Do take a look. It's called Cute Chewer:
I will teach my last class for the summer today. My students and I will present literary texts that we admire and hope to/will teach in the fall. I will offer up Sherman Alexi's: "The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me." I always teach this short autobiographical narrative on the first meeting of my College Writing class. And on the first evening gathering of my Salon class. Alexi's writing is bold [ideas and positioning], simple [in its construction on a sentence level] and thoughtful [lessons everywhere about noticing, and then understanding, how we fit into our worlds]. Here is a paragraph about paragraphs from this text that does all of this at once:
I can remember picking up my father's books before I could read. The words themselves were mostly foreign, but I still remember the exact moment when I first understood, with a sudden clarity, the purpose of a paragraph. I didn't have the vocabulary to say "paragraph," but I realized that a paragraph was a fence that held words. The words inside a paragraph worked together for a common purpose. They had some specific reason for being inside the same fence. This knowledge delighted me. I began to think of everything in terms of paragraphs. Our reservation was a small paragraph within the United States. My family's house was a paragraph, distinct from the other paragraphs of the LeBrets to the north, the Fords to our south and the Tribal School to the west. Inside our house, each family member existed as a separate paragraph but still had genetics and common experiences to link us. Now, using this logic, I can see my changed family as an essay of seven paragraphs: mother, father, older brother, the deceased sister, my younger twin sisters and our adopted little brother.
Sherman J. Alexie, Jr., a Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian, grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit, WA. Take a look at his web page.
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