Windy Whisps

I'm pleased with my sermon; I went to bed last night with the sermon finished, which is rare for me.  Usually I spend Sunday morning creating/tinkering with the ending.  I've had some extra time, which is unusual for a Sunday.  So here are some random thoughts, a Sunday version:  

--The wind is howling outside, 17 miles per hour with gusts up to 30.  It's been windy for days, with dropping temperatures, a rawness that makes me grateful for all the warm autumn days we had for the past two months.  Should I bundle up and go for a walk at 6 a.m. anyway?  The answer is yes, but it remains to be seen if I will.  [I did not go for a walk; I am a wimp this morning.]

--I've been making poetry submissions this morning.  For years, I didn't submit to journals who charged a fee.  This year, I've decided to include them.  I'm still not submitting at the level I was in the early years of this century.  Back then, I had hope that if I had more publications, I could get the kind of tenure track job that I have now.

--We've spent the week-end making some purchases for our S'burg house:  a dining table that comes with 6 chairs and a sofa.  It makes me happy to think of making this house a home, not just a makeshift home base for when I'm teaching.

--I still love our Arden home, particularly now that it's not so overcrowded with stuff.  I've often had 2 home bases during my adult life, but I haven't usually loved both.

--As I've been thinking about having 2 homes, let me clarify, just so no one thinks we're wealthy in a certain way.  From 2005 to 2013, we had a condo we couldn't sell.  From 2000 to 2005, my mother-in-law lived in the condo, which we paid for.  When she died in 2005, the housing market in Florida was strong, and we expected a certain sale price.  By the time we adjusted our expectations in 2006, the housing market in Florida was starting to crash, even before the larger housing crash of 2008.

--When I feel guilty about making money when we sold our last Hollywood house, I remember the long condo possession, which kept our finances tangled up in so many ways.  We didn't need a condo in the way that we need a place in Spartanburg.

--In some ways, our current situation is like the time when my spouse went back to school to get his MPA degree.  We had a house with close-friend housemates in Goose Creek and a place in Columbia for my spouse.  I went back and forth and loved each place, with friends in each place.

Chaos Kids as Teacher Metaphor

Yesterday we had our last faculty meeting of the year.  During each semester, we typically have a faculty meeting on the 2nd Friday of the month and a Town Hall on the 3rd Friday.  All employees come to the Town Hall, and there's typically coffee and pastries before hand.  I sat at the meeting feeling a swirl of stuff:  gratitude for a tenure track job, gratitude for the continued existence of humans who are committed to a liberal arts education, the feeling of disbelief that we are almost done with the semester, the nagging worry that I've forgotten something important.

Our school president spoke and talked about seeing a holiday picture, actually 2.  One was the composed picture:  everyone matching, everyone clean, everyone posed and smiling.  The second one was a picture of his grandchild in chaos mode (hair a mess, snot draining from the nose, sticky face) but having a great time.  He said that faculty at this point in the term are like the grandchild picture--we may be feeling like we're a mess, but it means we've been teaching well.

I do realize that he greatly oversimplified, but it made me feel good.  I do realize that one can get to the finish line in a state of chaos incarnate because one made an unfixable mess of one's classes.  But this term, I feel like I did well by my students.

I was needing a kind word because I'd been mad at myself for not giving my students more time for the short research-ish essay #2.  It's always hard to know how much time to leave because some students move more quickly through it than others.

I have spent the week reminding myself that students don't become research experts because of one brilliant assignment--it's a years-long practice.  And I do realize my assignments aren't necessarily brilliant.  I am also less and less sure that knowing how to write a research paper is an essential skill in the 21st century.

The events of this week make me think I should be teaching them homestead skills like cooking without a recipe or how to build a fire.  It's been a week with a huge Microsoft outage, an FAA grounding of all flights for over 5 hours, a building collapse in NYC, a boat plowing into a cruise ship with the cruise ship on its side but all passengers safe.  And then there's the chaos with Nvidia.

I've been very lucky this semester--all of my classes have been great, full of students who are trying their best.  I've been teaching long enough that I know how rare it is, which makes me even more appreciative.

First Lines and Writing Prompts

Yesterday's exercise with first lines went really well.  I had an 11 page handout, which I put in a folder.  Each page had a first line (s) or first sentence(s).  We pulled them out a page at a time.  We wrote for 5 minutes, and then we pulled the next sheet out of the folder.  At the end of class, I had them choose the one they liked best, the one we would work on next week.  Some of them wanted to include more than one, and I said yes.

Next week, I'll give them a folder of first pages, and we'll add to each other's writing.  I'll report back about how it goes. 

My students stayed with the process for the whole class period.  That shouldn't surprise me, but it's the end of the semester, and I wouldn't have been offended if our capacity for trying something new has vanished.  Happily, they wrote and wrote, and after class was over, 2 of the 6 students stayed behind to tell me how valuable the process was.

I did it too.  I wondered if my knowledge of the larger works would influence my writing, and I'd say, overall, no--but here and there, yes.

Here are the first lines, in case you want to try it too.  After the lines, I'll post the sources.  I also think they make an interesting poem, when read together.

---

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. It seemed to me I stood by the iron gate leading to the drive, and for a while I could not enter for the way was barred to me.


Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.


I read about it in the paper, in the subway, on my way to work. I read it, and I couldn’t believe it, and I read it again. Then perhaps I just stared at it, at the newsprint spelling out his name, spelling out the story.

They eat beans mostly, this old yellow pair.


Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.


I was getting along just fine with Mama, Papa-Daddy, and Uncle Rondo until my sister Stella-Rondo just separated from her husband and came home again.


This is the world we wanted.
All who would have seen us dead
are dead. I hear the witch’s cry
break in the moonlight through a sheet
of sugar. God rewards.



First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. They were not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of his rucksack.



It was a dark and stormy night. In her attic bedroom Margaret Murry, wrapped in an old patchwork quilt, sat on the foot of her bed and watched the trees tossing in the frenzied lashing of the wind.



In a hole in the ground there lived a ___________. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down or eat: it was a _______-hole, and that means comfort.



“Where’s Papa going with that axe?”

---

Here are the sources (and you'll see above, I took the word "hobbit" out, and only one student recognized the source):

  

Page # of handout	Author	Source
1	Daphne du Maurier	Rebecca (novel)
2	W. S. Merwin	“Separation” (poem)
3	James Baldwin	“Sonny’s Blues” (short story
4	Gwendolyn Brooks	“The Bean Eaters” (poem)
5	Virginia Woolf	Mrs. Dalloway (novel)
6	Eudora Welty	“Why I Live at the P.O.” (short story)
7	Louise Gluck	“Gretel in Darkness” (poem)
8	Tim O’Brien	“The Things They Carried” (short story)
9	Madeleine L’Engle	A Wrinkle in Time (novel)
10	J. R. R. Tolkien	The Hobbit (novel)
11	E. B. White	Charlotte’s Web (novel)

 

Opening Lines, Search Committees, Free Cats, and Spies

It's been a strange week, a bit tiring, even with less commuting back and forth between Spartanburg and Arden.  We have movers coming today in Arden to take the big items that need a moving van down to the S'burg house, so last night, we got those items ready (taking stuff out of drawers, mostly).  So no wonder it feels like it should be a Friday.  Let me record some fragments before they slip away.

--I've had several hours of extra faculty work this week; I'm on a search committee for a new Speech faculty member, a tenure track position, and it's not the only tenure track line Spartanburg Methodist College is filling.  Around the nation, schools are contracting, and I am so grateful to be part of one that is expanding or holding steady in terms of enrollment.

--I've been working on an assignment for the last few class meetings with my Creative Writing class.  Today I'll give them a variety of first lines and sentences from published works, like Rebecca, Mrs. Dalloway, and "Sonny's Blues."  Students will write a chunk today to go with the opening lines/sentences; they'll have 6 minutes with each one, and they'll have 11 in total.  On Tuesday, they'll add to the work of classmates, which I think I'll have them do by cutting and pasting and writing.

We're running out of time; if we had more, I might have them do an exquisite corpse kind of experiment, adding without seeing what had gone before.   But as it is, I think I'll have each student choose the top 3, and on Tuesday we'll add, and a week from today, we'll read and reflect on what we learned from this strange collaboration.

We might also talk about the elements of fiction/narrative and how they decided to move forward; was plot more important than character, for example.  I also want to remember how this experiment could be used to talk in more detail about the importance of a good beginning.   I've been paging through literature anthologies, surprised by how few compelling first sentences are in there.

--If/when I teach nonfiction writing or journalism classes again, I wonder if it would be useful and/or interesting to have students read and/or listen to the same expert interviewed by different people.  I've been listening to a Fresh Air interview with Jill Lepore and next I'll listen to the New Yorker's Political Scene podcast interview with her.

--On Tuesday, I did quilting the way I once did, with a plastic cutting board under the part I was hand quilting--much easier than quilting across a big table.  Quilting across a big table is a much easier way to get the middle part quilted.

--I've taken several walks around the neighborhood of the fixer-upper house in Spartanburg.  On Wednesday, a man sitting on his back stoop asked if I wanted a cat.  I said no thank you and kept moving.  I thought about all the offers I've gotten through the years of exercising outside, mostly offers of sex and drugs.  And now I'm in the free cat part of my life.

--When I remember Fall 2026, I want to remember that big money didn't always win--it was true in many political races and true in baseball.

--The week's news has been full of Nvidia's leader, Jensen Huang's affair with a woman who turned out to be a Chinese spy.  Really?  REALLY??? He fell for one of the oldest tricks in the competition sourcebooks.  Humans can be such idiots.

I loved this beginning to David Ignatius' recent opinion piece in The Washington Post:  "Keith Riggin, a former CIA station chief in Beijing who later advised U.S. companies on the Chinese intelligence threat, says he gave American executives a simple warning about beautiful women who might approach them in Beijing: 'You don’t get any better-looking when you go to a place like China.'”

Veterans Day 2026

Today is Veterans Day, a day to celebrate everyone who has served in the military, unlike Memorial Day, when we remember those who lost their lives during military service.  Here is a picture of my favorite veteran, my dad:

He's my favorite veteran for obvious reasons, but there are many other veterans who would also be favorites:  my father-in-law, an Army veteran, and my Florida pastor Keith Spencer and his wife, Piper Spencer, Navy veterans, for example.  I think of one of my best friends from high school, Chum Kimsey:

The above picture is from 2014, when she had just been diagnosed with esophageal cancer, which would take her life.  She served in the Army in the late 80's and early 90's.

Every so often, I hear people talk about how young people should be required to do military service.  I remember all the wars which wrecked so many lives, and I don't think military service requirement is the answer to whatever problems we see in "the youth today."  Spend a summer working in a VA hospital and then come tell me how military service would be a solution--and how we would afford to take care of even more injured veterans.

On November 11, I'm also thinking of Armistice Day, the end to World War I.  I think it's hard for most of us to conceive of how many people died in World War I. Even when I have my students imagine all of their male classmates going off to fight and no one coming back, I think it's hard to get our heads around the total. I wish we could all go to the WWI cemeteries in France. It's a visual that's tough to capture in a picture; it does make a very different impact.

And here's the even more sobering statistic:  look up how many people died in World War II.  It's staggering, the kind of numbers that make me say, "Were there even that many people alive at that time?"  Yes, there were that many people alive--and at the end of 4 years, they were dead.

Here's a picture of my dad, my sister, and me at the WWII Memorial during an Honor Flight event.

It was both a joyful trip and a somber one, being surrounded by living veterans, all older than 65, and the monuments to the wars that they fought.  It was a sobering reminder of the ultimate cost that so many veterans pay/paid.

I am also thinking of all the quilters I know who make quilts for veterans as a way to say thank you:

I'm not at a point yet where I could do that--but this morning, I'm wishing that I could show gratitude in this way, a way that results in a beautiful quilt.  For this morning, though, words will have to do.

Waking Up Alone in the Fixer-Upper (but All Is Well)

I have spent the first night by myself in the fixer-upper house in Spartanburg.  We've spent one night here before, which I wrote about in this blog post.   But last night it made more sense for me to be here and my spouse in Arden.

I'm happy to report that all went well.  When I was younger, in my late teens and 20's, I was much more afraid to be the only one sleeping in a house.  It's not that I was sleeping in unsafe places--no, they were perfectly nice houses in the suburbs, with several locks on every door.

I was not afraid sleeping in the open, as part of a backpacking trip.  Of course, I never backpacked by myself.

Yesterday was a long, long work day--nothing bad, but lots of responsibilities in one day.  I didn't have a chance to do grocery shopping, so this morning, I wondered if there were any bakeries nearby.  Lo and behold, I found the Little River Brewing Company just a few miles away.  It's a coffee roaster, a cafe, and an outdoor dining/concert space--I went to the Fretwell Street location.

I bought a health nut cookie, a pumpkin scone, and a molasses cookie, and I think the health nut cookie was my favorite.  It had pumpkin seeds and nuts and dried fruit held together with gluten free flour.  It didn't taste fatty, although it wasn't dry.  It also wasn't sweet.

I am planning to go for a walk at 10 this morning--I can still do that and be to work by 11:45.  What a revelation.  I've done some poetry packet submitting.  I want to make sure the closet is cleanish/dust free before moving the clothes I brought with me.

It's strange to look out the windows and see so many bare branches on the trees.  Autumn is zooming by.  We have a truck coming on Thursday to move the bigger items to our S'burg house.  Two weeks from now, we have the last day of classes; when we come back from Thanksgiving, we have a reading day and go right into exams.

My spouse should be here soon, so let me go and make the house look less like a hurricane swept through.

Amish Quilters and Mistakes Made with Abandon

Some people see me as a talented quilter, but I realize all of my shortcomings:  I'm not precise in terms of cutting or stitching.  I've figured out projects that work for me.  I want to stitch so that I have something to do during times of TV watching, so sewing on the machine won't work.  I don't like hand quilting as much on big projects, but modern batting doesn't need extensive quilting to keep it in place, so I quilt less.  Some people pay for long arm quilters to finish their projects, but so far, I haven't.

Quilt Camp always reminds me of how many ways we can create fabric arts.  I'm also reminded of how often quilting finds its way into my poems.

Ten years ago, four years before I went to my first Quilt Camp, I wrote a poem with some of these ideas, a poem which was also a response to a poem by Luisa Igloria.  It appeared in a post on Dave Bonta's Via Negativa site. 

One Intentional Mistake

                    “how for years I was taught:
                    fly low under the radar.”
                    “Only” by Luisa Igloria



Amish quilters made intentional mistakes
because only God can craft
items of perfection.

I make mistakes without precision,
scattering them across my work
with great abandon, as if to ward
off evil spirits.

Those spirits will move
on to haunt those who are too proud
of their precise stitches, their perfect
children, their houses ready to grace
the cover of glossy magazines.

I fly under the radar
of every evil spirit with my chaotic
collection of art supplies spread
out across every surface, children frolicking
in paint or mud.

But my children get their nightly baths
before being tucked into beds with bright
quilts with crooked seams. I will tell
them one last story
about the woman who abandoned
the neatness of numbered columns
for the spatter of paint and the magic
of fairy cakes in the overgrown garden.