Last Wednesday afternoon, while driving home from campus, I heard a story on National Public Radio about New York City’s ongoing effort to re-plant its storm-damaged beaches with native grasses. It turns out that seeds from those grasses have been painstakingly preserved at the city’s Greenbelt Native Plant Center on Staten Island, and those seeds […]
I came to Middlebury, Vermont, last week on family business. I like to think I would have explored, and documented, any place where I was staying for nine days, especially if it was late spring in the northern hemisphere. And I’m sure I would have brought my bicycle, even if it was not a traditionally […]
Here’s a short movie, exported from Keynote, about teaching writing with maps. My goal was to collect examples of the kinds of maps that my students might create or use in their own writing about place. Let me know what you think! (There’s no audio on this one; as a couple of you have already […]
In April, I took several day-long bicycle trips from a cabin in Laurel Springs, North Carolina, both north and south on the Blue Ridge Parkway. The furthest I went south was to the Northwest Trading Post in Glendale Springs, NC, on April 13, 2013. The cabin is about 0.8 mile from the Parkway (milepost 246), […]
City of Rhetoric 