This morning in class, after your Scrabble debriefing, we will examine David Sedaris‘s essay “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” and you and two or three of your classmates will collaborate on an exercise that involves identifying an instance of tension in the essay. Locating such a moment in another writer’s work provides you with a model for creating tension in your own story, which is key to maintaining the reader’s interest and propelling the narrative forward.
Your group will also identify a minimum of three talking points in Sedaris’s essay. Those points may concern any parts of the narrative you have questions about or any passages that you deem particularly interesting or revealing. I will include those points in tomorrow’s class notes.
Sedaris rose to prominence in 1992 after National Public Radio broadcast his essay “Santaland Diaries,” which chronicles his stint as an elf at Macy’s flagship store in New York. That essay is included in his collection Holidays on Ice (1997). “Me Talk Pretty One Day” is the title essay in his 2000 collection, which you will have the opportunity to win in today’s class drawing.
Sedaris’s current reading tour includes a performance at Greensboro’s Tanger Center on October 28.
Scrabble Debriefings
Starting today, at the beginning of class on Mondays, I will return your Scrabble score sheets from Friday, and you and your group members will participate in a Scrabble debriefing in which you will (1) review and discuss your game, and (2) individually compose journal entries on the game. Questions to address include, but are not limited to, the ones on the handout that I will distribute this morning in class. Those questions for consideration are also listed below.
Did you learn any new words from your teammate or from your opponents? If so, what were they? If you did not look up their meanings after class and record them in your journal, look them up and record their meanings now.
What plays involved analyzing multiple options? Did your team opt not to make the highest-scoring play possible in order to either (1) block your opponent, or (2) keep letters that might enable you to score more points later?
Where did creative problem-solving figure in the game? If your team had a rack of all consonants or vowels–or mostly consonants or vowels–how were you able to advance the game by playing only one or two letters?
What was the largest number of words formed in a single play and what were they?
Scrabble, like writing, is a process of composing, only the board game involves composing smaller units, words rather than sentences and paragraphs. What parallels, if any, can you draw between your Scrabble play and your writing process?
You will have the opportunity to draw on the journal entries that you write during debriefings when you compose your midterm and final reflections for the course. If you choose Scrabble as the focus of your annotated bibliography and preface, you may incorporate portions of your Scrabble debriefings into that assignment as well.
Next Up
In class on Wednesday, you will begin drafting your first major writing assignment longhand. The assignment, a literacy narrative, is an account of a learning experience involving reading, writing, or learning to speak a language. As part of your prewriting process, look back at “Me Talk Pretty One Day” and consider how you might incorporate some of the same elements David Sedaris includes.
Section 1 (L-R): Bridgett Murphy, Oliver Henderson, Michael McNamara, Claire Jahnke
To help us put names with faces, I have included in this post pictures of all of you in sections one and eight with picture captions that list your names. I encourage you to review this page frequently. In between the pictures, I have included lists of first names that are also common nouns, making them playable in Scrabble.
Al: a type of East Indian tree
Alan: a breed of hunting dog (also aland, alant)
Alec: a herring
Ally: an advocate
Ana: a collection of miscellany about a specific topic
Ananda: extreme happiness
Anna: a former Indian coin
Ava: at all, of all
Section 1 (L-R): Kel Wadley, Grace Duffy, Hayden Porter, Sebastian Olander
Toby: a drinking mug in the shape of a man or a man’s face
Tod: a British unit of weight for wool equal to twenty-eight pounds
Tom: the male of various animals
Tommy: a loaf or chunk of bread
Tony: very stylish
Vera: very
Victoria: a light, four-wheeled carriage
Warren: an area where rabbits live, or a crowded maze-like place
Webster: one who weaves
Will: to choose, decree, or induce to happen
Willow: a tree or shrub
Willy: to clean fibers with a certain machine
Section 8 (L-R): Layla Rothberg, Ryan Lofton, Marisol Moreno
Bonus Assignment Opportunity!
Students who correctly respond to the playable first names and last names question below will earn a bonus assignment credit, which means they will have an extra assignment in the short assignments (course work) category. Completing a bonus assignment such as this one will offset a low class exercise or pop quiz grade.
How many students in English 1103.1 and 8 have first and/or last names that are playable Scrabble words? Keep in mind that only playable first names appear in the lists above. Some students in each section may have playable last names as well.
Directions for Finding and Submitting Your Answer
Review the list of playable first names, compare it with the students’ first and last names in the photo captions above, or on the class page, and determine which of the students’ first and last names are playable in Scrabble. If you aren’t sure whether a name is also a common noun, you can consult the Merriam Webster’s Scrabble Dictionary site. The spelling of the name must be identical to the spelling of the common noun. Homophones with different spellings don’t count.
Compose a response of one or more complete sentences that includes the first and last name of each student with a playable name. Indicate which name, first or last, is playable.
Post your comment as a reply to this blog post by 7:30 a.m. on Monday, August 24.
To post your comment, click the title of the post, “What’s in a Name. . . . ,” then scroll down to the bottom of the post. There you will see the image of an airmail envelope with a white rectangular box for your comment. Type your comment in the box and hit return. Voila! You have submitted your answer. Good luck! I will make the comments visible before class on Monday, August 24.
Next Up
For class on Monday, you will read and annotate David Sedaris‘s essay “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” which I distribuded in class today. An additional copy is posted in the readings folder on Blackboard. We will examine Sedaris’s essay as a model for your own literacy narrative: a personal account of one of your experiences with reading, writing, or learning to speak a language. You will begin drafting your literacy narratives in class on Wednesday.
Every Friday is WordPlay Day, which means that the class period will be devoted to Scrabble games in which you and one of your classmates will play as a team against two other classmates. Before the beginning of class each Friday, volunteers will draw four names at a time at random to form five groups of four and write the group members’ first and last names on the white board. If you arrive early to class, please volunteer to help with the name-drawing or name-writing (on the whiteboard) process.
If you haven’t played Scrabble before, this short video tutorial will provide you with a helpful overview of the game. Also, I will be offering a brief introduction to the game myself at the beginning of class and will be available to answer your questions, except these: (1) Is this a word? and (2) Is this a playable word? For the answers to those questions, you must rely on your own knowledge and that of your teammate.
You may think of Scrabble solely as a game that increases players’ word power, but it also fosters creative problem-solving skills and foresight. And for those who play in teams, as you will in English 1103, it offers exercises in collaboration. Through my own research on the game, I have learned that college faculty in a variety of disciplines incorporate Scrabble into their classes, including an English professor at California State University-Monterey Bay, a professor of Christian education at MidAmerica Nazarene University, and a professor of engineering at Tomsk Polytechnic University in Russia.
Each week I will publish a blog entry devoted to tips for improving your game. This week’s post focuses on parallel play and two-letter words beginning with a.
Parallel Play and Two-Letter Words Beginning with “A”
Parallel play increases your score through the points you earn by spelling more than one word in a single turn. In the first play of the hypothetical game pictured at the top of this post, the first player or team would score sixteen points by spelling enact with the t on the center double-word square. With the second turn, the other player or team could take advantage of the opportunity for parallel play. If the team knew that aa is a type of lava, they could earn twenty-four points with four words: whoa, he, on, and aa.
Aa is one of sixteen playable two-letter words beginning with a. Learning these two-letter words, as well as the others that follow in the alphabet, will enable you to see more options for play and increase the number of points you earn in a single turn.
aa: a type of stony, rough lava
ab: an abdominal muscle
ad: an advertisement
ae: one
ag: agriculture
ah: an exclamation
ai: a three-toed sloth
al: a type of East Indian tree
am: the first-person singular present form of to be
an: an indefinite article
ar: the letter r
as: similar to
at: in the position of
aw: an expression of sadness or protest
ax: a type of cutting tool (also axe)
ay: a vote in the affirmative (also aye)
Recording Scores
The image of the hypothetical game below includes seven words that were spelled in the players’ first two turns. Examine the scoresheet beside it and note how the scores are recorded.
Because both teams played multiple words in their second turn, those words are recorded in the same space. Each cell is for a single turn, not a single word. The second line in each score column is for the score of the second play. The line that follows the plus-sign line is for the total. Maintaining a running tally enables all the players to see the current scores at a glance.
For the task of completing the scoresheet, select the team member with the best penmanship. Make sure that the writer you appoint records the first and last names of each group member, the section number, and the date. After a blank tile is played, the writer should write the designated letter in the box provided (see the two boxes near the top of the sheet). Remember that the designated letter for a blank cannot change once the letter has been played and recorded on the score sheet.
Important Note about Challenges
If you think that the opposing team has played a word that isn’t permissible, such as a misspelled word or a proper noun, tell me that you have a challenge. I will consult the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary to determine whether the word in question is playable. If the challenged word isn’t playable, the team that set it down loses a turn. Conversely, if the challenged word is playable, the team that called the challenge loses a turn.
The Scrabble socks pictured above were a Christmas gift that I will wear for the first time tomorrow. To commemorate our Wordplay Days, I will sport these socks each Friday.
Matters of Style
MLA (Modern Language Association) style, the standard format used for writing and documentation in the humanities, is the style that you will use for paper assignments in English 1103.
Formatting a paper in MLA style requires changing the font because Times New Roman, used in MLA papers, is not the default font in Microsoft Word. You will also need to create a running header that includes both your last name and the page number. If you do not know how to change a font or create a running header, this YouTube video on MLA page set-up will show you how.
For additional models of MLA style, see the sample essays posted on Blackboard and the MLA Style center’s sample essays, including this one by Holly Nelson, an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins University.
Bonus Assignment
As practice in both revision and MLA formatting, complete the assignment below. Students who do so will earn a bonus assignment credit in the short assignments and participation category.
Directions
Revise the introductory reflective writing that you began in class on August 17. If your literacy narrative will focus on one of the classes that you wrote about in your reflection, do not include that class; the content of your bonus assignment should be markedly different from the content of your literacy narrative. You do not need to begin with a paragraph of summary followed by a paragraph of commentary. Those specifics were included in your reflective assignment so I could assess your understanding of the differences between the two and your ability to follow directions.
Compose a revision of at least two-hundred and fifty words, and type it into a Microsoft Word document that you have formatted to comply with MLA style. If you are unsure of how to change the formatting in a file, revisit the second paragraph of this blog post.
Print a copy of your file, and submit your paper copy at the beginning of class on Monday, August 24. You will not submit a copy online. Posting to Blackboard and WordPress is a requirement for your three major writing assignments only. However, if you want to publish your bonus assignment on your blog as practice in using WordPress, you are welcome to do so.
In the first half of today’s class, we will review the syllabus questions that you answered on Monday and address any other questions you have about the course. In the second half of the period, we will discuss the reflections that you began composing, and you will have an opportunity to continue working on them.
When I return your reflections in class, they will include a copy of the notes on diction, mechanics, grammar, and style that are included in the bulleted list below.
Summary
The reflection that you began on Monday required you to begin with a one-paragraph summary. As I noted in the directions, summaries are by nature objective. If you expressed your opinion about your high school English courses, the course readings, or the writing assignments, you shifted from summary to commentary or analysis.
If you had time to begin a second paragraph, that is where your commentary or analysis should have entered your writing. There you had the opportunity to address such questions as these:
Were those recent courses similar to or different from your previous English classes? How?
Did the courses contribute to your development as a writer, as an analytical reader, as both, or as neither?
How did those courses shape your attitude towards writing and/or reading?
How do you anticipate that English 1103 may be similar to or different from those courses?
Whenever you are faced with a writing assignment, be sure you understand the requirements. If the assignment calls for a summary to proceed your own take–your commentary or analysis–beginning with your opinions will undermine your credibility. That misstep will tell the reader that you lack rhetorical awareness.
Diction, Mechanics, Grammar, and Style
&: Do not use an ampersand (&) in place of the word and in formal writing.
Abbreviations should often be avoided in formal writing. Do not write vocab for vocabulary. On first reference, spell out Advanced Placement in the name of a course. In subsequent references, AP is acceptable.
A lot: Don’t use a lot a lot. There are a lot of better ways to express that idea, such as many, often, considerable, etc. If you use a lot in your writing, I will mark it with a d, which denotes diction or word choice.
Compound modifiers are linked with a hyphen. Write twelve-page paper, not twelve page paper.
Do: What specifically did you do? (There is almost always a stronger verb than do.) Drafted, revised, edited, reviewed, studied, and memorized are all verbs that denote a particular action. Use action verbs whenever possible.
English and the names of other languages are always capitalized. If you write English with a lower-case e, I will underscore the letter with three vertical lines. Those three lines are the proofreader’s mark that denotes the need for a capital letter.
Like and such as: Such as is used for specific examples. Like is used to indicate a similarity to or make a comparison. Such as introduces true members of a group; like shows resemblance.
Modifiers: Place modifiers and modifying phrases as close as possible to the words they are meant to describe. Consider this sentence: As a fifteen-year-old, my English teacher inspired my interest in poetry. In it, the person who is fifteen is the teacher, which makes no sense. (Unless he or she was a child prodigy.) The sentence should be revised to read something like this: As a fifteen-year-old, I was inspired by my English teacher to develop my interest poetry.
Numbers that can be expressed as one or two words are written as words, not figures, in MLA style, which is the style used in English courses as well as some other courses in the humanities. Write twenty-five, not 25.
Paragraphs: Business writing calls for block paragraphs, but English 1103 and many of your other classes will require you to indent the first lines of each paragraph five spaces or one-half inch.
Passive voice should often be avoided in formal writing. The subject should perform the action. Write, we read several nineteenth-century novels, not several nineteenth-century novels were read.
Separate: an easy way to remember the spelling of this often-misspelled word is to tell yourself, there’s a rat in separate.
That/Who: The relative pronoun who, not that, refers to people. (That refers to things.) Do not write He is the teacher that taught me how to develop my writing. Instead, write He is the teacher who taught me how to develop my writing.
That/This: The relative pronoun this refers to something at hand or occurring now. That class is the one you’re writing about in your reflection. This class is English 1103.
Then/Than: Than is used in comparisons; then refers to a point in time.
Titles: In MLA style, the titles of book-length works are italicized. If you are writing longhand, the titles of book-length works are underlined. The titles of shorter works—such as essays, short stories, and poems—are enclosed in quotation marks.
Whether/If: Whether introduces alternatives or a choice. If introduces a condition. Write, I don’t know whether my sophomore or junior English class was worse, and, If my pen runs out of ink, I will write in pencil instead.
Next Up
Wordplay Day! If you haven’t played Scrabble before, this short video tutorial will provide you with a helpful overview of the game. Also, I will be offering a brief introduction to the game at the beginning Friday’s of class and during gameplay I will answer your questions, except these: (1) Is this a word? and (2) Is this a playable word? For the answers to those questions, you must rely on your own knowledge and that of your teammate.
Before tomorrow’s class, be sure to complete the following tasks.
Review yesterday’s blog post as well as the syllabus. If you added the class after our first meeting on Monday, you can download the syllabus from Blackboard. In your journal, jot down any questions you have about the course.
Also, if you added the class after our first meeting on Monday, begin composing a reflection focusing on your most recent experiences in literature and/or composition courses. Begin your essay with a one-paragraph summary. Keep in mind that summaries are by nature objective. Do not comment on the courses, simply offer an overview of them.
Follow those paragraphs with your observations on the courses. (Here is where your personal observations enter the writing.) Points to address include the following:
Were the courses similar to or different from your previous English classes? How?
Did the courses contribute to your development as a writer, an analytical reader, both, or neither?
How did those courses shape your attitude towards writing and/or reading?
How do you anticipate that English 1103 may be similar to or different from those courses?
If you haven’t purchased or rented it already, order the textbook, the paperback edition of Exhalation by Ted Chang.You are required to have a physical copy of Chiang’s book, not the ebook, because your screen time will be limited in class. Your first reading assignment in the textbook is scheduled for October 19, which will give you ample time to order and receive your copy before you are required to have it in class.
Bring your journal to class along with your other required materials, which are listed in the syllabus and pictured in yesterday’s post.
Also, as soon as possible, create a free WordPress blog at wordpress.com, and email the URL to me so that I can link your blog to the class page.
Because writing longhand and limiting screen time are essential components of the class, I am including below some notes that illustrate why those practices, which may seem quaint, are vital to our work.
Writing Longhand
One practical reason for writing longhand: What we mark through remains on the page. Sometimes what we cross out can be useful later on, elsewhere in our writing. More importantly, research in cognitive neuroscience indicates that writing longhand has these benefits:
When we use our phones and laptops, it’s difficult for us to give our undivided attention to one endeavor, but often that singular focus is critical.
When we type on our phones, we often aim to convey as much as we can with as few characters as possible. Texting and emailing–both of which now feature predictive text–do not foster the vital skills of developing our writing and producing original thought.
Limiting our screen time not only helps us improve our writing skills, it can also benefit our overall well-being.
The research cited in the links that I’ve included above isn’t definitive, but it makes a strong case for the value of limiting our screen time and putting pen to paper. I encourage you to continue these practices after the semester ends.
Next Up
On Wednesday, we will review the syllabus question questions that you answered in class, and I will return the reflective writing that you began on Monday.
Am I the person who will teach your English 1103 class? I posed that question this morning at the beginning of class as a starting point for our critical thinking, one of the key features of the class and of your other college courses.
To begin the collaboration and inquiry that will figure prominently this semester, you worked together in groups today to find the answers to some of the most frequently asked questions about the course. After class, continue to review the syllabus. (An additional copy is posted in Blackboard.) If you have any questions about the assignments, the course policies, or the calendar, please let me know.
Textbook
All of you in section 8 of English 1103 are required to purchase or rent the paperback edition of the textbook, Exhalation and Other Stories by Ted Chiang. Bring your copy to class on the days when the title, Exhalation, appears in bold on the course calendar. On those days, we will examine portions of the chapters in class, and you will address passages in the textbook in your own writing.
Your first reading assignment in the textbook is scheduled for October 19, which will give you ample time to order and receive your copy before you are required to have it in class.
Other Required Materials
Writer’s notebook/journal, bring to every Monday and Wednesday class.
Loose leaf paper (for drafts and short in-class assignments), bring to every Monday and Wednesday class
Pen with dark ink, bring to every class
Pocket portfolio (for class handouts), bring to every class
WordPress Blog
As practice in developing your web literacy and writing for a broader online audience, you will maintain a free WordPress blog for the class. As soon as possible, create a free blog at wordpress.com. After you create your blog, email the address, or URL, to me, and I will link your blog to our class page, English at High Point. If you encounter technical difficulties creating your blog or publishing a post, email help@wordpress.com or contact the HPU Help Desk: helpdesk@highpoint.edu, 336-841-HELP (3457).
You will post the revisions of all your major writing assignments both to your blog and to Blackboard. The posts that you publish for class will be public. You are welcome to create additional posts on your own. If you prefer for some of those posts to be private, keep them in draft form or choose the private visibility option.
Mandatory Student Safety Training Video
If you were absent on the first day of class, be sure to watch the safety training video we viewed on Monday.
Next Up
On Wednesday, you will continue to compose the introductory reflective essay that you began in class today.
For weeks, my reading and writing have been limited almost exclusively to Shakespeare’s sonnets sixty-four and ninety-eight, along with parts of eighty-four, which I will perform at Creative Greensboro’s second annual Sonnet Fest, August 7-9.
I marvel at my actor friends who can sit backstage and lose themselves in the pages of a novel only minutes before they make another entrance and speak the words they have committed to memory. For me, those words I will speak on stage must remain in the forefront of my mind–a necessity I put at risk if I crowd my brain with the words of a book-length narrative.
The importance of focusing on the lines I will speak on stage grows greater when those words are Shakespeare’s. I am not a quick study, so learning lines is difficult for me and even more so when the diction and syntax are centuries removed from my own.
But after weeks of listening to my lines–in my car and on my morning walks–and writing and rewriting them in my journal, I once again witnessed the effects of the process that I am repeatedly doubtful of trusting.
With the knowledge that the hardest part of my line work was behind me, two days ago, as a birthday gift to myself, I began reading a novel I had avoided because of my focus on the lines.
To stave off a line backslide, I decided to return to my lines whenever I completed fifty pages of Shelby Van Pelt‘s Incredibly Bright Creatures, which found me toggling between late sixteenth-century England and early twenty-first-century Pacific Northwest.
The two began to intermingle in my mind. As I found myself inhabiting the small (fictional) town of Sowell Bay on the Puget Sound, the words of Sonnet 64 turned over in my head: “When I have seen the hungry ocean gain / Advantage on the kingdom of the shore, / And the firm soil win of the wat’ry main, Increasing store with loss and loss with store;” (lines 5-8).
For anyone who hasn’t read Van Pelt’s novel, I don’t want to spoil it, so I won’t offer any of the particulars I am tempted to detail. I will simply say this: If anyone had told me that I would be captivated by a narrator who is a giant Pacific octopus, I would have been incredulous. Then again, whenever I am faced with lines of iambic pentameter that are centuries removed from my own speech, I am similarly incredulous, convinced that I cannot learn them. And then slowly, I do, as I give them the attention they require.
Shakespeare would appreciate Marcellus, the octopus, and his human friend, Tova, both haunted by the same loss that pervades Sonnet 64. In his last brief chapter of narration, Marcellus reflects that “not a day passed when I did not ruminate on my own death” (349). I will stop there (to reveal no more) and turn to the bard’s words the octopus echoes. Meditating on the rise and fall of the tide, the poet notes that such “interchange of state” (9) has taught him “thus to ruminate, / That Time will come and take my love away” (11-12).
With the words he pens, Shakespeare strives to make sense of that loss. When Cameron, another of Van Pelt’s characters, asks Tova how she recovered from her own grief, she says, “You don’t recover. Not all the way. But you do move on. You have to” (346). Tova, too–a lover of language, like her non-speaking friend, Marcellus–is sustained in part what is written, spoken, and in one instance, etched: words.
My discussions with students about generative AI have been limited to plagiarism and academic integrity. But an end-of-semester faculty summit and a follow-up seventeen-day AI bootcamp led me to realize that I need to devote more attention to GenAI and model its responsible use.
How could I achieve those goals without increasing students’ screen time in the classroom? In the digital age, requiring students to compose drafts longhand and to read and annotate texts on paper seems anachronistic, but cognitive neuroscientists have identified those analog practices as vital. To provide students with a classroom experience that fosters the learning that screens can impede, my students will continue to draft their essays longhand and read on paper, but they will turn to GenAI for exercises in planning and brainstorming.
That series of exercises—which the students will complete outside of class—begins with asking an AI assistant for guidance on selecting a topic for their literacy narrative. Rather than starting with the simple question, what should I write about?, the students will instead present three topics and ask the AI assistant to ask them a series of questions to determine which one has the most narrative possibilities.
Although the students may not agree with the AI’s suggestions—just as they might not agree with a classmate’s or mine—the process itself will likely generate ideas that will lead to starting points. If they don’t, false starts will be steps in the journey, as they often are.
To prepare students for that initial exercise, I will conduct it myself, with three topics of my own, and take screenshots of the questions and answers. That documentation of my own process will enable me to lead students through the process step by step without opening an AI application in the classroom.
Though the students will not turn to AI in the classroom—and will turn only occasionally to their screens—AI will remain at the forefront of their classwork through our study of a sequence of science fiction that explores the nature of artificial intelligence: Isaac Asimov’s “Runaround,” which introduces his Three Laws of Robotics, followed by Brian Aldiss’s “Supertoys” stories and Ted Chiang’s “The Lifecycle of Software Objects.”
I chose those sci-fi stories not because I am naturally drawn to the genre but because of the ways the writers of those narratives use their imaginations as testing grounds for questions about humanity and the future. At the beginning of Ted Chiang’s “The Lifecycle of Software Objects,” a young woman, Ana, sits in front of her computer, waiting for a videoconference job interview that she learns moments later has been canceled. The company has decided to hire someone else.
Ana’s interview-that-wasn’t would have been her first in months to reach the videoconference stage. Trying to recover from her disappointment, Ana sends queries to other companies and receives automated rejections.
For current college students, that doesn’t seem like science fiction. Contemplating such circumstances now in the classroom, their own testing ground—and trying to make sense of them through their own writing—may help them face a future with AI that we cannot know.
In 1978, when I first saw a Peanuts comic strip featuring Sally Brown’s new friend—a girl she’d met at summer camp—the name Charles Schulz had given the character wasn’t a familiar one. The name wasn’t one I’d even remember, at least not until recently, when I read Simon Beecroft’s The Peanuts Book: A Visual History of the Iconic Strip.
When I spotted her in Beecroft’s book, I immediately recognized the girl with the long brown hair capped with a purple tuque, but I had no memory of her name. Undoubtedly, her name had escaped me because eight years had passed between the time I had first encountered her in the panels of Peanuts and my introduction to the writer who inspired her name.
In 1986, I enrolled in my first creative writing class at UNC-Chapel Hill, English 23W, Introduction to Fiction Writing, taught by James Seay. The textbook Professor Seay had chosen for the course was an anthology that included “Why I Live at the P.O.,” a short story that delighted me with the narrator’s description of her uncle, “suddenly appear[ing] in the hallway in one of Stella-Rondo’s flesh-colored kimonos, all cut on the bias” (Welty 48). The woman who wrote those words became—and remains—one of my favorite writers. When I saw her first name in my sophomore textbook, I thought I was seeing that name for the first time. Only recently, forty years later, was I reminded that my first glimpse of the name Eudora was in a speech balloon penned by Charles Schulz. Seeing Sally Brown’s friend Eudora for the first time since 1978 prompted me to wonder whether that brown-haired girl in the purple tuque was named for Eudora Welty.
Beecroft answers my question in his book, noting that Schulz referred to meeting Welty as “really one of the great moments of my whole life” (158). Beecroft also mentions that Welty held Schulz’s “writerly qualities” (158) in high regard: “[T]he way he had imagined the inside of Snoopy’s doghouse but left it to the reader’s imagination. ‘That’s so good,’ Welty said. ‘A writer has to know all about the inside of a thing even if he is just going to show a little bit of it’” (158).
Long before I developed an appreciation for literary fiction, I was enamored with the comic art of Charles Schulz. Was the future writer in me drawn to something in Schulz’s panels that led to my devotion to the written word, some “writerly qualities” I could not yet name?
In her memoir, One Writer’s Beginnings, Welty distinguishes chronological time from the order that we as storytellers give to events: “[I]n their significance to ourselves they find their own order, a timetable not necessarily—perhaps not possibly—chronological. The time as we know it subjectively is often the chronology that stories and novels follow” (69).
Though I first met her namesake eight years before I read Welty’s fiction, the chronology of my writer’s narrative places Schulz’s Eudora second. Only after rediscovering her in the pages of Beecroft’s book did I remember her name. And now she and Welty remain bound in my mind by what Welty would call “the continuous thread of revelation” (69).
Works Cited
Beecroft, Simon. The Peanuts Book: A Visual History of the Iconic Strip. DK/Penguin Random House, 2020.
Welty, Eudora. One Writer’s Beginnings. Harvard University Press, 1984.
—. “Why I Live at the P.O.” 1941. The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980. pp 46-56.
Congratulations to Mark Epstein (ENG 1103.23, Fall 2022), who will commence his life after graduation as a corporate analyst for Morgan Stanley. You can read more about Mark’s achievements at HPU on the Career and Professional Development’s Success Stories page and in the social media post below.
Mark Epstein (far right) in 2022 with his ENG 1103.23 classmates (l-r) Parker Pignataro, Shelby Scott, and Jack Rhynning.
Please keep me updated on your own achievements, so I can celebrate your success stories and share them with the students who follow in your footsteps.
Jane Lucas 