The Mercy of Moonlight

During five full days without electricity (and thus without water from our well) after widespread windstorms in Pennsylvania and Ohio, we have lived a bit of an adventure. A commiserating friend suggested that at least we will have a lower electricity bill this month. But I think there's more good than that to come out of the week.

It was good to slow down and just "wait" at times. I had several periods of that during the week--like at first when we thought the power would be back within hours, or after I'd gotten all the perishing food dealt with and had only to wait until it was time to drive to town to make a dinner. And then I could get through a good chunk of Bible study or math with a son, or set a sparrow free that a daughter had rescued as a fledgling two months ago, or read a light novel myself, or have a long talk with another daughter about *The City of God.*

It was good to have offers of help that I know were sincere, and only a few of which we could take advantage of, though it's a little chilling when some people ask how you're doing and have a too-bright smile on, as if they're eager to hear of your discomforts.

It was good to enjoy a shower when I got one the first, third, and fourth days, and to do the dishes with small trickles of water from a pitcher and from a kettle the fourth day. It was good to enjoy the scrambled eggs my husband insisted on making for us on the propane ring the fifth day.

It was good to bask on the porch--front or back--and just enjoy the sunshine and breezes; we marveled at the wind storm the first night, too, until some of the gusts showed their frightening power.

It was good to share the church kitchen with others without power, and to create pleasant, orderly meals out of the chaos of thawing and cooking. It was good to create a vat of chicken and sausage gumbo to be frozen in batches for the future.

It was good to enjoy the smell of matches and candles and to live "pioneer evenings" thinking about Lincoln reading in such an atmosphere (I waited to try to read until Thursday when we borrowed a kerosene lantern).

It was good to get a toilet flushed with the aid of a five-gallon bucket of water. It was good to keep ice in a cooler and to serve two children chilled pudding cups with the last of a can of whipped cream and a sprinkle of nutmeg the fifth day.

It was good to give people the opportunity to share and offer hospitality and equipment, as those who did did it with such ease and good will and cheerfulness--one called me on the phone the fifth day to pester me to bring over my laundry!

It was good to have so much of the world around us electrified, so that we could drive a few miles to campus to use computers or some of us to shower and shave, and so that others COULD offer us help.

When I got word last evening that the power was restored, it was good to share the news with one who had lived the same sort of week and to have a spontaneous hug of celebration.

It was good to know the graciousness of God in the midst of inconvenience (for that was all it was for us, really): We had ideal weather for such a week--sunshine and temperatures ranging from the 40s to the 70s, and what I came to think of as His gracious timing in a full moon all week--the Mercy of Moonlight.

Moonlight made it easier to navigate in a pitch-black house at night, to fumble to the candle or flashlight. Moonlight cheered our arrival at home each evening for bed (after we'd whiled away some darkness in the realm of electricity). Moonlight spared us the fear that might have otherwise closed in, gently reminding us of the goodness of our God and showing us that nighttime is just the same as day, only seemingly less in our control--it is all in His control.

Moonlight revealed much in its tender, comforting way. Did you notice it?

A Good Assignment--Imitating a Narrative

This Progymnasmata Narrative assignment includes several exercises you can . . . well, imitate . . . to work with a narrative. This version is from my Great Books Writing Workshop: Modernity.

From Greenmantle, by John Buchan, 1916

Hertfordshire, United Kingdom: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1994

The introduction to this edition notes that “John Buchan wrote this swashbuckling tale of high adventure between February and June 1916 when serving as a Major in the Intelligence Corps in France during the First World War.” The hero of the tale, Richard Hannay, is sent as a spy on behalf of Great Britain to uncover and foil a plot by the Germans“to invoke a Jihad or Holy War amongst Muslims in the Near East against the British.” In this selection, a little over halfway through the novel, Richard Hannay and his companion Peter are on horseback, finding their way through pitch darkness in a land unfamiliar to Richard. Though it is a narrative, the piece shows how a narrative can create an overall atmosphere or description. Each step through the darkness emphasizes how dark it really is.

We had to trust to Peter’s instinct. I asked him where our line lay, and he sat very still for a minute sniffing the air. Then he pointed the direction. It wasn’t what I would have taken myself, but on a point like that he was pretty near infallible.

Presently we came to a long slope which cheered me. But at the top there was no light visible anywhere—only a black void like the inside of a shell. As I stared into the gloom it seemed to me that there were patches of deeper darkness that might be woods.

“There is a house half-left in front of us,” said Peter.

I peered till my eyes ached and saw nothing.

“Well, for Heaven’s sake, guide me to it,” I said, and with Peter in front we set off down the hill.

It was a wild journey, for darkness clung as close to us as a vest. Twice we stepped into patches of bog, and once my horse saved himself by a hair from going forward into a gravel pit. We got tangled up in strands of wire, and often found ourselves rubbing our noses against tree trunks. Several times I had to get down and make a gap in barricades of loose stones. But after a ridiculous amount of slipping and stumbling we finally struck what seemed the level of a road, and a piece of special darkness in front which turned out to be a high wall.

I argued that all mortal walls had doors, so we set to groping along it, and presently found a gap. There was an old iron gate on broken hinges, which we easily pushed open, and found ourselves on a back path to some house. It was clearly disused, for masses of rotting leaves covered it, and by the feel of it underfoot it was grassgrown.

We were dismounted now, leading our horses, and after about fifty yards the path ceased and came out on a well-made carriage drive. So, at least, we guessed, for the place was as black as pitch. Evidently the house couldn’t be far off, but in which direction I hadn’t a notion.

(pp. 132-133; 364 words )

Warm-up

Answer the journalist’s or even military intelligence reporter’s questions about this narrative.

Who? What? When? Where? Why? How?

Condense the 364 words of the main narrative to about 100-150 words. Think about getting “just the facts” for an intelligence report.

Submit your version as “Part 1—Condensed”

Aerobic

Expand the narrative again to a solid 250 words from your condensed version, without looking at Buchan’s original, and create your own details to convey that sense of darkness Richard Hannay reports.

Submit your version as “Part 2—Expanded”

Anaerobic (Optional)

Create a similar narrative to Buchan’s to convey in a series of events a pervading impression. Below are some suggestions to get you started, but try to create something original if you can. Use about 250-300 words.

• Enter a familiar room occupied by people of longstanding habits and find something that’s just out of place, something wrong in the atmosphere. Use details in the room, discovered over time as you look around or walk around, to convey that feeling. This is a great opportunity to use the comparative mode: instead of…although…
• Tell how a young person discovers bit by bit in a particular interaction that another person is in love with him or her.
• Trace the excitement or dread of a journey (like the one above), as the traveler gets closer and closer to the destination.

I hope you can make good use of this assignment, and perhaps I have interested you in Buchan's fine work!

Beg, Borrow, or Steal

While I'm busy planning the school year for my children and my clients, I offer a little something from a friend . . . "Writing As a Craft."

Thanks, Chris!

Meeting the Famous (and a rule for Real Writers)

From the interesting blog Soul Shelter comes a little tale from a writer about meeting a more-famous writer. The famous one has a run-down little structure in which he Writes, but we don't find out about that until the end of the piece, and in that little shelter is a closing piece of wisdom for all writers or aspirers to important things. You'll have to click the link to read it. :-)

This entertaining account reminds me of one of my favorite topics from my teaching days at Auburn University. Students had, in preparation for an end-of-term exam, read a journalist's account of a breakfast in the presence of Abraham Lincoln. The journalist gave a close description of Lincoln's now-familiar odd looks and just the sort of detail we'd want to know about the President in an article such as the journalist wrote. However, the original was edited down significantly, to leave out the "disrespectful" parts (the parts about how unattractive the man was--though the journalist described him with real restraint and awe). That editing itself is an interesting study. But to the assignment . . .

In the exam period, a timed writing, I asked each student to write about a famous person he or she had met. One had been hit in the leg by the erring golf ball of a famous golfer and got a dinner invitation as a result. A good proportion of the tennis team happened to be in the class in which I first gave this assignment, and two different students had met John McEnroe (notorious bad-boy tennis player at the time). For one student McEnroe performed as expected, ranting at reporters outside a locker room. But for the other--female--he was a charming and unrecognized companion in a long line for a soda at a tournament. When they got to the stand, he bought her drink for her and then walked away, and only then did she hear someone nearby say, "Hey--that's John McEnroe!" I had a great time reading those essays!

So I commend to you the assignment for students to write about meeting someone famous. Marlon Brando once offered my mother a stick of gum when she was a teenager. I once had novelist Larry Woiwode to Sunday dinner. . . .

New Course Announcement: Apprenticeship Writing Workshop

NEW!! Apprenticeship Writing Workshop Part One with Criterion^SM Service $175 (Introductory Price)

Designed for more advanced students desirous of working on their writing style and experimenting with creativity and invention. Both parts of this workshop use Gregory Roper’s The Writer’s Workshop: Imitating Your Way to Better Writing, which students should purchase on their own. Students and the instructor will complete approximately eighteen assignments of from 50 to 400 words (about 5000 words total in submitted work) and share them with other workshop participants, commenting on one another’s work. “Part One: Foundations” includes exercises using models from Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Dickens, Hemingway, Joyce, Sojourner Truth, Moses, and the Apostle Paul. Writers will consider the effects of small decisions in writing, reflect on Impressionism and Realism, Rhetorical forms, law and morality, authority, and invention.

Letter grades will be assigned to a final portfolio of selected assignments, and I suggest ½ credit for this workshop. Criterion^SM Service is included to give students access to the online workshop space and to provide additional practice with essays through graduate school level.

Please visit my blog at wrasselings.blogspot.com to see my own work on two assignments—July 16 and 17, 2008.

Part Two of the Apprenticeship Writing Workshop will be available by late 2008 to those who have completed Part One. It continues with Roper’s “Part Two: Precision Tools and Finer Crafts” and involves close work with Logic, Argument and Negotiation using models from Aquinas, Cicero, a Pope, and a King. This is Rhetoric in action, a great apprenticeship for aspiring serious writers. This workshop introductory price is $150 and it, too, is approximately ½ credit with assignments totaling about 5000 words.

Please visit my website below to learn more!

Mini Review of *The Complete Writer: Writing With Ease* by Susan Wise Bauer

Renee Mathis pointed me in the direction of Susan Wise Bauer's new book series, The Complete Writer: Writing With Ease Instructor Text. Visit that link and read the sample pages from the chapters "Why Writing Fails" and "The Three Stages." I agree quite a bit with SWB, though she advocates saving the Progymnasmata (see my own web site for that :-) ) for the last years of high school, treating them as advanced tools to be used when the student has a good understanding of how to use them. I believe the Progymnasmata can be introduced in the elementary years in a small way and worked on as profitable exercises in themselves in middle school. So that's how I use them. But I think her overall observations of the state of student (college) writing today match my own, and I think her prescription is a good way to deal with the problem. I intend to use some of her ideas with my youngest, entering fifth grade this year.

So check it out--see what you think--and let me know! :-)

Definition Exercise--Creative Imitation, Part Two

See July 16 post for Part One

Exercise 3.6
“Contentment” on the model of Sojourner Truth’s “A’n’t I A Woman?”

(First, I outlined the basic structure of Truth’s argument, then used that structure for my own. Because I do not have the drama to set up the argument, I begin a different way and wind up with a reference to it to tie everything together.)

On Deal or No Deal, now on NBC, or the old Let’s Make a Deal, a contestant comes to a suspense-filled decision, at a point at the top of the roller coaster: Will you keep what you have or cast it away for the unknown Other, the Possibility? What is behind that curtain, what’s in that case?

The one who chooses the modest thing he knows or thinks he knows holds interest for us only if what he passed up is worse, or if we crave seeing his disappointment at what he lost. But the contestant so resolved often crosses his arms against his chest or puts his hand on the case, illustrating with his body language the original meaning of “contentment”—“I’ll hold with this.”

Some say contentment comes with true grit, determination, hard work, and the satisfaction of a job well done. Yes, that satisfaction is a part of contentment, and does come with the knowledge that we’ve worked hard. But how often does that hard work miss the point of contentment and become focused on itself, on the sweat and the clenched fist? Better to hold loosely, easily, what comes of our work.

Others say contentment is just bearing up with What Is, being realistic, not expecting much. But how easily this becomes bitter cynicism, a drafty emptiness. The hands are missing something—half empty rather than enjoying the half full.

Still others suggest that we must be unselfish and not measure our contentment by what we have, even if it’s just a little, but we must give it all away. We must abase ourselves, claim to deserve nothing even to the point of turning away what is offered, in apathy. But what sterility there is in this kind of emptiness—no material for growth, or for sharing with a smile and enjoying something WITH another person.

If these misunderstandings of contentment were put together we’d have tension, emptiness, stagnation. But Spirit-led contentment brings freedom, fullness, and growth, which the fist, the empty hand, and the downturned hand don’t have. The case and the curtain hide secrets, surprises. But the Lord owns the cattle on a thousand hills, and every knee will bow to Him, and He sees and cares for the lily and the sparrow. Godliness with contentment brings great gain. I’ll hold with this.

© Cindy Marsch
2008