3 Reasons Why Ron Swanson Is a Transcendentalist

Every year about this time in my American Literature classes we get on the topic of transcendentalism, namely the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.  This leads us to reading comparative essays by Wendell Berry.  This also invariably causes students who are fans of the NBC hit show Parks and Recreation to draw the conclusion

Question for the Writer: Who Are You?

We will begin today’s post with a simple quote from the late great Kurt Cobain:   Wanting to be someone else is a waste of the person you are. I have been writing something whether it be short stories, poems or now mostly novels for the better part of my life.  I can remember as

Writing As Therapy

Today my students started reading Charlotte Perkins Gilman‘s The Yellow Wallpaper, an early feminist story about a woman who is not allowed to write because it might upset her “delicate condition”.  This started me thinking about what writing means to me beyond the overall joy of seeing my ideas and crazy plot lines taking on a

Creative Writing Techniques for the Essay Writer

In my years of teaching students how to write well formed essays, I have seen my fair share of texts written with boring verbs, humdrum descriptions and lazy constructions.  In order for a student to rise above the chaff of the mediocre scribblings of others, that student must understand that there is much to learn

Who Is Talking?: Narrative Voice and the Writer

Plato and Aristotle identified three basic kinds of narrator: 1.  The speaker or poet who uses their own voice. 2.  The speaker or poet who assumes the voice of another person or persons, speaking in a voice not their own. 3.  The speaker or poet who uses a mixture of their own voice and that

Good Writing Should Tell the Truth

One of my favorite writers is Wendell Berry, an essayist, poet, novelist, farmer, activist and environmentalist.  He is a wise sage of our time, pointing out our society’s problems and struggles with uncanny accuracy. In a letter to an English teacher who wrote to him about the subject, Berry writes: The thought that I keep returning to is