Tag: projects

Collectanea 25.25 Microthemes-Slash-Felt

/ Derek Mueller
⏳ Approximate reading time: 5 mins

Week of June 16, 2025

Microthemes

“One new approach that I incorporated was the use of microthemes. A microtheme is defined as ‘an essay so short that it can be typed on a single five-by-eight inch note card.’ There are four types of microtheme that I have used successfully. These are (1) summary writing, (2) supporting a thesis, (3) generating a thesis from provided data and (4) quandary posing. Each can be used to have students focus on a small segment of material and write short responses” (33).

—Janet D. Hartman. (1989). Writing to learn and communicate in a data structures course. Proceedings of the Twentieth SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, 32–36. https://doi.org/10.1145/65293.71191

A reference to Hartman’s work on microthemes appears in Chapter 5, “Writing to Learn,” from Bazerman et al.’s 2005 collection, Reference Guide to Writing Across the Curriculum. As I followed this farther, I stumbled upon Trish Roberts-Miller’s 2020 blog entry, “Teaching with Microthemes.” Initially I’d been wondering about whether writing-to-learn bore even the smallest hints of drawing-to-learn, but so far I haven’t found anything connect them directly (over and above the “[blanking]-to-learn” phraseology). So, that’s it–microthemes widened to an etcetera, miniatures, the dinky heap of speck genres we have named as a way to patch wee scale pedagogical interactions and large scale genres.

Felt Sense

Figure 1. Think of it as a snowball.

F. sheds. A lot. A LOT–a lot. And so, what might these wool heaps become? From a 2009 Maker page and from elsewhere, we’re lint-rolling for ideas.

“But that hair! It gets everywhere. I’ve seen it floating around like snowdrifts under the couch, and of course it gets on every piece of clothing in the house! Grooming your dog is the best way to keep the hair from finding its way into your wardrobe permanently. The hair that you remove from the dog when you brush her can be put to crafty use! It can be felted, just like sheep’s wool. Well, not exactly like wool, but close enough! Don’t let the soft fibers go to waste. Use some pipe cleaners and a felting needle to create a replica of your pet, made from her fur!” –Brookelynn Morris

Methods of Placing

“Some methods of placing freshman writing before students are particularly interesting. Fifteen schools [out of 186 respondents] place themes on a bulletin board for student inspection. In nine schools, themes are returned and circulated in class for reading and comment. Three schools place themes which exemplify certain assignments on a reserve shelf in the library for use by students in the course. One school devotes the entire May issue of its alumni bulletin to the publication of freshman composition work. The yearbook, a printed anthology of themes used as a text, and a local newspaper are all used as media for the presentation of freshman writing.”

This, from the first CCC article, Edith Wells’ report on a survey of 400 colleges and universities’ first-year writing publications.

—Edith Wells. 1950. “College Publications of Freshman Writing.” College Composition and Communication 1.1.

Food Poisoning

Figure 2. “Easy Queasy.”

Stick Henge Update

Writing this week about branching indices in the morning and then in the afternoons, when the skies cooperate, piling sticks to hengiform monument. Stick Henge has three perimetering arc segments; each amounts to a cradle held vertical by hammer-set wooden posts. Two sets of posts are 3.5 feet tall; the third is seven feet tall. The twiggy offshed from the two black cherry trees and the catalpa have been piled into the cradles, along with a few branches from the red oak, though that one is harder to cut and slower to sculpt with. I thought I might be able to get Stick Henge finished by solstice, but Thursday’s work session convinced me that even as it is well begun and more than half done, not unlike a book project, the finishing shall be a Zeno’s paradox considering there is a slower-more to do and even after that another stick can always be placed atop.

5ives

Writing’s Microgenres

  1. Microthemes (Hartman, 1989)
  2. Aphorisms (Haynes, 2016)
  3. Representative anecdotes (Rice, 2015)
  4. Hundreds (Berlant & Stewart, 2019) (or nineties, my preferred variation)
  5. Crots (Weathers, 1980)

What other microgenres can you think of? I am teaching two sections of ENGL3844: Writing and Digital Media this fall, and I think I might build the class around microgenres and digital circulation.

Somewhat of a Virgule

“I have been hailed by a slash, called into these questions (How has the slash between rhet/comp come to be and to mean? Will the slash between rhet/comp persist?) by a virgule, a solidus, a dia/critical mark (of sorts). It is not a task I take lightly, nor one that I find distasteful. I am somewhat of a virgule myself, poised on the cusp of a slightly disreputable figure. (I once bristled when an oh-so-proper official of the MLA requested that I remove a slash from the title of my already-accepted MLA conference presentation. Before the program went to print, you see. I said no. The slash was necessary, and it stayed. For once in my life, it was an either/or decision.) Such it is with rhetoric/composition—both doomed and/or fortunate to live with this aporetic virgule between them, listing like a slightly disfigured lightning bolt” (para. 1).

—Cynthia Haynes. (2003). “Rhetoric/Slash/Composition.” Enculturation 5.1. https://parlormultimedia.com/enculturation/5_1/index51.html #slash #virgule #punctuation

Serpents/Jungle Fowl

Unexpectedly, ill-advisedly, Betty briefly took an interest in doppelgänger Hisstilla. The encounter was short-lived, peaceful. I am convinced there are at least two black racers canvassing Wonder Hollow, this younger, smaller one at the front (east), and an older, larger one at the back (west).

Figure 3. Betty, Hisstilla; Histilla, Betty. 🫱🏿‍🫲🏽
About Collectanea

Collectanea is a series I’m trying out in Summer 2025 at Earth Wide Moth. Each entry accumulates throughout the week and is formed by gathering quotations, links, drawings, and miscellany. The title of the entry notes the week and year (the fourth in this series from Week 25 of 2025, or the Week of June 16). I open a tab, add a little of this or that most days. Why? Years ago my habitude toward serial composition and, thus, toward blogging, favored lighter, less formal, and more varied fragments; gradually, social media began to reel in many of these short form entries, recasting them as posts dropped a Facebook or Instagram or Twitter (while it lasted), albeit with dwindling ripple effect into the ad-addled and algorithm-ambivalent streams. This space, meanwhile, began to feel to me like it wanted more thoughtfully developed entries bearing the shape and length of what you might find on Medium or Substack. But, because I am drafting toward a book project most mornings, I don’t quite have reliable essayistic bandwidth for Earth Wide Moth this summer. Collectanea, if it goes according to my small bites chicken scratch plan, will be a release valve for the piling up of too many tabs open, functioning as a shareable, intermittent (weekly?) repository for small pieces cut and pasted from stuff I am reading, and also as a scrapbook for illustrations. -DM

The diverter pond’s liner experiment. #wonderhollow #rollcall

Fractally Branched and Oozing Sap

/ Derek Mueller
⏳ Approximate reading time: 5 mins

A month ago, around February 13, SW Virginia sagged under an ice blanket, everything coniferous leaning or buckling or some combination thereof. Roads blocked, downed lines, a pop rocks concert throughout the long dark of night. We lost power for 48 hours, only to have it restored just as steady rains rinsed through the region dumping more water than we’d gauged in one day in these three plus years. The holler washed, toggling from soil course to water course, to what I would guess was a depth of at least 10 inches. And the creek spilled over the driveway, another first, though the washout was minor in the end. Not that there is any such thing as an end. A weather event lashes down. We clean up. And so that’s pretty much what I’ve been up to for the past several weeks, aside from joining Is. and her roommate E. on short trip to San Diego, and then being sick for a solid week at the end of that trip. Friday I was back in the yard again for some tree cleanup.

Figure 1. Shed and coops at mid-holler, facing north, where a tall stand of white pines populates the ridgeline. During a mid-February ice storm, 5-7 pines split and fell over, littering the terraced slope with branches and trunks.
Figure 1. Shed and coops at mid-holler, facing north, where a tall stand of white pines populates the ridgeline. During a mid-February ice storm, 5-7 pines split and fell over, littering the terraced slope with branches and trunks.

A mature stand of white pines towers weak and leanerly over the north side of the holler. It has ‘we are soon about to fall down’ energy. Are they thirty or forty years old? I’d guess so. Fifty or 100 trees dropped in the ground in, say, 1985. They are bedraggled, showing lots of signs of shedding whole trees or major parts of trees in recent years. I am older than them; I get it. February’s conditions brought down four or five of them, and elsewhere throughout the holler as many as ten more trees snapped off their tops or leaned over kaput. I have a decent Echo chainsaw. It’s plastic, nothing to brag about it’s bar length, so just one notch up the model numbers from a child’s chainsaw. But just this once, I decided I could use an extra hand. I texted a landscaping crew we’d used a couple of times to weed eat the creak bed last summer, and they were interested, said they would stop by, then didn’t. No show. No message. Just blew it off. So I crawled back to the drawing board, a new query posted to Everything Christiansburg, and found a generalist willing to cut the trunks into 15-inch pieces, wood burner sized.

I have brushed a few of the trunks so as to introduce a gradual, incremental method to the cleanup. I’d told myself this week, spring break week for VT, would be good for two hours a day in springlike weather, late afternoon breaks from the computer to chip away, saw away, branch dragging into piles, the slow clearings not long behind. Two hours on the Echo chainsaw is about two refuels, allowing for interruptions to clear branches and make space. But then I got drawn waders deep into detailing the pond, and that cascaded into bigger pond retaining wall problems than I was bargaining for, so there went a day, and I still don’t know enough about hydraulic cements but the pond wall still stands. And it will be repaired, eventually, or even likelier, it will crumble. Masonry not being high on my short list of competencies.

When I look at the trees in various states of brokenness and leaning along the banks, I size up their cleanup and think it will quick, manageable, even basic. They look small, no more heavy or complex than a nub of steamed broccoli. I’m really ready. Gloves on. Water bottle. Appropriate footwear. I let the chickens out and get to it, sawing then hauling, bigger branches then smaller ones. I am not getting better at guessing correctly the work involved. I always underestimate. The cleanup is slower; the work is more; the wood is heavier. The chickens, if they notice at all, quietly celebrate that there will be more snail’s-paced afternoons free-ranging as I trundle along, small branches in this pile, medium limbs still needing chainsaw work here, the rest stacked in the woodshed.

A blue Ford Maverick loaded with 12' sheets of corrugated metal, sandwiched between a few framing planks, flagged with pink plastic, and secured with nylon straps.
Figure 2. A blue Ford Maverick loaded with 12′ sheets of corrugated metal, sandwiched between a few framing planks, flagged with pink plastic, and secured with nylon straps.

Tree cleanup notwithstanding, dubious labor estimates favor me now and then, meaning that sometimes I imagine something will be arduous and it turns out to be a cinch. This happened to be the case when, after weeks of overthinking the tools I would need to cut sheet metal, I got started on the chicken coop roof. I’d read around about needing right and left curving sheers, about grinder blades, about using a circular saw with a cheap wood blade on backwards, about nibblers, and so on. Phone calls to my dad and to my brother. How would you cut it? And then I ordered the metal, picked it up, and got started, figuring it would be the hardest part of the job. I was convinced I was going to screw up a few cuts. But then I tried it, and it was nothing, a breeze. Measure twice, Sharpie line, and tin snips eased through it swiftly, straight lines, not much hazardous waste (I was worried about curls of sharp metal too small to clean up effectively and right-sized for harming the chickens). This kind of being wrong about labor feels light and the holler saturates again with hues of hope and possibility.

Photograph of a chicken coop and run, an 8' by 8' metal structure wrapped in hardware cloth and covered with a shiny metal roof.
Figure 3. Photograph of a chicken coop and run, an 8′ by 8′ metal structure wrapped in hardware cloth and covered with a shiny metal roof.

Such is wayfinding in projects. Venture in and rarely is it as I imagined it would be. I’m routinely off at guessing how many hours it will take to clear a tree. Yet, in another project, like the coop roof, a task I imagine to be immensely complicated turns out to be as easy as cutting a sheet of construction paper. As grand inconclusion goes, these puzzles are a lot like scholarship, grounded formations beholden to the unpredictability of labor and materials and time.