HW 1

HW_ “OTHER” ESSAYS

DIRECTIONS

Complete the responses below in a Word or Google document and then copy and paste your answers in a new thread on the discussion board:

– Make sure that number and format your answers to match the questions below. 5

– Please copy and paste your answers in the actual post (do not attach them as files; this makes

it much easier to read).

– Post your answer to #2 as a reply to that student’s original post.

1. SELECTED “OTHER” ESSAYS 10

Briefly scan through the selected essays on “other” and then choose three (3) pieces that you might like to use as models for your own piece of flash nonfiction about a topic not directly related to place, family, or work and then complete the following:

Note that for our nonfiction project we will be using model essays just as we did for the poetry

project. 15

Note that for this project, we will be reading selected essays about place, family, work, and

style; you will need to choose two different models on different themes to develop your

nonfiction project.

“[INSERT TITLE of FIRST SELECTED “OTHER” ESSAY]” BY [INSERT AUTHOR’S NAME] 20

What makes the style of this short essay stand out from the others you have read?

1a. Line [#]: “[Insert passage from that best illustrates the essay’s style: 50-75 words]”

1b. Line [#]: “[Insert passage from that best illustrates the essay’s style: 50-75 words]”

1c. What stands out to you about the style of this piece and why would this make for interesting

style to model for your own “other” essay? 50-75 words. 25

“[INSERT TITLE of SECOND SELECTED “OTHER” ESSAY]” BY [INSERT AUTHOR’S NAME]

1d. Line [#]: “[Insert passage from that best illustrates the essay’s style: 50-75 words]”

1e. Line [#]: “[Insert passage from that best illustrates the essay’s style: 50-75 words]”

1f. What stands out to you about the style of this piece and why would this make for interesting 30

style to model for your own “other” essay? 50-75 words.

“[INSERT TITLE of THIRD SELECTED “OTHER” ESSAY]” BY [INSERT AUTHOR’S NAME]

1g. Line [#]: “[Insert passage from that best illustrates the essay’s style: 50-75 words]” 35

1h. Line [#]: “[Insert passage from that best illustrates the essay’s style: 50-75 words]”

1e. What stands out to you about the style of this piece and why would this make for interesting

style to model for your own “other” essay? 50-75 words.

40

HW 2

2. MODELING

Choose one (1) of the three essays you selected above and use it as a model to start a brief draft of your own essay about work (either your own work or the work of someone or multiple people you have observed closely for an extended period). 45

2a. “Title of Selected Essay to Model”

2b. “Tentative Title for Your Own Essay”

2c. Develop 100-200 words of a draft of CNF about a topic that is not directly related to place,

family, or work (though it may address one of those topics indirectly).

50

3. RESPONDING

Scan through the students with other posts and reply to a student who had an especially strong piece of micro-nonfiction and post the following: 55

3a. “Insert most compelling line from the student’s piece.” (nouns & verbs in bold)

3b. “Insert second most compelling line from the student’s piece.” (nouns & verbs in bold)

3b. Explain why the student’s piece of micro-nonfiction effectively models the style of the work

essay they selected. 50-75 words.

60

SELECTED ESSAYS / pg. 1

SELECTED ESSAYS: THE CREATIVE NONFICTION PROJECT

ESSAYS ABOUT PLACE ESSAYS ABOUT WORK (continued)

Boat People Michael Perry 2 All The Forces At Work Here Joe Wilkins 17

In Wyoming Mark Spragg 2 Things Are Meted Out to People and Then They Leave Tory M. Taylor 18

In Nebraska Ted Kooser 3 A Black Hairstory Lesson Niya Marie 18

Moving Water, Tucson Peggy Shumaker 3 The Deck Yusef Komunyakaa 19

If I Wanted to Write About the South Daisuke Shen 4 Mown Lawn Lydia Davis 20

Hochzeit Debra Marquart 5 Fish Nicole Walker 21

Duck, North Carolina Christina Olson 6 ESSAYS ABOUT OTHER

Genderfuck Madison Hoffman 22

Meditation on a Morning Commute Aram Mrjoian 7

Neurod(i)verse Sounds Like Universe Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach 23

Becoming a Sanvicenteña: Five Stages Kate Hopper 8

Women These Days Amy Butcher 24

Variations on a Home Depot Paint Sample David Andrews 9

The Quantum Theory of Suffering Natalie Diaz 24

ESSAYS ABOUT FAMILY

Fun For Everyone Involved Heather Sellers 10 Joyas Voladoras Brian Doyle 25

On The Elliptical Machine, You Ask Your Mom Rachael Peckham 10 A Brief Atmospheric Future Matthew Gavin Frank 26

Photograph Michael Ondaatje 11 S__ __T (A Dialogue) Janis Butler Holm 27

Clean Slate Joanna McNaney 11

Hill Street Blues Brian Fry 12

A Thing of Air Andrea Rinard 12

I hoisted them, two drug dealers Dianne Seuss 13

We’ve Waited For Vaccines Rebecca Entel 13

The Memory of My Disappearance Meg Rains 13

ESSAYS ABOUT WORK

Work Lessons Lizz Huerta 15

Partition Nic Anstett 16

On Fire Larry Brown 16

SELECTED ESSAYS / pg. 2

ESSAYS ABOUT PLACE

Boat People 5

By Michael Perry

The women here put on their makeup like rust-proofing. Preschoolers toddle through the trailer park mud puddles, splashing and pimp-

cussing. Teenage girls in sweat pants and ratty NASCAR t-shirts smoke over parked strollers, hips set at a permanent baby-propping cant. The

afternoons oxidize like trailer tin. Still, there are boyfriends, and emotions worth screaming over, fistfuls of affections rained down behind

closed doors. At the bar up the block, the closing-time domestics wind up on Main Street, playing out beneath the one streetlight, the fuck 10

you/fuck you execrations concluding with a door slam and squealing tires, the roar of the engine pocked by a missing cylinder.

The clan living next door to me is not easily sorted. Many children, several women, two men. The fighting frequently spills out into the yard,

which has steadily disappeared under a welter of absurd possessions: a tangle of thirty unworkable bicycles; a mossy camper; a selection of

detached automobile seats; an inoperative ride-on lawnmower wrapped—Christo-like—in a blue tarp; a huge rotting speedboat. The village

board sent someone around to recite nuisance ordinances chapter and verse, but beyond rearranging the bikes and aligning the camper with 15

the speedboat, nothing has changed. You take what you can get in this life. Someone calls you white trash, you go with it, and fight like hell to

keep your trash. You understand it is only a matter of distinctions: Yuppies with their shiny trash, church ladies with their hand-stitched trash,

solid citizens with their secret trash. In a yard just outside town, a spray-painted piece of frayed plywood leans against a tree and says, "Trans

Ams—2 for $2000." It has been there for two years.

The old man and his adult son tinker on the speedboat now and then. It has never left the yard. The slipcover is mildewed and undone, and 20

the deck is layered with decaying leaves. Traffic by the house is never more than desultory, but it does pick up a little on the weekends,

minivans and SUVS cutting through town on the way to summer cottages and lake properties to the north. The old man and the kid will work

a while, then disappear into the house for days, but they're in there with their beer, with their feet up and one thumb hooked in a belt loop,

and they're assuring each other that life is shit, but By God, we've got a speedboat, and one of these days we'll get that son-of-a-tatcher

runnin', and we'll go out some Sunday-fuckin'-afternoon, and we'll blow them Illinois tourist bastards right outta the water. 25

In Wyoming

By Mark Spragg

This place is violent, and it is raw. Wyoming is not a land that lends itself to nakedness, or leniency. There is an edge here, living is

accomplished on that edge. Most birds migrate. Hibernation is viewed as necessary, not stolid. The crippled, old, the inattentive perish. And 30

there is the wind.

The wind blows through most every day unchoreographed with the spontaneous inelegance of a brawl. There are tracts where the currents

draw so relentlessly that the trees that surround a home, or line an irrigation ditch, all lean east, grown permanently east, as though mere

columns of submissive filings bowed toward some fickle pole. Little is decorative. There are few orchards. Fruit enters by interstate, truck-

ripened, not tree-ripened. Wyoming boasts coal, oil, gas, uranium, widely scattered herds of sheep and cattle, and once, several million 35

bison. The winds have worked the bison skeletons pink, white, finally to dust. The carboniferous forests rose up and fell and moldered under

the winds, layer upon layer, pressed finally into coal. The winds predate the coal. The winds wail a hymn of transience.

On the windward sides of homes, trees are planted in a descending weave of cottonwood, spruce, Russian olive, finished with something

thorny, stiff, and fast-growing—a hem of caragana: a windbreak; utilitarian first, ornamental by accident. Shade is a random luxury. There is

nearly always at least a breeze. Like death and taxes, it can be counted on. Almost one hundred thousand square miles and a half million 40

residents; there aren’t that many homes. Towns grip the banks of watercourses, tenaciously. Ghost towns list, finally tumbling to the east.

Gone the way of the buffalo bones. To dust.

There are precious few songbirds. Raptors ride the updrafts. The hares, voles, mice, skunks, squirrels, rats, shrews, and rabbits exist

squinting into the sun and wind, their eyes water, their hearts spike in terror when swept by the inevitable shadow of predators. The

meadowlark is the state’s bird, but I think of them as hors d’oeuvres, their song a dinner bell. Eagle, falcon, hawk, owl live here year-round. 45

SELECTED ESSAYS / pg. 3

The true residents. The natives. The gourmands. Their land-bound relatives work the middle ground. Lynx, lion, fox circle the table.

Coyotes make their living where they can: as gypsies do.

Much of the landscape is classified as subarctic steppe. In Laramie a winter’s evening entertainment consists of watching the gauges on the

local weather channel. Thirty-below-zero, sixty-mile-an-hour winds, are standard fare. From early fall to late spring Wyoming’s odor is that

of a whetted stone; the tang of mineral slipping endlessly against mineral. There is no tulip festival in Wyoming. The smell of sap risen in 50

cottonwood and pine is remembered, and cherished.

And then the winds quit. It happens on five or six days every season, more often in the summer and autumn. The sky settles as the dome of a

perfect bell settles—blue, uninterrupted, moistureless. It is nothing in Wyoming to look twenty miles in every direction, the horizons

scribbled in sharp contrast at the peripheries. “No wind,” we shout in wonder. We speak too loudly. We’re accustomed to screaming over the

yowl of air. We quiet to a whisper. “No wind,” we whisper. We smile and slump. Think of the slouch that survivors effect at the end of crisis. 55

That is our posture.

We emerge from our shelters. If it is summer we expose our soft bellies to the sun, gaining confidence, we breathe deeply, glut ourselves

with the scent of sage, a stimulating and narcotic perfume. We tend our yards. Paint our homes. Wash cars. My neighbor burns back

overgrowths of dried weed, heaps of tumbleweed. He mends his fence. “Nice day,” he says. I’ve heard him say as much when it is thirteen

degrees above zero. What he means is that the wind is not blowing. 60

The foolish become bold. They start construction projects that will require more than forty-eight hours to complete. The rest of us work

tentatively. We remember we’re serfs. We know the lord is only absent, not dethroned. I pass through bouts of giddiness; I cannot help

myself, but like the mice and voles, I remain alert. In Wyoming the price of innocence is high. There is a big wind out there, on its way home

to our high plains.

65

In Nebraska

By Ted Kooser

This prairie is polished by clouds, damp wads of fabric torn from the hem of the mountains, but every scratch shows, from the ruts the wagons

made in the 1850s, to the line on an auctioneer’s forehead when he takes off his hat. No grass, not even six-foot bluestem, can cover the

weather’s hard wear on these stretches of light or these people. But though this is a country shaped by storms—a cedar board planed smooth 70

with the red shavings curled in the west when the sun sets—everywhere you see the work of hands, that patina which comes from having been

weighed in the fingers and smoothed with a thumb—houses, sheds, machinery, fences—then left behind, pushed off a wagon to lighten the

load, a landscape of litter: the boarded-up grocery store with leaves blown in behind the door screen, its blue tin handle reading RAINBO

BREAD, the sidewalk heaved and broken; the horseshoe pits like graves grown over with crabgrass and marked by lengths of rusty pipe; the

square brick BANK with its windows gone, even the frames of the windows, its back wall broken down and the rubble shoveled out of the 75

way to make room for a pickup with no engine.

You read how the upright piano was left upright by the trail, the soundboard ticking in the heat, how the young mother was buried and left in

a grave marked only by the seat of a broken chair, with her name, Sophora, and the date scratched into the varnish, and only a lock of her hair

to go west. There are hundreds of graves like that left in the deep grass, on low rises overlooking the ruts that lead on. I tell you that

everything here—the auto lot spread in the sun, the twelve-story bank with its pigeons, the new elementary school, flat as a box lid blown off 80

the back of something going farther on, the insurance agent with his briefcase, the beautiful Pakistani surgeon, all these and more, for some

reason, have been too burdensome, too big or too small or too awkward, to make it the rest of the way.

Moving Water, Tucson

By Peggy Shumaker 85

Thunderclouds gathered every afternoon during the monsoons. Warm rain felt good on faces lifted to lick water from the sky. We played

outside, having sense enough to go out and revel in the rain. We savored the first cool hours since summer hit.

SELECTED ESSAYS / pg. 4

The arroyo behind our house trickled with moving water. Kids gathered to see what it might bring. Tumbleweed, spears of ocotillo, creosote,

a doll’s arm, some kid’s fort. Broken bottles, a red sweater. Whatever was nailed down, torn loose.

We stood on edges of sand, waiting for brown walls of water. We could hear it, massive water, not far off. The whole desert might come 90

apart at once, might send horny toads and Gila monsters swirling, wet nightmares clawing both banks of the worst they could imagine and

then some.

Under sheet lightning cracking the sky, somebody’s teenaged brother decided to ride the flash flood. He stood on wood in the bottom of the

ditch, straddling the puny stream. “Get out, it’s coming,” kids yelled. “GET OUT,” we yelled. The kid bent his knees, held out his arms.

Land turned liquid that fast, water yanked our feet, stole our thongs, pulled in the edges of the arroyo, dragged whole trees root wads and all 95

along, battering rams thrust downstream, anything you left there gone, anything you meant to go back and get, history, water so high you

couldn’t touch bottom, water so fast you couldn’t get out of it, water so huge the earth couldn’t take it, water. We couldn’t step back. We

had to be there, to see for ourselves. Water in a place where water’s always holy. Water remaking the world.

That kid on plywood, that kid waiting for the flood. He stood and the water lifted him. He stood, his eyes not seeing us. For a moment, we all

wanted to be him, to be part of something so wet, so fast, so powerful, so much bigger than ourselves. That kid rode the flash flood inside us, 100

the flash flood outside us. Artist unglued on a scrap of glued wood. For a few drenched seconds, he rode. The water took him, faster than you

can believe. He kept his head up. Water you couldn’t see through, water half dirt, water whirling hard. Heavy rain weighed down our

clothes. We stepped closer to the crumbling shore, saw him downstream smash against the footbridge at the end of the block. Water held him

there, rushing on.

105

If I Wanted to Write About the South

By Daisuke Shen

It would go like this:

Sometimes in youth group they would ask us to confess our greatest sins, in more or less words. Phil would said okay if you need us to pray

over you come up to the stage and everything would fall quiet like shut up—God’s about to do some shit. so one day terra went up on that 110

little stool and said sometimes she liked girls and started crying. and so then we all laid hands on terra and prayed over her like "god we want

to love you more than we love thinking about pussy." And afterward Jamie mentioned she didn’t want to change in front of terra any more. I

didn’t know how to tell anyone that I thought a lot about naked women kissing each other and would ask God to forgive me after I came. I

cried a lot because I knew my mom wouldn’t love me anymore and definitely not my grandma. I stopped believing in god when I went to

college and after that whenever I was forced to go to church I went high because I felt scared and shaken in ways I couldn’t name, so I smoked 115

cigarettes in the parking lot during big service, stoned out of my mind.

It would also be like this:

My mom has a southern accent that’s really heavy, and everyone always says it. “Your mom has a really thick accent.” Then they laugh. I think

they think it’s funny because we’re not supposed to sound like that but my grandma married someone who was stationed in Japan during the

occupation after WWII and the bomb and my grandma’s brother dying from the bomb. my grandpa was from a place called Spartanburg, 120

South Carolina, and so my grandmother learned how to cook fried green tomatoes and hash browns and gravy and biscuits and green bean

casserole and broccoli casserole and served them with canned peaches and canned beets and canned carrots all swimming in the same sweet

syrupy juice. and I ate it with rice and fried potatoes and I ate it with chopsticks. and I went to Japanese school and American school and boys

were mean to me because I was fat and uncomely, but this isn’t a story about not belonging or belonging somewhere. It’s about how I

belonged everywhere all at once. 125

It could sound like this too:

I think that living in the south means that you can live anywhere. you can go to any diner and it’s going to taste pretty good even if it’s bad,

because there’s always going to be something fried or buttered or toasted or salted that settles down into your gut all firm.

SELECTED ESSAYS / pg. 5

I can tell you about good barbeque verses bad barbeque. I can tell you about all the stories I didn’t hear from my family, all the secrets we’ve

kept from each other, and I can tell you about the stories and folktales and songs I stole from other people, their families, to keep me warm at 130

night. I can tell you that I’ve learned how to make friends and treat people nicer and I’ve tried to stop saying yes ma’am and no sir to older

people and I have some authority issues anyway.

I can tell you that it’s really warm down here during the summers and I’m going to miss that if I move somewhere else. I’m going to miss the

familiarity of people knowing you even if they don’t know you, and how I know that if I needed a place to stay I would know where to ask,

and how nice it feels to be on the other side of things. 135

Mostly, it sounds like this:

This is a story about how my mother remarried a white guy who was also a police officer who died when I was ten. this is also a story about

how he was very poor and from a place called Marietta where my cousins lived in trailers and my stepcousin who played Eminem for me when

I was nine years old sitting in her mom’s house, just the two of us on that green couch, and how years later I heard that she had her baby taken

away due to fleas. it’s about how class traitors become class traitors. 140

It’s a story about Greenville, South Carolina, where I grew up, and liberalism and religion and mental hospitals and finding catharsis in online

spaces. it’s about Marietta, South Carolina, where we barbequed a turkey for Christmas, and Aunt Billie who stayed in her bed a lot and how I

never felt like I didn’t belong in the family. it’s about Wilmington, North Carolina, where I finally came to terms about how I was cruel to my

loved ones to figure out if they still loved me and was capable of great harm but also great healing. it’s about the time Uncle Everett and I

caught a frog in the lake, and how Everett had a face that looked like a knotted fist, and how later on the frog died, and Sam died, and how at 145

twenty-four I tried to die but didn’t.

It’s about how one night I got super drunk and was on Xanax and stumbling over the cobblestone downtown with Jonny, and we left the bar

to get him a hot dog. and it’s about how while he was standing eating the hot dog I asked him how he knew him and Phil were supposed to be

together and Jonny said “it just made sense, we made sense together” and I thought about me and I thought about you and I thought of us being

careful because it felt good to be careful with each other. and later, after it was all over, I was glad that at least I could be sure that I really had 150

loved and even liked this person who I had gotten to know for a short while. and I really wished I could have been better, smarter, more

beautiful, less anxious, less needy, more anything but myself. I realized that the future only held more uncertainty and pain and that the

eternal maybe of our parting terrified me, and I resigned myself to feeling it all, unshowered and petrified in Charleston.

It’s about how the south feels like a damp, heavy hand I can’t let go of twenty years later, and how shitty it feels sometimes, like when my

grandma used to walk me around the mall wearing a child leash. everything feels like a ticket out and then I realized that I could never leave, 155

even if I want to. even when it’s time to go.

Hochzeit

by Debra Marquart

I remember circles—the swirling cuff of my father’s pant leg, the layered hem of my mother’s skirt. A neighbor lady polkas by, the one who 160

yells so loud at her kids every night when she walks to the barn that we can hear her across the still fields. She has a delicious smile on her face

tonight, and the creamy half moon of her slip shows under her long, tight dress.

The dance hall is an octagon, eight sides squaring off in subtle shades to a circle. The Ray Schmidt Orchestra is on the bandstand, a family of

musicians. The two young daughters wear patent leather shoes, chiffon dresses and white tights as they patter away at the drums and bass. 165

Their mother, her lips a wild smear of red, stomps and claws chords on the jangled, dusty upright.

The father and the son take turns playing the accordion, the bellowing wheeze of notes, the squeeze, the oom-paa-paa. Years later, this son

will become minorly famous—wildly famous in this county—when he makes it onto the Lawrence Welk show. He’ll be groomed as the new

accordion maestro, the heir apparent to Lawrence Welk, a North Dakotan who grew up thirty miles from here. This is polka country. The 170

accordion is our most soulful, ancestral instrument.

Someone is getting married, a cousin? Who knows. Everyone is a cousin in this town. I have a new dress with a flared skirt and a matching

SELECTED ESSAYS / pg. 6

ribbon; I get to stay up late. This has been going on for hours and promises to go on for more. Old ladies in shawls, looking like everyone’s

Grandma, sit around the edges of the dance hall, smiling with sad eyes at the children. 175

A man who looks like everyone’s Grandpa makes the rounds with a tray of shot glasses, spinning gold pools of wedding whiskey. The recipe is

one cup burnt sugar, one cup Everclear, one cup warm water. The old man bends low with the tray—three sips for everybody, no matter

how small. Sweet burning warmth down my throat, sweet, swirling dizziness. This is Hochzeit, the wedding celebrat