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)

Week 11 Famous Last Words

My lower back was aching all throughout last week and I had to slog through several classes while enduring the nagging pain. To my great relief, a combination of icing and the occasional ibuprofen has led to me feeling quite a bit better today. Sitting around for longer than an hour does still result in some pain in my tailbone, but the pain is pretty tolerable and not as bad as it was a few days ago. It’s amazing how a hurt back pretty much puts a damper on anything you do throughout a day. I’m certainly glad that whatever injury I sustained has healed, and hopefully my back remains healthy throughout the rest of the semester, because sitting through classes in pain is no way to live!

In other news, it's so nice to not be hounded by papers and long reading assignments anymore! Of course I've still have to worry about doing research for a big paper due at the end of the semester, but research is a less stressful process than having to write an essay or read a big chunk of something for class. I've nevertheless been pretty lax in getting around to actually doing my research unfortunately, and I hope to remedy that by Sunday or Monday. In addition, I want to see if I can't use the greater amount of time I have available to work ahead in this class. I've already read the Welsh Fairy Book unit for Week 12 and plan to finish up this week's work in addition to doing the reading diary for that unit. I also think I've come up with a good idea for Week 12 storytelling that I can hopefully put on paper before Tuesday comes around. The end of the semester is not too far off, so here’s to hoping I don’t slack off too much during this slow work period!

Penguins! (Wikipedia Commons)

Week 10 Famous Last Words

Agh, my back! That's pretty much been the theme for this previous weekend. Ever since my Thursday morning commute to Norman for classes my lower back has been aching a lot. My Capstone basically has me bent over a book the entire period listening to the professor lecture, so my back was complaining particularly loudly during that time. It was off and on at first, but now it's present and not going away. I must have injured it some way or another, but I don't really know how. All I know is that it is making it extremely hard to concentrate fully on getting my assignments done for this class.

The goods news is that the semester has slowed down since midterm time and now pretty much the rest of the semester has me doing smaller assignment for my two online classes while working steadily on longer-term projects that will be due at the end of the semester for my other two classes. In other words I have a ton more flexibility in my schedule and won't have to worry about being pressured by papers until near the end of this semester. Consoled by this fact, I pretty much took it easy this weekend, but my ailing back has prevented it from being as relaxing a weekend as it could have been. At this rate I'm probably going to have to take some pain medicine just so I can sit through my classes tomorrow without squirming in pain.

It looks like we're heading toward the European mythology unit next, which has me excited since I've been looking forward to reading some more Arthurian stuff. The last two storytelling weeks I've felt a bit starved for inspiration, so I'm hoping that delving into one of my favorite mythological worlds will properly stoke the fires of my imagination and allow me to write something really good for Wednesday.

Penguins! (Wikipedia Commons)

Week 9 Famous Last Words

So my last Famous Last Words ended with me wanting to curl up and weep right? Well, things turned out for the better when I found out one of my papers that I thought was due last Thursday was changed to where it was due Tuesday instead. This left me more time to study for the mid-term I took Wednesday, so as a result I think I did fairly well, although the test was harder than I thought it would be. I still had to rush Friday to get the majority of the paper proposal and annotated bibliography done before I left for Latham Springs, Texas for a College age Christian Conference that would leave me pretty much without internet access from Friday evening until Sunday evening. Still I got it done, and was able to enjoy my weekend without having to worry about school at all. Thank you, Lord!

The conference I was at was great. I've been to around ten of them since I first started college and have never regretted going. Every conference  has benefited me spiritually, and you get to spend a lot of time with your fellow club members, not to mention see and meet members from the Christians on Campus clubs in universities all over the Midwest area and sometimes beyond. It’s a really rich and enjoyable experience. I’ll post a youtube video that shows a little bit of what it’s like for those who might be curious:

Video is from College-Conference.org (there's me in green with the goofy grin at :26!)

I feel pretty tired from having such a busy weekend, and I’ve still got a paper that I have to get written today, but I’ve been writing so much over the years I have spent in college that it’s come to the point that the prospect of writing a paper in less than a day no longer intimidates me. Onward I go!

Penguins! (Wikipedia Commons)

Week 8: Famous Last Words

So this week has been the calm before the storm that will be my week 9. My weekend was awesome but woefully unproductive considering how much I've got on my plate for this new week. On Friday I played basketball with my friends at the nearly empty Huff and then ate out at Louie's with a few of them. I watched the game at a friend's house the next day. I took naps and laid idly on the couch often. I  I barely did anything that resembled work, and for that I feel myself becoming rapidly regretful. 

Here's my laundry list for the week: I’ve got my work for this class and my usual reading for my capstone. I've got a midterm in my Sports Management class Wednesday that I have yet to study for. I have a paper over a historical fiction book called Fire and Beulah due on Thursday that I have not started.  I haven't even so much as picked out which prompt I want to address from the list I was given! I have a research paper proposal and annotated bibliography due a week from today and I haven't even decided what my research topic is yet. There's an upcoming Christians on Campus trip to a camp in Texas next weekend that will ensure that I have no access to the internet from Friday afternoon all the way until Sunday evening, so last minute research is out, meaning I'll have to find a way to figure out a topic and gather sources between cram and paper-writing sessions. Oh yeah, and I've got a quiz on Thursday over two-hundred pages worth of reading from a book I don't even have yet. 

These are the moments that define a person, right? Right? Excuse me while I curl up in the fetal position on my bed. 

Week 7: Famous Last Words

So I missed Storytelling this week (or rather last week, because I'm also writing this Famous Last Words way late), which is especially bizarre for me since I really love to write and Storytelling is my favorite aspect of this awesome class. Things just really piled up on me since I had a lot of reading to do for a class and had an essay due in my Capstone that was really stressing me out.

Just to go into a little detail about that essay: The assignment was to write a 5-7 page paper over a poem in the Norton Anthology of Poetry (5th edition). I picked a random Wordsworth poem and went with it. Now keep in mind that I didn't choose to become an English major out of any particular love for poetry. I actually don't like poetry that much. I prefer meaning to be more concrete and easy to see, as it is in prose (not so much the case with the language of Faulkner, Woolf, or Joyce, but even their works are easier to analyze than a lot of poetry to me). Believe it or not, I've made it through most of college having had to write very few essays about poetry. As a result, I found the task of writing a poetry analysis essay to be one of the most difficult writing assignments I've had in a long time. I think the main thing that bothers me about writing over poetry is that I'm never confident that what I'm writing is actually a good argument. Digging out evidence for an argument in a book is easy to me, and I'm always sure that my argument makes sense and never doubt the logic of my premise. With poetry it's different, because in some cases I'm having to look at a single word or phrase and pull a much more subjective idea out of it in order to validate my argument. Evidence that has a greater subjective element to it innately feels more flimsy to me, and as a result I find that when I use such evidence I begin to doubt my argument as whole. This is a terrible feeling to me, and it's why I found writing this essay to be a less than pleasant experience.

Nevertheless, I got through it. Now I've got the 10-12 page poetry analysis coming up to worry about. Yay!

Back to the subject of missing Week 7 Storytelling, one of the main reasons I'm really sad that I missed it is that I actually had a story idea ironed out already. Since I have time this week, I plan to follow through with it and write the story despite the fact that I won't get any points for it.

Penguins! (Wikipedia Commons)

Week 6: Famous Last Words

So this week was a bit tough for me. It started on Monday, when I burned the midnight oil until about four in the morning writing an essay over The Grapes of Wrath for my class, along with doing some last minute reading and response paper writing. Like all the late night writing experiences I've had, it was tough to push through and do the things I needed to do when my brain is not functioning at full capacity, but I gritted my teeth and finished everything. I thought my paper turned out pretty well, and just in the process of writing the essay I found myself learning about and appreciating the nuances of Steinbeck's book more. This, in my opinion, is ultimately what such writing is for. As we gather the evidence for our essay and endeavor to validate our argument, at the same time we should be learning more about the work we are writing about and growing to see more clearly what the author was intent on doing at the same time. Not every writing experience has done this for me, but this one did. I felt accomplished having written the paper. Here's to hoping I made a decent grade!

The other tough thing that happened to me this week was having to read a large portion of a historical fiction book entitled Fire in Beulah for Thursday. Now while the book itself was fairly interesting, the fact that I hadn't started reading it yet and the Thursday assignment was to read 126 pages of it left me daunted. I read a little bit of the book the Wednesday before, and decided to reserve some time to get as far as I could in it the morning of the next day since the class doesn't start until 12:00. I set my alarm for around nine with the intention of getting up and logging in at least a few more hours of reading, but either my alarm never went off or I just didn't hear it, because I ended up waking up at ten. In the end all I could do was skim as much as I could and hope that the professor didn't have a mind to give out a quiz. Despite my panic over not being where I was supposed to be in the book, I made it through all right and determined to catch up over the weekend. I'm hoping to at least get to page 200 before Tuesday's class. There's nothing more nerve-wracking to me that coming to class and not being fully prepared!

Things in this class are going pretty well, I'd say. My most recent blog story, "Yamato and the Demon Boar," is one of the better re-tellings I've written so far, in my opinion. I thought the use of a frame structure that allowed for me to explore the theme of loyalty vs. self-aggrandizement worked out pretty smoothly in the story. I also feel pretty happy with my storybook site, which I was able to make look a little more distinctive by messing around with the site layout and adding a neat banner at the bottom. I'm pretty satisfied with the introduction I wrote, and I am really looking forward to writing about one of my favorite mythological heroes ever, ranking right up there with King Arthur and Gawain (which, given my love for Arthurian mythology, is no small compliment).

Penguins! (Wikipedia Commons)

Week 5: Famous Last Words or My Cool Trip to Lubbock, Texas

This is a very belated Famous Last Words for Week 5 that I felt a compulsion to write since the weekend of week 5 was a very eventful one for me. On Saturday and Sunday--September 19th and 20th, I went on a Christian on Campus trip to Lubbock, Texas. I woke up groggily at around 6:15, put myself together hastily, and drove to the church where we were to meet before we set out. A little more than twenty people were going down, and so we took two van fulls of people and embarked on the approximately six-hour journey to Lubbock.

The van in which all the guys rode is incredibly old and has a long history of breaking down on such trips. The thing burns oil like it does gas, has terrible air conditioning, and is in general very cramped. Despite these annoyances, the trip was still going smoothly enough when the van decided to break down on the highway. After pouring oil into the van and still being unable to get it to move, it was concluded that the van's engine was busted and needed to be replaced.

So about nine guys and myself are stuck on a service road beside the highway, right next to an overpass. It's ninety degrees outside, and we have to figure out what to do even as we bake in the sunlight. Luckily, some members of the church affiliated with the Texas Tech Christians on Campus volunteer to come rescue us. Since we're still about an hour or so out, we've got a wait ahead of us.

So what do we do? Well, some of the more adventurous guys decided to climb up near the overpass and take in the sights. Here's a somewhat bad picture I took on my phone:

I made it big so you could better make out the three guys hanging out up there. 

Eventually we decided it would be a good idea to throw the frisbee around to kill time. So we idled maybe ten minutes of time throwing the frisbee with the guys on the overpass. Since the frisbee is made of cheap fake plastic, it breaks pretty quickly, and then we're left with no other option than to clamber back into the van, crank up the air conditioning, and embark on a campaign to kill the flies that have invaded the vehicle.

Eventually we got picked up and made our way to Lubbock, cosigning the van to being picked up by a tow-truck later. The first thing we did when we reached the city was tour Texas Tech, with numerous Tech Christians on Campus members tagging along to talk to us and help show us around. It was a great time, and I was incredibly impressed with the campus. It's absolutely sprawling, and the buildings are just plain gorgeous, all of them bearing a lovely and distinctive Mediterranean style that I found very appealing.

Afterwards we met at the club campus house and ate dinner with CoC members and some of the local Christians who live nearby. We then had a short meeting, after which we went to separate hospitalities provided by local members and spent the night.

The next day we had morning service at the campus house, went out to an awesome Tex-Mex place called Rosa's to eat together, then set back out for Oklahoma. Yeah, the trip was incredibly short--too short, in my opinion--and not everything went perfectly, but overall I loved my experience there in Lubbock.  Our sister club at Tech is thriving, and the Christians we met there were incredibly kind and hospitable. It was an awesome time!

Personal photo of our group at the campus house near Texas Tech (taken September 20th, 2014)

Week 4: Famous Last Words

This week’s felt really busy even though there wasn’t a lot of school-related things I had to worry about. I played basketball with some friends on Wednesday and for whatever reason found myself falling on the floor a lot during play. At one point I was dribbling up the court and either tripped over someone’s foot or stumbled and ended up sliding about ten feet across the hardwood! The result of all this was about four or five really nasty floor burns, all of which still look pretty bad even though it’s been several days now. Even though my muscles ached pretty badly Friday, I played again with my friends that day and probably didn’t do my body any favors by doing so. I know I didn’t do the burn on my left knee much good when I landed on it again after getting caught up in a screen. My knee is hurting even as I type! 

Naturally, Saturday I felt absolutely exhausted and could not motivate myself to do anything other than lay on the couch staring blankly at a TV screen for most of the day. So yeah, last weekend was not particularly productive for me. I’ve been sleeping a little more than normally and have felt overall very gassed for whatever reason. I’ve got two big papers due within the next three weeks though, and I have signed up to go to a Christian on Campus trip to Lubeck, Texas next weekend, so I can’t exactly afford to slow down my pace now. Hopefully I can get a second wind as I progress through this week. I'm only doing a half-reading for this week, but I found a good unit that I works well with a half-reading. The Khasi folktales have a lot of entertaining, self-contained stories.

Penguins! (Wikipedia Commons)

Week 3: Famous Last Words

Penguins! (Wikipedia commons)

Today was a really fun week in this class for me. Reading about Sindbad and his adventures was very enjoyable. On top of that, I was able to write a pretty good story exploring a very dark scene in Sindbad's fourth voyage. Unlike my stories for Weeks 1 and 2, this story had very little in the way of dialogue. However, this left me a lot of room to include a large amount of description in the narrative. As a result, I felt like the imagery in this story was strongest of the three stories I've written for this class so far. I also thought that “Gallery of Accusers”—I’m still not sure if that was the best name for it, but it works well enough—was my strongest story from a characterization standpoint as well. The other two stories I wrote were largely plot-centered, but this one was much more character-focused, and I think more thematically strong as a byproduct of that.

I read several students' stories this week as well, and I found Kelsey Link’s “My Name is Theodora” to be my favorite of the ones I looked at. The story has barely any dialogue at all, and instead is almost completely focused on the inward thoughts of a dying, regretful mother. This is not at all an easy type of story to write, but Kelsey handled it well, and produced a strong, very emotional story. I would expect nothing less from a person aiming to become a professional author.

Not much else I can think to talk about right now. I haven't hit the hard point of the semester yet when I have to write a bunch of papers all at one time, but I believe it will soon be upon me in the coming weeks. I had better start to work ahead more in this class so that I don't end up with too much of a work load as the semester's difficulty level increases.

Week 2: Famous Last Words

So week two marks the time when I’ve finally started to get into school mode. I’ve been a lot more successful in motivating myself to work throughout this week, and hope that my weekend will continue to be productive. I have yet to read the chapters I need to read from Steinbeck for my Oklahoma Writing class, but hopefully I can catch up  on Sunday and Monday. This class has kept me the most busy, but I’m hoping that I can use this weekend to begin the process of working ahead a little bit. I ended up cornering myself at the beginning of this week and was only able to do the half-reading, but I’m hoping to get a full reading in for Week 3.

Despite being a little bit under the gun at the beginning of Week 2, I was still able to write a pretty decent piece for my storytelling assignment. Based on “The Ballad of Saint Felix,” my story was an improvement over my first storytelling piece, as I felt I was able to get a better balance of narrative action, dialogue, and imagery. My story “How Codger Saved the World and Got  A New House” had a creative premise, but might have been a little bit too dialogue-heavy, at the cost of lacking in descriptive detail. With 1,000- stories, it really is tricky figuring out how to balance action, speech, and description in an effective way, and I hope with this week I’ve taken some steps forward learning how to achieve this balance.

I read two good stories from other students that I thought were worth noting. Kelsey Link’s “Nice for a Wife” is a retelling of the lead-up to the marriage of Rebekah and Isaac. Told from Rebekah’s point of view, it sets the Biblical character up as a very relateable young lady. Kelsey nicely fleshes out Rebekah’s relationship with her family, and interprets Eliezer’s character in a very interesting way (he comes off as a bit of creeper). Alissa’s “Abigail and the China Doll” is a modern retake on “Saint Kentigern and the Robin.” Her story stars a young girl name Abigail, a student at a French boarding school, but thematically the narrative matches up well with the source material. In addition, the prose is quite good, making the story a very pleasant and easy read.

I’m considering trying some more unconventional narrative styles in the coming weeks. Perhaps I’ll try writing something super weird, maybe write in second-person present tense (okay, that might be too weird, but it would be fun to experiment with such a looked down upon narrative style).

Wait, 2nd-person POV is only for Choose Your Own Adventure books and the like, right? (Wikipedia)

Week 1: Famous Last Words

So the first week of school is always a bit tricky for me since I have to work myself into school mode, which typically takes about a week. On top of too many hours’ worth of procrastination on assignments, I spent most of my weekend attending Christians on Campus events, so as a whole I've spent a woefully small amount of time actually doing school work. Now I'm looking at having to read 12 chapters worth of Steinbeck, writing a short paper, reading a chapter in my Sports Management textbook, and taking an online quiz all before Tuesday, in addition to this class's work. If doing all that doesn't get me into school mode, then I don't know what will.

Yes. (Wikipedia Commons)

On a more positive front, my classes all look interesting, and this one in particular looks like it will allow me to learn a lot through reading and writing. Since my goal is to be a short fiction writer, learning to write in a way that requires me to cut to the bone when it comes to writing will be very useful. I think the storytelling assignments in this class will give me plenty of opportunity to improve my ability to express myself in a more short and succinct manner.

Just to give a bit of a review of what I've enjoyed from this class so far, I'll say a little something about the two student-authored stories I've read so far. One of them was Yuli Liu's "The Fox and the Grapes," a variation on the fable of the same name. Although the changes to the story were subtle, Yuli provides a more detailed ending to the story that, at least in my mind, does a very good job of expanding on the theme of rationalization that I felt was important in the original work.

The other story I read was Chris Dunlap's irreverent but amusing "The Skank and the Neighbor," which was a greater departure from its source material--the fable "The Owl and the Grasshopper"--than Yuli's story, but still very in touch with the original story's events and themes. Chris skillfully manipulates the setting and characters to make the story take on a distinctly modern tone, but never loses sight of the idea behind "The Owl and the Grasshopper."

Overall, I've really enjoyed what I've read so far, and look forward to reading more as I progress through the course. I hope to learn a lot about writing through reading everyone's works and absorbing what I can from them.

I'm not sure I know what all this means, but I'd lay odds that I'm guilty of all of it (Wikipedia Commons)