"Machine of Wonders" Response

            Kirby, aka “Gumball,” is an eight year old girl sitting in the hallway of a hospital where her mother is being treated. To distract from the familial turmoil occurring around her, she constructs an elaborate fantasy involving the vending machine, which her troubled and distracted father insists is a cigarette vending machine. Kirby believes it is an “Art-O-Mat,” which is confirmed by one of the nurses treating Kirby’s mother’s medical emergency. 

I enjoy the childlike flights of fancy Kirby’s mind went to, especially connected as the first one was to a familiar child story, Beauty and the Beast. I really enjoy her fascination with candy, especially as it pertains to her nickname, Gumball. It rings true for her age and the way she looks at the world. 

However, I have a hard time believing she would be as fanciful, especially in the midst of such a traumatic situation, at eight years old. Certain words or phrases used in the story (not even necessarily by Kirby herself) accentuate this, like “blue-blue” used to describe candy and Kirby’s eyes. Also, the tense of the story appears to change from past to present in transition from the first to second paragraph. The primary issue I have with the story is its point of view. As I’ve said, sometimes the diction is childish and seemingly centered in Kirby’s experience, but certain sentences draw the reader out of her mind and into a distant, almost fly-on-the-wall perspective. This can be seen in sentences like “The ‘vvvvvvving’ is quieter than the buzzing of the florescent lights and the blinking and shushing sound of machines coming from the room across from her, and the soft voices of her father and the doctor discussing something they don’t want Kirby to hear.” The use of more complex words or phrases, like “monochromatic” or “tall conifer of a man,” in contrast to the relatively simple diction of the majority of the story, accentuates this issue. I also feel conflicted about the ending, and the confirmation that the vending machine is indeed an “Art-O-Mat,” whatever that means. I’m not sure why this fact is significant, or why her father didn’t believe her before. I’m also not really sure how this connects to the conflict with Kirby’s mother’s medical condition, or how this shows a change in either Kirby or her father. I feel pretty lost overall regarding the ending. 

"Red Checkered Suit" Response

       The man in the red checkered suit is a withdrawn individual harboring an intense, secret affection for Cheryl, a waitress at a local diner. Over the course of the story, the reader learns of the depth of his fascination, to the extent that he frequently follows her home. One day, Cheryl notices his stalking, and in an accident in their altercation she falls and suffers a serious injury. 

One thing I really enjoyed about this story is the unassuming and casual tone with which the speaker describes events that are ostensibly highly problematic. What seems like a harmless crush turns far more sinister, but the tone still remains outwardly milk and pleasant, which throws the nature of his obsession, and the reader’s growing knowledge of it, into greater contrast. I also enjoyed the hints of dark humor that pervaded “Red Checkered Suit,” in instances like the description of the man’s childhood experiences at the Natural History Museum, where visitors “picked their noses or smacked a rowdy kid when they thought no one was watching.” The appearance of the protagonist himself, in the title of the story, didn’t seem strange to me until his character and mental judgement were called into question. I think even more instances of humor like this would heighten the contrast even further. 

I do have a few suggestions for how “Red Checkered Suit” could be improved. I would like to know the specific setting of the story; this is obviously an urban environment, but I think setting it in a specific city and state could add a lot to the story. Along with setting, I’d like to know how long his ritual of watching Cheryl at the diner has been going on. If it’s been an extended period, if seems odd that she wouldn’t have recognized him or engaged with him. Also, there seems to be a verb tense shift on page 6 from past to present. It goes from past, as in “The air was thick…” to present in “People are starting…”. I like the story from the man’s at the end; I wish this theme which I sensed throughout the story (male violence, physical or whether mental/emotional, against women and onlookers’ indifference) had been more developed throughout. Perhaps I’m looking too far into one anecdote, but its placement as the concluding image seems to suggest I’m not. 

"The Passing Days Only Brighten" Response

          Butch Godfrey is the mayor of Rhodesia, Alabama, a small town devastated by a tornado. In the wreckage, Butch discovers the body of Carver Belvoire, and is deeply shaken. The recovery efforts begin under the aegis of Reverend Jeremy Kelworth, Butch’s anticipated rival for the Rhodesia mayorship, as community tension builds. 

There were a lot of things I really admired about “The Passing Days Only Brighten.” I love the correlation between the Biblical books that Pastor Kelworth chooses to preach from and the tiny town shaken up senselessly by an event seemingly at the hand of God. I think this could be played up even more, perhaps with some of the weirder stuff from Revelations, because the creepy parallels are pretty much endless there. Along the same line, I think the image of the two churches, Rhodesia Baptist and the Redeemed Apostolic Church of the Penecost (great name) facing each other, one ruined and one intact, across the road. I’d like to see this image surface again nearer to the end of the story. One last thing I admired was how certain elements of the story, like subtle weather description, repeated themselves in a way that was noticeable but meaningful. In one place, weather description is used to signal the passage of time (“When the sky turned purple and orange”), which is understandable for a town so heavily affected by it. 

One issue I had with this story is a desire to know more about the protagonist. How did Butch end up the mayor for over a decade, as alienated as he seems to be from the town’s other inhabitants? Does he or did he have a family? The reader is teased with the information that “His house had room for at least four people, but he lived alone.” What is his background with religion, since he seems to have a wariness for it approaching antipathy? Not all these questions need to be explicitly answered, but as I reader I would like more information about Butch. The only other significant issue I have with this story is the ending. I was a little caught off guard by the suddenness with which the ending arrived. The sections leading up to the conclusion focus on Butch’s alienation and apprehension about the eventual mayoral battle, and the last paragraph seems to continue this theme. However, the introduction of the artifacts of Carver Belvoire’s past (especially the yellowed letter that seems to suggest that his son had something to do with the death of Carver’s wife, if I’m not reading too much into it) doesn’t seem powerful enough to provoke the physical reaction they do in Butch, with his “senses blurring.” If they’re not intended to have a powerful effect, then I question why they are included, or how they facilitate a change in Butch’s character. 

"The Mansion" Response

         Lydia is a troubled mother haunted by memories of a past seemingly-abusive relationship and the possibilities of the life she desires for her son, Ronny. While sleepless and smoking, she describes the tiny, cramped dimensions of her current living space, while imagining an alternate idyllic life in the abandoned mansion next door, but eventually concludes the physical and emotional closeness she shares with her son wouldn’t be worth risking for that kind of lifestyle. 

I thought this story made a daring move in attempting to portray the mindset of a woman looking back on an abusive relationship. Lydia seems ambivalent towards Mike in the present, but when examining memories of their life together and the conflict it produced, she can only wonder “Why do I love this man?”. I thought her inner conflict to reconcile her feelings and his behavior was interesting. I think expanding this narrative to include how she eventually found the strength to move out would tell us more about Lydia as a character. 

The timing of the relationship is a little confusing to me, though. Is she still engaged to Mike? If so, why doesn’t she live with him and his children anymore? If their relationship was completely in the past, I would make sure the verb tenses describing it are uniformly past tense. Also, I want to know more about the narrator outside of her relationship with Mike and her son. She mentions she suffers from insomnia and has “terrible stomach problems.” How did these conditions develop? What was her family situation like growing up, that she feels the need to provide for her son so strongly? Where does this story occur, and what is the speaker’s relationship to this place? These are just a few of the questions I have, which could be answered with much more detail about Lydia. As a reader, I would prefer these questions to be answered in dialogue or description, rather than straight exposition, which is how most of the details we do know about Lydia are shown, like “I am a mother of one son and I am single,” which feels almost too blunt. Lastly, there is the issue of the “you” address, which is present in a few places in the story. There aren’t enough clues in the story for me to know who this “you” is, or why Lydia speaks to them with such frankness, or why this address is powerful. 

"Normalcy" Response

       Rose is a struggling college student who, while visiting home, discovers that her beloved mother is having an affair. Her parents become separated, and she counsels her father on how to deal with the demands of work and family alone. Rose's mother visits her, and Rose confronts her about her infidelity. 

       There were several things I enjoyed about this story. One aspect was the parallelism of the beginning and ending, with Rose's mother holding her as an innocent child at the beginning, and Rose holding her crying mother as a maturing adult at the end. As the 11 years between the two have passed, Rose and her mother have almost reversed roles, as Rose matures and her mother commits an immature indiscretion and pays for it with the dissolution of her family. I enjoyed how the Sound of Music playing in the background of Rose's discovery of her mother's affair provided a dark contrast between two seemingly happy families. I think this contrast could be played up even more, to emphasize the drama of the moment of discovery. 

       One thing I struggled to reconcile in this story is the mention of Rose's overeating problem. This is brought up one at the end of page two, and never mentioned again. Though it could just be a symptom of her ill-adjustment to college, I kept expecting the eating problem to come up again, and was disappointed when it didn't. Seeing Rose seek help, eat healthy, and take control of her eating habits could be a visible sign of an inward maturation. Though Rose loves her mother deeply, the mother character remains unlikeable and morally condemned for most of the story. The reader gets a small taste of her reasoning for her mistakes, but this only comes in the form of her summation at the very end. She mentions she felt "bored" with "the suburban housewife life," but this is too general and a little cliche to really make the reader feel any sympathy for her. If her dissatisfaction or depression were mentioned earlier in the story and her character developed further through dialogue and memory, the reader would have more sympathy for her. I also wished for more of a resolution at the end, one that makes it clear how the character has changed, rather than how she will compromise her simultaneous anger and love towards her mother. 

       

"The Savior Sibling" Response

          Mollie is teenage girl whose life is disrupted by the unexpected diagnosis of an aggressive type of leukemia. She suffers through chemo with the support of her family, but no treatment is successful, and the family seeks a bone marrow donor match. Finding none, they decide to have another child on the slight chance it will be a match for Mollie, which the little girl eventually is.

I like the unexpected turn the story took near the end, and how it raised some difficult ethical questions in the mind of the reader. I was unaware of the real-life events this story was based on, but now I’m intrigued to look up the stories of “Anissa and Marissa Ayala,” as your note at the beginning of the story says. 

However, I felt like the story ended just as it was getting really interesting! Since this is based on a real-life, controversial story, use that fact to your full advantage and focus on what makes this an exceptional case rather than just another sad cancer story, which is what it felt like until the last two pages. Ending the story what felt like abruptly after a solution is found raised a lot of questions for me: how will the transplant affect the child? Is a solution like this morally right or acceptable to the family? How has the character changed through her struggles, or is this “savior sibling” an example of deus ex machina? I recommend beginning the story after diagnosis and after chemo so the bulk of the focus could be on the “ethical controversy” and harsh media attention brought up at the very end. Focusing on this ethical conundrum could help eliminate some of the instances of “telling,” rather than showing, I found in the story, which I think functioned as summations to move the story to its most interesting point. One example of this I found was “David and I became closer as a result of everything, which was a blessing.” Rather than give readers this general summary to speed things along, it would be more helpful for characterization to give specific examples of how David helped Mollie, or using his humor to lighten the family mood helped their relationship, or some specific detail like that. 

"A Racist's Cry" Response

            Ansley is a young student who, on the first day of a new school year, finds herself in class with a domineering teacher, Mrs. Sherman. While disciplining an unruly student, Mrs. Sherman opens her students minds about the unacknowledged racism that can occur even within the classroom environment. 

One thing I enjoyed about the story was the immediate characterization of Mrs. Sherman via the dialogue opening. Readers immediately have a clear idea of her uncompromising need for discipline among her students and unconventional teaching style. There were occasional dashes of humor within this story that I also really enjoyed, like when the speaker describes her reluctance to speak based on her wish not “to be on Sherman’s shit list.” I wish this humor had been sustained throughout the rest of the story.

However, I felt some elements within this story were not clearly developed. I was unaware this story was in first person until the bottom of page two, which is the first point the “I” narrator entered the story. The reader has little idea of the narrator’s thoughts or feelings until near the end of the story, except through the narrator’s long section of dialogue in speaking to Mrs. Sherman. Given the tiny role of the narrator, it is difficult to grasp how she changes over the course of the story. Several key details are revealed about the narrator nearer the end of the story, like the fact that Mrs. Sherman is an infamous figure within the speaker’s family. This leads to questions in the reader the story leaves unanswered, such as: How does the speaker’s family know this teacher? Is it through an older sibling? This raises another question, one I found myself asking throughout the story: how old are these students, or what grade are they in? This scene would have far more resonance in a middle school classroom, than a high school one. In addition, the narrator has a seemingly overdramatic reaction to Jimmy’s description of his friend Justin and his girlfriend Ashlee. Jimmy’s description are a little rude, but definitely not deserving of him being condemned as a “horrible friend and boyfriend.” Lastly, the poem Mrs. Sherman read out loud didn’t seem provocative enough to cause such extreme reactions, like shock or embarrassment, among the listening students. 

"Nightmare" Response

          Damien is troubled young man who, upon visiting his boyfriend, Stefan, suddenly discovers Stefan has been unfaithful and impregnated a girl. Distraught and shocked, Damien slips into an episode of delusion and murders his boyfriend’s lover, convinced that she has tricked or drugged him into a relationship. 

I admired how physically grounded all the protagonist’s emotions were in this work. By that, I mean that, instead of simply stating the character’s emotion, like fear, or anger, physical symptoms were supplied that helped the reader discover the emotion for herself. For example, instead of stating Damian’s shock at discovering the girl in Stefan’s apartment, the work has “My throat closed up on me and my vision blurred.” However, some of the physical reactions to emotion were overdramatic, as I’ll discuss later. 

Unfortunately, I had several problems with this story. Most of the issues I found had to do with the form, rather than the content. The exact repetition of the opening scene at the end was an interesting parallelism, but as soon as I realized the conceit, I had no interest in reading the end, and skipped over it entirely. Using the scene at the beginning worked to peak interest, but it detracted heavily from the end. I found the use of italics in the story to be distracting and excessive. Disregarding the opening scene, from page 5 onwards it seemed like every other word, including unnecessary ones, was italicized. In dialogue, the extra emphasis made it seemed like the characters were constantly shouting. In addition, the bolded demarcations of time before scene transitions were overly explanatory. Rather than outright telling the reader how much time as passed, I would try to make that clear through details within the story itself. The female character was very stereotypical, more of a screeching, annoying harpy than a real person. Because she is so obnoxious, I felt no reaction and little shock when Damien finds himself standing over her dead body. Finally, many of the reactions within the story seemed overdramatic and unmerited by the severity of the situation at hand. For example, on page 6 the protagonist seems to be experiencing a complete mental and emotional breakdown, complete with sobbing and nausea, over a revelation that, while shocking, wouldn’t merit such an extreme reaction. That same kind of melodrama occurs again on the next page, especially in passages like: “I could barely stifle my cries and hiccups with my fist and bloody knuckles, though the heavy rain helped.”

Lahiri and Davis Response

       One reason I really enjoyed this story was the novelty of the perspective; I don’t think I’ve ever read a story in second person before. “Once in a Lifetime” seemed a blend of second person and first person, with Hema both speaking as if to Kaushik and also narrating her own internal thoughts. After I finished the story, I took time to consider why Lahiri made this choice, instead of going with a more conventional point of view. The only conclusion I could reach is that the frame of a direct address of a young girl to an older boy she has a crush on is an indict way of dealing with several deeper, more serious topics (sickness, acculturation, family dynamics, etc) through the prism of a young girl’s experience of them. These issues could be too weighty to be dealt with directly without becoming sentimental. 

     In relation to the Davis essay, when the narrator cries, I feel her emotion is genuine and touching enough to truly move, rather than a trite gesture in the context of a technically “clever,” rather than emotionally meaningful, story. The tears here are not beautiful, they are human, above all. The sensory imagery in this passage emphasizes this: “…I began to cry. At first the tears fell silently, sliding over my nearly frozen face…becoming ugly in front of you, my nose running in the cold, my eyes turning red.” The moment is a powerful mixture of visual and tactile imagery, familiar to anyone (everyone) who has cried unexpectedly in the company of someone they don’t know well. The gesture of tears is a mixture of emotions like anger, fear, shock, and sadness, rather than one-toned. The lack of reaction from Kaushik in the face of such a serious revelation and accompanying response also keeps the moment from being overdone or sentimental. 

Schappell and Hempel Response

             In her essay “Endings,” Elissa Schappell describes thirteen common ways of ending stories, both favorable and unfavorable. Schappell makes the point that endings in life, like the ends of relationships, are much more memorable than the relationships’ beginnings. This may be true of real life, but when I thought about it, I could remember far more literary beginnings, or first lines than endings, or last lines. The only ending I remember specifically being struck by is the ending to one of my favorite novels, One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Marquez. I remember the ending because it perfectly tied together the prophecy made by Melquiades at the beginning of the novel regarding the degradation of the Buendia family and the town of Macondo. The reader is left with one poignant image of a baby, the one hope for the family’s lineage, being carried away and eaten by fire ants, thus bringing the story full circle. Schappell describes several of the undesirable types of endings, like the “Doogie Howser” ending, wherein the narrator bluntly tells the reader the message meant to be gleaned from the story, or the “big bang” ending, which involves sudden dramatic concluding events. To guard against these types of undesirable endings, I often gravitate towards open or symbolic endings. In open endings, the story merely ends without reaching a point of distinct resolution, leaving the reader to interpret the change that has occurred. However, I fall into the temptation of leaving the ending too open, which can feel lazy instead of intentional. I also gravitate to symbolic endings, which can work, but often don’t, as in my first story, where in my haste to finish a first draft I invoked the symbolic image of rebirth in flowery language, without fully considering the meaning of the image in relation to the rest of the narrative. The image thus becomes like the “low-hanging fruit” Schappell describes. 

         In Amy Hempel’s story “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried,” Hempel uses a similar structure to Marquez, introducing an element in the beginning of the story that is given greater emotional weight by the time it is repeated at the closing. Hempel’s ending fulfills Scheppell’s advice that, through an ending, “the world gets larger, not smaller.” Through the anecdote of the grieving chimp, Hempel’s narrator comes to terms with her own grief. Just as the profound emotion of grief transcends species, so it transcends narrative and fills the reader with a sense of aching loss as well. 

Color "Map" Exercise Response

         The Faulkner passage I worked with was a veritable rainbow by the time I had finished with this exercise. The only words without a color were conjugations and pronouns. I know Faulkner has a very "dense" style like that, but I think this would be characteristic of most good writing as well. Not only were there a wide variety of colors, but they overlapped quite frequently. Even within one "color," like a long stretch of dialogue, there was action, backstory, and sensory detail. There was an almost total lack of exposition in the Faulkner piece. The necessary details of the story were conveyed within other elements, like dialogue or thought. I like the idea discussed in class of exposition in the first draft as a writer's note to herself, even though this makes the revision process seem even more daunting!
          In my own color map, I noticed there were sentences concentrated with several colors, and then a gap of little color for a sentence or two. So there were sentences rich in action and sensory detail, and then sentences that functioned only as "fillers" or bridges to the next, more interesting sentence. In my scene, there was a lack of taste and smell sensory detail, even though the scene in question would benefit greatly from these, especially smell, as it was emphasize several qualities about the room described without having to state them directly.
        The story, unlike my last one and the stories I've written previously, is in the first person. Thus, most of this story I've written thus far is thought. I'd like to cut back on the backstory in this scene, but to do so I think I might have to change the tense of the story. My plan had been to use present tense to frame the story, at beginning and end, with past tense for the majority. In this plan, most of the story would be backstory, so I'm considering a revision of the tense.

Place Revision

Here are a few sections of my short story that I revised with regards to "place."

        Bees buzzed by the purple flowers spilling from their pots by the stairs to the rooms. Occasionally they flew too close to the water and were hit by the slash of the children playing at the shallow end. Once hit, they fell and struggled, tiny legs pumping, to free themselves from the water. Their black legs slowed and then were still, and they died before being sucked into the pool filter.

If the tourists listened closely, they could sometimes hear the crash of the sea against the dock several hundred yards down the shore, but never the keening call to prayers and mosque spires they could have heard and seen in the streets of Amman. This place was insulated from all that, an escape from the very culture they had come to see. There were no crumbling ruins or Mosaic temples here; there were only overpriced cocktails by the pool and dead bees floating in the tepid water.

Lily could say lazily how her bank account couldn’t handle all this alcohol, but every hour or so she still called the dark-skinned boy in the black pants and the sky blue polo to her pool chair and ordered another cocktail. She called him Muhammad with a familiarity that seemed more than a little insulting. Kate winced every time, thinking 'Not every Arab person is named Muhammad.’ A few minutes later, the same boy would scuttle over from the bar by the hot tub and present her with the drink, always with a slight bow that seemed more terrified than deferential. She dropped a few small dinar coins into his hand, but the drink itself was always charged to the room–Lily wouldn’t carry bills here. 

“You know those cost like seven dinar, right?” Kate asked her.

Lily raised her sunglasses to look at her, squinting. “How many US dollars is that? Like, ten?” 

“Yeah, about ten.” 

Lily swirled her glass around, watching the muddled lime float then sink to the bottom again, before taking another sip. “Ah, fuck it. My mum is paying for the spa, I can afford a few drinks.” 

Kate had seen Lily’s mother only once, in the incarnation of a pair of sunglasses and a silk scarf waving from the car window when they dropped Lily off at college. She was always traveling, Lily said, so she only rarely called. She and her husband had divorced a year ago and were all the more vengeful for it, according to Lily. 

and

        What really unsettled Kate was the fact that no matter how she tried, she couldn’t completely cast herself as the martyr, the counterpoint to their conspicuous consumption. Her clothes were well-made and fashionable, if not designer. Her parents lived in on a quiet tree-lined street in a sprawling subdivision outside of Houston. It was no mansion in Santa Monica, like Lily’s father’s house, but it was spacious and clean and comfortable. Yes, Kate worked part-time, but it was mostly for extra money to spend on luxuries like concerts or shopping. Yet still she felt vaguely disadvantaged, and felt guilty for the feeling. But brandishing the scholarship, her middle class passport, in her hand, she could refuse spa days or sushi at Nobu with impunity and spend the evening in the quiet dorm cherishing rare solitude. 

and 

         The men glanced back as if surprised she was following them down the narrow hall, lit with fluorescent lights and walled with white cinderblock. They spoke to each other, then called back, “We take him to the office.” A few moments later, they stopped at a door marked in Arabic, opened it, and pushed the gurney in. Kate followed, her heartbeat pounding in her ears. The room was small and sparsely furnished, with a few small cots, a desk, and some shelves. One man spoke quietly into the desk phone, and the other pulled a dusty white box emblazoned with a red cross, from a cabinet and took out bandages, rubbing alcohol, coating pads, and safety pins. Their efforts were measured, unhurried, and Kate felt the panic begin to bubble up within her. 

"Disaster Stamps of Pluto" and "Place" Response

          Louise Erdrich’s “Disaster Stamps of Pluto” provides a great example of the suggestions for setting or place developed in Dorothy Allison’s “Place.” The reader has a clear sense of the town immediately, both in its details, like city and state, population, and weather, as well as in its mood and probable future. In addition, by the end of the fourth paragraph, the reader has an understanding of the speaker’s place in this dying, lonely town as the “president of Pluto’s historical society.” Unrelated to place, the development of the speaker’s character is the thing I enjoyed most about “Disaster Stamps of Pluto.” For most of the story I felt a slight frustration at not knowing much about the speaker’s identity, other than that she is a woman in her 80s. I never suspected that the surviving child of the murdered family, who grew up to be Pluto’s first female doctor, could be the speaker until the speaker mentioned her medical practice. The final “twist,” revealing that this entire story is part of the historical newsletter, took me completely off guard, but only added to the quiet drama and heartbreak to be found even in a tiny, dying town. 

I enjoyed Allison’s point about reading as an attempt to learn about those whose settings and experiences are different from ours. I agree, and this explains a frustration I’ve felt before, especially this weekend at the Writer’s Conference, whose theme was “The Inspired South.” Most everyone at the conference was either raised in the South or consider themselves Southern. Thus, a conference of Southerners talking in their writing about the South doesn’t provide any sense of exploration, of covering new or uncharted territory creatively. If this conference’s theme was explored in California or Boston, I think it would have been more impactful and could have exposed a new audience to talented writers from the South, because the people of these locations don’t have the context we do. Choosing a theme or topic with which almost everyone had a lifetime of experience felt too “safe” to me. On the other hand, I do understand the need to preserve a sense of regional identity and discover what this identity means in a modern context. I enjoyed the conference, but I’m still conflicted about how I feel about it’s focus. 

"Performing Surgery without Anesthesia" Response

          Revision has always been a terrifying process for me, one that I frequently shirk in favor of merely polishing minor errors. The initial feverish, intense process of creating a first draft is so creatively exhausting, it’s difficult to muster the energy to radically change your own creation. Another factor that makes “cruel and ruthless” objective revising difficult that Offutt didn’t discuss is the tendency to write autobiographical characters. Just as the writer makes herself vulnerable through the story as a whole, if she sees aspects of herself in the characters, they will be particularly difficult to view objectively. Realizing upon revision that a character based on aspects of the author’s life or personality is boring or whiny isn’t just tough for the revising process: it’s a blow to one’s own self esteem. 

Offutt dwells several times on recognizing what the story is, rather than what the writer intended or envisioned, and revising accordingly. This is where I think the group workshop process becomes most valuable, in gauging what the story really is from an objective rather than subjective eye. From my own experience in this class and others, workshopping a piece of mine brought out different perceptions and unexpected possibilities I had not envisioned or intended, at least not consciously, in my work. 

I do question, however, whether the revision process really makes a difference through dozens of drafts and many years, as Offutt says he has occasionally done. At that point, I think it’s possible the story will have been revised so much that it bears little resemblance at all to the original draft. That is not necessarily a bad thing, as the changes were probably positive, but I wonder if a story that is not “operational,” for lack of a better word, after 10 years is even worth salvaging. 

Ekphrasis Exercise

This was inspired by Raoul Hague's "Untitled" sculpture, created in 1975 using reshaped walnut tree trunks. The shape of the sculpture reminded me of a female body, so I worked from that premise and developed this short piece.

Juglans regia

In the dark, I see her stomach rising and falling like the phases of the moon. She hasn’t much time left, but I can’t help but pause in the doorway to see the light falling silver on her skin in the dark, electrifying and gilding. The walnut tree outside was dancing and moaning with the wind and somehow she was one with it, two great limbs of pale woodenness surrounding an absence, a cavity where something was and is not anymore. I’d been carved out years ago and left her hollow, concave with wanting. The grain is irregular, dipping here and there in droops and folds, but I know it is beautiful. I climbed these limbs when I was small and hid myself among them. 
We ate walnuts by the handfuls then, cracking shells and leaving them littering the front porch. Walnut breads, risottos, roasted with sugared sweet potatoes so the aroma spread itself throughout the house like a thick blanket coating my hair, my clothes. I had no other companion; sometimes she didn’t feel like my mother, more like a second self. When she cradled me at night I felt like I could almost sink back into her, complete the circle again to make her stomach full and round like in the pictures she showed me on the mantle. The walnut tree was strong and full then. She was beautiful in those pictures, long hair flowing down onto her shoulders all the down to her stomach, encircled by her own arms. She stood in front of the gate of the house, face dappled with the walnut’s shadow, her body as full and strong as its limbs. The picture was still on the mantle, but I no longer lived within her or within the confines of the house that had been my kingdom. When I left fifteen years ago, I felt as though I were carving out some portion of her as well, hollowing out the core of her being. She was hollow ever since, growing smoother and leaner with the wind and rain. I wanted to stay, but my roots had grown beyond the ragged fence and I felt the walls of the house pressing in on me. I had outgrown the taste of walnuts; I preferred harder, bitter flavors. Yet at the beck of a spidery handwriting’s call I’ve drifted back, back to the crumbling house and the shell-speckled lawn. 
She will not last much longer, the hospice nurse said. They’ve cut the malignancy out of her stomach (I cannot help but feel offended) but still she falters, weakens. I wonder if I am a malignancy too, a bacteria worming its way into the wooden whorls it once called a home. A few hours, and she will never been empty again, only filled with something I cannot give her. I want to stay with her but I don’t feel strong enough, I want to brush the leaves from the open window off her bed and murmur Oh Susannah, Oh Susannah as I brush her hair, still long but faded. I want to graft new stems onto the hole, to make her gaping body smooth again.  
Her stomach is a waxing crescent, stiller and stiller by the minute. I smell creaking wood and hear the walnut tree splinter in the wind. 

"Put One Foot in Front of the Other and Breathe" Response

          Celia is a troubled student who connects with a boy online, only to find out that he is not who he pretends to be. In pursuing him, she alienates her parents and her high school best friend, Tess, who warned her against the relationship. When his true identity is revealed, Celia realizes her thoughtlessness and immaturity towards her family and her only friend.
          I thought the subject matter of the story was very timely, especially considering there is an entire TV show now dedicated to uncovering the truth behind suspicious online relationships. It's also easy to see how Celia's loneliness and alienation fed into her love for "Cain" and obsession with their relationship, eventually ruining her academic future and her relationship with Tess before the ruse was even revealed.
          However, there were a couple flaws I found in this story. For one, it was apparent from the very beginning that Cain was not going to be all Celia hoped, both from her describing her narrative from the very start as a "sad little tale" and Tess's foreboding warning that "You're gonna get matched with some creepy stalker." From these constant reminders that this story will not end happily, it is neither surprising nor moving when it doesn't. The warnings of Tess and the worries of her parents are exactly confirmed; I can't feel sympathy for the narrator if she ignores all good advice and is then surprised when good doesn't come of it. For me, I want the "stakes" of the story to be higher. If she has a secure safety net of her family and their support before she takes the risk of dropping out of school and traveling to Colorado, the risk isn't too large. She can come back home, mend the relationships with Tess and her parents, and ease into school again. I would like to see the "real" Cain, as that would add a greater sense that she has been deceived, and thus more sympathy for her. Instead of a cute college student with "sandy blonde hair and brown eyes," it would be more interesting if we saw he was an unhappily married 30-something with 2 kids, a desperate loner intent on scamming her, a teacher at the school rather than a student, etc. Never seeing or having direct, face-to-face conversation with Cain leaves the story feeling incomplete. One suggestion to remedy this could be that Celia uses the last of her money to travel to New Mexico, still believing they can be together, only to realize he is nothing like he pretended even in conversation. There are other options to be tested out, any of which would add a lot more depth to the story.

"Wounded" Response

       Through the frame of his friend Mikey’s self injury and following nighttime hospital trip, Jason flashes to and from his past experiences (each characterized by wounding or wounded people, from my perception), both as a child farming with his grandfather and his interactions with his bizarre and flawed neighbor Nick, eventually inhabiting multiple moments at once as the morning dawns. 

The characteristic of this story I enjoyed most was the author’s masterful use of visual imagery. This worked, I think, especially for a story like this, which transitioned quickly between scenes each characterized by a particular set of sensory details. Certain key images from each scene reappear, like the angled columns of sunlight and the feel of cold concrete of the porch, in the last brief scene, which I perceived as Jason, in his sleep-deprived and emotionally exhausted state, blending the subjective narratives of his own past. I also enjoyed the eerie parallelism in description between the wound on Mikey’s leg, with its natural diction as in “a yawning valley, flanked by two immaculate cliffs of flesh…” and the description of the land hewn by young Jason’s shovel, as “the incision that interrupted the smooth ground.” The more the reader picks up on similarities like these, the more these scenes separated by place and time seem to correspond. 

However, I think a little more emotional linkage between the scenes would be helpful, especially between the conversations with Nick and the hospital scenes. From my reading, I’m picking up that guilt is a major emotional element in the story, as it is mirrored at the beginning of the story, when the narrator says “I knew that he had been struggling with things, but this never seemed likely,” and at the end, when he wonders, “What could I have done to stop the bleeding?”. Is the narrator implying he should have picked up on Mikey’s mental troubles, and thus does this story become about his expiation of guilt? I can feel the element of guilt or wounded-ness in the scenes with the grandfather, at Jason’s inability to shovel and work to his grandfather’s standards, but not in the conversations with Nick. I like the haziness and quick jumps in place and time of these scenes, as those qualities characterize memory, and I don’t want the connection between them to be laid out explicitly, which would damage the tone of the story. However, the inclusion of just a little more introspective thought during these scenes would help make the linkages a little more clear. 

"A Little Less than Nothing" Response

        Tyra is a popular, beautiful, and self-aware high school girl living in Everett, Washington. She alternately approves of and disapproves of her two friends, Bretta and Haley, and struggles to move past the heartache of a breakup with her former high school boyfriend, Darren. One day, an outfit her father had warned her against wearing causes an older male teacher to implicitly proposition her, and she rejects his advances with disgust, deciding to change her pattern of dress to avoid incidents like these in the future.
        One characteristic of this story that I really admired was the narrative risk the author took in writing for a character of a different gender than himself. I believe this is the first story we've workshopped as a class to do this, and I commend the author for his bravery, as I know I've tried and failed to write a convincing character of a gender besides mine. I think his female character's voice was convincing except in small instances when typically male expressions slipped out, like "I mean, hell..." I also enjoyed the wry, sarcastic, and often offensive voice of the character developed throughout the story, especially in lines like "How's my little nail painter this morning?" when addressing Brita, who is half-Vietnamese. I can see how the character has internalized some of the misogyny present in our culture, like when she asks Haley to tone down her "sex appeal" so Tyra appears more beautiful, and when she implicitly competes with Bretta, who is dressed better than usual, but denigrating her appearance as looking "like a maid."
        I enjoyed the story's unlikeable characters, but I wish the plot did more to showcase them. As the story is now, there doesn't seem to be any real conflict until the next to last page, with the exception of the small dispute with Tyra and her father at the very beginning. The characters of Bretta and Haley are mostly fleshed out to be crucial side-characters, but once the girls reach the school they are almost immediately discarded and never heard from again. The story is short enough as it is that the conflict can be complicated and prolonged without having to sacrifice any of the valuable narration at the middle of the story. I don't buy that the narrator would so immediately and so unequivocably turn down the teacher's offer, given how eager she seems for recognition of her beauty and talent, and the wistful way she describes her former relationship with Darren. Also, there are a few places when the characters, as teenage girls, become cliched. In the dialogue when they arrive at school, the use of "like" and "totally" make Haley seem like the walking "dumb blonde" cliche. Perhaps to remedy this, the perception of Haley as dumb and almost worthless could be a projection of the narrator's self-importance, and Haley contributes to their conversation intelligently. This would call into question the reliability of the narrator to accurately depict reality, which would make her descriptions and actions much more shaded with doubt and subjectivity than presently, where everything she says is exactly confirmed.

"The Young Man and the Lake" Response

         Mike is an aspiring professional fisherman preparing for a major tournament against the disapproval of his father. After a night out of underage drinking and a conversation with his father, Mike discovers that his friend Dave is planning to use his possible tournament winnings to go to college, rather than pursue professional fishing together like they’d planned. 

I loved the opening paragraph, with its humor and direct address to the reader, but it didn’t seem like either of these characteristics were sustained across the whole of the story, something I would have enjoyed. I would like to know why Mike is addressing us such, who he is addressing, and from what temporal distance the narration is occurring. Another thing I enjoyed about “The Young Man and the Lake” is the precise employment of terms to describe the fishing equipment and techniques, which clearly reinforces what the reader will later learn about the narrator, that he has a long-standing passion for fishing. 

The primary conflict of the story seems to be the troubled relationship between Mike and his father. Though this conflict was partially resolved with the conversation the two had after Mike returned from the bar, it didn’t seem to fully conclude. A full and complete conclusion isn’t strictly necessary for a story, but I feel like the relationship shown in the story ended in nearly the same place it began, with the father unsure of his son’s chances of winning the fishing tournament and disapproving of lack of future plans. The conversation with the father introduces the second conflict, of Mike feeling betrayed by Dave’s plans to enter college and forgo professional fishing. This second conflict will end the story on an inconclusive note, but I think it was too recently introduced to give the conclusion the weight it deserves. Finally, some specificity in the setting of the story, as well as the age, appearance, etc of the characters would have been helpful. We know the lake that the young men fish at is “Goose Pond,” but little beyond that about the setting or characters, beyond that they are underage young men in a presumably rural area. 

"Three Things Cannot Long Be Hidden" Response

        The speaker, Lanie, is a police officer assigned to partner with the fiancé, Philip, of her sister Rachel. Lanie and Philip had a brief affair before Lanie realized his identity, and she is now pregnant with her future brother in law’s child. Lanie must deal with the guilt of how she has betrayed her sister, and the emotional trauma of working a difficult case with someone she now detests. 

There were several things I enjoyed about this story. One thing was the in media res opening, which there the reader immediately into the principle conflict of the story, that of partnering with Philip. Another thing I enjoyed was how the narration gave the reader certain clues about the speaker, ones that from her characterization we can assume she would be unlikely to expend time and energy explaining. An example of this I found was when Lanie says that “Philip is one of those cops who are good cops but bad people, which you would think would be impossible…” The reader knows that there are many “bad” and corrupt police officers, but the fact that Lanie comments that this is so unlikely gives a clue to the fervency with which she loves her profession. 

However, I would have liked to learn much more about Lanie, Rachel, and Philip as people, particularly the relationship between the two sisters, as this could give more of a clue as to why Lanie cannot bring herself to tell Rachel about Philip’s infidelity. Right now, her silence on the matter seems inexplicable. The addition of more introspective thought, narration, or memory, rather than mostly dialogue, in the scene between them, could help this. Second, the story begins on a high note of tension, with Lanie’s exclamatory curses and sentences like “My insides freeze over.” It seems like the tension already begins so high that it cannot build steadily to the climax. I would suggest beginning with more neutral language that still communicates her distress, or rearranging the scenes of the story so the tension can build more steadily. Also, the first page of the story makes a reference to a “screw up” Lanie made the previous month, which is why she was assigned a partner. The reader never learns what this mistake was, but including it could give characterization and a point of vulnerability to a character that seems somewhat impenetrable.

"The Record that Defined My Summer" Response

        The unnamed narrator experiences a painful break-up with his girlfriend of three years. As he drives home, he flashes back to his memories of their time together, seeking reconciliation of memory and reality.
        There were several things I enjoyed about this story. One was the subtle hints of humor pervading the voice of the narrator. I saw these in passages like: "We went to La Parilla for dinner. It was one of those chain Mexican restaurants that looked like it was really fun from the outside, but all the food was crap, but I took her anyway because that's where she wanted to go." Excluding the problematic double conjunction, I'd like to see more of this humor throughout the story, as I think it could help vary the tone. Another characteristic of this story I enjoyed was the level of detail, which is occasional but fitting to the concept of story as primarily memory. For example, noting that his girlfriend's dress is patterned with penguins is familiar to the hazy and inconsistent quality of memory.
       However, there were several flaws I found with this story. The primary one I found was the inconsistency between past and present tense. Though the story is ostensibly primarily in past tense, with flashbacks to further past, there were many times when present tense was used, which distracted me from the content of the story. This problem was evident from the first sentences, "The sky is so blue that day." "That day" leads me to believe this is memory, but the present tense "is" confuses this. Another issue I found was the sameness in sentence structure. So many sentences, especially in a row, begin with "I," and utilize the same uncomplicated structure. Simplicity isn't a bad thing, but make sure to keep the structure interesting, above all. Lastly, the bulk of this story consists in the speaker simply telling us exactly what was happening (as in "The reason why we were at the lake was because it was some trip for the seniors who were about to graduate. . .") or how he was feeling ("I continued to deny the idea that I would be alone, and feeding the idea that I was this perfect guy. . ."), rather than showing the reader through action and characterization.

"Train Wrecked" Response

        Juniper, or “Junie,” has moved from Boston to North Carolina seeking to put behind her the ghosts of a complicated past involving  a mysterious accident that left her best friend, Anna, seriously injured. At her new school, Junie meets a girl named Amberly who helps her to open up and enjoy her life again, before her secrets are resurfaced and her future is left in limbo. 

One thing I really enjoyed about this story was the tension that is built throughout by the subtle references to Junie’s mysterious and dark past. This is introduced from the very beginning, on page 3, when Junie says obliquely, “Somtimes I think the accident hurt her more than it hurt me, or Anna.” I also enjoyed how aspects of Junie’s character, like her observance of fashion, were kept up throughout the story, from the first time Junie compares her mother’s hair to someone from a fashion TV show, to her terming of Amberly’s wardrobe as “shabby chic.” 

The conflict throughout the majority of the story seems to be social, focused around Junie fitting into her new home and school, but the concluding conflict has to do with Junie’s mysterious past and the accident that befell her and Anna. I would suggest introducing and emphasizing the fact that Junie has lied to both police and her mother about what really happened more frequently. I know the author wants to keep the backstory mysterious, but I found myself confused at several points putting the story together. Also, there are several points in the narrative where Junie “summarizes” the action that is occurring, rather than the events being included fully in dialogue and action. For example, as Amberly is explaining her past, Junie narrates, “She laughter and explained that she was once like me. She categorized people. The cool kids, the art freaks, the band geeks, everything. That was unti her mother died.” This could be communicated in a simple conversation, and would feel like less of a break in the flow of the two girls’ conversation. Finally, I personally wished for more finality in the ending, which in its current state feels like a “cliffhanger,” and more like the first chapter of a book than a complete short story in itself. This might be difficult to change, but one possible solution is to only focus on Junie’s social adjustment rather than the possible criminality of the “accident.”

"Chieko and the Sea of Trees" Response

        The unnamed narrator is a depressed, withdrawn loner from Georgia who travels to a “Suicide Forest” in Japan with the intent of committing suicide. After making preparations, just as he is about to commit the act, he is stopped by a young woman named Chieko. The narrator learns, from her conversation, that his suicidal aims were selfish and misguided, and he resolves to live his life with intention from then on. 

I enjoyed how the sentence structure of the first person narration reflects the mindset of the character. Just as the sentences begin and end similarly, creating a monotonous tone (Ex. “I have a dead end job… I have no kids… I am 27.”), so do the narrator’s days proceed monotonously, which provides some of the motivation for his desire to end his own life. 

However, there were some significant flaws I found within this story. Some of the passage of narration seemed to be telling exactly what the reader needed to hear, not showing through setting, description, or action, which would be more interesting. For example, whereas in the story’s current state the narrator says “It is 11 PM on this rain-washed Friday,” a revision could include sensory detail or images about the rain, the jet lag of the narrator, which could include a description of time and day. I also had an issue with setting the story in present tense. I think it would be more interesting to set it as a memoir in past tense, or maybe reorganize it as a diary, if present tense is necessary. With present tense, I didn’t feel a cohesive sense of time passing, so when Chieko says it has been 30 minutes since the narrator had the noose around his neck, I was taken aback. In addition, some of the dialogue between the narrator and Chieko seemed a little formal or forced. For example, it is difficult to imagine one stranger saying to another, “So, you’ve never ventured outside your small existence…” The reader has some very factual information about the character (age, hometown, job, family) but this is stated so bluntly and without emotion that the reader feels little sympathy for the narrator, and his self-pity feels excessive rather than invoking of genuine sympathy. Like I want to know more about the narrator, I also want to know more about Chieko. Besides the death of her father, the reader knows absolutely nothing about her, not even age, ethnicity, appearance, etc. I suggest giving her character much more depth, so the reader will feel a connection to her persuasion. 

Second Creative Writing Event Response

         I attended the second of this semester’s Third Thursday Poetry Series, at the Jules Collins Smith Museum of Art. I attended the first event and enjoyed it immensely, but I was apprehensive about attending this one, solely because I planned to read one of my own poems during the open mic section. I thought my reading went well, and it was a huge confidence boost, as my social anxiety usually prevents me from sharing my work publicly, especially in front of professors and even a few professional poet. 

The entire night seemed to me like a personal exercise in breaking stereotypes. One of the open mic readers, a distinguished-looking older woman, included in her poem a phrase similar to “fucking your brains out,” or something in the same vein. Another of the open mic readers, a man dressed in a camp print hat, a plaid shirt, and cowboy boots, rather than a poem closer to his assumed purview, read a touching poem about the alienation felt by a young girl. Finally, Tom Crawford, in his tight pink t-shirt and huge silver belt-buckle, subverted all my expectations about what a poetry reading could, and possibly should, be. 

It takes a special kind of humanity to arrive to your own poetry reading swigging Heineken and dressed like my grandpa on vacation. I had read several of Tom Crawford’s poems before arriving at the reading, and was excited to hear the poet himself real them aloud. However, he didn’t really do that. He interrupted the readings and interjected stuff like “stay with me know” so frequently that sometimes I was unsure if he was reading the poem or directly addressing the audience. His “poetry voice” was so similar to his natural voice that the two seemed indistinguishable. Mr. Crawford spoke more than he read, and I did enjoy some of the original things he discussed. He focused some of his discussion on the topics poets, himself included, choose about which to write. He has written at least one volume chiefly concerning birds. In expanding hugely upon an apparently simple theme, he raised more complex question like the poet’s relationship with the natural world, and it’s power to inspire self-reflection. Another concept he spoke of that I really enjoyed was his emphasis that life’s quotidian encounters, struggles, and conflicts are the stuff of poetry, and more generally, of all creative writing, not necessarily solely the grand and eternal. He emphasized that one’s personal journey and experiences are both real and important, for oneself and for poetry. A direct phase he used I wrote down was: “What’s real is inside you and not outside. You have to go there for the poetry,” with which I agree. Hearing messages like this strengthened my resolve to focus meaning in my work in the material which corresponds to the abstract I wish to convey. In this way, as a writer I should convey the spiritual and true that can be found in the quotidian of life and human experience. 

"A Fresh Start" Response

         Jake is a dissatisfied and disgruntled employee at a major corporation, his job hanging on tenterhooks. While contemplating his life on a park bench, he is invited into a nearby barbershop by a friendly, but strange, barber to unburden himself and describe his troubled life and past. 

Looking back over the story, I can see how elements in Jake’s childhood manifest themselves in his adult life and struggles. For instance, it is clear that the constant bullying he suffered in middle and high school affected his self-esteem, so it follows that he wouldn’t think he knew “how to go about being extraordinary,” like his boss demands. I like the in media res style of the opening paragraph, and how immediately it intrigues the reader. I also like the narrative risk you took with incorporating such a unique story structure, when I’m sure most of our classmates will go for a traditional narrative, for comfort’s sake. 

However, I found this story to have some significant flaws. I have no idea what Jake wants in this story. He seems easygoing and subdued at the beginning, not really caring at the thought of losing his job. If his goal is to relieve his inner pain by sharing it with someone, this is not communicated, as the reader has no idea of his feelings after telling his story or the barber’s reaction to it. His thoughts, such as feeling creeped out by the man’s friendliness and scanning the room for a possible weapon, don’t match his action of completely unburdening the story of his childhood past, without reservation or hesitation. The extremely long passages of dialogue uninterrupted by description or action seem unrealistic, and the lack of dialogue tags most everywhere else is distracting. This story seems to include several extraneous details, like the posters on the barbershop wall and the two pit bulls. These inclusions feel like they should be symbolic of something, but the symbolism isn't clear. If these are meant to be symbolic, I would suggest strengthening those connections, perhaps by incorporating them into the later narrative pieces. For their starkness, these separate pieces of a story that come close to the end don’t seem connected, and appear disjointed and random. I think they could be connected, if aspects of the war scene were incorporated or foreshadowed in the first narrative portion.

"Surgery" Response

            After being awakened in the middle of the night, Tim is forced to struggle with deal physically and ideologically with the self-injury of his friend Cal. Tim must confront his own immaturity in order to remain focused on his friend’s distress, and try to be understanding and supportive to help alleviate that distress. 

Several things struck me about this story: for one, the syntax does well in reflecting the tone, with the long, run-on sentences joined by several conjunctions emphasizing the frantic mindset of the narrator. Also, the setting was made clear and distinct through the repetition of certain key details, especially at the beginning and end. In both of these places, certain images that stand out and give a circular sense to the story are: the blood comparison with wine, the descriptions of light on the linoleum floor, the rippling atmosphere of the waiting room, and the use of “running.” In addition, the first person narration and stream-of-consciousness style helped reveal key characteristics of the narrator without seeming out of place or overly expositional. For example, Tim shows his immaturity in the fact that he is constantly distracted from his friend’s pain by the attractive nurse Claire, and that instead of asking how is friend is feeling, inquires whether the doctors saw him naked. 

One thing in this story that confused me was the unstated age of the characters. Until page four, when Tim says he can smell the beer on Cal’s breath, I assumed Cal to be much younger, at least a young teenager or even a child. I assumed Tim was Cal’s older brother, from the fact that they were both in the same house in the middle of the night, and the fact that Cal called him “Timmy,” which seems more childish. I would like to see worked into the story some explanation of their relationship, to give more clarity. There are also several instances when sentences of description conclude with a more broad, abstract statement, like at the top of page 4, which ends the paragraph with “…then I realized how little I knew him, and I refused to feel it was my fault.” I think better knowledge of their relationship, as mentioned previously, would help this, but also maybe a little more relation of the concrete detail to the abstract realization to back these statements up. On a purely visual note, I would rework the very beginning few lines and the stretch of dialogue on page six. As it is, upon first glance I assumed there must be a grammatical error, even though both passages are grammatically correct. Perhaps adding some longer sentences of setting or character description, especially to the page six passage, would help add variety and make the page look more cohesive and appealing. 

Diaz and Dandicat Response

           After reading “Aurora,” I have even more of a desire to read more of Junot Diaz’s work. My Intro to Creative Writing professor at Pepperdine raved about This Is How You Lose Her, and even from this short story, I can see why. Here I really felt the power in speaking authentically, using the vernacular of a particular community, unflinchingly. In a lots of stories I read, I feel like the writer is just throwing slang out for effect, like putting on a mask of authenticity. Here, the slang phrases and the drug pseudonyms like “rocks” and “H” are fitting, and add both authenticity and humor. It isn’t necessary for the reader to understand the exact denotation of the words used; I don’t know what drug “H” is, but that doesn’t detract from my reading experience, because the message still comes through. 

Another technique for capturing the voice of the speaker is to keep the narration conversation, shown through the employment of sentence fragments, like on page 214: “Concrete with splotches of oil. A drain hole in the corner where we throw our cigs and condoms.” I love the beautiful irony in the speaker’s sometimes-love’s name: Aurora. It conjures the idea of someone ephemeral, appearing in and disappearing from the speaker’s life with a glow of light and life. It is something unable to be contained and captured, outside of one’s control. The speaker cannot pin her down, both because of her flighty and troubled life and his own misgivings. As such, each finds pleasure in hurting the other in their turn. This is a portrait of two complicated people caught and catching themselves in a savage love, at least from the speaker’s perspective. 

In “Night Women,” the speaker revels in the innocence of her son sleeping, as contrasted with the night time activity she is forced to perform to provide for him. What makes the voice of the narrator eerily distinct is the way she seems to sexualize him in her descriptions of him. No mother would describe her young son’s moans in sleep like “he’s already discovered that there is pleasure in touching himself,” nor their relationship like that of “faraway lovers, lying to one another, under different moons.” However, given both the speaker’s profession and her fierce love for her son, we can understand the eerie juxtaposition of innocence and adult knowledge. 

Unreliable Narrators and Unlikeable Characters

        “Off” introduces the idea of the unreliable narrator. From my experience, unreliable narration occurs when the credibility of the speaker is in doubt or compromised. In “Off,” the rational judgement of the narrator is immediately in question with her unexplained, fervid goal to kiss men of three different hair colors, of “flavors,” as she later describes, at a party. As we as readers learn more about her past, her thoughts, and her mind, it becomes even clearer that she is most likely not all she professes to be. This culminates in her cool and seemingly practical (to her) plan to lure the last man into her embraces by hiding with everyone’s coats, a plan that is not only childish but also deeply irrational. 

The character of the unnamed narrator at first glance seems stereotypical in her outwards characteristics, being pretty, rich, and self-centered, but she is made interesting through our questioning of her mental state in unsettling vignettes like her account of the deadly elements hidden within her painting, and her instructor’s apparent failure to notice them, which caused the narrator a deep urge to have her fired, which she did successfully. Is the narrator really so talented at painting, and conversely, was her teacher really so clueless? The reader cannot be sure either, but from the tone of her thoughts, we assume that reality is not actually as presented and her talent and beauty not as self-evident, a trait that points to the narcissism we might already suspect from her constant assumptions of the thoughts and feelings of others. The speaker subverts stereotypes and materialism while at the same time reinforcing them herself, as when she describes how a beautiful dress transformed her “friend,” the hose of the party, into “a whole different genre of person.” 

         From this story I learned who to complicate and make more interesting a character that could at first glance seem one-dimensional, a skill I struggle with in my own writing. My characters frequently come across as props, as stand-ins for societal stereotypes or issues, rather than three-dimensional, living beings with both good qualities as well as bad, or vice versa. In the search to make a particular point, I end up seeking only to “make undeniable the validity of [my] particular ideological system,” as Rick Moody phrased it, through the lessons imparted by moral stand-ins, rather than really telling a story, which is, after all, supposedly the reason I started in the first place. Thus, complicating my characters would help broaden the reach of my stories as a whole. 

"1-900" Response

          In Richard Bausch’s story “1-900,” there are no descriptors like “in frustration” or “exasperatedly,” but those characteristics are made clear through the structure of the dialogue in the way Marilyn continues to try to loop it back to its assumed intent. There is also the frustration that can be read into her short, blunt reply of “An education” to his faintly patronizing question of what she hopes to “get out” of college, and his assumption that she is unaware of the meaning of “lethargy.” Behind these gestures we can guess a variety of reasons, none of them ever explained. Is she worried she’ll receive a bad review if she doesn’t perform her usual purpose, and thus risk her job? Is she reluctant to share personal information for fear of harassment or exposure (and has this happened before, to cause such reluctance?) 

The fact that John has called a phone sex service in itself can give us certain clues about him, beyond even what he reveals himself. Though the time setting of this conversation is unclear (besides being post-Vietnam war), there is a certain quaintness in phone sex, as now it has been rendered largely redundant by the internet and its profusion of porn. Is John put off by the frankness and unabashedly explicit nature of online pornography? Is he seeking only a willing listener for his discussion of his marital and family troubles? This hypothesis is strengthened by the identity of “Marilyn,” as a female conversation partner with an obligation to please (though not in the way she had suspected.) He could desire to “start over” with a woman he paid to listen to him, to hear his side of the story, with a desperation reinforced by his constant reminders that he has paid for her to converse with him. 

Though this story consists of pure dialogue, over the course of the story I developed a clearer and clearer picture of the two characters at the time of the conversation: her, sitting in a nondescript office building in a cubicle like several other girls, looking exasperated and confused as she holds the phone; him, sitting on a faded couch in a blank apartment, holding a drink (though he professes to be sober) with his head in his hands as he talks. I have no factual basis for these images, but the power of the dialogue to invoke them speaks to its efficacy. 

Literary Dialogue Exercise

        For this exercise I chose dialogue from “Lavande,” by Ann Beattie. This stretch of dialogue takes place between the story’s protagonist and her daughter Angela, as they discuss her former engagement to a man named Steven Stipley and his family. 

One key characteristic of this conversation is that the narrator is operating under a false premise, believing the woman she met in Rome to be Steven’s mother, rather than Donald Stipley’s mistress. Thus the reader learns the truth about Lavande at the same time as the narrator. One principle for literary dialogue I gathered from this excerpt is the need for each character conversing to have a “stake” in the conversation. In this story, the narrator is questioning her daughter (with whom the relationship is already troubled) and defending Lavande, in a case of mistaken identity. Her daughter is justifying her assertions about her former fiance and defending them against her mother’s protests. Because of the mother-daughter relationship’s troubled past, the consequences for this conversation are heightened, as the outcome could affect their relations for some time. Unlike the conversation I overheard and transcribed, this conversation discusses roughly only one subject, with more and more information being revealed and tensions rising until the climax, shortly after which the conversation ends. In this way this section of dialogue could be seen as a microcosm of the plot as a whole. The lines of this dialogue seem to be longer than would feel natural in real life, and they are broken up with character description and action like the collaborative process of making coffee, so the importance of the lines previous can sink in, as well as to give character insight. However, this dialogue is similar to real-life conversation in the frequent interrupting speakers, with interjections and refutations that eclipse the previous speakers words. Because of the emotional distance between the story’s characters, they do not have much shared history to reference or relate to, unlike the real-life conversation, which was littered with references to people and places unknown to me. 

The dialogue from “Lavande” is successful because it captures the character and tone of its speakers. Angela has only been described by the narrator, but the dialogue gives more information about her character with her whip smart tone and derision towards her mother. The narrator has engaged in direct dialogue only once previously; from her way of speaking we gain more knowledge about her character, including her formal, complete sentences and adherence to proper grammar even in argument with family, both of which speak to her self-admitted “stuffiness.” 

Overheard

          This overheard conversation took place between two girls at a restaurant. By the time I’d sat down, they were already eating and talking. I picked up in the middle of their conversation and tried to transcribe it as accurately as I could, though the restaurant got more and more noisy as time passed. One girl is speaker 1 and the other is speaker 2. The different sections indicate where a pause occurred in the conversation. 

1: Because it’s a business account, there’s like 30 something members on it or something. Anyways, he um- I’m sure there’s some way he pays half.

2: And then they paid the other half.

1: Yeah. She was just like “charge this to this number and this number

(unintelligible)

2: What did she do?

1: She just basically goofed around around all day. Like usual. 

2: Everyone else knows. Does Charlotte?

1: No.

(both laugh)

1: Can you imagine what he would have done if he had woken up to that?

2: Oh god, no. 

2: Tomorrow’s going to suck.

1: What do you have to do?

2: I have one class with 102 people in it, but he never takes attendance, so…

1: That’s great.

1: I’m so full, this stuff and the mac and cheese is like so rich.

(after both looking at their phones)

1: I need more pictures in here, I feel like I never take pictures

2: I take pictures but it’s never of anything interesting.

1: I took some yesterday on Taylor’s phone at the game but she’ll have to send them all to me, which is annoying. 

(unintelligible)

1: So when are you going to see him again?

2: Well, maybe next weekend I’ll go back. Kinda don’t want to. But I feel like I should, you know?

(unintelligible)

2: Next weekend I think I’m going home, so it could be then.

1: But you have to be careful, like you know what I mean?

2: Yeah

1: Yeah

(unintelligible)

1: I don’t know I felt like they wanted to go and talk to other people, and I didn’t want to butt in, you know what I mean?

2: Yeah. So they went to the game together?

1: No, they went to that tailgate.

2: Where?

1: Some girl’s house. I think she’s a Theta

(one girl shows the other a text message she received)

2: I feel like she texts me everyday.

1: She texted me yesterday and was like “Where are you? We’re at halftime” and I was like “….Okay” Because we all went to Amsterdam, that place on Gay and it was awkward because we’d already started and everything. She asked me to borrow a dress for tomorrow, and then she made me go find it and pick it out and everything and I was like “April, this is annoying” and she was like “I don’t know, I just don’t know” so…..

2: You don’t even really need like a perfect matching dress

1: Right, you just mix and match

1: I’m done, are you ready?

2: Yeah, we can go.

In most every conversation between two people, there is a dominant member and another who tends to initiates less and respond more. As I listened to this conversation I found myself speculating about the feelings of speaker 2, who spoke far less frequently and at shorter length than her friend. Was she nervous about this lunch and its conversation? Was she just tired, or shy, or preoccupied? Or did she really not have much to say about the topics raised? This led, in turn, to wondering about the feelings of the dominant speaker: did she fear she was monopolizing the conversation? Was she nervous too, and were her initiations an attempt to keep an awkward conversation going? It was difficult to gauge the “vibe” of this conversation from mere observation, a feature that requires membership in a conversation to truly determine. 

Like most casual conversations, this one stopped and started, moving from topic to topic in a mostly random way. Sometimes a topic was a  “non-starter,” not even producing a response from the other person. Occasionally the shift in topic was precipitated by some outside stimuli, like the food they were eating, or a message one speaker received on her phone, which led to gossip about the message’s sender. One challenge in writing accurate dialogue is to include these diversionary details, so the conversation doesn’t seem to be happening in a vacuum, but to keep them from diverting from the conversation’s main point, or aim. However, all literary dialogue is unrealistic to a certain extent, as real life conversations often meander aimlessly between subjects, with no aim or goal, and would thus be quite uninteresting to read. These two speakers obviously moved in the same social circles and had a history of acquaintance. Writing dialogue like this conversation, or even reading it, with its many references to people and places unknown to the reader, would require extensive knowledge of the subjects and their backgrounds before it could make any comprehensive sense. 

TC Boyle's "The Love of My Life" Response

        To be honest, this story gave me a panic attack when I read it for the first time. I’m already prone to them, but I was so horrified by “The Love of My Life” that it came over me involuntarily as I reached the story’s conclusion. I think one reason I was so affected because the depiction of Jeremy and China’s relationship at the beginning of the story sounds so similar to the relationship I have with my boyfriend. Like them, we go everywhere together, take vacations together, and display the same kind of sickeningly-sweet affection. I feel more comfortable sleeping on his parent’s couch than I do on my own parents’. So it pains me by parallel to see a happy, close couple, with their cocoa, camping, and poetic pet names, fall so far and so horrifically. 

Yet at the same time, from the outset the reader, whether through pessimism or expectation of a typical plot structure, is waiting for the moment they begin to fail, the moment it goes wrong. The story foreshadows trouble even in an innocent night of movies, with: “They’d rented a pair of slasher movies for the ritualized comfort of them—‘Teens have sex,’ he said, ‘and then they pay for it in body parts’—and the maniac had just climbed out of the heating vent, with a meat hook dangling from the recesses of his empty sleeve, when the phone rang.” Sooner or later the mania must, and will, emerge, and a nightmare becomes reality. Jeremy and China are so terrified and immersed in each other that they end up ignoring the reality of their circumstances and becoming the “breeders” they so detested.

I loved the language of this story, as it heightened the details of the couple’s world, like the “otherworldly drumming of pellets flung down out of the troposphere,” making it all the more heartbreaking when it falls apart. I pictured this couple like Toulouse-Lautrec’s series of two young lovers, most famously 1893’s In Bed. A girl and boy tucked deep in a bed gaze sleepily at each other, a smile fading on the boy’s face. The scene is cozy and affectionate but looking at it now, I feel a sense of unease. Are these these figures too young to be locked in such a passionate embrace? If the perspective was changed, would we see a smile on the female figure’s face, or would she have the same fading sliver of a smile? Do they love each other? I wish I knew. Or maybe now, I wish I never will.