Does This Story Make Me Look Fat?
Molly Larson Cook and...
...her thoughts, comments, ideas, hellraising, some of her writing, and maybe an occasional epiphany.
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Pop Quiz for August!
I hope you have been spending your summer days profitably studying and boning up
for this latest Pop Quiz.
Summer days were meant for reading, you know. I've been doing my share,
even as I polished up the novel and made my lists of possible
agents and publishers.
So, without further ado (adieu? adew? ah do?) here goes. Pencils at the ready. No peeking on Google until you've given it your best effort!
1. This year marks the 50th anniversary of one of America's great novels. Which one? (If you do not know the answer to this, please move to the back of the room.)
2. The wonderful southern writer, Ellen Gilchrist, created an entire world around her central character, a middle-aged woman who may or may not have been modeled on herself. What is that character's name?
3. In E.B. White's novel, Charlotte's Web, Charlotte spins important words about the character, Wilbur? What kind of animal is Wilbur and what are the words?
4. Poet Wallace Stevens described a particular kind of bird in a set of short poems, the title of which provides both the number of poems and the kind of bird.
What is the title?
5. Which southern writer spoke of writing that describes "the human heart in conflict with itself"?
6. Which contemporary writer used a Fourth of July road trip with his son as the basis for a Pulitzer Prize winning novel?
Please be sure your name is on your paper.
Have a good weekend.
If you have ideas for good Pop Quiz questions, send them along to
jazzcookie@verizon.net.
AND BODKINS
"If we suppress our wackiness, we'll seal off the source of some of our most truing impulses. Our potential will dwindle. We'll no longer feel the sweet daze and speed of the push of it."
--David Greenhood,
The Writer on His Own
Things I am not making up...
**There is a newly discovered sea slug that can produce chlorophyll and looks like a leaf. Really. I saw a picture of one today in the paper. When I see a zinnia bloom, I'll be convinced. A Star Trekkie friend wrote me that this proves all those Star Trek fantasies were correct, and the green alien women were probably growing chlorophyll and tasted like brussels sprouts.
**I went to high school in Walla Walla, Washington. Yes, the city they liked so well, they named it twice. This was back in the dark ages before Walla Walla became a tourist destination for wine drinkers. The people who drank wine back then mostly drank it out of paper bags down on Lower Main where the more or less legal houses of you-know-what were also located. I'm not sure how much of Walla Walla's colorful past is being passed on to the tourists, but believe me, some of it was very colorful.
**You can visit Maine and also visit, without a passport, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, New Sweden, China and Mexico. The first time a neighbor in Maine told me she was going to Denmark to visit her parents, I asked how long she'd be gone. When she told me she'd be back the next day, I was impressed. Maybe Stephen King will write a Scandinavian novel one of these days with overtones of China and Mexico for the fun of it. There is a Misery, Maine, and he did write about that.
