recycling work

For the next few posts I'll be re-publishing here some of the posts I wrote for my class this past spring. The class was called, "Collisions of Beauty and Violence: Terry Tempest Williams and the Mosaic of Community." The readings focused around author/activist Terry Tempest Williams' works and the works of those that inspired or were inspired by her. The class culminated with a 3 day campus visit by Williams during which we attended a writer's interview with her, conducted by our instructor and one of our class members.

Throughout the class we read a lot of creative nonfiction, writing about home, place, landscape, community, democracy, and people's connections to one another. Our major assignments involved writing around the theme of "Broken Midwest," for which I wrote two individual blog posts. I wrote a third post as part of a group project centered around the theme of Landscape, Home & Community, and the book "A Paradise Built in Hell" by Rebecca Solnit. (I highly recommend Solnit's work - she is amazingly smart, does deep and thorough research, and writes in a truly engaging and personable style.) We ended up looking at Minneapolis' 35W bridge disaster in 2007 from our three different perspectives, inspired by Solnit's examination of how people come together during times of catastrophe.

Since I posted so little over the summer, I want to remember that I really have been writing - just not necessarily up in here. So even though the next few posts will have been recycled, at least they're new to this blog.