Week 12: Famous Last Words

Whew, I feel like I did a lot today, even though in fact I didn't do all that much. I spent about five hours straight doing research for a big paper I'm putting together for my Oklahoma Writing class. The paper is a study of the Native American (and Oklahoma-born) authors N. Scott Momaday and Joy Harjo and a few of their works. I basically spent those hours reading through books and typing excerpts that I felt might be useful in a Word document. Reading through some of the conversations Momaday had with various interviewers, I was impressed with just how much the man reveres language, whether written or spoken. Here's a quote from Conversations with N. Scott Momaday (1997, edited by Matthias Schubnell).

 In the oral tradition one appropriates things to his experience. This is the business of being a human being. And the only way we can express that idea of appropriation, of course, is through language . . . I think myths are appropriated to our experience, myths from the long distant past, but we also appropriate things that happen to us in our daily lives, very immediate things. In the oral tradition these recent appropriations have a way of becoming merged with the whole of our experience. It is a process of renewal . . . (41-42)

This idea that Momaday expresses is relevant to what we're doing in this class, I think. We're reading all these myths and experiencing new things through them, or perhaps relating the familiar experiences in them to things we've gone through in our own lives. We're retelling these stories and adding to them our experiences, and as a result renewing those stories, breathing fresh ideas into age old tales. Stories evolve as human experience evolves and changes over the course of time. I think Momaday would certainly be fascinated with the way so many students have evolved stories in so many rich and unique ways in this class. 

I'm really grateful I got the chance to take such an awesome class that allowed me to read so many new and cool stories and that freed me to stretch my creative wings when I write without worrying about making the grade all the time. Thanks, Professor Gibbs, for offering such a fun and engaging class! I've learned so much and have improved as a writer as a result of the work I've done, and hope to continue to improve as I approach the finish line for the course. I couldn't have asked for a better last semester course to take before I graduate.

Penguins! (Wikipedia Commons)