Chapter 3: Description
Gordon Grice


Grice

Gordon Grice

Gordon Grice earned his B.A. at Oklahoma State University and his M.F.A. (Master of Fine Arts) at the University of Arkansas. Currently a faculty member at Seward County Community College in Liberal, Kansas, Grice has published essays and poems in a wide range of literary magazines. His first collection of essays was The Red Hourglass: Lives of the Predators (1998). Grice was the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award in 1999. The following essay, originally titled "The Black Widow," first appeared in High Plains Literary Review. Grice reworked it for its appearance in Harper's Magazine and then again for The Red Hourglass. See Chapter 10, "Revising," for some of the draft sections of the essay.

Commenting on this essay, Grice observed: "I worked on this piece for years. It was originally written in 1993, and then I put it aside for a year. One day when I was substitute teaching in a shop class in high school and the kids were all busy, I took it out and rewrote the opening. The next journal I sent it to accepted it for publication." Widely praised for his precise and detailed attention to the "micro-world," Grice has said, "Personal observation and experience are part of my approach to writing as a whole. I like to delve into the details and give my readers the feeling of being there and having their own hands in it."

Related Readings and Other Background Information

You can probably find—in the bound periodical section of your library, in microform, or in a full-text database—the following related articles:

  • Grice, Gordon. The Red Hourglass: Lives of the Predators. New York: Delacorte Press, 1998.

  • Pollack, Michael. "Where Better to Find Out About Spiders Than on the Web?" New York Times 22 Apr. 1999: D11+.

  • Stack, Lawrence B. "Latro dectus Mactans." The New England Journal of Medicine 336 (1997): 1649.

  • Weiss, Rick. "Tough It, Miss Muffett, Spiders Have Substance." Washington Post 21 July 1997: A3.

You can also gather a wide range of information about the black widow spider through on-line encyclopedias and through websites maintained by cooperative extension services at state universities or natural history museums.



Web Destinations

Gordon Grice Interview
This page offered by Random House provides an interview with Grice.

Black Widow Spider
This page provided by the San Diego Natural History Museum gives detailed information about the black widow spider and other arthropods.

The Red Hourglass by Gordon Grice
This page maintained by Random House provides an excerpt from The Red Hourglass by Grice.

Online Help with Descriptive Writing
This site maintained by the Purdue University online Writing Lab provides an electronic unit on descriptive writing, including advice on choosing adjectives, describing a person, and describing a place.

Caught in the Widow's Web


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