ENGL 399 Writing Assignment #2 REVISED

first-person account of a body part, re-worked. is this too oblique? 

Thunder strikes, bellowing through the sky as the winds shriek through black air. The sudden rush overwhelms me, flash floods of sound filling my brain. I shudder as the uproar increases. It becomes too much. I cover my ears with both hands. The waves are cut off but they die slowly, echoing with diminished force inside tiny vaulted grottos until sheer exhaustion forces them to hush.   

Sound never leaves me. Every once in a while, in a very long while, the waves quiet. I breathe, deep and slow. Sounds collects in far corners, smoothly washing over deserted beaches as the moon pulls the tide towards himself. Ripples barely mar the clear mirror of the night sky. But sound rarely dries up entirely. In times of drought, eddies still whisper and sigh across the floor. Tiny ghosts of waves lap against the edges, reminding all that they are still there, that they are loath to leave. 

When music or talking or thunder or shouting rises again, the sound swirls in and down and around, going deeper and deeper. The cusp of the channels, rising in a bowl shape, surrounds the depths, protecting the more delicate pathways. Waves crash in a world where up and down is sideways and diagonal. All furrows lead to the center, beckoning the waves to swirl down, down, until they have disappeared in translation into my head as I hear them arrive. Some escape, some come swooshing back to the surface, but most pummel through the hole in my skull. Boom. Boom. Boom.

And they never stop. 

ENGL 399 Writing Assignment #5 REVISED

non-fiction story, draft 2. i struggled ending this draft.

At 13 years old, I walked into school for the first time. I walked back out before the day was over. I was the willing participant in a family experiment; after being home schooled for the first seven grades of my education, it was time to try public school. Eighth grade was the year to do it, both by reason and default: it would be good, we thought, to acclimate to the culture of public school before the GPA years. My sister had also started in eighth grade, but that was more directly affected by the chemo that wiped out our mom's white blood cells for a year, leaving her exhausted at the thought of teaching an eighth grader in addition to four younger children. The cancer was gone by the time my year arrived, though, and calculating the complex formula of my personality, academic needs, and age, we reached a compromise. I would climb onto the yellow bus with my sister at whatever inhuman hour it arrived, go to algebra and chorus and PE, and then vanish from the school before the sixth graders could swallow their first bite of peanut-butter-and-jelly.

ENGL 399 Writing Assignment #4

non-fiction story plans and ideas

CONCEPT: Transitioning from homeschooling to public school and how that shaped me

BASIC OUTLINE:
--Scene: speaking at graduation
--Scene: flashback to where I came from (academic adjustment)
--Reflect: social adjustment (with snapshots)
--Reflect: how the challenge reflected in who I was standing at the podium

SNAPSHOTS: 

--Since I only went part-time, I stood out. (Our team was called Odyssey, and my end-of-the-year award was "Phantom of the Odyssey.") 

--"What, do you get A's in homeschool classes too?" A benign-sounding quotation, betrayed by the scornful tone of the asker.

--"Do you go to class in your pajamas?" I must've gotten this question a million times.