{"id":594,"date":"2006-01-09T23:13:00","date_gmt":"2006-01-09T23:13:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=594"},"modified":"2006-01-09T23:13:00","modified_gmt":"2006-01-09T23:13:00","slug":"594","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=594","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Porch-ism<\/strong><\/p>\n

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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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<\/em><\/a>, which I had the opportunity to read in manuscript and found to be superior to the books that I had used.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> count day–and a bottle of Corona<\/a>, but I was actually able to feel somewhat hopeful about the new semester.<\/p>\n

Tag: Writing<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-594","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s6xQTg-594","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1242,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1242","url_meta":{"origin":594,"position":0},"title":"Fate Magazine Reanimated","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"October 29, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"When pre-writing the blog post on dining above the dead (something best done while walking the dogs), I was thinking about how it was perfect for Fate magazine.Digression 1: Dog-walking is not all that meditative, because Something Always Happens, like this morning when they charged off through nine-inch-deep snow to\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Halloween\"","block_context":{"text":"Halloween","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=halloween"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1055,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1055","url_meta":{"origin":594,"position":1},"title":"Gods Below","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"August 27, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"\"Gods below!\" was a favorite oath of the characters in Rome, my favorite HBO series ever.I have been giving them a lot of thought lately, starting with Cloacina (scroll down to Poster 6).The line to the septic tank at the guest cabin was clogged beyond my ability to clear it\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"polytheism\"","block_context":{"text":"polytheism","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=polytheism"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3811,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=3811","url_meta":{"origin":594,"position":2},"title":"Thought Crime in the Writing Classroom","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"February 11, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"I taught writing for twenty years. I heard some shocking stuff\u2014especially in the \"Creative Nonfiction\" class, which occasionally produced some, shall we say, highly confessional material. And there was one outright psycho student who, lucky for me, fixated on a different professor as the cause of all her problems\u2014not to\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"academia\"","block_context":{"text":"academia","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=academia"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":84,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=84","url_meta":{"origin":594,"position":3},"title":"Neil Gaiman on blogging versus\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"December 15, 2003","format":false,"excerpt":"Neil Gaiman on blogging versus writing Neil Gaiman, author of American Gods, a favorite novel of mine, interviewed at Slashdot, responds: \"I'm not sure that there's a conflict between journalling and writing fiction. (I'm not sure that there's not.) The big picture problems with doing the journal are more to\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1285,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1285","url_meta":{"origin":594,"position":4},"title":"Writing English as a First Language","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"January 15, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Some writing is bland because it does not take chances. Other writing is bland because of poor technique.William Zinsser deals with the second in this talk to international students in the Columbia University journalism school: \"Writing English as a Second Language.\"Actually, writing\u2014as opposed to speaking\u2014is a \"second language.\" That is\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"writing\"","block_context":{"text":"writing","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=writing"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1762,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1762","url_meta":{"origin":594,"position":5},"title":"Freelancing: the Horror","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"August 14, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Via Rod Dreher's new blog, Macroculture, comes this essay by Richard Morgan on the horrors of freelancing. By the time that I finished it, I was thinking of Knut Hamsun's novel\u00a0 Hunger. See the movie version\u2014I saw it as a teenager, and how I ever became a writer afterwards, I\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"writing\"","block_context":{"text":"writing","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=writing"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/594","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=594"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/594\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=594"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=594"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=594"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}