Our Wordplay days in class gave us opportunities to build our word power, collaborate, and engage in creative problem solving. Now they offer us a way to forget our sense of isolation. I hope that games, whether table-top or digital, continue to lift your spirits.
With that hope in mind, I designed this assignment devoted to word games.
Directions:
Choose one of the options below, and post your response as a comment by 5 p.m. on Friday, April 17.
Option One:
Imagine that the first seven letters of your name (all first, or first plus part of last) are seven tiles on a Scrabble rack.
Go to the Scrabble Dictionary, click the Scrabble Word Builder tab (to the right of Scrabble Dictionary), enter your seven letters, and click “Go.”
Post a blog comment of twenty-five words or more that includes (1) the seven letters that you entered, (2) the number of playable words that you can spell with those letters, (3) at least one of the words in the list that was unfamiliar to you, and (4) the definition of the word.
Sample: Entering the first seven letters of my name, J-A-N-E-L-U-C, into the Scrabble Word Builder yields fifty-one playable words. Two that I wasn’t familiar with are fish: “alec,” a herring, and “luce,” a pike.
Post a blog comment of twenty-five words or more that includes (1) one of the newly playable words, (2) its definition, and 3) whether the word was familiar to you.
Sample: The New York Times article “New Scrabble Words Get the ‘OK’” includes the newly playable word [insert word here], which was unfamiliar to me. [Insert word here] means [insert definition here].
Do not use the word “OK.” In other words, “OK” is not okay. It’s in the title of the article, and you already know its definition.
Let the play begin!
Remember to check your CVCC email and Blackboard regularly for updates and assignments.
Wordplay days gave us opportunities to build our word power, collaborate, and engage in creative problem solving. Now they’re pastimes that can help us forget our isolation. I hope that games, whether table-top or digital, continue to lift your spirits.
With that hope in mind, I designed this assignment inspired by Fred’s Victorian parlor games In A Christmas Carol (stave 3) and our Wordplay Days. Below the directions, I’ve included a list of Victorian authors for your reference.
Directions:
Choose one of the options below, and post your response as a comment by 5 p.m. on Friday, April 17. The first ten students who post comments and the student whose letters yield the largest number of playable words will receive bonus points.
Option One:
Imagine that seven letters of a Victorian author’s last name (all last, or last plus first letter/s of the first) are the seven tiles on your Scrabble rack. See my sample below.
Go to the Scrabble Dictionary, click the Scrabble Word Builder tab (to the right of Scrabble Dictionary), enter the seven letters, and click “Go.”
Post a blog comment of twenty-five words or more that includes (1) the seven letters that you entered, (2) the number of playable words that you can spell with those letters, (3) at least one of the words in the list that was unfamiliar to you, and (4) the definition of the word.
Sample: Entering the seven letters A-R-N-O-L-D-M (for Matthew Arnold) in the Scrabble Word Builder yields 103 playable words. Two that I wasn’t familiar with are “dolma,” a stuffed grape leaf, and “lardon,” a thin slice of bacon or pork.
Early-bird bonus points go to Madison St. Clair, Joshua West, Grey Sacona, Peyton Moore, Breanna Bowman, Joe Van Story, Ruben Castillo, Anna Young, Emily Brown, and Roberto Perez-Perez. Well done!
And Emily Brown earns extra credit for submitting the first correct response to the bonus questions! Very well done!
Everyone needs a little Shakespeare.
Apparently Dickens thought so.
And here’s an image of winter again to put you in more of A Christmas Carol reading mood.
Remember to check your CVCC email and Blackboard regularly for updates and assignments.
Welcome to our second drama workshop session, and thank you for your thoughtful feedback on the first script, Twins of an Ill Fate. Before we turn to the next two scripts, The Slow Declineand the monologue from Bound, I offer these follow-up notes:
Brandy, Brennan, and Zane mentioned the difficulty of distinguishing Harry from Henry. That’s a point that I’ll return to later in my notes.
Mia and Brennan both envisioned the story as one better suited for another medium, and Brennan added that there were moments that would be difficult if not impossible to stage. Since the realm of Twins of an Ill Fate lies somewhere between fourth wall realism and extreme theatricality, it might be staged with scene changes–as Mia suggested–and the Angel-to-Grim Reaper transformation could take place in a black-out or otherwise out of view.
Trevor recommended condensing the stage directions, and Brennan noted that some of them could be omitted. Often the characters’ words alone suffice. As I mentioned in our first session, in Imaginative Writing, Janet Burroway notes that “good dialogue will convey most of its tone as an integral part of the lines, and when this is the case, there is no need to announce the tone of voice in a stage direction” (327).
Although Henry and Harry are easily confused on the page, seeing them on stage played by two actors, wearing clothes that aren’t identical, would enable the audience to distinguish Harry from Henry more easily. And in all likelihood they’d be played by actors who aren’t identical twins. That said, I’ll return to the what-if I asked in our first session and add another.
What if Henry and Harry were never on stage at the same time? What if everyone except the surviving twin–Sally, Margret, the Grim Reaper, and the audience–was left without an answer to the question, did one brother lie to save his own life?
Mia questioned the need for the twins to be identified as adopted, and Trevor mentioned Romulus and Remus, the adopted twins of Rome’s founding myth, and the opportunities that twin characters present, both as archetypes and subjects for exploration of nature and nurture. One reason for the revelation of the twins’ adoption–which Margret’s phone conversation provide–may be the existential crisis that crests with the realization that we are not who we thought we were, whether children of God or the children of the people we believed were our biological parents. I don’t know whether that’s what the writer intended, but the symbolic framework of the play leaves it open to that possibility.
One play I recommend to the writer is Deborah Zoe Laufer’s End Days, a dark comedy about a family preparing for Armageddon. The mother has visions of Jesus, and the daughter has visions of Stephen Hawking. One actor plays both Jesus and Hawking.
The points I have included below are not ones that you’re required to address in your comments about The Slow Decline and the monologue from Bound. I offer them as suggestions only. I will address some of them in the follow-up remarks that I’ll post at the beginning of our third session.
The Slow Decline
Mr. Castillo begins with his earliest memories and offers his story chronologically. Where else might he begin, and what might that alternate starting point contribute to his monologue?
What costume notes could place Mr. Castillo at odds with his words? Is there a stage lie? Is he wearing pajamas or or a pin-striped suit? How does that affect our reading of the line, “[t]he doctors say I don’t have much time left”?
The tape recorder’s breakdown thwarts Mr. Castillo’s plan. What other obstacles, internal or external, might complicate the delivery of his story?
What plays, if any–ones in Imaginative Writing or others that you’ve read–would you recommend to the writer as models or possible sources of inspiration?
Monologue from Bound
What is the risk of beginning, as this monologue does, with a solution rather than a problem?
Where might the writer use italics for emphasis? David Ives’ play The Philadelphia (see Imaginative Writing, 158-64) uses italics effectively in the conversation between the characters Al and Mark. Imagine the narrator emphasizing “finally” when he repeats it, then imagine him emphasizing “god.” How does the change in emphasis affect your perception of the narrator’s stance?
Consider the stage lie again. Is the narrator reliable? What actions or gestures might reveal his reliability or lack thereof?
What plays, if any–ones in Imaginative Writing or others that you’ve read–would you recommend to the writer as models or possible sources of inspiration?
Post your two responses, twenty-five words or more each, as replies. If you address a point that one of your classmates has written in a previous reply, mention that classmate by name in your own reply. Post by 5 p.m. on Thursday, April 9.
Remember to check your CVCC email and Blackboard regularly for updates and assignments.
Part I of this blog post offers a look back at excerpts from some of the comments that you posted last week. Although I never would have chosen for us to communicate exclusively online as we are now, I am grateful for the opportunity to see your thoughts on the screen. And I hope that reading your classmates’ comments has been a comfort. I know it has been for me. If your gravatar isn’t on your blog, I encourage you to add it. It puts a human face beside your words.
From Crowson Roosa:
The past two weeks have definitely shifted my views of the novel. As Jeremy said, “being under quarantine has definitely caused me to become very cautious.” After being alone in isolation, I never really appreciated interacting with my classmates and friends until I could not see them anymore.
From: Joe Van Story:
I have learned to not look at everything at face value and to try to look deeper and try to find the good in what is happening. An example of this is the COVID-19 virus, while it is a tragedy it has brought unexpected joy in my life, such as spending more time with my family.
From Jenna Ramsey:
In regards to Del Toro’s remarks, he states how reading the book showed him “how deep, how life-changing, a monster parable could be–how it could function as art and how it could reach across distance and time to become a palliative to solitude and pain.” This also goes hand-in-hand with the virus. This virus is the ‘monster parable’ that has been life-changing to most everyone, in at least one way or another. While this virus has been ‘a monster parable,’ it could also be considered an ‘art’ of sorts in the way it has caused us to stop and think about what we truly need to be buying (if we truly need to run out to this store or that store), has caused us to spend more time at home with our families and rethink what we are doing with the time we have on our hands. It has also spread all over the world, affecting many people, leaving us to solitude/quarantine and caused pain to those who have had life-altering things happen due to the virus.
From Jacob Palmer:
As Caeley Arney mentioned in her comment, it is true that Victor Frankenstein hid himself from his creation in disgust. But we must not forget that the monster too isolated himself from society, intently watching over the DeLacey family from the safety of their hovel. Being deprived of the company of fellow creatures for such a long time, the monster took an uncharacteristic liking of this intriguing family, longing to be embraced by them and admitted into their ranks. It is in this time of isolation that we may really understand what the monster is feeling, and come to sympathize with him more so than before. One may come to recognize this desire to socialize to be unmistakably human. Thus, while the monster may be confined to the body of a monstrosity, it is evident that the feelings he expresses are none other than those of a human being. This raises questions as to what constitutes humanity and may challenge original notions over who the real monster is in this harrowing story.
Below I’ve included a works cited list as a model for citing comments on a blog post. Yes, there’s actually an MLA-style format for that, and there’s one for tweets as well. If you want to cite one of your classmates’ comments in your Victorian project, look to these entries as models. For more sample entries, see OWL’s page devoted to citing electronic sources.
As we begin our study of Victorian writers, observe how their fiction differs from the prose and poetry of the Romantics:
On the one hand romances were writings that turned, in their quest for settings conducive to supernatural happenings, to distant pasts, faraway exotic places, or both . . . . On the other hand romance also named a homegrown, native tradition of literature, made unfamiliar and alien by the passage of time. (Lynch 18; emphasis added)
The Celtic ballad “The Dæmon-lover” exemplifies those two seemingly disparate accounts of the writing of the Romantic period; it features the supernatural, and its renewed popularity in the nineteenth century illustrates the revival of interest in older forms, “native tradition[s] . . . made unfamiliar and alien by the passage of time” (18).
Turner, J.M.W. Interior of Tintern Abbey (1794). / tate.org
We’ve also seen the Romantics’ renewed interest in medieval literature in Victor Frankenstein’s early account of his friend Henry Clerval: “He was deeply read in books of chivalry and romance. He composed heroic songs, and began to write many a tale of enchantment and knightly adventure (Shelley 33).
Much later in Frankenstein, Victor’s description of Henry elucidates another trait of the Romantic period, the adoration of nature: “The scenery of external nature, which others regard with only admiration, he [Henry] loved with ardour” (Shelley 139). That observation of Victor’s serves as an introduction to the verse that follows in Chapter 28, eight lines from William Wordsworth’s poem “Tintern Abbey,” the first-generation Romantic’s own recollection of his attachment to nature.
As a counterpoint, consider these descriptions of the Victorian age:
In the eighteenth century the pivotal city of Western civilization had been Paris; by the second half of the nineteenth century this center of influence had shifted to London, a city that expanded from about two million inhabitants when Victoria came to the throne to six and a half million at the time of her death. The rapid growth of London is one of the many indications of the most important development of the age: the shift from a way of life based on the ownership of land to a modern urban economy based on trade and manufacturing. (Robson 3; emphasis added)
Because Britain was the first country to become industrialized, it’s transformation was an especially painful one: it experienced a host of social and economic problems consequent to rapid and unregulated industrialization. Britain also experienced an enormous increase in wealth. (Robson 4)
Works Cited
Lynch, Deidre Shauna. Introduction: “The Romantic Period, 1785-1832.” The Norton Anthology of British Literature: The Romantic Period. 10th ed. Stephen Greenblatt, General Editor. W.W. Norton, 2018. pp. 3-27.
Robson, Catherine. Introduction: “The Victorian Age, 1830-1901.” The Norton Anthology of British Literature: The Victorian Age. 10th ed. Stephen Greenblatt, General Editor. W.W. Norton, 2018. pp. 3-27.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. 1818, 1831. Introduction and Notes by Karen Karbeiner. Barnes and Noble, 2003.
PART III
Engraving by John Leech (1843) / gutenberg.org, The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992) / disney.com
One of the challenges of reading A Christmas Carolnow is seeing beyond the images that are part of our collective memory. Even those who have never read Charles Dickens’ novella see in their minds Ebenezer Scrooge, the ghosts, Bob Cratchit, Tiny Tim . . . . We have watched the iconic miser’s story unfold on-screen over and over. Whether we see him as Michael Caine (in The Muppet Christmas Carol), as Disney’s Scrooge McDuck, or as Alastair Sim (A Christmas Carol, 1951), he’s there in our minds.
Your assignment this week is too look beyond those images and see the story anew through Dickens’ own words. I have assigned each of you one of the five staves. Dickens labeled each section or chapter as a stave, an archaic term for a stanza of a song or poem, to underscore the idea that the story is a Christmas carol in prose.
Directions
Study the stave assigned to you in A Christmas Carol (see the lists below), and identify at least one detail that isn’t familiar to you, something you haven’t seen or heard in an adaptation: a description, a line of dialogue, an unfamiliar term, etc.
Compose a response of twenty-five words or more that addresses that detail. Include the stave number in your response. If you include a quote, follow it with a parenthetical citation: stave with a lower-case s followed by the number (stave 1).
If you’d like to address the experience of reading Dickens’ novella in the days of the novel coronavirus, you’re welcome to do that in addition to (not in place of) addressing your assigned stave.
Post your comment as a reply to this blog post by 5 p.m. on Thursday, April 9.
To avoid the risk of students restating what classmates have written in earlier posts, I will not make the comments available for view until after the posting deadline on Thursday.
ENG 242.871AC
Stave 5: Carmen Bonilla, Gabe Carswell, Dakota Clawson, James Erwin, Caleb Fountain, Deanna Grogan, Allison Lasher, Paige Lewis, Emma Maltba, Hayleigh Marshall, Jaanai Mendez-Santiago, Mason Nance, Shea Ortiz, Andrew Parker
Stave 4: Amelia Price, Caroline Riddle, Grey Sacona, J.D. Sharpe, Kenna Sipe, Josh Sloan, Joshua West, Autumn Yang
ENG 242.872AC
Stave 4: Cierra Ballard, Mariana Bonilla-Quesada, Ashton Canipe, Allie Desantiago, Sarah Fox
Stave 3: Cristian Gonzalez-Sanchez, Candace Johnson, David Long, Hannah Maltba, Keara McCann, Peyton Moore, Jacob Palmer, Roberto Perez-Perez, Jenna Ramsey, Chandler Rhyne, Joe Robbins, Jeremy Simpson, Alex Xiong, Madison St. Clair
Stave 2: Ahira Yanez, Anna Young
ENG 242.873AC
Stave 2: Bryan Alba, Caeley Arney, Eden Austin, Breanna Bowman, Emily Brown, Ruben Castillo-Martinez, Landon Childres, Breanna Church, Colin Coffey, Chandler Danner, Noah Dietrich, Courtney Gant, Cole Harris
Stave 1: Jachin Jenkins, Caleb Little, Kayde Morgan, Luke Noble, Declan O’Halloran, Brian Paz-Tellez, Courtney Powell, Crowson Roosa, Lauren Setzer, Cole Sharpe, Madison Starnes, Joe Van Story, Riley Whitener, Linsey Wike
The first ten students to post will receive bonus points, and the first student who correctly answers the questions below will be awarded an extra credit assignment in the participation and preparedness category.
Extra Credit Questions
Along with the ghosts that visit Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, there’s a reference to another literary ghost. Who is the ghost, and in what work of British literature does he figure?
Remember to check your CVCC email and Blackboard regularly for updates and assignments.
Reading your textual analyses demonstrated that an exercise in integrating quotations would be a valuable follow-up assignment. In academic writing, sentences never begin with quotations. Instead, they’re introduced with signal phrases, such as these:
According to Tara Westover,
Tara Westover writes that
In Westover’s words,
As an example for the comment you will post this week, I have turned back to the comment that Madison wrote last week. First, here is her comment as it appears word for word:
Deep down, past her internal struggle of accepting vulnerability, Westover realizes that she, too, has her own voice. This is revealed in her conflicting journal entries where she writes about a violent event involving Shawn assaulting her and her uncertainty about what to think about it. She bounces back and forth between reasoning that the attack was her fault and Shawn being in the wrong. Her doubt is disclosed as a turning point in the perceiving of her thoughts compared to her family’s.
Here’s my revised version, which introduces three lines from the end of the chapter:
Deep down, past her internal struggle of accepting vulnerability, Westover realizes that she, too, has her own voice. This is revealed in her conflicting journal entries where she writes about a violent event involving Shawn assaulting her and her uncertainty about what to think about it. She bounces back and forth between reasoning that the attack was her fault and Shawn being in the wrong. Readers witness her predicament as she reflects on her journal entries. In Westover’s words, “[t]he second entry would not obscure the words of the first. Both would remain, my memories set down alongside his. There was a boldness in not editing for consistency” (197). The bold act of writing her own memory to counter Shawn’s serves as a turning point, a place where her perceptions diverge from her family’s.
What I’ve done with Madison’s comment is what I’m asking you to do with your own response to a passage in our reading for this week.
Directions
Write a short response to a passage in Chapter 25, 26, 27, or 28 of Educated.
Include in your response a short quotation with a signal phrase and a parenthetical citation.
If you name Westover in the signal phrase, include only the page number (216).
If you do not name Westover in the signal phrase, include her last name (Westover 216). Note that there’s no comma or page abbreviation.
Post your comment/reply no later than 5 p.m. on Wednesday, April 8.
Oscar-winning director Gillermo Del Toro first read Frankenstein when he was a fourteen-year-old growing up in Mexico. Mary Shelley’s novel transformed him. As we conclude our study of Frankenstein, consider these words of his:
I saved my Sunday allowance for a couple of weeks and bought it [the paperback]. I read it in one sitting, and by the end of it, I was weeping. It was my Road to Damascus. It illuminated the reason I love monsters, my kinship with them, and showed me how deep, how life-changing, a monster parable could be–how it could function as art and how it could reach across distance and time to become a palliative to solitude and pain.
And here we are, two centuries later, faithfully depositing flowers to this most exquisite storyteller, this extraordinary Galatea who refused to be shaped by her circumstances and gave us all life. And we try, in return, to help her creature stay alive. We strive to turn a curse into a blessing.
We hope that in some way, somehow, our gratitude, our love, can reach him like a whispered prayer, like a distant song. And we dream that perhaps he can stop–amid that frozen tundra and the screaming wind–and can turn his head and look back. At us.
And we hope that then he might recognize in our eyes his own yearning. And perchance we can walk toward each other and find meager warmth in our embrace.
And then, if only for a moment, we will not feel alone in the world. (xiv-xv)
Although Mary Shelley’s novel may not have transformed you as it did Del Toro, you are reading, or rereading, its final chapters as the COVID-19 pandemic transforms all of our daily lives.
Have the unprecedented circumstances of the past two weeks altered your perceptions of Shelley’s novel? If so, how?
If you’d rather not write about finishing Frankenstein in the days of coronavirus, write about one of the novel’s themes or one of the moments in the narrative that lingers in your mind.
Or respond to Del Toro’s remarks.
Post your response of twenty-five words or more as a reply. If you address a point that one of your classmates has written in a previous reply, mention that classmate by name in your own reply. In the coming weeks we may turn back to some of your replies/comments as we study Dickens, Carroll, Stevenson, and Doyle.
Remember to check your CVCC email and Blackboard regularly for updates and assignments.
Sincerely Sequestered,
Dr. Lucas
Work Cited
Del Toro, Guillermo. Introduction. “Mary Shelley, or the Modern Galatea.” The New Annotated Frankenstein. By Mary Shelley, edited by Leslie S. Klinger, W. W. Norton, 2017, pp xi-xvii.
Postscript
And the early-bird bonus points go to these CVCC Red Hawks: Grey Sacona, Caeley Arney, Madison St. Clair, Gabe Carswell, Chandler Danner, Lauren Setzer, Jenna Ramsey, Joshua West, Ruben Castillo, and Joe Van Story! Well Done!
Chapter 22, “What We Whispered and What We Screamed,” marks a change in Tara Westover‘s journal writing.
Reread the final pages of the chapter, 195-97, and write a short response that describes the change.
Post your response of twenty-five words or more as a reply. Next week we will turn back to your responses as a starting point for our conversations about Educated and the craft of writing.
Remember to check your CVCC email and Blackboard regularly for updates and assignments.
Wherever you are in your reading of Educated, I encourage you to look back at the pages where Tara Westover recounts her first days on campus at Brigham Young University (155-58). Stepping into the unfamiliar–as she was then and we are now–is always difficult.
As we continue our study of Educated, consider not only what Tara Westover’s memoir reveals about the craft of writing but also how her resiliency can serve as a model for us in this time of uncertainty.
Remember to check your CVCC email and Blackboard regularly for updates and assignments.
This post serves as both a welcome back note and a blog entry on the writer’s craft, the second one I’ve written with you. (I posted the first one on January 22.)
I’m always grateful when I discover that readings and assignments in my various courses dovetail. It reminds me that although the particulars of the courses differ, communicating effectively in writing and closely examining written texts are fundamentals they all share.
Two dovetail discoveries occurred earlier this semester. The first one happened when I was reading the composition students’ weekly assignment in The Norton Field Guide to Writing. It was in the chapter devoted to description. There the textbook’s authors include excerpts from two pieces of writing about multiple sclerosis that together illustrate lucidly the differences between the general description of objective nonfiction and the concrete, significant details and voice that bring creative nonfiction to life. Read the two excerpts that follow and consider both the differences between the words and how the words in each excerpt affect you.
First, a description from a brochure published by the National Multiple Sclerosis Society:
Multiple sclerosis is a chronic, unpredictable disease of the central nervous system (the brain, optic nerves, spinal cord). It is thought to be an autoimmune disorder. This means the immune system incorrectly attacks a person’s healthy tissue.
MS can cause blurred vision, loss of balance, poor coordination, slurred speech, tremors, numbness, extreme fatigue, problems with memory and concentration, paralysis, and blindness. These problems may be permanent, or they may come and go. (qtd. in Bullock et al. 444)
Second, an excerpt from “On Being a Cripple,” by Nancy Mairs, a writer with MS:
During its course, which is unpredictable and uncontrollable, one may lose vision, hearing, speech, the ability to walk, control bladder and/or bowels, strength in any or all extremities, sensitivity to touch, vibration and/or pain, potency, coordination of movements–the list of possibilities is lengthy and yes, horrifying. One may also lose one’s sense of humor. That’s the easiest to lose and the hardest to survive without.
In the past ten years, I have sustained some of these losses. Characteristic of MS are sudden attacks, called exacerbations, followed by remissions, and these I have not had. Instead my disease has been slowly progressive. My left leg is now so weak that I walk with the aid of a brace and a cane, and for distances I use an Amigo, a variation on the electric wheelchair that looks rather like an electrified kiddie car. I no longer have much use of my left hand. Now my right side is weakening as well. I still have the blurred spot in my right eye. Overall, though, I’ve been lucky so far. (qtd. in Bullock et al. 443-44)
Another dovetail discovery occurred when my composition students were studying Chapter 11 of Tara Westover’s memoir, Educated. The latter half of that chapter, “Instinct,” depicts Westover’s brother Shawn reining in the frightened gelding, Bud, preventing him from throwing Tara.
As my composition students and I examined the series of conflicts that propel the chapter forward, it occurred to me that the concluding pages of Chapter 11 would serve as an ideal segue from our study, in English 126, of creative nonfiction to our study of fiction. That scene exemplifies the structural similarities between fiction and memoirs, such Westover’s, that follow the same narrative arc.
In the span of only two and a half pages, Westover presents five conflicts: (1) Bud, the gelding, in conflict with the angry mare, (2) Tara in conflict with the frightened Bud, (3) Tara in conflict with herself (Should she let go of the saddle horn?), (4) Shawn in conflict with the mare, and (5) Shawn in conflict with–and ultimately prevailing over–Bud. Thanks to Brennan for pointing out the fourth conflict, which I had overlooked earlier.
Lastly, I’ll address our final in-class reading on March 12, Christopher Durang’s For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls. Not only did Durang’s play let us exit laughing, it also showed us how quirky, well-wrought parody can pull readers into a play regardless of their knowledge of the source. When Lawrence says: “I call this [cocktail stirrer] Q-tip because I realized it looks like a Q-tip” (19), readers will laugh even if they don’t know that he’s a spoof of Laura Wingfield.
Remember to check your CVCC email and Blackboard regularly for updates and assignments. We will get through these days–and exit laughing again, I hope.
Bullock, Richard et al. Chapter 42: “Describing.” The Norton Field Guide to Writing with Handbook. 5th ed., 2019. pp. 443-44.
Durang, Christopher. For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls. Christopher Durang: Twenty-Seven Short Plays. Smith and Krauss, 1995. pp. 12-27.
Our Wordplay days in class gave us opportunities to build our word power, collaborate, and engage in creative problem solving. Now they offer us a way to forget our sense of isolation. I hope that games, whether table-top or digital, continue to lift your spirits.
rack.
Wordplay days gave us opportunities to build our word power, collaborate, and engage in creative problem solving. Now they’re pastimes that can help us forget our isolation. I hope that games, whether table-top or digital, continue to lift your spirits.
your Scrabble rack. See my sample below.
Welcome to our second drama workshop session, and thank you for your thoughtful feedback on the first script, Twins of an Ill Fate. Before we turn to the next two scripts, The Slow Decline and the monologue from Bound, I offer these follow-up notes:
the adopted twins of Rome’s founding myth, and the opportunities that twin characters present, both as archetypes and subjects for exploration of nature and nurture. One reason for the revelation of the twins’ adoption–which Margret’s phone conversation provide–may be the existential crisis that crests with the realization that we are not who we thought we were, whether children of God or the children of the people we believed were our biological parents. I don’t know whether that’s what the writer intended, but the symbolic framework of the play leaves it open to that possibility.
Reading your textual analyses demonstrated that an exercise in integrating quotations would be a valuable follow-up assignment. In academic writing, sentences never begin with quotations. Instead, they’re introduced with signal phrases, such as these:
Dear Readers,
And the early-bird bonus points go to these CVCC Red Hawks: Grey Sacona, Caeley Arney, Madison St. Clair, Gabe Carswell, Chandler Danner, Lauren Setzer, Jenna Ramsey, Joshua West, Ruben Castillo, and Joe Van Story! Well Done!
Chapter 22, “What We Whispered and What We Screamed,” marks a change in 
Wherever you are in your reading of Educated, I encourage you to look back at the pages where Tara Westover recounts her first days on campus at Brigham Young University (155-58). Stepping into the unfamiliar–as she was then and we are now–is always difficult.
This post serves as both a welcome back note and a blog entry on the writer’s craft, the second one I’ve written with you. (I posted the first one on 
Another dovetail discovery occurred when my composition students were studying Chapter 11 of Tara Westover’s memoir, Educated. The latter half of that chapter, “Instinct,” depicts Westover’s brother Shawn reining in the frightened gelding, Bud, preventing him from throwing Tara.
Jane Lucas 