Covenant College - Lookout Mountain, Georgia So we needed the expertise of a poet, and Anne brought her insights to meet that need. It was a fiction writing course, but the class that we had imagined was about how to improve and enrich fiction writing by practicing the disciplines of poetry. We had the honor of serving as Writers in Residence at Covenant College in Georgia during Autumn Quarter. My wife Anne co-taught this course with me. The only thing I love as much as writing is teaching. In squeaking galoshes, with mackintosh collars up and bowlers and trilbies weeping, youngish men from the offices bundled home against the thistly wind-Īnd older men, clinging on to the big, black circular birds of their umbrellas, were wafted back, up the gaslit hills, to safe, hot, slippered, weatherproof hearths, and wives called Mother, and old, fold fleabag dogs, and the wireless babbling.Ī few weeks ago, I shared the opening pages of this story with fifteen young, aspiring writers in a college writing course. Thin, dingy rain spat and drizzled past the lighted street lamps. It was six o’clock on a winter’s evening. On a rainy winter evening, under the streetlights, young men in raincoats and hats hurry home through the howling wind, grumbling, while old folks cower under umbrellas on their way home to their cozy homes where their families and dogs and flat-screen TVs are waiting for them.Īs the beginning of a story, that would be acceptable, I suppose.īut one writer wasn’t content with that. Here’s how a writer’s description might begin: You'll drive yourself crazy.What is your neighborhood like on a dark and stormy night? If you were asked to describe it, what would you write? The second one suggests that, if my usual walk is an out-and-back, I was somewhere near my turnaround point when I witnessed the accident.īut don't let those little details get in the way of my main point: When you just look at two sentences – one in the simple past, the other in the past progressive – don't search for some difference in meaning. The first one indicates that at least some of the streets in my neighborhood have sidewalks. Notice how I'm sneaking in some additional information with these two versions.
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