Mentor Text: The Sea Glass Collector by Lawrence Maxwell
Techniques:
- Imagery
- Memoir
Background –
As we move further into the post-pandemic reality of education, a lot of things are going back to normal.
For some of us, that means we’re returning to government mandated assessments. (Ugh. That sounds awful – I was trying to find a way to bridge the Canadian and American differences.) In my classroom, Grade 12 students will be writing the provincial assessment for the first time in 3 years.
The return of this test impacts the end of the semester for me, as students now write their final assessment a few weeks before the course ends. The culminating project in our memoir writing work is one of the things we’ll use to fill that time, and to work around other assessments that will disrupt the last month of this course.
As a result, I’ve been digging through shorter memoir pieces, and memoir tinged poetry looking for lots of pieces to inspire our writing.
How we might use this text:
Imagery – Often, I let my daily poetry newsletter emails pile up, and I go through a week or two of them at a time. It’s a nice way to decide which ones really pop.
And what popped in this one first off was the imagery. The way that Maxwell describes the pieces of beach glass physically resonated with me. Perhaps it’s because of the joy that my daughters still have in sharing each piece they find, the way they explain why each piece is special. Maxwell uses beautiful language to do this so succinctly. Physically describing things effectively within the constraints of a poem is a nice challenge for our writers.
He then follows it up with an imagined story, imbuing each piece he describes with something more than just a physical beauty. The nature of this collection means that the pieces are laden with mystery, their full stories unknown. Things have stories, real or imagined, that our writers should be telling.
The last stanza, where Maxwell shares the resting place of this collection is a beautiful, if melancholy image. It pushes the reader to consider the reality of a collection – a series of items we store somehow – and it will be interesting to see how they might describe the totality, and storage, of their own collections.
Memoir – It’s easy to collect memoir mentor texts that are overtly narrative, that focus on capturing a story. I love that this poem approaches the exploration of their lives through a different angle. The things around us, the things that we collect help tell our story. Perhaps our writers aren’t outwardly expressing things about themselves, or telling their stories, but the things they collect carry stories. Is it a reflection of home? Is it because of a person? How did the collection start? Which pieces have stories – of their addition to the collection, or from their time before being part of the collection? I love that this poem approaches those stories in such an abstract way, and think our writers might enjoy the challenge of hinting at those stories.
Maybe it’s because I’m writing this surrounded by books and records, with a handful of geeky collectibles on those shelves. Maybe it’s because I have dear friends with wonderful collections that I low key envy. Maybe it’s a desire to push my writers to talk about themselves without doing it as explicitly as some of the texts we’ve looked at so far suggest. Regardless of the reason, I’m glad that this piece popped out from my collection of memoir mentor texts so I could share it with you.
Do you have other pieces like this, that approach the genre of writing you’re doing in a more abstract way? Do you have other memoir poems that focus on the imagery around the subject? And obviously, what do you collect, and why does it matter to you?
Leave a comment below or find me on Twitter @doodlinmunkyboy!
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