Wild Waters: Landscapes of Language

1. Place as Character StoryCircle Conference 2016 Dawn Wink Susan J. Tweit

6. The summer rain danced in sentences across the tin roof in the night. Shards of lightning rent the black fabric of the desert night, pulling thunder in its wake. Moisture misted in under the metal overhang, carrying the scents of creosote and wet earth. Another voice joined the staccato whispers on the roof—the rush of water down a nearby canyon. Cracks of rocks chimed into the desert’s conversation, as the water tumbled them across the canyon floor through blanket of night, rain, and thunder. I was eight-years-old, and sat on the low stucco wall under the porch of our ranch house, my legs curled up in front of me and my back pressed against the rough stucco of the column behind. My younger brother sat across from me against the next column. Mom and Dad rocked on the front porch swing, the slow glide of the hook rubbing against the eye ring creaked its own rhythmic voice into the night. Lightning illuminated sheer bluffs rising above the river behind the house, their face lined with shadows of the crooked paths of water’s journey downward over thousands of years. The muddy, chocolate-colored waters of the nearby canyon poured into the northward bound river. The staccato whispers of rain on tin.The desert speaks a symphony of sounds. ~ Dawn Wink Wild Waters: Landscapes of Language

7. Let the fiction grow from the land beneath your feet.Willa Cather

11. Sometimes, though, when all was very quiet, she would find herself drawn, as if in a trance, into her own depths. Down she traveled past the layers that composed her, through the skin of the surface crust, and the few inches of topsoil, down through the intermittent stratum of soft, pliant sand and hardpan dirt. The layers reflected the story of her life; some yielded softness, acceptance, movement, and others fostered the formation of an impenetrable protective shell. She traveled down into her earthen body and ran her fingers lightly over the layers of landscape formed by the winds and weather of her experiences. The prairie was Grace and Grace was the prairie. The prairie was feminine, an old, wise woman who had seen it all, who took temporal cards and softened them with her infinite wisdom and patience. Took their sharp edges and smoothed them, dulled them with her strong, aged hands and molded into them grooves and ridges, shapes that fit together and formed an interconnected whole, like a stone wall with each rock fitted within the cradle of others, knitting together to form a strong whole. In her life Grace had walked the wild, windswept land and tossed her cares to the wind. The prairie caught them, relieved her of their weight for a time, and Grace walked lighter for a while. ~ Dawn Wink, Meadowlark

12. Clustering Writing the Natural Way by Gabriele Rico Dreams and Deadlines: Some Ideas on Organization http://dawnwink.wordpress.com/2012/12/30/dreams-and-deadlines-in-2013-some-ideas-on-organization/

13. Writing, Teaching, Language, Landscape, Life DAWN WINK: DEWDROPS Wild Waters: Landscapes of Language