Week 10: First Writing Memories (Essay)

From an early age, my parents have little art books with stories in them that I wrote, but I don't have any solid memories of writing those. However, this last summer we went through a lot mine and my brother's old projects like that and it was really fun to read the little stories I had written.

 And through school, I learned cursive in third grade and had little papers and writing projects due throughout schooling. But to me, that was always just school work I had to do. I don't have any distinct memories of school writing before fourth grade.

My first memory of writing often outside of the required school work was when I began fourth grade.

In fourth grade, we had just moved to Colorado and  I was enjoying school for the first time in years. One of the teachers decided to set up a writing club for the fourth and fifth graders. I joined with a friend and once a week we would go to the club on our lunch time and talk about stories and write.

This is when I first thought that I wanted to write for a job when I grew up. I had read books all through my childhood (but that's a different essay). But with this writing club I wanted to make my own. I wanted to make other people feel the escape that I felt when reading.

One of the most vivid memories of this club was the first day, the teacher brought each of the students in the club a Lisa Frank pocket folder.For anyone who didn't go to school somewhere where there was a Lisa Frank craze, those folders and notebooks were like the riches of the class. They were designs of cartoon animals and sometimes people with bright rainbow colors. The girl with the most and best folders may as well have been the queen of the grade.

Lisa Frank Dalmatian Design. Source

The folder I got had two dalmatians with colored spots and paint brushes in their mouths. I'm pretty sure I still have that folder in a box somewhere. But anyways, one side of my folder was crammed full of poems and little stories and the beginnings of longer ones that I never finished. The other side had print outs of writing tips the teacher had given us.

I wrote so much that year that I now have permanent writing callouses on my hands for the first time and one of my fingers had a graphite tint there the pencil lead would rub it.

This is when my passion for writing really began. This is when I began collecting notebooks and folders that would all have random scribbles and poems and stories. While I know I did write earlier. For me, this club in fourth grade was when it all started.

Week 10: Legend of Pleiades (Storytelling)

There once was a young man, who never fit in with his village. He was a daydreamer and never connected well with people his age. Instead of going hunting with the others, he would rather watch the clouds in the day and the stars at night. He would lie in the grass, looking up, imagining what it would be like to live sky. But the other villagers believed that reality was where people should stay.They would whisper about the young one who was always lost in his mind.

When his parents insisted he find his own place to live, he moved to the very edge of the village’s land. He built his house on a lake that marked the end of their territory. It was peaceful there. The sunsets and would glisten off the lake and the moon’s path would be reflected across the clear water at night. Here his mind could wander without the judgmental eyes of his village.

Lake Shoreline by Norm Andreiw. Wikimedia

For the first few nights he stayed at the house, the quiet filled the air, broken only by the gentle lapping of water on the bank and the sounds of animals in the distance. One night, a week after the man moved to the lake, he woke to hear voices in the distance. The wind carried soft singing and laughter into his house. He stood quickly and listened to be sure he wasn’t dreaming, but the sounds continued.

He quietly snuck out of his house and followed the sweet sounds. He had rounded the side of the lake, when the sounds became clearer. There was splashing and giggling and singing from a group of girls close by. He continued to walk, trying to find where they were. Finally, he pushed some tree branches to the side to reveal seven young women. They were singing and dancing in the lake, splashing one another and giggling in the moon light.

The young man began to move towards them, when his foot slipped, sending rocks tumbling down the bank. The girls froze, searching for the source of the sound. Before he could move again, all of the young women grouped together and disappeared.  They seemed to somehow ascend into the sky, but they boy didn’t understand how they could. After staring silently at the now calm lake, he made his way back home, trying to work through what he had just seen.

The next morning when he woke, the young man decided it was probably a dream. Yet, he couldn’t shake his curiosity. So he decided to sleep that day, and return to the place he thought he had seen the women that night.

When the sky turned to the darkest shade of blue, he left his home once again. The faint moonlight revealed footprints. Maybe it hadn’t been a dream. He made it to the other side of the lake. When he reached the tree line, a scuffmark was etched into the ground where his foot had slipped. The man walked a few steps forward and sat on the rocky bank of the lake to wait for the women he was certain wouldn’t come.

For a few hours, nothing happened. The man watched the stars and the rippling of the water as the wind brushed across it. As he gazed up again, he looked for patterns in the stars. Suddenly, the star he was looking at dimmed, and seemed to streak toward the earth. He sat up. He shifted his gaze back to the lake, where one of the women stood before him, the water rising a little above her ankles.

She looked at the man suspiciously. Her only movements were the wind catching her long dark hair and her eyes looking over the man and the forest behind him. When she spoke, her voice was as clear and beautiful as the man had heard the night before. “You were the one spying on my sisters and I last night?” An angry edge seeped into her soft voice.

“I… I didn’t mean to spy on you,” he stuttered. “I just heard the singing…”

She continued to watch him cautiously. “So, why are you here now?”

“To… uh… to see if I imagined you… and apologize for startling you, too.” He couldn’t take his eyes off the woman or form a coherent thought. She began to relax a little, although she didn’t move any closer.

She looked up at the sky and nodded. He managed to tear his gaze from the woman to see six other stars streaking towards the earth. Then there were six women standing behind the first. Her sisters.

“This man means us no harm,” she said to the girls standing behind her. He nodded, trying to reassure them. That night he stayed by the side of the lake. The younger sisters played in the water. The middle sisters sang and danced together. The oldest, the first woman to come down, sat with the man and they talked.

She asked him about his life and world. She told him about their lives, living in the stars. Then at the end of the night, she and her sisters rose again into the sky world. For many weeks after, the oldest sister and the man would talk nightly, while her sisters played and sang. During the days, the man waited until he could see her again. Finally, after months of these meetings, he asked the oldest sister to marry him.

She told him she wanted to but she couldn’t leave her sisters. They sat in silence for a while before she said, “Would you come with us? I know you have your family here, but you could come and live in the sky with us if you wanted.” After some thought, the man agreed. He and the seven sisters ascended to the sky. Even today, in the night, you can see the seven sisters shining bright. But one stays close to another star, her husband. This is the constellation Pleiades. 

Pleiades by NASA. Wikimedia.

Author's Note: The original story was called The Origin of the Pleiades from the British North America reading unit. I kept the overall plot the same, and the third person narrative, but I changed a lot of details in the plot and added more back story. In the original, the young man just spied on the seven sisters for a long time and never approached or talked to them. When he decided he wanted to marry one of the women, he ran at them from the trees and just grabbed the most beautiful one before she could get away. He then said she would be his wife and would stay on earth with him. The woman agreed to be his wife but said that he had to go to the sky world with her for them to marry. I wanted a less creepy/stalkery version of the main guy and a bit more of a romantic story, instead of a type of bride capture. 

Story source: Myths and Legends of British North America by Katharine Berry Judson (1917). 

Week 10: British North America Reading Diary

For this unit I read the British North America Folklore unit.

For part A, I had two favorite stories, Creation of the Earth, and The Burning of the World.

The Creation of the Earth story, was unlike any creation myth I had heard before. Like most myths, the story says that in the beginning there was nothing, only blankness. However, there were also living things (people or personification?). I'm not quite sure how all of the characters Earth, Sun, Moon, and Stars change from the beginning to the end. In the end, the everything is placed by an the Old Man, who seems to have a god like role in the creation and placement of the universe. But at first, the characters seem to be much more human like where they live in a house together, although I'm not sure why there's a house in all of the blankness the story describes. I'm also not sure where the Old Man came from, because he wasn't mentioned as one of the exceptions to the nothingness in the beginning as the other characters were.

(Thompson River, photo by A. Bowden)

The Other Story I liked was the Burning World. It reminded me a lot of Noah's ark, except fire instead of water. Similarly to the Noah story, very few people (besides the man's mother and sister) believed him that the world would burn. I thought it was very interesting how in the story, the animals seem to want to switch roles with each other and the man has to straighten out their role in the ecosystem. This part of the story reminded me of Adam in the Garden of Eden. Only this story was much more entertaining. I loved how the animals tried to convince him that they should be something else. My favorite was how the rabbit jumped into the water to try and be like the beaver.

"Fire" Source: Wikimedia