#junkjournal

[cwl190]

Week 12

[cwl190]

Week 11

ROSS GAY and DANUSHA LAMÉRIS: In Gaiman’s short story, he describes how there’s a liberation in writing in that there are no set rules and direction for where your writing needs to go. He highlights this with one of the books from his childhood, whose table of context is a poem. Structure in writing are rules, but there are no actual rules in writing. Gaiman talks about how a majority of creative writers that want to get into publishing get driven away from it because they are being fed guidelines that eventually usurp writers’ enjoyment from it, and he emphasizes that sticking to something that you enjoy about writing isn’t a bad thing. You’re allowed to do whatever you want. All he asks is “Can you do it with aplomb?... with style?... with joy?” (326). And as long as you’re able to do so, no matter what restrictions you break, most people are going to look at what you wrote and enjoy it.

In “Small Kindnesses”, all Laméris seems to be doing is listing small acts of graces strangers perform for one another, but you can tell that there was intent put behind every one he lists. For example, lines such as “For the waitress to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder” is a very specific line, but I believe it’s something a lot of people can picture happening to them and agree with. A lot of the times, poems seem to revolve around concepts and emotions that we find hard to describe or confront because we think that if our work doesn’t have depth, it’s not worth writing or reading about. However, the subject behind Laméris’s work isn’t melancholic or tragic, and he doesn’t seem to be trying to force an epiphany. He enjoys these small acts of kindnesses, he knows we do, and he is expressing his love for the love that we show strangers that we mutually want for ourselves. It’s a simple topic, but one that is heartwarming nonetheless. 

Gaiman states, “You made the whole thing up... Right now you’re a madrunner running from mesa to mesa across the air on a bridge of stuff that you’d made up. All that happened is you stopped” (327). I interpreted this quote as that everything you write down technically doesn’t have a correct structure and doesn’t have to be. A beginning and end are just how you chose to start and end your writing, and it doesn’t matter what the contents are. A poem that seems to take example of the freeform approach Gaiman has is Gay’s “to the fig tree on 9th and christian”. It reads as a bunch of fragments of actions and adjectives strung together that hardly makes sense and doesn’t seem to have a general idea at all. But this is Gay’s flow of writing and how he thinks, and somehow he manages to use really neat imagery like “I was a little tipsy on the dance of the velvety heart rolling” and "giddy throngs of yellow-jackets sugar” blended with questions. I don’t understand it, but it still feels as though it’s a poem.

GARY YOUNG: 

In Addonizio and Laux’s Images, they state “An image, when it’s doing its full work, can direct a reader toward some insight, bring a poem to an emotional pitch, embody an idea” (86).“ Although Young’s poem is very vague, I think it’s really well written because I can tell there’s a bigger emotion he manages to convey with such few words. 

I think this poem has a similar theme to Laméris’s poem about acts of kindness because the narrator seems to be treating the girl he’s holding hands with with lots of care, but he’s shocked to see that he could direct that same reverence for himself. 

The fact that the narrator finds it hard to show himself care is something that I believe would resonate with the audience. In Tan’s “Pixel by Pixel” she states that something she finds important is connecting the audience together through words, and I think that the strangeness the narrator feels for showing himself kindness is something everyone can relate to. The use of “I”, and the narrator being himself all along might cause readers to see themselves in the poem.

Young’s poem also is subtle in a way that works perfectly, because I feel like the ambivalence is what causes to connect the reader the most to the poem. According to Aimee Bender's "Light the Dark", “The words that click into place, wrap around something mysterious. They create a shape around which something loves- and they give hints about what that thing is, but do not reveal it fully” (5). To me, by not giving the audience more context, we want to analyze the poem more in depth. 

ERIKA L. SÁNCHEZ: 

In “Image”, Addonizio and Laux praise the masterful use of color in poems to make the writer’s imagery stand out even more, such as an orange being displayed against a gray December. The stark contrast is used to enhance the poem. When Sánchez uses imagery such as “lucid semen trailing down a crisp, white sheet”, we can vividly imagine it’s reflectiveness against the sheets. The use of “crisp” and “white” are something we associate with cleanliness, so the imagery of the semen stained on it only gives the sense of it not belonging there. This can be a way of Sánchez effectively expressing her resentment at her own feelings.

Along the same vein, in “Writing the Erotic”, Addonizio and Laux state that when writing about sex in Hillman’s “The Spark”: “Each image supports or extends to the next... these images are graphic.... but because the sexual images are tied together with images of the natural world, they feel instinctive, right” (51).  Sánchez does this effectively in her own poem, as Sánchez describes sex with nature imagery such as “olive groves” and “sucking on sour oranges”, as well as blends her feelings with carnal want. “The wet earth of my desire” and “a hunger still unraveling” give the poem a frustrated, more animalistic and angry emotion to it. 

[cwl190]

Week 10

BENJAMIN PERCY & ADDONIZIO and LAUX: 

In “Set Pieces”, Percy puts a lot of emphasis on the set piece of a book/movie. He talks about how Charles Baxter states “we write to make sense of the widowed images in our lives” (41). Something that we want to get down on paper is centered around an image that was unforgettable to us. Percy also introduces his corkboard, which is used to compile several of these images so that he has several scenes of inspiration to draw from. However he also warns against describing every single little fact in your story in great length because the reader’s attention begins to waver. As a result, when it comes to presenting your set piece, the audience is not going to be as affected by what is supposed to be an impactful moment. Percy advises that you should make sure that you are building tension to the attention grabbing moment rather than making every single moment a hard hitting one. 

Similarly, in “Images”, Addonizio and Laux talk about the important of sensory details to invoke a certain feeling in the reader. According to the text, “Poets need to keep all five senses- and possibly a few more- on continual alert, ready to translate the world through their bodies, to reinvent it in language” (86). This ties into Percy’s corkboard because he describes he draws inspiration to write from everywhere. People’s conversations, magazine cuts, all and anything can be used to enforce his own work, and this constant vigilance definitely carries over to a medium that relies on connecting with its readers with less words. The set piece that Percy describes is the entirety of a what a poem is. Addonizo and Laux use examples from the poem “Where You Go When She Sleeps” where the poet uses the hair of the woman the narrator loves and associates different, grander things with that same color to make us understand how the narrator feels about something so simple about her. 

RACHEL ELIZA GRIFFITHS: 

In “Death and Grief”, Addonizio and Laux state that when you write about death, you need to make sure the reader understands what the context of your poem is about, or at least have a general idea of what the theme of the writing is. In Rachel Eliza Griffith’s poem “Good Mother”, I think she’s successfully able to connect to the readers through what is a commonly universal association with mothers, which is their unconditional love despite outside circumstances. According to the text, despite being completely strangers to the narrator, she “didn’t wipe my snot from her shirt, my tears from her collarbone, who did not tell me to pull myself together while everything inside me dropped”. This type of care in this form is something that most people would associate with something only their mothers can give to them, or once did. I think that part of the poem works really well because the narrator doesn’t explicitly state how a notion like this would be important to the narrator. However, in terms of subtlety I think that’s where it ends. The readers definitely understand what the grief is about, but I think that the way the narrator was grieving was too hammered in. That might have been the point, but the repeated “mom” mantra, and then the poem being turned into a general statement about appreciating mothers just felt overdone to me. Readers will know the loss, but I’m more ambivalent on whether or not they feel it with this poem.

HEATHER SELLERS: 

In Heather Seller’s “Accidental Practitioners”, intimacy is created in the poem through name association. Everyone knows the feeling of being reminded of another person closer to them when someone has the same name. People’s identities are tied down to their names, and the Sellers uses that as the concept of the poem, because the students the narrator is teaching are all painful reminders of people she once knew. I believe the reader may feel the loss through quotes such as “I say his name aloud to alter my relationship to grief”. We can understand the narrator is struggling to change that association to the student rather than her brother. And although the narrator plainly states what happened to her brother, ex-husband, and father so the reader knows exactly why she feels the way about them, the narrator also shies away from stating how they have truly hurt her, just as she avoids seating those students with the names together. For example, when the narrator tells the student with her ex-husband’s name, “You can lose me, I tell him. Pretend you will lose me”, this creates a feeling of desperation because we know that her ex-husband has clearly moved on from her. The readers can interpret that she says this because she wants her husband to feel as though he has lost something and that she meant something, and that idea could be saddening to the reader.

KAVEH AKBAR:

One of the most effective things about similes and metaphors are that they transform the literal meaning in a sentence into something deeper to express a certain feeling or idea. Intimacy is created in Akbar’s poem through Akbar’s daily surroundings. According to Addonizio and Laux, the magic behind the use of similes and metaphors when used in poems such as “Finding Something” is that the poem is written in a way that combines both senses and emotion alike. The narrator states that his “heart is as helpless as crushed birds” (Simile and Metaphor, 98). Beings that fly being constricted and harmed shows the magnitude of the grief the narrator is feeling. Akbar does something similar in his poem where Lydia is represented by orchids that are in everything the narrator sees. The reader comes to expect to see orchids described in every line, and when the last two lines are revealed, the reader understands that it’s not really about the orchids. This creates a feeling of claustrophobia and helplessness because no matter where the narrator goes, they will be reminded that Lydia is gone.

ADDONIZIO and LAUX, JANE SMILEY, & CATHERINE POND: 

Some “seeds” I noticed in Pond’s poems was definitely the way she wrote how them and their friend would react to the funeral procession if she had been with them, to drawing us back to their reality. I think everything about Kayaderosseras moves smoothly, from the flower petals hitting the windshield to the narrator inexplicitly expressing how uncomfortable they are passing by the funeral procession by describing how their fingers felt against the wheel.

However, I thought that “As If” was not as neatly executed as the previous poem. This one was more of a pebble for me because the narrator mentions lots of seemingly unfinished ideas and thoughts. They jump between mentions of Ontario’s fires which didn’t fit the theme of the poem and made it feel out of place, and it’s difficult to tell who is being addressed to in the poem in a way that is more confusing than interesting. For example, the narrator states that “Now we stare at the lake not speaking”, but who the “we” is is never specified, and right after she’s turning on the blinker. It’s nonsensical, but we can tell that there’s real grief behind what the narrator is saying. This makes me think that it’s what Addonizio and Laux meant when they stated that although a poem may seem to be well written, there were definitely feelings behind it that may or may not be polished and refined in the future.

**Professor Gaudry if you happen to be reading this, did you know that I make dollhouses? I know you mentioned liking miniature furniture so here are some of mine (house 1 | house 2 | house 3)**

[cwl190]

Week 9

DONIKA KELLY: 

In “Writing and Knowing”, Addonizo and Laux make the point that poets began to write “with the simple idea that what they saw and experienced was important to record, and that the modest facts of their lives... could contain the enduring facts and truths of the larger world” (Poet, 23). In my opinion, what I interpreted from this text is that writing poems isn’t only something that is based on what you know, but can also be used to expand on a bigger idea. Anything that may seem mundane on a surface level can be written into a great poem if made into something people can emphasize with, whether that may be through the senses or something common people share.

In Donika Kelly’s poem “Hermit Thrush”, by describing how white girls covering their legs make specifically the narrator feel better about themselves, Kelly is able to use winter to make a commentary on how societal standards on beauty affect poc such as the narrator. The narrator implies through this that by concealing their skin because of winter, it undoes some of the underlying inferiority the narrator faces due to how they are treated due to their ethnicity. 

I think that this is what Addonizo and Laux wanted to express when they state that poetry is about “bringing forth something that’s inside of you... making something, in language, that can be transmitted to others” (Poet, 22). “Hermit Thrush” is the narrator’s own feelings brought to expression by winter, and minorities that face discrimination may be able to connect with this same feeling. 

ROBERT WRIGLEY: 

Addonizio and Laux’s statement about using imagination to compensate for a lack of experience is an effective tool in writing poems. According to the text “The trick is to find out what we know, challenge what we know, own what we know, and then give it away in language” (Poet, 21). Your inspiration comes from what you experience in your life, whether or not they may be happy, confusing or even troubling. You might not know enough about it, but the point they may be trying to make though this is that although that experience is important in making your writing compelling, it’s the emotions and senses tied into the text that will make the audience emphasize with and believe what you write. 

Meanwhile, Percy puts emphasis on researching every single facet of a topic you’re writing about to be believable. He tackles all his stories as research projects that he takes into his real life, where he’d spend “several days working with the employees, eavesdropping on their conversations, taking notes on the peculiar insider lingo I could never have gleaned from Wikipedia” (146). He places emphasis on embodying what you are writing, and through the experiences he had himself will be able to bring what he knows instead of what he read in. By being there in the flesh, he is able to notice things that may have been looked over on paper. 

In Robert Wrigley’s poem “Machinery,” Wright seems to be a blend of both of these perspectives. The narrator doesn’t know machinery to the extent his father did, and his father doesn’t know poetry the way he did. This results in a weird hybrid of knowledge where Wright knows what all the tools his father uses are called, but he doesn’t know how to make them work: “A fine wood plane but not the thickness planer, which I would not know how to use. A variety of clamps I use to clamp things-needing-clamping clamped” (Wright, 2). Imagination plays a huge part in this, as he begins stringing tool functions in with his own writing so that it functions as a representation of his feelings about his father as well as what he remembers of him. 

EMMA DONOGHUE: In “You and Me,” Emma Donoghue says that for her,  “writing is about the basic thrill of making something out of words that never existed before” (236). She shares an example from her own book about how a “scene begins in a pleasant way, everything green and pastoral—and then we watch as she begins realizing that the bumps of the grass under her feet are not clods of soil, but skulls” (Donoghue 236). She says that “if you give the reader a vivid and concrete image, that will hook their attention, making it easier for them to understand and remember the details longer” (Donoghue, 236, italics mine). For this prompt, connect the dots between Donoghue’s thoughts about “vivid and concrete images” and any of the poems for today.

Donoghue puts the most emphasis on using sensory details in order to convey a type of emotion or idea in your poem. She brings up how she herself has trouble grappling with bigger concepts, so by giving her a visual example of what you are trying to describe, that gives her a better understanding of what is trying to be expressed. Donoghue uses the example of a poem that is largely split between locations: “You think you’re moored, then the next thing you’re sailing again, and then you’re rowing instead of sailing” (235). Donoghue emphasizes that through this, we are whiplashed into location and scenario rather than just being told that there’s a sense of turbulence.

This is used in “Hermit Thrush”, where the narrator does not specifically state how they feels in comparison to the white girls, but through them covering themselves up we are able to interpret the narrator’s insecurities.

SHIRA ERLICHMAN: Connect the dots between Shira Erlichman’s poem “The Knife-Flower” and the craft chapters on “Images” and “The Family: Inspiration and Obstacle.”

In “Images”, the strengths of using sensory details are strongly emphasized in this craft chapter. The mental images we derive from our senses are essential not for just the sake of enhancing the description of things, but the significance they hold when tied with emotions and memories. There is no stronger way to evoke a certain feeling than when you give an object association with something distinct. According to the text, “The poet enlivens his images with the use of color: “gold whirlpool,” “gold sea,” “full of the gold that took him.” Brightness, gold, and sunlight are everywhere. Like the love described, the poem won’t let us go- in one long sentence it takes us into that whirling and shining” (Images, 88). Love is a broad feeling, but it manages to be encapsulated by things that are more tangible due to the visualization given to us. 

In “The Family: Inspiration and Obstacle”, there is a discussion on importance of family on our writing. According to the text, “those closest to us still need to be written about, to be memorialized and argued with and resented and loved” (The Family: Inspiration and Obstacle, 36).  All the positives and negative emotions we first experience are because of our families. It doesn’t have to be detrimentally tragic to be a factor to our inspiration, but family is what introduces us to what we know. 

In Shira Erlichman’s “The Knife-Flower”, Erlichman writes a scenario of the narrator receiving a lily with a stem that pointed into a knife created unpassionately for the sake of a project. In this poem, when returning home for Spring Break, the narrator’s father breaks the knife-flower. The craft essay “Images” ties into this knife-flower because of how fragile it is, much like the slightly strained relationship between father and narrator. It’s been delicately made, and because of the father’s lack of caution, is easily broken. The incident is told in a way that is very matter-of-fact, but the way in which the second half of the poem is presented is in a clumsy, awkward matter that gives us the impression of the familial dynamic between the narrator and their father. Fumbling and falling short at times, but well-intended. The narrator doesn’t seem phased: “Immediately my mouth formed “It’s okay,” even though the break looked dooming” (The Knife-Flower). Although the father is extremely guilty, the narrator seems to have accepted the break for what it is despite their feelings about it. I interpreted this as growing up. The narrator has taken hurt and rejection as a part of life, despite how the parent may try to shield them from it.

HAYAN CHARARA (A): Connect the dots between Hayan Charara’s poem “Mother and Daughter,” one of this week’s chapters from Addonizio and Laux’s The Poet’s Companion, and Benjamin Percy’s “Consider the Orange: Meaningful Repetition.” For Percy’s essay, you’ll focus on the third element: manner of speech.

In Benjamin Percy’s “Consider the Orange: Meaningful Repetition”, Percy describes the significance in repetition isn’t necessarily in the repetition itself, but how it ties into certain themes: “I’m talking about aligning the narrative, creating a sense of structural and thematic cohesion, satisfying the emotional arcs of characters” (159). Repetition can be given a double meaning, used to convey something with more nuance and causing the reader to analyze the text on a deeper level. 

Hayan Charara’s poem “Mother and Daughter” takes this repetition and transforms it into an exploration between the relationship between a mother and daughter. The repetition becomes a mimicry of how daughters adapt behaviors from their maternal figure, then a window into their innermost thoughts and feelings about each other due to the car sinking. I thought the escalation in this was done really well because rather than the daughter remaining as a static mime of her mom, we can see their relationship wasn’t perfect despite the daughter’s admiration of her mother, and yet they still deeply love each other. Addonizio and Laux’s “The Family: Inspirational and Obstacle” is reflected in this work, because the relationship between mother and daughter is the central focal point of this story.

[cwl190]

Week 7

Benjamin Percy’s “Consider the Orange: Meaningful Repetition”

“I listened to people say consoling things to my mother, and I was glad that my dad’s family had turned up, had come to where he was. I thought I’d remember everything that was said and done that day and maybe a way to tell it sometime. But I didn’t. I forgot it all, or nearly. What I do remember is that I heard our name used a lot that afternoon, my dad’s name and mine. But I knew they were talking about my dad. Raymond, these people kept saying in their beautiful voices out of my childhood. Raymond” (158).

Mary Gaitskill’s “I Don’t Know You Anymore”

“He knows everyone will utterly look down on him if he does what he wants to do. Actually, I feel that he would do it anyway if Anna stayed with him- but she doesn’t stay with him. When she comes out of the fever she no longer remembers what she felt, and she looks at him with fear. She feels guilty, and she simply can’t be the way she had been. Perhaps she doesn’t even remember- as if the other woman has taken over again. And that’s what destroys him. But which is the real Anna, and which is the real Karenin: the people they are at the tender bedside moment, or the people they become af-terward, when the fever subsides?” (72).

“I wouldn’t go as far as to quote Nabokov and say they’re gallery slaves, but they are your creations- so they’ll do whatever you want them to do and be whatever you want them to be. Still, you don’t always know exactly what that is when you first conceive of them. And sometimes they do change. I wouldn’t say they surprise you, but your idea of them certainly changes as you go along. In the book I just wrote, one of the characters behaves in a way that could seem out of character and I suppose some people could say it’s unbelievable. But I think that people in real life do unbelievable things all the time, that, in fiction, the things that are realistic or literally true don’t always feel true... The thing is that everyone, including me, picks out as unbelievable sometimes is exactly the thing the writer will say, “But it really happened!” And it probably did. But it means they havne’t done enough to make that incident enter the world of the story, which becomes a reality with it’s own logic. When something genuinely surprising happens in a work of fiction, you have to be very in the story, and very in the moment, to make the reader accept it” (72-73).

“I could know a person like him [Karenin], and we wouldn’t have anything to say to each other; each would find the other un-interesting and even repellent. But through a book like Anna Karenina, we can be enticed to go beyond the uninteresting, day-to-day appearance- and find the true person beneath the surface” (73).

Edwidge Danticat’s “All Immigrants Are Artists”

“Pero of course it is, mijita. All your life is a work of art. A painting is not a painting but the way you live each day. A song is not a song but the words you share with the people you love. A book is not a book but the choices you make every day trying to be a decent person” (94).

“Their experience of touching down in a totally foreign place is like having a blank canvas: You begin with nothing, but stroke by stroke you build a life. This process requires everything great art requires-risk-taking, hope, a great deal of imagination, all the qualities that are the building blocks of art. You must be able to dream something nearly impossible and toil to bring it into existence” (94).

“...first-generation immigrants often model artistic behavior for their children. They don’t necessarily realize it, like the father who says the immigrant life is art in its greatest form. But I realize now I saw artistic qualities in my parents’ choices- in their creativity, their steadfastness, the very fact that we were in this country from another place. They’re like the artist men-tors people have in any discipline- by studying, by observing, by deading, you’ve had this model in the form of someone’s life” (95-96).

Ken Liu’s “Paper Meangerie”

“Son, I know that you do not like your Chinese eyes, which are my eyes. I know that you do not like your Chinese hair, which is my hair. But can you understand how much joy your very existence brought to me? And can you understand how it felt when you stopped talking to me and won’t let me talk to you in Chinese? I felt I was losing everything all over again. Why won’t you talk to me, son? The pain makes it hard to write” (18).

CONNECT THE DOTS—MEANINGFUL REPETITION: 

Benjamin Percy writes about meaningful repetition when it comes to objects, setting and manner of speech. In Orringer’s “Pilgrims” the main character has a loose tooth that she constantly wiggles throughout the story. It’s not very significant, but when playing with the pilgrim’s kids, they have a really vicious idea of rough-housing that causes the main character’s tooth to come loose. I think that this accentuates how off the house is. When the main character runs to her mother and can’t communicate to her that she lost her tooth and cries, this also highlights her helplessness and lack of control of the situation. This adds to the horror of the events of the story that eventually unfold. 

CONNECT THE DOTS—I DON’T KNOW YOU ANYMORE: 

Mary Gaitskill’s essay applies to Weike Wang’s “Omakase”. To me, the man’s extraversion and amicableness towards the restaurant workers is him trying to portray himself as a friendly, approachable person. But as much as he wants to project this image, he’s either non-perceptive or actively brushes off the woman’s feelings and doesn’t know when to stop pushing boundaries. I felt his ingenuinity the most when the man tries to assert that he knew the chef from somewhere outside of the restaurant. It’s not that he can’t be an entertaining person to be around and insensitive at the same time, but you can tell that he is trying to appeal to people in a certain way, and when they’re not receptive to that he doesn’t quit his advances. In a way it kind of negates some of the good in the initial impression you might have of him on a surface level when you’re aware of this.

CONNECT THE DOTS:

Benjamin Percy’s “Consider the Orange: Meaningful Repetition” describes how symbolism that evokes an emotion with a disparity to one’s expectations can be so much more effective in making a plot stronger. It subverts cliches and it allows your characters to have more depth. The origami figures in “The Paper Menagerie” are symbols of Jack’s internal struggle with his roots as well as his damaged relationship with his mother. When he played with them, it was during a time when he was willing to learn and embrace his Chinese roots. Them getting ripped up and thrown in his face is what spurs him to distance himself from his mother and abandon them. And when he uncovers them again and reads the note his mother gave him, that’s when he’s confronted with his regret and brought back to retracing his roots. In idea, the origami figures are just arts and craft toys used to entertain Jack, but he sees them as something that used to tie his mother and him together. They’re all he has left of her now.

CONNECT THE DOTS—ALL IMMIGRANTS ARE ARTISTS: 

Both Danticat and Jack’s mother are, in concept artists. Danticat describes how her mother would make dresses out of her own fabric to substitute for just buying pants to save money. While Jack’s mother had the means to buy him regular toys, she folded him origami figures. In the process of providing for their children, both of these mothers were creating art in an unexpected medium. Neither of them are an artist in the traditional sense where they went out of their way to want to create a grand piece of work, but were able to make something unique due to their cultural backgrounds. They used their creativity to fix, invent and solve something, so regardless of intent their imagination is what makes them artists. 

[cwl190]

Week 6

Amy Tan's "Pixel by Pixel":

“You take the ideas you rely on for survival, and discard what weighs you down” (32).

“...when I had a feeling like sadness, I couldn’t find a word that meant everything that I felt inside of me. I always felt that words were inadequate, that I’d never been able to express myself- ever. Even now, it’s so hard to express what I think and feel, the totality of what I’ve seen. But this loneliness is the impetus for writing, because language is the best means we have to connect” (33).

Michael Chabon's "To Infinity and Beyond"

“I saw the rotted dust and bones that had once deliciously been Beatriz Viterbo; I saw the circulation of my own dark blood; I saw the coupling of love and the modification of death; I saw the Aleph from every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth and in the earth the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth; I saw my own face and my own bowels; I saw your face; and I felt dizzy and wept, for my eyes had seen that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon- the unimaginable universe. I felt infinite wonder, infinite pity” (78).

Angela Flournoy's "A Place to Call My Own"

“Readers come to the book with all sorts of back-grounds, and they don’t need me to communicate how they should feel about a character. They don’t need me to suggest a character should be excused for his actions because of X, Y, and Z. They’ll make their own decisions” (182-183).

PIXEL BY PIXEL: 

Some of the microscopic pixels that made Gonzeles’s, Parameswaran, Orringer’s and Wilson’s characters stand out to me was probably their thought process. You can get a good handle on what the character’s personality is based on how they react to a situation, such as the narrator wanting to view his wife under a microscope and the tiger being unaware of the carnage he’s unleashing until he kills the child and his zookeeper. Or Orringer’s main character being fixated on the tooth among all the other pressing problems which highlights that she is just a child. These little details are important because they are aspects of their flaws and also give us a wider picture of their personality traits.

TO INFINITY AND BEYOND:

I think Parameswaran narrating with a tiger is so useful because of the tiger’s own motivations versus the failed result of those motivations.

“What had I done? I had to find help for him if it was the last thing I did. I turned and ran out of the people door- I had never been outside of the people door before, but I didn’t even think twice about running outside of it” (13).

Here, we see that the tiger wants to find someone to take care of Kitch, but in the eyes of people, they see a threat that is trying to escape the cage after brutally murdering someone. You feel bad because the tiger has no ill intent and yet it will get misconstrued by everyone else around him due to the species (??) barrier. We can see the tiger’s impulsive decision when trying to help humans always blows up in his face but it doesn’t make us hate him. Maybe we feel pity and uneasiness but the fact that he is an animal makes us regard him with a more merciful moral lense.

EVERYTHING I MEANT TO SAY: 

Most of the stories we’ve read and discussed did not make me feel good in any way. Maybe it’s the premise or the characters or the ending, but I feel like we start out at a low point already, and then it gets worse, and at best we are back at the same point at which we started. There’s not really a comfort to be found while reading these stories, but if I had to choose one text in this class that made me feel more comfortable with reading than the others, it has to be “grand stand-in”. I can’t tell if it’s the science fiction set-up, the dialogue, the first person point of view or the character herself, but it just felt like a writing style I was more familiar with than any of the other texts I had read so far. The exchange the main character has with the arranger just read very satisfyingly to me:

“You hate them, don’t you?” he says.

“Yes.”

“You’re going to make them love you, aren’t you?” he asks.

“Yes,” I say. “Yes I am.” (10)

It’s effective and it works well in establishing her. She doesn’t even say much, but the simplicity in their exchange is so effectively telling of what the main character is like. Just from that we can tell the narrator does a morally ambiguous job, but she has her own set of morals that she strongly commits to that is strongly contradictive to what her customers expect of her. And even so, the narrator takes a lot of pride in her work. Despite her own personal feelings, performing exceptionally is at the forefront of her mind. I didn’t really connect with that feeling of spite, but it’s something I feel like I’ve seen before, but done in a way that shows exactly the type of person the main character is and handles her job.

A PLACE TO CALL MY OWN: 

I think you need to treat your characters like people. I found that it’s a lot easier to get a feel of your characters through character sheets where you have to write about how they respond to given situations, or even their favorite foods. It might not seem as though it’ll be effective to your plot, but to me any inch of familiarity can get me a better understanding of who my characters are. The way they react to situations is more telling of their personality rather than describing them to the audience. However, at the same time, I find the more I explore aspects about my character, I end up being able to rationalize everything about them and that just makes them more uncertain to me. I feel like that kind of over analyzation can be applicable to real life. You don’t need to know everything about another person, and if you feel the need to you’ll just end up growing obssessed with the idea of them and not the person themselves. There’s a balance you need to strike so you don’t end up retconning them the further along you get with your story.

CONNECT THE DOTS—HORROCKS: 

Caitlin Horrock’s “It Looks Like This” contains usage of a lot of the advice that Perry gave us. Percy states in “Get a Job” that:

“It is a job that frames and sets into motion every element of your story or essay or poem- and it is your job to do the required research that will bring the language and tasks and schedule and perspective of your characters’ work to life. Google can do only so much for you. The library can only do so much for you. You need to write from the trenches” (145). 

Horrock does this especially well in her own writing:

“...this quilt, with the crooked angles and the lazy handstitching, was machine-pieced out of salvaged, distressed, printed cottons, on a 1886 Singer treadle, filled with flat, all-cotton batting, and quilted with a size 7/9 needle using unwaxed thread. The pattern (Log Cabin: Barn Raising) was popular in northern Ohio from 1865-1895, and if I told you that’s when this quilt was made, you’d have to know a fair bit about quilts to be able to prove me wrong” (22).

I have no idea what’s going on here. I don’t even know what a treadle is. My knowledge of sewing extends as far as a home economics class I took in elementary school, but from what I read from this text, even when the narrator points out her work’s shortcomings, I can tell that she definitely knows what she’s talking about. I really like that she sounds so self-assured here because although she didn’t finish school, you can tell she’s very knowledgeable about quilting. These specifics are exactly what Percy expects to make the character’s occupancy believable. The audience doesn’t really have to know what the meaning behind the phrases the narrator was using, and Horrock is well aware of it in the last sentence of the quote. You’d have to be an experienced seamstress or have a wealth of knowledge about quilting to be able to overturn the information she’s feeding us, because any average person would not be able to discern whether or not it’s real or not. The general, ignorant public would usually just accept it as fact.

CONNECT THE DOTS—WANG: Write a response that connects the dots between any of the craft essays we have read and Weike Wang’s story “Omakase.”

Amy Tan states, “I’ve found that the way to capture the truth of a character- and beyond that, to reflect the truth of how I feel- is to write microscopically. To focus on all the tiny details that, to-gether, make sense of a character. Each person’s perspective is absolutely unique; my job is to unearth all the specific events and associations that form an individual consciousness. It’s not enough to show how someone behaves in a single moment- I want to provide the whole history and context that informs each action” (33).

I think Tan’s viewpoint really shines through “Omakase” because the way in which the woman responds to the chef when he brings up that his manager was Chinese may seem defensive, but to her it appeared as a jab at her ethnicity. She seems very passive, but throughout the story we see her pick apart and analyze every action and every interaction between the people around her. Through her long, winding monologues we can see her own inner conflict about her suspicions her boyfriend had yellow fever, questioning why her friends thought that she got lucky for finding someone white, all her ambivalence. It’s established that she’s an overthinker, so in the moment it makes perfect sense for her to speak up to the chef. 

[cwl190]

Week 5

Benjamin Percy’s “Making the Extraordinary Ordinary”:

“Burton was enamored with the gritty nightmare of Gotham, the whiz-bang awesomeness of the Batmobile, and was carelss with characterization. So I didn’t believe... I was only a child, but after dreaming my way darkly through Gotham, the movie felt comparitively silly. Because it had no heart” (66). 

“I remember my mother crying and running upstairs when I was suspended. I remember my father ripping up my report card and hurling the pieces across the room like the saddest sort of confetti, not saying a word, just staring at me with hooded eyes” (66).

“Silence, I came to understand, was knowing when to shut up” (67).

“Saunders reinvents grief by giving it a beating heart. And he normalizes the weirdness by giving her a pitiable desire we can all relate to. Would the story be just as effective if it were told as realism? Some might say so. But fantasy allows us truths that might otherwise be unavailable. Normally a reflection means little except as a way to check our teeth, to smear on makeup, but before a warped mirror we pause, studying ourselves with awe and care, struck by a new way of seeing” (71).

“We expect winged men to be angelic, muscled and white-robed and blonde-haired and backlit by radiant light, but Garcia Marquez plays against our expectations: this figure is far from heavenly. They call him an “angel”, yes, but they also wonder if he is Norwegian or a sailor, a “castaway from some foreign ship wrecked by the storm.” And he is not exalted, as we would expect, but persecuted. He performs no miracles. He cowers pitifully. They cage him, prod him, pick his feathers, throw stones at him, burn his side with a branding iron. And in this way Garcia Marquez not only makes the fantastic accessible but captures the human tendency to fear whatever is different and the desire to label, define, control” (73).

Benjamin Percy’s “Get a Job”:

“Whether we like it or not, work defines us. Work dominates our lives. And we have an obligation, in our prose and poetry, in the interest of realism, and in the service of point of view, voice, setting, metaphor, and story, to try to incorporate credibly and richly the working lives of our characters” (140).

“Nor, tonally, should you build baroque sentences when the mind of your character is empy, his life unadorned. Her voice shouldn’t sound like white lace and gold trim when her home reeks of cheap whiskey and wood smoke” (144).

“It is a job that frames and sets into motion every element of your story or essay or poem- and it is your job to do the required research that will bring the language and tasks and schedule and perspective of your characters’ work to life. Google can do only so much for you. The library can only do so much for you. You need to write from the trenches” (145).

“Writing is an act of empathy. You are occupying and understanding a point of view that might be alien to your own- and work is often the keyhole through which you peer” (149).

Tom Perotta's "Ordinary People"

““I can’t look at everything hard enough”: The tragedy is that, while we’re alive, we don’t view our days in the knowledge that all things must pass. We don’t- we can’t- value our lives, our loved ones, with the urgent knowledge that they’ll one day be gone forever. Emily notices with despair that she and her mother barely look at one another, and she laments our self-possession, our distractedness, the million things that keep us from each other. “Oh, Mama,” she cries, “just look at me one minute as though you really saw me.... Let’s look at one another.” But mother and daughter remain self-absorbed, each in a private sea of her own thoughts, and that moment of recognition, or connection, never comes. Eventually, Emily has to return away” (130).

“Some people think of Our Town as being sentimental. Obviously, there’s a wish-fulfillment aspect here: the character who returns to the past, in a sense conquering death for a moment. But what’s unsentimental is that it’s too much, the way the experience is heartbreaking for the character. There’s a real emotional courage in the fact that there’s not a catharsis: only an unflinching acknowledgement of the gulf between the town and the cemetery. The living don’t appreciate the dead; the living don’t even appreciate the living. For me, that’s not sentimental- it’s unbelievably tough. The play presents us with a difficult truth, and forces us to take a long, hard look at it” (130-131).

Leslie Jamison's "On Commonness" 

“You remember too much, my mother said to me recently. Why hold onto all that? And I said, where can I put it down?” (158).

“I want to tell you how much it hurts, but I’m also going to tell you that there is a vioce inside of me, dogging me at every moment about tryingtoo hard to tell you how much it hurts... Carson’s mode of self-awareness doesn’t apologize for its emotion...” (158).

““I thought I would die” It’s so willfully plain. There’s something moving to me about saying it so embarrassingly straight. The following line, “This is not uncommon,” can be read so many different ways. The tone might be clinical or dismissive, as in, this is not an uncommon symptom of the disease of heartbreak. But it’s also an acknowledgement that what she’s going through is in no way extraordinary. It’s something that’s been felt before, and it’ll be felt again. Yet she owns this commonness, without apologizing for it, relinquishing it, or dismissing it” (159).

“I think there’s an additional layer of use when it comes to personal experience: You just see the events of your own life so differently after more  years have passed. That doesn’t mean that the truest version of an event is going to be the version you write when you’re eighty. But your perspective keeps changing” (162).

MAKING THE EXTRAORDINARY ORDINARY—TRUTH:

The truth that exposes itself in “The Miniature Wife” and “The Infamous Bengal Ming” is the failures in the narrator and his wife’s ability to communicate with one another and that wild animals cannot mingle with humankind. The narrator’s wife being shrunken down and the negligence of the narrator portrays how she herself has literally been minimized through the course of their relationship. The marital problems between the narrator and his wife have existed even prior to the events of the story, and now it’s presented as the main conflict of the story. Gonzales reveals that it’s not really the incident that was the problem between them, but rather the catalyst.

In “The Infamous Bengal Ming”, the truth that becomes available in this story is that humans and animals cannot cross the bridge between their nature. Whether or not this is due to a communication problem is up to our interpretation, but everything the tiger does that he thinks will aid humans is villainized and he suffers the consequences of it. In the end, it doesn’t even matter because the tiger’s idea of love becomes distorted due to his senses. He finds some type of twisted euphoria in killing a woman he despises, and because of his hunger he eats her. The tiger still calls it love even though it’s clearly not, and I think Parameswaran is trying to make apparent the futility of trying to bridge that gap between species.

FEAR: 

This observation applies to “The Miniature Wife” through the narrator’s fascination with his wife. Rather than try to find a solution to her problem, he observes her as if she is a wild animal as well as gives her a habitat for his own self-gratuitous reasons. We see that views her more as a test subject than as a person through ways such as peering at her through a microscope, prioritizing crafting a dollhouse for her to live with and not making any pursuits to undo the shrinking ray effects. Instead of handling her infidelity with communication, he fears the ramifications of anyone finding out he has two shrunken people in his house and kills his co-worker. 

In “The Infamous Bengal Ming”, this theme is present all throughout the story. The tiger approaches humans with good will, but almost everyone recoils away in fear and is killed from the tiger’s advances (understandably). The tiger's position as an apex predator puts him at the forefront of their defensiveness and rather than embrace him, they seek to restrain and control him based on their preconceived notion of tigers being a threat. Fear moves along the plot. The tiger runs away in fear of the consequences for killing the zookeeper, leading him to the house where the woman and her child live in, and because the woman is terrified of the tiger's presence in the room she drops the baby, causing the tiger to catch it with his jaw and eventually kill it. It leads the reader to wonder, what would have happened if the people in this story were not as terrified as the tiger as they were? Would that have changed the way the story spiraled out of control, or would the tiger have given into his animalistic instincts earlier?

CONNECT THE DOTS—GET A JOB AND GONZALES: 

The narrator’s world revolves around his job. The way he handles the situation, his relationship with his wife prior to shrinking her and how it ends is all because his job is his life. Due to the way he got caught up in his work, he was never a very attentive husband and always left his dishes in the sink and didn’t clean up even after his wife reprimanded him several times. Because of his constant pursuit of knowledge, instead of doing the reasonable thing and trying to grow his wife, he instead observes her as if she was an experiment rather than his partner. Because of the narrator’s occupation, he has been portrayed as a very cold, obsessive, and negligent man, or maybe that was the kind of person he was to be suited to the job to begin with.

ON COMMONNESS: 

I think it’s a matter of the ego? The author summarized why the describing the full scope of your genuine feelings can be seen as something to rag on at pretty well. Adding “This is not uncommon” is a self-aware statement that tells you they’re aware it’s not that big of a deal. I really liked the examination of this concept because being sincere is a scary thing to do when you write, or even in your everyday life. Your works are somehow a bit of an extension of yourself, and by shoving that into the forefront of everyone’s judgement you are exposing your expressed thoughts and feelings. You don’t want to be completely genuine because you’re usually not. There’s not much I can add onto that because I think the essay put feelings into words that I wasn’t able to do myself. 

ONE THING: 

The fake grandmas was something that I felt was done in a way that could really make us suspend our belief. When they mentioned how when visits from kids became more of a chore than something they enjoyed was the correct time to kill the grandparents off, it made so much sense to me. That was such a calculated strategy on their part because most children’s memories change with the passage of time. They won’t remember every feature on their grandparent’s face, so using their naivety to the business’s advantage works perfectly in the context of the story to me. 

Also, the way the stand-ins are required to memorize the entire family tree as well as their parent’s vacations, photoshopping photos to put them in it. It all seems like a huge elaborate gaslighting project. The moment the grandparent is killed off is the moment when the person they’re tricking decides it of their own accord without even realizing it. It made me realize the inevitability of family relationships eventually growing apart. A lot of people aren’t close to their grandparents at all so it was pretty easy for me to accept that them eventually being phased out of their grandchildren’s life is pretty believable.

WILSON: 

The narrator’s way of seeing the world definitely bends around her work. Her ability to disconnect from relationships at her job translates into her everyday life, where we see that she doesn’t bother with building her own attachments. She isn’t married, doesn’t have any kids and she refuses to enter committed relationships with other men. Whether or not this is due to the nature of her job or because of her past we don’t know, but we can glean that someone who treats familial relationships as a transaction isn’t very authentic or sentimental.

We especially see this when the narrator converses with her co-workers, who all seem to have a bitter, snarky approach to their jobs. They make death into a lighthearted subject manner or something with a double meaning. When Martha says “I was so good, fams were going to keep me until I outlived all of them. They were going to be leaving me money in their wills” (14) and the narrator reminds her that they all have due dates at one point. it’s not really just about the completion of their agreement as a stand-in. It can serve as a foreshadowing to when being a stand-in truly takes a toll and the narrator is no longer competent to their job.

ORDINARY PEOPLE: 

Perrotta’s ideas of ordinary details come in the form of people’s mannerisms: The breakfast they eat in the morning, how someone might put up their hair, etc. The “Grand Stand-in” makes all of those ordinary details into it’s own concept. It’s the grandparent’s job to embody those details and form themselves into a believable person. The narrator is transfixed on the lullaby because she feels the need to prove herself as a professional. Every part of their job is calculated, all those little details that make up their identity is the bizarreness of being a stand-in. The ordinary things about these grandparents are what makes them fascinating because it’s not them at all. 

CONNECT THE DOTS: 

The “Grand Stand-in” follows Boyle’s advice in “How Stories Say Goodbye” and has a closure where we are more or less satisfied with the ending. The narrator goes through an epiphany where she realizes that she doesn’t want to continue with her job due to wanting something real. The loss she experiences by cutting herself off from all the families is a hallmark of these change because although all the families she involved herself in was nothing but a fabricated lie, quitting unexpectedly gave her “deaths” meaning. She states herself that the sadness she feels is more rewarding and genuine.

[cwl190]

Week 4

Benjamin Percy’s “Designing Suspense”

“Start with reality. Come up with a moment when you really, really wanted something. Could be you wanted to land a job or could be you wanted to quit a job... Recall tha tmoment. Then inject it with a healthy dose of imagination. What is the worst-case scenario for this character?” (80-81)

“Some of my characters are on a quest, moving from point A to point B. But by flashing back and forth between the Sancturary and the journey west, I’m able to enhance suspense (by leaving the reader hanging with every chapter break) and to contrast the terrors and hopes of two very different worlds. The more tiem we spend in the Sancturary, the more we understand why the perilous escape from it is so necessary” (87).

TC Boyle’s “How Stories Say Goodbye”

“When the narrator says “It’s really something.” it tells us that he’s feeling deeply, but it doesn’t tell us what he’s feeling. That’s the beauty of the story: It’s up to us to know what he’s feeling” (298).

Talks a lot about your work flowing organically, not everything being structured

Ethan Canin’s “Rehearsals for Death”

“Endings are about emotion, and logic is emotion’s enemy. It’s the writer’s job to disarm the reader of his logic, to just make the reader feel” (305).

“The biggest problem for young literary writers, besides plot, is how to characterize: how to make a character seem like a real human being. One of the more subtle ways... is to have a character describe other people” (307).

“Writers tend to think that their own prose is the most compelling thing. You have to strangle that off, I think. Talk about killing your darlings. It’s not just about killing your good scenes, it’s about killing your instinct to try to impress with witticism and handsome phrasing- becoming, instead, a vessel for telepathy in a way. The less present you can be, the more you can be the character you’re trying to write about” (308).

“With characterization, you have to let go. You’ve got to release yourself from your grandiose intentions, your ambitions, your ideas about humanity, literature and philosophy by focusing on the being-another-person aspect of it- which, by the way, is freeing, delightful, and one of the few real joys of writing. Stop worrying about writing a great novel- just become another human being” (308).

“Whether or not a novel actually contains death, it’s often about the highlights of a life. Literature allows us to experience thousands of lives, to understand how we might want to live our own” (309).

DESIGNING SUSPENSE; Or, FLAMING CHAINSAWS: 

The authors were able to keep those flaming chainsaws “dancing” through the momentum they managed to keep up throughout both of their novels. In “The Minature Wife”, things continue to escalate right after the climax of the story. We had just gotten over the fact that the wife had cheated on the narrator and the narrator had literally fed his co-worker to the birds. We aren’t given a pause or hope things will get better because the tension between the narrator and the wife overflows and she attacks him, kills the cat as well as gouges out one of his eyes. 

The same thing occurs in “The Infamous Bengal Ming”, where the author hits us with a murder after a murder. The entire thing is veiled in confusion and unreliable narration until the tiger caves into his natural instincts and we are given a sense of violent euphoria from him as he tears into his final victim for the last time. We feel overwhelmed by sensory and emotional overload the same way the narrator is. It’s due to the fact that the narrator is a tiger that we are able to buy into his corruption.

HOW STORIES SAY GOODBYE: 

When I read “The Infamous Bengal Ming”, I think the story was finished for me. At the start of the story the tiger seems to have a very idealistic sense of love, but by the end it’s devolved into something warped beyond our comprehension, something more sensory and without reason or limits. We know that the tiger will eventually get caught and things will most likely not end well for him, but his emotional arc is already finished. I didn’t feel the need to see anything more.

For the “Minature Wife”, I think I am still compelled to see what happens next. Does the wife end up killing the narrator? Is the narrator able to capture his wife? I also want to learn more about the shrinking machine, and the consequences that extend beyond the narrator’s own personal circumstances. However, I don’t think that’s the direction the author set out to do and I thought the blowout confrontation between them was satisfactionary enough.

REHEARSALS FOR DEATH: 

I don’t believe that quote because there are several classics that have been praised to no end with super ambiguous endings. One of them that comes to mind is “The Giver”. We have no idea whether or not Jonas finds his way into the real world, heaven, or if the entire thing was a hallucination he created in order to help him cope with the deadly circumstances in which he escaped from. I think it depends on the story you want to tell. I agree with the idea that you should definitely feel something, but just because an abstract conclusion pushes you to think logically doesn’t mean you aren’t feeling something at all. If done right, you might leave confused, but with a drive to pick at the story. It might make you want to talk about it with other people who read the same book, or even revisit sections of the book to design your own interpretation of what happened. 

This is partially applicable to “The Minature Wife” because we don’t know what happens to the narrator or his wife at the end and we have an even fainter idea of the lab the narrator works at, which means that even after they are done ripping each other to pieces we still have questions for the world the narrator lives in. becoming, instead, a vessel for telepathy in a way.

CONNECT THE DOTS: 

“It’s not just about killing your good scenes, it’s about killing your instinct to try to impress with witticism and handsome phrasing- becoming, instead, a vessel for telepathy in a way” (Rehersals for Death, 308).

I think Orringer applies this piece of advice really well into her novel because in the section of the story where Ella goes to fetch her parents after burying Claire’s body, we are not given any insight into what Ella’s thinking at all. Orringer utilizes show not tell to the maximum here. We don’t get a window into Ella’s emotions because she is focusing on her present goals and senses. She needs to fetch her parents and leave that place immediately, and she’s probably in shock over what had just happened. We’re being fed that Ella is paranoid through what she sees, which is a portrait of someone who resembles who Ella had just saw die.

THE END: 

Orringer’s story simultaneously invites me back in as well as makes me hope the story is finished because I want to know what happens while the family makes their escape, but also not because if they’re stopped from their escape I’ll be upset, and also because they’ll be held accountable for the death of Claire.

EMOTION v. LOGIC:

I was feeling a sense of unease and sadness throughout the novel because of how helpless it was. Ella and Benjamin have no control over what happens to them all throughout the novel and it just made me feel upset from them. The circumstances before they entered the house was very depressing because of their ill mother. I just felt uncomfortable when they moved into the new house because of how unnerving the adults were, the violence of the kids and the weird foods they were forced to eat. The story seemed to be setting itself up for Ella to evolve emotionally and appreciate this more “humbled” enviornment due to how she kept wanting to return to the past, but I didn’t even want that to happen to her because of how awful it seemed there. When Claire died it completely subverted my expectations, and honestly made me relieved because her family was able to bag it and run. It was still completely horrifying, I don’t understand the point of why they came there. If it was for treatment, the mom was better off going to a regular hospital.

HOW’S IT GOING?: 

It’s okay. I really like the texts we were given. If it was something boring like American history, my entries would probably be halved. I wasn’t expecting Benjamin Perry’s “Thrill Me” to be so good, and honestly I’m glad I’ve been forced to read it because I don’t know if I would’ve been able to finish it if I couldn’t. There’s some super helpful advice there and some examples of suspense/horror/escalating that seem to be done well that I’m interested in checking out. I don’t know if I have that much faith in his recommendations though because he describes the horror of what happened to the professor in Paul Bowles’s “A Distant Episode”. It really intrigued me when I read it in the context of Perry’s book, but recently I was assigned to it in another class and I didn’t even recognize that gorey scene until it happened. While it seemed horrible in description, I didn’t feel much of the fear and disgust I think I should’ve. It just felt like it was being described to me but there was nothing to be scared of or dread.

[cwl190]

Week 3

Benjamin Percy “Set Pieces: Setting the Iconic Stage” (Thrill Me)

“Mine your past. Think of a place... Three or four images will typically race to the front of your mind. You can hunt for those images too. Keep your mind open, a notebook ready” (43).

“Every winter, in Ames, Iowa, crows appear. Clouds of them. Thousands of them. They blacken rooftops and leafless trees. They mutter and wheeze. They slick sidewalks with their shit. They dive and peck people who walk too close” (43).

Benjamin Percy “There Will Be Blood: Writing Violence” (Thrill Me)

“... where imagination takes over and the reader becomes a kind of writer, inventing the violence, and in doing so the story becomes their own and they carry it with them like a red-veined tumor” (54).

“We’re all guilty of it at one time or another. Excess. Recklessness. Dangerous indulgence. Driven by the same impulse that compels us, when we spot a sign that reads Wet Paint, to reach out a hand for a touch, delighting in the smear, bringint a finger to our nose for a sniff, to our tongue for a taste. Especially when the paint is red” (55-56).

Gorenography - Prolonged suffering, splashing buckets of blood across stories without principle and with peculiar malice and glee.

“Their flamboyand style aestheticizes the mayhem, as if the authors love what we are meant to despise. They linger on the violence, wallow in the gore, celebrate it to such a degree...” (56-57). 

“Violence is not the answer, but a variable in a long, complicated equation” (58).

“Almost every shot is a close-up, each of them flashing on-screen for the briefest moment, giving us a shutter-speed collage of horror. A screaming mouth. An outstretched hand. A bulging eye. Knife, knife, knife” (59). 

“We are not told about his aching heart or his mind stricken black with grief” (64).

SET PIECES: 

One movie with a set piece that really sticks out to me is this scene from “Perfect Blue” directed by Satoshi Kon. Honestly the entire last third of the movie is a ride and I never explain why I like this film so much because I think everyone should watch it at least once in their life going in blind. From the beginning of this clip to the end, we can see the main character Mima’s struggle with her own identity to the point where it crosses over to her reality. Just like it is for her, the audience has no idea how to draw a distinction between what is real and what’s in her head. I still don’t completely understand everything that happened in this film even after rewatching scenes and analysis videos because everyone’s interpretation of this movie is so different. Even so, I think the beauty of the film is it’s bizareness and how no one can truly grasp what was trying to be conveyed there.

CONNECT THE DOTS (SET PIECES): 

The defining set piece in “The Minature Wife” for me was the scene where the narrator walks in on his wife sleeping with his co-worker, who had shrunken himself to her size. I think that this is the set piece of the short story because it’s the catalyst for everything to really turn to havoc. The narrator and his wife have had rising tension throughout, from the narrator neglecting his wife to her slowly adapting to being small, but I think that her cheating on him was the breaking point where we just knew their relationship was past salvagable. The main character killing his co-worker by letting a bird eat it and his wife assaulting him as an act of war is just an escalation of this set piece after the other.

WRITING VIOLENCE: 

I think this advice is perfect for any aspiring writers because by shying away from the ugly, you are not making any progress regarding your plot or characters. Your writing doesn’t always have to be raw and visceral, but conflict is what drives a story and to make something compelling, it has to be believable. People do ugly things. By embracing that in your writing you can convince the audience your characters are real. I’m still trying to work on this in my own writing but in a way where I can balance dialogue seamlessly with action.

CONNECT THE DOTS (VIOLENCE):

I think the violence in Gonzales’s story is something that got proper buildup. Gonzales’s story is an allegory that works especially well in the context of today’s relationships. There were a lot of underlying problems in the relationship between his narrator and his wife, and I think that accidentally shrinking her was symbolic for how he minimized her feelings. I think the narrator and his wife had flaws, but their inability to communicate is what spurred the chain of disasters. Her eventual infidelity and hatred of him seems to explode out of nowhere, but I can see this happening in any regular marriages as well. 

DON’T LOOK BACK: 

I think there is backstory in Gonzales’s story when he’s explaining how his wife used to leave passive aggressive notes to him. It works here in a way that helps us understand that it wasn’t just being shrunk that drove a wedge into the narrator and his wife’s marriage. There was already unresolved conflict between them due to the narrator’s overdedication to his work and his neglect of his wife’s feelings. This wasn’t something that came out of left field, it was just something that escalated the ruin of their relationship at an even more rapid pace. 

CONNECT THE DOTS:

Parameswaran uses violence in a unique way where he downplays the tiger’s brutality towards Kitch and the baby. He means to be gentle when he takes the baby in his mouth and ends up suffocating it, and he wants to show Kitch affection and kills him. This makes the tiger’s strength even more convicting because the tiger doesn’t mean to do any of those thing but is so powerful he cannot help himself. This gives the tiger’s violence meaning instead of just describing a rampage beast on the hunt out of malicious intent.

SET PIECES: 

The set piece in Rajesh Parameswaran’s “The Infamous Bengal Ming” is definitely when the tiger bites into Kitch and kills him. It sets in action him becoming a runaway and escaping from the zoo. This is an escalation to the plot and shows that although the tiger loves Kitch, it’s impossible to bridge that gap between man and animal.

VIOLENCE: 

I think that violence is written responsibly in “The Infamous Bengal Ming” in that it is not responsible at all. This tiger has well-meaning intentions through most of the story but his strength ends up being his unbecoming, as every act of good he tries to commit is received with punishment. This is thoroughly intentional because while it portrays that predators can never be fully tamed, it also brings a new perspective to an otherwise terrifying animal. 

DON’T LOOK BACK: 

I don’t think there is any flashbacks, only context to who certain characters may be, like Saskia, Maharaj and the old lady he despises. I think that this is more effective for this story because it puts you more in the headspace of the tiger who is mainly focused on his present feelings of hunger or danger. 

[cwl190]

Week 2

Benjamin Percy’s “Urgency”

“To create suspense, you must have both: what is outside of the character (whatever is intruding on her life) and inside of the character (whatever she desires that is just out of her reach). When these two things come together, you build the potential for something to happen” (21).

“"You never make an effort," he says. "What about that bartender at the Pine Tavern? She's got eyes for you." The way Brian saws hurriedly through a joint or lets his knife slip to puncture the gut sack and spoil the meat is as full of meaning as anything he might say aloud” (26).

“Their eventual appearance in the narrative does not eliminate tension but instead exacerbates it, encouraging more trouble, introducing greater mysteries” (34).

Google: Cormac McCarthy's The Road

Jim Shepard’s “No One Ever Changes”

“We have to value the moments when a person is everything we'd hoped this person would be, or became briefly something even better than she normally is. We need to give those moments the credit they're due. The glimpse ofthis capacity is part of what allows you to write characters who are so deeply flawed” (146).

URGENCY: 

I think the Lower-Order Goals taught me something new I could’ve used for my writing. While the apparent stakes are important, I think that lower-order goals can be just as essential because it allows the author to explore the nuances their character dynamics as well as establish or develop their relationship with one another. What a character does or even doesn’t do in a situation can create moments of tension that escalate the plot later on in the story. Percy’s example of Brian gutting the meat is subtle and yet his actions speak louder than him replying verbally. 

NO ONE EVER CHANGES: 

I think Shepard is right. We’re all flawed and bound to repeat mistakes whether it’s intentional or not. What makes us human is that constant vigilance required to go against our vices. We might not even be aware of when we slip up most of the time, and it’s even more difficult to drive ourselves to make sure it doesn’t happen again. This just a matter of life, and because a good character is one that’s believable we need them to have a constant struggle with something we personally connect with so if they manage overcome it, it’ll feel earned. But because everyone is flawed, there is still room for them to regress or find new problems. Just because a conflict ends doesn’t mean the characters’ development does either.

CONNECT THE DOTS: 

A craft essay goes into detail on storytelling elements that enhance the story itself, such as elevating the stakes in a plot and adding suspense so the readers will be invested up until the final arc. When reading Manuel Gonzales’s “The Minature Wife”, a lot of the points in Benjamin Percy’s “Urgency” seemed really applicable to the story. The narrator and his wife’s clashing motivations are huge factors in what led to the horrible fallout in the end. The narrator is so invested in his work even before he manages to shrink his wife, and even once that happens to her he priotizes working on shrinking things to suit her little needs. Meanwhile, the wife grows resentful of him not trying to solve the problem and ends up sleeping with his co-worker. The stakes got raised exponentially higher due to the narrator murdering his co-worker and to his wife completely giving up on him trying to kill him. I think that really shows how good suspense building can really escalate a good story to a great one. 

[cwl190]

Week 1

SEMESTER GOALS:

Something I expect for this course that emphasizes “reading like a writer” in order to “borrow like a writer” is teaching me how to approach works from a more analytical/technical standpoint. Reading something purely out of enjoyment is different from reading a work that will inspire me or help me work on an area of writing where I’m lacking. I could see the way something is paced and use that to progress a story I write, or even use descriptives that I wouldn’t have remembered and aren’t something I pulled straight from Google. Two of my goals this semester is to write with more variation and to be able to write on a regular basis without getting burned out.

FIRST LINES: 

“The truth of the matter is: I have managed to make my wife very, very small” (1).

This is the line that interests me the most out of the seven because I found that there are two completely different directions this work can go. This line could to be an epiphany from the narrator where they realized they have minimalized their wife’s contributions to their relationship or is dismissive of her feelings, or it could be taken literally and the narrator has actually managed to shrink his wife. I think that the questions the first sentence poses is an attention hooker because I don’t have any context to this story. The lack of expectations I have is what makes this first line the most intriguing to me.

Steven King’s “You’ve Been Here Before”

“What a beautiful thing-fast' clean' and deadly, like a bullet. We're intrigued by the promise that we're just going to zoom” (24).

“An appealing voice achieves an infimate connection-a bond much stronger than the kind forged, intellectually, through crafted writing” (25).

“So there's incredible power in it, when you say, Come in here. You want to know about this. And someone begins to listen” (28).

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s “Follow This Voice”

“There was something incredible about the ways these sentences were constructed, in terms of the languidness of their rhythm, that would engulf me and pull me back into the past of my narrator's own time” (228).

“The language itself had some kind of impact on me that was more emotional than intellectual. The book acted as a condensed, compact, extremely powerful substance that woke me up to what I needed to do, each day, as a writer. I thought of it as expresso. It wasn't coffee-I couldn't drink it all day long. I couid only take small doses, and that was enough” (229).

“Whatever happened with this book, it was a decades long process of osmosis: the product of reading hundreds and hundreds of books and authors, absorbing all their styles on conscious and unconscious levels” (231).

YOU WANT TO KNOW ABOUT THIS: 

My chosen line did invite me in and made me want to know more. The lack of context and the contrasting possibilities the opener offers forces me to wonder what did the narrator do to make their wife small and whether or not I should take it literally. 

VOICE & DILEMMA: 

A line that establishes the narrator’s voice and their dilemma can definitely drive the rest of the story because it tells you what kind of personality the narrator has as well as show the major/minor conflict in the story. Based on that voice, we are either hard pressed to see how the story evolved, or we won’t even want to touch the rest of the book. One of the first lines in the “First Lines” PDF that best accomplishes this is: 

“One of my earliest memories starts with me sobbing” (1).

To me, this one establishes that the narrator probably hasn’t had the happiest life, and we want to know why this memory is so distinct to them. If this is the narrator’s earliest memory, what about what happened in their past makes it so distinct? What does that say about the entirety of their life, and how would that anecdote reflect on them as a person? Since the first line starts out direct, we can see that the narrator is probably straightforward. The rest are good on their own, but I think that this quote is the one that I connected to the most due to how simple yet meaningful it is.