1. It occurred to me a couple weeks ago that I had never written anything about my August, 1992 Richard Hugo tour of western Montana, the handful of days when I drove around, stopping at different towns, settings for Hugo's poems. Today, nearly twenty-one years later, I finally started to write about that, well, that pilgrimage and it excited me. If you'd like to read this installment, just go here.
2. While writing this piece on what happened in August of 1992, I took a detour back to August of 1982 and my raucous ten year high school reunion in Kellogg. It was fun writing about that epic Friday night, Saturday, and the wee hours of Sunday morning. Structurally, my memories of the ten year reunion didn't really have anything to do with the Richard Hugo tour, but I didn't take it out. Structurally -- at least in the way I've taught structure in essays for the last 400 years in college writing courses -- then, the bit I wrote shouldn't work. It doesn't all fit together, at least not logically. But it does work and I think today I might have said "NO" to structure being a tyrannical principle when I write. (Thanks for the right word, Kendall.) I realized, too, that I'm not nearly has strict about essay/paragraph-to-paragraph structure in my students' writing as I make myself sound. I know I read certain papers and a voice inside me hectors me, saying, "If the assessment committee reads this paper, they will wonder how this teacher lets students get away with this lack of structural integrity", and, yet, I don't want to mess with what the student wrote and let the structural wobbliness go. Man. This question of how essays are built is on my mind a lot. I think I've loosened up about it as a teacher, and maybe today I loosened up about it as I do my own bits of writing. We'll see.
3. I read Richard Hugo's "Letter to Kathy from Wisdom" aloud this afternoon. Only the dogs heard me. I cried, starting here ".....please know/old towns we loved in matter, lovers matter..." Richard Hugo awakens the sentimental old sap in me. It's among the many things we have in common.
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