Mattie's Pillow

Sun on the eaves again today. Though the sun is lovely to see, clear skies mean more cold weather as the heat radiates away from the ground and off into the atmosphere. On the radio today, I heard that Tok, down the Alaska Highway, had 78 below. These are North Slope temperatures-minus the wind. They say we’ll enter a warming trend over the weekend. We’ll see.

I may write this entry in phases. Today, I’m headed out to a meeting to talk about a project I’m involved with this spring-a high school outreach program involving science, writing (my part), and dance. We’ll be working with rural Alaskan and Alaska native Junior High kids who have selected this class as an elective. How this will all go together will be interesting to see, but the writing part will be about observation in the natural and human world and translating that into language. We’ll work with poetry to start, then touch on prose. Ultimately, there will be a presentation involving movement, storytelling, poetry. The wonderful part for me will be working with dancers I know and sharing the creative impulse with them and with kids who are at a wonderfully inventive stage of life. An added plus is that I will be working with my dancer son, Ira, who is coming up from NYC to work on the performance part of the project. The idea for Mattie’s Pillow evolved, in part, from long discussions with him about what’s happening in the arts in New York and what Alaska has to offer that no other place does.

More later.

Tags: Alaska, dance, Jr. High, poetry, teaching, winter, writing

This entry was posted on January 9, 2009 at 9:00 pm and is filed under View from Mattie's Pillow. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.