Tag: sticks

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

An Unlit Stick Pile

/ Derek Mueller
⏳ Approximate reading time: 3 mins

Back felt well enough yesterday that I attempted to unblock the 2″ PVC line that diverts creek water to the pond. I’d attempted to free the line twice this winter, once failing fairly quickly, and the second time taking extra steps to dig out the spring-fed muck underneath the line’s only bend, then to snake from both ends with 25′ coil line. No magic in the conclusion. It was plugged at the bend, 20′ up line from where it empties into the pond, and 10′ down line from where the creek feeds it. The problem remained, but I pushed a stake in the ground and left it there until yesterday. Yesterday I was over-prepared. I’d gathered a belt of implements Wile E. Coyote would’ve admired. But then I tried again with the plumber’s coil and just kept at it, and for a few minutes the line echoed tink ta-tink, tink ta-tink, tink ta-tink before it broke through.

Not that the pond is ready to be corked and refilled. I still need to power wash the retaining wall and coat it with something I have yet to figure out, possibly Drylock, possibly a more basic masonry slurry. And that also means borrowing (or buying, but preferably borrowing) a power washer. And more research about the trade-offs with drylock versus other coatings. Trial and error. Should it be sealed-sealed? Or just laxly coated so as to hold on for a season? What is the hoped for horizon with such things?

The creek burbles along rocks, pooling in a few places before bending east and tunneling under the driveway. It’s in a zone of the yard I am now more than before thinking of as Wonder Hollow Micropark. One purpose for the park is to enjoy it and to put seating there where others can sit when they visit. Another purpose is to write a grant to get the park’s stewardship funded by an outdoors supporting benefactor. I’d guess it’s only 700 SF, a narrow strip between the steep bank of the road, the other steep bank of the mountain, and at the far end, the thicket of brambles where any day now hummingbird guests will return for summer. They showed up last year on April 10. The Micropark catches morning sunlight but is in the shade by 3 p.m. Getting to it—also getting the push mower to it—requires stepping over the creek, or edging slowly along slopes of 20-30 degrees.

The park has a couple of dead trees next to it. When the winds gust, old branches fall. It’s nothing clockwork, this slow, branch-shedding funeral. Tending to the park means piling sticks for burning, eventually. Yesterday I tried to light the heap of sticks using as a wad of scruffy stems that had remained upright throughout the winter, and they started, but then stalled. Nah. Wasn’t to be. The pile will burn another day.

I carried over a garden rake, and walked the creek, nudging free leaf-clumps, a kind of anti-coagulant pass that would by the end leave the stones showing—juts to the sky—and raise the audibility of water falling, here a couple of inches, there a foot, and then another couple of inches, and so on down. Without the leaves the creek reclaims a seasonal aesthetic more pleasing in spring-summer-early fall. Walking the creek slowly, rake in hand, I noticed two different watercress patches where the watercress is fresh and healthy-seeming, and the water courses through it with a calm adjacency, running, but running quietly and casually in contrast to the higher volume rush. Every bend is unique, but one rock in particular bears such a shallow and constant water course that it is more like a rinsed-over ramp than a part of any of the more active transitions. That one rock suggests itself as a painter, much quieter than a poet, like you could pin a sheet of paper or canvas to the rock with two stones, and let the water’s steady rinse make its marks. Creek as mixed media artist.