Tag: Blogging

Writing Process

Writ in Water Updates

Posted on by Desmond White

Last year I launched a student magazine, Writ in Water, through HBU’s Academic Success Center. At the time I was the center’s Writing Coordinator, a position that involved working with staff and tutors to assist students with academic writing. That was, after all, the mission of the ASC—”to facilitate student academic success.” But I also wanted to promote student success through creative writing. All throughout Fall and Winter, I worked diligently with my Assistant Director, Samantha Bottoms, and a dedicated corps of tutors to set up a submission and reading period and finally a physical print of the magazine.

After I graduated from Houston Baptist University, I stepped down from my role as the Writing Coordinator and redevoted my full attention to my career as a high school teacher. Call it a year of rest where I no longer had to be a teacher by day, student by night, and writing coordinator in-between. Along with my ASC retirement, I passed on Writ in Water, a campus literary magazine that I founded, to an amazing dude named Seth Grant.

This semester I’ve been sneaking into a Roman History course (all right, fine, I’m not that cool—the professor lets me swing by), and just imagine my profound sense of place when I discovered that HBU will be continuing the Writ in Water series!


I’m excited.

Writing

Nonfiction — “Honest Seafood”

Posted on by Desmond White

My sister will not eat seafood. She is a brown-haired, brown-eyed girl, all inherited from my mother, and she is picky, an inheritance from no one. Or perhaps a suspicious ancestor—maybe the caveman who ate the poisoned mushroom?

We (the boys) are wide, sandy, blue-eyed beasts. We’ll eat anything, be it a bagel or small dog. It’s that cavalier attitude Mom rewarded with meals that stretched the definition of food. She was not the best cook, and sometimes pizza would be recast as “lumps,” or toast as “carcinogens with a side of yeast.” Nor was she the most honest about ingredients. She wanted us to eat, after all.

So, Sis found herself in a constant state of seafood consumption. She’d eat tacos and realize afterward: “These were fish tacos!” She’d eat red beans and rice to discover soggy shrimp.

My poor sister. She’s had more sushi than a sushi chef.

Life

Prose Partner

Posted on by Desmond White

Since Christmas, I’ve been posting my works (some of the same ones on this blog) to Prose, a social media app that takes what’s best about Facebook and Twitter and Instagram – having followers (“friends”) and getting your posts liked or reposted – and applies those networking techniques to the profession of writing. Recently I’ve become a Partner, a promotion that allows me to create Prose-wide challenges, boost others’ work to the Spotlight (the front-page), and monetize my books on the site. Mostly, however, it prints the word “Partner” beneath my username, which is kind of cool.

Life
Posted on by Desmond White

 

HBU’s premiere student literary journal is going to drop May 8th, 2017, and I’ll be posting it here after it’s available. As editor-in-chief, I didn’t think it proper to publish my own work in the journal, but I will admit to a little nepotism; my brother’s short story somehow made it in, although that’s more because it has actual merit as an absurdist dark comedy and less because he happens to be related to the guy in charge.

Writing

Nonfiction — “Snakes and Spiders”

Posted on by Desmond White

When I wake, the cats are at the door—they want to slip into bed and lie in my warm vacancy. One is black with a teacup on her chest, the other gray as elephant’s breath with muted stripes. In the darkness, I fumble against their fur, locating rump, scruff, finally head, and I pet what I can find until they roll over and expose their tummies—a trap.

Under the bluing shade of early morning they are furry dead spiders.

Cats aren’t the only parasite squirming in the bedwaters. My wife, snorting like the Union Pacific, snakes her cold fingers and toes toward me, seeking flickers of heat like sausages over a campfire.

Shower. Toothpaste. Size 40 pants instead of last year’s 38. An XLT button-down that’s starting to hug. The cats follow me to the living room as I pick up a satchel and keys. Jenny lets me pet her back. She has a funny habit of bursting forward when my hand reaches her tail, to circle around for another run.

Remy sits on the couch, feet tucked under his chest like a chicken in a coop. I think of saying goodbye to the snoring pile of hair in the other room, but my wife doesn’t work until 9.

Still, what if I never see her again?

I open the door and step into a world devoid of Julie and Jenny and Remy and the little routines of morning before the light.

Writing

Nonfiction — “Starry White”

Posted on by Desmond White

I open the year with a joke. “My name is Mr. White, like the color of my [the students look expectantly toward my skin] walls.” Cue enough laughter to sustain the joke next period. But now it’s noticeable, the harsh white of the room, a combination of paint and the clinical spray of ceiling bulbs. We are as illuminated and shadowless as models in a photoshoot, sans forgiveness.

There is one window: a square portal on the door. When I sit at my desk, I can see “Starry Night” through it, one of the Van Gogh prints distributed through the school. There’s an apocryphal story of how he painted that landscape in a sanatorium. Unable to see the city from his window, he imagined it in his hand. It gets me wishing they’d let us paint our madness on the canvas of our walls. Why let filth color us? Scuffs, gum, “fuck school” in blue pen, a poster of an iguana saying “character is who you are when no one is watching.” Let swirling blacks, blues, and yellows, stars and cities and black towers roil down the hall, drowning disquiet and sterility of asepsis.

Life

Brewing Beer

Posted on by Desmond White
 

Crawford Notch Brewery (Dad, brother, myself) brewed a gallon of Elephant Head (a pale ale with fresh ginger root) and a gallon of Wild Ammonoosuc (a raspberry golden ale). Names are derived from the area around Crawford Notch, New Hampshire, where my Dad was born.