Porch-ism

While I was fretting last night about the forest fire 50 miles south of here (but in similar terrain), a little cold front came through and dropped an inch and a half of snow. (So what is that, an eighth inch of moisture?) And it did help the firefighters.

Classes start in a week, so I am working on syllabi, primarily for the “creative nonfiction” class. The textbook–“handbook” would be a better term–is Perl and Schwartz’s Writing True, which I had the opportunity to read in manuscript and found to be superior to the books that I had used.

No book can teach you how to write, but this one has good explanations of subgenres, helpful exercises for getting started (which some students need after years of writing research papers), and, even better, advice on reading other people’s writing and commenting intelligently.

For a magic hour around 1 p.m., the sun was on the south end of the front porch, the air temperature reached 40 F. (5 C.), the breeze was negligible, and it was warm enough to read outdoors. I had to juggle book, pencil, reading glasses, binoculars–it was a Project Feeder Watch count day–and a bottle of Corona, but I was actually able to feel somewhat hopeful about the new semester.

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