Category Archives: Big Stone Gap

The Monday Book: THE FREEDOM WRITERS DIARY edited by Erin Gruwell

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This floated into the bookstore and I grabbed it to take to Chile; Jack and I like to take books we’ll both read to keep down weight, and swap during our travels.

The book is entries from students keeping journals for a school project, and it has that overtone of worthiness one remembers from previous books like it: Dangerous Minds, et al. But it’s also got some lovely moments; in the background of student entries shines their erudite observations of how the project was allowed to flourish despite bureaucracy and the jealous nature of any professionals being outstripped by a colleague. Some of the entries are as simple as “crap, I wish I’d made the basketball team” and others are about students realizing they’re not the only ones with abusive fathers–which they learn from reading each others’ entries, editing them for the book.

If you teach writing, if you like to write, if you teach high school at all, you’ll see all sorts of evidence of the careful editing process of peer and professional review, which made the book even more interesting to me. Gruwell has been very careful to both keep her project in close view of very senior officials, and keep it as organic as possible for the students–a process that is about as hard as squeezing cheese curd from rocks, and for which I salute her big time.

And I flat loved reading the entries, so carefully stitched together to actually make a narrative arc out of something that could have been very piecemeal. It isn’t a story story, but it’s got a story running through it. I enjoyed this approach tremendously.

Well done, Freedom Writers!

The Cabin without a Clock

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Jack and I are fortunate to own a cabin out in the middle of the Tennessee woods. It was my home before graduate school, and the place where Jack and I had our first meal together. So it’s got a lot of history for both of us.DSCN0078

What it doesn’t have is a clock. Electricity, yes; flush toilet, check. Even a nice wood-burning stove. But no Internet access, telephone or clock. Which means once you get out there, you tell time by the sun, or the radio. It’s amazing how quickly this alters perspective. I remember a children’s book, To Walk the Sky Path, about indigenous people in Florida. The young protagonist observes his white teacher at school constantly being directed by the round thing on the wall. He offers to throw a rock at it for her, because it’s clearly bothering her, and she laughs. “How would we know when to do things without a clock?”

Jack and I use the cabin for escape time, and I use it for writing days. Free from clocks on these days, it is startling to identify the depth of their influence on our lives. At the cabin, we get up when it’s light enough to see the pond at the bottom of the hill. We go to bed when we get sleepy. And I write without deadlines of how much (or little) time I can spend on something.

The rhythm of the day rotates as gently and unobserved as the sun. You look up from a chapter and realize your stomach is rumbling, so you eat. Did you have breakfast? Is this lunch? Surprisingly enough, we eat less following this pattern.

If you’re going to take the dogs for a walk, go before dark. In the deep woods, eyes closed or open is almost the same; there literally is no difference inside the house on a dark night.

Life gets simple when you take the clocks away. Unfortunately, it only works for a few days, then you have to calculate your re-entry into society. Like as not, someone is expecting you at a numbered hour. But for those days measured by sunup and sundown, when it’s sleep, write, read, walk, cook and eat and clean up afterward, then sit on the porch watching a flock of turkeys, a herd of deer, or even (once) a bobcat shuffle up the hill on the other side of the pond, time’s measure is simpler, slower, sweeter. And oh so contented.

People have asked if Jack and I rent the cabin out; yes, if we know you or have only one degree of separation. Be warned that it is remote, and has proven too peaceful for some.