Last (W)rites

I hope the seminar papers proceed productively apace; I will certainly look forward to reading them. Given how many of our texts were fragmented, multi-perspectival, and creolized, I wonder nearly if there could have been some way of following suit in your final papers for the class. We danced around this possibility on one or two occasions, but maybe it's something we should have discussed more seriously! I remember chancing upon (and finding appealing) this description by Robert Root in his book The Nonfictionist's Guide: On Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction: "The segmented essay is like an oratorio or a concerto. The spaces are like intervals of silence between the separate elements. Sometimes the segments of prose in an essay can be recitative, aria, duet or trio, chorus; they can be allegro non troppo, allegro appasionato, andante, allegretto grazioso. This is what the spaces say: In this interval of silence hold onto what you have just heard; prepare yourself to hear something different; ponder the ways these separatenesses are part of a whole. Like musical compositions, nonfiction need not be one uninterrupted melody, one movement, but can also be the arrangement of distinct and discrete miniatures, changes of tempo, sonority, melody, separated by silences. This is what the spaces say" (86). I don't know how that could be made to fit the final seminar paper for a course like this, but it's beguiling nonetheless. Could you imagine a multigenre essay, too, that would involve each of us contributing 2-3 pages, with multiple segments, that we assembled into one piece that we then tried to get published as a multi-authored article in a literary journal? Had I achieved fuller buy-in with this blog maybe we would have found a good bit of the potential material right here. Maybe it's an idea for a future iteration of the class.

Well, the whale-oil has nearly been exhausted, and thus it may be time for me to conclude this bloggy yarn and depart The Quarterdeck! The foregoing, to quote Captain Josias Lockwood of the Star of the Sea, has been signed and written in my own hand, "and I attest it on my solemn honour a compleat and true account of the voyage," undertaken with my seafaring companions during the Fall 2015 semester. I am grateful to those nine for everything they contributed these many months, and for no small amount of patience and good cheer, and I wish them a restorative winter break on land and happy trails extending into their futures!