Cleaning, weeding, repairing flower boxes. Planting herbs, sunflowers, chile peppers, sweet peas, and marigolds--gardening together is one of the many ceremonies of spring at UNM.
The inspiration and desire to create (to write or to make art) most often follows the action of doing, an act of making something. We learn by doing. Creative action is pragmatic. This is as true for wine making as it is for writing. In other words, if you wait for the Muse to touch down and turn you into a wine maker or a writer (or an artist of any kind), you will likely wait a very long time to produce anything. Start by planting a vine and cultivating new fruit; learn the necessary art of pruning and grafting. It’s not much different when we want to write a poem or an essay or a story—you plant an idea, nurture it, revise, edit, and transplant it into a new written product or genre (the root of an idea might become a poem or a story or scholarly research project). Engaging in an act of generativity (planting a vine, making a pot of soup, writing a haiku, building something, restoring an old car) invites us into the universe of creativity, spa...
Drink Good Wine with Interesting People in Memorable Places. ENGL 320 Spring 2019 Dr. Michelle Hall Kells Writing About Wine & Culture “The effect of Dionysis is now dear to me, as well as Aphrodite’s urgings and the Muses inspiration—they all bring good cheer to all people.” Solon of Athens Echoing the ancient Athenian scholar Solon, a more modern mantra reads: “Drink good wine with interesting people in memorable places.” Wine as a cultural, social, and rhetorical trope speaks to us across communities, place, and time. Good wine feeds the body and the soul. Wine is communion. It seals romance and toasts good fortune. The story of wine stretches through history for over some three thousand years. The purpose of this class is to create a community of writers and to cultivate opportunities for considering our roles as makers, consumers, artists, scholars (of place) through the study of local and global wine cultures. The rich literar...
“Gozarse uno la carne del alma.” -Miguel de Unamuno "Enjoy the flesh of one’s own soul.” Human beings are as much body as soul; like the mystery that makes good wine, body and soul all in one, a union that renders bold mixtures of physical and spiritual metaphors as in “ gozarse uno la carne del alma .” --Miguel de Unamuno Tragic Sense of Life (11). My love affair with wine began at the same time in life that I became a “certified” scholar of rhetoric. The spark of delight and fascination for wine happened the summer that I crossed the academic threshold as a freshly-minted PhD of Rhetoric and Composition Studies. After completing my doctoral studies at Texas A&M University, I took a journey to Spain in July 2002. During that trip I discovered a taste for wine. It was first time I truly enjoyed the beauty, pleasure, and mystery of wine. The epiphany happened in a glass of tinto vino served to me as I w...
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