An update from our sixty-eighth Writing Workshop A summary of the workshop held on Saturday, September 17, plus some of the output published below In this workshop, we covered the idea of ‘sense of place.’ The students learned that sense of place is a literary device that not only evokes physical, objective descriptions, but also uses vivid imagery to capture the thoughts and feelings of a character about a certain place. We studied numerous example of sense of place within literature and music, including Jack London’s Call of the Wild and an excerpt from Claire Rinterknecht’s story featured in the March 2020 issue of Stone Soup. Students participated in a brief 5 minute write in which half of the class described a place as a neutral narrator and the other half described a place through the lens of a character. Pearl, Greta, Nami, and Peri all shared their incredible work before we moved into our half-hour writing period, during which Peri, Yueling, Pearl, and Ava read. Overall, we had a blast kicking off this fall semester and look forward to more great work yet to come! The Challenge: Describe a place or a setting in which a story will take place. 1) Describe as the omniscient narrator, like the art director for a movie set description including lighting and mood. OR 2) Write from the point-of-view of a character. This is the skeleton vision of the place (lighting, sound, feeling, etc.) as appropriate to your vision. The Participants: Anya, Ava, Celia, Cora, Greta, Nami, Pearl, Peri, Reethi, Sofia, Yueling Arctic Winter Pearl Coogan, 10 Cold howling wind whipped through my fur, blowing endlessly. The deep snow crunched under my paws, stretching as far as my keen blue eyes could see. Snow-covered mounds that were once grey cliffs rose out of the white sea, not a hint of rock visible on them. Farther beyond the once-cliffs were the towering mountains, also covered in snow that was continuously piling higher and higher. The streams that ran and pulled in spring were now completely frozen over with ice. Everything was beautiful. But like many things, the looks of the tundra didn’t say much about the tundra. I couldn’t see or smell any other animals except the six other wolves in my pack, all of them my relatives. The prey, even the caribou, had disappeared like all the other animals, having hidden in their snow-covered burrows or migrated south. To make it even worse, the falling snow prevented me from seeing far. I was an Arctic wolf living in my Arctic habitat with a thick winter coat, but I was still shivering. The snow, though beautiful, covered up all of the hare’s burrows and even rocks that I could fall and hurt myself on. Hunger, as ruthless as ever, gnawed at my stomach. But I had survived one cruel Arctic winter before and could live through another, even if I wasn’t thriving. “Taiga!” My cousin Icicle called, standing on top of one of the snow-mounds, clearly trying to find prey like me and the rest of my pack. But, unlike me and the pack, she wasn’t a good hunter. At all. “Leave her alone, Icicle! She’s a much better hunter than you,” Icicle’s mother and my father’s younger sister Snowclaw growled. Icicle bowed his small head and padded down from the mound he was standing on. I couldn’t help but feel sorry for him. He was still young with plenty of room to improve his hunting skills and Snowclaw didn’t seem to like him at all. Smelling a wisp of deeply burried hare, I started digging into the endless sea of snow. The smell grew stronger, more vivid, as I dug. Crackly brown grass started to appear, a hole in the middle of it. Lighting up, I started digging in the hole. Surprised yellow eyes glared at me. The snowshoe hare leaped up and started sprinting away from me, but he was tired from his hibernation and wasn’t use to running in such deep snow. My paws pattered on the ground, barely touching the snow before they lifted up. The howling wind was even louder and stronger as I ran, flurries snaking down faster. Suddenly I wasn’t cold anymore. Suddenly the Arctic winter wasn’t as menacing anymore. My sharp fangs sank into the hare’s neck, sinking deeper and deeper. I knew my teeth, once gleaming white, would be stained with blood for days. But I didn’t care. Once I had thought that in the winter, the tundra was a cruel place. A menacing place. An evil place. But now I knew that it wasn’t so terrible. There was still prey but you had to work to find it. There was still warmth but you had to rely on other wolves for it. There was still water but you had to break through the ice to drink it. After all, why would nature make the tundra so cruel that the only good things about were the looks. Holding my head high, I trotted back to my den with my pack following me. My aunt and uncle had brought down a caribou and my brother had caught a bird, so combined with my hare, there would be plenty of food to go around. Maybe not as much as the bounty of prey in spring, but enough to thrive through the not-so-cruel arctic winter. To Let Go Aditi Nair, 14 And I let go. It happened to be a fall much similar to the ones I’ve seen on T.V, and I was ready–well, sort of ready. The adrenaline came to me like a lightning bolt, but I know that this was the best scenario, if any at all. It felt like the world was racing to greet me on all sides, and everything
Writing Workshop
Writing Workshop #67: Rhythmic Writing
An update from our sixty-seventh Writing Workshop A summary of the workshop held on Saturday, June 4th, plus some of the output published below In this workshop, students focused on the rhythm and sound of their writing and looked to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, Klingon poetry, and J. R. R. Tolkien’s Elvish languages for inspiration. William introduced the concept of anaphora, the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses, as a way to add rhythm to writing. Similarly, he showed how assonance, consonance, and alliteration can be used for the same purpose. As a tongue-loosening mini-challenge, William prompted students to let go of meaning and grammar and just focus on sounds, whether they be flowing, not flowing, rhythmic, or chaotic. The Challenge: Let the words flow with rhythm and pattern. Keep your mind open, read aloud to yourself. Be exuberant! The Participants: Benedetta, Delight, Lena, Pearl, John, Madisen, Peri, Anya, Agatha, Jolene, Aimee, Eric, Amelia, Nysa, Aditi, Advika, Yueling, Elbert, Sally, Liam Three Poems Peri Gordon, 12 Don’t Be Afraid Don’t be afraid and come with me. Don’t be afraid and do as I do. Don’t be afraid, and know that you are in good hands. Relax and breathe. Relax and smile. Smile and don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid and face down your fears. Don’t be afraid and face down your foes. Don’t be afraid, and don’t forget my words. One and the same are your fears and your foes. One and the same are my values and yours. Smile and don’t be afraid. Battle Cry Be the cocoocha Of our shetoocha No need for globeil or flitchak or thuba Hoblosochey, the war cry of the day Resounds from the hills and the poikamarey Hee, shee, don’t be a clee! Awake and hoolachoo, we will rise from the glub And take back the gley that they left in the shub! Layers of Say-ers Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your shoe Let down your bracelet Your necklace too But never you dare Let down your hair For care I do not About you Cried the boy to the girl As she told him to help On a hot summer day In a hot, stuffy room With a hot-headed boy And a hot-headed girl And a hot hair curler And a hot stove And wet, salty sweat pouring down their backs And wet, salty tears coating their faces And wet, salty water crashing against the house Flooding their space and flooding their minds And then all was cold And the cold, wet room With the cold-hearted girl And the cold-hearted boy And a cold glass of water And a lifetime of cold smiles Was no more Said the man to the kids As he taught them to care Not hot-headed Not cold-hearted Warm, cool, and just right And just right was the mood And just right was the temperature And just right was the time for the kids to grow up Then stress crashed down upon them Like weights on their backs Weights on their arms Weights on their legs Pinning, and trapping, never to escape Never to see the sunny day For death and despair had darkened their vision With a cumulonimbus perspective And years went by in weeks for a while And then they were no more Said the fox to the ant As he taught how to block All the stress and dark thoughts and the fear and whatnot “Just be free,” said the fox “Just give in to the bliss and think sesa and fosa and shandy and clist” And the ant and the fox went along hand in hand Wrote the author As the arc of her story did land Penelope’s Pickles Liam Hancock, 14 “Pish-posh,” Penelope pressed playfully, picking and pickling powerfully pickled pickles per pound. “This simply won’t do,” proclaimed Penelope. “These pickles are turning blue and practically stew! A picking of pickles is long overdue!” And so Penelope penned a personal paper to the Pickling People’s Prefect, professional pickler Peter Piper, who previously perfectly picked a peck of plenty pickled peppers in the Pre-Pickle-Picking Period. Peter Piper penned a paper back to Penelope, but she was too preoccupied with her percolating pickles to pick up his paper and pen a paper back to Peter Piper. “Oh, dear,” Penelope said sadly, sunken in despair when she turned around after tending to her pickles and saw the letter waiting there. “It’s much too late to write back now!” She wiped the sweat from off her brow, and she turned to go and sit back down, but her pickles were practically pungent and Penelope figured that the Pickling People’s Prosecutor had done it. And so, feeling as if she was perpetually penning one paper or another, Penelope penned one last paper to the Pickling People’s Prosecutor, Percy Presto, and he promptly penned a paper in response, proclaiming that all pickles in the providence had been put to rest, and that all pickle-picking was to be promptly replaced by pepperoni packing plants. Penelope was appalled, and so she packed her pickles and paraded to the Pepperoni Providence and planted her pickles beside the pepperoni plants. Soon enough, a garden of gherkins had grown just beside the pepperoni plant, and every morning the pepperoni personnel purchased a peck of pickles and pickled peppers. The procession of pepperoni personnel purchasing Penelope’s peppers became so prolonged that very few were able to get to work before the day was done, and the pepperoni plants of the Percy Presto’s providence began to perform poorly, penny-pinching just to produce enough pepperoni to stay afloat. “Pish-posh,” Percy pressed, perceiving a powerful privation of pepperoni personnel. “This simply won’t do! Perhaps due to that proud Penelope, our pepperonis are turning blue and practically stew! A planting of pepperonis is long overdue!”
How Stories Work—Writing Workshop #40: Ekphrasis (Revisited)
An update from our fortieth Writing Workshop with Conner Bassett A summary of the workshop held on Saturday, June 4 This week, Emma Hoff, 10, led workshop with her own interpretation of ekphrasis, a favorite topic of the Stone Soup workshops. For the workshop portion, Emma presented us with the following three paintings and their accompanying ekphrastic interpretations. The Old Guitarist by Pablo Picasso — “The Man with the Blue Guitar” by Wallace Stevens. These two are different in that Stevens’ poem speaks of a blue guitar yet the only thing that isn’t blue in Picasso’s painting is the guitar. This is because Stevens speaks of a symbolic blue. Both works express modes/moods of sadness, or blueness. Hunters in the Snow by Pieter Bruegel the Elder — “Hunters in the Snow” by William Carlos Williams. WCW literally describes the painting, even references the painter. How does his reference of the painter affect the poem? Well, like the painting, which is crammed with details, William Carlos Williams crams his poem with details. House by the Railroad by Edward Hopper — “Edward Hopper and the House by Railroad” by Edward Hirsch. He, like WCW, is incorporating the painter. Hirsch really gets enamored with the painter. He’s kind of antagonistic towards Edward Hopper. After she’d shown us these three paintings and we together came up with interpretations, she asked us to choose between three more paintings in order to write an ekphrastic story/poem. The Challenge: Write an ekphrasis story/poem about either People at the Zoo, The Dream, or The Peasant Wedding The Participants: Emma (presenter), Lina, Anna, Jolene, Josh, Elbert, Fatehbir, Ellie, Samantha, Chelsea, Alice, Advika, Shiva
