Muse on Monday – April 29, 2024

It’s almost May, which means it’s almost summer. Where did the spring go, right? As the students start to finish up the school year and go on summer vacation, it is a time of relaxation. The Green-Walled Treehouse will still be here and this is a good chance to do some summer writing. Story Prompt:…

Muse on Monday – April 15, 2024

When we think of a war story, we usually think of fighting. However, there are a lot of stories that take place in a time of war that are far away from any battlefield. Here are some ways: How much the war overshadows the story depends on how much the characters or the people they…

Muse on Monday – April 8, 2024

If you were in certain parts of North America today, you could have seen a total eclipse. I am lucky enough to be in Erie, Pennsylvania, which is right in the path of totality, so we got a good view of it here. We all knew long in advance the exact minute that it was…

The Impossible Circle

The date was December 13, 2022. That’s important, as you’ll see. I was walking to work, the rain pattering in fitful drops, not enough for an umbrella, but just enough that your coat is wet through by the time you arrive. I reached the crosswalk on 38th and Maple and retreated under the canopy of…

Hail Mary 1230

Hail Mary 1230 The world looks peaceful from up here, the irregular polygons of the old fields and forest divisions looking like they’ve been cut by a toddler with a pair of stolen scissors: straight lines, weird angles. But this is the exclusion zone and the people have gone and left their straight lines behind….

I Should Have Bought the Radio

I Should Have Bought the Radio I woke up in the hospital, which is never a great day to start your day, or evening for me since it turned out to be 8pm. I was just wondering how I got there when my sister leaned into my sightline. “Hey, you’re awake,” she said. “Mom and…

Windows on the World

We got one of those Windows on the World packages today, or as the commercials say: “Just . . . WOW!” I was in class when the installers came to hang the panels, and I came out of my room to find my mother sweeping up the packing materials and pushing it all down the…

Shy Pain

Shy Pain There are many kinds of pain. There are the small angry pains of a papercut and the dull, lumbering pain of sore muscles after walking home when your mom forgets to pick you up from school again. Pains also live in different places. The pain that happily splashes around in a pot of…

Writing Corner: Types of Fiction

Types of Fiction A while back, I did a post on genre, which is a way of classifying stories by their subject. Today I’m going to look at types of fiction based on their length. When we talk about books, we often talk about the number of pages. However, the number of pages in a…