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"I see your spider legs and raise you an octopus tentacle."
The only legible phrase on our recently-decorated banner is also - though it does loosely correspond with the crayoned-in contents of the bubble letters - nonsensical. This doesn't matter.
The English and Creative Writing Club is among hundreds of recognized organizations on the University of Arizona campus and at least a handful of special interest - that is, non-exclusive - clubs. When I was became vice president my sophomore year, I wasn't worried; I knew the drill. Mostly due to low membership, the activities had dwindled to the bare bones of annual projects - chapbook, outreach, outreach - and the weekly meetings revolved around these bones.
by Elizabeth Maria Falcón
I taught a Halloween lesson at Apollo Middle School last fall that centered around mood and tone. I began by reading the opening of Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book:
There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.
The knife had a handle of polished black bone, and a blade
finer and sharper than any razor. If it sliced you, you might
not even know you had been cut, not immediately.
by Bryan Davis
Bryan Davis is the Director of Holocaust Education at the Jewish Federation of Southern Arizona.
What words did victims of the Holocaust use to attempt to represent their experiences during the war? They were faced with the unthinkable challenge of realizing (depending on when they wrote) that what they wrote would be used as a marker of their place individually, and the Jewish place collectively, in history, as they were being systematically annihilated and that at the same time, words were inadequate for representing the horrors they experienced.
Hélène Berr was a twenty-one year old student in the English Studies Department at the Sorbonne when, in 1942, she began keeping a diary in her home in avenue Elisee-Reclus in German occupied Paris. Hélène came from an affluent family, she was well read in British literature, especially the Romantic poets, and she was a gifted amateur violinist. Hélène's diary served shifting and overlapping purposes for her during the time she kept it from April 1942-February 1944. At times Hélène hoped the diary would provide a message to her fiancé Jean who had fled France to join the resistance, while increasingly, as the persecutions around her grew closer and more brutal, she hoped to use the diary to "tell the story." On October 10, 1943 she wrote:
Colleen Burns is a volunteer and avid supporter of the Poetry Center. She and her granddaughter Anika are Poetry Joeys regulars and they spend quite a bit of time writing together.
About writing with Anika, Collen says:
Children Anika's age (3-7) have rich imaginations and large vocabularies that can construct sophisticated stories if the physical act of writing doesn't get in the way. When children are asked to 'write' a story using an unwieldy pencil and unruly paper, this sheer physical act of writing slows down and sometimes can stop a story altogether.