Didion Activity
Prepared by Matthew DeAngelis
Grade E-4 (Can be applied throughout all high school levels)
Adapted from Bruce Ballenger’s Crafting Truth
1. When trying to teach students how to write about place, it’s important to assign meaning.
Description about a place can be rudimentary and ordered. Working with an excerpt from Joan
Didion’s Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream, take the students through the text to show how
description can set tone and meaning for the content that follows. This introduction-based
activity works for academic writing, creative non-fiction, and personal narratives. For this
particular lesson, I like to use personal essays and instruct the students to write about place.
2. Discuss with students the first two lines of the Didion piece. Explore their meaning as they link
to the main themes of the piece. Be sure to discuss the excerpt in the context. Ask the students
to write down any details that link to the overall message of the piece. How is Banyan street
represented? The new west? The hopes and dreams of the dreamers? Be sure to stress the tone
and emotion of the piece. Make a list of words and details that stand out to the students.
Discuss why and how.
3. Have the students brainstorm a list of important places in their life. This can be anything from a
vacation home to a memorable trip to a tree house from childhood. When the list is complete
have the students select one. At this stage in the lesson, it’s important to draw the students’
attention back to the Didion piece for connections in the narrative.
4. Using the particular place and memory, students will each write three separate openings for
their work. Which of the three openings seems the most promising? Why? Which would each
student be able to discuss most openly? What kinds of themes and emotions come from this
particular place and how can you reflect that in your word choice and story construction?
5. Instruct the students to follow this opening. They will write for fifteen minutes. It’s important
here when they write that they understand the purpose of the fifteen minutes. They should
write as fast as possible to best flesh out the memory.
6. Discuss with the students the kinds of connections they are making in their own writing. How
does Didion’s piece help the construction?
7. This assignment will lead into a personal narrative essay, with this particular opening now
capable of providing not only the beginning, but also the emotional tone to follow.
Text to be studied:
Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream
This is a story about love and death in the golden land, and begins with the country. The San
Bernardino Valley lies only an hour east of Los Angeles by way of the San Bernardino Freeway but is in
certain ways an alien place: not the coastal the California of subtropical twilights and the soft westerlies
off the Pacific but a harsher California, haunted by the Mohave just beyond the mountains, devastated
by the hot dry Santa Ana wind that comes down through the passes at 100 miles an hour and whines
through the Eucalyptus windbreaks and works on the nerves. October is the bad month for the wind,
the month when breathing is difficult and the hills blaze up spontaneously. There has been no rain since
April. Every voice seems a scream. It is the season of suicide and divorce and prickly dread, wherever
the wind blows.
The Mormons settled this ominous country, and then they abandoned it but by the time they left
the first orange tree had been planted and for the next hundred years the San Bernardino Valley would
draw a kind of people who imagined they might live among the talismanic fruit and prosper in die dry
air, people who brought with them Mid-western ways of building and cooking and praying and who
tried to graft those ways upon the land. The graft took in curious ways. This is the California where it is
possible to live and die without ever eating an artichoke, without ever meeting a Catholic or a Jew. This
is the California where it is easy to Dial-A-Devotion, but hard to buy a book. This is the country in which
a belief in the literal interpretation of Genesis has slipped imperceptibly into a belief in the literal
interpretation of Double Indemnity, the country of the teased hair and the Capris and the girls for whom
all life's promise comes down to a waltz-length white wedding dress and the birth of a Kimberly or a
Sherry or a Debbi and a Tijuana divorce and return to hairdressers' school. “We were just crazy kids”
they say without regret, and look to the future. The future always looks good in the golden land,
because no one remembers the past. Here is where the hot wind blows and the old ways do not seem
relevant, where the divorce rate is double the national average and where one person in every thirtyeight lives in a trailer.
Here is the last stop for all those who come from somewhere else, for all those who drifted
away from the cold and the past and the old ways. Here is where they are trying to find a new life style,
trying to find it in the only places they know to look: the movies and the newspapers. The case of
Lucille Marie Maxwell Miller is a tabloid monument to that new life style.
Imagine Banyan Street first, because Banyan is where it happened. The way to Banyan is to drive
west from San Bernardino out Foothill Boulevard, Route 66: past the Santa Fe switching yards, the Forty
Winks Motel. Past the motel that is nineteen stucco tepees: "SLEEP IN A WIGWAM-GET MORE FOR
YOUR WAMPUM." Past Fontana Drag City and the Fontana Church of the Nazarene and the Pit Stop A
Go-Go; past Kaiser Steel, through Cucamonga, out to the Kapu Kai Restaurant-Bar and Coffee Shop, at
the corner of Route 66 and Carnelian Avenue. Up Carnelian Avenue from the Kapu Kai, which means
"Forbidden Seas," the subdivision flags whip in the harsh wind. "HALF-ACRE RANCHES! SNACK BARS!
TRAVERTINE ENTRIES! $95 DOWN." It is the trail of an intention gone haywire, the flotsam of the New
California. But after a while the signs thin out on Carnelian Avenue, and the houses are no longer the
bright pastels of the Springtime Home owners but the faded bungalows of the people who grow a few
grapes and keep a few chickens out here, and then the hill gets steeper and the road climbs and even
the bungalows are few, and here desolate, roughly surfaced, lined with eucalyptus and lemon groves---is
Banyan Street.
Standards:
Standard E4-1 The student will read and comprehend a variety of literary texts in print and nonprint
formats.
E4-1.1 Compare/contrast ideas within and across literary texts to make inferences.
E4-1.2 Evaluate the impact of point of view on literary texts.
E4-1.3 Evaluate devices of figurative language (including extended metaphor, oxymoron, pun, and
paradox).
E4-1.5 Analyze the effect of the author’s craft (including tone and the use of imagery, flashback,
foreshadowing, symbolism, motif, irony, and allusion) on the meaning of literary texts.
Standard E4-2 The student will read and comprehend a variety of informational texts in print and
nonprint formats.
E4-2.3 Analyze informational texts for author bias (including word choice, the exclusion and inclusion of
particular information, and unsupported opinion).
E4-2.4 Create responses to informational texts through a variety of methods (for example, drawings,
written works, oral and auditory presentations, discussions, and media productions).
Standard E4-4 The student will create written work that has a clear focus, sufficient detail, coherent
organization, effective use of voice, and correct use of the conventions of written Standard American
English.
E4-4.5 Revise writing to improve clarity, tone, voice, content, and the development of ideas. (See
Instructional Appendix: Composite Writing Matrix.)
Standard E4-5 The student will write for a variety of purposes and audiences.
E4-5.2 Create narratives (for example, personal essays, memoirs, and narrative poems) that use
descriptive language to enhance voice and tone.
E4-5.3 Create descriptive pieces (for example, personal essays, travel writing, or restaurant reviews) that
use sensory images and vivid word choice.
E4-5.4 Create persuasive writings (for example, editorials, essays, speeches, or reports) that address a
specific audience and use logical arguments supported by facts or expert opinions.