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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. What is a writer compared to in Chapter 5?

2. When Dillard left her cabin for home in Chapter 5 during a northeaster, how was she feeling, walking down the beach?

3. Who once said about writing, 'Know your own bone'?

4. Who did Dillard's neighbor, Glenn, tell her about when she returned to the island in late June?

5. Who once said that '..his firewood warmed him twice because he labored to cut his own'?

Short Essay Questions

1. How does a work in progress turn on its author, according to Dillard?

2. What was Glenn's story about Ferrar Burn?

3. How does Dillard say that she believes a writer must control his or her own energies in order to work?

4. In Chapter 4, Dillard's typewriter erupted. What was the damage done?

5. What did writers such as Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Ralph Ellison, and Eudora Welty have in common when learning to write, according to Dillard?

6. When Dillard mentions that Thoreau's firewood warmed him twice because he labored to cut his own wood, why does she say that her wood froze her twice?

7. What was unfortunate about Dillard learning how to split wood correctly?

8. What did the children who visited Dillard in Chapter 3 surprise her with?

9. Why does Dillard compare a writer writing a first draft to a Zulu warrior and an Aztec maiden?

10. Why does Dillard say that the life of the mind of a writer is hard to be called "living"?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

How is the sensation of writing an unmerited grace, a new idea likened to a chicken laying an egg, as Einstein is to have said? If the gift of writing is handed to you if you look for it, how does Dillard believe you find it?

Essay Topic 2

Dillard asks why anyone would read books with advertising slogans and brand names in them.

Why does Dillard feel this is not a good thing to have in books?

Do you agree with her? Why or why not?

Essay Topic 3

What is the overall theme of Chapter 1? Give examples to support your answer.

(see the answer keys)

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