To The Woods - Day 7 - June 3, 2015

Today we did vignettes. No field trip, just vignettes. We were taught a mini-lesson on vignettes that was fairly interesting. Vignettes are small passages of writing no more than 800 words long that evoke emotions and are usually written in the form of a poem, some sort of art, or a narrative using as many senses as possible. When writing a vignette, it is important to keep in mind that the purpose of your writing is to make the reader feel something. We followed five steps to create a vignette. The first step is to create a web of words stemming from one central word. The second step is to choose a focus or a main idea from this web. The third step is to find a picture of your focus or visualize it in your mind. The fourth step is to determine what medium of writing it will be written in and from what point of view. The final step is to draft and re-draft the vignette. We started by creating a practice vignette based on a provided picture. Here is what I came up with:

The picture we used for practice 

The web of words I came up with for this one 

I decided that my focus would be on the mountain, and that my piece would be a monologue with a poem-style arrangement from the point of view of the mountain. 

I stand tall over my kingdom.

Everything here is here because of me.

My hat of snow falls away,

tumbling past the treeline, bringing life to life.

The sun bathes my left side,

the shadows cool my right,

Regulating temperatures in my vibrant valley.

Even up here, the rich pine scent finds its way to me.

I peer upon the valley's boulders,

pieces of my own self brought away by the bubbling stream.

Other mountains surround me,

each with their own valley teeming with life.

Suddenly I am insignificant,

a lonely piece in an overwhelming puzzle, 

but I look at my valley and think.

Everything is here because of me.

I stand tall over my kingdom.

And I feel insignificant no more.

I went through all the same steps with the picture of a turtle I took at Cox as directed by the teachers. Here is what I came up with:

The turtle 

The web of words I came up with for this one

I decided that my focus would be on the ripples of water and that the piece would be a monologue from my point of view. 

I stand firmly upon this curved bridge 

scanning the dark water for life. 

I always seem to miss the wildlife around me,

so I feel I must find a turtle.

Soft ripples spread themselves out, glinting.

Sudden sunlight in my eyes.

I hear no animal movement, only ripples.

My eyes follow a set of ripples to their source.

Smells of wet sediment clog my nose

when Lo! A turtle has shown itself to me.

The source of the ripples

whose shell hardly contrasts the water

whose head rests gently on the surface 

floats easily among the pond flora. 

As you can see, my first poem is of much higher quality than the second poem. I think I found it so much easier to write the first poem because there was more going on in the subject picture, more to write about, more left to the imagination. With the turtle picture, there was nothing happening in the photo and I know exactly what was going on around me when I took it, leaving nothing to the imagination. To finish the day we watched a movie based off of a book, Never Cry Wolf. I loved the movie. It was about a dude who lived in the wilderness observing a family of wolves. The movie had a strong theme of nature presentation and was beautifully filmed and put together. It made me really want to visit the arctic circle.