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</o:shapelayout></xml><![endif]--></head><body lang=EN-US link=blue vlink=purple><div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center'>Writer's Block<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center'>By DeAnna Quietwater Noriega<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>"I was ringing up this guy's books in the bookstore and you wouldn't believe what he said," exclaimed Angie, shoving her granny glasses up on her snub nose. She flipped back a wayward strand of hair the color of sandalwood. Widely spaced blue eyes and a pair of faded dungarees gave her the look of a Wisconsin farmer's daughter—not the fine arts major from California that she was. <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>"So, tell!" coaxed Dee, a petite, dark haired girl with the high cheekbones of her Chippewa ancestors. <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>"Well, he was talking about you and Tansy. He’s in your psych class and was complaining about you bringing her."<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>"Why would he do that?” Dee said. At her feet lay a large, black Labrador. The dog's golden amber eyes were fixed on the girl, following her every move. <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>"Well, he said to his friend that if you kept bringing that huge dog to class, he was going to start bringing his horse. Then his friend said you had to have her there because she’s your guide dog. The guy said, ‘No she wasn't’ because he’d seen you running down a hall with her coming along behind you on a leash."<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>"I wonder when that was." Dee mused. "I sometimes answer the dorm phone without bothering to put her harness on. I guess I might have run a few steps after a friend inside a building without telling Tansy to guide me. It's not like I need her help in a familiar setting like I do out on a street. Look, I've got to run,” Dee said, lightly sliding slender fingers over the face of a braille watch. “I've got English Comp in ten minutes." <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>"Who've you got?" <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>"Anderson." Dee sighed. <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Tansy moved to press close to her girl and growled softly. <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Angie giggled. "Sounds like Tansy doesn't like him any more than you do!" <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>"I don't dislike him," said Dee. “It's the other way around. He seems to hate my writing. I get an upset stomach every time I know he’s returning an assignment. He can be so sarcastic!" She dropped her hand to the handle attached to Tansy's harness, straightened her shoulders, and stepped away in a swirl of long skirts and dark chestnut hair that nearly reached to the backs of her knees.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>A few minutes later, Tansy wove confidently through the crowd of college freshmen to a desk in the front row. She dove under the attached seat, curling herself into a compact ball. Dee let her backpack slide to the floor and started to sit on the seat her dog had located for her. Too her embarrassment she discovered it was already occupied. She attempted to haul Tansy out from under someone’s feet. <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>"Girl, when I said chair I meant an empty one! Sorry! I think my guide dog wants to improve my social life by making sure I meet more of my classmates. I'm Dee and this devious female in the dog suit is Tansy," she said. <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>The young man occupying the chair, moved to the next desk.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>"Ah, no problem, I'm Dave Cross."<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>"Dave Cross? Aren't you in my biology class too? I heard you tell my friend Angie you’re premed,” said Dee. "I was going to ask you if you’d be my lab partner. If you could do the dissections and microscope work, I could take all of the notes and keep the lab books up to date."<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>"That sounds great. I've already started working on becoming a doctor by having handwriting so lousy sometimes even I can't read it."<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Professor Anderson strode across the front of the room to the far wall. As he talked, his steps kept tempo with the rapid fire of his speech. <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>"You write like grade school <i>children</i>! These essays are what I would expect from naive prepubescents, not college students." He tossed all but one paper onto his desk as he swept past. Pausing in front of Dee, he ripped her paper dramatically in half and threw it contemptuously in the wastebasket. <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>"With your disability and minority heritage, I expected better of you, young lady! Where are your passion, your anger and pain? You are obviously sublimating because no one with your problems could possibly be so full of sunny, optimistic tripe. I want you to forget all of that attention to sentence structure, punctuation, and elements of style bunk and give me truth. This Pollyanna sweetness and light is crap."<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Anderson strode toward the door, spun back to resume his diatribe. He was forced to skid to an abrupt halt by a black bulk sprawled directly in his path. The dog hadn't been there moments before when he had stomped past the little blind girl with her tape recorder. He liked dogs. Guide dogs were supposed to be gentle and friendly. Didn't Labradors have big, sad brown eyes? This dog stared up at him with the feral, yellow eyes of a wolf. The expression in them didn't look the least bit gentle or friendly. <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>"Where was I? Oh yes, for your next assignment I want you to read chapter two of my book and write about a painful experience. Make me feel your anguish. Class is dismissed." He turned his back to exit the room. A pretty blonde freshman cut him off, skipping ahead to block his exit.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal> <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>"Sir, how long does our essay have to be?" she chirped. <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Before he could snarl at the empty-headed little bimbo, something slammed into the back of his right knee. He staggered to avoid landing unceremoniously on his backside. The damned dog shouldered by him with her little blind waif in tow. That buffoon who headed the music department had dubbed her the wood nymph. With her long, flowing chestnut hair and childlike face, she did resemble one. It was witches, not wood nymphs, who were supposed to keep familiars. After twenty years of teaching freshman English classes, he usually enjoyed challenging the one or two students who showed promise. But there was something uncanny about how the dog glared back at him each time he tried to push that little girl she guided to reach her potential. <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal style='text-indent:.5in'>As the two of them sped off down the hall, Dee was torn between wanting to laugh and feeling she should have apologized. Instead, she murmured to her companion, "That's one way to remove a writer's block!"<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal style='text-indent:.5in'><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center;text-indent:.5in'>***<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal style='text-indent:.5in'><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Professor John Anderson scanned the pages of the print-out on his desk. Frowning in concentration, he read:<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center'><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center'><b>Resolution<o:p></o:p></b></p><p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center'>By Delia Stillwater<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center'><i>The Vow<o:p></o:p></i></p><p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:150%'> "I won't ever let anyone make me cry again," said the little girl with welts on her back and legs. She had been so excited when Isabel came over, bringing her new jump rope to play. It had bright red plastic handles with silver jingle bells on its ends. When the girl's baby brother wanted it and she tried to give him her own jump rope instead, he threw himself down—hitting his lip on the bottom step. His screams of anger turned to ones of real pain. Daddy came out on the porch. She started to cry too, because she knew the blame would fall on her. Crying never made him stop. It made it harder to talk and explain. Daddy grabbed Isabel's jump rope from her hand and used it for the spanking. He yelled that he would teach her to be mean to the baby. That didn't make sense. Shouldn't he have said that he would teach her not to be mean? Isabel ran home. Now she would never want to come over to play again. It wasn't fair! <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:150%'><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:150%'> The next time her daddy got angry, he spanked her with a piece of wood until it broke, but she didn't cry. She held her breath until the pain and yelling went away. When she woke up, mama was holding her and crying. Didn't she understand that tears didn't help?<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:150%'><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center;line-height:150%'><i>She Couldn't<o:p></o:p></i></p><p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:150%'> "I'd love to dance," said the teenaged girl through her gritted teeth. "Could I catch a ride home with you and Beth after the party? Danny seems to have forgotten he was my date in his eagerness to make that new girl Jean feel welcome. If I let him take me home I will have to kill him!" She tossed her head and stepped out onto the dance floor with Marty. She couldn't cry. She wouldn't give Jean the satisfaction. She didn't want her friends to pity her. <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:150%'><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center;line-height:150%'><i>She Wouldn't<o:p></o:p></i></p><p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:150%'> "Why can't you understand? I need to go to college for at least one year. I have to be myself and find out who that is before I step from being my parents' oldest daughter to being your wife." Chad was ten years older. He had a good job. He owned a home, and her parents were so thrilled she had found a man to take care of her. All of her friends were envious of the half karat diamond he had given her. She was a senior in high school and had won a scholarship. Was she asking too much? Why couldn't he believe she would come back to him after she had proved to herself that she could make it on her own? <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:150%'><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center;line-height:150%'>"You had better take back this ring if you can't trust me out of your sight," she said, slipping it from her finger. Entering her parents' quiet house, she closed the door. She took deep calming breaths. She wouldn't allow herself to cry.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:150%'>I am thinking this story needs to end when the college student walks away, but worry that the professor comes across as a single dimension jjerk without the office scene. <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center;line-height:150%'><i>She Could<o:p></o:p></i></p><p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:150%'>"How can you think I would be so shallow as to pretend to be his friend because he has a car and can drive me, whenever I need a ride? I thought we were friends!" said the college girl to her roommate, before she fled the dormitory room. For twelve years, she hadn't cried—no matter how much they’d hurt her. It had never been safe to cry. If you shed tears, they had won. They had made you give in to the struggle and they hurt you more because you were weak. She knelt on the cool grass, pressing her face into the glossy, black fur of her dog and let the tears flow. For the first time since she had been a child, she wasn't afraid to let someone else know she was hurt. She wasn't alone against the world. She was safe within the shelter of her dog's love. It was finally alright to cry. <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:150%'><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal> Professor Anderson laid the manuscript back down on his desk. He studied his student. She sat stroking the silky head of the dog resting on her knee. Her long dark hair screened her face from him. The black Labrador's gaze was fixed on the downturned face of the girl. The dog's eyes shone with a golden glow of devotion. <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal> "Miss Stillwater, this piece is very different from what you usually write. It is almost minimalist in its lack of description. It doesn't have the vivid texture and color of your other work."<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal> Dee lifted her head to face the man who never seemed pleased, no matter what she wrote. <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal> "You asked for truth. I don't think there was much color in that girl's life. She was like a spindly weed struggling to find some sunlight and nourishment in a vacant lot. I'm not her anymore. If I choose to glory in the bright, beautiful things all around me, rather than pick at old wounds to watch them bleed; then that is what is true for me. I won’t keep exploring the past when there are so many tomorrows to anticipate. I have always loved the poetic beauty of Steinbeck, rather than the stark realism of Hemmingway. Maybe I will never achieve the elegance of the one, but I don't intend to be a mediocre imitator of the other. If it means failing your course, I will write the way that seems real to me."<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal style='text-indent:.5in'>Dee rose. Her hand dropped to the handle of Tansy's harness as the dog swiftly fell into position at her left side. The two whirled out of Professor Anderson’s stuffy little office. <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal style='text-indent:.5in'><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal style='text-indent:.5in'>John Anderson watched them flee. He was only mildly irritated. The stupid child had missed the point entirely. Only by forcing her to stretch and struggle would she reach her potential and find her voice as a writer. Even the ones possessing a grain of talent were too egotistical to see that he was trying to bring out the best in them when he demanded more effort. If he wasn’t going to write the next great American novel, then he was going to keep prodding and pruning in the hopes that one of his students would write it. <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p> </o:p></span></p></div></body></html>