How We Survive: A Poem Analyzing Life, Death and Necessity

This poem is an analysis of the short story "Living Like Weasels" by Annie Dillard. It focuses on life and death, as well as how life is fleeting, and draws on themes expressed in the source work. This poem was created as part of a multimodal project for an American Literature class in the Fall of 2024 using the following prompt: You are responding to literature using creative techniques in two phases. In the first phase, you will compose a 2-4 page piece of creative writing that includes a theme we’ve studied in the class that has significance to you. That creative writing is “in conversation” with a literary text from any assigned reading in the course that has the theme you selected. The text you write is in a creative genre different than the genre of the literary text you selected.The second phase of the assignment is to transform your creative writing into a multi-modal text. The goal for this dialogic project is to draw on a practice of American writers responding to earlier generations’ work. Then, drawing on contemporary work with visual and auditory elements, we extend our thinking with a multimodal text to deepen our study of key themes in American Literature.