Michael Steinberg

Note: This is the last installment of Karen Babine's "Articulation: On Using the Essay to Teach Place-Consciousness to First-Year Writers." If you missed the first four installments, they appear right below this one.

Here's my original introduction to the piece:

This month’s guest is Karen Babine, the founder and editor of the very fine, online magazine, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies assayjournal.com

Karen’s contribution, Articulation: On Using the Essay to Teach Place-Consciousness to First-Year Writers, is, as its title suggests, a personal, yet very detailed and meticulously researched piece on/about using the essay to teach “place” to first-year-writers. Although it’s aimed at first-year students and freshman composition teachers, this essay, I believe, will be of great value to just about anyone--both experienced and beginners--who teach and write literary nonfiction.

For those who follow this blog, Karen’s essay is a departure of sorts. For almost four years, I’ve been posting personal/teaching essays on/about matters of genre and craft. I've written some and selected guest writer/teachers have written others. Karen’s piece, an expansive essay--a thoughtful, thought-provoking, personal/critical essay. Not only is it an informed, in-depth, study on/about the teaching of place, but it also re-visits an important conversation about teaching writing, about the relationship between creative writing (in this case, literary nonfiction) and composition, and about the writing process itself--a passionate, transformative, approach to writing that began in the 1970’s. The movement included a host of concerned practitioners, rhetoricians and theorists, and beginning teachers of composition. It thrived for almost three decades before being replaced ,in the late 80’s, by a traditional, heavily prescriptive, outdated, methodology, an approach that’s being taught today in most public schools and in many colleges and universities as well.

This essay is a reflective, complex (and a very important, I believe), piece.

The FIFTH segment appears below.

Note: In this and in each subsequent post, I'll include the full list of citations.

MJS


PART FIVE: PRAXIS: USING THE ESSAY TO WRITE PLACE-CONSCIOUSNESS

The active citizenry required of place-conscious education—that it does not simply stay inside the classroom, but finds its way out of the personal into the global context—finds a different expression in a cross-curriculum unit that Sharon Bishop designed between her English class and a biology class at Heartland Community Schools (“Power of Place” 76). Though her unit is designed for her specific high school setting, the concept transfers nicely to a first-year writing classroom, one that considers the Essay an important part of teaching place-consciousness. Collaboration between departments and classes at the college level is rare and difficult. As a result, trying to get my students to understand where they are already using what they are learning in my classes in other classes is essential.

But if the best essays are taking place in the subgenres—like science—collaboration and overlap of disciplines is essential. The opportunities for such are simply greater and the possibilities more intricate at the college level, and it seems a shame not to take advantage of what is present on the UNL campus. My students largely come into my classroom thinking that each subject they have been taught in their K-12 education must remain separate. Combine science and history? For them, it’s unthinkable—but tell that to Stephen Jay Gould. Literature and biology? Absolutely not—so we might as well toss the Annie Dillard. What about UNL’s own John Janovy, Jr., of the biology department, who has published fifteen books, ten of which are creative nonfiction about the Plains? If students learn that writing is only confined to English classes—and if in those English classes there’s a certain definition of what you can write about that teaches students that the place they come from, that the thoughts they have aren’t going to be interesting to anyone else, that’s hugely problematic. But it is also a wonderful opportunity that the Essay can fill.

The point is to teach students different ways to envision their own essays and teach them that there are many, many ways to write an essay—and all of them are “right.” “What the Spaces Say,” by Robert Root, delivered as a 2001 CCCC presentation, presents the function of the segmented essay and how it achieves that purpose:

“Beyond an expanding recognition of nonfiction as a literary genre, the most significant change in the nature of nonfiction in our time has been the sue of space as an element of composition. […] Segemented essays…depend on space, usually expressed as numbers or rows of asterisks or squiggly lines or white breaks in a text, as a fundamental element of design and expression. Knowing what the spaces say is vital for understanding the nonfictionist’s craft and appreciating the possibilities of this contemporary form; it also help us to better understand the nature of truth in the segmented essay.”

It’s one thing to consider space in the context of the outside world of place, the grounding that I require in this particular assignment, but it’s another thing entirely to consider space on the page. David A. Gruenewald writes of the importance of space in place-consciousness: “Just as place cannot be reduced to a point on a grid, neither can space, which has taken on metaphorical and cultural meanings that describe geographical relationships of power, contested territories of identity and difference, and aesthetic or even cybernetic experience” (622).

As we read Mark Tredinnick’s The Blue Plateau for WP3, students are often thrown by the fragmented structure, broken up into little sections that flash and circle each other. Through our discussions, we tease out the idea that there is no other way this book could be structured, because his relationship to the place is fragmented, broken. The structure itself articulates that just when the reader thinks they know a character or has some insight into the Kedumba Plateau, it’s over and Tredinnick moves to something else, which leaves the reader jarred and possibly confused. But that is deliberate—and teaching my students that nothing a writer does is accidental is a wonderful moment. If you’re confused, why would the writer want you confused? If you’re angry, why would the writer want you angry? And then, perhaps most importantly, how can you create the same types of reactions and emotions in your readers?

The discussion of structure within WP2 begins with Michele Morano’s “In the Subjunctive Mood” and Tom Coakley’s “How to Speak About the Secret Desert Wars,” as well as Robert Root’s “What the Spaces Say,” which is a segmented Essay about segmented Essays. The point of this particular day, the Quest of which is “What does it mean to consider the language of a place? And what happens if you can’t put language to it?” we discuss how many different languages the students speak and where they speak them, beyond English, Spanish, or French. We talk about the language of cars and mechanics, we talk about the language of fall in eastern Nebraska and how that’s different from fall in western Nebraska, we talk about how the language of Huskers Football at Memorial Stadium will likely not translate outside of Nebraska.

Michele Morano’s essay is written in the second person, in the form of a grammar lesson. The narrator is teaching the reader how to use the subjunctive mood in Spanish, but it is a gateway to the narrative itself, which is about Morano moving to Spain to escape a boyfriend she is afraid will kill himself. The use of second person, as we discuss, can be off-putting to a reader who has never had that particular experience—but, as we also have discussed many times by this point in the semester, nothing a writer does is accidental, so why would she do this? We talk through it and decide that the reader being told that “you” are doing something, feel a certain way, forces the reader to actually put themselves in that position and imagine what it is like. It takes away the reader’s freedom to feel what they will: Morano tells the reader what to feel, which echoes what she was feeling, the trapped feeling she was so desperate to escape. As we consider the structure of the grammar lesson, segmented and numbered, we consider what we would have lost if the piece had been a straight, chronological narrative. We discuss the subtext that she is not saying and how the structure itself, by providing breaks and white space, allows the reader to breathe, to consider what she has just presented, and then we move on.

Tom Coakley’s essay, “How to Speak of the Secret Desert Wars,” titles its sections with imperatives, turning the piece into a literal How To. We compare the section breaks, how they are used. We consider the function of the white space on the page. We discuss how the sections do exactly what the titles suggest, even those sections that seemingly have nothing to do with war at all. By coming in from a different direction, Coakley makes his point even more strongly. By using some of his sections to speak about things he cannot speak about—and some of the sections to not speak about those things he cannot speak about, he makes his overall point.

At this point, I remind my class that one of the first pieces we read in the class, W. Scott Olsen’s “The Love of Maps,” so the segmented essay is something we’ve been aware of since the very beginning. Getting students to consider space in their Writing Projects has been one of the most difficult premises of teaching the essay. They are so transfixed by the straight narrative form that they cannot conceive of white space, of breaking up the line. But the truth is this: the students who decide to be brave and try this segmented form have written some of the best essays that I have come across in my years of teaching.

ARTICULATION VI: AN ESSAYED CONCLUSION

One of the central tenets of place-conscious education is the active citizenry, the moving of students out of their local context into seeing how their local plays a part in the global, and moving to participating in that conversation. In this particular course, the active citizenry is less political than it is a measure of consciousness. My goal for this course is to give students a way of thinking of place as active, that neither the place nor themselves are passive. Home is not accidental. Community is not accidental. Ashfall didn’t happen by accident and neither did the Sandhills, Omaha or Lincoln or Chicago. The context they are creating themselves is not accidental: they are making choices that form what surrounds them. So it is fitting that the final reading of the semester, as we prepare to discuss the rough drafts of the final Writing Project, is the epilogue to Mark Tredinnick’s The Blue Plateau.

While Tredinnick’s book is ultimately about learning to belong to a place that wants no part of you and failing at it, the overall point of his book is that the attempt is necessary. It is necessary for Tredinnick himself to wonder why he feels connected here, even if the relationship is one-sided. The middle of the epilogue puts all of this into an active language that my students understand well by this point: it is not how long you are in a place that matters—what matters is how you are in that place:

“I must not blame the place, though, for my leaing—not even the town. I was always like this: I plateau. And I plateaued even there. […] Home is a verb—a word that dwells infinitely between those who say it often enough together. Home is the sayer and the said and above all it is the saying. Home is the conversation we make with what, and whom, we say we love; and what it’s about is who we are and always were. Home is a word—sometimes it is a whole sentence—for the ecology of belonging, and it includes deposition and erosion, the wet and the dry and the cold and the windl it includes the making and the unmaking, the coming and the going, and it isn’t always happy. Sometimes it rains, and sometimes it burns, and sometimes it falls and you fall with it. But home runs deep, and it runs hard, and sometimes it runs dry, and once it starts, it never seems to end” (232).

What happens after they leave the classroom? What do they know about place? What do they know about what it means to write an essay? And what have they learned about how place and essay give them a different way of active participation in their world? How has home turned into an active verb for them, rather than simply a noun? Some of this I will never know. But some of it I do. When I ask my students to write a reflection after each paper, the prompt asks them to consider who they might share their essay with. Most have an answer: family members, friends, and such. Almost never do I read a reflection where a student writes that he will never share it.

But there is another way: there are several literary magazines dedicated to publishing undergraduate work. Throughout the semester, I encourage students to send their work to these magazines, to submit their work to the departmental awards in the spring, to try to teach them that even though they may not identify themselves as writers, that is what they are. They may not choose to write for a living—or even for fun—but that does not mean they have not produced a work of writing that other people should read. Some students submit their work, some do not. But the point is that the active citizenry required of place-conscious education offers more outlets than political action. Sometimes the action is literary, sometimes the action is artistic, sometimes it is simply functional, but it is just as much a risk as protesting the Keystone XL pipeline through the Sandhills. Home is a verb, as much an active concept as writing, as much a space worthy of exploration as the page home is written on.  Read More 

Introductory Note: I've gotten a good deal of positive feedback to the first three parts of Karen Babine's "Articulation: On Using the Essay to Teach Place-Consciousness to First-Year Writers." This is the fourth of a five installments. If you missed the first three, they appear right below this one. I'll post the fifth installment on December 16, one week from today.

Below. is my original introduction to the piece:

This month’s guest is Karen Babine, the founder and editor of the very fine, online magazine, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies assayjournal.com

Karen’s contribution, Articulation: On Using the Essay to Teach Place-Consciousness to First-Year Writers, is, as its title suggests, a personal, yet very detailed and meticulously researched piece on/about using the essay to teach “place” to first-year-writers. Although it’s aimed at first-year students and freshman composition teachers, this essay, I believe, will be of great value to just about anyone--both experienced and beginners--who teach and write literary nonfiction.

For those who follow this blog, Karen’s essay is a departure of sorts. For almost four years, I’ve been posting personal/teaching essays on/about matters of genre and craft. I've written some and selected guest writer/teachers have written others. Karen’s piece, an expansive essay--a thoughtful, thought-provoking, personal/critical essay. Not only is it an informed, in-depth, study on/about the teaching of place, but it also re-visits an important conversation about teaching writing, about the relationship between creative writing (in this case, literary nonfiction) and composition, and about the writing process itself--a passionate, transformative, approach to writing that began in the 1970’s. The movement included a host of concerned practitioners, rhetoricians and theorists, and beginning teachers of composition. It thrived for almost three decades before being replaced ,in the late 80’s, by a traditional, heavily prescriptive, outdated, methodology, an approach that’s being taught today in most public schools and in many colleges and universities as well.

This essay is a reflective, complex (and a very important, I believe), piece. And so, I’ve chosen to post one segment each Wednesday for five consecutive weeks.

The fourth segment appears below.

Note: In this and in each subsequent post, I'll include the full list of citations.


FINDING THE MIDDLE VOICE: ARTICULATING DISTANCE

The struggle to articulate why their experiences or thoughts should matter to an outside audience, to people who do not know them and do not know the place they are writing about, mostly comes down to the element of exposition. This is what we felt was missing from Elizabeth Dodd’s piece, ability of the writer to navigate the distance between the self who experienced the event and the self who is writing about the event. This is the important link between valuing an experience as a writer and valuing it as a reader. Mark Tredinnick writes that “the essay depends on a world and on an author: it stretches between them, author and solid earth, speaking of, made of, both of them” (“Essential Prose” 36). He coins the term “middle voice” to speak of the space between the author and the earth—or, more broadly in this context, the student-author and his or her subject. In some languages, the grammatical middle voice refers to the third voice that bridges active and passive voice. Both are apt metaphors to discuss the analysis that exposition provides and universal quality of high exposition.

Teaching students about distance proves to be as difficult—and as simple—as teaching them that their experiences are valuable. Just as Natalie Kusz’s succinct description of nonfiction values “what you know now as a result of what happened,” teaching students that who they were when the experience happened is not the same person who is sitting down at the computer writing of the experience is a process that has proven to be easy in the conversation, but tough in the execution. My students nod in comprehension when I explain this, but the execution on the page takes practice that often spans the sixteen weeks of the semester. One student who wrote about the 2004 Hallam, NE tornado, an F-4 tornado that destroyed a wide swath near her grandparents’ house, a tornado that struck the same day her mother told her she had breast cancer, which resulted in a lovely essay about the language of cancer and tornadoes. My student, who was eleven at the time, knows a lot more now at eighteen than she did at the time, which, when that particular light bulb went on, shifted the draft from merely a journal entry about how she felt at the time into a true Essay that made these two unique events relevant to those who were not familiar with the tornado or had no experience with cancer. It is, as Mark Tredinnick writes in “The Essential Prose of Things,” “That writing self is a mosaic of many selves touched by many parts of the other she engages with; and the words she writes are made not so much by her—or even by all those many bits of her—as by the relationship between herself and the other. This is the kind of self the essayist must be” (37). The point here is that it is in this place that content and craft intersect.

In the Foreword to the 2011 volume of Best American Travel Writing, the eleventh volume in the annual series, series editor Jason Wilson fits the essay—and the necessity of the middle voice—within the framework of his own classroom: “I always encourage them to think about their youthful adventures with as much distance as possible, and to fit their personal stories into the context of the place. ‘Why are you telling me this story?’ I ask them. ‘What makes this your trip and no one else’s?’” (x). At best, place and travel writing are two sides of the same coin and in my classroom, I often do not make the distinction, offering students the greatest chance to find what it is they need to write about without labeling their work one way or another. Wilson continues:

“Perhaps the real measure of success is whether or not these students sharpen their critical eye, learning to look for the sorts of fascinating or idiosyncratic or unexpected or profound moments and experiences that make travel (and life) more meaningful. Meaningful travel…is, of course, open to all of us. Writing about travel in a way that resonates with readers? Well, that’s something else altogether (xi).”

My intention in using the essay, knowing that I will be starting from zero-knowledge in this form, is to teach students to find the exceptional in the ordinary. I want to teach them that it does not matter if they can relate to a topic: the more relevant questions are Is this piece of writing successful? If so, what makes it work? If not, what makes it unsuccessful? What can you learn from this piece of writing that you can use in your own writing? As might be expected, this process takes some time. My students are writers—even if they do not claim themselves as such, I claim them as such.

It is this articulation of the space between the literal elements of the essay as well as the elements of craft that is important and I like the term middle voice for it. Later, Tredinnick writes that “The middle-voiced writer is not separable from what she encounters—is not merely an agent of action, or even of observation. Nor is what she observes reducible to a lifeless object. Each affects and is affected by the other. And the voice we hear belongs to them both; the self of the piece of writing is a self composed of its many figures of participation with the place” (36). Given this, the middle voice acknowledges that part of the page needs to be active, part of the page needs to make sense of that action, some of the page needs to observe and contemplate. None of the elements could survive without the other. The page is as much a place as the ground my students stand on.


ARTICULATION V

During WP2, while we are discussing place and language, we read Kim Barnes’s essay “The Ashes of August,” which teaches us the language of Idaho and the language of wildfires. Even on the first page, as we get a spectacular grounding in light and color and taste (which is bookended in the last paragraph by a wonderful evocation of smell), the reader is told that “the riverbanks are bedded in basalt.” My students and I agree that it means something different to know that your bedrock is basalt. On Tim Robinson’s Aran Islands in Ireland, it means something to know that the bedrock limestone, just as when he writes of Connemara, it means something different to know the bedrock is granite. As Mark Tredinnick writes of the Blue Plateau in Australia, the knowledge of sandstone beneath your feet also tells you what you need to know about what it means to stand here, today, in this particular angle of sunshine.

It means something to know that Barnes’s canyon was formed by volcanoes, as she’s making the point with that one word that her home is a volatile place, formed by fire from its earliest days. As the essay itself is about wildfires that come every August, it means something to know that fire still forms the people who live here, and it begins to answer the question what does it mean to live here, today? What are the layers of meaning? What is our context? What is underneath our feet that affects how we live? And how do we articulate what we cannot see?

And the answer is this: this is how we are connected. A volcano twelve million years ago connects those of us who stand on the Great Plains to those who stand in Idaho and it does not matter if we stand on flat or mountain, water or clay. Because the mud that cakes our shoes at Ashfall in Nebraska can be traced directly back to a specific volcano in Idaho, to a specific moment in time, linked by science, linked by the glass shards of volcanic bubbles when they shattered.  Read More 

#44 Part 3, Articulation: On Using the Essay to Teach Place-Consciousness to First-Year Writers (Part 3) by Karen Babine

Introductory Note: I've gotten a good deal of positive frrdback to the first two parts of Karen Babine's "Articulation: On Using the Essay to Teach Place-Consciousness to First-Year Writers." This is the third of a possible four or five installments. If you missed the first two, they appear right below this one. I'll post the fourth installment on December 9, one week from today.

Below. is my original introduction to the piece:

This month’s guest is Karen Babine, the founder and editor of the very fine, online magazine, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies assayjournal.com

Karen’s contribution, Articulation: On Using the Essay to Teach Place-Consciousness to First-Year Writers, is, as its title suggests, a personal, yet very detailed and meticulously researched piece on/about using the essay to teach “place” to first-year-writers. Although it’s aimed at first-year students and freshman composition teachers, this essay, I believe, will be of great value to just about anyone--both experienced and beginners--who teach and write literary nonfiction.

For those who follow this blog, Karen’s essay is a departure of sorts. For almost four years, I’ve been posting personal/teaching essays on/about matters of genre and craft. I've written some and selected guest writer/teachers have written others. Karen’s piece, an expansive essay--a thoughtful, thought-provoking, personal/critical essay. Not only is it an informed, in-depth, study on/about the teaching of place, but it also re-visits an important conversation about teaching writing, about the relationship between creative writing (in this case, literary nonfiction) and composition, and about the writing process itself--a passionate, transformative, approach to writing that began in the 1970’s. The movement included a host of concerned practitioners, rhetoricians and theorists, and beginning teachers of composition. It thrived for almost three decades before being replaced ,in the late 80’s, by a traditional, heavily prescriptive, outdated, methodology, an approach that’s being taught today in most public schools and in many colleges and universities as well.

This essay is a reflective, complex (and a very important, I believe), piece. And so, I’ve chosen to post one segment each Wednesday for four consecutive weeks.

The third segment appears below.

Note: In this and in each subsequent post, I'll include the full list of citations.


ARTICULATION IV

For the third Writing Project, my students and I spend a class period at the University of Nebraska State Museum, more familiarly known as Morrill Hall or the Elephant Museum. In the chamber off the main hall, an exhibit of Ashfall: twelve million years ago, a volcano in Idaho erupted in what is called the Bruneau-Jarbidge Event. It dumped enough ash on the Great Plains to create a mudpit out of a watering hole, resulting in a death trap that preserved two hundred different skeletons of animals. Most of my students—even the ones who have generational roots in Nebraska—do not know this place exists, let alone that it is three hours north of Lincoln.

One of my students follows me into the exhibit.

“This is my favorite exhibit in the whole place,” I say to fill the silence.

My student, who only voices his most important thoughts, nods. He then asks if the volcano in question was the Yellowstone eruption—and I am thrilled that he even knew of the Yellowstone caldera eruption—and I almost hate to tell him that it wasn’t, but I have to admit I do not know which specific volcano created Ashfall.

I leave him to wander the museum on his own and I lose myself in the bones of five species of prehistoric horses, three species of prehistoric camels, one species of rhinoceros—the teleoceras major. (There are several species of prehistoric rhinoceros native to the Great Plains.) One rhinoceros skeleton was found nose-to-nose with its calf. Smaller mammals that were the ancestors of the antelope and deer of the Plains, birds and turtles and tortoises and other reptiles that largely remain the same today as they were then.

What makes the bones of Ashfall unique is that the matrix holds them in the same position as their moment of death. Most fossils collapse into one dimension once the flesh has decomposed, once the skeletons have been stripped by the scavengers who take advantage of the opportunity. There is nothing left to hold the bones together and they collapse. If they collapse into a way that keeps the order of bones intact, we say that the skeleton is articulated, as if the order of the bones allows us to speak of them. What is missing when we cannot articulate the bones?

During the next class period, I tell them that the Western Black Rhino has just been declared extinct in Africa. This is place, I tell them. And I wonder how we articulate a place like that, one that no longer knows the Western Black Rhino.

Praxis: Using the Essay to Read Place-Consciousness

When I ask my first-year students to name Great Plains writers (not just Nebraskan writers), I rarely get anything beyond Willa Cather. But the reality is that the Great Plains—just like the Minnesota I grew up in—is wild with writers, one of whom, Ted Kooser, Pulitzer Prize winning poet and former Poet Laureate, teaches in our English department at UNL. How can we expect them to know—and value the writing of place—if we do not teach them? How can we expect them to value the writing of place that they are doing—if we do no teach them that their voices are as valuable as what is already in print? In her article “Sense of Place,” Sharon Bishop writes of proposing, in 1986, to replace the traditional anthology of literature with Nebraska authors in her sophomore English class (66). She complicates the reading of Nebraska literature by asking the students to actively participate in writing the stories of their place (with an oral history project), and the result is the sort of active learning that is so central to place-conscious education. But the idea is larger than a simple syllabus change: the result is that she is teaching her students that literature that matters is still being created in this place, that the students are also participating in the creation of that literature.

Since our first Writing Project in 150 is designed to explore an aspect of a place that the student is connected to—does not have to be home—we are looking at Gruchow for examples of how one writer does that, as well as forms that we can use for inspiration. Phillip Lopate writes that “Eventually, one begins to share Montaigne’s confidence that ‘all subjects are linked to one another,’ which makes any topic, however small or far from the center, equally fertile” (77). We consider W. Scott Olsen’s “The Love of Maps,” which explores all possible answers to the question that starts his essay: “Why are you here?” We talk about answering that question through history, theology, philosophy, weather, and more. We discuss that Judith Kitchen’s short-short “Culloden” is about more than being at Culloden on her birthday. Readings like these emphasize that there is no one right way to know something, that any moment we consider profound in our own lives can be articulated to our readers, so they can share in the experience.

On the day we discuss “What Is Lost and What Can Never Be Lost,” we have read two Paul Gruchow essays out of Grass Roots (“Visions” and “Bones”) and Elizabeth Dodd’s essay “Underground,” from the anthology A Year In Place. It’s easy to write about loss—but it’s not easy to make people care about your loss. Since we are starting the day with “Visions,” about Gruchow’s childhood experience with the ghost of a cowboy in his bedroom and an adult encounter he and a friend have with a grizzly bear who tears apart their camp, we question beliefs and superstitions, growing up, and what do we lose when we put away “childish” beliefs? The cleverly titled “Bones” is about Gruchow’s lifelong obsession with bones. The content itself of these readings is the place-conscious element of the class, as we consider how other people relate to their places, how they form attachments to places and how they forcibly reject attachments.

But neither Gruchow essay is about its subject: “Visions” is not about the cowboy ghost, nor is it about the bear incident. “Bones” is not about bones. “Visions,” as we tease out of our discussion, is about how we make sense of loss: Gruchow is reacting to the loss of childhood curiosity and awe, what he feels like he has been required to give up to become an adult. The scene with the bear is his antidote to that loss—a re-mythologizing that counteracts the myth of the cowboys and Indians by finding awe and curiosity in nature. Does he create a new mythology here, with bears as mythical creatures—charismatic megafauna, a term from ecocriticism I introduce to them—stories we hear but never see ourselves? This is how he makes us, as readers, care about what he is doing, by making the stories he is telling evidence of some larger purpose. In “Bones,” what happens when all that is left is bones? Are the stories gone? How can they be part of something larger, when nobody knows the stories they represent? I want them to see that the Essay form is a perfect outlet for these kind of ideas that we are learning. We read as writers to discern how Gruchow achieves the effect that his content offers and this is the composition classroom element: how does writing work? Read More