Crick Hollow Day 2

Today at Crick Hollow Writing Retreat for Kids, I read this excerpt from Barbara Kingsolver’s Small Wonders:

In the slender shoulders of the myrtle tree outside my kitchen window, a
hummingbird built her nest. It was in April, the sexiest month, season of
bud-burst and courtship displays, though I was at the sink washing breakfast
dishes and missing the party, or so you might think. Then my eye caught a
flicker of motion outside, and there she was, hovering uncertainly. She held
in the tip of her beak a wisp of wadded spiderweb so tiny I wasn’t even sure
it was there, until she carefully smoodged it onto the branch. She vanished
then, but in less than a minute she was back with another tiny white tuft
that she stuck on top of the first. For more than an hour she returned again
and again, increasingly confident of her mission, building up by
infinitesimal degrees a whitish lump on the branch – and leaving me plumb in
awe of the supply of spiderwebbing on the face of the land.

I stayed at my post, washing everything I could find, while my friend did
her own housework out there. When the lump had grown big enough – when some
genetic trigger in her small brain said, “Now, that will do” – she stopped
gathering and sat down on her little tuffet, waggling her wings and tiny
rounded underbelly to shape the blob into a cup that would easily have fit
inside my cupped hand. Then she hovered up to inspect it from this side and
that, settled and waddled with greater fervor, hovered and appraised some
more, and dashed off again. She began now to return with fine filaments of
shredded bark, which she wove into the webbing along with some dry leaflets
and a slap-dab or two of lichen pressed onto the outside for curb appeal.
When she had made of all this a perfect, symmetrical cup, she did the most
surprising thing of all: She sat on it, stretched herself forward, extended
the unbelievable length of her tongue, and licked her new nest in a long
upward stroke from bottom to rim. Then she rotated herself a minute degree,
leaned forward, and licked again. I watched her go all the way around,
licking the entire nest in a slow rotation that took ten minutes to complete
and ended precisely back at her starting point. Passed down from hummingbird
great-grandmothers immemorial, a spectacular genetic map in her mind had
instructed her at every step, from snipping out with her beak the first
spiderweb tuft to laying down whatever salivary secretion was needed to
accrete and finalize her essential creation. Then, suddenly, that was that.
Her busy urgency vanished, and she settled in for the long stillness of
laying and incubation.

Then, I sent them out to the yard to observe and write about nature.  We talked briefly about looking closely and seeing the things we may never have noticed before.  We talked about how we can apply this to characters that we are writing about by bringing the reader in close to details about the character that might be easy to miss or how we can slow our action down to have our character look closely at something or how our close observation of things can inform the setting that we create in our writing.

Here’s the poem we read today: Water Snake by Mary Oliver

Water Snake

 

I saw him

in a dry place

on a hot day,

a traveler

making his way

from one pond

to another,

and he lifted up

his chary face

and looked at me

with his gravel eyes,

and the feather of his tongue

shot in and out

of his otherwise clamped mouth,

and I stopped on the path

to give him room,

and he went past me

with his head high,

loathing me, I think,

for my long legs,

my poor body, like a post,

my many fingers,

for he didn’t linger

but, toughing the other side of the path,

he headed, in long lunges and quick heaves,

straight to the nearest basin

of sweet black water and weeds,

and solitude—

like an old sword

that suddenly picked itself up and went off,

swinging, swinging

through the green leaves.

 

The kids talked about how the narrator’s perspective changed about the snake from feeling like it “loathed” her for her body to seeing the snake as a powerful, graceful sword once in its preferred environment.

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