Rural Voices: Place-Conscious Education and the Teaching of Writing

Editor: Robert E. Brooke

From the preface (p. ix): “In short, we believe energized writing is, at core, place-conscious. To write well—to want to write well—writers of any age must feel “located” in a particular community and must feel that their writing contributes.”

The book contains nine essays from English teachers involved with the Nebraska Writing Project’s “Rural Voices, Country Schools” team. Each essay is written by a single teacher and is focused on their attempt to include “place conscious-learning” within their curriculum. While the line-up of teachers does include one Elementary School teacher and one teacher at a Community College, the majority of the essays take place within high school classrooms. That is not to say that the students and teachers remain in their classrooms. The goal for all of these teachers is to find ways for their students to get out of the classroom and connect with the people and places that make up their communities.

It makes absolute sense that this book is so narrowly focused on one population—teachers and students participating in the RV, CT project in rural Nebraska. By doing so, the project and book in itself becomes evidence of it’s thesis that by paying closer attention to the people and places that directly affect us we will better be able to understand and interpret the larger world. While all of the teaching examples in this book are born out of and relevant to students in rural Nebraska, I think that all of them can be adapted to communities of students throughout the country and world.

Small Wonder

Author: Barbara Kingsolver

For class we were asked to bring in examples of words/sentences that we love/loathe. I just finished this book of essays and mostly really enjoyed it. For the assignment, I decided to quote from it in order to show that love and hate are often right next to each other.

A sentence I love:
On p. 197 Kingsolver quotes a line from Robert Frost’s poem, “Death of a Hired Man”: “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” I like the ‘universal truth’ of this sentence. Kingsolver comments, “Frost captured in just a few words the most perfect definition of home I’ve ever read” and I agree. There is something really inclusive about the simplicity of words used and the complexity of the term “have to.” He doesn’t say that home is good or bad, he just says it’s there, and I think it’s kind of profound.

A word I love:
“Home.” The only synonyms for ‘home’ are words for a physical place, and each of these words sounds like an object (house, residence, domicile) whereas home sounds more like a feeling.

A sentence I loathe:
On p. 126 Kingsolver writes: “If there’s anyone who still thinks eating organically is a bland, granola-crunching affair, he or she must have missed the boat back around midmorning in the Age of Aquarius.” Kingsolver really pulled me along with her throughout this essay on the importance of being more conscious about what we eat and where it comes from, until I got to this line. Mostly I hate her use of the word organic here because I don’t think it supports her main argument (that we should eat locally), and secondly I think she really distances any reader here that doesn’t believe in eating organically, but does believe in eating locally, (as I do). In other words, I was totally on the boat, until she told me I missed it, “around midmorning in the Age of Aquarius”… whatever that means.

A word I loathe:
"Organic." It’s overused, simplified, misunderstood, and romanticized. And I probably need to just buckle-down and write the essay on why I believe so.

Genre: Nonfiction, Essays

Grammar Lessons: Translating a Life in Spain

Author: Michele Morano

I came across one of the essay from this book in a lit magazine. I started reading it because I knew Michele was a Chicago author and sometimes taught in my program and then just got sucked in. I think that essay ("In the Subjunctive Mood") is really the best one in the book, but all her writing is smart and clever and just really put together. I bought the book and read the rest of it while I was in Italy. Even though she was writing about her time in Spain, there was a lot just about travel and the idea of "translating" that umm.... translated to my own experiences abroad. Like, The Horizontal World, this book is another example of a collection of essays that can each stand alone, but have deepened meanings/effects when all read together.

The book's website is also very put together.

Genre: Nonfiction, Essays

Counting Coup: A True Story of Basketball and Honor on the Little Big Horn

Author: Larry Colton

I was excited when I found this book in a thrift store (and surprised that I hadn't come across the title sooner) but I was also skeptical about the idea of an old white guy, an ex minor league baseball player at that, writing about an American Indian girl playing basketball. I read the introduction and first chapter ready to underline ignorant lines and write angry responses in the margin. As I continued to read, I found that Colton was indeed ignorant about a lot--he hadn't spent much, if any, time on Indian reservations before beginning the book and his original intention of course was to write about the boy's high school team, not the girl's--but he was also honest about what he didn't know and that made all the difference. In fact, I began to kind of like this old white guy. I felt like he gave a very honest and respectful portrait of the team and the girls on the team and he did so by also including his own story of how and why he was first attracted to this team and the relationship he forms with them throughout the writing of the book.

Genre: Nonfiction, Journalism
Subject: Women's Sports, American Indians

Publisher

Who will run the frog hospital?

Author: Lorrie Moore

Book Details: I found this book at the Bayfield Public Library the first time I ventured out of the kids/young adult section when I was about ten. Over the next eight years, I probably checked it out twenty times, but I haven't read it again since I graduated from high school. As I read A Complicated Kindness, I was reminded of this book and I was curious to return to it and figure out why. Both authors write with an affecting humor. Both novels take place in a small town near the US-Canadian border (one on the Canadian side, one on the American side) that has a small amusement park frequented by French Canadian tourists in the summer. Both have female narrators: one a sixteen year old writing in present tense, the other a middle-aged woman on vacation with her husband in France and reflecting on being sixteen. Both are about how the place we have grown up (and the people in this place) have simultaneously pushed us away and pulled us back.

"I never knew what to do with all those years of one's life: trot around in them forever like old boots--or sever them, let them fly free? Of course, one couldn't really do either. But there was always the trying, and pretending. And then there was finally someplace in between, where one lived."

Genre: Novel

a complicated kindness

Author: Miriam Toews

Author details: I just read an interview with her and I think I understand so much more why I like her. She grew up Mennonite in a small town (like the narrator of her book) and then she moved to Montreal. The interviewer asked her about her transition and Miriam responded, "It was exciting and it was stimulating. I loved the cosmopolitan culture and its physical beauty, but at the same time I was stuck in between worlds and wondering where I was going to best fit in. I felt like an outsider in my own town as a teenager, and I certainly felt that way in Montreal. I'm not a part of this community, clearly, but I can't go home." Ummm... yeah. I feel ya, Miriam.

Book Details: Funny and sad and with an underlying feeling that people are innately good and well-intentioned, but also complex. Mariam comments on the characters in the novel in her interview: "The people of the community, the individuals, are like individuals everywhere: there are good ones and bad ones, but most of them are in between, like all of us. It's the culture of control that complicates their decency."

I thought this sentence (well, two actually) captured the essence of the novel well: "I miss kids. The way they react to everything like they're alive."

Genre: Novel
Subject: Family

purchase from W&CF
she also wrote a memoir.

The Horizontal World: Growing up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere

Author: Debra Marquart

Book Details: I bought this book at a used bookstore a couple months ago based solely on the cover and the description on the book flap. I had read a few pages of it here and there put never really got into it. And then I picked it up again recently, started reading from the beginning, and became thoroughly consumed with her writing. I finished over half of the book in that first day, and the rest of it by the end of the week. She touches on a number of ideas around growing up in the Midwest that I am just beginning to dig up in my own writing, and she weaves it all together beautifully. I hope I am eventually able to do the same.

Genre: Nonfiction, Memoir
Subject: Home, Rural Midwest

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