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. 

Creative Writing Event Response: Third Thursday Poetry Series (8/18)

            Last week I attended the Third Thursday Poetry event held monthly at the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art. The theme of the night was “Coming Home: Poets of Auburn.” At the event a variety of poets, from Auburn students and professors to local poets in the Auburn community, read their work. 

Seeing other writers (especially poets, as I am primarily a poet) showcase their work is inspiring to me, primarily because if forces me to reflect on my own work and its improvement. Maybe it’s just my competitive nature, but when I see someone my own age showcase their poetry, I applaud their bravery and talent, but, at the same time, I’m kicking myself for not having done the same! Thus, I’m determined to force myself, social anxiety and all, to read at least one of my own pieces during the next Third Thursday event.

This event encouraged me to experiment with new forms and modes in my writing. I was struck by one of the first readers, who read poetry written in the style of tweets, all of them being less than 140 characters. I think this is a great way of taking poetry, which I know many of my generation consider to be an outdated form of expression, into the digital age, where increasingly people are losing interest in it in favor of other mediums. I also enjoyed one of the student readers’ blending of the literal and the metaphoric in his work referencing the four horsemen of the apocalypse. I haven’t attempted to write anything approaching the almost-absurdism of his piece, but now I realize that employing techniques like this can make a piece unexpected and intriguing, as each listener adds her own layer of interpretation that give agency to the reader almost more so than the writer’s original intent. 

One of the first speakers read a piece which described the nostalgia she felt for her mother and the simplicity of the life she led. Writing poems about nostalgic experiences is a frequent habit of mine, but I find it encourages one of the major faults I find in my writing, whether poetry or prose: that of only writing of subjects within the realm of my own experience. As a consequence, whenever I attempt to write about wider social issues I observe in the world, the tone can come off as moralistic and, ultimately, boring. With this fault in mind, when I hear other writers read their work, I am intrigued as to where they glean their inspiration, and how I can learn from their processes and adapt them to my own work. 

Discomfort Story Scene

“What kind of treatment are you getting again?” Kate asked, putting down her book. 

“This Dead Sea mud thing. Basically they cover you in dirt and then massage it off. It’s supposed to be great for your complexion,” Lily said. 

“You know you can do that for free when we go to the actual Dead Sea on Friday, right?”

Lily rolled her eyes. “I think the mud they have is supposed to be cleaner, or something. Anyway, what’s the point of getting covered in dirt if I can’t get it massaged off of me by (fingers crossed) a really buff guy?” She took another swig, rattling the ice to free the liquid trapped at the bottom of the cup. “I hope they don’t try to talk to me during the massage. I hate that. This is supposed to be relaxing, like just leave me be. Not to be racist, but it’s so hard to understand people here anyway, even when they’re speaking English.” Kate wanted to object, but couldn’t think of anything to say, so she merely nodded vaguely. 

They fell silent as the drink boy scuttled past again, this time to deliver a concoction with strawberries impaled along the rim to a middle-aged woman in a sun hat. He gave the same nervous half-bow and Kate felt sorry for him. He must be boiling in those black pants, she thought. It had to be at least 90, and the sun was almost directly overhead. But the boy didn’t appear to be sweating. He was made to endure this kind of weather, she decided. 

The resort drew tourists from many countries, visible by the different varieties of swim attire sported by the sunbathers. Kate had played guess-the-nationality for several hours yesterday, and was beginning to attain a fairly high degree of accuracy, as far as she could tell. The Germans were sunburnt as lobsters, and the men tended toward Speedos with little sense of embarrassment. The English were pale and fussy, slathering their children with tubes of sunscreen as the fiery line of the sun crept across the tile towards their chairs poolside. The Spanish depended their tans and stood at the pool’s edge, drinks held aloft to protect them from children’s splash. There were no Jordanians. 

 
           Every so often Kate felt self-conscious at how artificial the whole situation was. She’d had these sudden flashes of objectivity often on this trip, as she and her classmates stood on the top of Mount Nebo, squinting in the sunlight and half-listening to the tour guide drone on about the men who had wandered these mountains thousands of years ago. She saw herself leaning against the protective railing, head on hands, and felt she should have learned something. Wasn’t this supposed to be educational? It was difficult to justify a resort by the sea as a necessary expense for a university educational field trip. Last night, as Kate, Lily, and a group of their fellow students drank cheap wine on the balcony of one of the girl’s room, she’d looked around at the happy, relaxed faces of her friends and felt completely alone. They sipped their wine with an elegance she tried to emulate. The life did not seem real to her, still. Even with the scholarships and the subsidies, Kate couldn’t fake the kind of confidence the rich girls seemed to possess naturally. 

        “Almost time for my masaaaaaaage!” Lily sang out, stretching her arms high and yawning. The sun caught the tiny metallic letters on the sides of her glasses, and a sparkling LV danced in Kate’s vision. “Another drink for the road, I think,” she giggled. She beckoned the boy in the sky blue polo over again, and within minutes a pink cocktail dripped condensation onto the tile. As she stood to go, a little unsteady, her bag swung from the crook of her arm and knocked it to the ground. A syrupy pink puddle spread over the tile by her feet. “Ugh, shit.” She nudged the glass with the tip of her flip flop. “Get someone to clean that up, will you?” She traipsed off, her flip flops clacking on the tile. 

As soon as Lily disappeared between the palm trees, Kate leaned over to pick up the fallen glass. She felt vaguely embarrassed, and drew her knees up to her chest and returned to her book. The sun crawled across the tile and Kate felt the familiar unease of being alone in a place she felt she didn’t belong. 

Alternate Story Opening

The initial opening to my story took the form of in media res, which is how I prefer to begin my stories. However, I thought I'd try an alternate opening in a form I tend to avoid: setting. I typically avoid setting because I feel it is often overdone and occasionally boring. In this alternate opening, I tried to establish the dominant images of the setting while maintaining the tone of my original opening and the rest of the story, as I am envisioning it.
       
Alternate Opening
        The sunlight reflected harshly off the pool’s surface, throwing sparkling glare onto the patrons sprawled by its side. There were far too many bees buzzing around, mostly by the purple flowers spilling from their confines by the stairs leading up to the resort rooms. Occasionally they flew too close to the water and were hit by a tidal wave of splash conjured by one of the few children playing in the shallow pool. Once hit, they fell and struggled, tiny limbs pumping, to free themselves from the chill watery embrace. Their black appendages slowed and then were still, and they expired before being sucked into the whir of the pool filter. 
If you listened closely you could sometimes hear the crash of the ocean several hundred feet down the shore, but never the keening call to prayers you could hear in the city center. This place was insulated from all that, an escape from the culture the tourists had ostensibly come to see. There were no ruins or Mosaic landmarks here; there were only waves and overpriced cocktails served poolside and dead bees floating in the tepid water. 

"Lost in the Woods" (Nelson) Reading Response

Antonya Nelson's story led me to think deeply and rewardingly about how the "tropes" of story are constructed, with her construction of choice being the literal or metaphoric premise of a character lost in the woods. As I read the simple characteristics of this kind of story as imagined by children ("A person... goes into the woods alone.... discovers a friend... and then is no longer alone"), I began to realize how many of both my favorite narratives and the most celebrated in literary history follow this pattern. Nelson brings up Dante's Inferno as a clear example of the latter, and I thought of Murakami's 1Q84 and Nicole Krauss's The History of Love. In most cases the story is complicated or extended by time, space, a longer plot arc, or in Murakami's case, the supernatural, but the basic skeleton remains familiar. I began to question why this narrative is used over and over again, before considering that it is engaging, attention-holding, and makes the reader hopeful and less alone herself.  The point of a story is to be read, after all, and sometimes I forget how narrative is shaped and standardized by simple human factors like boredom and anticipation. This narrative is reinforced even from an early age, as the children of Nelson's subject Vivian Paley recounts. This narrative is self-perpetuating, in that it sets up predictable goals and checkpoints for itself, as opposed to life in "the real world," which is often random, unpredictable, and, most of all, boring. In the "real world," sometimes nothing ever happens. Sometimes we do not find a friend or better ourselves through our experiences in the dark woods, and most of the time we don't enter the woods at all. Thus it's difficult not to view stories like these as wish fulfillment, a kind of preparing oneself for the experiences we might one day face with the successes of others.
Again, I enjoyed this reading's reference to Eugenides in the form of his Marriage Plot. The first time I read that novel I was indifferent and a little unimpressed, but over time I've come to appreciate its subtleties. Nelson would appreciate the uneasy, if not unhappy, conclusion, which helps to complicate the trope of the "marriage plot" that the story simultaneously invokes and refutes.

Story Opening Exercise

As-Yet-Untitled Story Opening

Lily could remark lazily how her bank account couldn’t handle all this alcohol, but every hour or so she still lazily called the boy in the black pants and sky blue shirt over to her pool chair with a few snaps and a wave to order another cocktail. And a few minutes later, the same boy, or another (Lily told her she couldn’t tell them apart) would scuttle over from the bar by the hot tub, unsteady on the puddled tile, and present her with the concoction, always with a slight bow that seemed more terrified than deferential. The drink was always charged to the room–Lily didn’t carry cash 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.” 

Ann Hood "Beginnings" Response

As Hood describes how opening sentences introduce the protagonist, I wonder whether she is disguising herself beneath her premise. While reading the story’s first paragraph about how painstakingly Hood composes her first paragraphs, it strikes me that even as candid as an author appears, the message given is carefully composed, and may be crafted to merely simulate honesty. Hood echoes the self doubt she is describing in phrases like “the opening paragraph–no, the opening page–has to do so much….” .

I was struck by the concept originated by Richard Hugo that Hood brings up, that of a story’s “two beginnings,” the true beginning discovered while writing and the beginning “triggered” by the writer’s initial interest. The criticism that a story with these two beginnings often receives, that the story only begins several pages past the “triggering” beginning, is one I have often received in workshops of my short stories!

As soon as I began reading this story, my mind was drawn again and again to one of my favorite novels, Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex. I was delighted, when I reached the end of “Beginnings,” to see that Hood shares my admiration. From this first admittedly long line, readers gain much information about the story that will follow. They are simultaneously alerted to the nontraditional nature of the narrator, the elegiac nature of the style, and the vantage point of the story, that of an adult looking back on a turbulent and conflicted teenage time. 

The use of the “old saw” opening line of “Once upon a time…” is certainly trite, but I think it can be effective when combined with a sentence that juxtaposes the innocent, fairy-tale like quality of the beginning phase. I find myself drawn to in media res opening lines, as they immediately engage and provide an active challenge to the reader. 

Now, this assignment completed, I’m off to obsessively scrutinize the first line of everything I’ve ever written!