"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.