Friday, February 5, 2016

Tarian

Back by popular demand.....

Students in 6B enjoy visualizing. We are almost finished our class novel, The Tide Turner. Students requested the challenge of drawing their interpretation of Tarian, the trader of power and knowledge. Here is the description:

"Traveling towards them was the most extraordinary caravan. First came to striped sailfish, swimming side-by-side, with long, lean bodies, blue blacks, white bellies and slender sickle-shaped tales. Their spirits reminded Jake of the deadly Marlin. Each wore a harness around its body from which trailed a dozen or more links of rope and chain. On to those were tied an assortment of objects; scraps of metal, a small broken propeller, a crook of bone that might have been the jaw of a young whale, empty lobster pots and net bags filled with urchins and mollusks. Both harnesses were attached to a pair of reins and holding these, following the sailfish, was a Delphine man swimming powerfully through the water. This man was quite unlike the Bloodfin Jake had seen. He had loose, white hair and stubble on his jaw. His body was thin but immensely strong and wiry. Jake noticed how every muscle and sinew strained as he controlled the will of the big fish. He wore a curious wristband of twisted wire with green glass beads and there were scars on his forearms and chest. From his shoulders flowed a layered cloak made with scraps of fishing net laced together. He reminded Jake of a picture in Charlie's big Bible, of a bare chested old man on a mountaintop, looking up at jagged lightning in a thundery sky. Jake couldn't decide if he was young and strong with the appearance of age or an old man who had somehow retained his vigour." p.97-98

Friday, December 11, 2015

Orcara

"He made out a huge mound of knotted seaweed, this time heaped in a pile the size of a beach hut. Looking closer he saw that it was tangled up with shells, twine, fragments of cork, and crabs' claws, the sort of flotsam and jetsam he loved to trawl through at the tide line. Then the whole mound heaved and shook, and a shower of slugs dropped from its fronds. To Jake's horror a withered finger emerged halfway up the heap. It grew into a gnarled hand that stretched up, parting the seaweed to reveal a small face, white as bone, with hooded yellow eyes and cruel lips. Orcara! Her mess of hair, with matted skullcap of algae, had been extended with lengths of kelp and weed to the floor and threaded with small bones, beads of glass and sea trinkets. It was so long and thick that her body was completely hidden. (...) Orcara lifted the shell to the light and smiled, revealing a solitary tooth - sharp and serrated, like that of a shark."