I Think This Pretty Much Sums It Up....

...except for the month before school. Usually it's not more than two weeks here in Utah.

The Decapitation of a Carrot

I found this old writing from a CUWP advanced institute. We were shown this funny picture and had to tell what was going on from the point of view of something in it. It will be obvious what I picked.

Mine is a lonely life. I spend most of my days in a dark and crowded drawer. On this particular day, I was pulled from my reverie and slapped ruthlessly on a table. I wondered what was coming next – soft warm bread, a juicy steak, at the very least a ripe red tomato? But, no. It was a puny little carrot with a most alarmed look on its face. How ignoble. Me, once the very heart of a mighty maple, reduced to bearing an mere insignificant root vegetable. It was almost a relief to feel the snick of the knife and know that my humiliation was over.

Cat / Beast Fable

I'd forgotten all about this fable I wrote as an example for my students on how to change a simple story from their lives into a beast fable (using Chaucer's "Nun's Priest's Tale" and Jon Sciezksa's Squids Will Be Squids). Fun times!!!

Book Spine Poetry

I tried this with my students this year. These are the two I came up with as examples. One of them is about my life...with too many teenagers in one house. The other one is about writing papers.

On Technology

This is my scribble from the CUWP advanced institute on digital writing:

One technology memory is associated with Word Perfect. Word Perfect came into being when I was a BYU student. I worked in the Business Office of the Wilkinson Center, and we used a rudimentary, beta version of Word Perfect in our office. As someone who was majoring in English and writing very long papers on a manual typewriter, Word Perfect seemed like such an amazing thing. I really, really liked it. I graduated, and we moved to Palo Alto where my husband got his masters in computer science. While we were there I went to a technology conference with him, and who did I see there? Young enthusiastic presenters from BYU pushing Word Perfect. Wow. I was excited. Word Perfect was going to be big. Over the next few years I didn’t do much with computers, but then my husband and I bought our first computer--333 MG of storage--if I remember correctly. It was a windows computer, but it came with Word Perfect. Of course we quickly ran out of space on that computer, and the next one we bought came with MS Word. Oh my. I did not like Word, and I talked my husband into putting Word Perfect on in. Two or three years later, we got another new computer, once again carrying Word. I asked my husband to put Word Perfect on it, and he said, "Honey, I think you’d better just learn to use Word, as I think Word Perfect’s days are numbered." I fought the idea, but eventually I gave in, and within two or three years, Word had completely taken over, and my beloved WP was no more. Thus I feel I lived through the whole lifespan of that company.

Mentor Authors

Here's a blog that shows some authentic writer's rough drafts.