Writer. Teacher.
“I will / think of the Carolina oak who might just remember / the night we kissed in the first bands of rain /from a hurricane just making landfall.” Daniel Nathan Terry, from the poem “The 8th of May: A Vow Made for the 7th of May“
image from the poet’s website
I’m teaching a Critical Reading and Writing: Short Stories class this year to a group of engaged and eager graduate students in Creative Writing: Fiction at Columbia College Chicago. Lately, we have entered into an ongoing conversation about beautiful sentences. (Beauty is in the eye of the reader and all that…) As a writer or prose and a lover of poetry and plays, I often find myself stunned, enthralled, swept away, breathless, thick-throated, and love-struck by single sentences. I bet you do as well.
On occasion–say, twice a week or so–I would like to share a beautiful sentence I have discovered while reading. I will offer it to you without comment but for where I found it.
Feel free to share your own with me (us) here. And as always, thanks for reading!
Beautiful sentence #1: “They were flying high and low but ever round and round in straight and curving lines and ever flying from left to right, circling about a temple of air.” – James Joyce, PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN
October 28, 2012: Every Sunday…
October 25, 2012: We watched while…
Patricia Ann McNair 