Story-Hoard

Layering Instruction: Text Selection

ENGLISH 1A: Non-Fiction Reading and Writing
Fall 2020 Readings/Viewings:

All of the texts feature models of effective writing and present learning as a key theme. As the students are reading about rowing solo across an ocean or about octopuses and shellfish navigation, they are also reading about learning. Resilience (through preparation and practice) is another underlying theme. Four layers of instruction through text selection.

And I haven't started talking yet.

Martin Wells, Civilization and the Limpet

Tori Murden McClure, A Pearl in the Storm

Tim Severin, The Brendan Voyage

Laurence Gonzales, Deep Survival

Films: Heart of the Sea and Fish People

and a collection of short essays on related topics.

Pillars of Atlantis

The names and geography of the adventure tales of my childhood are never that far away from me.

The Telling

The telling.

That's what I like best about anything: stories, essays, novels, plays, epics.  That's what I love.

How the makers create meaning sentence by sentence, phrase by phrase, word by word, and sometimes morpheme by morpheme.  There's a wonderfully erotic ee cummings poem about bodies that has the phrase "I like its hows" and I'd apply that to every story, every essay, ever offered up to its readers.

The hows.  The telling.

I only wish I'd figured out in grad school how to craft that focus into an appropriate project.

Some might find that a shallow approach to literature, but there's a world of interest in that surface interface between teller and told, between player and audience, between maker and you.  

If you want to dive deep, you have to start at the surface and return to the surface.  There's more there there than we are often taught to understand and appreciate.  (And, frankly, most misreadings arise from lack of attention to detail, to the foundation, to the surface interface I'm calling attention to, to the there.)

Luckily, teaching intro to literature and intro to non-fiction at a community college allows me to delve so much into the telling on a daily basis.

Hungry for Story

Hungry for story
I open the book
To any page
And read again
And again and again
Until I feel full
Only to begin
Again and again
The next day
And the next-next
Each day
Every day
Hungry again.

--MD

Bedside Reading

I think I had Byron's Don Juan in my hand.

After The Paddling And Diving . . . .

Flor de Cana is a memorable rum.

(And, that clipboard. Middle school, high school, college, the warehouse job, the swim instruction job, grad school, community college -- a friend for life, you know?)

Marching Orders

William Shakespeare's Macbeth;
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein;
Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest;
Guy de Maupassant's The Necklace and Other Short Stories;
Mark Strand and Eavan Boland's The Making of a Poem;
E. Annie Proulx's The Shipping News;
assorted stories and poems via handouts;
and some appropriate film clips.

English 1B: Spring 2013

Keith: The Fisher of Tales

 Prince William Sound: June 2002.  Keith Sanders in one of his favorite postures: with fishing pole in hand.  (The only posture better would be with his wife and kids, with friends.)  Keith and I had been kayaking about from a cabin in the nature reserve, after having been dropped off by boat for a few days of catching up on each other's lives, even if we didn't catch any fish.  

Photos of photos.  

Keith,

Happy 51st, again.  I wish you were here.  We all wish you were here.

Remember that time back in '79 or '80 when we waited two hours or so in line at the Original Steele's Diveshop for the rental equipment sale to begin?  We had a blast telling tales in tandem and entertaining the crowd.  (Okay, ten or twelve people was not much of a crowd, but for two young guys, it felt like a crowd.)  I remember that time passing so quickly, so smoothly, as we told silly story after silly story, mishap after mishap, that day.  Folks did thank us for helping the time pass so quickly.  We did good, and we had some fun.  We also both picked up decent ex-rental suits that day, suits I can still picture and may have somewhere in the garage: 5 mm thickness, though broken in; black with blue highlights; waffle-stitched; high-rise pants (not farmer johns); and jackets with integral hoods.  Those wetsuits proved just a bit too snug, suits we had to pass on and replace within the year or two.  We weren't noticing that we were still growing.  Those bargains still count.

We worked together well, kayaking that time (deciding against hubris together, deciding not to venture out into that storm), diving so many times, watching over friends and strangers in the abalone-waters, working on the school newspaper,  solving the ills of the world (at least, theoretically), road-tripping, and telling so many tales over and over.  

(I'll admit that I was counting on you to stand up against any bears for us both; luckily, that one never happened, and you were Alaska's recently adopted son.)  

More than anything, I know you are out there collecting more stories, fishing for the good ones to share when I cross over too.   We never voiced that plan aloud, but we didn't need to, did we?  

I'm looking forward to that reunion, my friend.  But just not yet.

Your pal,

Matt

Plotting The Course

Or, After The Sunset.

Hardcore Waterman; Irreverent, Generous, Genuine Soul

MICKEY MUNOZ

My favorite book right now: Mickey Munoz is amazing.
He's a wonderful model for living life to the fullest and keeping your sense of humor.
The title really says it: "No Bad Waves."

I'll have more to say and samples to share once I finish the work of the semester.

Mickey Munoz,  
No Bad Waves: Talking Story with Mickey Munoz, 
Patagonia Books: Ventura, CA,
2011

Isla Blanca

I like water-and-rock shots like this to feed my imagination.  I picture an island and I put my characters in play there.   This time, there's been a murder, and now that the fog has pulled back out to sea, well, Tom Dacre is about to wish the sunlight wasn't quite so bright.  Though that's not fair, he . . . .

Asilomar, actually.
Looking north toward what I call the Gazebo Rocks.
Perspective?  Memory for mourning?  Story-telling?  Uh-huhh.

Moya Cannon: "Isolde's Tower, Essex Quay"

ISOLDE'S TOWER, ESSEX QUAY

It is our fictions which make us real.
--Robert Kroetch

Is there no end
to what can be dug up
out of the mud of a riverbank,

no end
to what can be dug up
out of the floodplains of a language?

This is no more
than the sunken stump
of a watchtower on a city wall,
built long after any Isolde might have lived,
built over since a dozen times,
uncovered now in some new work--
a tower's old root in black water
behind a Dublin bus stop;

and the story is no more than a story.
Tristan drifted in here on the tide to be healed,
taken in because of his music,
and a long yarn spun on
of which they'd say--

Had not the lovers of whom this story tells
Endured sorrow for the sake of love
They would never have comforted so many.

Wagging Tales

Coyote: clay trickster.

Alexandra Teague's "Language Lessons"

LANGUAGE LESSONS

The carpet in the kindergarten room

was alphabet blocks; all of us fidgeting

on bright, primary letters. On the shelf

sat this week's inflatable sound. The Th

was shaped like a tooth. We sang

about brushing up and down, practiced

exhaling while touching our tongues

to our teeth. Next week, a puffy U

like an upside-down umbrella; the rest

of the alphabet deflated. Some days,

we saw parents through the windows

to the hallway sky. Look, a fat lady,

a boy beside me giggled. Until then

I'd only known my mother as beautiful.

--Alexandra Teague,

from her recent --and recently award-winning-- volume

Mortal Geography.

I love this book of poems.

"Language Lessons" catches more than a moment of childhood, I think.

Young Boar

I like his attitude, though I could have done a better job on his body.

A primitive beast, son of the great boar that gored the hero Odysseus as a boy.

Stories, you know.