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One To Watch Books: Your Guide to October YA Releases
One To Watch Books: Your Guide to October YA Releases
Grab a pumpkin latte and make it a Venti because we’ve got enough October YA releases to fill a pumpkin patch! From Jason Reynolds, Maggie Stiefvater, John Green, EK Johnson, Rae Carson, Anna-Marie McLemore, Nic Stone…some of our most anticipated release are out this month. No Tricks. ALL TREATS! (more…)
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My Calendar Will Need Forgiven
When I was 15 y/old I started working retail. It was a good job, and it taught me many useful tools. My first job was at Loehmann’s department store. There I would learn marvelous clothes that could transform you into any way you desired to be perceived.
If I wore a silk Oleg Cassini with wide leg silk slacks and a simple gold chain on my wrist and one for my neck I was no longer that awkward 15 y/old girl. I was powerful and I flowed above the ground when I walked. If I wore a Calvin Klein jean jacket, an olive Fendi top, and jeans that accentuated my full rear end I was a well put together powerhouse. In my mind at least. I figured out this disguise and manipulation of appearance very quickly. At 15, I got that my outward appearance could affect how I was treated by adults. I got that I could transform into anyone and fit in and manipulate. I didn’t work for commission, but I did work for recognition. When the women who came in intending to spend significant amounts of money I wanted them to request this 15 year old over everyone else. I’ve always been a fast learner and this goal didn’t take long.
My manager Mr. Evans, my purist inspiration was the first gay man I had ever met. I honestly don’t think I knew the word gay previous. He bought dresses for his mother in a size that was 10 sizes bigger than the mother he introduced to me. The disguise. Monday through Friday his suit and tie with shiny shoes was a powerful man and the dresses he brought home were unforgivingly fierce.
My mother had zero fashion sense, she never wore make-up, and she saw no reason to help me out in those areas. Mr. Evans, however, lovingly taught me how to be whomever I wanted or needed to be on the outside and we thrived.
2016: The year I decided
January 1, 2016 is the first day in the first year I have decided.
I have decided to share and breathe and live.
I am a work in progress like everyone, but this will be dedicated to the work most needing of my attention. There was just under a decade of my life that changed the trajectory of everything that was familiar and I have never gotten back on course.
I am terrified. I am vulnerable. I am determined.
I am free to think. I am free to feel.
I have decided.
The creative writing club is a little too creative sometimes.
The other night we held the first meeting of the semester for the NCSU creative writing club, Outside the Writers Block. My co-president had the idea of doing pass-around stories for an icebreaker. If you’ve never done a pass-around story, you are missing out. Everyone starts writing a story based on a given prompt. They have one minute (maybe two) to jot something down before they hand their paper over to the next person. You can go around the circle as many times as you want and allow up to five minutes for subsequent turns. Eventually the stories end up with the person who started them, and then you share aloud the story that evolved from your original sentence or two.
Our prompt was a single sentence. ”These are the things I no longer wish to understand.” Everyone had to start their story with that sentence. It went beautifully. We ended up with two stories about assassination, two about calculus, one about turnips, and one about a vengeful unicorn ghost. I thought I would share “my” story with ya’ll. I’ll be honest; I had no plan for where this story was supposed to go. I wrote a weird topic sentence and let the others do what they wanted. No regrets.
These are the things I no longer wish to understand: calculus, the nature of man, and bananas. I’m not sure why bananas confuse me, probably the weird number of vowels. It just feels like a joke of a word in general. The nature of man is not much better–people don’t make much sense really. They something, thi[n]k something else, and do something completely opposite. Then there is calculus, which [is] a mystery unlike any other. It all seems fairly simple at first with its many methods and theorems, but then it all blows up in your face. My teacher constantly shows the class examples that make sense, but then the homework are completely different. The tests seem like they are written i[n] some long forgotten language. This confused me greatly, so I decided to go down to the library and talk with Misses [sic] Sara Ann Debow, directer of archival studies.
“What is the secret to calculus, Miss Debow?” I said sheepishly, my beret in my hand.
She smiled and sighed.
“Two weeks,” she said in a gruff but deliberate voice.
“What?” I asked.
“It will be clear in two weeks.”
“…you know I’m asking about calc[,] right? Not the weather?”
She scowled and smacked my hand with a ruler, forcing it off the circulation desk.
“TWO. WEEKS.” She returned to munching on her sandwich–a Mayonnaise overloaded monstrosity on rye bread–with bananas.
I stood there for a moment, textbooks in hand, thinking of what kind of crackpot college this was. NOTHING MADE SENSE. What’s two weeks going to do? I exited the library and started heading to my dorm, but along the way I was ATTACKED BY NINJAS! ON A COLLEGE CAMPUS! … WHY!? Good thing I had my trusty phaser set to stun. My textbook made a surprisingly good weapon as well–I guess I’m not the only one out there who had been damaged by math. But the ninjas appeared to be popping up out of nowhere–and even armed with an evil textbook and my trusty phaser, I couldn’t fend them all off.
They overtake me and place a cloth over my head. ”We’re here to tell you the secret.”
“Oh my God, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” I breathe. ”She said two weeks!”
