Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Atwood Stories (Part II)

Respond to the previous post about the Atwood Stories!

Work on any of the 44 new prompts in the post below.

How are your "palm-of-the-hand" stories going?

Writing prompts

We will be in the Creative Writing Lab today.

Continue to work on "palm-of-the-hand" stories, writing prompts and revisions.

Go to Raymond Carver site, explore and read "Little Things":

http://www.carversite.com/story.html

End of marking period is May 4!

Monday, April 16, 2012

Atwood stories

Post responses to these stories here:



The first story, "True Trash," a deceptively easy going coming-of-age tale, accustoms us to the author's bold leaps in time. Set mainly in a summer camp on an island in Ontario's Georgian Bay, "True Trash" gives us a leisurely account of teen-age waitresses' fitful interaction with the "small fry" and counselors at Camp Adanaqui.
But it is only in a flash-forward of 11 years, when the former schoolboy camper Donny has dropped the last syllable from his name and grown a beard, that the story begins to take shape. During a chance encounter with him in Toronto, Joanne, a former waitress at the camp, begins to put together the missing pieces in a real-life True Romance story -- or rather, as one of the waitresses called this type of magazine, True Trash. "The melodrama tempts [ Joanne ] , the idea of a revelation, a sensation, a neat ending." But she is too sophisticated now for such a pat, "outmoded" story, and withholds from Don a revelation that would make him seem a True Trash character.

Kat...enjoys a slick rise to the top, though hers, in "Hairball," is more easily explained. "When knives were slated for backs, she'd always done the stabbing." What would otherwise be an all-too-familiar tale of comeuppance in the dreary world of fashion magazines is given an uncanny aura by the presence of a benign tumor, dubbed Hairball, which Kat has preserved from an operation and given a place of honor on her mantelpiece. "The hair in it was red -- long strands of it wound round and round inside."

This well crafted story concerns a contemporary woman in her thirties who undergoes significant personal losses; in fact, she seems to lose or lack an identity. Over the years, Kat, an "avant garde" fashion photographer, has altered her image, even her name, to suit the situation and the times. She has had two abortions and "learned to say that she didn't want children anyway."
The story begins when Kat undergoes surgical removal of a rare and peculiar ovarian tumor containing hair, teeth, bones (the clinical term is a dermoid cyst ); Kat dubs it "hairball " and stores it in formaldehyde on her mantelpiece. We learn that Kat's relationship with her married lover is going sour, that he will replace her as creative director at work. She fantasizes that she has given birth to "hairball" who she sees as the "warped child" of their failed relationship. Physical symptoms accompany Kat's growing emotional confusion. Hairball becomes the vehicle for an ultimate bizarre act reflecting Kat's personality disintegration. She has gone from being Katherine to Kath to Kat, to K, to being "temporarily without a name."
CommentaryThis story addresses the emptiness and superficiality that is pervasive in some segments of contemporary Western culture, and particularly it addresses the impact of the culture on the modern woman--the woman of the eighties and nineties. The narrative tone is almost satiric and masterfully reflects the lifestyle portrayed. The piece shows how women may subvert their own needs and best interests by the way in which they interact with men. Further, the story reminds us that abortion and surgery on reproductive organs can never be taken lightly, by patient or by physician. The implications, even when not consciously acknowledged, may be profound.

Wednesday, April 4, 2012

Wednesday workshop

Let's use the figment.com website to workshop today.

Go to figment.com.  Find Ms. Gamzon's Advanced Poetry/Fiction class.
Find folder for palm-of -the hand stories.

Over the break, read "True Trash" and "Hairball" in Wilderness Tips by Margaret Atwood.

Monday, April 2, 2012

Atwood/Debra Dean

Read "My Life as a Bat" by Margaret Atwood

WRITING PROMPT

Why does the narrator think being reincarnated as a bat would be the ideal reincarnation?  If you were to be reincarnated as an animal, what animal would it be?  Write a monologue or short piece from the point of view of this animal.

ALSO:  Please respond in a posted comment here to Thursday's workshop with Debra Dean (for credit).

What did you think of the workshop with Debra Dean?  What did you learn from the writing prompts she offered?

And of course, since you have read the book, what did or did not impress you about the narrative style, characters, plot, etc.?  Please respond "talking literature"---in other words, like a literary reviewer, refering to specifics in the novel and discussing them using literary terminology.

Finally, continue to work on your "Palm-of-the Hand" stories for a group workshop on Wednesday.

Thursday, March 29, 2012

Debra Dean Workshop

This morning--Debra Dean workshop in the Ensemble Theatre--8:30-9:45. Please bring a notebook and pen to take notes. You will be writing a response piece to the workshop, focusing on what you learned from the workshop--so taking notes is a good idea!

Monday, March 19, 2012

Another Joyce Carol Oates Story

www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2010/03/29/100329fi_fiction_oates?currentPage=all

The Madonnas of Leningrad


Introduction
In this sublime debut novel, set amid the horrors of the siege of Leningrad during World War II, a gifted writer explores the power of memory to save us... and betray us.

Questions for Discussion
  1. The working of memory is a key theme of this novel. As a young woman, remembering the missing paintings is a deliberate act of survival and homage for Marina. In old age, however, she can no longer control what she remembers or forgets. "More distressing than the loss of words is the way that time contracts and fractures and drops her in unexpected places." How has Dean used the vagaries of Marina's memory to structure the novel? How does the narrative itself mimic the ways in which memory functions?
  2. Sometimes, Marina finds consolations within the loss of her short-term memory. "One of the effects of this deterioration seems to be that as the scope of her attention narrows, it also focuses like a magnifying glass on smaller pleasures that have escaped her notice for years." Is aging merely an accumulation of deficits or are there gifts as well?
  3. The narrative is interspersed with single-page chapters describing a room or a painting in the Hermitage Museum. Who is describing these paintings and what is the significance of the paintings chosen? How is each interlude connected to the chapter that follows?
  4. The historical period of The Madonnas of Leningrad begins with the outbreak of war. How is war portrayed in this novel? How is this view of World War II different from or similar to other accounts you have come across?
  5. Even though she says of herself that she is not a "believer," in what ways is Marina spiritual? Discuss Marina's faith: how does her spirituality compare with conventional religious belief? How do religion and miracles figure in this novel? What are the miracles that occur in The Madonnas of Leningrad?
  6. A central mystery revolves around Andre's conception. Marina describes a remarkable incident on the roof of the Hermitage when one of the statues from the roof of the Winter Palace, "a naked god," came to life, though she later discounts this as a hallucination. In her dotage, she tells her daughter-in-law that Andre's father is Zeus. Dmitri offers other explanations: she may have been raped by a soldier or it's possible that their only coupling before he went off to the front resulted in a son. What do you think actually happened? Is it a flaw or a strength of the novel that the author doesn't resolve this question?
  7. At the end of Marina's life, Helen admits that "once she had thought that she might discover some key to her mother if only she could get her likeness right, but she has since learned that the mysteries of another person only deepen, the longer one looks." How well do we ever know our parents? Are there things you've learned about your parents' past that helped you feel you knew them better?
  8. In much the same way that Marina is struggling with getting old, her daughter, Helen, is struggling with disappointments and regrets often associated with middle-age: her marriage has failed, her son is moving away, she may never get any recognition as an artist, and last but not least, she is losing a life-long battle with her weight. Are her feelings of failure the result of poor choices and a bad attitude or are such feelings an inevitable part of the human condition?
  9. In a sense, the novel has two separate but parallel endings: the young Marina giving the cadets a tour of the museum, and the elderly Marina giving the carpenter a tour of an unfinished house. What is the function of this coda? How would the novel be different if it ended with the cadets' tour?
  10. What adjectives would you use to describe The Madonnas of Leningrad? Given the often bleak subject matter - war, starvation, dementia -- is the novel's view of the world depressing?

Unless otherwise stated, this discussion guide is reprinted with the permission of Harper Perennial. Any page references refer to a USA edition of the book, usually the trade paperback version, and may vary in other editions.



Thursday, March 15, 2012

Ron Carlson "Bigfoot Stole My Wife"

Bigfoot Stole My Wife
By Ron Carlson

The problem is credibility.

The problem, as I'm finding out over the last few weeks, is basic credibility. A lot of people look at me and say, sure Rick, Bigfoot stole your wife. It makes me sad to see it, the look of disbelief in each person's eye. Trudy's disappearance makes me sad, too, and I'm sick in my heart about where she may be and how he's treating her, what they do all day, if she's getting enough to eat. I believe he's beeing good to her -- I mean I feel it -- and I'm going to keep hoping to see her again, but it is my belief that I probably won't.

In the two and a half years we were married, I often had the feeling that I would come home from the track and something would be funny. Oh, she'd say things: One of these days I'm not going to be here when you get home, things like that, things like everybody says. How stupid of me not to see them as omens. When I'd get out of bed in the early afternoon, I'd stand right here at this sink and I could see her working in her garden in her cut-off Levis and bikini top, weeding, planting, watering. I mean it was obvious. I was too busy thinking about the races, weighing the odds, checking the jockey roster to see what I now know: he was watching her too. He'd probably been watching her all summer.

So, in a way it was my fault. But what could I have done? Bigfoot steals your wife. I mean: even if you're home, it's going to be a mess. He's big and not well trained.

When I came home it was about eleven-thirty. The lights were on, which really wasn't anything new, but in the ordinary mess of the place, there was a little difference, signs of a struggle. There was a spilled Dr. Pepper on the counter and the fridge was open. But there was something else, something that made me sick. The smell. The smell of Bigfoot. It was hideous. It was . . . the guy is not clean.

Half of Trudy's clothes are gone, not all of them, and there is no note. Well, I know what it is. It's just about midnight there in the kitchen which smells like some part of hell. I close the fridge door. It's the saddest thing I've ever done. There's a picture of Trudy and me leaning against her Toyota taped to the fridge door. It was taken last summer. There's Trudy in her bikini top, her belly brown as a bean. She looks like a kid. She was a kid I guess, twenty-six. The two times she went to the track with me everybody looked at me like how'd I rate her. But she didn't really care for the races. She cared about her garden and Chinese cooking and Buster, her collie, who I guess Bigfoot stole too. Or ate. Buster isn't in the picture, he was nagging my nephew Chuck who took the photo. Anyway I close the fridge door and it's like part of my life closed. Bigfoot steals your wife and you're in for some changes.

You come home from the track having missed the Daily Double by a neck, and when you enter the home you are paying for and in which you and your wife and your wife's collie live, and your wife and her collie are gone as is some of her clothing, there is nothing to believe. Bigfoot stole her. It's a fact. What should I do, ignore it? Chuck came down and said something like well if Bigfoot stole her why'd he take the Celica? Christ, what a cynic! Have you ever read anything about Bigfoot not being able to drive? He'd be cramped in there, but I'm sure he could manage.

I don't really care if people believe me or not. Would that change anything? Would that bring Trudy back here? Pull the weeds in her garden?

As I think about it, no one believes anything anymore. Give me one example of someone believing one thing. No one believes me. I myself can't believe all the suspicion and cynicism there is in today's world. Even at the races, some character next to me will poke over at my tip sheet and ask me if I believe that stuff. If I believe? What is there to believe? The horse's name? What he did the last time out? And I look back at this guy, too cheap to go two bucks on the program, and I say: its history. It is historical fact here. Believe. Huh. Here's a fact: I believe everything.

Credibility.

When I was thirteen years old, my mother's trailor was washed away in the flooding waters of the Harley River and swept thirty-one miles, ending right side up and neary dead level just outside Mercy, in fact in the old weed-eaten parking lot for the abandoned potash plant. I know this to be true because I was inside the trailor the whole time with my pal, Nuggy Reinecker, who found the experience more life-changing than I did.

Now who's going to believe this story? I mean, besides me, because I was there. People are going to say, come on, thirty-one miles? Don't you mean thirty-one feet?

We had gone in out of the rain after school to check out a magazine that belonged to my mother's boyfriend. It was a copy of Dude, and there was a fold-out page I will never forget of a girl lying on a beach on her back. It was a color photograph. The girl was a little pale, I mean, this was probably her first day out in the sun, and she had no clothing on. So it was good, but what made it great was that they had made her a little bathing suit out of sand. Somebody had spilled a little sand just right, here and there, and the sane was this incredible gold color, and it made her look so absolutly naked you wanted to put your eyes out.

Nuggy and I knew there was flood danger in Griggs; we'd had a flood every year almost and it had been raining for five days on and off, but when the trailor bucked the first time, we thought it was my mother come home to catch us in the dirty book. Nuggy shoved the magazine under his bed and I ran out to check the door. It only took me a second and I holldered back Hey no sweat, no one's here, but by the time Ireturned to see what other poses they'd had this beautiful woman commit, Nuggy already had his pants to his ankles and was involved in what we knew was a sin.

It if hadn't been the timing of the first wave with this act of his, Nuggy might have gone on to live what the rest of us call a normal life. But the Harley had crested and the head wave, which they estimated to be three feet minimum, unmoored the trailer with a push that knocked me over the sofa, and threw Nuggy, already entangled in his trousers, clear across the bedroom.

I watched the village of Griggs as we sailed through. Some of the village, the Exxon Station, part of it at least, and the carwash, which folded up right away, tried to come along with us, and I saw the front of Painters' Mercantile, the old porch and signboard, on and off all day.

You can believe this: it was not a smooth ride. We'd rip along for ten seconds, dropping and growling over rocks, and rumbling over tree stumps, and then wham! the front end of the trailer would lodge against a rock or something that could stop it, and whoa! we'd wheel around sharp as a carnival ride, worse really, because the furniture would be thrown against the far side and us with it, sometimes we'd end up in a chair and sometimes the chair would sit on us. My mother had about four thousand knickknacks in five big box shelves, and they gave us trouble for the first two or three miles, flying by like artillery, left, right, some small glass snail hits you in the face, later in the back, but that stuff all finally settled in the foot and then two feet of water which we took on.

We only slowed down once and it was the worst. In the railroad flats I thought we had stopped and I let go of the door I was hugging and tried to stand up and then swish, another rush sent us right along. We rammed along all day it seemed, but when we finally washed up in Mercy and the sheriff's cousin pulled open the door and got swept back to his car by water and quite a few of those knickknacks, just over an hour had passed. We had averaged, they figured later, about thirty-two miles an hour, reaching speeds of up to fifty at Lime Falls and the Willows. I was okay and walked out bruised and well washed, but when the sheriff's cousin pulled Nuggy out, he looked genuinely hurt.

"For godsakes," I remember the sheriff's cousin saying, "The damn flood knocked this boy's pants off!" But Nuggy wasn't talking. In fact, he never hardly talked to me again in the two years he stayed at Regional School. I heard later, and I believe it, that he joined the monastery over in Malcolm County.

My mother, because she didn't have the funds to haul our rig back to Griggs, worried for a while, but then the mayor arranged to let us stay out where we were. So after my long ride in a trailer down the flooded Harley River with my friend Nuggy Reinbecker, I grew up in a parking lot outside of Mercy, and to tell you the truth, it wasn't too bad, even though our trailer never did smell straight again.

Now you can believe all that. People are always saying: don't believe everything you read, or everything you hear. And I'm here to tell you. Believe it. Everything. Everything you read. Everything you hear. Believe your eyes. Your ears. Believe the small hairs on the back of your neck. Believe all of history, and all of the versions of history, and all the predictions for the future. Believe every weather forecast. Believe in God, the afterlife, unicorns, showers on Tuesday. Everything has happened. Everything is possible.

I came home from the track to find the cupboard bare. Trudy is not home. The place smells funny: hairy. It's a fact and I know it as a fact: Bigfoot has been in my house.

Bigfoot stole my wife.

She's gone.

Believe it.

I gotta believe it.

Senior page poetry/New short stories

Today, work on your Marking Period portfolio 15-20 pages.

Also, let's get some poetry from last semester for the yearbook senior page!

Finally, if you haven't already, please read Lorie Moore's "How to Be a Writer"--the link is on a post below this.

Thursday, February 9, 2012

LeGuin, Barthelme, Carver

Thursday:

Discuss "Texts"  by Ursula LeGuin, "The School"  Donald Bathelme, and Raymond Carver's "Are These Actual Miles"


Ursula LeGuin on the decline of reading:
harpers.org/archive/2008/02/0081907

Article about donald Bathelme and "The School":
ronosaurusrex.com/metablog/2010/08/14/preface-to-an-introduction-to-donald-barthelme-and-the-school/

About "Are These Actual Miles?"




www.mdbell.com/blog/2011/5/7/ssm-2011-are-these-actual-miles-by-raymond-carver-reviewed-b.html


HOMEWORK:   Read Bradbury and Malamud

Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Fever

To help you understand "Fever":

Reviewers of Fever also single out the title story, noting its uniqueness, its range, and its message. Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, writing for The New York Times, calls ‘‘Fever’’ ‘‘almost majestic in its evocation of the goodness and evil of the human heart.’’ She further notes the peculiar perspective used by Wideman in this collection, which she expresses as ‘‘not quite human but godlike, not limited by the conventions of ordinary storytelling.’’ She finds that ‘‘Fever’’ makes use of this style of storytelling successfully, culminating in ‘‘an almost unbearably anguished meditation on human nature in plague time, the power and sadness of the story are enormous, its vision triumphant.’’
Wideman’s career can be characterized by his search for new ways to explore themes and ideas and to express the African-American experience. ‘‘Fever’’ is a boldly experimental work, one that floats back and forth between time periods and narrators and thus defies easy labeling or analysis. Randall Kenan of The Nation forthrightly deals with Wideman’s slipping back and forth in time; he presents his own reasoning: ‘‘It is as if Wideman is again playing games with us, forcing us to see the past and the present as one; how we are affected by what has gone before, not only in our thinking but in our acting and in our soul-deep believing.’’ Despite the story’s elusive nature and Wideman’s claims to Rosen that the story ‘‘shouldn’t be tied to any historical period,’’ reviewers note his evocation of a specific period in American history. Other reviewers comment on the way Wideman collapses time to present a composite picture of a certain place and mindset. Cara Hood writing for the Voice Literary Supplement claims that present-day Philadelphia emerges as the protagonist of the story.
Reviewers do not overlook the significance of Wideman’s message in examining his style. Herbert Mitgang in the New York Times finds that even after reading the story, he is left with the knowledge of Wideman’s search for ‘‘some sort of universality’’ to the human condition. Some reviewers, however, do not care for the way in which Wideman attempts to get his message to readers. For instance, Clarence Major of the Washington Post believes ‘‘Fever’’ to be the most ambitious if not the most artistically successful story of the collection. Mitgang recognizes the importance of what Wideman is saying when he writes that Wideman’s ‘‘voice as a modern black writer with something to report comes through.’’ Despite this praise, Mitgang does not believe that the rest of the stories are successful, asserting in his review of the collection that they add nothing to Wideman’s reputation as a writer.
In Wideman’s extensive and accomplished body of work, ‘‘Fever’’ occupies only a small spot. Yet, if it accomplishes nothing more, it demonstrates Wideman’s careful exploration of relationships among people and the effects that these relationships have on society. Wideman’s interest in the issues he raises in ‘‘Fever’’—including racial relations, communication, personal freedom, and violence— is seen in the works that he has written later in his career. Philadelphia Fire picks up the final section of the story in its fictionalization of the 1985 MOVE bombing. The Cattle Killing explores the devastating effects of racial prejudice on the African Americans who remained behind in Philadelphia during the 1793 yellow fever epidemic in greater detail. The body of Wideman’s work strengthens Robert Bones’ assertion, made in 1978, that Wideman is ‘‘perhaps the most gifted black novelist of his generation.’’

Friday, February 3, 2012

The Shawl Themes

The Shawl" is noteworthy because of its scrupulous control of its limited point of view, with the point-of-view character being the mother of a starving infant during the Holocaust. There is nothing in the story about the political conditions in Germany’s Third Reich, which developed a policy of mass extermination of Jews; yet, within just a few pages, the story provides an inside view of the horror as it affected those who were the victims of this unspeakable policy. The story requires great attention, for the details are not described objectively but rather appear as they have been filtered through the suffering eyes and mind of the major figure, Rosa.

Survival
Underlying Ozick's story is the theme of survival. Rosa struggles with this constantly. During the march to the concentration camp, Rosa struggles over whether or not she should pass Magda to an onlooker, possibly ensuring her child's survival. Rosa decides against this, however, realizing that she would risk her own life in doing so and could not guarantee Magda's safety. Rosa chooses survival in the moment for both of them, rather than probable death for herself and uncertainty for her child. As Rosa struggles over what to do about Magda, Stella longs to be Magda: a baby rocked and sleeping in her mother's arms. Rosa also thinks that the starving Stella gazes at Magda as if she wishes to eat the child. Magda, though far too young to have any knowledge of what is happening to and around her, gives up screaming and quietly sucks on the shawl.
Life in the camp is a constant battle for survival. Rosa, apparently caring more about Magda's survival than her own. gives most of her food to her child. Stella, caring mostly about her own survival, gives no food to Magda. Magda herself turns to the shawl for comfort: it is her "baby, her pet, her little sister"; when she needs to be still—and stillness is necessary to her survival—she sucks on a corner of it.
Halfway through the story, Stella takes Magda's shawl because she is cold. It is, perhaps, the only one of her afflictions that she can do anything about. There is no food to ease her hunger, and there is nothing she can do to escape from the camp; but Magda's shawl might ease her cold. This, too, is a form of reaching for survival. Stella has chosen to bring what small comfort she can to herself, ignoring the potential cost to Magda and Rosa.
Magda, knowing no better, leaves the barracks in her search for the shawl. Again, Rosa has to make a choice about her survival. If she runs to Magda, they will both be killed. If she does nothing, Magda will be killed. The only solution she can think of, however slim, is to get the shawl to Magda before she is discovered by the camp's guards. She runs for the shawl and returns to the square with it, but she is too late. A soldier carries Magda away toward the electric fence at the other side of the camp. Rosa watches her baby fly through the air, hit the fence and die, then fall to the ground. Again, there are choices. If she goes to Magda, she will be shot; if she screams, she will be shot. Rosa chooses survival, using the shawl to mute her scream.
Motherhood and Nurturing
Closely linked to the theme of survival are issues of motherhood and nurturing. Throughout "The Shawl," Stella longs to be nurtured. On the march, she longs to be a baby, comforted by her mother's arms. In the camp, she longs for food, sometimes causing Rosa to think that she is "waiting for Magda to die so she could put her teeth into the little thighs.'' She takes the only bit of nurturing she can find: warmth from Magda's shawl.
The issues of motherhood are more complex. Because she is a mother, Rosa cannot think only of herself, as Stella does. Each decision must be weighed. What is the possible benefit to her? To Magda? What are the possible costs? With each decision, Rosa must decide whether it is in her best interest to sacrifice herself, her baby, or both of them.
Prejudice and Tolerance
Issues of prejudice and tolerance are also raised in "The Shawl." Rosa, Stella, Magda, and the others are imprisoned or killed in concentration camps simply because they are Jewish. Prejudice exists on then- part too—at least on the part of Stella. Looking at Magda's yellow hair and blue eyes, she says "Aryan," in a voice that makes Rosa think she has said, "Let us devour her."
The issue of tolerance is raised in the camp itself. Rosa and Magda are not alone in the barracks they occupy. The other occupants are aware of Magda's existence and of Rosa's deception. In the camp, "a place without pity," they cannot know what might happen to them if Magda is discovered in the barracks. Yet no one reports her presence.
Betrayal
Rosa constantly fears that Stella—or someone else—will kill Magda to eat her. While this does not happen, it is Stella's betrayal that costs Magda her life and Rosa her child. "The Shawl'' points to one reason for this kind of betrayal: the inhuman treatment Stella has received has made her pitiless. "The cold went into her heart," the narrator says. "Rosa saw that Stella's heart was cold."

Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Hunters in the Snow





















Answer in complete sentences and use text-based references (page numbers and/or  quotes) to support your answers.

1. Contrast the culture of hunting as you know it and the culture of hunting as Wolff presents it. What point do you think Wolff is by making by creating this contrast?


2. What do Tub's overeating and Frank's interest in the babysitter have to do with the way they treat Kenny after he has been shot?   How are the three men characterized and contrasted from each other?  What do they share?

3. Describe the TONE of “Hunters in the Snow”.  What would you say is the THEME?

4. The final plot twist in "Hunters in the Snow" comes in the last two sentences of the story.
Here the narrator speaks directly to the reader, giving us information the characters don’t know. How is this an appropriate conclusion to the story? What final statement is being made about the characters?   Is it ironic?

HOMEWORK:   Read Wideman's   "Fever" for Friday

Monday, January 30, 2012

Joyce Carol Oates "Heat"

Joyce Carol Oates'. "Heat" and Tobias Wolff's "Hunters in the Snow"

Pick up Oxford Book of Short Stories.

Focus on narrator's voice in "Heat".

HMK: For Wednesday, read tobias Wolff's  "Hunters in the Snow"--indirect and direct approaches to character description and development. Major themes? Symbols?

Continue to work on short stories.

For Friday, read John Wideman's "Fever".

Joyce Carol Oates:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgJ809QKmas

www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaxFbNgskOw

Biography (born in Lockport):

www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/oat0bio-1

Video adaptation:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4Mw-1EQTpM

Fiction Exercises

Fiction Warm-up Exercises/Brian Kiteley

A Selection of Fiction Exercises, from The 3 A.M. Epiphany

Published by Writers Digest Books
Copyright Brian Kiteley (clicking on this will take you back to my home page)

Take a look at some sample �exercises from The 4 A.M. Breakthrough, which has just been published.
1. Synesthesia, according to M.H. Abrams in A Glossary of Literary Terms, is a description of “one kind of sensation in terms of another; color is attributed to sounds, odor to colors, sound to odors, and so on.”  Here is an example of synesthesia from Bruno Schulz’s Street of the Crocodiles:  “Adela would plunge the rooms into semidarkness by drawing down the linen blinds.  All colors immediately fell an octave lower [my italics]; the room filled with shadows, as if it had sunk to the bottom of the sea and the light was reflected in mirrors of green water.” Schulz describes a change in color by means of a musical term.  Writers consciously and unconsciously employ this peculiar method to convey the irreducible complexity of life onto the page.  Diane Ackerman (in A Natural History of the Senses) feels we are born with this wonderful “intermingling” of senses:  “A creamy blur of succulent blue sounds smells like week-old strawberries dropped into a tin sieve as mother approaches in a halo of color, chatter, and perfume like thick golden butterscotch.  Newborns ride on intermingling waves of sight, sound, touch, taste, and, especially, smell.”  Use synesthesia in a short scene—surreptitiously, without drawing too much attention to it—to convey to your reader an important understanding of some ineffable sensory experience.  Use “sight, sound, touch, taste, and, especially, smell.”  600 words.
2. Deja Vu.  Write a 500-word sketch of a scene in which a character has an experience that causes her to recall a startlingly similar past experience.  Juxtapose the two scenes, the present one and the past one, on top of each other, writing, for instance, two or three sentences of the present moment, then alternating back and forth between present and past that way.  Show the reader the remembered scene by use of Italics.  Why would a character be haunted like this?  Think of a convincing reason for the deja vu experience.  Or don’t worry too much about convincing reasons—just let some strange set of events impinge on the present moment of your character.  Be playful with the relationship.  Simple advice to beginners: don’t be heavy-handed.  It’s easier said than done, I know, but you can train yourself to relax and honor your readers with difficult and unusual human patterns of behavior.  Always flatter your readers by proposing a complex and unexpected reality.
3. The Reluctant “I.” Write a 600-word first-person story in which you use the first person pronoun (“I” or “me” or “my”) only two times—but keep the “I” somehow important to the narrative you’re constructing.  The point of this exercise is to imagine a narrator who is less interested in himself or herself than in what he or she is observing.  You can make your narrator someone who sees a very interesting event in which she is not necessarily a participant.  Or you can make him self-effacing yet a major participant in the events related.  The people we tend to like most are those who are much more interested in other people than in themselves, selfless and caring, whose conversation is not a stream of self-involved remarks (like the guy who, after speaking about himself to a woman at a party for half an hour, says, “Enough about me, what do you think of me?”).  Another lesson you might learn from this exercise is how important it is to let things and events speak for themselves, beyond the ego of the narration.  It is very important in this exercise to make sure your reader is not surprised, forty or fifty words into the piece, to realize that this is a first person narration.  Show us quickly who is observing the scene.
4. Body English. Write a “conversation” in which no words are said.  This exercise is meant to challenge you to work with gesture, body language (or, as a baseball announcer I heard once misspeak it, body English), all the things we convey to each other without words.  We often learn more about characters in stories from the things characters do with their hands than from what they say.  It might be best to have some stranger observe this conversation, rather than showing us the thoughts of one of the people involved in the conversation, because the temptation to tell us what the conversation is about is so great from inside the conversation.  “I was doing the opposite of Freud,” Desmond Morris says, of his famous book The Naked Ape that first studied the ways humans speak with their bodies.  “He listened to people and didn’t watch; I watched people and didn’t listen.”  Because of Morris, according to Cassandra Jardine, “when politicians scratch their noses they are now assumed to be lying—and the sight of the Queen [Elizabeth] crossing her legs at the ankles is known to be a signal that her status is too high for her to need to show sexual interest by crossing them further up.”  Autistic children cannot understand human conversation even when they understand individual words because they cannot read facial expressions, which is clear evidence of how important other forms of language are.  600 words.
5. The First LieTape-record a conversation.  It’s a tried and true method of understanding how people talk, but still surprisingly effective.  Obtain permission of the people you are taping.  Instruct your group each to tell one small lie during the session, only one lie.  Tell them, if they get curious, that some philosophers think that deception was a crucial learned behavior in the emergence of modern consciousness several thousand years ago.  You can participate in the conversation yourself, but don’t become an interviewer.  Let the machine run for a good long while, allowing your friends to become comfortable and less aware of the tape recorder.  Listen to the tape a day or two later.  Play it several times.  Choose some small part of the conversation to transcribe (the lies may be interesting, if you can spot them, but more interesting should be all the other stuff they say).  Transcribe as faithfully as you can.  Do not transcribe more than one page of talk.  After that, fill out the conversation with information about the people who are speaking, giving us only details about them that we need to know.  The final product should be no longer than two pages long, double-spaced.
6. Phone TagWrite a fairly long, complicated phone conversation overheard by someone in the room.  All three people—the listener in the room, the caller, and the person on the other end of the line—are involved with each other in some way (not necessarily romantically).  Let us hear the other end of the conversation, without actually hearing it.  This means you will be giving us only one side of a conversation, so you will have to work to make the side we’re hearing intriguing and capable of carrying a story.  The listener in the room can guess what the person on the other end of the line is saying, but try to keep this guessing to a minimum, and make sure this guesswork is done with integrity—well after the unheard speaker has spoken.  600 words.
7. Underground History Reread your own older fiction—one story or as many as you want to.  Find the ten most common words from this fiction (excluding small and uninteresting words).  Use these words as hidden titles for ten paragraphs of prose.  By hidden, I mean that you should operate as in the above exercise, but after several rough drafts, eliminate the titles.  Choosing these ten words is obviously going to be somewhat subjective, unless you have a program that allows you to do some of the work for you (for instance, you could pick a word that seems to occur commonly, then do a MS Word global search—the find icon under edit).  This exercise may help you uncover the trends and unexpected subject matter of your fiction.
8. BackwardsWrite a story backwards.  Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold works this way, more or less.  Murder mysteries are told backwards, in a sense.  Most stories we tell orally we tell from the middle forward until someone tells us we’ve left out important details, then we double back.  You might try taking one of your own short pieces—or someone else’s—and simply reversing the sentences.  What then?  Unless you’re very lucky, you’ll have to do a good deal to make this reversed piece of prose make sense.  Make sure this does not become simply a device.  The structure should be inherently useful to the material, which is good advice for any fiction.  500 words.
9. Jointly Held Story.  Speak the beginning of a story with someone else.  Choose someone you know well, who also writes, but that’s not a necessity.  Choose a good storyteller.  Do this in a relatively private place, where you won’t be interrupted.  One person starts the story and continues for a few sentences.  The next person continues for another few sentences, and so on for a while.  You don’t need to start up right away after the other person has finished his or her bit.  End when you feel things getting exciting.  Both speakers should go away from the experience and write down what they remember of the story, but don’t write the tale down right away.  Let it sit in your memories for a day or so.  Don’t play games of one-upmanship with your partner.  Be faithful to the growing story and the characters created on the spur of the moment.  Listen to the other person’s quirks of storytelling.  Let someone else’s manner of creating a story guide you and influence your own story-telling style.  The two stories that result from this exercise ought to be quite different from one another.  1,000 words.
10. Home “Some women marry houses,” says the poet Anne Sexton, meaning presumably that these women marry not men but the ideal of house and home.  The different etymologies of these two words are instructive.  Home originally referred to village or hometown. House has in its earlier meanings the notion of hiding, of enclosing oneself.  Now house indicates any house, and home is the place that is central to our notions of ourselves.  Use a home in a story fragment (500 words).  Think about the power of rooms (kitchens, basements, unfinished attics, walk-in closets) on psychology and conversation.  In this fragment, make the house a unique participant (though a passive one) in the unfolding events.  The room need not be in a typical house.  Think about all the other rooms we become familiar with—classrooms, office cubicles, public toilets.  What are their personalities?  How do the more public spaces we inhabit affect our behaviors?  You might consider keeping several characters permanently stuck in different rooms in a house, communicating by shouts, cell phones, intercoms, Dixie cups, or telepathy.
11. In the Belly of the Beast. Describe an unusual interior space, one with lots of interesting appurtenances and gadgets sticking out: a submarine, a small plane, a subway tunnel away from the platform, a boiler room in the sub-basement of a high rise building.  Again, do not yield to the easy use of this scene.  The boiler room, for instance, we all expect to hide a creepy axe murderer-type.  Put two innocent children in it instead, romping and playing among the glow and roar of the fire and steam vents as if this were a sunny playground (their father is the superintendent of the building, and he prefers to keep the kids where he can see them).  500 words.
12. Absent. Construct a character who is not present.  You have many options here: people may talk about this character before meeting him, or after meeting her; you might choose to examine what this character owns, how he or she lives, under what conditions; you might use indirect approaches, like letters or documents that attest to the existence but not presence of the person.  How do we know of people?  Examine the ways we build characters in our minds and in our social environments before and after we meet them.
13. Ways of Seeing. Imagine a person with an idiosyncratic way of seeing the world (for instance, an occasional drug dealer, who, because of his amateur status, is more than usually prone to seeing danger where there is none; an entomologist who tends to categorize the world dryly, as if seen through a microscope; a world-class athlete whose clarity of vision is almost hallucinogenic).  Have this character witness a traumatic event that does not directly involve him or her.  Narrate the event from a first-person point of view, making sure that the perspective is carefully built around the idiosyncrasies of this personality.  Also, as a hidden aspect of this character, imagine him or her as some kind of unusual animal.  600 words.
14. Loveless. Create a character around this sentence: Nobody has ever loved me as much I have loved them.  Do not use this sentence in the fragment of fiction you write.  The sentence comes from Guy Davenport’s aunt, Mary Elizabeth Davenport Morrow, via his essay “On Reading” in The Hunter Gracchus.  Resist the temptation this exercise offers for a completely self-indulgent character.  Of course, some self-indulgence will be fun with this character.  But don’t write from inside your own wounded sense of the world.  500 words.
15. Loving. Write about a person you love.  This apparently simple instruction may be more difficult than you think.  What makes us love people?  How do we avoid being sentimental when describing the attributes that make someone loveable?  You will immediately be faced with the decision of writing about someone you love or loved romantically or as a friend.  Or perhaps you’ll choose a family member.  Your greatest challenge will be to make your reader love this person, too.  600 words.
16. Improvisation. Put two characters in a situation that demands improvisation, on both parts, which also demands that the two characters interact and compromise with each other in the improvisation.  We should be able to observe the surprise, pleasure, and frustration that result from this improvisation.  Remember that most of life involves one form of improvisation or another.  Beginning writers tend to control their characters too much, so in this exercise you should work hard to let the characters surprise themselves as well as you.  500 words.
17. True Feeling. Using language that is simple and straightforward, describe intensely and exhaustively a moment of true feeling between two characters.  Meryl Streep says that when she’s researching a character she’s going to portray, she always gives the character some simple secret that no one on the set, none of the other actors, and none of the other characters knows about.  Give the character you’re showing us this moment of true feeling through a secret, but don’t reveal the secret either to us or to the other character.
18. Teacher. In a 500-word scene, have one character teach another character something that changes the teacher.  But this exercise asks you to go another step beyond the first layer of reality.  It should teach you how to play with more than one level in your fiction.  The teacher learning something from her student is surprising, though not so unusual as you may think.  The audience is moved by Rose’s tragic learning curve in the movie Titanic.  Imagine how much more interesting the film might have been had Jack learned something from what he taught Rose, rather than simply dying handsomely.
19. The Bunny Planet. Rosemary Wells has written a trilogy of children’s books collectively called Voyage to the Bunny Planet.  The basic problem she sets for each book is that a child (in the form of a young bunny) has a bad day (in prose).  Halfway through each little book, an unseen narrator intervenes and says that the child in question “needs a visit to the Bunny Planet.”  Everything alters in this other world, first of all by changing to rhyming poetry.  The world is better after we hear the words, “Far beyond the moon and stars/Twenty light years south of Mars,/Spins the gentle Bunny Planet/And the Bunny Queen is Janet.”  Wells encourages children, in these wonderful books, to rethink their world, to take an emotional timeout and find a better world than the one children frequently find themselves stuck in—chaos, messes, tantrums, sickness, loneliness.  What I want you to do in this exercise is only very tangentially linked to this trilogy.  Use this hinge device that Wells employs so deftly.  For the first part of your 500-word piece, tinge the world in darker hues, show us a narrative style that reflects frustration, sadness, alienation, whatever.  Then, with a phrase a little like this central phrase of Wells’s, change everything—especially the narrative method.  Wells goes from a very dense and quite beautiful prose (almost prose poetry, as the best children’s literature is) to this light rhyming style (although she does not stick to one method of rhyme—she uses couplets, quatrains, etc.).
20. The Argument. Two people are arguing—a man and a woman.  They don’t have to be a couple.  Each is convinced he or she is right.  You, as the writer, do not know—and do not want to know—who is right, but you will have exquisite sympathy for both points of view, both sides of the argument.  How do men and women argue differently? Couples tend to disagree over relatively minor issues, which often stand for larger issues.  Give us enough background and history, but try to stay in the moment as much as possible.  Narrative PoV is going to matter here a great deal: writing from one or the other’s PoV is likely to make it very difficult to show both sides fairly.  An omniscient narration may seem to be the answer, but I don’t like omniscient narration—I don’t think it’s really possible in fiction about contemporary life.  Choose an accidental arbitrator—a third party narrator, either first or third person narration.  This narrator knows and likes both these people well, but doesn’t and can’t favor one over the other.� 600 words.
21. Standup. The usual method of the standup comedian monologue is apparently casual connections.  For instance, Elvira Kurt once started a monologue with the simple idea of bad hair.  “As a five-year old, you never had bad hair days.  You woke up with hair straight up, and you said, ‘I look great!  I slept in my swimsuit and I feel wonderful!’  Mother made clothes for me—horrible outfits.  She probably laughed herself to death.  I got back at her.  When I told her I was gay I said it was because of those clothes.”  Note the deliberate movement from plain detail to plain detail, with great leaps between the details—the mother making clothes to the coming-out declaration.  We are not expecting this transition (nor for that matter the simpler transition from bad hair to mother making clothes).  But the transitions are funny, and they affect us, shock us even in this day and age.  Write a 600-word standup comedy monologue, fitting it into a story situation you’ve already begun working on.  Don’t make it obvious to your reader that you are doing a stand-up routine—just tell a story as if you were doing a monologue in front of a smoky, irritable audience, with a Late Show talent scout scribbling notes at the bar in the back.
22. The Joke. End a 600-word fragment of a story with a joke you like or loathe.  Use the joke as a way of coloring the whole passage, but don’t just lead up to the joke.  The joke should be relatively short, and it might be better if the joke is somewhat odd.  A guy walks into a bar.  He says to the bartender, “I’ll have one g-g-gin and t-tonic, p-p-please.”  The bartender says, “One g-gin and t-tonic c-c-coming up.”  The customer glares suspiciously at the bartender, who smiles innocently.  Another patron walks into the bar and says, “Scotch on the rocks, barkeep.”  The  bartender says, “One Scotch rocks, coming right up.”  A moment later he brings the gin and tonic to the first customer, who says, “You were m-m-mimick-k-king m-m-me.”  The bartender, with a truly pained look on his face, says, “N-n-no.  I was m-m-mimicking that other g-guy.”
23. Outrunning the Critic. Write 100 short sentences about a character you are working on in a piece of fiction. The sentences should not connect and should not follow one another in any logical way.  The idea of this exercise is to force you to outrun your own thoughts and intelligence and critical mind.  Be careful not to be monotonous, using the name of your character or a pronoun to start each sentence.  A better exercise would be to write 200 or 500 sentences about this character, but 100 sentences is still enough of a stretch to make this useful.  The idea for this exercise comes from a collaboration the poet John Yau did with a painter, which was to match 1,000 small watercolors with sentences by Yau.  John Yau is the author of Edificio Sayonara, Forbidden Entries, and Hawaiian Cowboys, among other books.
24. Rehearsal. Imitate the method of actors rehearsing a scene, repeating lines and whole sections of a speech, going over mistakes, etc., with several familiar characters of yours. Use this social trial and error to find new, submerged material for your story. You should think of this exercise as artificial and behind-the- scenes work, but it may also trigger strangely realistic conversation.  Human beings constantly rehearse and re-rehearse their lines.  The anarchic rhythm of conversation is more akin to a social science experiment than to the polish of theatrical dialogue.
25. Surprise. Write a short scene about a character you’ve become familiar with over time—either your own fictional creation or a character based on someone you know.  Start the scene by letting the character do what you expect this character to do.  But at some point in the sequence of events, allow the character to do something completely out of character.  Let the character surprise you.  This exercise demands that you consider what is expected and unexpected in a character.  You may want to make a list, behind the writing of this scene, of the kinds of things this character usually does; and another list of the sorts of things this character would never do.

Thursday, January 5, 2012

Thurs. 1/5/12 Renga, Slam, Song, contests

Finish Renga poem in group

Work on Slam poem with group--Slam is Friday Jan 20

Contest entries--SOKOL, GANNON

Song lyrics

New exercises--James Wright cut-up


Angel/Gargoyle


Part 1
Take a piece of paper and fold it in half side to side so you have a long thin rectangle.

On the one side you write a heading that says, Angel. On the other side you write Gargoyle.

Spend ten minutes writing under the angel heading from the part of you that is an angel.

Turn over the page and under the heading Gargoyle, write from the gargoyle aspect of your personality.

Part 2

Now, unfold the paper. You are now looking at a page that is headed Angel . . . . Gargoyle.

All your lines start out angel, and then become gargoyle.

Edit and shape the material you have into a poem. Feel free to be wild and to augment liberally.

 



Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Poetic Form: Renga  


Renga, meaning "linked poem," began over seven hundred years ago in Japan to encourage the collaborative composition of poems. Poets worked in pairs or small groups, taking turns composing the alternating three-line and two-line stanzas. Linked together, renga were often hundreds of lines long, though the favored length was a 36-line form called a kasen. Several centuries after its inception, the opening stanza of renga gave rise to the much shorter haiku.
To create a renga, one poet writes the first stanza, which is three lines long with a total of seventeen syllables. The next poet adds the second stanza, a couplet with seven syllables per line. The third stanza repeats the structure of the first and the fourth repeats the second, alternating in this pattern until the poem’s end.
Thematic elements of renga are perhaps most crucial to the poem’s success. The language is often pastoral, incorporating words and images associated with seasons, nature, and love. In order for the poem to achieve its trajectory, each poet writes a new stanza that leaps from only the stanza preceding it. This leap advances both the thematic movement as well as maintaining the linking component.
Contemporary practitioners of renga have eased the form’s traditional structural standards, allowing poets to adjust line-length, while still offering exciting and enlightening possibilities. The form has become a popular method for teaching students to write poetry while working together.
 

36 Views
A Solo Renga by Jane Reichhold

Failing a drum
heart and fingers beat
rib-laced hollow


filled and overflowing
the flute empties its notes


mountain breathing
noon heat shimmers
cool from crevices


pattern of dry river weaving
brown gray snake skin


wearing feathers
the messenger braves the cold
moonlight owl


first the fear and then the power
seeing shadows stretch the night


whip-tailed
the scorpion untouched
by its own poison


babies in her wolfish belly
which one will kill her?


when old and lame 
the wise woman knows best
the grace of dancing


prayers stir the dusty earth
bells set the air to jingling


no one speaks 
the body begins to tremble
the burn and salve


electric fingers light the way
to collect the boji stones


the travelers 
without wings
plain


gauzy gowns long gone
angels now wear T-shirts


neon advertising 
someone else's name
on your chest


lost on the threshold
first step in the labyrinth


the map 
in your hand
lines


the curve of latitude
and longitude meeting


the star 
in the apple's center
seed distance


capsules of sunshine darken
taking the shape of tears


mad with love 
only sea skin fabrics
cloth the depths


full of fishes worms and worries
we walk the aisles of grocery stores


woman 
chanting to the goddess
tiny banners of blood


tying us together we cry
breached beseeched at childbirth


human sacrifice 
helmet and gun in empty shoes
of a soldier son


shell home at last
the hermit crab slips in


moonset 
the sea recedes 
into a bright hole

white ash circles the embers
of the all-night vigil


eyes red-rimmed 
staring at nothing to see
the dream


leaving three hairs braided
in the cedar a thank-you note


from the flute 
breath, blessing and perfume
of warmed wood


manifesting in the fog 
pyramids of slanted sun

the lens disk 
focused as close as 
we come to stars

sisters hand in hand 
with rainbow brothers

the music fades 
the lights come up
and credits roll


inside the darkness of night
all the things we are.

Copyright © by AHA Books and Jane Reichhold 1995.
Copyright © by Designated Authors 1995.