graphic: giving a vivid picture with explicit details,
or rocks having a surface texture resembling cuneiform writing
It was a book I came across in a discount store for a dollar. it was worth more than a dollar. Graphic the Valley by Peter Hoffmeister is a rarity that somehow flew under the radar. In short, it’s the story of Samson loosely retold as the story of a modern American Indian young man living in Yosemite Valley.
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Marvel’s Luke Cage on Netflix is not your typical comics-to-screen project. It contains heavier amounts of profanity (including the first Marvel use of the “n word”). It takes place in Harlem. It gets heavily political, rather than merely nodding to current events. And it feels very real.
It began with a boy with a lightning bolt on his forehead on a train. And just as the idea came to Rowling, a Dickensian novel could have started out like this: a little orphan boy with a mark on his face being laid at the door of some snobbish middle class brick-heads.
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My poem, “Birds and Bees,” is now featured on VerseWrights.
Check it out!
X-Men: Apocalypse opened this summer, the latest installment in a famous comic turned film franchise. Although I have not seen the film, anyone familiar with the titular villain knows that the premise follows his character’s legacy: A nearly invincible and all-powerful mutant wishes to destroy the world of humans (and weak mutants) and create a world meant only for the strongest.
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Teaching in public high schools, I am sometimes still surprised by the confusion some juniors and seniors may have concerning the terms “fiction” and “nonfiction.”
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I am happy to announce that the poetry website Contemporary American Voices has selected me as their featured poet for May 2016!
Three of my poems appear:
“Pilgrim”
“Contours”
“Happy Hour”
Along with my work, poetry of my brother, Lukas Guard, and an old schoolmate, Allison Boyd, also appears.
That final year of high school, we all died. We were going to face that shadow guard to our IB certificate (or diploma), that infamous man, Mr. Campbell.
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Creative Writing and Journalism—Mrs. B
In my second half of high school, I sank my teeth into writing endeavors under a single teacher who would come to be one of the most influential teachers I would ever have: Mrs. Barbour.
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11th grade: Mr. Bolte.
Junior year began the actual IB classes, incredibly rigorous examinations of difficult literature. We had to think more critically than ever before. Some of my friends were full IB, all 4 core classes plus like 2 or 3 extra being IB level. I would have died. And because I was not full IB, I felt the pressure to display my intelligence to my peers. But I also still wanted to be a goofball.
