"January 13"

One may be asking themselves why I would've entitled this post "January 13," when it is in fact February 5th. The answer relates back to my professional writing class, when I was assigned to read a piece of writing entitled "January 13." The author of the piece is Rick Bass.

The piece was very short in length, which I found very strange at first. My initial thought was that it couldn't possibly be as detailed as my professor made it out to be, when she announced we would be close reading for detailed descriptions. I was wrong.

"I've seen flakes as big as my fist, and monstrous, wet, stuck-together flakes as big as wadded-up sheets of newspaper, falling among the myriad other, smaller flakes plummeting madly down, tumbling like planes crashing, but landing silently, or nearly so."

Bass's very detailed description, allows for his readers to experience this blizzard as if they were along side him, seeing/hearing everything exactly as he did in that moment. The way he can describe the snow flakes is fascinating to me. I am sure everyone has experienced what wet, stuck-together newspaper pages are like, or even wet paper for that matter. I love how he relates the snowflakes to something that most people would have experienced at one point in their lives. That description is something I admire of his writing style that admittedly, I probably would not have thought of myself. The plane crash description makes me think back to last week, when we watched the pilot episode of the TV show, Lost. The plane definitely tumbled, yet there was nothing silent about the blades crashing into the island. Unlike, snowflakes, that have that ability to seem to come crashing down, yet at the same time, do it ever-so gently and silently.

Last semester, I took a creative nonfiction class. I enjoyed getting to go back to reading a creative nonfiction piece of writing, even though it was for my professional writing class. The very close details draw me in as a reader. I believe it was a nice change and also nice to get back to a well-known topic.