Essays on Childhood: A Sense of Place

Writing About Place: “Where I’m From”

/ Elizabeth Gaucher / 2 Comments

I am from pastel and oil, acrylic and watercolor, pencil and ink, wood and ruler, hammer and nail, chisel, chainsaw, miter, drill, screw.

I am from Mr. Rogers and Bob Marley, Uncle Wiggly and The Rainbow Goblins, The Monkey King and Thumbelina.

I am from a marriage and a divorce, love and its opposite, the familiar clang of the world at its end and at its beginning, splitting apart and then reformed, broken and whole, the consistency of two people working out their distances across town and across a river and across a home and across a little girl.

Fascinated?  Visit the Essays on Childhood website to read the entire piece of writing and to connect with writer Valley Haggard, the founder of Richmond Young Writers!

Many thanks go out to Valley for her generous permission to share her writing on Esse Diem and Essays on Childhood.

“There’s No Crying in a Tobacco Field”

/ Elizabeth Gaucher / 1 Comment

Writers participating in the 2011 Essays on Childhood may be interested in this link from the North Carolina Writers’ Network (NCWN):  Rose Post Creative Nonfiction Competition Winners Announced.  This essay sounds right in line with the work we are doing at Esse Diem around Essays on Childhood, especially the sense of place focus in 2011.

The winning essay, “There’s No Crying in a Tobacco Field,” is described by a contest judge as follows:

“This essay took me into a world I barely knew—a North Carolina tobacco field—and taught me something,” Varner said. “The writer effortlessly weaves together a personal narrative about working as a ‘tobacco kid’ in the fields and the chilling research about the unseen health hazards thousands of children surely suffered. Here is a piece wrestling with the hard lessons learned plucking leaves from the field and long-term medical concerns these former tobacco kids could face.”

The NCWN is a wonderful resource, and I encourage anyone writing for the EOC project to peruse it.  I like to think of the Essays on Childhood as one day being part of something larger that will offer even more resources and encouragement to writers, a la NCWN.

West Virginia is fortunate to have West Virginia Writers, Inc., which I am rather ashamed to say is new to me but I was quite pleased to find online today.  I am looking forward to being a part of that network, and I hope anyone participating in the EOC project will visit the WVW site and engage the resources there.

Happy writing!

Image credit:  The Human Rights Brief