monday, June 14, 2010

Summer by Alexander Pope

Summer

See what delights in sylvan scenes appear!
Descending Gods have found Elysium here.
In woods bright Venus with Adonis stray'd,
And chaste Diana haunts the forest shade.
Come lovely nymph, and bless the silent hours,
When swains from shearing seek their nightly bow'rs;
When weary reapers quit the sultry field,
And crown'd with corn, their thanks to Ceres yield.
This harmless grove no lurking viper hides,
But in my breast the serpent Love abides.
Here bees from blossoms sip the rosy dew,
But your Alexis knows no sweets but you.
Oh deign to visit our forsaken seats,
The mossy fountains, and the green retreats!
Where-e'er you walk, cool gales shall fan the glade,
Trees, where you sit, shall crowd into a shade,
Where-e'er you tread, the blushing flow'rs shall rise,
And all things flourish where you turn your eyes.
Oh! How I long with you to pass my days,
Invoke the muses, and resound your praise;
Your praise the birds shall chant in ev'ry grove,
And winds shall waft it to the pow'rs above.
But wou'd you sing, and rival Orpheus' strain,
The wond'ring forests soon shou'd dance again,
The moving mountains hear the pow'rful call,
And headlong streams hang list'ning in their fall!
But see, the shepherds shun the noon-day heat,
The lowing herds to murm'ring brooks retreat,
To closer shades the panting flocks remove,
Ye Gods! And is there no relief for Love?
But soon the sun with milder rays descends
To the cool ocean, where his journey ends;
On me Love's fiercer flames for every prey,
By night he scorches, as he burns by day.

--Alexander Pope

Sunday, June 13, 2010

Wendell Berry: Telling the Truth



Wendell Berry at his farm in Port Royal, Kentucky

Dear Friends,


Your teacher, Ms. Linsley, has written to tell me about your writing class, and to ask if I might have something encouraging to say to you. This is an assignment that I take seriously, and I have been asking myself what you should hear, at this time in your lives, from an older writer.

The thought that I keep returning to is this: By taking up the study of writing now, you are assuming consciously, probably for the first time in your lives, a responsibility for our language. What is that responsibility? I think it is to make words mean what they say. It is to keep our language capable of telling the truth. We live in a time when we are surrounded by language that is glib, thoughtless, pointless, or deliberately false. If you learn to pay critical attention to what you hear on radio or television or read in the newspapers, you will see what I mean.

The first obligation of a writer is to tell the truth--or to come as near to telling it as is humanly possible. To do that, it is necessary to learn to write well. And to learn to write well, it is necessary to learn to read well. Reading will make you a better writer, provided you will read ever more attentively and critically. You will probably read a lot of contemporary writing in your textbooks, in magazines and newspapers, in popular novels, etc. The contemporary is inescapable. You may more easily escape the writing that is most necessary to you. I mean the books we know as "classics," books that have been read for generations or for centuries and so have proved their excellence.

As you learn to judge what you read, you will learn also to judge, and so improve, what you write. Reading, I think, is half of your responsibility as students of writing. The other half of your responsibility, of course, is to write, and your effort to write well, as I hope you already know, will make you better readers.

But you must never forget that the purpose of all this effort is to become capable of knowing and telling the truth.


Yours sincerely,

Wendell Berry


Saturday, June 12, 2010

Motivating Children to Write

Encouraging my two-and-a-half-year-old son to write isn’t a problem. Encouraging him to express himself on paper, rather than on the walls, is the issue in my household. But once the act of writing is mastered and scribbling becomes meaningful composition, how do parents motivate their child to write more?


Having a fresh supply of writing materials (i.e., crisp paper, colorful writing instruments, and reference books) can be helpful. After all, who can resist the temptation to mark up that stark white paper? However, the most critical factor in motivating children to write is to help them become aware of the many writing opportunities right at home. Keeping a journal, having a pen pal, or creating a family newsletter are just a few ways writers can find inspiration. Making children aware that writing doesn’t always have to be the result of a school assignment is essential.

Encourage your child to share selected writings with you, but realize that they may wish to keep some pieces private. Bear in mind that your feedback should be thoughtful and constructive. For children to become confident writers, they need to be assured that their parents support their efforts.

Some other suggestions for inspiring your young writer:

Read it all here.

Thursday, June 10, 2010

Poem for Georgia O'Keeffe

Georgia O'Keeffe's My Last Door


My Last Door

for Georgia O’Keeffe
15 November 1887 ~ 6 March 1986

Death is not
some entrance made
from shades of bright desert sunlight
into a blackened square end
made in dark, silent
earth.

It is mystery,
& not so, ever carrying
a familiar scent, untasted, yet
common as childhood recollections
awaiting the Christmas
feast.

It is hope,
faith, and then some,
reality defined more firm than mountains,
built more certain than crimson tinted soil come
from ancient adobe desert
floors.

My last door:
a step through this square world
of tinted darkness into clarity, a real sunrise,
Christ enthroned beyond eternity, golden luminario,
a regal beacon foreshadowing all humble
journeys towards our true
Home.

-- Matushka Elizabeth Perdomo
15 January 2000 ~ Saturday AM ~ Driving in rural Georgia


Notes: “My Last Door” is the title of a work painted by artist Georgia O’Keeffe in 1954. We viewed this painting at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum on 23 December 1999 in Santa Fe, New Mexico during a Nativity Season visit to that region. The poem, however, was inspired by our youngest daughter, Rosa, who was then age 4. At the museum, she took me by the hand and walked me back to the room where the “My Last Door” painting was hung. Upon studying the work once again she asked me, “Mom, what’s the poem that goes with the one with the black square?” I had to say that I didn’t know. Then, several weeks later, after we’d returned home to Georgia, she surprised me one day saying, “Mom, read me that poem that goes with the black square.” Having nearly forgotten about the first query, it took me a while to figure out exactly what she meant. Then, finally, this poem about “the black square” came to me…