Choose a single line, excerpt, image, or craft issue to examine in 1 essay due this week (select from required or optional readings): see what the writer is up to; how does it do what it does; what does it teach you as a writer? Responses should be brief. Do not summarize. While your ideas should be clearly formulated and presented, these responses are not expected to be formal or linear — think of them as conversational, meditative, exploratory.
17 thoughts on “Week 2 Reading Response”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
“Hidden beneath the driver’s seat, way up in the branches, is a silver pocket watch with a broken face. It had been someone’s great-grandfather’s, hand down and handed down, until it reached the boy who drove his car into the side of a tree” (Beard 7) From Cousins.
This sentence is representative of what I love so much about Beard’s writing, the detail is so specific and spoken with so much conviction, even in places that the narrator could not have possibly known this much detail that the reader has no choice but to trust their description. Beard also starts the essay out with this, describing the scene of the moms in the fishing boat right down to each woman’s exact action, even though Beard admits to not even being alive at this point. This conviction is an important lesson; I need to see and believe the details I may be fabricating in order to make them convincing.
This sentence is representative of what I love so much about Beard’s writing, the detail is so specific and spoken with so much conviction, even in places that the narrator could not have possibly known this much detail that the reader has no choice but to trust their description. Beard also starts the essay out with this, describing the scene of the moms in the fishing boat right down to each woman’s exact action, even though Beard admits to not even being alive at this point. This conviction is an important lesson; I need to see and believe the details I may be fabricating in order to make them convincing.
The Sloan piece was something that I really didn’t want to keep reading. My dad just turned 54 a couple weeks ago, and it pains me to realize that my parents are getting older. He isn’t terminally ill or anything, but every time I hear a high blood pressure reading or see the stress or age in his eyes, it reminds me that parents are not the invincible protectors that we were taught they were as children. As the voice got deeper and deeper into the story and started talking about her family’s separation, it reminded me of my own when I was young. I was about ten years old when my parents divorced and it felt like the end of the world at the time. The separation of mom and dad’s house felt really familiar. For me, my dad’s house had a lot more rigidity than my mom’s. Especially with her father trying to introduce his lover and the daughter not gravitating towards him at first, this sounded like a really familiar account of the novelty of changing family structures. I also found the language really interesting, especially in the beginning. “We sit on rock and watch the waves, and on the other side, New Jersey…” The author uses fewer words than necessary which I think shows how wrapped up she is in the very moment she is in. Our experiences may not always make sense to other people but what matters is that they make sense to us.
“But this isn’t about school (I was in eighth grade). And it’s not about my father handcuffing me to a pipe and leaving me there in the basement of his old house. And it’s not about the hotel room I ended up in one homeless evening with a white man in a nurse’s uniform and a wig giving head to three black men, lines of coke spread haphazardly across the table. All of that is true but this is just a list of the different places I slept. It’s the only way I can get any perspective.”
This paragraph by Stephen Elliott resonated with me because it made me think about how life is made up of multiple events. Yes, Elliott was homeless, and on top of that, he had to go through everything he mentioned in the paragraph above. He brings up other situations that happened while he was homeless, not only putting the situation in perspective for himself but also the reader. As I was reading his story, I was shaken up by a child not having a place to live, and then I got to that paragraph, and I was even more horrified by his experiences as a child, which put his life story in perspective for me.
Joan Didion Response:
“Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel.”
This line exemplifies why I am looking forward to taking this class! I feel like it successfully summarizes the value of creative writing as a method for processing experiences. It serves as a solid reminder that you don’t always have to know the answers to the questions you want your readers to ask, nor do you have to know the direction your writing will take. The act of writing is a journey that will lead you to unexpected and meaningful places.
I chose an excerpt from “The Green Room” by Elliot Sloan. The line I chose says “I long for a different father, one whos normal and shares Cheerios instead of caveat, Muppet movies instead of tormented French films, love stories about girlfriends instead of boyfriends”
I selected this line for a few reasons about its writing. I think this line is a beautiful way of showing so much about the author’s upbringing through showing instead of telling. Through these comparisons, we learn that the author had a more materialistic, worldly, open upbringing rather than outright saying that. The comparisons and adjectives make the reading so much more dynamic and interesting to read. Through this, I learn the power of a strong comparison as well as vivid descriptions in writing.
“Total Eclipse” by Annie Dillard
From the clown in the hotel room to the experience of the eclipse itself, the author used wonderfully descriptive language that allowed me to feel as if I was standing right beside her throughout her entire trip. I could almost see the views from the hilltop, overlooking the avalanche-covered highway; hear the screams as the moon slid in perfect alignment with the sun; and imagine the futuristic black and silver world the author was temporarily transported to as she witnessed the total eclipse. She did an outstanding job of using sensory imagery throughout the piece, which added a depth to her memories that placed me in the field of silvery grass as the black shadow forced a scream from deep within me. This writing style introduced to me a way in which to pull a reader into the story using frequent, detailed sensory descriptions, and I will definitely take inspiration from this in my future written work.
“The family vacation. Heat, Flies, sand and dirt . My mother sweeps and complains, my father forever baits hook and untagles lines” from “In the Current”, Joan Ann Beard
In the excerpt from “In the Current”, Joan Ann Beard uses sentence structure to provide the reader a picturesque description of the family vacation. The single words that compose the first sentences serve as flashbulb images that allow the reader to imagine the surroundings. From this excerpt, It taught me that to describe something there are many different approaches. This approach lets the reader form their own images that they associate with the words. Secondly the description of the parents show the casual and quiet nature of their vacation. They are not going to skydive or visit a new country. It also communicates a bored attitude from the point of view character towards the actions of the parents and the trip overall
The Green Room by Eliot Sloan:
“I am my father; I am Layla; I am all the voices and wants and angers and stories and secrets.”
With this line, Sloan breaks convention. In the rest of the paragraph, she recounts her experience literally from an embodied first person perspective: “I hang up the phone… My breathing catches and twists… I don’t know what to say.” Once she writes “I am my father; I am Layla,” she diverges from literally recounting her experiences and instead feeds an abstract connection to the meaning-seeking reader. I love it. It really weaves together the presence of each primary character and their contributions to the piece, and underscores the influence of interconnectedness for the author.
“The Green Room” by Eliot Sloan
Excerpt: “He craved action. 10 hours of a long day at the office and then a hot game of tennis, dinner afterward with six or seven people drinking and dancing. He craved the mad crush in the mornings on West End Avenue of well-dressed people rushing to work, hurrying to hail a cab, the exotic, expensive texture in his nostrils of perfume in the elevator at the U.N., the buzzing of cars on Madison Avenue as he gazed at windows filled with French antiques, silk scarves patterned with zebras and tropical fruits, long, white robes and hand-carved, walnut cigarette holders, richly colored oriental rugs and brave new abstract watercolors from the south of France, from Tahiti, from those places that sounded so wonderful he wanted to go just to say he’d been there.”
These three sentences subverted the expectations I had subconsciously built up regarding the writing in this essay. Rather than give a striking blend of vivid sensory details and descriptions that delve into the raw feelings that influence how the world is seen by the author, these three sentences give surface level descriptions that lack the emotional impact I had come to expect in “The Green Room”. The brief three word sentence of “He craved action” felt like a shallow breath before I was submerged in two lengthy sentences riddled with brief description after brief description of surface level, materialistic desires, descriptions separated only by commas in which I got lost and had to start reading again multiple times to keep up and follow along. Through the multitudes of wants that are thrown at me with little preparation beforehand and little room to breath, Sloan effectively disorients me and helps me enter the mindset of the “he” whose story Sloan is telling in this portion of the essay. This mindset clicked for me with the final portion of these sentences, “he wanted to go just to say he’d been there”, which for me called back to a previously defined characteristic of “He loved the outside of things” while using different words. Once I made this connection the lack of detailed emotional and sensory descriptions made sense, as I had entered a mindset in which the outside of things were valued, and as a result the fulfillment of each want was ultimately unfulfilling, leading the creation of a new surface level desire, creating an endless cycle of being unable to find comfort and contentment in peace and rest. In my own writing I want to be able to help people enter the mindset and world view of the perspective I’m writing from, whether it be myself, someone else, or even a fictional character, as Sloan does here by defying previously built up stylistic expectations.
The Blue of Distance by Rebecca Solnit
“We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the distance between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing.”
This sentence sparked an emotional response in me as a reader. It brought up images of my long-distance friends who I often miss desperately when we are apart. That is the “blue of longing” Solnit is referring to here. That tether you feel between you and another person or place. This sentence serves as a way to further the author’s metaphor around “the blue of distance”. The “distance” is the landscape of the emotion of desire. “Blue” is often associated with feelings of sadness, melancholy, and despair. Yet here Solnit is encouraging the reader to recognize their desires as a measure of distance and note that the feeling comes from a sense of longing. Even if it is in a melancholy way, it is a powerful feeling that keeps us connected to each other across the world. As a writer, I want to be able to spark people’s emotions and help them to analyze and further understand the emotions that guide them in their daily lives.
“The Green Room” by Eliot Sloan
On page 3, Sloan laments about being 13 and having a father that she was ashamed of, saying “I long for a different father, one who’s normal…” She begins the paragraph that follows this one with a change in tone: “But there is also this: It is dark already outside on a late Sunday afternoon as I wake up warm after a nap on the sofa with him…” I felt struck by this, specifically the simplicity of saying, “but there is also this.” This line removes us from the scattered nature of the piece. Instead of trying to explain themself or summarize all of these little moments, Sloan takes us right into this quiet moment on the sofa, making us sit down a moment with this. The expertise of the word “this” to me lies in its ambiguity; This moment is not a solution to Sloan’s childhood angst or a reconciliation with their father, it is just another piece of the story that is just as crucial as all the rest. Sloan wished for a different father, and also experienced “this”. Even if they felt badly about their father, it never came without a second truth, an also. This is what family feels like to me, full of contradictions. Sloan reminds me to let these contradictions live together in my writing and to embrace the simplicity of language.
“When I recovered the blouse, I lost the memory, for the two were irreconcilable.” (“The Blue of Distance” by Rebecca Solnit)
This sentence reminded me of something that I believe was mentioned last class, about how writing about our experiences inevitably changes the memories we have of those experiences in the act of shifting them from intangible thoughts to tangible sentences. To me, it seems that the author here is essentially saying something very similar. This sentence, and her piece overall, made me consider the way in which changes in perspective (due to time, space, growth, etc.) has the ability to rewrite the entire tone or outcome of something that before was simply a moment or experience that we had. I wonder how, in our writing, we can explore the idea of two things being “irreconcilable,” and whether or not we agree if this is true for us and our work (for instance, that a memory and a story are “irreconcilable” when put together).
“But that’s not what this is about at all.” – Stephan Elliot’s ‘Where I Slept’
A central idea running through this essay is Elliot deciding to explicitly tell the reader that his story isn’t about whatever the reader assumes it’s about. However, this repetition leads to all of these instances coming together, and in the denial of their meaning, it slowly draws these incongruous moments into a narrative that goes beyond a listing of uncomfortable truths. He chooses to say towards the end, “It’s not about culpability. It’s about sleeping and the things that are important to that like shelter and rain.” The first piece of advice I remember receiving about creative writing was “show don’t tell”. If you want a reader to care about what you mean, then put them in that instance and let them draw conclusions. If that’s what makes good writing, why does Elliot choose to blatantly tell the reader what conclusions they shouldn’t be drawing? Especially considering how much of this piece is sensory, with details that are meant to place a reader in the moment, displaying how well Elliot can craft a scene. These statements are part of the showing. Creative devices are used to channel into a point, and Elliot’s point is that telling can be worked into the atmosphere of a piece, and can shift a reader away from seeing the shocking as the same as the revealing, and while these painful moments are important they aren’t emblematic of a whole person. Even in the most expansive pieces of literature, there is only so much space, and if a point is important enough to the whole of the piece, it’s appropriate to tell that to the reader.
The Green Room by Elliot Sloan
“They share a part of my father that I will never touch, but I know that I have what they really want: I have his heart” (3)
This line exemplifies the restrictions that people feel that there are when they are children discussing the livelihood of their parents. In this story, Sloan talks about her family dynamic and personal identity which a lot of the time had an isolating and mellow tone. As a writer, it reminds me that I have a right to be as free in my description or portrayal of things as I want. Sometimes writing about uncomfortable topics can be liberating so I want to sit in my discomfort if necessary for my growth as an artist and person.
“I told her I knew about women, what’s inside them: a green room like the underneath part of a wave, walls of emerald velvet coiled against the chaos of air and light.” — from Eliot Sloan’s “The Green Room”
This is the most abstract part of the entire essay, and I think that’s how the writer makes the audience feel like they’re getting a view of the main character’s inner mind, but only in this paragraph. It’s timeless and absolutely how a preteen would vocalize their complicated internal spider web of emotions. There’s also a lot of sensory descriptions here, which draws us away from the plot line and time-jumping of the rest of the piece to instead create a space separate from time, full of abstractified potential. As a reader, this shows me what I believe to be the most intimate part of the narrator; as a writer, it shows me how powerful the timing of visual language can be when placed at the right moment. It did seem to come quite out of left field though, and I’m certain there were other points in the plot that must have held deep emotional value to the author. So I do wonder why Sloan chose this specific moment to expand past the boundaries of the shuffling pieces of her non-chronological plot line. I wonder if it’s because this internal turmoil was more vulnerable to her than the rest; it seems as though most of the story is about various things coming in to her, whereas this is the only thing that comes out of her. An external and internal play that really adds to the theme of her feeling out of control of her own life.
Essay: “In the Current” by Jo Ann Beard
Line: “A river runs in front of our cabin, the color of bourbon, foamy at the banks, full of water moccasins and doomed fish. I am ten.”
In Beard’s essay “In the Current,” these adjacent sentences establish a sense of contrast that continues strongly through the rest of the short piece. Stylistically, the two could not be more different, one brimming with commas and descriptors and the other six letters total. The content of each sentence, meanwhile, juxtaposes without a transition the power, beauty, and danger of the river with the youth, naivete, and simplicity of the young narrator’s perception. These two concepts overlap and interact throughout the essay; the essay’s focus splits between the river trapping three teenagers and the narrator’s childish worries about the nearly drowned older kids’ impression of her. However, much like the earlier sentences I chose do not have a defined transition between them, these two elements of the essay are not divided by sharp or clear transitions. Instead, the narrator’s youth simply modifies the entire essay and provides a lens for the events.