Up The Hill

So I've been working at this material for quite a while. I wrote this for my freshman composition class in 1982 (I was 18). My professor, Judy Rogers, included the essay several years later in a textbook that she and her husband Glenn put together for teaching composition. At some point, Kathy Mincey, one of the English professors at Morehead, used it for her class, and for some unknown reason it's still sitting out there on the MSU website. It isn't a great piece of writing, but it's a good example of some of the themes that I'm still trying to chase down and nail to the page.

The piece was written as a response not to my grandmother's death (who was still very much alive at the time) but borrowing details from the burial of my great grandmother Octavia Hatfield. The cemetery is the J.F. Hatfield cemetery at the head of Blackberry Creek. It was always up there, above where we lived, serving - at least for me - as a reminder of where we would all be going sooner or later.

Go here.