"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.