Maps To Anywhere

Maps to Anywhere written by Bernard Cooper is full of essays and does not have a clear pattern. After reading this book I researched about what the moral of the book is, the results showed that, "The essays explore the contrast between idealism of a 1950s childhood and the disillusionment of family members struggling with medical issues, sexuality, and disappointment" (CNF, 2012). these topics were not very apparent to me when reading these essays. I noticed him focusing on specific objects, for example the essay obsessing about potatoes; many of these essays seem random and pure fiction.

He also writes about his past memories, mostly sad and melancholy stories at some parts but then he will go off randomly talking about potatoes. I don't see a lot of correlation when reading them back to back, when writing a book I think that the fiction stories should have an obvious topic throughout the stories. His sentence structures are typically longer than usual with multiple commas; this makes it difficult to read through smoothly and articulate the large diction at the same time.

I love the essay "How to Draw" because of the attention getter. When trying to catch an audiences' eye you must have a great first line to your book; we're all humans and we judge quickly. During my fiction packet I worked on editing my first two lines of every story to make them more interesting. Although I typically am not a fan of Cooper's long sentence structures separated with commas and deep breaths but "How to Draw" is unique, "I'm going to demonstrate how to draw, but first let me say that despite several years of a fine arts education, including extensive classes on the history of world art (with an emphasis on contemporary American art), and after learning all I possibly could about the human impulse to make images- from horses on the walls in the caves at Lascaux to the patterns dug in the possess, against every cultivated judgement which came with my master's degree, a fondness for amateur art" (Page 31). This sentence is genius; Cooper establishes his credibility by sharing his education in such an efficient way and then sharing his pleasure for amateur arts.

The last section of essay packet #1 (Total Eclipse By Annie Dillard)

This weeks blog will focus on Annie Dillard's article from Teaching Stone to Talk, Total Eclipse. This specific section of the book focuses on language, diction, and communication. Dillard used pathos and her personal experiences to interest the audience and attach them emotionally to her writing. Many of her sentences where hard to dissect and find the real meaning but I can tell that Dillard intends for her audience to read between the lines, "I turned back to the sun, it was going. The sun was going, and the world was wrong," (Page 91). That line is so interesting to me, you can have the worst day of your life but the sun keeps moving and the billions of other people in the world, they keep living. When you put life into perspective and realize how small you are compared to everything around you, you are able to maintain a more serene mindset: sanity. Dillard's adjectives (language) was absolutely amazing, I could create vivid visuals and pictures in my head of what she was describing. Dillard describes her experience in 1979 as she traveled to experience an eclipse. She described the scenery as her eyes peeled out the window on the long car ride with her husband Gary. 

This writing was impressive, one of the few that i've enjoyed this semester and for an essay I enjoyed the risk that Dillard took to go in such depth with her personal stories to get her voice and adventures out there. The only bad thing I have to say about this is I feel as if she was "too" descriptive for me. She got her point across and then would continue on explaining when it was not necessary. This essay could have been several pages shorter and still the same, if not better quality, by getting to the point and deleting the filler words she used so frequently. By using her personal experiences to communicate with her audience and teach them something through her credibility she proved herself as an author in this article 

Essay Packet 1

The first story in this packet is called Red: an invocation, written by Lia Purpura, and the author focuses mainly on a fox. In a lot of these stories we read in this class the writers have an obsession with a particular person, place, thing, or animal. The whole story revolves around a fox and how, "red for the body of the fox isn't right, though when you look, as you might for long minutes if you've ever seen a fox before, not like this, you'd see, not red exactly, but how the color is a form, recognizable," (page 1).  I think a lot of these essays and fiction stories that we read are metaphors but they are not clear metaphors. Five different people can see this story mean five different things and I'm not the biggest fan of that kind of writing. I want it to make sense to me and this writers fascination with red and how it's not exactly the color of the fox but whenever they see red they think of a fox? It's just strange and not interesting, this story lost my attention quickly.

The second story in the packet was actually not awful, I'm surprised! It is titled Sunday, written by Henry Louis Gates Jr., the short essay is about how, "White people couldn't cook, everybody knew that!" (Page 2). The story gives the audience a great visual of an african american family cooking and eating all Sunday long: enjoying themselves. I was unsure how the author was going to finish this essay but I enjoy the route he took, he decided to end it on a line that was memorable and gave the story was meaning/lesson. "White people can't cook, that's why they need to hire us," (Page 2). I found this line so memorable and interesting, imagine being so young and hearing that from your aunt, it would give me no hope for the future. I can't imagine what those little kids grew up thinking for their future, they were basically expected to be slaves and stereotyped to exceed to be nothing better then that, it's sad.

The short essays were very similar to the fiction packet stories but definitely written better for the most part. I was kind of confused how the first few stories were about two-three pages and then the last story or two was extra long, there seemed to be no pattern to the chaos. But regardless I enjoyed the essay "Sunday" the best because it actually had a moral and a purpose, I was left understanding what the reader was trying to tell me and a lot of times I think that we analyze these stories so much in class that we completely lose the real meaning behind them and we leave thinking the stories mean something totally opposite then what the author was trying to portray.

Fiction Packet # 3

Fiction packet number #3 was assigned for this week. The Singing Fish is originally from a book and I looked at each part as a chapter. The language seemed as if it was translated because it didn't necessarily make sense at each part. The first sentence is a great example of how the text is translated, "One night Girl is so sound asleep sleeping that her sleeping body.." (page 8). That sentence is terribly written and not a good attention getter at all. I'm not sure why we are spending so much time analyzing these boring and poorly written articles, I expected to enjoy at least SOME of the readings we did. The sentences lose you because they are so repetitive and confusing for example, "There are these words there, too - these words - they have got to be words" (page 8). That sentence is incorrect in every way. Why is girl capitalized? is it someones name or are they doing it for emphasis? I was very unimpressed reading this article.

Falling Girl had great diction and visual. The first two paragraphs did a good job at catching my attention, I found it interesting how in the beginning of the article she was 19 and at the end she was an old women. I took this as time flies by without us even noticing, I felt as if the women was not necessarily "falling" but more so a metaphor for "falling". When I started reading this I thought that she was trying to committee suicide but as I read further I noticed it was more of a lifecycle being explained, possibly a midlife crisis? I say this because in the middle of the article she says, "She spitefully noticed that another girl was falling about thirty meters above her. She was decidedly prettier than Marta and she wore a rather classy evening gown" (page 32). She seems upset as she compared herself to other people and it leads me to believe that she is feeling like time passed too quickly and she wishes she wasn't becoming so old.

I don't like these packets, they are not good pieces of writing or something that are enjoyable to read. Maybe i'm the only person who feels that way, but this packet seems as if it is written by a child and I know i'm not the only one who agrees with that fact. I want to be a journalist and was hoping this class would teach me about creative writing or how to be a better writer; quite frankly, I am very disappointed in all of these packets and readings.

Kearney & Bryant

I began by reading Douglas Kearney, The Black Automation, and was confused by the theme. Each poem was titled a different bold text and every time underneath the poems was a different colored lion. The poems use descriptive words that tie along with the color of the lion for each specific poem, for example when writing about the "Blue Lion" She refers to, "a lake is no place for a cat like you. at least a river, or a sea floor of coral tenements. at least a delta" (page 14). Obviously the colors are used to guide the poems into different directions but to still keep them together as a whole. My favorite poem out of this packet was the very last one called, "From Voltron". It is written very unique with large spaces and uneven lines, it caught my attention and suddenly I was enjoying it. The poem seems like it's a last thought or last breath moment, the brain was forgetting about where her legs were or left hand and it ends in a cliff hanger which I wish it didn't, she says, "Our bodies said yes, and our mouths said … …." (page 15). I'm not quite sure what message Kearney was trying to portray to her audience with this being with ending to her whole short book of poems, but it was drastic and memorable.

In Tisa Bryant's ,Unexplained Presence, I felt she was focusing on history through fiction to explain how it has shaped our culture today. I found this story hard to follow because it seemed as if she was mixing fiction and facts all within her story and it was hard to determine what was true and false. I liked the sarcasm that was used in this article, I thought that it made it a little less awful to read. Danny Victoria was my favorite character because of how bold his personality was and how he was filled with spunk, "My name is Danny. They call me Victoria if they like me, and fuckhead if they don't" (page 35). I typically am not interested in this type of writing because it's hard to follow African American culture because I am not informed or very interested. The last line, similar to Douglas Kearney, leaves you with a cliffhanger, "When the credits roll, Violet isn't there at all" (page 38). I do not like when writers leave their stories without a finish because it leaves me feeling unsatisfied with the whole story in general and the only part that I'm left thinking about is the last sentence.

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.

October 16th

During class on Wednesday October 2nd we discussed the fiction packet in depth as a class. It was hard to follow because the fiction packet is a bunch of short poems put together that are very different and confusing. The first poem was about a homosexual couple who were both passing away from a disease sounding similar to AIDS. One of the partners does not want to pass away before the other because losing a loved one is hard and he did not want to deal with his partner's parent's and the parrot. He did not want to be blamed for possibly giving him the disease, he loved his boyfriend and they were both terribly sad. Both men want to die first because being the surviver in a gay relationship is far too difficult in that time era. 

My favorite part of the fiction packet were the Mystery Stories because they were a collaboration of small poems that left you hanging at the end of each. They all have a setting that they create and are very visual for the reader. The first short story about the cat shaking hands with the women was very creative and left the audience believing that it was only a dream or possibly just made up. The short stories in the fiction packet were attention catcher most definitely and created pictures inside of my head. I enjoyed the stories for the most part I just wish they would have been more clear and understanding.