<![CDATA[Hawk News: Kenny Lake School's Writers' Workshop - Voley Blog]]>Wed, 22 May 2013 20:27:40 -0800Weebly<![CDATA[50 Below]]>Sun, 23 Dec 2012 21:46:19 GMThttp://www.hawknews.org/2/post/2012/12/50-below.html     When Robert Frost stated in Fire and Ice, “Some say the world will end in fire, some say ice,” he was, of course, speaking metaphorically.  Poets tend to do that. If he had composed that same poem in Alaska, he might have been speaking literally.
    After what seems an eternity of 45 to 50 below, I realize the word “cold” does little to express the all-encompassing, creeping, strangling, compounding darkness of that experience. The Russian word for cold -- ha-loadnia -- seems better suited to express the sentiment I feel, especially if you stress the first syllable and shiver when saying the rest. What word can possibly capture the anxious terror you feel of getting stranded while driving along a lonely road? What word can capture the icy fist that stings and numbs every inch of exposed flesh of your body, first your nose and ears, then your toes and fingers; and slowly strangles your flesh and spirit like an icy anaconda? What word captures the sensation of the headache you receive when you attempt to breathe outside air through your nose? The cold beckons you; it wants to possess you and strangle you from the inside out. It is an icy relative who refuses to leave and weighs on you like a bad dream. It teaches us that nature can be a cold, thoughtless, unrelenting beast – that anyone who clings to a Disneylike, prelapsarian mindset is likely to be taken out with an icy sickle.    
    How do I explain the frustration of trying to start my truck at 50 below, or the sound of water flung from a cup cracking in the snow? How do I explain how my snowpants sound like waxpaper shortly after I step outside, or how the cold zings my metal glasses and begins to numb my eyes? How do I convey the haunting awe I feel that when I drive 10 miles from the well with five-gallon jugs full of water in the back of my truck, they are half-frozen by the time I get home? Or, how a 12-inch diameter piece of firewood splits like a potato chip? The only possible way to survive for more than five minutes outside is to dress up in long underwear, furs, bunny boots – then waddle along with the grace of an underwater tin man.
    Day after day, the cold grates me, my mindset that of a traveler crossing a swift river – one misstep will send me tumbling into an icy abyss where a cold dungeon awaits.  The cold does not have a heart. It is brutal, amoral, and relentless. It forces me to conclude that we humans, stripped of our technological cocoon, are very frail creatures, little more than walking petunias despite all our civilized pretensions.
    Fifty below forces me to contemplate the ironies and fundamentals of life. I came to Alaska because I enjoy the outdoors, but I find myself spending about 23 ¾ hours of each day indoors. We pay money to run fridges, to keep our food cold inside when outside the resource is free. It’s kind of like paying for a tanning booth in Hawaii.
    It’s amazing how the cold can strip away everything which seems important until your mind focuses on three essentials: heat, water, pipes. You need these first two to survive, and the last to live with a degree of comfort. When the power went out the other night, it could have led to disaster, but fortunately I have a wood stove and a winter’s supply of wood. When a drain pipe froze, I quickly rushed outside, unscrewed the couplings holding them together and brought the pipes into the cabin, standing them straight up with the ends in a bucket next to the woodstove where they would slowly unleash their frozen chunks, which I told my kids were homemade otter pops. They were not amused.
    Yet, and it’s a tentative yet, there is something almost mystical in the cold. Everything is bleak, stark, pristine, that even the early morning sunlight rays would seem to shatter if you touched them with a stick. I consider how Alaskan frogs are designed to endure such a winter; how the spruce trees manage to keep their limbs from snapping; and how the ravens still manage to squawk insolently as they fly by in the mornings. For once, I feel as though we are all in this together – men, women, flora and fauna. If a group of frogs and ravens suddenly wound up on my porch, I would rush to let them in.  We are all brothers of the cold. Everyone come in, sit by the fire; it’s crazy out there! Fifty below creates a strange fraternity, delivering empathy – a shared understanding -- for others facing the same perils.  
    During quieter moments, I feel kinship with the Russians of all people. Tolstoy in War and Peace  said Russia could thank “General Winter” for helping his countrymen to defeat Napoleon, but also Charles XII of Sweden (and later Hitler). And perhaps winter is one reason the Copper Basin has not turned into one congested city. I can thank winter for keeping out the hordes, for protecting us in the same way winter protected the Russians. This sentiment can grow into arrogance – a degree of climactic chauvinism as the writer Richard Paul Evans said, “It’s a peculiar character flaw to those of us from cold climates that we feel superior to those who have the sense to live elsewhere.”
    I do find solace in the fact that sometime the dungeon will fall; nothing lasts forever. I will howl with delight when it warms to 20 below, and think we have been annexed into the banana belt when it breaks zero. That’s what 50 below does to me. But for now, this cold spell teaches me to stay focused on what is simple, to avoid any rash moves. More than anything, General Winter orders me to consider that life is precarious and precious, that none of us should ever take anything for granted.
    I will obey that order.  

]]><![CDATA[Shakespeare and The Great Digression]]>Fri, 07 Dec 2012 21:28:08 GMThttp://www.hawknews.org/2/post/2012/12/shakespeare-and-the-great-digression.html     Twenty years ago I landed my first teaching job working with fifth- and sixth-graders in the Yup’ik Eskimo village of Scammon Bay. At my orientation I was given a fat, glossy book with a lamb on it and told that I was to teach reading using this resource. And together my students and I suffered through stories about mall shopping, garage sales, and Arizona vacation homes. The book performed a miracle in my students: it had the almost mystical ability to transform their bright eyes into glazed donuts in 500 words or less.
    One day we stumbled upon a picture of William Shakespeare in a story about England. One student asked me about Shakespeare, and I told him he was one of my favorite authors. He then asked the one dreaded question that has destroyed countless philosophies, doctrines, and regimes – not to mention curriculums: “Why?” And so began what I call The Great Digression that would forever change the way I approached education; I spoke of the characters, the puns, colorful language – of murders, heroic triumphs, witches, fairies and pithy insults. The students wanted more. I shared a few of Mercutio’s lines from “Romeo and Juliet,” and their eyes cleared up. I completely missed the objectives in the day’s reading lesson in a story about a boy who decides to sell oranges from his grandfather’s orchard.  
    A couple of students came back and asked what it would take for them to perform “Romeo and Juliet.” I laughed, but I knew they were serious. I told them I would have to do some digging. I flipped through a couple of resource magazines and discovered an elementary version of the play. A week or two later, the much reduced script of “Romeo and Juliet” arrived in the mail. I asked the principal if it would be okay to perform this play with my students, and he mentioned that “Romeo and Juliet” might not be “culturally relevant” to these kids. I pointed out that something about Shakespeare seemed to resound in my students’ hearts. Not wishing to discourage me, he approved the idea, perhaps recognizing that this class had chased last year’s teacher into an early retirement, and anything that inspired them surely must be a good thing. Goodbye lamb book, hello Shakespeare.
    So we set to work. We divided up the parts, and my young students leaped onto that tricky, tongue-wrenching terrain known as Shakespearean English. They fired off their thous, woos, and come hithers. Gradually, they began to discover the beauty in Shakespeare’s poetry, and laugh at the rich, quirky characters. Across my walls were posted sections from the scripts, and the students sometimes missed gym in favor of working on our play. Two cousins played the part of Romeo and Juliet, and the student who was always out in the hall because of troublemaking became Mercutio. He never sat out in the hall again, and when he “caught” his first seal, a huge rite-of-passage for a young boy, he stated that he had “wooed” it.
    On performance night, outfitted in the gaudiest costumes Value Village could muster, this little class of fifth- and sixth-graders shined. The parents, elders, and curious community members nodded and laughed with approval. Shakespeare entered the hearts of these young people, who, if you believed the cultural pundits, would never have related to the stories told by a crudgy, 400-year-old Englishmen. Shakespeare was right, the skeptics wrong, and even before our performance he had proven to be one of the most enduring and transcultural of artists –inspiring people in China, Russia, the Middle East – why his play Macbeth was  adapted by the Tlingit in Southeast Alaska. Only the Bible has been translated into more languages. President Lincoln kept a copy of Shakespeare’s works on his desk, and we know he was no slouch. Shakespeare proves that imagination can tie us together as human beings.
    We went on to perform Macbeth, using ketchup for the bloody murder scene, and The Tempest where an old wooden skiff filled in for the shipwreck scene. And through it all I watched some very young people drawn into the Bard’s orbit, as if by a spell. If you were to ask me why, I would have to reduce everything to two reasons:
    Shakespeare’s language and his three-dimensional characters are mesmerizing, and through magic touch the common core of who we are as humans. The character Hamlet has haunted me my entire life. I have watched and read the play at least 30 times, and each time I journey through the words, I am drawn to some different discovery. Recently, I have pondered the way Hamlet apologizes to Laertes right before their famous duel with these words:

Free me so far in your most generous thoughts
That I have shot my arrow o'er the house
And hurt my brother.

How gracious, how beautiful.

    This year as we produce the Tempest, the same hidden treasures abound. During class, when I am making an important point about a character, I will often look at the class and exclaim Prospero’s warning to Miranda: “Dost thou attend me.” And my class, like Miranda, responds: “Sir, Most heedfully.”
    Even Trinculo, the fool, can be profound. In Act II, Scene II, when he is examining what he thinks is a dead monster fish, but in reality is Caliban, he pierces the heart of modern men with these words:

When they will not give a doit (dollar) to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian.

    He’s absolutely right. How many of us would spend money on cheap entertainment, cage fighting in Anchorage comes to mind, rather than to help out a homeless person? Wow! His words sometimes force us to consider the absurdity of ourselves.
    And then there is Prospero, an enraged aristocrat, who slowly learns the importance of patience, mercy, and forgiveness. He realizes that to be vengeful is to slowly poison your heart and soul, and he sees the light in Act V when he says:

Though with their high wrongs I am struck to the quick,
Yet with my nobler reason 'gaitist my fury
Do I take part: the rarer action is
In virtue than in vengeance:
   
    But Prospero also enchants us, forces us to consider what is important in life. So much of what we consider essential, is really not. Every material thing on this earth will ultimately wither and perish as he points out:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

    Soon our revels – this play -- will be ended, but one thing will endure: Shakespeare has ignited something deep in our students with beautiful words spoken by some of the most intriguing characters who have ever graced the stage. Where will these words take our students? Has Shakespeare permeated their hearts and minds? I do believe, they would answer, “Most heedfully.” Indeed.

]]><![CDATA[Portrait of a Meat Wagon]]>Thu, 01 Nov 2012 14:03:08 GMThttp://www.hawknews.org/2/post/2012/11/portrait-of-a-meat-wagon.htmlPicture
    It sits in my yard like a warrior serpent, with nicks in its body and cracks along the windshield. Venom spews from its front radiator, and oily blood drops from its crankcase, as it lies precariously suspended between life and the junkyard. Despite the rust, its age, and the general assault of time, this green truck – affectionately known as the Meat Wagon -- seems ready to pounce on any adventure I might throw its way – a moose hunting trip, a dipnetting excursion, a run for manure.
    It’s a 1979 Old Green Dodge that I bought from my neighbor, John, about seven years ago for $1,000, and the requirement that I pick it up in Portland loaded with his essential junk and drive it to Alaska.
    I wanted a beater -- a warrior truck -- that I could take hunting or fishing and leave at the trailhead for days, not worrying if some Neanderthal vandalized it. I wanted a truck I could take up the Klutina River Road, a vehicle that felt no inhibition about running over stumps, mud puddles, and other assorted flora and fauna. This truck certainly fulfilled these requirements. It’s a sore to look at, has dubious reliability, and is in need of therapy. It survived a troubled and abused history in Portland where it was used for hauling greasy transmissions and engines at a taxi shop, its owners refusing to take it out on the road because it would have failed every emissions or safety test thrown its way.
    This green truck is an EPA nightmare, or straight out of a Grade B country and western song. If you fill it full of gas, it spills a quart or more on the ground; it burns oil at such a rate that it undergoes a constant transfusion so there is no reason to change the oil.  She also came with front tires that were bigger than those in the rear, which meant that if you hit a bump or made a turn, the front wheels would grind hard against the wheel wells, sending out a death grunt. To start this “cold blooded” beast requires no fewer than 20 pumps on the gas pedal, or the gas pedal arm, because the plastic gas pedal is long gone. But when she fires up, she purrs like a lion, awake and ready to pounce on the road, unless it cuts out when I push too far on the gas. On any trip over 100 miles, I bring along a milk carton full of supplies: one gallon of oil, automatic transmission fluid, and brake fluid. I also carry a steady supply of tools that practically fill up one side of the extended cab.
    John is the Mother Teresa of old trucks. He sees life where others see scrap, and his commitment to old Dodges, particularly Power Wagons, could be considered noble or troubling depending on your perspective. I like to think that we saved this old truck from a certain death in the city where it would have rusted away in some junkyard. For the past seven years I have owned this old Dodge, and she has packed out numerous caribou, moose and king salmon, which is how it was christened the “Meat Wagon.” It has been at the center of many great adventures in my life. It hauled out my first Copper Basin moose, my son’s first caribou, and his first moose. It hauled out more than 300 salmon from assorted dipnetting adventures, and we used the stout rack on it to display the catch from an amazing day of king fishing with John and Mike Lawrence. We filleted the fish right on the hood.
    When the old Dodge is not on the road, I use it for a staging area. I have dried clothes, meat bags, and waders on its black rack, and cleaned my guns on the hood, thoughtlessly spilling solvent on it. I tuck my smelly filet gloves underneath the wiper blades where they air and dry. This is a good life for the Green Dodge, and I honestly feel it displays pride in being my indispensable vehicle. The only time I abused it was when the tailgate got stuck right before I headed to the mountains on a hunting trip. Not being one for subtlety, or the finer arts of mechanical repair, I took a sledge hammer to bust out the tailgate. Now it doesn’t have one.
    Most of the time it is a compliant truck, but we have an uneasy, edgy relationship. I worry about its reliability, and I think the truck worries I will send it down the road for scrap metal. My suspicion about the Meat Wagon’s faithfulness plays in John’s favor. Every time I go on an adventure, I need to bring him along as trusty mechanic in case troubles strikes.
For the most part, this old Dodge delivers me home when it counts. True it can be temperamental, but I think it appreciates its liberation from its former Portland slavery. It stranded me only twice: once when a fuel pump went out, and once when the alternator went kaput, but these were fixed in a matter of hours. Other than that, there have been just a few minor mishaps like last year when the wiper motor died during a rain storm and I had to drive with my eyes directly over the wheel, peering through the window as if I were exiting a coma, or when the heat went out during a September drive to go moose hunting, and we had to roll down the windows to keep them from frosting up; or when the lights flickered then died and I had to push the speed limit in the last fading light to get home – transforming an otherwise ordinary trip into sheer terror. This was the only time I cussed at the vehicle, calling it a Chevy, and in a darker moment yet – a Ford. I’ll admit, I lost it, and I feel remorse to this day. I was not born with the mechanic’s gene, and so The Green Dodge provides me with a chance to redeem a degree of mechanical competence.
    When you look under the hood, there are only about four moving parts, and you can crawl inside – Okie style -- with the greatest of ease. I have tuned her up, replaced the belts, starter motor, and automatic transmission cooler, along with a few other parts. I feel like I understand at least 20 percent of what it takes to make this baby run, and that gives me a little solace on longer trips.
    Sometimes I think about selling the Meat Wagon, but the nostalgic bond is just too great. When I see it covered with snow in my yard, it looks homely like a fermented green pig in a blanket, and I wonder how many more summers this old truck can survive before everything seizes up. How many more times can this old truck endure the humiliation of getting passed by some guy in a shiny $45,000 Dodge with a double cab, and a Hemi under the hood, complete with heated seats, iPod plug in, and a $1,500 a month payment? Perhaps I should just park it in the woods, or sell it cheap to someone in McCarthy where it will find other companions in convalescence, or let the mechanical buzzards scavenge parts, but I get a sense the Meat Wagon still wants to stay in the game. Its value is greater than the sum of its parts.
    Embedded in this vehicle are some of my most precious memories; the front carpet contains so much spilled coffee, and fire extinguisher residue from when Wesley and John horsed around, and there are blood stains in the bed from game that has been transported, and dents from my sledgehammer.  I remember sleeping in the cab during a rainy night in Cordova, and then there was the time it carried a group of students across the Million Dollar Bridge when Child’s Glacier calved and the students whooped in delight.  I bet the old beast thought the students were cheering for it.  A new owner would invariably not appreciate this truck’s rich, dignified history.  I’ll admit it seems a little ungracious to even consider selling the Meat Wagon. In some ways, it has become part of the family.  Our two lives are intertwined; the Meat Wagon has become an eerie reflection of who I am -- and to sell it -- would be akin to selling myself.
]]><![CDATA[The pursuit of 500 and other crimes against humanity]]>Sat, 01 Sep 2012 19:12:11 GMThttp://www.hawknews.org/2/post/2012/09/the-pursuit-of-500-and-other-crimes-against-humanity.html It finally happened. On August 23, 2012, we reached my goal of creating a website that attracted 500 hits. The way I found this out was by accessing the statistics that come with the Weebly website that we use to build hawknews.org. It was on this statistics page that I saw the number 508, the most hits we have ever received in a single day.  

I was happy. For some deeply mystifying reason I established the number 500 as success, and I felt delighted throughout the year when we achieved 390 hits several times. And yet, I held onto that arbitrary 500 number as a goal. When the magical 508 number appeared, I was delighted. But slowly, I started asking questions:  What does 500 matter? What does it say or mean? Actually, as my scruples took hold of me, the answer came back, “not much.”

Last year I wanted to create a Writers’ Workshop class that brought in a lot of traffic to its website, and one that helped students attain higher writing assessment scores. It took both of these accomplishments to make me realize that my “lofty” goals listed to the superficial side.

I want hawknews to be relevant. I want it to be a voice for my students, and a gathering place for all of those people whose hearts seek to connect with our community and its writers. I want it to be a place where our emerging student writers take chances, develop confidence, and more than anything else – find their voice. To see my students sneaking to the hawknews.org website when they really should be working on a class assignment, now that’s relevance – that’s success.

Our website should celebrate the “endless variety” of life here in the Copper Basin. It should tell the amazing stories of the people who live here, the adventures they have, and the events that are important in their lives. It should be a place where Spencer Jones, who is stationed in Afghanistan, can go to find “encouragement.” It should be a place where Sami Knutson, while attending school in Australia, can go to stay in touch with her sisters. It should be like a warm campfire on a cold night, a place where families can celebrate our unique way of life in a wild place that many in the Lower 48 can’t even imagine.

On an average day we get over 120 hits. That seems pretty steady these days.  I am encouraged that so many people have taken an interest in our students’ creative work. If we have a mission statement it is this: “Our website will mean something special to our student writers and their readers.” That’s our guiding vision, and we’ll just let the numbers take care of themselves.

]]><![CDATA[Adrina: She danced]]>Wed, 22 Aug 2012 16:11:14 GMThttp://www.hawknews.org/2/post/2012/08/adrina-she-danced.html On my back wall, among some of the best memories of my teaching career, is a picture of two young ladies taken when they were in Washington D.C. in 2006. The girl to the left appears elegant, confident, happy, and determined – a look that seemed to pierce everything before her with a desire to set the world on fire. It’s a photo I look to often when I try to make sense of that day I received the phone call informing me that Adrina Knutson had died in a car accident in Tanzania. It seemed so senseless; Adrina was full of hope and promise, and everything in the world seemed to be going her way.

With the grief came memories of the wonderful times I shared with Adrina as her teacher for six years. I remember the first documentary she produced on the Underground Railroad in junior high and how she seemed smitten on film at that very moment. We did a lot of hokey things in those days to achieve film effects. To create the illusion of slaves running through the forest, I rolled down my car window on the Old Edgerton, positioned the camera on the door and drove, capturing the rush of trees as they fluttered by. It was certainly not the worst effect we created as neophyte film producers. In the credits, Adrina even thanked my Old Dodge Ram 50 for its service to the cause.

Adrina went on to co-produce a documentary about the Barrow Duck-in, the 1961 protest of federal hunting laws by Barrow duck hunters. This documentary won the state History Day competition and took Adrina to Washington D.C. On my wall I have the picture I just referred to of her and her dear friend Dana Betts.

Adrina had a poetic touch when it came to film. I remember asking her to put together the Social Life section of “Bonanza: The Story of Kennecott,” and when it came time for our trip to the mine, she had everything ready: script, cue cards, costumes and a vision of what she wanted to achieve. She was a born organizer, one of those rare people who could take stock of the resources, form a vision, and figure out a way to make it reality.  Her Social Life chapter is still my favorite section in the documentary. Adrina went on produce “Stampede: The Story of the 1898 Valdez Gold Rush.” As always, Adrina handled that challenging task with grace, composure and artistry.  It was a joy watching her work with the other students when filming. She took charge, telling the students where to stand, what to say, and how to say it with expression.

Adrina went on to use film as a vehicle for exploring her passions. She produced a short documentary on the battle against AIDS in Africa, which I think helped shape her commitment to use film for social good. She produced an award-winning film on Martha Graham, the great American dancer. Martha was a bit unorthodox, perhaps a bit clumsy, but yet she danced. At the end of the documentary Adrina could very well have been talking about herself when she said this: “Martha Graham was an individual in history because she did not give up; she followed her dreams, she pursued them; she worked hard; she had passion. She was an individual because she stepped out of her box, and created a stage of her own.” One could say those very words about Adrina.

But perhaps Adrina’s greatest Opus had nothing to do with film: During Adrina’s senior year, and I’m not really sure how it happened, but a cold wall formed between us. These things sometimes happen when you are a teacher, and they just linger on, but not with Adrina. One year later she sent me a letter, saying she was sorry for what had happened and thanking me for inspiring her as a teacher. She took it upon herself to remove the wall of bitterness. Her example proved what we all know instinctively -- that life is too short to hold a grudge. If we really want to honor Adrina, we should remember her courage and emulate it. We should rake our hearts of bitterness, go up to a person who we are not on the best of terms with and say, “I know there are hard feelings between us, and I am sorry. It is wrong to feel this, and life is too short to continue on this way.” In Colossians 3:13, it says we should “Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you.”

We could honor Adrina through this action, and we know it would make the world a better place, and it would make us better people. But do we have the courage to do it? Life is too short to dwell in bitterness.

I will never forget her passion for life, her willingness to take chances, to live on the edge. I will never forget trying to teach her to act like the mildly insane Sir Toby Belch when we performed Twelfth Night, or how to play Bottom, a character transformed into a donkey, in a Midsummer Night’s Dream.

At 21, it seems that Adrina had an unfinished life, like a fireweed cut before it fully bloomed. But in a world where so many people define success as a number in a bank account, Adrina recaptured that independent Alaska spirit that I believe came from her grandparents, her family, and the beautiful homestead on which she lived. She was not preoccupied with the making of a living; she was focused on making a life.

Adrina loved deeply; she laughed constantly; she was passionate, forgiving, eccentric, all of which were held together by her wild, yet gentle Alaskan spirit. Her life certainly seemed unfinished, until you realize that when she threw her nets onto the water, she captured so much of what is good, so much life. We should all be so lucky. She understood what many of us take a lifetime trying to figure out: it’s the memories, the human connections, the passionate pursuit of art and truth, and the love we have for each other and God – that matter most.

Adrina’s showed us the importance of following our dreams, to do what we do with passion and a forgiving heart. When the troubles in this world became too much, Adrina adapted the best way she knew how. She stepped out of her box, and created a stage of her own.

And then, she danced… She really danced.

]]><![CDATA[Let's use the film subsidy to gamble on our youth]]>Fri, 03 Aug 2012 19:42:06 GMThttp://www.hawknews.org/2/post/2012/08/lets-use-the-film-subsidy-to-gamble-on-our-youth.html I was sitting in the Golden Spruce restaurant in Kenny Lake enjoying a fine lunch with my wife when I was accosted by a scout working for a New York film company that desired a location for a new reality TV show about a family that moves to the wilderness. This scout asked me if I knew some “real” Alaskans she could interview. I was torn between screaming and running – my indignation further fueled by news of a TV reality show about cage fighting in Anchorage, and the Taco Bell airdrop – two schemes whose producers hope to win reimbursement from the state under the film subsidy program begun in 2009.

Big film studios get to pedal their skewed image of Alaska and we get the bill. So far, our state has spent more than $30 million on this program that doesn’t make sense from an economic, or common sense perspective. I think it’s time for us to think differently and invest in Alaska’s potential, instead of enriching a multitude of digital carpet-baggers from California and New York.

How about setting aside $250,000 a year and allow Alaska high school and college film programs to apply for $25,000 grants to tell the story of Alaska. I can think of a dozen stories about our history that Hollywood would not touch because the subject matter does not pander to the viewing public’s base instincts, and might actually require some depth, some sense of Alaska to produce. Why not give our students the financial support to produce stories about Project Chariot, the Allen Expedition, The Barrow Duck-in, or the story of Samme Gallaher as told in her book Sisters? Imagine our own filmmakers telling stories about an Inupiat whale hunt, the Pebble Mine project, Jim Crow in Alaska, or give them the resources to turn a powerful Native legend into a modern day parable. I know the local cable and public television stations would love to air these programs that would be both fascinating and substantive.

The History Channel has proven that America has an appetite for meaningful stories, and Alaska with its rich colorful collisions and cultures, offers plenty to engage viewers across the nation and the world. No one can predict how our economy will shape up in the years ahead, but Alaska’s mystique – its ability to inspire, captivate, and educate the viewing public will not be diminished. Our rugged beauty and lifestyle have given us what economists call a “comparative advantage.” Why not allow Alaskans to exploit this advantage? Are we too feeble-minded or burdened by an inferiority complex to believe that Alaskans are incapable to producing meaningful films about their own state and people? As an educator, I believe we have the most creative students on earth who would rise to the challenge.

Alaska history is full of outside corporations exerting control over our resources beginning with the Russian promyslenniki through the Seattle fish canneries and the Morgan Guggenheim Syndicate all the way to today with Big Oil. Why can’t we take back our own stories and invest in the creativity of our own people who understand the nuances of this great land and its people? Let’s direct a sliver of the film incentive program toward our students and see what they come up with. If we can support Taco Bell or cage fighters, why can’t we believe in our own people? Giving our students the opportunity to write scripts, shoot video, and produce their own films will have more of an enduring impact than the current subsidy program. 

Let’s take a chance on the creative potential of our youth. Let’s give them the finances to start telling their own stories, and let’s start growing our film industry from the ground up – not through wishful trickle down thinking – the hope that Hollywood and New York can be trusted to tell our stories, and through some kind of economic osmosis provide the impetus for a homegrown filming industry, that in reality, leaves us holding little more than a bag full of old tacos.

]]><![CDATA[Winter Tracks]]>Mon, 02 Apr 2012 04:22:44 GMThttp://www.hawknews.org/2/post/2012/04/winter-tracks.html     A little dust of snow on the windshield always brings excitement for me in the morning.  I live on the Old Edgerton Highway, and it’s hard to get fired up about anything at 5:30 a.m., much less a drive through the dead of night to school. But the dust on the windshield indicates that the Old Edgerton will also have a thin blanket of snow on it, which means it’s showtime for animal tracks made during the night.
    As soon as I turn on to the old road, my headlights scan the white blanket of snow, unblemished and untouched.  I see a set of light indents like miniature roses kneaded daintily into the road. These must be fox tracks. They wind, meander, and twist across the road like a ribbon. The set I am following dips into every driveway I pass, almost as though this animal is making the rounds like a door-to-door salesman.  
    Once in a while I will see the expanded tear shaped snowshoe hare tracks along the road. They rarely run alongside the road, and are usually perpendicular to it. They scramble from side to side, perhaps to avoid the lazer eyed focus of the owls that hold siege in the aspens along the road. It’s tough road on which to be a hare. Everyone is out to get you, it seems. The hares love the willows, and the owls along the road are fond of the hares, but not in a Platonic sense. Sometimes I will see the crater thud in the snow, with wing cuts off to the side, and I believe that is the mark of success, or breakfast, for a hungry owl. The other day I saw a flash of white out of the corner of my eye; it was an owl flying off with a hare in its talons. It’s a tough, cruel world in the hood.
    When I drive through a low area, I see the unmistakable signs of moose tracks. On this morning they recently attacked a stretch of willows, and their tracks drill deep into the snow on both sides of the road. Moose are the true Bohemians of the old road. They never seem to take the path of least resistance. They go straight through everything, diamond willows, young cottonwood and aspen, even fledgling spruce trees.
    I am always on the lookout for wolf tracks. Wolves travel through the hood on occasion, but rarely are they seen. I can only remember a couple times in my life when I have seen wolf along the road; for the most part they are Frostian critters, those who prefer to take the road less traveled.
    I remember walking along a trail in the Chugach one summer. On the way back down the trail I noticed a grizzly bear track stamped across my very own tracks. To punctuate the matter, he deposited scat right in my right boot track. It seemed a little indignant, a bit uncouth and uncultured, but I did not take it personally. I could have seen it as a challenge, a shot across the bow, to see who really was master of the food chain. Instead, I preferred to look at it as a friendly greeting – a scatological calling card.    
    As I drive along the road, I am struck by the realization that there is a whole wild world out there, with its own rhythms, dramas, and tragedies that cares little about my movements. But I would hardly know it; I rarely see these animals during the day.  It is as though my car is a cocoon of nocturnal bliss that hermetically seals me from the life outside my screaming wheels.  Yet an inch of snow during the night forces our worlds to intersect, and I am required to ponder the connection, but the language I read is nothing more than a white sheet of paper with punctuation marks on it. The tracks are like notes written on a page of a musical symphony I will never quite understand.
    I don’t have the answer as to what it all means to cross these nighttime visitors’ tracks with my four P245/70 R 16  studded snow tires. When I return in the evening, all the delicate artwork the animals have laid down will be gone,stomped down and scrapped away by the traffic and the Department of Transportation snow plows. No trace of this world will be left; yet I will keep waking up on those snow-dusted mornings wondering what stories lie ahead on the old road.  

]]><![CDATA[What would the world be like without poetry?]]>Sun, 29 Jan 2012 00:36:06 GMThttp://www.hawknews.org/2/post/2012/01/post-title-click-and-type-to-edit1.html_      When I first came to Kenny Lake School about 12 years ago, I remember receiving a copy of a poetry anthology produced by Mrs. Van Wyhe’s language arts class. I was immediately impressed by the quality of writing in this book. Somewhere, the place escapes me at this time, lingered a quote from a student who said -- and again -- I might not have it quite right: “What would the world be like without poetry.” 

How did this happen? How could a high school student burdened by his share of challenges, angst, and fears, arrive at such a point? It takes a talented teacher, but it also takes poetry.

    This quarter I am hoping one or two of my students will reach that same destination as Mrs. Van Wyhe’s passionate poet. I admit that I am unqualified for the job as poetry trailblazer, which portends poetic injustice. I know precious little about poetic devices. True, I do know how to distinguish a metaphor from a simile from hyperbole.  And I could probably explain the difference between an oxymoron and your ordinary, run-of-the-mill moron. But if you insisted that I explain “enjambment,” I might say it describes the process of making jam, or what happens when you stick your toe into a tight place, and I might explain alliteration is the process by which one becomes illiterate. If you asked me to describe my favorite poetic “form,” I might say it’s sitting down with a pen and paper.

    Ignorance is no excuse for inaction. This is my motto for life, which can be a particularly dangerous philosophy when applied to electrical work. And for better or worse, this is how I approach poetry –dang the devices, full speed ahead. I simply love poetry despite my deficit of mechanical devices. Every so often a poem expresses a sentiment that forces its way through the dark recesses of my reptilian brain, which makes me want to share it with others. Hopefully, by sharing poems that change how I look at the world, I can inspire the students to write.  

    Last week we read, The Farmer by W.D. Ehrhart. This elegant poem celebrates hope, hard work, and the importance of fighting for what the world might view as a lost cause. We could all use a little more Don Quixote in our lives. The students then wrote their own poems, using  different occupations as metaphors  for special qualities important in their lives.  The effect was, quite simply, magic. Thank you Harold, Audrey, Alichia and Abbie for having the courage to share your poems with all of us.  You brought warmth to our classroom, and touched all of us.  Audrey, remember Mrs. Carlson’s reaction when she walked into our class while you were reading your poem. “Wow, did you write that?” she asked. “I thought that was a poem in a book.”

    That’s the job of poetry: to rescue love, to push us forward, to make us look at the world in a new way, while forcing us to consider that there are others with whom we share a mystical bond connected by our words. In a society too obsessed with “practical skills,” poetry just might be the antidote that stirs something  meaningful deep inside our students. It just might promote compassion, understanding, and a joy that those who refuse to engage their tumultuous thoughts will never experience. And perhaps, one day, these young poets will arrive at a very special destination and proclaim: “What would the world be like without poetry?” 

    Now, that would be poetic justice, indeed.

]]><![CDATA[One Million and One]]>Thu, 03 Nov 2011 04:08:59 GMThttp://www.hawknews.org/2/post/2011/11/one-million-and-one.html Funny thing about electricity. We usually don’t pay much attention to it until the power goes off.

I watched in dismay as the headlines flashed across my computer screen. “1 MILLION WITHOUT POWER,” read the headline on CNN. A few people died, many panicked, and general mayhem was the order of the day in the cities back east. But here in the Copper Basin we usually treat a power outage a little like a surprise visit from a distant cousin – a bit of a nuisance, but something that will pass soon enough.

Tuesday night it happened here, and interestingly enough, I predicted it. We left school around 6 p.m., and when we arrived home the wind was blasting through the trees. Somehow I could sense the breaking point of a typical spruce had been breached, and I imagined it falling on a powerline, bringing discord to the people of the grid – gridus sapiens. I predicted the power would go out, and about an hour later it did.

For some reason such an event stirs my reptilian brain – the same region of the lobe where Rambo gets his inspiration – and his monosyllabic grunts. I fly into action, and I must say I enjoy it. When the lights go out, the guantlet is thrown down. My thoughts are energized: ‘Can I survive the elements? Do I have what it takes to persevere?’ Visions of Jeremiah Johnson skinning “grizz” flash through my mind as I stoke the fire, flip on the gas light valves, and find the flashlights – usually buried somewhere in the kids’ rooms. I plan for the longterm. I expect the power outage to last for days -- even weeks -- and I imagine the lonely strolls to the outhouse, melting snow for water, and chewing my boots in the morning – well, maybe, almost.

Once order is re-established, nostalgia creeps into the picture. I reminisce about how it was in the “old” days when we lived without electricity, running water, and DSL. I remember how we used to heat water on the woodstove, and pour it into a metal tub to give the kids baths. I remember those invigorating runs to the outhouse at 40 below, and the rifle blast sound of splitting wood. At the risk of sounding like a prelapsarian, I find that a strange calm permeates me when the electronics go dead.

And I must say I rather enjoyed being free from the distractions. I picked up a book, planted myself on the couch, and read in absolute bliss. I soon discovered that I could wrap my mind around a single thought. What a concept!

I recently read an article in theNew York Times about a Waldorf school in California that seems so different from the technology rich school environment I enjoy.  The school bans technology in the lower elementary grades. Before you start thinking that these people are some fundamentalist sect of Luddhites, it’s important to know that these are the children of Silicon Valley workers who work at such places as Google, Intel, Microsoft, and Miramax  -- companies that make cutting edge technology. The rationale for this school’s policy seems based on common sense. They state that technology is not a necessary ingredient to engage students, and it can sometimes wind up being a great distraction. Creativity flows from using the resources at hand in unusual ways. The school uses pens, paper, knitting needles, mud, yarn, quesadillas, cake – and yes, books -- to teach just about everything an elementary student would need to know.

Students are not missing out on technology because, as one person said, “At Google, and all these places, we make technology as brain-dead easy to use as possible. There’s no reason why kids can’t figure it out when they get older.”

So as the wind shook my house, the thought of a school that doesn’t rely on technology rocked my world. Technology can help increase engagement, but it can never really substitute for deep human connections that come from a caring environment. We should all learn to be creative with the resources at hand, and I must admit some of my best teaching techniques – the ones that engage students the most – are rather low tech: musical vocabulary chairs, last man standing, an engaging book. Sometimes we look at computers as surrogate teachers, when in reality, they are nothing more than cold pieces of silica.

I remember how meaningful it was to really get to know my students during last summer’s raft trip down the Copper River. None of us had cell phones; only a few had digital cameras. The students were forced to be creative at night, to entertain themselves without their digital pacifiers. So we played capture the flag; we invented Frisbee bowling, and we held a talent show in Cordova. The friendships and connections the students made on that trip beat anything they ever experienced over Facebook or Twitter.

As I sat there on the couch quietly imagining a classroom without technology, a world without cellphones, iPads, iTouches, interactive whiteboards, digital cameras, video cameras, tablets, a moment of clarity entered my thoughts.   

Ahh, the bliss. Ahh, the peace…. And, just then the lights came on.

]]><![CDATA[Maybe the words shouldn't be so easy to change afterall]]>Wed, 19 Oct 2011 02:28:15 GMThttp://www.hawknews.org/2/post/2011/10/maybe-the-words-shouldnt-be-so-easy-to-change-afterall.html The first real job I ever had was working as an editor for a 3,000-circulation weekly called The Wasatch Wave in Heber City, Utah. As editor, I was a virtual one-man show or circus, depending on whose opinion you believed. I wrote editorials, laid out the pages, developed pictures, sold ads, delivered the papers to local businesses, and took out the trash. I made $5.00 an hour and a commission on my ad sales. I was not a very good ad salesman– so I lived on a shoestring.

The first day on the job, the publisher took me for a tour of the business, and I was immediately impressed by the powerful offset presses that were in the back of the building. When they ran, the whole building shook, and I swore it felt like the heartbeat of the newspaper. Near these presses were relics from a bygone era: old, wooden drawers filled with linotype characters. Before the offset presses, newspaper publishers would have to arrange letters that resembled metal Scrabble pieces on a tray, spelling out each word of each sentence, of each article, on each page. It was incredibly time -consuming, so you had to make sure you precisely formed the words in your stories because editing linotype was a hard, monotonous task. You didn’t so much as align letters on a tray as nurture them into the proper place.

Offset printing required publishers to type each story on a glossy paper. This paper was then run through a waxer, cut into columns with an exacto knife, and arranged on a proof page along with the pictures. Then a negative was shot of the page, and it was formed into a plate, which was then attached to the presses. This type of printing also made revision difficult – so again, the words had to be right before the negatives were shot.

Within two years, The Wasatch Wave made the leap to digital, desktop publishing. Wow! No longer did I need to spend so much time printing out copy, waxing it, and pasting it to the proof sheets. Digital cameras came along, and that turned the darkroom into a closet. Until that time, I actually found solace in the darkroom among the fixer, developer, and other assorted chemicals. I would no longer have to open the film canisters with a can opener, and spin the film onto a spool, and place it in a small tank. I performed this job completely in the dark because one small light streak would ruin the negatives. After the negatives dried, I would slide each negative through the projection unit and shine it on the beautiful Kodak print paper. Then I would develop the prints in a series of chemical trays. It was exciting to see a print slowly come to life in the developer, and I never grew tired of the experience.

The digital age made it easy to change the words in any story. You could add, delete, and shift paragraphs around with the greatest ease. It was, quite simply, a miracle. But now I wonder if something wasn’t lost in the digital leap. Maybe the words shouldn’t be so easy to change. I wonder what it would be like to write deliberately again, knowing how painful it would be to change words once your fingers committed them to a typewriter

Years ago I had a student say it was too time consuming for him to take a better digital picture for a yearbook page. If he only knew what it was like in the old days!  I have also had students complain a little when I ask them to re-write a story, or fix the corrections. I wonder if they had to fix their writing on a linotype tray a few times, if that would force them to pay more attention to what they were crafting in the first place. Would it teach them to write more deliberately, with a little more reverence.  

A lot has changed since those early days, even more so from the days of Ben Franklin – who was probably the coolest newspaper publisher in history. However, one constant still permeates the present. Good writing – the power of the written word can still stir our souls. The computer has not made us better writers – not by a long shot. It still comes down to one person facing a blank page, armed only with their thoughts, cajoling an ember of inspiration into a piece of writing.  A writer with a computer has no advantage over another with a sharpened goose quill. Computers will never make us more creative; rather they are simply tools to help give it form.

I try to teach my students the most essential part of any story, even if it’s a podcast or a video news story, is the writing. The text should stand by itself. All the dazzling special effects in the world will not rescue a weak piece of writing. You cannot transform a lackluster piece of writing into something magical simply by adding sound effects, transitions, and other technological embellishments for the same reason you cannot turn chicken poop into chicken salad with a few spices. There are plenty of dismal Hollywood movies to prove that point.

Writing requires “blood, sweat, toil and tears.”  Sorry Winston. But writing also allows us one of the best tools for expressing ourselves, and that makes it a pursuit worth learning how to do better. I imagine that was a lesson the early Sumerians understood right from the start. Now it’s time for my students to re-discover the essential lesson I learned when I stared into that pile of linotype letters so many years ago.    

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