A Fishing Expedition (for Comfort Texts)

As for offering some sort of inaugural post, or any kind of response to our first two days, I scarcely know where to begin. There's already so much in the air. I thought Dave's "Examining Beliefs About Writing" session on Monday morning was a nearly perfect first-day exercise, and it might be fun to revisit some of the items from that handout. Based on our small-group conversation, some of the items produced immediate unanimous responses (e.g., "Teachers need to read everything that kids are writing": Disagree; "Students need to see their teachers as writers": Agree; "Invented spelling is always encouraged" (huh?): Disagree etc.), some produced fun counter-arguments (e.g., "Students can write well without writing models"; "Spelling doesn't matter in a first draft"; "The room needs to be quiet when students are writing"; "Students should choose most of their own writing topics"), and some, mostly because of ambiguity in the prompt itself, puzzled us (e.g., "Good sharing of writing is really a public conference"; "Once a piece is published, conventions and spelling must be perfect" etc.).

But, anway, I have fishing on my mind. On Monday we went from Heather's reading of the Billy Collins poem to Casey's connection (in the freewrite he shared) between writing and fishing. I suppose this ends up modeling a kind of internal hypertext of the mind, but using fishing as a metaphor for writing reminded me of Virginia Woolf's reflections in To the Lighthouse on the agonies of the artist (Lily Briscoe as painter, Virginia Woolf as writer: "It was in that moment's flight between the picture and her canvas that the demons set on her who often brought her to the verge of tears and made this passage from conception to work as dreadful as any down a dark passage for a child" et al.) . By Tuesday morning, I was still thinking of Woolf's novel, my mind ranging from that fabulous "boef-en-daube" that is served at the dinner party near the end of Part I (and which is so seductively described that it tempts even a vegetarian like myself!), to the idea of "comfort food," to the idea of "comfort texts." And this chain, perhaps, brings me to something that might approximate a first question for this blog. What are proving to be your "comfort texts"( or "comfort topics," or "comfort lesson plans," etc.)? On what days do you feel that extra bit of excitement and confidence as you walk into the classroom? What do you find to be especially teachable material? I think Woolf's novel is one of those texts that does it for me -- maybe because I now know it so well, maybe because on a sentence-by-sentence level it's so stunningly beautiful, maybe because it's such a difficult novel that it forces me to slow down (thus making it easier to uncover the localized moments of beauty with my students). But there are others that spring to mind, too: Thomas Hardy's poem "The Darkling Thrush"; Keats's last great ode, "To Autumn"; Rushdie's "children's" novel Haroun and the Sea of Stories; Seamus Heaney's poem "Casualty."

And, ah, "Casuality," which brings me back to fishing and writing. In the poem, the speaker eulogizes an older man with whom he had become close (the man is tragically killed in a retaliatory pub bombing after Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland). He remembers the man's love of fishing, and specifically "that morning / When he took me in his boat, / The screw purling, turning / Indolent fathoms white, / I tasted freedom with him. / To get out early, haul / Steadily off the bottom, / Dispraise the catch, and smile / As you find a rhythm / Working you, slow mile by mile, / Into your proper haunt / Somewhere, well out, beyond ..." The poet, of course, is finding an apt metaphor for his writing in the old man's fishing, and in these lines I hear Billy Collins's trailing ants, Heather's notion of "writing our way to understanding," various types of passionate attachments. And realizing that I'm now "somewhere, well out, beyond" what had been modest intentions for this posting, I will abruptly close!