Okay, so, stirctly speaking, the post title isn't accurate since I still have yet to return to the flock (our seminar) with any measurable evidence of growth, spiritual or literary. But here are some thoughts.
Back in September, before my date was up, I was hard at work on a short story about a manzanita. The inspiration came from an article I'd read on Muir "The Botanist" in Smithsonian. In it Muir gives a brief description of the process by which he would learn about a new plant. Evidently when he encountered an unfamiliar species John would sit silently with the thing for up to a day, just listening, until it stated to talk to him. The implication being that all plants have a story, an evolutionary autobiography of sorts.
Well, you guys know all about me and my checkered relationship with science. So it should come as no surprise that when I finally sat myself down to try out Muir's idiosyncratic scientific method, the resulting story had little to do with natural history. It was raining that day, the first rain of the season, and while the mosses and grasses in my live oak woodland celebrated with vibrant green fireworks, the crimson bark of a manzanita in the courtyard took on the appearence of raw, bleeding flesh. I sat with that tree all day, and it did start talking to me, but the story was a strange one that after 2 months still has yet to run its course.
So, this may seem a bit ad-hoc to you guys in light of how late my essay now is, but, I think I agree with Sydra's recent post about making due dates optional. As excited as I am to share writing with Y'all, it just isn't ready yet. Also, I'm in SE Asia for the winter, so if I do finish something in the coming weeks it probably won't be that essay about the Manzanita.
Okay, Vietnam calls. Cheers,
Nate
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Friday, December 5, 2008
Well, it seems we're slackers through and through. Not a big deal really, but are we dropping the ball on our fantastic seminar already?
I guess I began the procrastination...sorry...and still haven't mailed Jenny's piece to her, so I probably shouldn't be writing this at all. But I am because well, why not?
All I'm trying to say is that maybe we don't have to "go in order" since it's not working super well. (Nathan where's your piece?) Perhaps some of the others in the group that haven't submitted anything could just email or snail-mail some of their writing from the last few months. I bet most of us have been doing some writing, especially with the anticipation of this seminar.
So without further ado....I miss your writing everyone! Let's bask in each others' insights.
(Goodness that was awful.)
I guess I began the procrastination...sorry...and still haven't mailed Jenny's piece to her, so I probably shouldn't be writing this at all. But I am because well, why not?
All I'm trying to say is that maybe we don't have to "go in order" since it's not working super well. (Nathan where's your piece?) Perhaps some of the others in the group that haven't submitted anything could just email or snail-mail some of their writing from the last few months. I bet most of us have been doing some writing, especially with the anticipation of this seminar.
So without further ado....I miss your writing everyone! Let's bask in each others' insights.
(Goodness that was awful.)
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
I'd planned to have my piece ready for y'all by Monday, but this weekend I got seriously distracted by 1,500 vertical feet of granite and didn't end up writing nearly as much as I should have. Soon. I promise.
In the mean time, I'm going to tell Emma that we're okay with her joining the team. Unless someone voices their objection in the next 15 minutes. Cheers!
Nate
In the mean time, I'm going to tell Emma that we're okay with her joining the team. Unless someone voices their objection in the next 15 minutes. Cheers!
Nate
Friday, November 14, 2008
Response to Sydra's piece
So, I guess I'll be the first to respond to Sydra's essay. If I seem overeager, it's because I am. Also I have to spend a couple hours every day in the office feigning productivity, so this is a good outlet.
I really liked reading an urban essay, especially one that takes on the sharper, less aesthetic side of PDX and not just the hippie-bourgeoisie side of the city. Some suggestions:
- Tighten up the details within each vignette; there were a few times I was confused about who was doing/saying what and why.
-I want to know what will draw someone who has never known you or Portland into this essay. I like the sense of unease you have created and the way you have a skeptical eye towards what's going on around you. Like, is that guy selling drugs or trinkets? And are those police really giving shit to the black people or is everyone being overly sensitive? What really are you trying to say through this tension, other than that there is tension?
Some fave parts:
-"dual voyeurism"
-"I sit up on my bicycle and light my rollie cruising effortlessly through the side streets towards home."
I really liked reading an urban essay, especially one that takes on the sharper, less aesthetic side of PDX and not just the hippie-bourgeoisie side of the city. Some suggestions:
- Tighten up the details within each vignette; there were a few times I was confused about who was doing/saying what and why.
-I want to know what will draw someone who has never known you or Portland into this essay. I like the sense of unease you have created and the way you have a skeptical eye towards what's going on around you. Like, is that guy selling drugs or trinkets? And are those police really giving shit to the black people or is everyone being overly sensitive? What really are you trying to say through this tension, other than that there is tension?
Some fave parts:
-"dual voyeurism"
-"I sit up on my bicycle and light my rollie cruising effortlessly through the side streets towards home."
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Q for you all
So is anyone going to be severely offended if I only send my piece via email?
I'm a bit strapped for cash, I know it's only a few dollars but yeah....it's still tight.
None of you have to snail-mail me copies unless you're really keen on it.
Just do that lovely Word editing thing, Track Changes I believe - it makes everything nice and RED!
Okay, enough out of me for one day
I'm a bit strapped for cash, I know it's only a few dollars but yeah....it's still tight.
None of you have to snail-mail me copies unless you're really keen on it.
Just do that lovely Word editing thing, Track Changes I believe - it makes everything nice and RED!
Okay, enough out of me for one day
finally...
hey all,
i just emailed my piece.
i'm out of practice in this deadline thing....
my life is ambiguous and day-to-day
it's kind of amazing, but sorry to keep you all waiting.
i just emailed my piece.
i'm out of practice in this deadline thing....
my life is ambiguous and day-to-day
it's kind of amazing, but sorry to keep you all waiting.
Monday, November 10, 2008
For Jenny from Matt
Jenny -
Great to read this fun little piece. What's been said before all rings true, but could your essay lie in your final paragraph? Maybe I've been way too politically tuned these last few weeks, but perhaps you could follow the thread of the "strained mix of liberal and conservative political sentiments gleaned from the western and eastern halves" of Washington. This concept could be a book, but left as it is, this sentiment becomes an elephant of an idea reduced to just being mentioned in passing.
Remember, a gun in the room means someone ought to be shot.
I'll be sending an annotated copy of your piece, Jenny, in the mail soon. I've been out on the Kaibab Plateau with my students for the past week, and I might have found an essay out there, but it has put me a bit behind.
-Matt
Great to read this fun little piece. What's been said before all rings true, but could your essay lie in your final paragraph? Maybe I've been way too politically tuned these last few weeks, but perhaps you could follow the thread of the "strained mix of liberal and conservative political sentiments gleaned from the western and eastern halves" of Washington. This concept could be a book, but left as it is, this sentiment becomes an elephant of an idea reduced to just being mentioned in passing.
Remember, a gun in the room means someone ought to be shot.
I'll be sending an annotated copy of your piece, Jenny, in the mail soon. I've been out on the Kaibab Plateau with my students for the past week, and I might have found an essay out there, but it has put me a bit behind.
-Matt
Thursday, November 6, 2008
Unas sugerencias para tu ensayo, Jenny
Jenny! Here are some comments, and I emailed you your piece with a bunch more written all over it, MOB-style.
Oh my. How I enjoyed reading your writing again, as I sit here looking out over the Patagonian seas at the sunset. I felt as if we were back in DS’s classroom, snarfing our hippie goulash out of yogurt containers and gazing out at Ankeny while listening to DS orate. After reading this my writing and editing juices are definitely flowing again.
I really like your premise of combining the ecological concept of an ecotone with your personal reality of transition and having a ‘home in tension’ (one of my fave phrases of the piece). It’s original and daring and makes me think, which is precisely the purpose an essay should serve. I would love to see you develop the idea of an emotional/spiritual ecotone more, as you have barely brushed the surface, and as I think that is probably the most fascinating idea you present in the essay. You throw it in at the end, but I want you to throw it in at the beginning. (That should also help it feel less journal entry ish). Connected with that, I think a stronger sense of what you feel or felt when you are in the different ecosystems (eastside, Westside, middle), and a stronger sense of what they actually look like and function like (ecologically) would help. More definition of terms (aridity? That’s pretty broad, and relative, and doesn’t give me a visual picture) and description, too (I get the idea from this essay that the Westside is a homogeny of doug fir while the east is a homogeny of P-pine, and that’s obviously not true) would help round it out. And then more about what it means to feel at home somewhere or not to feel at home somewhere or to be completely torn between two places that you love equally.
Although I like the dichotomy of the two trees as synechdoche of the two places (whoa, I sound so pretentious), and I want it to work, I think it needs some polishing. Is this essay about trees, really? Right now I’m not very engaged with or interested in the trees as you present them. I don’t feel the same things you feel (well, in real life I do identify with your experience, but the essay doesn’t provoke those feelings). You might also try mentioning a few other plants common to both types of forests, besides trees. Sword fern, sagebrush….you know.
Actually, I think I’m more interested in how ecotones function than I am by either of these trees. Ecotones are so intriguing, and you only devote one paragraph to them. Might you go more in that direction? A thought--Because ecotones are places of such diversity and such fierce competition and uneasy coexistence (by the way, I would LOVE it if you got into the whys and wherefores of exactly how strange bedfellows can even live together in ecotones….it’s an ecologist’s wet dream), they are by definition places of rapid biological evolution, places where change occurs by the very nature of the place as a ‘home in tension.’ I hella, HELLA want you to explore this, ecologically and personally and metaphorically. It’s sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo ready for milking. See me getting all biologically eroticized by the very idea?
Serious props.
Emily
Oh my. How I enjoyed reading your writing again, as I sit here looking out over the Patagonian seas at the sunset. I felt as if we were back in DS’s classroom, snarfing our hippie goulash out of yogurt containers and gazing out at Ankeny while listening to DS orate. After reading this my writing and editing juices are definitely flowing again.
I really like your premise of combining the ecological concept of an ecotone with your personal reality of transition and having a ‘home in tension’ (one of my fave phrases of the piece). It’s original and daring and makes me think, which is precisely the purpose an essay should serve. I would love to see you develop the idea of an emotional/spiritual ecotone more, as you have barely brushed the surface, and as I think that is probably the most fascinating idea you present in the essay. You throw it in at the end, but I want you to throw it in at the beginning. (That should also help it feel less journal entry ish). Connected with that, I think a stronger sense of what you feel or felt when you are in the different ecosystems (eastside, Westside, middle), and a stronger sense of what they actually look like and function like (ecologically) would help. More definition of terms (aridity? That’s pretty broad, and relative, and doesn’t give me a visual picture) and description, too (I get the idea from this essay that the Westside is a homogeny of doug fir while the east is a homogeny of P-pine, and that’s obviously not true) would help round it out. And then more about what it means to feel at home somewhere or not to feel at home somewhere or to be completely torn between two places that you love equally.
Although I like the dichotomy of the two trees as synechdoche of the two places (whoa, I sound so pretentious), and I want it to work, I think it needs some polishing. Is this essay about trees, really? Right now I’m not very engaged with or interested in the trees as you present them. I don’t feel the same things you feel (well, in real life I do identify with your experience, but the essay doesn’t provoke those feelings). You might also try mentioning a few other plants common to both types of forests, besides trees. Sword fern, sagebrush….you know.
Actually, I think I’m more interested in how ecotones function than I am by either of these trees. Ecotones are so intriguing, and you only devote one paragraph to them. Might you go more in that direction? A thought--Because ecotones are places of such diversity and such fierce competition and uneasy coexistence (by the way, I would LOVE it if you got into the whys and wherefores of exactly how strange bedfellows can even live together in ecotones….it’s an ecologist’s wet dream), they are by definition places of rapid biological evolution, places where change occurs by the very nature of the place as a ‘home in tension.’ I hella, HELLA want you to explore this, ecologically and personally and metaphorically. It’s sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo ready for milking. See me getting all biologically eroticized by the very idea?
Serious props.
Emily
Comment on my essay!
Do it!
It may not be the best thing I've ever written, but it wants your criticism. Otherwise I may as well just write in my journal. And that would be lame.
It may not be the best thing I've ever written, but it wants your criticism. Otherwise I may as well just write in my journal. And that would be lame.
Thursday, October 30, 2008
A parlaiment of owls? Whose idea was this anyway?
From where I sit, I can hear Otis the Western Screech Owl calling from his mew. Made the mistake yesterday of telling him about our experimental seminar and now I think he want in too.
Anyhow, Kudos to Jenny for getting us off to a good start! Here's what I think about "Ecotonality."
Thanks to the last two sentences on page 4, it does feel a bit like a "journal entry" to me too. A good one by any measure, but still I say cut the phony ending and give us another fifty pages on tension. Maybe it's just because I'm in a similar place myself, but the exploration of the Cascade ecotone as a metaphor for being an itinerant 20-something (or is it the other way around?) seems like a worthwhile pursuit. Now I want to know what the counterpart of biodiversity is and looks like in Jenny Gilbert's life.
Some of my favorite lines: "These trees were so normal it didn't even occur to me to know their names." - made me think about how, as a kid, I could navigate anywhere I wanted to go in town by landmarks and it wasn't until driver's ed. that I bothered to learn street names.
"Just as the sun cleared the horizon its rays hit the base of the tree and the yellow light reflecting off the red trunk illuminated the whole yard as if by a campfire." -Lovely
"...the mountains are cloaked in dark green Douglas-firs, the trees' stiff, pointy tops making the ridges look as if they were cut by pinking shears."- The image is very good and accurate. I couldn't help laughing, though, as I imagined God, the progenitor of all things, (including, of course, arts and crafts) trimming away at creation with the kind of serrated scissors that people like my sister use to give their scrap-books a lil' extra flare.
Anyhow, Kudos to Jenny for getting us off to a good start! Here's what I think about "Ecotonality."
Thanks to the last two sentences on page 4, it does feel a bit like a "journal entry" to me too. A good one by any measure, but still I say cut the phony ending and give us another fifty pages on tension. Maybe it's just because I'm in a similar place myself, but the exploration of the Cascade ecotone as a metaphor for being an itinerant 20-something (or is it the other way around?) seems like a worthwhile pursuit. Now I want to know what the counterpart of biodiversity is and looks like in Jenny Gilbert's life.
Some of my favorite lines: "These trees were so normal it didn't even occur to me to know their names." - made me think about how, as a kid, I could navigate anywhere I wanted to go in town by landmarks and it wasn't until driver's ed. that I bothered to learn street names.
"Just as the sun cleared the horizon its rays hit the base of the tree and the yellow light reflecting off the red trunk illuminated the whole yard as if by a campfire." -Lovely
"...the mountains are cloaked in dark green Douglas-firs, the trees' stiff, pointy tops making the ridges look as if they were cut by pinking shears."- The image is very good and accurate. I couldn't help laughing, though, as I imagined God, the progenitor of all things, (including, of course, arts and crafts) trimming away at creation with the kind of serrated scissors that people like my sister use to give their scrap-books a lil' extra flare.
Thursday, October 23, 2008
2 cents
i'd say loose guidelines/no guidelines.
prompts if you want them, but i feel like we're all pretty capable of being inspired in our own lives.
maybe we could stick to prose....?
as for fiction...i'm all for it
prompts if you want them, but i feel like we're all pretty capable of being inspired in our own lives.
maybe we could stick to prose....?
as for fiction...i'm all for it
it's coming i promise!!
I started writing something. It's not about porches. It's also not done yet. (I'll pull the I-didn't-have-enough-warning card). By next monday. In the mail. Or cyberspace for you southern people.
Monday, October 20, 2008
I have an address!
It is...
oh shit, I forget. I'll look it up and post again. I like the front porch thing. I just checked out a short story anthology from the Boulder Public Library to study, so maybe get ready for a little bit o' fiction from me. Or, wait, are we only doing essays?
Fun! Blogging!
I love you all,
oh shit, I forget. I'll look it up and post again. I like the front porch thing. I just checked out a short story anthology from the Boulder Public Library to study, so maybe get ready for a little bit o' fiction from me. Or, wait, are we only doing essays?
Fun! Blogging!
I love you all,
Sunday, October 19, 2008
Salutations from sudamerica
Dudes. And dudettes. Or like they say here, 'gueònes y gueònas.' For now, please send me your drafts electronically, or else post them to ye olde blogge, and that`s how I`ll get comments to ye. (Mail here in the remoter regions of Aysen is not very existant.) Later I will join in the snail mailing.
Nate, thanks muchly for putting me last in the schedule. That`s perfect.
Is there a prompt we should be thinking of?
Abrazos.
Nate, thanks muchly for putting me last in the schedule. That`s perfect.
Is there a prompt we should be thinking of?
Abrazos.
Friday, October 17, 2008
On it.
What happened to going by backwards alphabetical order of middle names, huh? I should have been squarely at the end (it's gilberja, not gilberjz, you know? Actually, that would be a really embarrassing email address. I'm glad that's not it). Anyway, I can write something. It might not be in the mail by monday, but soon. Is there a promt or anything, N?
Oh, also, if you haven't already sent me a mailing address, do so. Otherwise I'll send you an electronic copy.
Oh, also, if you haven't already sent me a mailing address, do so. Otherwise I'll send you an electronic copy.
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Schedule (finally)
I couldn't figure out how to put this information in the "due dates" section that Jenny created. Anybody else want to solve that problem, be my guest.
Oct 20th: Jenny
Oct 27th: Sydra
Nov 3rd: Nate
Nov 10th: Matt
Nov 17th: Cori
Nov 24th: Chelsea
Dec 1st: Emily Davis
I could keep going, but how about instead of that we each try to remember the person who submits just before us.
If you have a problem with the order, or your first due date let me know and I can change it up.
The dates, by the way, are all Mondays and that is when I was thinking we should try to get envelopes in the mail. Good luck Jenny!
Thoughts?
p.s. Anybody want anything from Whitman while I'm here? You've got until Friday to make requests
Monday, October 13, 2008
Sunday, October 12, 2008
Thursday, October 2, 2008
Dwell as near as possible...
This is the blog. Use it. Unless of course you are sitting by a stream contemplating the human/nature connection. Then I recommend using a journal. Or just scratch in the dirt or something.
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