Tag: summer

“I feel like an old oak door” by Max Chu

Leave a comment

Over the summer I was in a funk. Whenever I tried to write, I got the overwhelming sensation that I was wasting my own time, in addition to whichever poor friend who had to read my own piece. For months this creeping sensation followed me, making itself intertwined with the heat of the summer like a cat in a curtain! I roamed about my day to day of summer nothings with this funk gnawing away at my creativity and only at night when it got cooler could I assess the damages. After the summer, I named this time in my life the “Funky Hours,” and out of the Funky Hours came nothing but that grey spitting funky mush.

The one and only salvageable thing I wrote over the summer came to me thusly, on the hottest day of the year. I was sitting at a kitchen table, sweltering. The window yawning, and through its mouth I could see the greater countryside of Britain. A man stood in front of me, and had been talking and talking for maybe days, who was I to say? I tip my chair back, and while balancing on the tip of two legs is when I deem it appropriate to evaluate how each part of my body is feeling, specifically (as I do in moments of great…inaction). I start with my toes, work up, and come to this conclusion, expressed best in the poetic form:

I feel like an old oak door

by Max Chu

              I
feel      like
an        old
oak
              door
.

This may be the best poem that came out of the Funky Hours. In the moment of conception, there was no doubt in my mind that this was the truest poem I could have written. As the author, I can tell you with full assurance that the speaker and the author are one, that the old oak door that the speaker describes is the same to the one that the author envisions in his mind’s eye! Therefore, whichever old oak door that the reader envisions the speaker to be envisioning is the same to the one that the author, me, is envisioning.

My godmother use to own this enormous house in the wilderness of Inverness. Whether it was actually in the wilderness and whether it was actually enormous is unknown to me, as I have not been back to the house since my childhood. However, in the mornings, my godmother would take a dog food dish and fill it with birdseed before leaving her front door and placing the food on the front porch. Then she would turn around and go back inside, closing the red old oak door behind her. I bet you didn’t expect it to be red!

Max Chu, class of 2020

Summer Homework Revisions by Sequoia Hack

Leave a comment

There’s no way to say it nicely. Assigned summer homework is not something all CW students enjoy. Summer is the only extended period time over two weeks in length where we aren’t sitting through classes lasting an hour and twenty minutes. It’s when we do not have to wake up at ungodly times of day to get to the climate-indecisive Glen Canyon where SOTA is located.

I am so fortunate to be a part of the uniquely Bay Area SFSOTA Creative Writing department. Throughout my year and three months here, I have become a much more responsible and aware person. Heather has not only guided and strengthened my writing passion, but has introduced me to perspectives I had no experience with prior to high school. But summer work was not my motivation to apply to this department, nor is it my favorite thing to do now. During the three months we have off of school, I’d prefer to escape to sleepaway camp without any looming deadlines.

However, one of Heather’s many insights is about how to improve one’s writing skills. It is centered around the cliche phrase, “practice makes perfect” (but of course as a writer, Heather introduced this concept without using any cliches). Her reason for assigning summer work is something like this: if one would like to strengthen their writing abilities, one must constantly write. I have taken this mindset to heart during the two times I have been assigned summer work, and I appreciate her firm belief for I have been able to explore my specific strengths in writing outside of the class environment.

Upon arriving back in school during August, CW revises their summer work based off of Heather’s comments. This has been an unpleasant process for me, as revisiting work done months in the past has been like looking at my application portfolio for this department after a year of being immersed in sophisticated writing — cringe-inducing. Regrets come forth about the piece, for example word choices or chosen formatting. Heather counsels us individually after reviewing our summer work, and has jokingly dubbed me the “thousand-poems-in-three-poems” girl after commenting that I wrote a poem with many concrete images but didn’t particularly blend cohesively.

These are some selected stanzas from a poem I had written this past summer and recently revised. I’ve centralized the theme, unified the imagery, and excluded extra words.

Excerpt from Coyote Bones

The bones flow and grow and sway,
suspended from cloud toes,
blown away with a fist of air
carried into Yosemite valley
by millions
of thousand year-old trees,
roots plunged to Earth’s core.
The trees remain there,
forever anchored in an ocean of
lush soil.

Robins greet blue jays
atop speckled boulders,
iridescent wings intertwine.
Slugs the hue of sunflower petals
mingle on slabs of granite.
Raccoons sulk in the heat,
claws clicking on rock,
paw pads lurching forward
to the dining birds.

And the bones keep moving,
around Glacier Point
where young couples marry,
out to fields enveloped in
sunset and lupine blooms.

Thank you so much for your comments and care, Heather! I truly appreciate the confidence you’ve instilled in me.

Sequoia Hack
Class of 2021

A Summer Influx of Past Work

Leave a comment

Well readers, it’s that time of summer again–the time of summer you don’t quite admit is there because summer exists as a timeless entity anyway: summer is halfway over. Actually, it’s a little more than halfway over. In a month and a week we’ll have to fill our backpacks with pens and notebooks, and finally sit down to finish that summer reading.

As the new school year approaches, we are proud to bring you some pieces of work from last year that we created with our artists-in-residence. Summer is a time to proceeding forward with life, relaxation, and activities that got thrown to the sidelines during the school year. Summer is also a time for reflection about the writing we’ve done and the writing we hope to continue to make. Enjoy!

A Balancing Act on Slackwire, Part I

Leave a comment

Which came first, the summer or the lethargy?

The easy connection to make is, school’s out, it’s vacation time, hence the desperate urge to do absolutely nothing. But it can also stand to reason that the urge to do nothing during the summer is some sort of universal truth of humanity, so instead of trudging through a forced-work ethic, we just give everyone three months off.

This is all rhetorical reasoning. I just wanted to think about the summer.

Or not. The do nothing-urge is quite all-encompassing.

…Ten minutes have passed since I typed the last sentence. I’ve gotten myself a glass of orange juice, and am congratulating myself on making the effort.

The way I see it, we (in general) function on a trial-and-error basis. As in, the way we figure out what we want to do when we grow up is through first figuring out what we absolutelyewgrossgetthatawayfromme not want to do. Maybe that’s what mandatory K-12 education is for (or has morphed into, for bizarre, tragic reasons). Throughout the school year, there’s a constant undercurrent of dissatisfaction, perhaps on account that we’re not strictly there by choice, and because school is all about workworkwork (if you’re lucky, not of the tedious sort), the natural rebellion is to not workworkwork. Of course, it takes some rumination to understand that not all work is the same (some work are just more equal than others) and further contemplation and self-reflection etc.etc. to figure out what work one is okay with doing. Just okay, as in, my tolerance level for this is decent enough. Then we take that as a starting point, move forward to find work that perhaps we actually– god forbid– like doing.

Or, you make like me and find ways to appreciate all of the workworkwork, convince yourself all work are created equal and smile ’em all to death. All in a day’s work in Stockholm.

So maybe summer serves a function. Just throwing it out there: it’s either a rehab, or a re-envisioning.

Rehab in the sense that you finally get to breathe without a bunch of grunt work on your shoulders, you quit every facet of school you can, and you come back in the fall with hastily-done work and regret/irritation that you didn’t space out your workload over all your free time (I speak with too much experience); it rehabilitates you for another year at school, where your teacher builds and schedules your learning for you, and by the end of the school year, you do feel accomplished, but in that awkward way when someone compliments you on store-bought pie-filling, rather than a cake which you made from scratch.

Re-envisioning in the sense that you have ruminated and contemplated and reflected, have combed through your school year’s learning with grains of salt relative to your care for them, how they matter to you. In the summer, you have the barest infrastructure to keep you conscious of school as an entity (summer reading, writing), and at this point you know how you best fit in (or out) of the school’s system. Once you are comfortable with that, you start doing work on your own, and moving forward on your own, and school becomes the extra jacket you keep slung over your arm that you don’t mind carrying around, per se, but would most definitely put down, put on, put into some kind of use at any given chance.

I’d like to be re-envisioning, especially seeing as it seems terribly convenient for the process of writing a senior thesis. I was so excited about writing the thesis for the past year, O woe be naive me. Nah, I’m still excited, just excited in that jump-up-and-down-and-cry-and-puke way. It’s only June, and the panic’s already settling in. Relatively unwarranted panic, but when has that ever stopped anything?

I’d like for my summer to be re-envisioning, but for now, I might be better off working the rehab. Just a month– I think I deserved it (Junior Year was exhausting in the best way, which is the worst way, ’cause you like that feeling of accomplished exhaustion). In July, I’ll get back on my feet, hopefully rejuvenated in a September way, and move forth with awesome work ethic.

For now, I think I’ll settle for another glass of orange juice.