Reading Journal Prompts
[ Week 3 – New England ] [ Week 4 – Mississippi ] [ Week 7 – Appalachia and Great Lakes ] [ Week 8 – Great Plains ] [ Week 9 – Rocky Mountains ] [ Week 10 – Cold Mountain ] [ Week 12 – Southwest ] [ Final Reflection Essay ]
Week 2 -- Reflection Essay
Barry Lopez is an active writer who has
produced 14
books in the past 20 years, half of them essays on places or environmental
issues, half of them "eco-fables" that draw on indigenous narrative
traditions to entertain and instruct children (some of these could be useful to
you teachers out there). His readers form a mixed bag: some are drawn to his
lyrical and descriptive wisdom, while others find him too pious and New-Age
misterioso. On the other hand, Lopez is well-regarded by academic critics and
often appears to teach or lecture: see his Three
Rivers Lecture series, delivered for the Carnegie Centennial last year, or
this interview.
Also, be sure to check out his essay on our course theme, the literature
of place.
Beginning reflection essay – For your first journal entry, use your experience
reading Barry Lopez’s “The American Geographies” and John Daniel’s “A Word in
Favor of Rootlessness” to help you think even more deeply about an encounter
you have had with a place, either past or present, but get in lots of details
about the place--map it in words. See also Lopez’s essay “The Literature of
Place” at <http://arts.envirolink.org/literary_arts/BarryLopez_LitofPlace.html>.
You might focus your
attention on the sights, sounds, and smells of your place as you attempt to
evoke it for your reader (someone not from your place).
If you write about your
hometown (but you don’t have to, you define this place in other ways), how much
information about your own city or town could you find by walking a few of its
streets? Take copious notes on your observations and impressions.
Then devise a thesis that would help you organize your material into an
interesting essay. Perhaps describe an event (from your past, like the time you
hid behind . . . or the town’s past,
when GW crossed the
Think about the history of your
relationship to the place you are writing about. What events occurred before
you knew this place that may have influenced your experience of/attitude toward
it? What assumptions have colored your experience of this place? Has your
relationship to this place changed over time? How? Why? Also think of the
future: What do you think will ultimately happen to this place and to your
relationship with it? Can you imagine a different outcome?
Some other
questions/issues to think about:
Length: about two pages, double spaced (preferably typed).
Due: On Wednesday during the second week of class.
For this week’s journal,
use the questions below to help you. You need not answer all of them (in the
space of a page or so, you wouldn’t be able to give each one full treatment),
nor do you need to mention each text.
You can, however, write on more than one question. Since it’s your
journal, decide what’s important for you to write about and reflect on for this
week. Try to get in particulars from the texts themselves.
1. Sarah Orne
Jewett is known as a local
colorist. To what extent is the “place” or setting of this story its
subject? To what extent does the story transcend its specific setting (what
about it seems “universal”)? Discuss how
the setting is important in at least one other work from this week.
2. What extended
metaphor does Chet Raymo use in “The Silence.” Silence may be a threatened
natural resource, but it is important to some writers why? Raymo argues that
silence is necessary for communication. If all that depends on verbal
communication—writing, singing, talking, naming—depends on silence, what will
happen as the world becomes noisier? Does it matter what type of noise fills
the silence?
3. As we saw in Silko,
for Bruchac in “The Circle is the Way to See” stories have a life. Are they as
valued in your culture? What “lesson stories” do you know “to remind us of our
proper place?” (Every culture has them: Greek and Norse myths, Judeo-Christian
fables, European fables and fairy tales). What were these stories supposed to
remind you of? Were they concerned with more than human interactions?
4. When McKibben says
the idea of nature is extinct, what does he mean? What part does style, perhaps
tone, play in your reaction to McKibben’s piece? The approach McKibben takes is
much different than the Indian or Native American animistic perspective. In the
description he gives there no magic or spirit in nature, and the world will
soon be full of genetically engineered plants and creatures. Instead of being
of nature, we have killed it. Do you agree. Is nature a “subset of human
activity.” Why or why not?
Here are some
possibilities for week 4. This week, you’ll hand in your entry for this week
and the last. You need not bring them to class on Wednesday. Instead, either
drop them off during office hours on Friday (11:00 to 12:00), leave them in the
box outside my door, or email them to me (rvannoy@radford.edu).
1. For Eiseley, even in the city,
“there are patches of wilderness.” What does he achieve by focusing on urban
nature? Does nature exist in the city? Eiseley strings together varied
encounters with nature in order to satisfy “the human need for symbols.” What
do birds symbolize in the essay and in our culture (quick, how many bird poems
can you name?). How do you react to Eiseley’s certainty that there will be an
end to the human species? Is it better
for writers to record, not define, marvels? Does he follow his own advice?
2. Sanders writes that
the Ohio landscape never showed up on postcards or posters. What images do? How
does Sanders’s account of the land his father passed down to him demonstrate
the local knowledge that Lopez says is so important?
3. Is there an environmental ethos to Faulkner’s
“The Bear?” Or, as one critic has
written (Louise Westling, in The Green Breast of the New World), does
the force of Faulkner’s writing, like Keats’s “Ode to a Grecian Urn” (invoked in chapter 4 as to why Ike
didn’t shoot the bear) “function to aestheticize acts of rapacity and
violence that destroy the object of desire”? How is the wilderness represented?
What part of that representation does Ben play? If there is an environmental
consciousness, why place it in a hunting narrative?
Here are some possibilities
for week 7 (welcome back). For a good
sample of what to do in the journal, see this resource that describes journaling on Annie
Dillard’s writing. You may hand in
your entry for this week in class, bring it on Friday during office hours, or
email it to rvannoy@radford.edu.
1.
Many readers can't fathom how a great ecologist could also have been a
wildlife manager and hunter (he describes how he used to hunt in “Thinking Like
a Mountain”). What do you think? See The Transformation of
Aldo Leopold, Aldo Leopold
Father of Wildlife Management. Leopold never describes the exact location of
his "shack" in Sand County, a fictitious name for a real part of
Wisconsin. Can you figure out where the shack was, and why this region lent
itself so well to his ecological theories? See this link (and subsequent other
ones) for help: About
Aldo Leopold. How does one think
like a mountain anyway? Why would a scientist use a kind of story, a parable,
to present his ecological theories?
2. Hemingway probably needs no introduction.
Learn about the river and
region described in “Big Two-Hearted River.” Commenting on his Nick Adams
stories, Hem wrote to Edward O'Brien in 1924: "What I've been doing is
trying to do country so you don't remember the words after you read it but
actually have the Country. It is hard because to do it you have to see the
country all complete all the time you write and not just have a romantic
feeling about it." He suggests that narrating place is not an effect of
rhetoric but rather a transparent re-presentation of beholding: "see[ing]
the country all complete." In a letter to his father in 1925, he noted,
"I've written a number of stories about the Michigan country--the country
is always true--what happens in the stories is fiction.” So, do you have the
Country? And, what I want to know, after reading the second story, is why
doesn’t Nick go to the swamp?
3. Learn more about Wendell Berry and the region
he has rooted himself in at Mr.
Wendell Berry of Kentucky. Berry
describes a land of deciduous woods and rolling hills, suitable for farming.
This “gentler” landscape may be reflected in the writing. Is it? Describe the
voice in his essays.
4.
Annie Dillard won a Pulitzer Prize for her first book, Pilgrim at
Tinker Creek (1974). Set in the Blue Ridge Mountains (several miles from my
own home), the book won her the unwelcome reputation of EarthSaint, the darling
of New Age fans who insist on reading her in the tradition of religious mysticism.
Dillard is often hailed as a modern day Thoreau. She’s more familiar with
science than he but finds in it the grounds more for ambivalence than optimism.
In her writing, she seems to try to reconcile beauty and creativity with
parasites (the water bug), violence, death. One profile calls her a
“horror writer.” She tries to avoid easy appreciation and “oneness” with nature
to offer something that recognizes the bizarre and even brutal.
The water bug episide led to a panel
on “fact and fiction in nature writing” when a reader claimed the bug
wasn’t actually a beetle. Dillard, if I
recollect right, has admitted that she actually read about the bug and didn’t
actually witness it. This leads to a good question, how much should nature
writers stick to the facts?
Dillard refers to herself as "the arrow shaft"
and to her book as "the straying trail of blood." From the bloody paw
prints of the tom cat to the blood running down the arrow's lightning marks,
blood imagery in found throughout this selection. What is its purpose?
Dillard is a master of the astonishing metaphor and
simile: "my twisted summer sleep still hung about me like sea kelp";
"he felt as though he had a canary on top of his mind, singing";
"they [the steers] have cast-iron shanks and tongues like foam insoles."
What does Dillard achieve by such comparisons? Read again sections from this
passage dealing with specific animals such as the tom cat, the steers, the frog
being consumed by the giant water bug, and the mockingbird. What impression do
these passages make upon you? What do you think Dillard is attempting to
communicate about the natural world?
Here's another resource:
This week we head out to the wide
open spaces (the Dixie Chicks song) and tall grass prairies of the Great Plains.
The texts by Cather (˝Neighbor
Rosicky˝) and Erdrich (˝Line of Credit˝) are both set in the
Great Plains but tell drastically different stories about it. An interesting
piece of intertextuality: Mary tells Doctor Ed when he visits that ˝you
must take us as you find us˝ and the developer Jack Mauser tells the
floozy Marlis ˝you have to take me as I am.˝ What divide separate the two statements and
situations?
If you wish, read some of Erdrich’s comments
about the Great Plains as a setting in this Salon interview. ˝Line of Credit˝ first appeared in Harper’s, a venue for some of the best
fiction (and non-fiction) being written today.
Look at some of the articles and perhaps even the ads. What audience do
you suspect reads it? Are the two pieces, by Cather and Erdrich, geared for
different audiences (is one, say, more for the urban city dweller than the
other?)
How can you weave in ˝Big Grass˝
with ˝Line of Credit?˝ What
view is she trying to give you in the non-fiction piece that the developer
lacks in the fictional one? Be specific (don’t, for example, just tell me that
she loves grass in the one and he doesn’t in the other :-).
What does Momaday mean when
he says his grandmother ˝bore a vision of deicide˝? How do you read
the description of the cricket in the moon in the second-to-last paragraph.
Symbolic? Here’s the Devil’s Tower that
he describes.
In both selections, Heat-Moon pays attention to names and
naming. Why does the preacher object to naming things in nature? Names could
bring a connection, he says, but might it also encourage ownership or mastery
over nature? Why do we name hurricanes and tropical storms and not tornados and
earthquakes? In ˝Atop the Mound,˝ Heat-Moon says he has a
˝woodland sense of scale and time.˝ How does walking toward a
specific goals across open ground affect his experience with time and space? How
different than Wendell Berry in ˝An Entrance to the Woods?˝.
Both Rick Bass
and Terry Tempest
Williams are activists as much as they are writers, yet both make a similar
claim, perhaps rhetorical move in their essay. Bass, trained as a geologist,
says he ˝gave up [his] science badge a long time ago.˝ And Williams writes that she ˝cannot
prove˝ that her mothers, grandmothers, or aunts develoed cancer from nuclear fallout. Is there
something inherently inconsistent in fighting for a cause if if you’re not sure
about it? Or not? Bass has said you have to decide whether the fight required
art or advocacy? Are both at work in these pieces? Where? Does nature writing
have the power to change things more than protests, civil disobedience, or
other forms or activism?
Gretel Ehrlich
went to Wyoming from New York in 1976 and never went back
(brief bio). Her Solace of Open
Spaces is a loving look at the people she met and the landscape that helped
form them--and herself. She describes many of the eccentric shepherds she's
worked with, and debunks the myth of the hard-hearted, laconic cowboy.
Here are some
questions I used for the whole book but they might be useful for the short
section we are reading:
1. Is Ehrlich a
new kind of cowboy, a "woman cowboy"? Is she trying to soften
the Marlboro Image? Is this nostalgia [as Sanders says we commonly
(mis)treat the word: "a sentimental regard for the trinkets and fashions
of an earlier time, for an idealized past, for a vanished youth" (14)] for
the Old West in gentler form?
2. A knock
against regional writing is that packages quaint regional traits for the
consumption of audiences not from there. I once heard someone (a Wyomingite)
say that Ehrlich "knows her audience better than her subject." What
do you think? Is she an imposter ("Was it a lie to be here? Was I an
imposter?" 41). Is there reason to believe her characterizations of either
landscape, animals, or people aren't "accurate"? Does it have
something to do with her motivations for coming to Wyoming? Is she
"selling" something. (Ironically, when I did a search for Ehrlich, I
came up with Robert Redford's Sundance catalog.)
Maclean plays
with perspectives, the view each bother has of the other, the view of the
brothers toward other creatures, the view of the creatures toward the brothers.
Where does this manifest itself? What effect does it bring to the piece?
Although this appears in a book of non-ficiton essays, this piece comes from a
work of fiction. Does this fact affect your experience as a reader?
You can skip
the reading journal this week. Instead, focus on getting the (first half) of
the text read and on finishing any remaining entries. Hand in what you haven't
already in class this week. After
this week, no entries from the first half will be accepted.
Here are some
of the main things we want to pay attention to in Cold Mountain:
The book is at
once an anti-war novel, an odyssey, and a book about paying attention to place.
In 1997 it beat out Don Delillo's Underworld and won the National Book Award.
1.
Inman's quest -- Describe the role that references to
nature, memories of nature, reading Bartram’s travels, etc. play in Inman’s
life not only while he is hospitalized but also during the course of his
journey home. What changes does Inman’s undergo during his journey, especially
related to his spiritual beliefs.
2.
Ada's growth – Ada's world after her father dies. How has
her education failed to prepare her? How does she fail to fit into Charleston
society?
3.
The role of Ruby – what's her attitude toward place? How
does she ˝educate˝ Ada? How does Ada teach Ruby? How does their friendship
unfold?
4.
The odyssey --
What do the various adventures reveal about Inman's character, what does he
learn, etc.—for example, the almost-murderer-preacher Veasey; the gypsies; the
inn—fight and Odell; Junior and the daughters; the experiences with the Home
Guard; the yellow man; the goat woman; Sara the young woman, the childless
older woman.
5.
The love story -- In what ways do Inman’s thoughts of Ada
and hers of him act as spiritual and emotional nourishment throughout the
novel? The brief time they have together and the changes their encounter brings
about in both. The healing power of love and friendship in various forms.
6.
The end – though Inman dies, does the novel end in
despair or affirmation? Why does Frazier make Ada lose her index finger?
Links:
Cold Mountain diary
A negative review of the book
Charles
Frazier and the Books of Cold Mountain
View of Cold Mountain
Some info on the upcoming
movie
Lyrics and music for Wayfaring
Stranger
Welcome back
from break. This week, we'll finish Cold Mountain and talk about Abbey, Meloy,
and Kingsolver and the desert Southwest.
Several things
seem worth commenting on in Kingsolver's essay »High Tide in Tucson«: our
animal natures (the high tides we feel in Tucson), weaves together topics on
our animal natures, her critic of Western society (especially religion), her
finding a place in a »godforsaken » desert, and her sense of humor. The
funniest writer we've read? You could
also comment on her essay about September 11, »Small Wonder.«
Like Abbey,
Meloy uses some sarcasm, most of it directed on the human species this
naturalist studies. One issue that keeps coming up in the essay is what's real
(most everything in Las Vegas isn't,
it's all simulated). Is real the same as natural?
In »The
Serpents of Paradise« Edward Abbey poses
questions about the human-animal relationship with irreverent humor. How do his
humorous statements bely the complexities behind this issus? Why title the chapter
as he does? How would he have us re-perceive snakes, deserts?
What is Abbey's
real purpose, ironically, in »The
Great American Desert«?
By now you
should have the idea for the kinds of questions to ask in the reading journal
and those to pursue. Ask your own questions and answer them for the final week,
Pacfic Rim and Far North.
Go to the final reflection essay(s).