Month: March 2025
-
Seeing the Forest for the Trees: Revision as Receptivity for Depth and Change
Revision: “making a subsequent draft better than a previous one.” But what does “better” mean when I’m trying to ground myself in “writing as a way of being” or “writing for writing’s sake” and not writing with an end-goal, a linear, teleological purpose? How do I adopt a purposeless purposefulness? The more I have written… Read more
-
Howl Into Poetry Month with Narya Rose Deckard’s Wolfcraft
I’ve just sent out a press release! Here it is: Kick off the first day of Poetry Month with Narya Rose Deckard at her book launch! Her first collection of poetry Wolfcraft will debut locally at Taste Full Beans Coffeehouse in downtown Hickory on April 1 at 6:15 PM. The event is free and open… Read more
-
From Johnson to Leopold: Dull Certainty to Humble Wonder
This semester my writing students and I have been exploring in a class I’ve called “Representations of Nature.” Part of our task has been to study how writers past and present have represented their relationship with or cultural perspective of nature via essays, poetry, almanacs, and fiction. Along the way we have our own weekly… Read more
-
We Still Read (Medieval Poetry): Gawain’s Failure as Success
Last year I assigned my college composition class to read the medieval Romance poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (“GGK”). I had spent time studying it over the past year, and, with the help of the book Approaches to Teaching Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, I couched the reading of it within the… Read more