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A Step-by-Step Guide to Achieving a BAND 6 in Creative Writing

Need to elevate your creative writing? Learn the foolproof formula for writing a full-mark creative response!

7 months ago   •   6 min read

I think we can all agree creative writing is the hardest and most annoying part of year 12 English. I mean it is so subjective, what's right or wrong?

Well lucky for you, I've been there, a struggling high school student tired of getting bad creative marks. Let me show you how I turned my creative marks around to get a 99+ Atar and how you can too!!

1. READ READ READ!!!

If you keep receiving feedback that says your work is cliché, generic, lacks substance and misuses literary devices the only remedy is reading . There is a reason the syllabus shoves texts down our throats. It's because by understanding the different ways other writers communicate ideas we ourselves become better communicators. By reading outside of your prescribed text you will be exposed to a new set of writing tools your peers wouldn't know about. You can see the recurring writing features well-renowned authors use and most importantly, you can gain worldly inspiration for your own text. Ideally, you want to be reading short stories, discursive and persuasive because that is what the syllabus demands of you.

Some recommendations are;

• Samsa in Love by Murakami
• The Second Bakery Attack by Murakami
• There will come soft rains by Ray Bradbury
• Hills like white elephants by Ernest Hemingway
• The Lottery by Shirely Jackson

Find an author whose writing style you really like and try mimicking their language and syntax in your own work.

2. FIND YOUR PURPOSE

The marking criteria for HSC Module C creative writing to score a Band 6 requires you to:

…consider purpose and audience to carefully shape meaning.

No matter how good your motifs or metaphors are, unless you have a strong and clear message or purpose permeating your writing you will not be able to access band 6 marks.  When about to write a short story, discursive or whatever, the first thing I want you to think about is:

What is the message you want to communicate in your writing

When coming up with your purpose/idea don’t overcomplicate it. Pick something simple and personal to you. You want to keep your ideas easily adaptable to different stimuli and something relatable to both yourself and the reader. Some examples are;

• The importance of reading
• The need for belonging and human connections
• The irrational and obsessive nature of love

Think of the texts that you have studied in other modules, What are the ideas and messages being put forward there? You will notice that most of them examine fundamental aspects of human nature and enlighten audiences with a new perspective. That is what you should be doing too!

Let’s say you want to write a story about a child in an immigrant family. If that was the limit of your ‘idea’ you won’t be able to reach a band 6. What is the purpose behind it? Why do you want to explore this experience? A more in-depth idea plan would be "I want to write about a child experiencing alienation within an immigrant family to highlight the importance of culture to a sense of identity and belonging."

3. PLAN YOUR STRUCTURE

Once you have your Band 6 purpose picked out, you now have to figure out how you want to communicate your purpose.

This means picking a writing style (imaginative, persuasive, discursive), developing a main character and conflict, and then selecting the point of view that would explore this character and conflict.

Write in a way that shows an understanding of how the text creates meaning.

There is no right or wrong option here. It is all about how well you understand and can justify your writing decisions (this is important for the reflection). When creating your response you want to be aware of all the features present and how it influences the piece and its meaning.

There are two things that I would recommend to ensure you are on the right track though. For plot structure use the plot pyramid. You will notice all great movies and novels follow this sequence. Why? Because it works every time to engage and compel audiences through the story.

The second thing is to develop dynamic characters. Characters that evolve throughout your story. This doesn't have to be physical, or even a big change. It could be as simple as a haircut or even just a small change in mindset. Essentially you want to show your character to have a change in perspective because that will in turn compel your reader to have that same change. This is easily done if you have carefully thought out your character.

• What is their personal story or background?
• What are their values and beliefs?
• What is the internal conflict they struggle with?

4. WRITE WRITE WRITE

• Use a simple setting (and try to stick to only one scene/setting in your short story you won't have time to delve into more).
• Concentrate on developing one dynamic and 3-dimensional protagonist before you try and introduce other characters. (And only introduce them if they are integral to the storyline. NPC's (or surface-level side characters) do not add value and will only disengage your audience.)
• Show don't tell. For example instead of "I heard footsteps creeping behind me which made me more scared" leave room for the reader's imagination and say "I heard a crunch behind me and my heart turned to sand, rising up into my throat." Instead of "we were really close" say "his smell reminded me of my childhood treehouse."
• Play with word order and vary syntax (punctuation is super important). Many people make the mistake of just using complex sentences, which causes their pieces to feel cluttered and clunky to read. Use short sentences as well to structure tension and emotions.
• The secret of good writing is to simplify and strip every sentence to its cleanest component. Only add the adjectives and descriptions that are integral to your plot line. DON'T GET TOO CAUGHT UP IN FLOWERY LANGUAGE.

5. EDIT AND FEEDBACK

It is highly likely your first draft will not be band 6 material, but that's normal. J.K Rowling took hundreds of drafts to get to the Harry Potter we know and love. And it took me a few drafts before getting a satisfied nod from my English teacher. A Band 6 response will take a series of feedback, edits and rewrites. Show it to your teachers, your friends, and your parents and importantly ask them if they understand the message you are trying to put forward because if they don't the markers reading in a time crunch definitely won't. You don't need expert opinion to make your piece better. You are looking to improve your clarity and communication to everyone .

In addition to this I always find annotating your own writing helps balance and improve the sophistication of literary devices. You should also be reading your piece out loud to help identify syntax and grammatical errors that desperately need to be reworded.

Remember your goal is to use the power of words to communicate a profound idea to the world as engagingly and with as much clarity as possible!!

Want more personalised tips to drastically improve your English mark? A private tutor can make the biggest difference!

Written by KIS Academics Tutor for HSC English, Thao Peli Nghiem Xuan. Thao received an ATAR of 99.55 and is pursuing a Bachelor of Mechanical Engineering at the University Of New South Wales. You can view Thao's profile here and request her as a tutor.

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Discovery: The Ultimate Guide to Creative Writing

Friday 4th, March 2016

Elyse Popplewell

If you’re a first time reader, then you might not be aware of my free online HSC tutoring for English (including HSC creative writing), and other subjects. Check it out! Also – I have a deal for you. If this post is crazy helpful, then you should share it with your friends on Facebook . Deal? Awesome.

HSC Creative Writing: The Guide.

HSC creative writing can be a pain for some and the time to shine for others. Getting started is the most difficult part. When you have something to work with, it is simply a matter of moulding it to perfection. When you have nothing, you have a seemingly difficult road ahead. After several ATAR Notes members expressed that they need help with HSC creative writing, I wrote this to give you some starting points. Then I edited this, and re-wrote it so that it helps you from the beginning stages until the very last days of editing. Fear no more, HSC creative writing doesn’t have to be the foe that it is in your head! Let’s get started.

Surprise: You’re the composer!

Write about what you know

In the years 2010-2015, not once has Paper 1 specified a form that you have to use. Every year in that time frame they have asked for “imaginative writing” except in 2011 when they asked for a “creative piece” of writing. Most commonly, students write in the short story form. However, students can also write speeches, opinion articles, memoirs, monologues, letters, diary entries, or hybrid medium forms. Think about how you can play to your strengths. Are you the more analytical type and less creative? Consider using that strength in the “imaginative writing” by opting to write a feature article or a speech. If you want to ask questions about your form, then please check out my free online HSC tutoring for English and other subjects.

Tense is a very powerful tool that you can use in your writing to increase intensity or create a tone of detachment, amongst other things. Writing entirely in the present tense is not as easy as it seems, it is very easy to fall into past tense. The present tense creates a sense of immediacy, a sense of urgency. If you’re writing with suspense or about action, consider the present tense.

“We stand here together, linking arms. The car screeches to a stop in front of our unified bodies. The frail man alights from the vehicle and stares into my eyes.”

The past tense is the most common in short stories. The past tense can be reflective, recounting, or perhaps just the most natural tense to write in.

“We stood together, linking arms. The car screeched to a stop in front of us. The frail man alighted from his vehicle and stared into my eyes.”

The future tense is difficult to use for short stories. However, you can really manipulate the future tense to work in your favour if you are writing a creative speech. A combination of tenses will most probably create a seamless link between cause and effect in a speech.

“We will stand together with our arms linked. The man may intimidate us all he likes, but together, when we are unified, we are stronger he will ever be.”

It is also important to point out that using a variety of tenses may work best for your creative. If you are flashing back, the easiest way to do that is to establish the tense firmly.

Giving your setting some texture

You ultimately want your creative writing to take your marker to a new place, a new world, and you want them to feel as though they understand it like they would their own kitchen. The most skilled writers can make places like Hogwarts seem like your literary home. At the Year 12 level, we aren’t all at that level. The best option is to take a setting you know and describe it in every sense – taste, smell, feel, sound and sight.

Choose a place special and known to you. Does your grandmother’s kitchen have those old school two-tone brown tiles? Did you grow up in another country, where the air felt different and the smell of tomatoes reminded you of Sundays? Does your bedroom have patterned fabric hanging from the walls and a bleached patch on the floor from when you spilled nail polish remover? Perhaps your scene is a sporting field – describe the grazed knees, the sliced oranges and the mums on the sideline nursing babies. The more unique yet well described the details are, the more tangible your setting is.

Again, it comes back to: write about what you know.

How much time has elapsed?

You want to consider whether your creative piece is focused on a small slot of ordinary time, or is it covering years in span? Are you flashing back between the past and the present? Some of the most wonderful short stories focus on the minutiae that is unique to ordinary life but is perpetually overlooked or underappreciated. By this I mean, discovering that new isn’t always better may be the product of a character cooking their grandmother’s recipe for brownies (imagine the imagery you could use!). Discovering that humans are all one and the same could come from a story based on one single shift at a grocery store, observing customers. Every day occurrences offer very special and overlooked discoveries.

You could create a creative piece that actually spans the entire life span of someone (is this the life span of someone who lived to 13 years old or someone who lived until 90 years old?). Else, you could create a story that compares the same stage of life of three different individuals in three different eras. Consider how much time you want to cover before embarking on your creative journey.

Show, don’t tell:

The best writers don’t give every little detail wrapped up and packaged, ready to go. As a writer, you need to have respect for your reader in that you believe in their ability to read between the lines at points, or their ability to read a description and visualise it appropriately.

“I was 14 at the time. I was young, vulnerable and naïve. At 14 you have such little life experience, so I didn’t know how to react.”

This is boring because the reader is being fed every detail that they could have synthesised from being told the age alone. To add to the point of the age, you could add an adjective that gives connotations to everything that was written in the sentence, such as “tender age of 14.” That’s a discretionary thing, because it’s not necessary. When you don’t have to use extra words: probably don’t. When you give less information, you intrigue the reader. There is a fine line between withholding too much and giving the reader the appropriate rope for them to pull. The best way to work out if you’re sitting comfortably on the line is to send your creative writing to someone, and have them tell you if there was a gap in the information. How many facts can you convey without telling the reader directly? Your markers are smart people, they can do the work on their end, you just have to feed them the essentials.

Here are some examples of the difference between showing and telling.

Telling: The beach was windy and the weather was hot. Showing: Hot sand bit my ankles as I stood on the shore.

Telling: His uniform was bleakly coloured with a grey lapel. He stood at attention, without any trace of a smile. Showing: The discipline of his emotions was reflected in his prim uniform.

Giving your character/persona depth

If your creative writing involves a character – whether that be a protagonist or the persona delivering your imaginative speech – you need to give them qualities beyond the page. It isn’t enough to describe their hair colour and gender. There needs to be something unique about this character that makes them feel real, alive and possibly relatable. Is it the way that they fiddle with loose threads on their cardigan? Is it the way they comb their hair through their fingers when they are stressed? Do they wear an eye patch? Do they have painted nails, but the pinky nail is always painted a different colour? Do they have an upward infliction when they are excited? Do the other characters change their tone when they are in the presence of this one character? Does this character only speak in high/low modality? Are they a pessimist? Do they wear hand-made ugly brooches?

Of course, it is a combination of many qualities that make a character live beyond the ink on the page. Hopefully my suggestions give you an idea of a quirk your character could have. Alternatively, you could have a character that is so intensely normal that they are a complete contrast to their vibrant setting?

Word Count?

Mine was 1300. I am a very fast writer in exam situations. Length does not necessarily mean quality, of course. A peer of mine wrote 900 words and got the same mark as me. For your first draft, I would aim for a minimum of 700 words. Then, when you create a gauge for how much you can write in an exam in legible handwriting, you can expand. For your half yearly, I definitely recommend against writing a 1300 word creative writing unless you are supremely confident that you can do that, at high quality, in 40 minutes (perhaps your half yearly exam isn’t a full Paper 1 – in which case you need to write to the conditions).

There is no correct word count range. You need to decide how many words you need to effectively and creatively express your ideas about discovery.

Relating to a stimulus

Since 2010, Paper 1 has delivered quotes to be used as the first sentence, general quotes to be featured anywhere in the text and visual images to be incorporated. Every year, there has been a twist on the area of study concept (belonging or discovery) in the question. In the belonging stage, BOSTES did not say “Write a creative piece about belonging. Include the stimulus ******.” Instead, they have said to write an imaginative piece about “belonging and not belonging” or to “Compose a piece of imaginative writing which explores the unexpected impact of discovery.” These little twists always come from the rubric, so there isn’t really any excuse to not be prepared for that!

If the stimulus is a quote such as “She was always so beautiful” there is lenience for tense. Using the quote directly, if required to do that, is the best option. However, if this screws up the tense you are writing in, it is okay to say “she is always so beautiful.” (Side note: This would be a really weird stimulus if it ever occurred.) Futhermore, gender can be substituted, although also undesirable. If the quote is specified to be the very first sentence of your work: there is no lenience. It must be the very first sentence.

As for a visual image, the level of incorporation changes. Depending on the image, you could reference the colours, the facial expressions, the swirly pattern or the salient image. Unfortunately, several stimuli from past papers are “awaiting copyright” online and aren’t available. However, there are a few, and when you have an imaginative piece you should try relate them to these stimuli as preparation.

The techniques:

Don’t forget to include some techniques in there. You study texts all year and you know what makes a text stand out. You know how a metaphor works, so use it. Be creative. Use a motif that flows through your story. If you’re writing a speech, use imperatives to call your reader to action. Use beautiful imagery that intrigues a reader. Use amazing alliteration (see what I did there). Avoid clichés like the plague (again…see what I did) unless you are effectively appropriating it. In HSC creative writing, you need to show that you have studied magnificent wordsmiths, and in turn, you can emulate their manipulation of form and language.

Some quirky prompts:

Click here if you want 50 quirky writing prompts – look for the spoiler in the post!

How do I incorporate Discovery?

If you click here you will be taken to an AOS rubric break down I have done with some particular prompts for HSC creative writing.

Part two: Editing and Beyond!

This next part is useful for your HSC creative writing when you have some words on the page waiting for improvement.

Once you’ve got a creative piece – or at least a plot – you can start working on how you will present this work in the most effective manner. You need to be equipped with knowledge and skill to refine your work on a technical level, in order to enhance the discovery that you will be heavily marked on. By synthesising the works of various genius writers and the experiences of HSC writers, I’ve compiled a list of checks and balances, tips and tricks, spells and potions, that will help you create the best piece of HSC creative writing that you can.

Why should you critique your writing and when?

What seems to be a brilliant piece of HSC creative writing when you’re cramming for exams may not continue to be so brilliant when you’re looking at it again after a solid sleep and in the day light. No doubt what you wrote will have merit, perhaps it will be perfect, but the chances lean towards it having room for improvement. You can have teachers look at your writing, peers, family, and even me here at ATAR Notes. Everyone can give their input and often, an outsider’s opinion is preciously valuable. However, at the end of the day this is your writing and essentially an artistic body that you created from nothing. That’s special. It is something to be proud of, and when you find and edit the faults in your own work, you enhance your writing but also gain skills in editing.

Your work should be critiqued periodically from the first draft until the HSC exams. After each hand-in of your work to your teacher you should receive feedback to take on board. You have your entire year 12 course to work on a killer creative writing piece. What is important is that you are willing to shave away the crusty edges of the cake so that you can present it in the most effective and smooth icing you have to offer. If you are sitting on a creative at about 8/15 marks right now (as of the 29/02/2016), you only have to gain one more mark per month in order to sit on a 15/15 creative. This means that you shouldn’t put your creative to bed for weeks without a second thought. This is the kind of work that benefits from small spontaneous bursts of editing, reading and adjusting. Fresh eyes do wonders to writer’s block, I promise. You will also find that adapting your creative writing to different stimuli is also very effective in highlighting strengths and flaws in the work. This is another call for editing! Sometimes you will need to make big changes, entirely re-arranging the plot, removing characters, changing the tense, etc. Sometimes you will need to make smaller changes like finely grooming the grammar and spelling. It is worth it when you have an HSC creative writing piece that works for you, and is effective in various situations that an exam could give you.

The way punctuation affects things:

I’ll just leave this right here…

Consistency of tense:

Are your sentences a little intense?

It is very exhausting for a responder to read complex and compound sentences one after the other, each full of verbose and unnecessary adjectives. It is such a blessed relief when you reach a simple sentence that you just want to sit and mellow in the beauty of its simplicity. Of course, this is a technique that you can use to your advantage. You won’t need the enormous unnecessary sentences though, I promise. “Jesus wept.” This is the shortest verse in the Bible (found John 11:35) and is probably one of the most potent examples of the power of simplicity. The sentence only involves a proper noun and a past-tense verb. It stands alone to be very powerful. It also stands as a formidable force in among other sentences. Sentence variation is extremely important in engaging a reader through flow.

Of course, writing completely in simple sentences is tedious for you and the reader. Variation is the key in HSC creative writing. This is most crucial in your introduction because there is opportunity to lose your marker before you have even shown what you’re made of! Reading your work out loud is one of the most effective ways to realise which sentences aren’t flowing. If you are running out of breath before you finish a sentence – you need to cut back. Have a look here and read this out loud:

The grand opening:

Writer’s Digest suggested in their online article “5 Wrong Ways to Start a Story” that there are in fact, ways to lose your reader and textual credibility before you even warm up. It is fairly disappointing to a reader to be thrown into drastic action, only to be pulled into consciousness and be told that the text’s persona was in a dream. My HSC English teacher cringed at the thought of us starting or resolving our stories with a dream that defeats everything that happened thus far. It is the ending you throw on when you don’t know how to end it, and it is the beginning you use to fake that you are a thrilling action writer. Exactly what you don’t want to do in HSC creative writing.

Hopefully neither of these apply to you – so when Johnny wakes up to realise “it was all just a dream” you better start hitting the backspace.Students often turn to writing about their own experiences. This is great! However, do not open your story with the alarm clock buzzing, even if that is the most familiar daily occurrence. Writer’s Digest agrees. They say, “the only thing worse than a story opening with a ringing alarm clock is when the character reaches over to turn it off and then exclaims, “I’m late.””So, what constitutes a good opening? If you are transporting a reader to a different landscape or time period than what they are probably used to, you want to give them the passport in the very introduction otherwise the plane to the discovery will leave without them. This is your chance to grab the marker and keep them keen for every coming word. Of course, to invite a reader to an unfamiliar place you need to give them some descriptions. This is the trap of death! Describing the location in every way is tedious and boring. You want to respect the reader and their imagination. Give them a rope, they’ll pull.However, if your story is set in a familiar world, you may need to take a different approach. These are some of my favourite first lines from books (some I have read, some I haven’t). I’m sure you can appreciate why each one is so intriguing.

“Call me Ishmael.” -Herman Melville, Moby Dick.

This works because it is simple, stark, demanding. Most of all, it is intriguing.

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” – George Orwell, 1984.

Usually, bright and sunny go together. Here, bright and cold are paired. What is even more unique? The clocks tick beyond 12. What? Why? How? You will find out if you read on! See how that works?

“It was a pleasure to burn.” Ray Bradbury, Farenheit 451.

This is grimacing, simple, intriguing.

“I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.” -Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle.

Already I’m wondering why the bloody hell is this person in a kitchen sink? How did they get there? Are they squashed? This kind of unique sentence stands out.

“In case you hadn’t noticed, you have a mental dialogue going on inside your head that never stops. It just keeps going and going. Have you ever wondered why it talks in there? How does it decide what to say and when to say it?” – Michael A Singer, The Untethered Soul: The Journal Beyond Yourself.

This works because it appeals to the reader and makes them question a truth about themselves that they may have never considered before.

“Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four Pivet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.” JK Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.

Who was questioning that they weren’t perfectly normal? Why are they so defensive and dismissive? I already feel a reaction to the pompous nature of the pair!

Resolving the story well!

There are so many ways to end stories. SO many. What stories have ended in a very efficient way for you? Which stories left you wanting more? Which stories let you down?

Because you are asked to write about discovery in HSC creative writing, you want the ending to be wholesome. This means, you need your marker to know that the ending justifies the discovery. You can’t leave your marker confused about whether or not the discovery had yet occurred because this may jeopardise your marks. If your discovery is an epiphany for the reader, you may want to finish with a stark, stand alone sentence that truly has a resonating effect. If your story is organised in a way that the discovery is transformative of a persona’s opinions, make sure that the ending clearly justifies the transformation that occurred. You could find it most effective to end your story with your main character musing over the happenings of the story.

In the pressure of an exam, it is tempting to cut short on your conclusion to save time. However, you MUST remember that the last taste of your story that your marker has comes from the final words. They simply cannot be compromised!

George Orwell’s wise words:

Looking for a bit of extra help?

We also have a free HSC creative writing marking thread here!

Don’t be shy, post your questions. If you have a question on HSC creative writing or anything else, it is guaranteed that so many other students do too. So when you post it on here, not only does another student benefit from the reply, but they also feel comforted that they weren’t the only one with the question!

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HSC Discovery Creative Writing Sample

Read a Band 6 creative that scored a former student and current English tutor a Band 6.

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Vce english units 1 and 2.

Creative writing is part of the HSC English Paper 1 Area of Study exam.  Through a creative writing piece, students are required to demonstrate the concept of Discovery.

Here is a sample of a Band 6 HSC Discovery Creative written by a Matrix Graduate in 2016.

When I was a child, my late father and I would spend every moment of the summer season on the sparkling white sand of the beach near our home. We would dance knee-deep in the icy surf, kicking up the surface so that the droplets glimmered like diamonds in the sunlight. We would lie on our backs and stare at the sky, until the swirling clouds began to take on fantastical shapes. We would grip imaginary weapons and spar, swinging tomahawks and thrusting swords like the most violent of fantasy pirates. These idyllic days went on and on; a never-ending cycle of azure skies, frozen forever within my mind. My earliest memories are filled with images of my father in these moments, laughing as he kicked up the warm sand and twirling a golden compass around his pinkie. And, now, as I stand on the same beach, feeling the same heat radiating under my feet, almost fifteen years later, I can’t help but think of him. I can’t help but think of him, and all of the pain he instilled into both himself and everyone around him during the final years of his life.

To most of the world, my father was a historian. To me, however, he was an explorer. My father would often venture out into unknown lands for months on end before returning home, tales of epic battles and glittering treasure troves flying off his tongue. I had listened fervently, taking every word as gospel. Even so, I never did hide my hatred of his frequent trips. “Why do you have to go again?” I once asked, gripping the hem of my mother’s skirt in my tiny fist. “If I don’t go, then what stories would I tell them?”

“Whoever asks. If anyone were to ask me how I lived my life, the last thing I want is for the story to be boring.” He winked.

Looking back, I knew now that the reality behind my father’s stories were never quite as exciting. In each trip he made, he was always looking for the same thing; the wreckage he believed was buried somewhere beneath the ocean. It was his obsession. His life’s work had all been spent on attempting to find it. His dark study overflowed with dusty, hastily-bound books on the subject. Ginormous maps were sprawled across every wooden surface. Whenever he was home, I would sit outside the door, my knees pulled up to my chest, and listen. His heavy sighs and the sound of crumpling paper seeped through the walls. I was never allowed inside the room when he was home, though my imagination flooded my mind with images of my father bent over cryptic clues and riddles; his brow furrowed as he cracked each one. Every now and again, he would let out a shout and burst through the door, gleefully picking me up and spinning around in excitement. We would dance around the living room, my father swinging his golden compass around his pinkie and singing joyously . Though, those moments grew fewer and further between as time went on. Even so, he always made time for our annual summer adventures.

That is, until he forgot we had the tradition.  

I remember the first time I truly realised what had occurred, when the child inside me faded from existence. Perhaps some small part of me had known for a while, but I had suppressed it, suppressed the knowledge of his sickness. I was too afraid to think of my father as human, something which could cease to exist at any moment. His great voyages out into the ocean halted, and his time at home seemed to last an eternity. He locked himself in his study, consumed by his work. His disease rooted itself deep within his mind and grew, branching out and puncturing every memory with its thorns. He became cruel, obsessed with finishing his work and finding the wreckage before it became too late. He would push the study’s door open, look down at my small frame and thrust a pale, slender arm towards the living room. “Go away!” He would yell. “I can hear you breathing and it’s pissing me off!” “He’s just stressed.” My mother had assured. “He’ll be back to normal once he finishes his work.” But I knew he would never again be the father I once idolised. The explorer of my dreams. Now, he was nothing more than a bitter old man, obsessed with reading the thousands of post-it notes he had plastered around his study, each screaming back to him the fragments of information he had long since forgotten. Too many times did he pack his brown leather suitcase only to remember that he no longer had anywhere to travel to. One day in the dead of summer, my mother and I heard a loud crash sounding from within my father’s study. We rushed over, pounding on the door with the sides of our fists. He emerged from within, sweat pooling down the sides of his sallow face and a hammer clutched tightly in his hand. On the wooden desk behind him, the golden compass lay defeated, shattered into various pieces.

I pulled myself out of the past and cemented my conscience back into reality. I hastily brushed away the beads of salt water that had formed in the corners of my eyes. It was pitiful to think that my father had died a broken, defeated man, one who lost track of who he originally aspired to be. I could imagine his younger self laughing at someone like him, swearing he would never be like that. I used to believe my father had taught me to dream and be curious. The voyage, following each point of the map, was most important. And though my father forgot what he once preached, that didn’t mean I ever would. After all, then what would I tell them? I withdrew a small, wooden box from within my satchel and dug my hand inside. I pulled out what remained of my father and cast the tiny, dark particles into the seaside wind. Perhaps they would, one day, reach the fated wreck, and settle into the cracks of its rotting hull. “I know what you can tell them” I whispered, as I watched the ashes spiral up into the distance. “Just tell them you danced on the sparkling sand, ran through the clear blue sea and played pirates.”

Written by June Heo

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• Focus: Belonging

'Belonging' or 'Not Belonging' creative writing ideas..

• Thread starter lollyxb
• Start date Nov 4, 2011

I'm doing Standard English and I really need ideas for a piece of creative writing! I am the MOST uncreative person alive. The only points I can come up with for belonging/not belonging are: + appearance + school groups + religion I need to write about something that isn’t too cliché, and something that will stand out for markers. HELP! --Lauren  

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lollyxb said: + appearance + school groups + religion Click to expand...

silentdreamer

doing a belonging creative based solely on appearance won't let you write a story that will get you a good mark imo, it's quite a superficial topic that will be hard to go in depth with. and also stay away from school groups as well, it's extremely overdone and teachers really don't like it. have you tried looking through the belong creative writing ideas thread in the english section? you could also draw inspiration from movies and books and things you've noticed in your daily life.  

Think of anything, really. If it helps, my creative writing was about a girl who was born out of rape. Born into a family that never truly wanted her, that blames her for a sin that wasn't hers, yet is plastered on her skin. In this way it transgressed the ideal preconceived idea of what a family should provide. It always got top marks.  

stillthinkin

Write what you know, markers can tell when you bullshit about things that you have no idea about. The best stories come from something within your own life, experiences, stories or whatever. The simpler the better.  

Don't write something like a girl trying fit in with the "popular" group or immigrants fitting into a country. Think belonging = attachment to a thing or place as well as to people. E.g. you can talk about one's strong sense of belonging to a place (e.g. a garden, a room in the house...make it specific) and then kind of give some background on why this person is attached to this place (e.g. because they use to go there with their close friend/relative etc...)  

Remember: It doesn't need to be literal - it doesn't need to be like - "I moved to a new school - must find new friends". It could be like say asylum seekers - "I left my country, my friends, my home the relaxing and refreshing culture it gave me. My family and I were escaping one of the most unfortunately countries..."  

SpreadTheWord

A word of advice, considering it was on places this year, i would avoid doing one on places, because it is unlikely to come up again. But wow, your preparing creative writing now. I did mine 3 weeks before the exam.  

I would definitely say write about YOU and your own life - i'm sure your first excuse is nothing happens in your life, but think outside the box and you will come up with a good idea! I would say just lock yourself in a room, grab yourself a piece of paper and then start writing about anything even if you think the story won't go anywhere. Then come back the next day and read over the written piece of paper and this should trigger a story in your mind which you can work with. Remember I'd say most of the marks in your creative comes from unique and original ideas more than how literate you are. As a suggestion, try these ideas (again, this may be cliched but if you can give it a good twist it WILL work): -Migrating from another country --> belonging or not dis-belonging in the new country -A person getting fired from work -A person revisiting an old home Big DON'Ts: -Stay away from anything school related (i.e. schoolies, new student at school) -Violence, drugs, crime, sex etc. -Death (unless it is done in an appropriate manner) -Waking up from dreams -Fantasy, science fiction (don't think its worth the words to spend describing elaborate settings) And remember your creative writing only needs to be around 800-900 words which allows some time for adapting  

As i said above, no matter how 'boring' you think your life is, there is something there which people want to know and read about, try thinking outside the box - maybe a funny random cousin you have or some place which you visited when you were younger  

caralouise_x

Sammy2011 said: Think of anything, really. If it helps, my creative writing was about a girl who was born out of rape. Born into a family that never truly wanted her, that blames her for a sin that wasn't hers, yet is plastered on her skin. In this way it transgressed the ideal preconceived idea of what a family should provide. It always got top marks. Click to expand...

Rubric: People, places, groups, communities, larger world, belonging through time Hopefully this'll provide a scaffold at least before you worry about the nitty gritty bits  

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Home Numéros 59 1 - Tisser les liens : voyager, e... 36 Views of Moscow Mountain: Teac...

36 Views of Moscow Mountain: Teaching Travel Writing and Mindfulness in the Tradition of Hokusai and Thoreau

L'auteur américain Henry David Thoreau est un écrivain du voyage qui a rarement quitté sa ville natale de Concorde, Massachusetts, où il a vécu de 1817 à 1862. Son approche du "voyage" consiste à accorder une profonde attention à son environnement ordinaire et à voir le monde à partir de perspectives multiples, comme il l'explique avec subtilité dans Walden (1854). Inspiré par Thoreau et par la célèbre série de gravures du peintre d'estampes japonais Katsushika Hokusai, intitulée 36 vues du Mt. Fuji (1830-32), j'ai fait un cours sur "L'écriture thoreauvienne du voyage" à l'Université de l'Idaho, que j'appelle 36 vues des montagnes de Moscow: ou, Faire un grand voyage — l'esprit et le carnet ouvert — dans un petit lieu . Cet article explore la philosophie et les stratégies pédagogiques de ce cours, qui tente de partager avec les étudiants les vertus d'un regard neuf sur le monde, avec les yeux vraiment ouverts, avec le regard d'un voyageur, en "faisant un grand voyage" à Moscow, Idaho. Les étudiants affinent aussi leurs compétences d'écriture et apprennent les traditions littéraires et artistiques associées au voyage et au sens du lieu.

Index terms

Keywords: , designing a writing class to foster engagement.

1 The signs at the edge of town say, "Entering Moscow, Idaho. Population 25,060." This is a small hamlet in the midst of a sea of rolling hills, where farmers grow varieties of wheat, lentils, peas, and garbanzo beans, irrigated by natural rainfall. Although the town of Moscow has a somewhat cosmopolitan feel because of the presence of the University of Idaho (with its 13,000 students and a few thousand faculty and staff members), elegant restaurants, several bookstores and music stores, and a patchwork of artsy coffee shops on Main Street, the entire mini-metropolis has only about a dozen traffic lights and a single high school. As a professor of creative writing and the environmental humanities at the university, I have long been interested in finding ways to give special focuses to my writing and literature classes that will help my students think about the circumstances of their own lives and find not only academic meaning but personal significance in our subjects. I have recently taught graduate writing workshops on such themes as "The Body" and "Crisis," but when I was given the opportunity recently to teach an undergraduate writing class on Personal and Exploratory Writing, I decided to choose a focus that would bring me—and my students—back to one of the writers who has long been of central interest to me: Henry David Thoreau.

2 One of the courses I have routinely taught during the past six years is Environmental Writing, an undergraduate class that I offer as part of the university's Semester in the Wild Program, a unique undergraduate opportunity that sends a small group of students to study five courses (Ecology, Environmental History, Environmental Writing, Outdoor Leadership and Wilderness Survival, and Wilderness Management and Policy) at a remote research station located in the middle of the largest wilderness area (the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness) in the United States south of Alaska. In "Teaching with Wolves," a recent article about the Semester in the Wild Program, I explained that my goal in the Environmental Writing class is to help the students "synthesize their experience in the wilderness with the content of the various classes" and "to think ahead to their professional lives and their lives as engaged citizens, for which critical thinking and communication skills are so important" (325). A foundational text for the Environmental Writing class is a selection from Thoreau's personal journal, specifically the entries he made October 1-20, 1853, which I collected in the 1993 writing textbook Being in the World: An Environmental Reader for Writers . I ask the students in the Semester in the Wild Program to deeply immerse themselves in Thoreau's precise and colorful descriptions of the physical world that is immediately present to him and, in turn, to engage with their immediate encounters with the world in their wilderness location. Thoreau's entries read like this:

Oct. 4. The maples are reddening, and birches yellowing. The mouse-ear in the shade in the middle of the day, so hoary, looks as if the frost still lay on it. Well it wears the frost. Bumblebees are on the Aster undulates , and gnats are dancing in the air. Oct. 5. The howling of the wind about the house just before a storm to-night sounds extremely like a loon on the pond. How fit! Oct. 6 and 7. Windy. Elms bare. (372)

3 In thinking ahead to my class on Personal and Exploratory Writing, which would be offered on the main campus of the University of Idaho in the fall semester of 2018, I wanted to find a topic that would instill in my students the Thoreauvian spirit of visceral engagement with the world, engagement on the physical, emotional, and philosophical levels, while still allowing my students to remain in the city and live their regular lives as students. It occurred to me that part of what makes Thoreau's journal, which he maintained almost daily from 1837 (when he was twenty years old) to 1861 (just a year before his death), such a rich and elegant work is his sense of being a traveler, even when not traveling geographically.

Traveling a Good Deal in Moscow

I have traveled a good deal in Concord…. --Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854; 4)

4 For Thoreau, one did not need to travel a substantial physical distance in order to be a traveler, in order to bring a traveler's frame of mind to daily experience. His most famous book, Walden , is well known as an account of the author's ideas and daily experiments in simple living during the two years, two months, and two days (July 4, 1845, to September 6, 1847) he spent inhabiting a simple wooden house that he built on the shore of Walden Pond, a small lake to the west of Boston, Massachusetts. Walden Pond is not a remote location—it is not out in the wilderness. It is on the edge of a small village, much like Moscow, Idaho. The concept of "traveling a good deal in Concord" is a kind of philosophical and psychological riddle. What does it mean to travel extensively in such a small place? The answer to this question is meaningful not only to teachers hoping to design writing classes in the spirit of Thoreau but to all who are interested in travel as an experience and in the literary genre of travel writing.

5 Much of Walden is an exercise in deftly establishing a playful and intellectually challenging system of synonyms, an array of words—"economy," "deliberateness," "simplicity," "dawn," "awakening," "higher laws," etc.—that all add up to powerful probing of what it means to live a mindful and attentive life in the world. "Travel" serves as a key, if subtle, metaphor for the mindful life—it is a metaphor and also, in a sense, a clue: if we can achieve the traveler's perspective without going far afield, then we might accomplish a kind of enlightenment. Thoreau's interest in mindfulness becomes clear in chapter two of Walden , "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For," in which he writes, "Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?" The latter question implies the author's feeling that he is himself merely evolving as an awakened individual, not yet fully awake, or mindful, in his efforts to live "a poetic or divine life" (90). Thoreau proceeds to assert that "We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn…. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor" (90). Just what this endeavor might be is not immediately spelled out in the text, but the author does quickly point out the value of focusing on only a few activities or ideas at a time, so as not to let our lives be "frittered away by detail." He writes: "Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; … and keep your accounts on your thumb nail" (91). The strong emphasis in the crucial second chapter of Walden is on the importance of waking up and living deliberately through a conscious effort to engage in particular activities that support such awakening. It occurs to me that "travel," or simply making one's way through town with the mindset of a traveler, could be one of these activities.

6 It is in the final chapter of the book, titled "Conclusion," that Thoreau makes clear the relationship between travel and living an attentive life. He begins the chapter by cataloguing the various physical locales throughout North America or around the world to which one might travel—Canada, Ohio, Colorado, and even Tierra del Fuego. But Thoreau states: "Our voyaging is only great-circle sailing, and the doctors prescribe for diseases of the skin merely. One hastens to Southern Africa to chase the giraffe; but surely that is not the game he would be after." What comes next is brief quotation from the seventeenth-century English poet William Habbington (but presented anonymously in Thoreau's text), which might be one of the most significant passages in the entire book:

Direct your eye sight inward, and you'll find A thousand regions in your mind Yet undiscovered. Travel them, and be Expert in home-cosmography. (320)

7 This admonition to travel the mysterious territory of one's own mind and master the strange cosmos of the self is actually a challenge to the reader—and probably to the author himself—to focus on self-reflection and small-scale, local movement as if such activities were akin to exploration on a grand, planetary scale. What is really at issue here is not the physical distance of one's journey, but the mental flexibility of one's approach to the world, one's ability to look at the world with a fresh, estranged point of view. Soon after his discussion of the virtues of interior travel, Thoreau explains why he left his simple home at Walden Pond after a few years of experimental living there, writing, "It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves" (323). In other words, no matter what we're doing in life, we can fall into a "beaten track" if we're not careful, thus failing to stay "awake."

8 As I thought about my writing class at the University of Idaho, I wondered how I might design a series of readings and writing exercises for university students that would somehow emulate the Thoreauvian objective of achieving ultra-mindfulness in a local environment. One of the greatest challenges in designing such a class is the fact that it took Thoreau himself many years to develop an attentiveness to his environment and his own emotional rhythms and an efficiency of expression that would enable him to describe such travel-without-travel, and I would have only sixteen weeks to achieve this with my own students. The first task, I decided, was to invite my students into the essential philosophical stance of the class, and I did this by asking my students to read the opening chapter of Walden ("Economy") in which he talks about traveling "a good deal" in his small New England village as well as the second chapter and the conclusion, which reveal the author's enthusiasm (some might even say obsession ) for trying to achieve an awakened condition and which, in the end, suggest that waking up to the meaning of one's life in the world might be best accomplished by attempting the paradoxical feat of becoming "expert in home-cosmography." As I stated it among the objectives for my course titled 36 Views of Moscow Mountain: Or, Traveling a Good Deal—with Open Minds and Notebooks—in a Small Place , one of our goals together (along with practicing nonfiction writing skills and learning about the genre of travel writing) would be to "Cultivate a ‘Thoreauvian' way of appreciating the subtleties of the ordinary world."

Windy. Elms Bare.

9 For me, the elegance and heightened sensitivity of Thoreau's engagement with place is most movingly exemplified in his journal, especially in the 1850s after he's mastered the art of observation and nuanced, efficient description of specific natural phenomena and environmental conditions. His early entries in the journal are abstract mini-essays on such topics as truth, beauty, and "The Poet," but over time the journal notations become so immersed in the direct experience of the more-than-human world, in daily sensory experiences, that the pronoun "I" even drops out of many of these records. Lawrence Buell aptly describes this Thoreauvian mode of expression as "self-relinquishment" (156) in his 1995 book The Environmental Imagination , suggesting such writing "question[s] the authority of the superintending consciousness. As such, it opens up the prospect of a thoroughgoing perceptual breakthrough, suggesting the possibility of a more ecocentric state of being than most of us have dreamed of" (144-45). By the time Thoreau wrote "Windy. Elms bare" (372) as his single entry for October 6 and 7, 1853, he had entered what we might call an "ecocentric zone of consciousness" in his work, attaining the ability to channel his complex perceptions of season change (including meteorology and botany and even his own emotional state) into brief, evocative prose.

10 I certainly do not expect my students to be able to do such writing after only a brief introduction to the course and to Thoreau's own methods of journal writing, but after laying the foundation of the Thoreauvian philosophy of nearby travel and explaining to my students what I call the "building blocks of the personal essay" (description, narration, and exposition), I ask them to engage in a preliminary journal-writing exercise that involves preparing five journal entries, each "a paragraph or two in length," that offer detailed physical descriptions of ordinary phenomena from their lives (plants, birds, buildings, street signs, people, food, etc.), emphasizing shape, color, movement or change, shadow, and sometimes sound, smell, taste, and/or touch. The goal of the journal entries, I tell the students, is to begin to get them thinking about close observation, vivid descriptive language, and the potential to give their later essays in the class an effective texture by balancing more abstract information and ideas with evocative descriptive passages and storytelling.

11 I am currently teaching this class, and I am writing this article in early September, as we are entering the fourth week of the semester. The students have just completed the journal-writing exercise and are now preparing to write the first of five brief essays on different aspects of Moscow that will eventually be braided together, as discrete sections of the longer piece, into a full-scale literary essay about Moscow, Idaho, from the perspective of a traveler. For the journal exercise, my students wrote some rather remarkable descriptive statements, which I think bodes well for their upcoming work. One student, Elizabeth Isakson, wrote stunning journal descriptions of a cup of coffee, her own feet, a lemon, a basil leaf, and a patch of grass. For instance, she wrote:

Steaming hot liquid poured into a mug. No cream, just black. Yet it appears the same brown as excretion. The texture tells another story with meniscus that fades from clear to gold and again brown. The smell is intoxicating for those who are addicted. Sweetness fills the nostrils; bitterness rushes over the tongue. The contrast somehow complements itself. Earthy undertones flower up, yet this beverage is much more satisfying than dirt. When the mug runs dry, specks of dark grounds remain swimming in the sunken meniscus. Steam no longer rises because energy has found a new home.

12 For the grassy lawn, she wrote:

Calico with shades of green, the grass is yellowing. Once vibrant, it's now speckled with straw. Sticking out are tall, seeding dandelions. Still some dips in the ground have maintained thick, soft patches of green. The light dances along falling down from the trees above, creating a stained-glass appearance made from various green shades. The individual blades are stiff enough to stand erect, but they will yield to even slight forces of wind or pressure. Made from several long strands seemingly fused together, some blades fray at the end, appearing brittle. But they do not simply break off; they hold fast to the blade to which they belong.

13 The point of this journal writing is for the students to look closely enough at ordinary reality to feel estranged from it, as if they have never before encountered (or attempted to describe) a cup of coffee or a field of grass—or a lemon or a basil leaf or their own body. Thus, the Thoreauvian objective of practicing home-cosmography begins to take shape. The familiar becomes exotic, note-worthy, and strangely beautiful, just as it often does for the geographical travel writer, whose adventures occur far away from where she or he normally lives. Travel, in a sense, is an antidote to complacency, to over-familiarity. But the premise of my class in Thoreauvian travel writing is that a slight shift of perspective can overcome the complacency we might naturally feel in our home surroundings. To accomplish this we need a certain degree of disorientation. This is the next challenge for our class.

The Blessing of Being Lost

14 Most of us take great pains to "get oriented" and "know where we're going," whether this is while running our daily errands or when thinking about the essential trajectories of our lives. We're often instructed by anxious parents to develop a sense of purpose and a sense of direction, if only for the sake of basic safety. But the traveler operates according to a somewhat different set of priorities, perhaps, elevating adventure and insight above basic comfort and security, at least to some degree. This certainly seems to be the case for the Thoreauvian traveler, or for Thoreau himself. In Walden , he writes:

…not until we are completely lost, or turned round,--for a man needs only be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost,--do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of Nature. Every man has to learn the points of compass again as often as he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction. Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations. (171)

15 I could explicate this passage at length, but that's not really my purpose here. I read this as a celebration of salutary disorientation, of the potential to be lost in such a way as to deepen one's ability to pay attention to oneself and one's surroundings, natural and otherwise. If travel is to a great degree an experience uniquely capable of triggering attentiveness to our own physical and psychological condition, to other cultures and the minds and needs of other people, and to a million small details of our environment that we might take for granted at home but that accrue special significance when we're away, I would argue that much of this attentiveness is owed to the sense of being lost, even the fear of being lost, that often happens when we leave our normal habitat.

16 So in my class I try to help my students "get lost" in a positive way. Here in Moscow, the major local landmark is a place called Moscow Mountain, a forested ridge of land just north of town, running approximately twenty kilometers to the east of the city. Moscow "Mountain" does not really have a single, distinctive peak like a typical mountain—it is, as I say, more of a ridge than a pinnacle. When I began contemplating this class on Thoreauvian travel writing, the central concepts I had in mind were Thoreau's notion of traveling a good deal in Concord and also the idea of looking at a specific place from many different angles. The latter idea is not only Thoreauvian, but perhaps well captured in the eighteen-century Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai's series of woodblock prints known as 36 Views of Mt. Fuji , which offers an array of different angles on the mountain itself and on other landscape features (lakes, the sea, forests, clouds, trees, wind) and human behavior which is represented in many of the prints, often with Mt. Fuji in the distant background or off to the side. In fact, I imagine Hokusai's approach to representing Mt. Fuji as so important to the concept of this travel writing class that I call the class "36 Views of Moscow Mountain," symbolizing the multiple approaches I'll be asking my students to take in contemplating and describing not only Moscow Mountain itself, but the culture and landscape and the essential experience of Moscow the town. The idea of using Hokusai's series of prints as a focal point of this class came to me, in part, from reading American studies scholar Cathy Davidson's 36 Views of Mount Fuji: On Finding Myself in Japan , a memoir that offers sixteen short essays about different facets of her life as a visiting professor in that island nation.

17 The first of five brief essays my students will prepare for the class is what I'm calling a "Moscow Mountain descriptive essay," building upon the small descriptive journal entries they've written recently. In this case, though, I am asking the students to describe the shapes and colors of the Moscow Mountain ridge, while also telling a brief story or two about their observations of the mountain, either by visiting the mountain itself to take a walk or a bike ride or by explaining how they glimpse portions of the darkly forested ridge in the distance while walking around the University of Idaho campus or doing things in town. In preparation for the Moscow Mountain essays, we read several essays or book chapters that emphasize "organizing principles" in writing, often the use of particular landscape features, such as trees or mountains, as a literary focal point. For instance, in David Gessner's "Soaring with Castro," from his 2007 book Soaring with Fidel: An Osprey Odyssey from Cape Cod to Cuba and Beyond , he not only refers to La Gran Piedra (a small mountain in southeastern Cuba) as a narrative focal point, but to the osprey, or fish eagle, itself and its migratory journey as an organizing principle for his literary project (203). Likewise, in his essay "I Climb a Tree and Become Dissatisfied with My Lot," Chicago author Leonard Dubkin writes about his decision, as a newly fired journalist, to climb up a tree in Chicago's Lincoln Park to observe and listen to the birds that gather in the green branches in the evening, despite the fact that most adults would consider this a strange and inappropriate activity. We also looked at several of Hokusai's woodblock prints and analyzed these together in class, trying to determine how the mountain served as an organizing principle for each print or whether there were other key features of the prints—clouds, ocean waves, hats and pieces of paper floating in the wind, humans bent over in labor—that dominate the images, with Fuji looking on in the distance.

18 I asked my students to think of Hokusai's representations of Mt. Fuji as aesthetic models, or metaphors, for what they might try to do in their brief (2-3 pages) literary essays about Moscow Mountain. What I soon discovered was that many of my students, even students who have spent their entire lives in Moscow, either were not aware of Moscow Mountain at all or had never actually set foot on the mountain. So we spent half an hour during one class session, walking to a vantage point on the university campus, where I could point out where the mountain is and we could discuss how one might begin to write about such a landscape feature in a literary essay. Although I had thought of the essay describing the mountain as a way of encouraging the students to think about a familiar landscape as an orienting device, I quickly learned that this will be a rather challenging exercise for many of the students, as it will force them to think about an object or a place that is easily visible during their ordinary lives, but that they typically ignore. Paying attention to the mountain, the ridge, will compel them to reorient themselves in this city and think about a background landscape feature that they've been taking for granted until now. I think of this as an act of disorientation or being lost—a process of rethinking their own presence in this town that has a nearby mountain that most of them seldom think about. I believe Thoreau would consider this a good, healthy experience, a way of being present anew in a familiar place.

36 Views—Or, When You Invert Your Head

19 Another key aspect of Hokusai's visual project and Thoreau's literary project is the idea of changing perspective. One can view Mt. Fuji from 36 different points of views, or from thousands of different perspectives, and it is never quite the same place—every perspective is original, fresh, mind-expanding. The impulse to shift perspective in pursuit of mindfulness is also ever-present in Thoreau's work, particularly in his personal journal and in Walden . This idea is particularly evident, to me, in the chapter of Walden titled "The Ponds," where he writes:

Standing on the smooth sandy beach at the east end of the pond, in a calm September afternoon, when a slight haze makes the opposite shore line indistinct, I have seen whence came the expression, "the glassy surface of a lake." When you invert your head, it looks like a thread of finest gossamer stretched across the valley, and gleaming against the distinct pine woods, separating one stratum of the atmosphere from another. (186)

20 Elsewhere in the chapter, Thoreau describes the view of the pond from the top of nearby hills and the shapes and colors of pebbles in the water when viewed from close up. He chances physical perspective again and again throughout the chapter, but it is in the act of looking upside down, actually suggesting that one might invert one's head, that he most vividly conveys the idea of looking at the world in different ways in order to be lost and awakened, just as the traveler to a distant land might feel lost and invigorated by such exposure to an unknown place.

21 After asking students to write their first essay about Moscow Mountain, I give them four additional short essays to write, each two to four pages long. We read short examples of place-based essays, some of them explicitly related to travel, and then the students work on their own essays on similar topics. The second short essay is about food—I call this the "Moscow Meal" essay. We read the final chapter of Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma (2006), "The Perfect Meal," and Anthony Bourdain's chapter "Where Cooks Come From" in the book A Cook's Tour (2001) are two of the works we study in preparation for the food essay. The three remaining short essays including a "Moscow People" essay (exploring local characters are important facets of the place), a more philosophical essay about "the concept of Moscow," and a final "Moscow Encounter" essay that tells the story of a dramatic moment of interaction with a person, an animal, a memorable thing to eat or drink, a sunset, or something else. Along the way, we read the work of Wendell Berry, Joan Didion, Barbara Kingsolver, Kim Stafford, Paul Theroux, and other authors. Before each small essay is due, we spend a class session holding small-group workshops, allowing the students to discuss their essays-in-progress with each other and share portions of their manuscripts. The idea is that they will learn about writing even by talking with each other about their essays. In addition to writing about Moscow from various angles, they will learn about additional points of view by considering the angles of insight developed by their fellow students. All of this is the writerly equivalent of "inverting [their] heads."

Beneath the Smooth Skin of Place

22 Aside from Thoreau's writing and Hokusai's images, perhaps the most important writer to provide inspiration for this class is Indiana-based essayist Scott Russell Sanders. Shortly after introducing the students to Thoreau's key ideas in Walden and to the richness of his descriptive writing in the journal, I ask them to read his essay "Buckeye," which first appeared in Sanders's Writing from the Center (1995). "Buckeye" demonstrates the elegant braiding together of descriptive, narrative, and expository/reflective prose, and it also offers a strong argument about the importance of creating literature and art about place—what he refers to as "shared lore" (5)—as a way of articulating the meaning of a place and potentially saving places that would otherwise be exploited for resources, flooded behind dams, or otherwise neglected or damaged. The essay uses many of the essential literary devices, ranging from dialogue to narrative scenes, that I hope my students will practice in their own essays, while also offering a vivid argument in support of the kind of place-based writing the students are working on.

23 Another vital aspect of our work together in this class is the effort to capture the wonderful idiosyncrasies of this place, akin to the idiosyncrasies of any place that we examine closely enough to reveal its unique personality. Sanders's essay "Beneath the Smooth Skin of America," which we study together in Week 9 of the course, addresses this topic poignantly. The author challenges readers to learn the "durable realities" of the places where they live, the details of "watershed, biome, habitat, food-chain, climate, topography, ecosystem and the areas defined by these natural features they call bioregions" (17). "The earth," he writes, "needs fewer tourists and more inhabitants" (16). By Week 9 of the semester, the students have written about Moscow Mountain, about local food, and about local characters, and they are ready at this point to reflect on some of the more philosophical dimensions of living in a small academic village surrounded by farmland and beyond that surrounded by the Cascade mountain range to the West and the Rockies to the East. "We need a richer vocabulary of place" (18), urges Sanders. By this point in the semester, by reading various examples of place-based writing and by practicing their own powers of observation and expression, my students will, I hope, have developed a somewhat richer vocabulary to describe their own experiences in this specific place, a place they've been trying to explore with "open minds and notebooks." Sanders argues that

if we pay attention, we begin to notice patterns in the local landscape. Perceiving those patterns, acquiring names and theories and stories for them, we cease to be tourists and become inhabitants. The bioregional consciousness I am talking about means bearing your place in mind, keeping track of its condition and needs, committing yourself to its care. (18)

24 Many of my students will spend only four or five years in Moscow, long enough to earn a degree before moving back to their hometowns or journeying out into the world in pursuit of jobs or further education. Moscow will be a waystation for some of these student writers, not a permanent home. Yet I am hoping that this semester-long experiment in Thoreauvian attentiveness and place-based writing will infect these young people with both the bioregional consciousness Sanders describes and a broader fascination with place, including the cultural (yes, the human ) dimensions of this and any other place. I feel such a mindfulness will enrich the lives of my students, whether they remain here or move to any other location on the planet or many such locations in succession.

25 Toward the end of "Beneath the Smooth Skin of America," Sanders tells the story of encountering a father with two young daughters near a city park in Bloomington, Indiana, where he lives. Sanders is "grazing" on wild mulberries from a neighborhood tree, and the girls are keen to join him in savoring the local fruit. But their father pulls them away, stating, "Thank you very much, but we never eat anything that grows wild. Never ever." To this Sanders responds: "If you hold by that rule, you will not get sick from eating poison berries, but neither will you be nourished from eating sweet ones. Why not learn to distinguish one from the other? Why feed belly and mind only from packages?" (19-20). By looking at Moscow Mountain—and at Moscow, Idaho, more broadly—from numerous points of view, my students, I hope, will nourish their own bellies and minds with the wild fruit and ideas of this place. I say this while chewing a tart, juicy, and, yes, slightly sweet plum that I pulled from a feral tree in my own Moscow neighborhood yesterday, an emblem of engagement, of being here.

Bibliography

BUELL, Lawrence, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture , Harvard University Press, 1995.

DAVIDSON, Cathy, 36 Views of Mount Fuji: On Finding Myself in Japan , Duke University Press, 2006.

DUBKIN, Leonard, "I Climb a Tree and Become Dissatisfied with My Lot." Enchanted Streets: The Unlikely Adventures of an Urban Nature Lover , Little, Brown and Company, 1947, 34-42.

GESSNER, David, Soaring with Fidel: An Osprey Odyssey from Cape Cod to Cuba and Beyond , Beacon, 2007.

ISAKSON, Elizabeth, "Journals." Assignment for 36 Views of Moscow Mountain (English 208), University of Idaho, Fall 2018.

SANDERS, Scott Russell, "Buckeye" and "Beneath the Smooth Skin of America." Writing from the Center , Indiana University Press, 1995, pp. 1-8, 9-21.

SLOVIC, Scott, "Teaching with Wolves", Western American Literature 52.3 (Fall 2017): 323-31.

THOREAU, Henry David, "October 1-20, 1853", Being in the World: An Environmental Reader for Writers , edited by Scott H. Slovic and Terrell F. Dixon, Macmillan, 1993, 371-75.

THOREAU, Henry David, Walden . 1854. Princeton University Press, 1971.

Bibliographical reference

Scott Slovic , “ 36 Views of Moscow Mountain: Teaching Travel Writing and Mindfulness in the Tradition of Hokusai and Thoreau ” ,  Caliban , 59 | 2018, 41-54.

Electronic reference

Scott Slovic , “ 36 Views of Moscow Mountain: Teaching Travel Writing and Mindfulness in the Tradition of Hokusai and Thoreau ” ,  Caliban [Online], 59 | 2018, Online since 01 June 2018 , connection on 23 April 2024 . URL : http://journals.openedition.org/caliban/3688; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/caliban.3688

About the author

Scott slovic.

University of Idaho Scott Slovic is University Distinguished Professor of Environmental Humanities at the University of Idaho, USA. The author and editor of many books and articles, he edited the journal ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment from 1995 to 2020. His latest coedited book is The Routledge Handbook of Ecocriticism and Environmental Communication  (2019).

By this author

• Introduction (version en français) [Full text] Introduction [Full text | translation | en] Published in Caliban , 64 | 2020
• To Collapse or Not to Collapse? A Joint Interview [Full text] Published in Caliban , 63 | 2020
• Furrowed Brows, Questioning Earth: Minding the Loess Soil of the Palouse [Full text] Published in Caliban , 61 | 2019
• Foreword: Thinking of “Earth Island” on Earth Day 2016 [Full text] Published in Caliban , 55 | 2016

The text only may be used under licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 . All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.

Full text issues

• 67-68 | 2022 Religious Dispute and Toleration in Early Modern Literature and History
• 65-66 | 2021 Peterloo 1819 and After: Perspectives from Britain and Beyond
• 64 | 2020 Animal Love. Considering Animal Attachments in Anglophone Literature and Culture
• 63 | 2020 Dynamics of Collapse in Fantasy, the Fantastic and SF
• 62 | 2019 Female Suffrage in British Art, Literature and History
• 61 | 2019 Land’s Furrows and Sorrows in Anglophone Countries
• 60 | 2018 The Life of Forgetting in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century British Literature
• 59 | 2018 Anglophone Travel and Exploration Writing: Meetings Between the Human and Nonhuman
• 58 | 2017 The Mediterranean and its Hinterlands
• 57 | 2017 The Animal Question in Alice Munro's Stories
• 56 | 2016 Disappearances - American literature and arts
• 55 | 2016 Sharing the Planet
• 54 | 2015 Forms of Diplomacy (16 th -21 st century)
• 53 | 2015 Representing World War One: Art’s Response to War
• 52 | 2014 Caliban and his transmutations

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