Reflection on Tenino

Tenino takes a topic that I have always been interested in—taking written works of the past and connecting them to a personal present—and expands upon it wonderfully. Mary Clearman Blew says that, “It seems to me that, if only for the length of a sentence, I have been freed from the inexorability of past tense” (50). This quote is interesting when pertaining to nonfiction, because the majority of what will be written in nonfiction is in the past, and a writer can easily get distracted by the “inexorable” fact that the information has already been experienced and is only being retold. But Blew found a way to connect past and present, freeing herself to write better nonfiction because of it, which I believe is an important thing to learn how to do.