PLACE ESSAY JOURNAL. Name:

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1 Place Essay, P1 PLACE ESSAY JOURNAL Name: We will use the ALERT process to build an essay of place, step by step. Doctors say that a person is "alert" when she is fully awake, which means vividly aware of who she is, where she is, and what is happening around her. In working through the ALERT process, you will find yourself awakening more and more to who you are, where you are, and what is going on in the world around you. The process has five steps: 1. ASKING questions 2. LISTENING for answers 3. EXPLORING the answers for better understanding 4. REFLECTING on what you have learned, trying to make connections between the various bits of information and what you already understand 5. TRANSFORMING your discoveries into a new contribution to what we know by making a final product that will endure.

2 Place Essay, P2 ASKING "What is a 'Place'?" Is that strip of grass between the lanes on the interstate highway a place? Is an internet website a place? Is McDonald s a place? What about our favorite summer swimming hole? PLACE describes the human and physical characteristics of a location. Physical characteristics include a description of such things as the mountains, rivers, beaches, topography, and animal and plant life of a place. Human characteristics include the human designed cultural features of a place, from land use and architecture to forms of livelihood and religion to food and folk ways to transportation and communication networks. Some "places" are really no place. That is, we pass them without seeing them. When we are there they have no meaning for us. We don't remember them when we are gone. But other places are part of the landscapes in our minds. When we are homesick, we remember them. Sometimes we feel an urge to go to them. When we think of important events, times full of life, we see in our minds the places where they occurred, which are inseparable from what happened. Other places are storied with events of national significance, so the entire country remembers important events by remembering the place where they occurred. Gettysburg. Wounded Knee. Pearl Harbor. Ground Zero. Thousands of people visit such places so that they can forge a personal connection with events that matter. At such places, monuments and signs and plaques usually retell the story. And yet other places have more personal meaning. The place where a brother died, or the place where a friend shared a secret, or the place where you thought through a hard problem and decided to change your life. In these places, no memorials make the story public, but the story is real and important, nonetheless. For this essay, you can choose to explore either a public place with which you want to have a better connection, or you can explore a personal place, to which you want to give a richer and deeper reality.

3 Place Essay, P3 [ASSIGNMENT] What questions might you want your place essay to answer? Example: How do we ever deal with loss? [ASSIGNMENT] : In your journal, make a list of places you may want to write about. Maybe a place where something important to you or your family has happened: Does your family have a special place it goes for picnics or reunions? Is there a place where you had an important conversation with a friend? Is there a place where something traumatic happened to you? Do you know where, exactly, your parents got married or got engaged? Do you know where the first members of your family to come to this town slept the first night they got here? Is there a special place you go with friends to be happy together? Or maybe a place where something happened that changed your town or state or nation Are there places nearby where something of historical significance to the state or nation happened. Are there places that are the subjects of debates today about what is going to happen to them? Are there places that have cultural significance to groups who live in your community? Don't pick a place that is completely private, about which you won't be able to gather any history or other people's stories. List your favorites below: Place Significance

4 Place Essay, P4 What is a story? Any sequence of events doesn't necessarily make a story any more than any arrangement of words makes a sentence. Children from a very young age can tell when a narrative is a story and when it isn't. We've all heard people who narrate without ever telling a story. One thing after another happens, but there's no point to it all. It just keeps going without reaching meaning. A joke that has no punchline. To make a story that works, you need to include three elements: a protagonist who cares about something, events that touch upon what he or she cares about, and a moment at which some new meaning is made. Or, in other words, character, plot and theme. Or, in still other words, emotion, action, and meaning. Since the foundation of a personal essay is your first hand experiences, you will want to tell the story of your search for the meaning of a place. In an essay, you, the writer, will be the protagonist. So, we have the character. Now we need to know what you care about. [ASSIGNMENT] : Identify a place that you want to write about. In a few paragraphs, say: what meaning the place has for you right now, what seems important about it. Include a narrative of one visit you made to this place, what happened on that visit, and how the trip made you feel. This needs to be a place that you will be able to visit as you work on your essay. The place is:

5 Place Essay, P5

6 Place Essay, P6 LISTENING There are a few simple ways that you can listen for what a place has to teach: you can find out something about its history, you can learn more about the natural or the built environment that exists there, and you can gather insights, either by interviews or by readings, from other people who have something to say about it. Before we are done, we will do all of these things. But first, go to your place and listen as carefully as you can for what secrets it might be holding, for what it might teach you directly. [ASSIGNMENT] Go to your place. Log what you hear. What secrets were revealed?

7 Place Essay, P7 Read these samples intro paragraphs drawn from published essays. Notice how the writers carefully observe their places. In particular, notice how they describe the human and physical characteristics of these places. Below are a few examples from the Norton Reader. How did these authors get their information? How did they find the right words or metaphors to describe these places? Excerpt from More Room by Judith Ortiz Cofer (p.116) My Grandmother s house is like a chambered nautilus; it has many rooms, yet it is not a mansion. Its proportions are small and its design simple. It is a house that has grown organically, according to the needs of its inhabitants. To all of us in the family it is known as la casa de Mamá. it is the place of our origin; the stage for our memories and dreams of Island life. Rhode Island is not an island. Most of it is attached to the continental United States, tucked into a perfect looking corner formed by the boundaries of Connecticut to the west and Massachusetts above. The rest is a jagged confusion of shoreline: delicate slivers of barrier beach, numerous inlets and peninsulas, and a cluster of stray puzzle pieces, created by the movement of glaciers, nestled in the Narragansett Bay. The tip of Watch Hill, in the extreme southwest, extends like a curving rib bone into the Atlantic Ocean. The salt ponds lining the edge of South Kingstown, where I grew up, resemble the stealthy work of insects who have come into contact with nutritious, antiquated paper. Excerpt from Rhode Island by Jhumpa Lahiri (p.144) Brooklyn, New York, has the undefined, hard to remember shape of a stain. I never know what to tell people when they ask me where in it I live. It sits at the western tip of Long Island at a diagonal that does not conform neatly to the points of the compass. People in Brooklyn do not describe where they live in terms of north or west or south. They refer instead to their neighborhoods and to the nearest subway lines. I live on the edge of Park Slope, a neighborhood by the crest of a low ridge that runs through the borough. Prospect Park is across the street. Airplanes in the landing pattern for LaGuardia Airport sometimes fly right over my building; every few minutes, on certain sunny days, perfectly detailed airplane shadows slide down my building and up the building opposite in a blink. You can see my building from the plane it s on the left hand side of Prospect Park, the longer patch of green you cross after the expanse of Green Wood Cemetery. Excerpt from Take the F by Ian Frazier (p. 154) A single knoll rises out of the plain in Oklahoma, north and west of Wichita Range. For my people, the Kiowas, it is an old landmark, and they gave it the name Rainy Mountain. The hardest weather in the world is there. Winter brings blizzards, hot tornadic winds arise in the spring, and in summer the prairie is an anvil s edge. The grass turn brittle and brown, and it cracks beneath your feet. There are green belts along the rivers and creeks, linear grows of hickory and pecan, willow and witch hazel. At a distance in July or August the steaming foliage seems almost to writhe in fire. Great green and yellow grasshoppers are everywhere in the tall grass, popping up like corn to sting the flesh, and tortoises crawl about on the red earth, going nowhere in the plenty of time. Loneliness is an aspect of the land. All things in the plain are isolate; there is no confusion of objects in the eye, but one hill or one truee or one man. To look upon that landscape in the early morning, with the sun at your back, is to lose the sense of proportion. Your imagination comes to life, and this, you think, is where Creation was begun. Excerpt from The Way to Rainy Mountain by N. Scott Momaday (p. 119)

8 Place Essay, P8 Like the authors above, apprentice yourself to your place. Try to learn from it. Visit your place, and take careful notes, looking for things that you want to know more about. How old are the trees that are there? How did they get planted? Are there any non native tree growing there? Who might have planted them? Is the vegetation different than it would have been fifty years ago, or a hundred years ago? If there are buildings, where did the material to build them come from? Who built the buildings, and why? Who else has used the site, and what did it mean to them? What is happening to the site today? Is it changing? In what ways? Is this good or bad? What do you see?

9 Place Essay, P9 [ASSIGNMENT]: Are there other lives that were connected with your place, that you wonder about? Try to imagine who was here, and what being here felt like for them. Write down three or four questions about other people who are connected with this place that you might be able to answer, either by researching history or by interviewing others. Share your questions with other members of the class. Hearing the questions of others allows us to begin to realize the other questions that we might ask. The number of details at any location that might be significant is literally infinite. The more we think about and talk about what might be learned about a place, the more questions we will have. The goal at this point is not to reach conclusions, but to wonder, and to begin making a plan to get from wonder to knowledge.

10 Place Essay, P10 EXPLORING: HISTORY Where can you learn more about the history of your place? What has happened there before? What other people have experienced the place, and what did it mean to them? [ASSIGNMENT] Identify at least two historical events that happened at this sight. Is your place not on Wikipedia? Do your two closest friends know nothing about it? What can you do? Try other research tools like: local newspaper archives (looking for events that occurred at the site) county courthouse records (to trace ownership of the land) published books, if the place is significant enough to be mentioned family records Additional Historical Information

11 Place Essay, P11 [ASSIGNMENT]: Write about an event that occurred in the past that relates to your place, focusing on what the event meant to ordinary people rather than just reciting facts.

12 Place Essay, P12 EXPLORING: NATURE You will want to evoke a sense of the earth as it is revealed at your place. This might be a matter as simple as carefully observing details about the plants and other creatures that are there, of describing the place. As you do this, avoid words like "beautiful" or "majestic" which are abstract nouns and don't let us see, smell, hear, feel, and taste the world that is present. Pass on the information that your senses pass on to you. But simple description, as important as it is sometimes, stops short of the most powerful writing, which aims for meaning. By now, you should have some general idea of what you would like to tell about your place. With this general idea in mind, do a bit of research into ecosystems like the one that exists at your place. If your place is a lake, read some scientific articles about lakes. If there are deer at your place, gather and read articles about the lives of deer. Read background science on the sort of place it is: is it a creek, a mountain, a lake or a pond? How long has it existed? What caused it to exist? Read samples of nature writers in the Norton Reader, such as Edward Abbey (p.496), Brian Doyle (p. 502), Rachel Carson (p.519), John Muir (p.525) or Terry Tempest Williams (p. 543), that show the writers trying to make sense out of what sort of a world we live in. Notice how there use of description aims for meaning. [ASSIGNMENT] : Write about some aspect of nature as it exists at your place. This can be a brief essay on the winter lives of chipmunks, on the ecology of boundaries between grasslands and forests, on the hydrology of rivers and streams, on the mid summer feeding habits of grizzly bears, on why leaves change color in the fall, on how dragonflies "see," or any of a few million other topics. If you have trouble getting started, take ten minutes to make a list of twenty questions for which you don't know the answer. Then pick one. You may want to go to your place, and ask questions about what you see there: What do the mosquitoes do when you're not there? What do the sort of trees that are growing tell you about the climate? What birds are there, and what do they eat? With your questions, you can begin research. As you are writing, look for chances to include sensory details from your place that will help the reader fully experience your place.

13 Place Essay, P13 EXPLORING: FOLKLIFE There are at least three levels of culture: the highest level is academic culture, which consists of those things we learn through formal education. The middle level is popular culture, which consists of the movies and magazines and songs that the media create and market. The most fundamental level is folk culture, which consists of all the things we learn by hanging around and observing, the things that are passed on from one generation to the next in the course of living. Folk culture has an extraordinarily strong influence upon us. Most of what we know we didn't learn in school or from movies. We learned it at home and just by living in the world. Who can you talk to about the place? Make a list of people who might know about the place, then pick the one that seems most likely to have personal knowledge of the place. Person Ethos (Authority)

14 Place Essay, P14 Optional Activities: develop a research outline make an appointment for an interview and familiarize yourself with the recording equipment at the interview, introduce yourself and build rapport with the person tell the person what you are doing and what you already know about the place move through your interview outline, listening carefully to answers and following any promising leads that come up, even if they aren't in your outline listen especially for interesting language or interesting observations; you won't use everything the person tells you, but most people will say something that gives you a vivid picture that you may want to use ask the person for the names of other people who might have personal knowledge of the place write a thank you note after the interview [ASSIGNMENT] : Interview someone familiar with the place. As soon as possible after the interview, write a summary of it, including a description of the person trying to capture unusual mannerisms or dress, and the gist of what was said, including direct quotations of the most vivid material.

15 Place Essay, P15 [FINAL ASSIGNMENT] Use your journal entries to construct an essay that tells about one visit or event at the site you have selected, pulling in other material you have developed. Optional: Structure your essay just as Judith Ortiz Cofer does in More Room (p. 116) Paragraph Summary Modes/Strategies 1 Describe the human and physical characteristics of the place. 2 Transition from describing the place to describing events that happened in the place. 3 7 Focus on one aspect of the place. Describe objects/items/things in the place that reveal deeper meaning about the protagonist while introducing plot. 8 Introduce central event/anecdote related to the place that will reveal the theme. Climax of narrative. (Don t reveal the theme) Description Description/Narration Description/Narration Narration/Exposition 9 10 Result of the central event. Falling action. Narration 11 Explanation of central event that reveals the theme or deeper meaning Exposition

16 Place Essay, P16 Paragraph Summary Modes/Strategies