As one of over seven billion humans on the earth, it terrifies me that many of those people are better writers than I am. I do not think of myself as a good writer, not even a decent one. This course scares me in the way that I will have to share my writing with a wider range of people than just a teacher. I understand that this class will challenge me with the readings I will encounter, and the writing that will take me out of my comfort zone. I believe, however, that it will do nothing but help me improve. I do hope that the way I will earn a good grade will not be a comparison of my writing to the writing level of my peers (being that some will be far more advanced than me) but how much work and effort I put into my assignments. I do not have much experience with any of the topics this class focuses on, so I am excited but hesitant to delve into all of the things I will learn and experience throughout this course. I hope the places I am able to write about are places the resonate to me. For example, somewhere I have traveled, or my favorite sunny spot near my house. At the end of this class the one thing I hope I have gotten out of it is to find my own personal voice in my writing, and to be more confident in what I can possibly do by the end of it.
Author: lizwhittles14
Read These!
1) The Art of Travel– Alain De Botton. This reading gives you a very good example of someone practiced in the art of writing about place. The author gives strong pictures of where he has traveled, and creates vast and detailed pictures in the readers mind, transporting them to the location he is speaking of. For example, “In Barbados, on the eastern shore, I look out across a dark violet sea that stretched unhindered to the coasts of Africa”
http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-Travel-Alain-Botton/dp/0375725342
2) White Swans and Photographic Seeing- Harlman from No Caption Needed. This is an interesting read about the power of photography and “images.” Referring to a picture of a swan flying against a black background he states, “The image doesn’t exist until the camera clicks. The image above is a near-perfect demonstration of that distinction. There never was a swan suspended against a black background; those effects were created by the camera.” He introduces an interest view on the act of photography, and a writer to wants to incorporate photos into their work may find it intriguing.
http://www.nocaptionneeded.com/2014/10/white-swans-photographic-seeing/
3) Imagining the World Now and Then –Lucaites from No Caption Needed. This read will be helpful for the writer who incorporates history of a location in their writing. It describes the then and now of a French beach: now being covered in tourists. “Seventy years ago this past week it was known as Juno Beach, one of the primary landing zones in the D-Day invasion.”
http://www.nocaptionneeded.com/2014/06/imaging-world-now/
4) Where Do Sentences Come From?- Verlyn Klinkenborg. For someone who wants to delve deeper into the meaning of sentences, structure, and putting thought’s into writing, this is the article for you. Klinkenborg explains “…try turning a thought into a sentence. This is harder than it seems because first you have to find a thought. They may seem scarce because nothing in your education has suggested that your thoughts are worth paying attention to.” He introduces some very interesting and new outlooks which can give you perspective on writing sentences.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/13/where-do-sentences-come-from/?smid=fb-share&_r=2
5) Notes From the Eastern Edge of Time- Maya Khosia. These dairy like non-fiction entries are extremely intriguing and dense. Khosia introduces as many pictures are she can into the paragraphs. Someone who formats in diary entries may find her structure and organization helpful. “Mass hatching has begun. Where a few hatchlings surrounded our boat last evening, there are hundreds today. The river mouth is full of little heads popping up for air. It is more and more evident that most are swimming east, heading for the mainland banks instead of out to sea.” One who enjoys story telling would also like this.
6) Where I’m From- George Ella. Poets, come one come all. Ella does a fantastic job of jam packing details into this short poem. Her structure is very specific.
“Under my bed was a dress box
spilling old pictures,
a sift of lost faces
to drift beneath my dreams.
I am from those moments–
snapped before I budded —
leaf-fall from the family tree. ”
http://www.georgeellalyon.com/where.html
7) 7 Cultural Concepts We Don’t Have in the U.S.- no author specified. This piece is one for the readers interested in other cultures. It is a quick cultural lesson on words that we do not have in the English language. “Wabi-sabi is the Japanese idea of embracing the imperfect, of celebrating the worn, the cracked, the patinaed, both as a decorative concept and a spiritual one — it’s an acceptance of the toll that life takes on us all.” It is fun to hear words from different languages explain a feeling you have had but cannot put a name to.
http://www.mnn.com/lifestyle/arts-culture/blogs/7-cultural-concepts-we-dont-have-in-the-us
The Tree House
Orange Country, California is an alien. It is unfamiliar territory and different to anything I’ve known, and even as I come to know it, I push it away. It is busy, hot, and barren of any real nature. My residence in Orange County is temporary, but until the time comes to move back to where I belong, I accept it as the makeshift home it will be for the next three years.
My real home is the smell of pine needles on the ground of the redwood forest. It is the shade from the ancient Redwood trees, allowing only specs of light to reach me. It is the squirrels and woodpeckers just feet away from me, as my house has been elevated forty feet up, to the level of the giant tree branches that are many wild animals homes. My home is healthy, happy, accepting, natural, nurturing Northern California, and it’s been hard to let go of that.
The last eight months I’ve been away at college, I have noticed some very interesting and humbling aspects about my life: 1. I have an extremely beautiful home to come back to when I want. 2. I am so very lucky my parents have the means to fly me home whenever I am feeling particularly homesick. 3. Many people around me do not have the same happy place I do in their homes. And, 4. I miss it very, very much when I am away.
Longview Ave
I am from sunlight, peaking through tall trees
I am from pine needles coating the ground
I am from Comforts Cafe
with crab cakes in hand and a workout behind me
I am from Stinson Beach
In an old house on the sand
where we had to evacuate a flood once
I am from 2222 Broadway street
but most importantly
I am from Longview Avenue
just beyond the United Market
up the hill
just past the 1999 neon orange Mustang
just inside the baby blue house
with a tree where a swing used to hang
where I became who I was
Lessons, Places and a Clever Teacher
I revisited the dorm pool, which I did my close observation project on. I could report no exact change besides the weather. The shadows were gone on this particular day because the sun was covered in a thick gray layer of fog and clouds. The pool was more empty. I cannot say the same about myself though. I have come to understand many things about myself in the last two semesters of college, and I will hold them with me for the duration of my time at Chapman. I am not empty like the dorm pool has come to be, but full of knowledge and experiences. It is interesting to be a freshman in college because you find yourself doing so many stupid things that you know you will laugh at in a few years. I will think of how lost I was as a freshman and I can see it now, not even finished with freshman year. I have learned a lot about my academic self, and social self, and those lessons have already begun to shape me as a grownup and academic.
As a writer, I still struggle to loosen up. I know how to create formal sentences, but to let myself loosen up and write in a more laid back way has been hard. I have never been so descriptive in my life about a palm tree, and the writing I’ve done in this class has helped me in other classes, as well. For example, writing an art history paper has become miles easier, as I am able to put my descriptive images in my head, into words on a paper
My theory about writing about place, however, is unchanged from my past writing. I still believe to be a writer about place one needs to be able to paint the picture in the readers mind. Without that, there is no place, and all that’s left is endless sentences and words. Writing about place forces you to observe, and inspect the little things. I encourage my readers to train themselves to make it muscle memory to observe. To make it subconscious, but forever clicking in their mind. Mike Rollin or Writersblock.loft.org writes in his article “Eyes Open, Ears Up-Writing about Place,”Every act of writing on place is a crossing of paths. An opportunity to reconsider the things of our world in a new encounter.” His comment resonates with me because many of the locations I write about are places from my every day life here at school or at home. But I have forced myself to see it in a different light to enable myself to delve deeper into it as a location and writing piece.
That being said, I have become much more in tune with what “place” means to me. It is not a pretty look out spot, but the feeling that spot gives me. A place is not significant to me unless I feel something there. A place is not significant to me unless I can feel at peace there. Writing about my go to places has made me feel somewhat at peace as well. But it has also made me feel nostalgic and homesick for the one place that gives me every kind of happiness and peacefulness a person could obtain: my home. That is why I found it hard to begin assignments, and push away my homesick thoughts to focus on a place down here in Southern California that could give me a glimpse of the same feeling. All in all though, the class pushed me to move past that, and also move past my insecurities as a writer.
One thing that I think could be changed is the “word count” aspect of the assignments. I found myself using quantity over quality in some assignments, because I had written everything I had to say in 300 words, when the assignment called for 600. I believe without any word count at all students would turn in five sentence assignments that did not better them as a writer at all, so the word count is necessary. But sometimes I found two pages for a blog-post to be too long. I droned on making up sentences that didn’t necessarily need to be there to fill in space. But with that, I was forced to really explore my mind as to what more I could scrunch out of the place or thing I was writing about, so maybe that is my teachers overall diabolical plan, and for that, I applaud her.
Travel With Me and Never Come Back
My word is livelust. This is a branch off of an actual word “wanderlust” which is defined as: a strong desire to travel. I love traveling, and I definitely have a very strong feeling of wanderlust, but what overrides that is my desire to live somewhere that I’ve traveled. I want to move across the world to an unfamiliar place where I don’t know the language and have to adapt to the strange and/or different culture. This desire grew as I began to travel to Europe with my family starting summer of sophomore year of high school. I felt this intense urge to stay forever in the ancient streets of Paris and London where I traveled, and going back home seemed almost painful. It was only inflamed more after my month long Europe trip with my best friends last summer, as I actually could have shed a tear leaving our apartment in Barcelona the morning it was time to hop on a plane back to our families.
I know others out there feel the same about this topic as I do. There is a reason people pick of their safe and settled home in the states, and do something crazy like move to Peru. It is almost like an itching for something different and exciting, and something that moving domestically really doesn’t fulfill. I searched the Internet in hopes to find someone that shared the same outlook as me, but since there is no actual word for the way I feel, you could imagine it was very difficult.
I did, however, come across an article on a website called Minimalstudent.com, entitled, “5 lessons learned from a year living in a foreign country.” Although the article as a whole was not very relatable to my circumstance, lesson number four definitely struck home. The author Jessica explained lesson number four as “You won’t get a good view just looking through the keyhole.” That hit home for me because it puts in one sentence, how I feel every time I go on vacation to a foreign country. Jessica writes, “…only doing it for a short while doesn’t mean you know what it’s like. You can’t just blitz through 5 countries in 10 days and expect to have gotten to know the people and culture.” I could not agree more with what she writes. As I trudge around London for six day, I cant help but have in the back of my mind the thought that all I am seeing is what the tour guide wants me to. I loved seeing Big Ben, and going on the London Eye (photo below), but what I really want is to truly understand what its like to live in London. Not visit. Live.
My livelust is intensely internally rock solid inside of my mind.
“The Wanderlust has got me… by the belly-aching fire” -Robert W. Service
London Eye
Big Ben
Varsailles
Those Palms Got Me Feeling Some Type of Way
The Palm Trees creak as they sway back and forth.
The grass slowly turns a light brown as the Southern California sun becomes hot at noon.
The plastic beach chairs squeak under student’s bodies.
The pool water spreads out onto the hot cement as students splash in the shallow end up the pool.
An ant colony follows in a line in an effort to find shade under the lounge chairs.
The clanking of construction on a Chapman building near by stabs into the quietness.
I flip over onto my stomach as my light blue eyes start to water from the sun.
My book, “The Night Circus”, transports me into another world, as my eyes dart from word to word not able to read fast enough for my intrigue.
Friends greet each other in passing, outside the fence of the pool, as they travel from class to dorm and vice versa.
As the sun goes away, students gather around the fire pit, engaging in song and marshmallow roasting.
Dodge student’s direct actors, as they create a pool scene for their upcoming film project.
Students retire to the shade of the Palm Trees and grass as the sun becomes unbearable.
Girls share tanning oil between friends, hoping it will give them that extra tan.
Birds fly above, heading to the coast to find food.
Boys balance on tight ropes, tied to palm trees, as people walk in awe.
The Power of the Mind: Creating a Picture
The power a writer has over its reader is a very interesting power to have. A writer has the power to make the reader picture absolutely anything they wish, whether it be bad, good, sad, scary, comical etc. True, anybody can describe something in a way that will paint a picture in someone’s mind, but it is the truly gifted writers that are able to incorporate that elementary, however, important aspect of “show, not tell”. In Harlmans “White Swans and Photographic Seeing” the author states, “There once was a bird passing over a canal, and there is the Swan, a Bird, token of Nature, passing through Life, again and again and again.” In that one sentence, I see the literal bird in my head passing over a canal, which is the author telling me what to see, but as I keep reading, I see a more symbolic passing of time and age, which is the author showing. My perception of what that looks like may be different than someone elses, but regardless, it is the same idea and topic we are both picturing in our heads.
I do not believe there are necessarily “responsibilities” that come with a writer’s power; however, he or she should have the ability to be clear and concise, as to not confuse the reader. It is very hard to be interested in piece of writing that is either too confusing to understand, or too dry to be interesting enough to suck the reader in. It is the happy medium between making it complicated and sophisticated writing, but also straight-forward and concise that makes a writer talented and a piece of writing worth reading.
In my writing, I aspire to create colorful and detailed pictures in my reader’s heads. For example, in my Close Observation Project, I wrote, “The year is 1915, exactly 100 years ago, and students of the first high school in Orange are walking to class. A mixture of nerves and excitement fill their stomach, as they stroll, bike, and run down the street to school.” In these two sentences, I have attempted to create a typical “before school” scene that one would see if he or she parked outside of a real school at around 8:00 am. In my head, the younger students, perhaps being the more eager of the bunch, are the ones running down the street excited to start their day. The older students, however, perhaps a little less excited to start school, will stroll down the sidewalk, not as interested in getting to school right away. Although that is only one persons interpretation of this very typical scene, it enables each reader to have guidance in what they are supposed to be seeing, while also letting the reader use his or her own imagination to create their own scene.
In my free time, one of my favorite things to do is read. Sometimes it is a new novel, and sometimes it’s an old one, but regardless, getting lost in the descriptions of scene after scene sucks me in more than television or movies could ever. I feel as if I am almost experiencing it personally when I read, because I get so very caught up in my head. But that’s just it. Its in my head not in front of me on a screen. What I see when reading a book is different than what another see’s because it is different in our heads, but it is the freedom to picture it just as you want that makes it special to me. I cherish the times I can get lost in a book, and I hope with my writing to do the same for my readers.
San Francisco to Orange County: My Changed Perspective
Orange County has transformed in my mind from a very media influenced impression, to an opinion of my own which I have been able to shape from my new experiences living here. Television shows like “Laguna Beach,” portraying blonde, tanned, and wealthy teenagers living their “difficult” high school lives led me to believe that that was how all of Orange County was. Not until I transferred my life from San Francisco to Chapman University, did I understand the parts of Orange County that were not portrayed on the MTV shows that I watched weekly. What one does not see, are the extremely vast number of ethnicities that fill the streets of Orange, Santa Ana, and all the towns that make up Orange County. The different ethnicities I see on a daily basis I picture as musical notes: one not the same as the next and each one containing its own unique sound. Coming from a large San Franciscan pool of ethnic diversity, that was a very refreshing discovery.
Although I know Orange County will never surpass San Francisco in my ranking of favorite places, sitting there on the warm sand of Huntington Beach, or laying by the Chapman Pool under palm trees, makes it a place I can cherish and enjoy. Orange County is full of hidden gems: peaceful places that one can find with a little exploring. I’ve been able to stand on large rocks on a deserted beach at two am with nothing to do but breathe in the sea air, listen to the wind whistle and watch waves slap against the shore. Or stand on the roof of an empty Chapman Parking lot, my best friend by my side, listening to the Disney Land fireworks explode in the dark of the sky in a symphony of bangs and clashes. Stars momentarily disappear as the colorful fire takes their place. I am endlessly thankful for these moments because every one sinks me deeper into the community of Orange County by enabling me to feel passionate about experiences and locations outside of my hometown bubble.
As an outsider looking in to this Orange County community, I see a place that children can grow up in and hold close to their heart, just as I can with where I grew up. I drive past a neatly kept and newly remodeled private school with children pouring out the doors in plaid and monochrome uniforms. It instantly reminds me of myself. I think back to the times I wore a uniform just like that: it was a time where pain was a stubbed toe and knees bruised from playing. It reminds me of my happiest time. The familiarity of this unfamiliar private school down the street from Chapman helps me to identify with the area I will be spending the next four years. The understanding that I can find similarities between my life here at Chapman and my former life in San Francisco, keeps me grounded in this foreign atmosphere.
Artist Statement: As a writer, I love creating colorful and enriching pictures in humans heads. My experiences and memories have always been something I have wanted to share with others, however, I don’t contain the necessary skills to create those memories tangibly in a medium like drawing or painting. Writing them out gives me a release that enables me to share whats in my head with others, and I am thankful for that.
Escape: an OC in Unison Project
As I lay in the eighty plus degree weather at the Chapman University dorm pool, it’s not just the sun that I soak up. The smell of cut and browning grass, sunscreen and tanning oils wafts by my nose. I take slow, steady breaths in and out, clearing my head of all stress; something I haven’t been able to do in what seems like months. In the distance, the smell of The Caf food creeps its way over to the pool in the wind, reaching my nose, and making me hungry. The gentle breeze blows my hair in different directions, but too relaxed to care, I let it. The coolness of the wind gives my skin some relief from the burning sun in the noon heat. As it beats down on my tanned skin, I squint my eyes to avoid the brightness. Shielding my face by my favorite book, The Night Circus, I lay in uninterrupted peace for hours, soaking up the ambiance of my peaceful escape. The only thing to hear is the sway of the Queen Palm Trees in the wind, and people’s feet pitter-pattering on the cement, followed by cannon-ball like splashes, one after another. I look out into the parking lot adjacent with the pool and watch students briskly walk to class, with backpacks full of books. I am thankful I’m done with classes for the day. I see a chipper Chapman student leading a mixture of parent’s, high school students and younger siblings on a tour of the dorms. I smile to myself as girls crane their neck to see through the bars of the pool gate in awe, trying to grasp that this is a school, and not a vacation spot. Little do they know, however, that these grounds have been connected to a school for generations of eager students.
The year is 1915, exactly 100 years ago, and students of the first high school in Orange are walking to class. A mixture of nerves and excitement fill their stomach, as they stroll, bike, and run down the street to school. A century later, students run to school on the same sidewalk to Orange High School, just down the street from the first High School created in Orange. As I sit on a lounge chair by the pool in 2015, I look out past the gate to see Orange High students race out the doors of their school and disperse every which way. I hear the yells of students from 1915 and 2015 mesh together. Times have changed since those first students sat with their hands folded on their desks and their posture upright. Hands in class are now busy on iPhone’s, texting friends sitting feet away from them in an attempt to scrape up a little entertainment to get through their class. However, if students in 1915 had iPhone’s to play with, they would be doing the same thing. I wonder to myself as I think of the students from a century ago, if they had a place to escape too, like I do
“Place” is a very broad word that can virtually describe anything. When I think of place in my head, I automatically picture my home in Northern California. I picture the sun peaking through the array of tree types, and my backyard after a night of rain, dripping and dark brown. I picture my cat and dog wandering around the open space of my peaceful mountain. I don’t worry about them though, they know the land better than any other person living. In Orange, my place is the school pool, possibly because it gives me a hint of the same relaxed “home” feeling and makes me feel a little less homesick.
The word “place” can mean many different things, but to me, it is that one location that is an escape. Sure, my dorm room is also a place, my pre-calculus class is too, but what makes a place worth noting is its significance to you and anybody else who feels the same. Our culture today is so fast paced, especially the life of a college student. We as humans need a place, whether it is internal, or an actual location, where we can shut it all away for an hour or so. I find it is very easy to get caught up in my daily routine to realize how stressed or burnt out I am, but when the sun is out and the whether is nice, I can stop my brain from racing, and focus on the breeze, the sun, and my book.
For this project, I wanted the reader to being in my standpoint of this experience. I took this picture as if the camera was where my eyes are as I lie there tanning in my “place”. I wanted the reader to see exactly what I see, but also to back it up with an image that can put my words into something more than just a made up visual in the readers head. I chose to write this for people out there who have a “place” like I do. It is hard to understand what I mean unless you have something like it. I think writing about place means being able to capture every sense of that location and put it into words. I think it means locking into the essence of the space, not only transporting the reader, but leaving a lingering picture in their head.
among the trees 