Tuesday, March 27, 2007

About This Blog



Alice C. Linsley in Gandria, Switzerland 


The host of this blog is Alice C. Linsley. If you teach writing, you are invited to send me some of your students' best pieces and I will consider publishing them here.

Most of the writings at this blog are the work of my students or of students whose writing has been sent to me by writing teachers. Students must agree to publication and, in the case of minors,  parental permission is required before work can be published. Only the student's name and grade are published, no other identifying information.

If you would like to know more about the logistics of publishing your students' work at this site, please contact me at aproeditor@gmail.com

I do not publish any writings that include profanity or erotica. 

The purpose of this blog is to help teachers teach good writing and to publish good student writing. If a piece has been published elsewhere, the publication is cited here.

My writing students learn the craft of writing as if they were going to become professional writers. They learn how to write well, how to research the market, how to write query letters and proposals and how to submit work to potential publishers. A few students have even earned some money for their publications! Each student must have at least 2 publications a semester.

It isn't terribly difficult to help students identify potential publishers for truly good writing. Good writing finds its way into print fairly easily. Then there are writers whose work is not quite at the level that they can find a publisher, but which deserve a public viewing. That's the main purpose of this blog.

I've been writing for publication for over 40 years and have over 1130 publications. My publications include short stories, poems, essays, and scholarly articles. Many articles appear at my other blogs: Just Genesis; Biblical Anthropology; Philosophers' Corner, and Ethics Forum.

In addition to writing for publication, I teach writing to high school students and adults, and run a small editing and translation business.

Writing teachers will find many helpful ideas at this site, so visit often!



Monday, March 26, 2007

Nature Clips

Most students love nature and have enough experience of phenomena to be able to write reflectively. It is best not to ask them to write long poems about nature, as their experiences usually cannot sustain extended exploration, but a strong short poem is better than a long weak one. Here are some nature clips written by students.


View of the Sea
Justin Clements (California)
Grade 10

The sea eats ships
beneath an endless darkness.
Salt burns eyes and dries flesh.
Slippery greens tickle fish at play
and moored boats
rise and
fall
as waves crash.



Winter's Alliteration
Justin Clements (California)
Grade 10

Frail relationships are made firm
when flurries fly.
Families form
when frost falls.
Neighborhoods forget
distances, fences and yards
watching children frolic
in winter's frigid fantasy.



Morning Birdsong
Sam Whitaker (Ohio)
Grade 11

Still sleepy eyed,
the birds taunt me
to join in song and so I do.
Together, in perfect harmony
we praise the sunrise.
For one glad moment
I feel all the happiness promised
of a new day
and fly teary eyed
in the first lavendar glow
that softens the edges of the world.



Banana Man
Ansil Williams (Trinidad and Tobago)
Grade 12

Hanging,
gentle winds brush
green lingering leaves.
Banana Man's rough mitt
soft grasps the yellow cluster
and places it with brothers
in a basket to be sold
golden new or speckled brown.
Banana Man knows the way
from womb to cradle of death,
from green to empty husk.

Focus on Details


Alice C. Linsley

One challenge facing every writer is learning to focus on something long enough to notice the finer details. Students who aren't able to focus on details produce flat writing. They need to practice being observant and putting their observations in writing. This is the objective of focused writing assignments, such as this work by Danny Trent of Kentucky, grade 10.


Hard Boiled Egg (Jan. 17, 2004)

I've been asked to focus on and write a description of a single simple object and I selected a hard boiled egg. I'm sitting at the dining room table with the hard boiled egg in front of me. It is resting in an Easter egg cup. This egg cup is one of my Mom's that she uses to serve soft boiled eggs on Easter morning. The egg cup has a sky blue zigzag pattern with pink dots. This pattern runs horizontally around the cup. I will focus on the egg and relate it to the cup, but the cup is not the focus of my writing. I'm focusing on the hard boiled egg.

The egg is from a box that is labeled "medium" so it is a medium size egg according to the USDA labeling standards. The egg is white. If I squint and look at the egg it appears to have a halo of blue around it. The color of the blue is darker than the blue on the egg cup. It is more like the blue of a storm darkened sky.

The egg is smooth to the touch. Looking at it under my Dad's magnifying lens, I see that there are some small blemishes on the surface. I can't feel these when I rub my finger over the surface, but they can be seen under magnification.

The surface also has some cracks were the egg bounced around in the boiling water. There are three cracks. Through the cracks I can see the smooth white flesh of the egg. Looking at it makes me want to break the egg open, pour salt on it and eat it. If this were an Easter egg, it would be dyed a pastel color, maybe like the colors on the egg cup. I hate eggs that are dyed pastel colors! Give me a plain hard or soft boiled egg any day, but hold the dye.