Fiction Packet #2, Juice, & Natalie Goldberg

I'd like to start this blog off with a concern of mine. I find these blogs rather confusing at times, I know that we are suppose to write about what we were assigned the previous week and what we will be discussing in class, but often times I do not understand the readings and want to wait until we further discuss them in class and then reflect on them in my next blog. Sometimes I will find a reading particularly interesting and want to reflect on it in multiple blogs if I find it important enough, the best way to get a point across is repetition. I believe that a blog has to be personalized in a sense in order for it to truly reflect the student, especially since this is a creative writing course, we should have some freedom for creativity and our own thoughts on the readings we like as long as it relates to the class or an article, right? I got a pretty poor grade on my last blog and I don't think it was deserved. I understand that it was not as long or as in depth as my previous writings, but I had had trouble with analyzing the Fiction Packet #2 and did not want to reflect on it until this weeks blog after we discussed it and I understood it.

After reflecting upon Fiction Packet #2 written by three different authors, the first time reading it I did not understand the main purposes of the stories. The first story, Internal, was rather confusing and I could not tell if the man was actually crazy or if he was doing research on real people. I learned from my classmates that I was perhaps correct on my first guess and the man was actually crazy. We came to the conclusion that he most likely had schizophrenia and was not ever seeing patients. The article is written similar to a research paper, it has headings before each paragraph that describes an event or action that took place. At the end of the story the author, Brian Evenson, gives a clue that the intern may be insane himself when he said, "During my sleep, something pushed through the hole. A rolled sheet of paper. I unrolled it. Blank, nothing on either side" (page 70). I believe that this piece of paper was a reference back to all the times he had "written" something down or I think that it may be a reference to his mink, blank. I think that Evenson wrote this as a satire on phycological treatments for people with disorders by the way his scholarly tone was throughout the article.

Juice was an interesting book and was led by Renee Gladman's tone and diction. I feel like the point of the book was not so much a big moral or purpose but more so the style and how you can write a short story off of creativity. Her main topic was Juice and spent most of the book writing about random events that had occurred in her life. She focused a lot on her obsessions: trains, apples, her lover, sleep, dreaming, juice, and the lack of juice in the city. The reason that I think that this book is strange is because of a line that I can't quite understand where she ends the chapter saying, "So far it has been sex and leaves that keep me alive" (Page 16). She's taking about her past life a lot in the book and is very visual with her audience.

I really enjoyed the article written by Natalie Goldberg, she has such a beautiful writing style and made valid points about truly freeing yourself to be able to write. I love the beginning of her article how she starts off with the topic of obsessions because it is relatable to every single person and grabs the audience's attention right away. She suggest to give your obsession a few pages, not to avoid it because, "the act of repressing it seems to repress everything else too, simply because I am spending a lot of energy avoiding something" (page 38). That's such an interesting thought that I haven't given much time to analyze. Natalie Goldberg is an intellectual thinker and I feel as if I can relate to her writing purpose: to inform and create awareness.