Category Archives: Personal Writing

Final Reflection: Writing, Poetry, Audience and Online Networks

by dogtrax

This is one of those posts where I am not sure where I am heading. Bear with me.

Throughout April, each morning, I was writing poems. Inspired by images put up by Bud Hunt at his blog site (Bud the Teacher) and by Mary Lee Hahn at her blog (A Year of Reading), I worked to be inspired by the media they had chosen to write poetry, every day.  I’d sit down with my cup of coffee, stare at the image chosen for the day and just write, and see where it took me. Some of the poems were magical; Most were just ordinary and quickly forgotten. You just never knew, and that was part of the gift of it.

I’ve been doing this with Bud for a few years now. Mary Lee just started her month of media this year (I think) as part of lessons around how to use Wikimedia Commons in the classroom. I know, and admire, both Mary Lee and Bud, I should add. Both are wonderful educators and writers, and I am grateful to have them in my network and community, and as friends.

In years past, at Bud’s site, a small group of others, including Bud, would be writing poems each day, too, so I always felt like I was part of a writing cadre, and I held on to this vision of us, in different places in the world, looking at the same image that Bud had chosen and writing from different viewpoints. It is a fascinating thing to read what someone else has imagined from the same photo that you just used for your own imagining. There grows this thread between writers.

This year, for whatever reason, no one else wrote at Bud’s site. (Not true, Bud posted one or two poems early on). But for the most part, my words and lines were the only poems on the page. It felt rather lonely, to be honest, but I kept writing because I was writing for myself as much as for Bud and the world. I even did some podcasting with Soundcloud of poems, but then realized through hit counts that only four or five people were listening. (It’s possible that other folks were writing in other places, but I never saw where).

I came to Mary Lee a few days late into the mix, and joined in a bit reluctant. Did I really want to write two poems every day? I did. And I did, and it was wonderful. Here, with Mary Lee, there was a small writing community in play, and the very things that I missed at Bud’s site this year – other writers — was in bloom at Mary Lee’s. A handful of poets were using Mary Lee’s inspiring media (images and videos) to write poetry, and even offer up some reactions to each other (I didn’t do enough of that every day, but I did some). It was lovely to come back later in the day and see how the post unfolded, with Mary Lee moving poems from the comment section to the main post as a showcase of sorts. I felt very connected as writer. There was an audience and a gathering of friends, all rolled up into one experience.

I can’t say I did not enjoy writing with Bud this year. I did. I always love the images he pulls out, and I appreciate that he does it, even if this year it felt like he was only doing it for me. (Thanks, Bud!) But it didn’t emerge as a writing network and by the end of the month, I was less inspired than at the top of the month. Mary Lee’s project did have those elements of connections, and that made all the difference in the world for me as a writer. I am thankful for both of my friends, but I wonder where all of the writers with Bud went to.

I told you I was going to meander, and so I did.

Peace (in the reflection),
Kevin

Collaborative Writing with Dead Authors

by dogtrax

(Thanks to Larry Ferlazzo for this one)
I know this may be little more practical than the “cool” factor but this is .. pretty cool. Google has released an automated version of its Google Documents that allows you to collaborate with dead writers. As a story unfolds, you’ll see Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Emily Dickinson and William Shakespeare and a few others pop into your writing, adding a phrase or word here and there, and maybe even an entire sentence. They might even remove some of your words and do a bit of editing. I found it interesting, if not a bit unnerving at times, to try to keep up with them (such as “they” are) and end up with something a bit coherent. (And I have no idea how the site actually works.)

If you want to see my document on Google, check out this link:

Read Writing with the Ghost Writers

But I also grabbed a screen capture as Google “previewed” my (our) story.

 

Give it a whirl and see what you can create as you write with The Masters.

Peace (in the ghostly collaboration),
Kevin

 

Inspired to Write by The Sunday Funnies

by dogtrax


(from Boolean Squared)
 
(This post is also a podcast)
I remember well the ink-stained fingers. On Sunday mornings, before anyone else received their delivery of the New Haven Register, I would sit on top of the red newspaper box where the bundles would get delivered. First, I would open up the pack by slitting open the plastic wrapper with my pocket knife, and then I would open up the first newspaper on top, turning quickly to the colored comic section. The rest of week wa black and white, but on Sunday, it was full color. It was early enough in the morning that there was often not much traffic along the main street of my town, and in some seasons, I’d have to use the streetlight above for a reading lamp.

But there I would sit, enjoying the first look at Sunday comics before anyone else. And my fingers would turn a rainbow hue from the ink coming off the news, the black of the front page mixed with the colored ink of the comics. My reading done, I would pack up the bundle and begin my methodical journey around the neighborhood, delivering the newspapers. All the while, though, my mind would be replaying the antics of Calvin and Hobbes, or the adventures of Spiderman, or nutty ideas of The Far Side, some of which I still don’t get.

I was thinking of those Sunday mornings the other day because I have a book collection of the comic, Zits, and along with many great strips that appeal to the comedy of being a father of a teenager, the book includes many short narratives of famous comic creators about their memories of comics as a child. Some write about their parents forbidding them from reading the funny pages, which only made it more enjoyable. Others write about where their inspirations as a writer come from, or where their drawing styles emerged from.

For me, the comics were part of childhood, and when I became an adult, I realized that I wanted to try my hand at creating a comic. I chose the classroom as my setting, and technology as the wedge, and created Boolean Squared. The art is minimal at best (I wish I had a partner) but I loved the writing challenge of a comic, and for a year, it ran in the online edition of our local newspaper, The Springfield Republican. I published about 150 comics during my two-year stretch and then retired it. Writing and publishing Boolean Squared was an incredible joy, and a whole lot of work.

The experience made me think of writing and creating in a whole new way, and I still bring comics into my classroom on a regular basis for teaching writing craft and for students, to write. They may never experience the ink-stained fingers of my own childhood (kids don’t deliver newspapers anymore, do they?) but at least they can experience the genre of comics, and who knows? One of them just might be a budding webcomic creator and they just might remember that teacher who valued comics as a piece of writing and art.
Peace (in the funnies),
Kevin

 

I’ve Given Up … Stories

by dogtrax

(Note: This is a response to a writing prompt by my friend Jeremy Hyler at our National Writing Project iAnthology writing site. The prompt was to write about something we have given up. I chose stories. By the way, you should consider voting for Jeremy for his blog at the Edublog Awards for best new blog. At the least, you should add him as someone to follow as he reflects on teaching, writing and, particularly, reaching middle school boys as readers and writers.)

Take a listen to my response as a podcast.

 

I’ve given up more stories than I can count, and each time, I feel as if I have lost someone dear to me. But they just had to go. I’ve given up stories that started strong and ran out of something by the middle and either fluttered to the end, or never even made it there. I’ve given up stories that seemed to go one way, only to veer another way, and then I could not find the strings to tangle them back together. I’ve given up stories because I have forgotten the story I wanted to tell in the first place, which is about as much of an awful feeling for a writer that you can have. I’ve given up stories because of the opposite, too: I told the story I wanted to tell and that story was for no one else but me. I keep those stories in my heart. So, maybe they aren’t completely given up. I’ve given up stories more often than I have not given up on stories, and I often wonder: what does that say about me as a storywriter? Do I give up too easily? Can’t I focus, for god’s sake?

My 11 year old son was writing a story the other day on our computer and then last night, he told me he had run into a wall and decided to delete the whole thing. No, I almost shouted. Don’t do it. At least save it for another day, another year. Save the story for another time when another version of yourself can pick it up and keep it going. I think I was talking to myself as much I was talking to him.

I’ve given up lots of stories, but somehow, I know where they still are.

Peace (in the lost and not-so-lost stories),
Kevin

 

Fiction Contest Honorable Mention: Connecting the Dots

by dogtrax

On a whim, I submitted this short story (if you can call it that) to the local newspaper’s annual Fiction Contest (which pulls in hundreds of stories from our valley, which is home to many writers and artists). I didn’t expect my piece to get very far. It is nontraditional in the sense that the story is buried inside of it, as the format it a series of biographical blurbs from the end of a book collection. I first shared it here on my blog and worked through some versions over at our iAnthology writing site. I liked the way it came out and figured I would give the contest a shot.  At the least, it would break up the reading of the reviewers, right? (Another story from two years ago got honorable mention, too, so I have a positive experience with the contest).

Yesterday, I opened up the newspaper to find that this story — Connecting the Dots: A Story of Contributors — received an Honorable Mention in the fiction contest. I am quite proud of this strange little story. You can give it a read, if you want.
Connect the Dots a Story of Contributors

 

Peace (in the sharing),
Kevin

 

Writing with My Students: Earth as Experiment

by dogtrax

I have been trying to work for more content-area related connections to our mostly-daily writing prompts in class as part of our shift into Common Core writing, and of course, as they write, so do I (and so should you). One resource that has been making my life easier is the blog  simply called Writing Prompts but which is completely made up of visual prompts. Many of them connect nicely with science, math and social studies. And most are very thought-provoking. It’s a wonderful site.

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On Friday, we used this one about earth as a science experiment, and it tied in with their recent work in science around the Scientific Method. We talked about what the alien might hypothesize, and then what kind of data collection it might do, and what conclusions it would discover. Then, they had a choice: they could create a fake science experiment write-up, a dialogue skit between the alien and a teacher, or a short story. I wrote this short story with them, using humor to tell my story.

“I can’t stand these planetary science experiments,”  I grumbled, pushing another nebula galaxy towards my best friend, Zingledoop. “It’s so … meaningless. Like, when will we ever need to know how to make a planet?”
”I know. And it always ends in disaster,” Zingledoop replied. He took the galaxy and popped into his nutrient chute. “Remember the last one?”
Of course, I did. I still have a vision of that flattened planet, all smooshed because Zingledoop had sat on it accidentally. We’d thrown that planet away into the intergalactic trash bin, just like the others.
“Maybe this one will be different,” I said hopefully. “What do the instructions say?”
Zingledoop pulled the instructions out of his left nostril and looked it over. “Create a planet with life forms that are destined to destroy the planet. Come up with a hypothesis, data collection and be prepared to write a conclusion of your experiment.”
“Great,” I said. “We’re just going to let them destroy it?”
“Unless we do it first,” Zingledoop said, and we both laughed.
We quickly got down to work. In some ways, we were old pros at this. We’d created our fair share of planets and done plenty of intergalactic science experiments. With this planet, we decided that we would see what happens if we incrementally increased the planet temperatures. With ice caps and large oceans, the place would soon be flooded out. Or at least, that’s what we predicted.  We’d be speeding up time to see if our prediction came true or not.
It was sort of boring. We’d “done” planets. What we wanted were Universes, but our teacher kept telling us “first things first.” So, here we were, creating this planet called …
“What’s this place to be called?” I asked.
Zingledoop looked at the instructions. “Earth,” he answered.
”Earth? That’s a pretty lame name.”
“Yeah. But on the bright side of things, it won’t be around for long.”
We both laughed again.

Peace (in the experiment),
Kevin

 

How Publishing Slows Down Time

by dogtrax

I was very happy to receive an email this week, informing me that a poem I had submitted for a local poetry anthology collection had been accepted. A contract/agreement was attached to the email and I dutifully signed it, and sent it back. I happened to glance at the date of publication for the poetry book: October 2012. That’s an entire year away.

The poem itself is a loving tribute to the old railroad bed in our neighborhood that has been given new life as a rail trail. I called it “Ghost Train” because I often imagine the trains running in the background of the woods as we ride our bikes or walk the trails during the warm seasons. The book is a collection of poems that capture the city where I live, a place I am proud of and love raising my family in. There’s no compensation for the poem, just a copy of the book.

What’s interesting is that when I tweeted that my poem would be published, a number of folks began asking me where they could find the link. They assumed it was online, and immediately accessible. It’s not.  We’re still a year away from the book form of the anthology. And it got me thinking through the day how odd it is for me to think about having to wait another year to see the poem in print, and even then, it may not be online anywhere. In fact, I submitted the poem many months ago and forgot all about it. I had to dig the poem back up and look through the lines again to remember what it is that I wrote, and remind myself why I liked it in the first place enough to submit it to the anthology.

I guess I have settled into the world of immediate publishing, like so many of us writers who use technology for publishing. I write it, I edit it, I publish it.  I get feedback. I revise, if necessary, and re-publish. I move on. This particularly anthology is forcing my poem to slow down. These conflicted feelings about the poem — about my inner push to publish against the need to accept the natural progress of book publishing — strikes me as a metaphor for the transition that the world of publishing is in these days (and why there are questions about how it will survive).

What will it be like to rediscover my poem in another year, when the writing of it will be almost two years in the past? Will I even like it anymore? I hope so.

Here are the first lines:

Ghosts of freight trains
ride these rails,
sound asleep beneath the bed
of fallen leaves.

The rest you will have to wait a year to read …

Peace (in the poems),
Kevin

 

Sharing the Page with Writers I Admire

by dogtrax

Book cover

I still can’t believe it.

I opened up a package the other day and in it was a huge textbook, Modern Literature: Rhetorical and Relevant, and there, on page 505, is a graphic novel review that I did for The Graphic Classroom. The review is for the book After 911: America’s War on Terror, which I liked but found to have some shortcomings. What gets me is who else is in this textbook collection broken down into themes of social justice, identity,  global issues and more. I am squished in this tome with some of my favorite writers, such as Billy Collins, Dave Barry, Annie Dillard, Gary Soto, Sandra Cisneros, Sherman Alexie, Marjane Satrapi and even Ray Bradbury.

Yikes!

To be honest, I almost turned down the request for the article because, eh, I wasn’t all that interested in being used by a huge publishing company trying to sell textbooks. But I wanted to get some good PR for my friend, Chris Wilson, at The Graphic Classroom, and I was able to work out a small financial deal from the company. At least, I told myself, I was getting paid for the writing gig.

If only I had known who else would be in the pages, I might not have resisted so much. (ha)

And then I was reading the foreword to the textbook (which I think is mostly targeted for California, but aren’t they all? Or Texas?), and I realize that one of the advisors behind the book is Kathleen Rowlands, who is the director of the Cal State University Northridge Writing Project. I am always happy to see writing project connections to any work I do. And I don’t even know her.

Finally, I started reading the textbook. I know. Who does that?  Who reads a textbook unless you have to? But there is some fine stuff in there, and while I mentioned a list of famous folks, there is an entire collection of some incredibly powerful student writing, poems and stories that showcase some amazing talent. Plus, there are comics and other non-traditional texts. That made me happy, too, to know some high school student somewhere has a chance to explore many kinds of text.

I can’t say I would run out and buy the book (it probably costs an arm and a leg) if I weren’t in it, but I am quite happy to have it on my bookshelves, knowing my words are sitting comfortably close to some wonderful writers. I hope they don’t mind a little riff-raff in the neighborhood.

Peace (in the book),
Kevin

PS — a version of the review that I got published here is still over at The Graphic Classroom.

 

Three Stories I Wrote Yesterday ….

by dogtrax

Some days, the stories just unfold.

Yesterday, I wrote four 25-word stories and I really liked three of them. The fourth was, OK, but not great. Interestingly enough, two of the stories were directly inspired by tweets in my Twitter stream. I read what two of my friends (Bill Ferriter, @plugusin; and Brian Fay, @brianfay) posted, caught a glimpse of a story and wrote it out. The third story just came out of nowhere, but it turns out to be the one I like best of all.

First of all, Bill was posting some thoughts about using a Livescribe pen, which is a nifty transcription tool that can create podcasts from writing and more. So, I wondered, what if the pen didn’t do what it was supposed to do, but did something a little … odd (I may have had Twilight Zone in my mind.)

Thus:

She realized the Livescribe Pen was writing something other than the transcription. It dawned on her then what was happening.

Then, later, Brian was writing about using his wife’s computer. He has been experimenting with the new Google Chrome netbook, which is entirely cloud based, and he was noting how odd it now felt to be living off the desktop instead of in the browser. I like the double meaning of cookies here, and wished I could have played off that a bit more. The constraints of the story didn’t allow that.

Thus:

Near the bookmarks, inside the cache & just out of reach of the cookies, she made a little nest & went to live in her browser.

But the story I really thought I nailed was this next one. I think an NPR story about Wikipedia I listened to the other day was still rolling around in my mind. And I had this idea of connecting a wiki to tattoos, for some reason (I can’t remember the connection I was thinking of now, so I guess it doesn’t really matter). With 25-word stories, remember, it is all about what is not being said, and trying to get a little “kicker” in there. It’s difficult to pull off. I think I did it with this one that, in just a few words, says all you need to know about this relationship. I think the word “tartly,” which I added only in the last moment, makes all the difference in the world here, don’t you?

“What if my body and spirit are nothing but a living wiki,” he wondered. She replied tartly, “You’d have a lot of edits.”

Peace (in the hint fiction),
Kevin

PS — The story I didn’t like so much, even though it hit closer to home?

The taxi rolled up, on schedule. Their eyes never left the cell phones. They opened the door. “Home?” “Duh. Of course, dad.”