Questions 1-10 are based on the following passage.
Passage A by Marita Golden
LITERARY NARRATIVE: Passage A is adapted from an essay[br]
by Marita Golden. Passage B is adapted from an essay by Larry L. King. Both essays are from the book Three Minutes or Less: Life Lessons from America's Greatest Writers (©2000 by The PEN/Faulkner Foundation).
Writers are always headed or looking for home.
Home is the first sentence, questing into the craggy ter-
rain of imagination. Home is the final sentence, pol-
ished,perfected,nailed down.I am American writer.
5 and so my sense of place 1s fluid, ever shifting. The
spaciousness of this land reigns and pushes against the
borders of self-censorship and hesitation. I have
claimed atone point or other everyplace as my home.
Like their creator, my fictional characters reject
10 the notion of life lived on automatic pilot. The most
important people in my books see Jife as a flame, some-
thing that when lived properly bristles and squirms,
even as it glows. In the autobiography Migrations of the
Heart, the heroine, who just happened to be me, came
15 of age in Washington, D.C., and began the process of
becoming an adult person everywhere else.If You sell
your first piece of writing in Manhattan, give birth to
your only child in Lagos, experience Paris in the spring.
with someone you love, and return to Washington after
20 thirteen years of self-imposed exile to write the Wash-
inton bovel nobody else had( and you thought you
never would!tickeet,visas lingua franca will all
become irrelevant .When all places finger print the
which grasp is judged to be the strongest?In my novel
25 A Woman's Place, one woman leaves America to
JOtn a liberation struggle in Africa. In Long Distance
Life, Naomi Johnson flees 1930s North Carolina and
comes up south to Washington, D.C .. to find and make
way. Thirty years later her daughter: returns to that her comp-
30 lex, unpredictable geography and ts sculpted like some
unexpected work of art by the civil-rights movement.)
I am a Washington writer, who keeps one bag in
the closet packed, just in case. I am an American. who
knows the true color of the nation's culture and its
35 heart, a stubborn, wrenching, rainbow. I am Africa's
yearning stepchild, unforgotten, misunderstood, neces-
sary. Writers are always headed or looking for home.
The best of us embrace and rename it when we get
there.
Passage B by Larry L. King
40 If you live long enough, and I have, your sense of
place or your place becomes illusionary. In a changing
world, our special places are not exempt. The rural
Tcxas where I grew up in the 1930s and 1940s simply
does not exist anymore. It exists only in memory or on
45 pages or stages where a few of us have attempted to
lock it in against the ravages of time. And It is, of
course. a losing battle. Attempting to rhyme my work
of an earlier Texas, with the realities of today's urban-
tangle Texas, I sometimes feel that I am writing about
50 pharaohs.
My friend Larry McMurtry a few years ago stirred
up a Texas tornado with an essay in which he charged
that Texas writers stubbornly insist on writing of old
Texas. the Texas of myth and legend, while shirking our
55 responsibilities to write of the complexities of modern
Texas. Hardly had the anguished cries of the wounded
faded away on the Texas wind, until Mr. McMurtry
himself delivered a novel called Lonesome Dove. A
cracking good yarn, if a bit Jong on cowboy myths and
60 frontier legends. And decidedly short of skyscraper
observations or solutions to urban riddles. But not only
did Larry McMurtry have a perfect right to change his
mind, I'm delighted that he did.
I spent my formative years in Texas, my first sev-
65 enteen years. before random relocation arranged by the
U.S. Army. Uncle Sam sent me to Queens. I must
admit, Queens failed to grow on me. But from it I dis-
covered Manhattan, which did grow on me, and I
vowed to return to Manhattan. And one day did. But before
70 that, in 1954, at the age of twenty-five, I came
to Washington, D.C., to work in Congress.
New York and Washington offered themselves as
measuring sticks against the only world I had previ-
ously known. They permitted me to look at my natural
75 habitat with fresh eyes and even spurred me to leave my
native place. I have now tarried here in what I call the
misty East for almost forty years. This has sometimes
Led to a confusion of place. I strangely feel like a Texan
in New York and Washington. but when I return home
80 to Texas, I feel like a New Yorker or a Washingtonian.
So if my native place has been guilty of change, then so
have I. Yet when I set out to write there is little of
ambivalence. The story speaks patterns. and values that
pop out are from an earlier time and of my original
85 place. I fancy myself a guide to the recent past. In an
age when the past seems not much value, I think that is
not a bad function for the writer.