For today’s creative writing class, I started my students off brainstorming “green” with the rhetorical modes. In other words, I had them define green, describe green, divide and classify types of green, give examples of green, compare and contrast greens, discuss the causes and/or effects of green, analyze the process of how to green, tell the story of green, and present a green argument. Then we discussed Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill” and Tom Waits’s “All the World Is Green” before moving on to analyze Jericho Parms’s “Red“; their assignment is to write a work of creative nonfiction investigating a color of their own choice, examining it from angles of memoir/autobiography, history, science, psychology, religious thought, philosophy, and sociology. We’ll see what they come up with . . . or up with what they come.