What do I need to write on a long day of December rain? What do I need to write on a day when I've simply felt pale blue? What do I need to write on day when I spend hours trying to say things and feeling discouraged at not finding the connections, the words? I need to write…
signs. countersigns.
1. A hand painted sign beside a country road advertises "MOILE HOME FOR SALE." Catch it from the other direction, and you'll find it's a "MOBILE HOME" available for purchase. Each time I see it, I am freshly baffled by the omission of the "B." I mean, in "MOBILE," it strikes me as an unforgettable…
It's funny the things you don't expect about being a teacher. Things like the need to discern the difference between a stretching student, student raising a questioning hand, and a student with the tendency to twist the hair on top of her head while working. We're doing in-class research today, and one boy sprawls across…
Wonder: Word-Wonder Day 31
How does one conclude thirty-one days of blogging about words? I struggle with conclusions: the ends of papers, the ends of stories, the ends of semesters, of chapters in life. I don't like goodbyes, and at the same time I feel a sort of panicky necessity to do goodbyes well -- because there have been…
Worlds out of Words: Word-Wonder Day 29
Today is a re-post from just under a year ago, since I've been wondering over words much longer than this month, and since we build whole worlds, not simply sentences, stories, and songs, out of words. You can find the original post here. “People make worlds out of words.”* They do. I know it. I…
Incarnation: Word-Wonder Day 27
As I've thought about what poetry is this week, I've realized that there are parallels to be drawn between poetry and the Incarnation. I've been thinking about them all week, but hesitating to draw them, lest you walk away from this post with some sentimentalized notion of Christ as God's poem to the world or…
Completeness: Word-Wonder Day 10
Last week, I spent a few minutes of class time talking about sentences with my college freshmen. I asked them to remember what defines a sentence. A sentence must have a subject and a verb; it must begin with a capital letter and end with some kind of end mark. Most importantly -- at least…
One Word: Word-Wonder Day 7
"If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent If the unheard, unspoken Word is unspoken, unheard; Still is the unspoken world, the Word unheard, The Word without a word, the Word within The world and for the world; And the light shone in darkness and Against the Word the unstilled world…
of vocabulary: Word-Wonder Day 4
My very first college English professor, who taught the very first course I attended my freshman year and who addressed us as her "dears," used to tell us that we ought to have good vocabularies, but we ought not use them. I was eighteen years old; I had been steeping for six years or so…
In the beginning: Word-Wonder, Day 2
Having introduced my series yesterday, it seems fitting to tell a bit more about the roots of my Word-Wonder. I begin here, then, with the beginning. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being by…
Between Blue Rocks 