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bettsfic · 4 years

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hello! do you have any writing exercises you would recommend to someone who is trying to get back into the habit of writing fiction after not doing it for years? I've wanted to write for a really long time but was always held back by insecurity and fear

sure!

1. beliefs & techniques

read kerouac’s “belief and technique for modern prose.” as you can see, it’s kinda nuts, but the gist is, it’s a list of 30 “rules” or really just vague thoughts kerouac values about writing. try writing your own list of 30 rules/thoughts/ideals you have about writing.

this exercise is important because it begins the practice of metacognition. what will help you grow most as a writer is to write about writing. i recommend handwriting this list and sticking it in an envelope to open in a few months or a year, and see if any of your perspectives have changed.

2. the imperative (choose one, or try both!)

option 1: read jamaica kincaid’s “girl.” consider a way in which you feel you’ve been led astray, someone has failed you, or you’ve felt stifled or constrained in some way. then, try to write your own version of “girl,” by writing a list of commands you’ve been told in the form of a story.

option 2: read lorrie moore’s “how to become a writer.” then, think of something you’re very good at, something that you’ve developed an expertise in. a la “how to become a writer,” write a story in the form of a tutorial. you could also try this as fiction, and do something like “how to get a restraining order from elon musk.” or at least, i hope that would be fictional.

both of these stories use the imperative to build a narrative. by constraining the structure into a list of commands, you’re immediately freed of a lot of creative decision-making you’d otherwise have to do if you were to write, say, third person literary past chronological order. you’re also writing about things you know. i don’t necessarily believe in the “write what you know” adage, but i do think sticking with what you know can be a good place to start.

3. make your own writing exercise toolkit

here’s how you can set up an ongoing writing exercise practice.

first, write a list of 20 things you love. i don’t mean material things, or things you like. i mean things you care about. things you’d die for. things that, when you think about them too long, you start crying or feel like you’re going to explode. they can be concrete, like “a cup of tea on a cold afternoon and a good book” or they can be abstract, like, “courage.” the point is, they all have to be things that excite you or fulfill you. things you can think about or talk about or do for hours. number them 1 through 20.

then, do a bit of searching and find a list of stories, essays, or poems that you haven’t read before (or ones you haven’t read in a long time). they should be short. if you don’t know where to start, check out matt bell’s thread of 365 short stories he read this year. by the way, he also has a monthly writing exercise newsletter! i’m also very fond of the longreads weekly newsletter.

once a week (or however often you want to do this), pick one of the stories/essays/poems and read it. while reading, consider how it’s constructed. what voice is it written in? how does it move through time? what is the inciting incident and rising action? how does it resolve? who are the characters, and how do they grow? find something you admire about it, that you want to “take” for your own writing. maybe you want to try out the structure, like the kerouac exercise, or maybe the narration, like the kincaid/moore exercise. maybe you like the way images are described, or how the scenes fit together. or maybe there’s something you hate about it, and you want to try to do the opposite. or maybe you want to try the thing you hate, to see if you can better understand it. pick something about the piece, and think of it as a prompt, the way i’ve written the prompts above.

then, roll a d20 (you can google “virtual d20″ and it brings up one automatically). correspond the result of the d20 with the list of the 20 things you love most. that will be what you write about. the idea is, it should be easy, since it’s something you love.

for example, let’s say i want to read kiese laymon’s “how to slowly kill yourself and others in america,” which is one of my favorite essays. what i admire most about this essay is its structure. while i read, i would take notes about the way it’s put together, and i would summarize the basic beats and movements. i’d note that the essay focuses on four moments that have a common theme. obviously, i do not want to steal from mr. laymon. i want to learn from him, in the same way as when you eat a good meal, you might ask for the recipe. so, i’d roll my d20, and let’s say i get “courage.” i would then write an essay or short story in which i focus on four scenes or moments of courage.

i’ll do one more example. let’s try “afterglow” by allegra hyde. i think this one is trickier because it’s a fabulist piece, but after reading it, i noticed that it’s a sort of braid with three main elements: the gatorade, the donor show, and the divorce. the gatorade is an unreal element of the story tying together the present conflict (the donor show) and the past conflict (the divorce). so maybe i’d pick 3 things off my list instead of just one, and write a story about my favorite stuffed animal coming to life, with a present conflict involving my best friend (or a character much like him), and a past conflict involving loyalty. or, i could broaden the prompt and simply take the fabulist element of turning into the thing you consume, while writing a story about loyalty.

if you run out of your first list of 20 things, you can make another list of 20 things that make you angry, or 20 things you’re afraid of, or 20 questions you have about yourself and your life. you could even make a list of a hundred things all together, and roll a percentile die.

i hope this helps. please don’t be afraid or insecure. everyone has to start somewhere, and the best place to start is just to play around writing about things that bring you joy.

#writing advice #Anonymous

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batmanisagatewaydrug · 4 years

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2020 reading roundup

feat: every book I read this year!

Favorite fiction:

Witchmark (C.L. Polk)

Kindred (Octavia E. Butler)

Fledgling (Octavia E. Butler)

The Killing Moon (N.K. Jemisin)

The Shadowed Sun (N.K. Jemisin)

Circe (Madeline Miller)

Freshwater (Akwaeke Emezi)

The House in the Cerulean Sea (T.J. Klune)

My Sister, the Serial Killer (Oyinkan Braithwaite)

The Affair of the Mysterious Letter (Alexis Hall)

Gideon the Ninth (Tamsyn Muir)

The Traitor Baru Cormorant (Seth Dickinson)

Further fun/fabulous/fruity fiction:

The Beautiful Ones (Silvia Moreno-Garcia)

Stormsong (C.L. Polk)

The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives In Your Home (Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor)

Rat Queens, vol. 1-4 (Kurtis J. Wiebe)

The Deep (Rivers Solomon)

The Song of Achilles (Madeline Miller)

Gods of Jade and Shadow (Silvia Moreno-Garcia)

Books that left me furious at death for taking Octavia Butler before she could write another sequel and tell us just what the hell Earthseed was getting up to out there in space:

Parable of the Talents (Octavia E. Butler)

Books that gave me a new appreciation for the short story as an art form:

Falling In Love with Hominids (Nalo Hopkinson)

Books that I didn’t get into right away but then they REALLY picked up and by the time the Big Reveal happened I was screaming like a howler monkey and feeling like a fool for not catching on sooner:

The City We Became (N.K. Jemisin)

Novellas that made me cry in record time, which is entirely unsurprising given the author:

To Be Taught, If Fortune (Becky Chambers)

Books that frankly took me by surprise and made me think I should be reading more horror, or at least more Stephen Graham Jones:

The Only Good Indians (Stephen Graham Jones)

Sequels that were good but also made my head hurt because Jesus Christ, oh my god, WHAT is going on:

Harrow the Ninth (Tamsyn Muir)

Books that I LIKED but wanted to like more than I actually did:

The Taste of Marrow (Sarah Gailey)

The Ballad of Black Tom (Victor LaValle)

In the Vanishers’ Palace (Aliette de Bodard)

Upright Women Wanted (Sarah Gailey)

The Devourers (Indra Das)

Sister Mine (Nalo Hopkinson)

Mexican Gothic (Silvia Moreno-Garcia)

Axiom’s End (Lindsay Ellis)

Totally respectable literary fiction that I cannot in good conscience lump into literally any other category:

Real Life (Brandon Taylor)

It was fine and I feel bad for not having anything particularly positive or negative or interesting at all to say about it, but it really and truly was just kind of alright:

My Lady’s Choosing: An Interactive Romance Novel (Kitty Curran and Larissa Zageris)

Favorite nonfiction:

In the Dream House (Carmen Maria Machado)

How We Fight for Our Lives (Saeed Jones)

An Autobiography (Angela Y. Davis)

Feed (Tommy Pico)

Ace: What Aseuxality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex (Angela Chen)

Black Women, Black Love: America’s War on African American Marriage (Dianne M. Stewart)

Heavy: An American Memoir (Kiese Laymon)

Notable nifty nonfictions:

The Dark Fantastic: Race and Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games (Ebony Elizabeth Thomas)

Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? Big Questions from Tiny Mortals About Death (Caitlin Doughty)

So You Want to Talk About Race (Ijeoma Oluo)

A Curious History of Sex (Kate Lister)

Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power (Anna Merlan)

Pleasure in the News: African American Readership and Sexuality in the Black Press (Kim T. Gallon)

Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women White Feminists Forgot (Mikki Kendall)

Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower (Brittney Cooper)

The Tragedy of Heterosexuality (Jane Ward)

Other people’s lives that I happily devoured:

Dear America: Notes From an Undocumented Citizen (Jose Antonio Vargas)

Wow, No Thank You (Samantha Irby)

I’m Afraid of Men (Vivek Shraya)

The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays (Esmé Weijun Wang)

Uncomfortable Labels: My Life as a Gay Autistic Trans Woman (Laura Kate Dale)

Brown Girl Dreaming (Jacqueline Woodson)

When They Call You A Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir (Patrisse Khan-Cullors)

Poetry & personal essays that I wanted to Get but didn’t quite:

Homie (Danez Smith)

Something That May Shock and Discredit You (Daniel M. Lavery)

More Than Organs (Kay Ulanday Barrett)

Junk (Tommy Pico)

Nonfiction that was interesting but also incomprehensible in many places because I don’t have a degree in biology, which I guess is my bad:

Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation (Olivia Judson)

Nonfiction that was interesting but also felt lacking in its analysis, perhaps as an inevitable side effect of trying to publish it quickly enough to stay topical:

Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger (Soraya Chemaly)

Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger (Rebecca Traister)

Sweet graphic novels:

The Prince and the Dressmaker (Jen Wang)

Shadow of the Batgirl (Sarah Kuhn)

Books that are significant for various reasons and good to read but sort of felt like homework:

Stone Butch Blues (Leslie Feinberg)

Are Prisons Obsolete? (Angela Y. Davis)

Books I reread during quarantine even though I am not generally much of a rereader:

Her Body and Other Parties (Carmen Maria Machado)

Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)

A Small Place (Jamaica Kincaid)

Books that weren’t really for me but probably would have rocked my socks if I read them when I was like 14:

Internment (Samira Ahmed)

The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls (Mona Eltahawy)

Periods Gone Public: Taking a Stand for Menstrual Equity (Jennifer Weiss-Wolf)

The Bone Witch (Rin Chupeco)

Pet (Akwaeke Emezi)

#bookblr

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aletdownsquid · 4 years

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Comprehensive Exam Readings

My research “question”:

Many writers of U.S. fiction insert nonfiction documents into their narratives to critique how marginalized citizens are excluded from their rights to equal protection granted by the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. I’m interested in how African American authors and other writers of color have employed these strategies since the end of World War II; for example, the inclusion of real warrants for runaway slaves in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, or passages from U.S. treaties with Native American tribes featured in Watershed by Percival Everrett. In the essay, I will identify, historicize, and examine some of these conventions, and drawing upon Assemblage Theory and Third Space theory, explore how these subversions of the fiction genre might allow authors of color to highlight historical truths, erase some of the distance between literary and political realms, and possibly affect political change.

To be completed by September 2020. (note: Strikethrough is complete / Bold means I intend to cite them in my comprehensive exam)

U.S. Fiction (Post ‘45): Major List

Guiding Questions:

How do works of geopolitical American fiction since the end of WWII explore the ways in which American exceptionalism has subjugated people of color? Specifically, how do these works examine the ways American colonial rule define U.S.–indigenous relations; and how do these works continue to engage with race in America since the Civil Rights movement?

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. Americanah. Anchor, 2014.

Akwaeke, Emezi. Freshwater. Grove, 2018.

Alvarez, Julia. How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents. Algonquin, 2010.

Aswany, Alaa Al. Chicago. Harper, 2008

Baldwin, James. Giovanni’s Room. Vintage, 2013.

Barthleme, Donald. “Concerning the Bodyguard,” Sixty Stories. Penguin, 2003.

Beatty, Paul. The White Boy Shuffle. Picador, 2001.

Chabon, Michael. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. Random House, 2012.

Cisneros, Sandra. The House on Mango Street. Vintage, 1991.

Clemmons, Zinzi. What We Lose. Viking, 2017.

Currie Jr., Ron. God is Dead: Stories. Penguin, 2008.

Diaz, Junot. The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Riverhead, 2006.

Egan, Jennifer. A Visit from the Goon Squad. Anchor, 2010.

Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. Vintage, 1995.

Everett, Percival. Watershed. Beacon Press, 2003.

Gay, Roxane. Ayiti. Grove Press, 2018.

Gibson, William. Pattern Recognition. Berkley, 2005.

Greene, Graham. The Quiet American. Penguin, 1980.

Habila, Helon. Travelers. W.W. Norton & Company, 2019.

Hagedorn, Jessica. Dogeaters. Pantheon, 1990.

Hamid, Mohsin. The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Harvest, 2008.

Herrera, Yuri. Signs Preceding the End of the World. And Other Stories, 2015.

James, Marlon. A Brief History of Seven Killings. Riverhead, 2015.

Jarrar, Randa. A Map of Home. Other Press, 2008.

Jen, Gish. Typical American. Harcourt, 2014.

Johnson, Adam. The Orphan Master’s Son. Random House, 2013.

Johnson, Mat. Pym. Spiegel & Grau, 2011.

Kaulfus, Ken. A Disorder Peculiar to the Country. Harper Perennial, 2006.

Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior. Vintage, 1989.

Kushner, Rachel. The Strange Case of Rachel K. New Directions, 2016.

Lahiri, Jhumpa. Interpreter of Maladies: Stories. Mariner, 1999.

Lapcharoensap, Rattawut. Sightseeing: Stories. Grove Press, 2005.

Le Nam. The Boat: Stories. Vintage, 2009.

Lee, Chang-rae. Native Speaker. Riverhead Books, 1996.

Luiselli, Valeria. The Story of My Teeth. Coffee House Press, 2015.

Mathews, John Joseph. Sundown. University of Oklahoma Press, 1988.

Mbue, Imbolo. Behold the Dreamers. Random House, 2017.

Mengetsu, Dinaw. How to Read the Air. Riverhead, 2011.

Momaday, N. Scott. House Made of Dawn. Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2010.

Ng, Celeste. Everything I Never Told You. Penguin Books, 2015.

Nguyen, Viet Thanh. The Sympathizer. Grove Press, 2015.

Nguyen, Viet Thanh. The Refugees: Stories. Grove Press, 2018.

Okada, John. No-No Boy. University of Washington Press, 2014.

Orange, Tommy. There There. Vintage, 2018.

Otsuka, Julie. The Buddha in the Attic. Anchor, 2012.

Ozeki, Ruth. A Tale for the Time Being. Penguin Books, 2013.

Packer, ZZ. Drinking Coffee Elsewhere: Stories. Riverhead, 2004.

Pena, Daniel. Bang. Arte Publico, 2018.

Reed, Ishmael. Japanese by Spring. Scribner, 1993.

Reed, Ishmael. Mumbo Jumbo. Scribner, 1972.

Rekdal, Paisley. Intimate: An American Family Photo Album. Tupelo Press, 2012.

Salesses, Matthew. The Hundred-Year Flood. Little A, 2015.

Sebald, W.G. The Emigrants. New Directions, 2016.

Shamsie, Kamila. Burnt Shadows. Picador, 2009.

Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony. Penguin Books, 2006.

Washington, Bryan. Lot: Stories. Riverhead, 2019.

Williams, John Alfred. The Man Who Cried I Am. Harry N. Abrams, 2004.

Wright, Richard. Native Son.Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2005.

Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse Five. Dial Press, 1999.

Vonnegut, Kurt. Breakfast of Champions. Dial Press, 1999.

African-American Iconoclast Fictions: Minor List

Guiding Questions:

What methods do African-American fiction writers use to interrogate racial subjugation for people of color in the United States and across the Global South?

Adjei-Brenyah, Nana Kwame. Friday Black. Mariner Books, 2018

Baldwin, James. Go Tell it On the Mountain. Everyman’s Library, 2016.

Baldwin, James. “Sonny’s Blues.” Going to Meet the Man. Vintage, 1995.

Beatty, Paul. The Sellout. Picador, 2016.

Bell, Derrick. “Space Traders”

Brooks, Gwendolyn. Maud Martha. Third World Press, 1992.

Butler, Octavia. Dawn. Aspect, 1997.

Butler, Octavia. Kindred. Beacon Press, 2009.

Cole, Teju. Open City. Random House, 2012.

DuBois, W.E.B., “On Being Crazy.”

Dumas, Henry. Goodbye Sweetwater.

Ellis, Trey. Platitudes. Vintage, 1988.

Everett, Percival. Erasure. Graywolf Press, 2001.

Gaines, Ernest J. A Lesson Before Dying. Knopf, 1993.

Hannaham, James. Delicious Foods. Back Bay Books, 2016.

Hopkinson, Nalo. Falling in Love with Hominids: Stories. Tachyon Publications, 2015.

Hopkinson, Nalo. Midnight Robber. Grand Central Publishing, 2000.

Hughes, Langston. “One Friday Morning”

Hughes, Langston. “Salvation.”

Hurston, Zora Neale. “Sweat”

James, Marlon. The Book of Night Women. Riverhead, 2010.

Jones, Edward P. The Known World. Amistad, 2006.

Keene, John. Counternarratives: Stories and Novella. New Directions, 2015.

Kincaid, Jamaica. “Girl”

Larsen, Nella. The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: Passing, Quicksand and The Stories. Anchor, 2001.

Laymon, Kiese. Long Division. Agate Bolden, 2013.

Mackey, Nathaniel. Late Arcade. New Directions, 2017.

MacPherson, James Alan. Hue and Cry: Short Stories. Harper Collins, 1969.

McFarland, Jeni. The House of Deep Water. Putnam, 2020.

Miller, Keith D., Joyce Lausch and Kevin Everod Quashie. New Bones: Contemporary Black Writers in America. Prentice Hall, 2001.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. Vintage, 2004.

Morrison, Toni. Jazz. Vintage, 2004.

Morrison, Toni. Paradise. Vintage, 2004.

Reed, Ishmael. Flight to Canada. Penguin, 1976.

Ross, Fran. Oreo. New Directions, 2015.

Scott, Rion Amilcar. The World Doesn’t Require You: Stories. Liverlight, 2018.

Senna, Danzy. New People. Riverhead, 2017.

Shuyler, George. Black No More. Penguin Classics, 2018.

Thompson-Spires, Nafissa. Heads of Colored People: Stories. 37 Ink, 2018.

Toomer, Jean. Cane. W.W. Norton & Company, 1988.

Toure. The Portable Promise Land. Back Bay Books, 2003.

Whitehead, Colson. Sag Harbor. Anchor, 2010.

Whitehead, Colson. The Underground Railroad. Doubleday, 2016.

Widerman, John Edgar. American Histories: Stories. Scribner, 2018.

Wideman, John Edgar. Phildelphia Fire. Vintage, 1991

Wideman, John Edgar. Fanon. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2008.

Theory: Assemblage & Third Space Theory

Guiding Questions:

Can fiction be used as a tool to engender a new sense of belonging while rejecting a stable state of being? If so, how can this framework of assemblage be applied in fiction to highlight the ways local identities intersect with shared global perspectives? Can an assemblage approach to fiction encourage accountability for civil rights without state sanctioned legal status?

Agamben, G., 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by D. Heller-Roazen. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

Anzaldua, Gloria. Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Aunt Lute Books, 2012.

Anzaldua, Gloria. Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality (Latin America Otherwise). Duke University Press Books, 2015.

Appiah, Kwame Anthony. “The Case for Contamination." The New York Times Jan. 2006. 5 Nov. 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/01/magazine/01cosmopolitan.html

Bakshi, Sandeep, Jivraj Suhraiya and Silvia Posocco. Decolonizing Sexualities: Transnational Perspectives, Critical Interventions. Counterpress, 2016.

Belletto, Steven and Joseph Keith. Neocolonial Fictions of the Global Cold War, University of Iowa Press, 2019.

Bhabha, Homi K. Nation and Narration. Routledge, 1990.

Bruynell, Kevin. Third Space of Sovereignty. University Of Minnesota Press, 2007.

DeLanda, Manuel. Assemblage Theory. Edinburgh University Press, 2016.

DeLanda, Manuel. A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. Continuum, 2006.

Dubey, Madhu. Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism. University of Chicago Press, 2003.

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Grove Press, 2005.

Gates, Henry Louis. The Signifying Monkey. Oxford University Press, 1988.

Gwaltney, John Langston. Drylongso: A Self-Portrait of Black America. The New Press, 1993.

Goyal, Yogita. The Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature. Cambridge University Press, 2017.

Goyal, Yogita. Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature. Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Goyal, Yogita. Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery. NYU Press, 2019.

Knadler, Stephen. Remapping Citizenship and the Nation in African Literature. Routledge, 2010.

Lorde, Audre. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name: A Biomythology. The Crossing Press, 1982.

Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider. The Crossing Press, 1984.

Machado, Carmen Maria. In the Dream House: A Memoir. Graywolf, 2019.

Madsen, Deborah L. Beyond Borders: American Literature and Post-Colonial Theory. Pluto Press, 2008.

Munoz, Jose Estaban, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. University of Minnesota, 1999.

Okker, Patricia. Transnationalism and American Serial Fiction. Routledge, 2012.

Omi, Michael and Howard Winant. Racial Formation in the United States from the 1960s to the 1990s. Routledge, 1994.

Puar, Jasbir. “I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess: Becoming intersectional in Assemblage Theory.” philoSOPHIA, vol. 2, no. 1, 2012, pp. 49-66.

Puar, Jasbir. The Right to Maim. Duke University Press, 2017.

Puar, Jasbir. Terrorist Assemblages. Duke University Press Books, 2007.

Rosen, Jeremy. “Literary Fiction and the Genres of Genre Fiction.” Post45, Aug. 2018. http://post45.research.yale.edu/2018/08/literary-fiction-and-the-genres-of-genre-fiction/

Rutherford, Johnathan. "The Third Space Interview with Homi Bhabha." Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, Lawrence and Wishart, 1990, pp. 207-221.

Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. Vintage, 1994.

Scott, James C. Weapons of the Weak. Yale University Press, 1987.

Shackleton, Mark. Diasporic Literature and Theory – Where Now? Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008.

Shamsie, Kamila. “The Storytellers of the Empire.” Guernica, Feb. 2012. <http://www.guernicamag.com/features/3458/shamsie…>

Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake On Blackness and Being. Duke University Press. 2016

Shklovsky, Viktor. “Art, as a Device.”

Soja, Edward. Thirdspaces: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other-Real-and-Imagined Places. Blackwell Publishers, 1996.

#compslist #Readings #CurrentlyReading

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essayeditorblr-blog · 7 years

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a-ramblinrose · 2 months

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A Weekly Reading Journal 8.4.24

Not the best run of writing these weekly lately. I suppose it was a bit unfun to write them when I was slumping so hard.

Currently Reading:

Fiction:

Spindle's End by Robin McKinley [RR]

Harrowing the Dragon by Patricia A. McKillip

Nonfiction:

Bad Girls Throughout History by Ann Shen

The Best American Essays 1995 edited by Jamaica Kincaid

Poetry:

The Collected Poems 1912-1944 by H.D.

The Shadow of Sirius by W.S. Merwin [RR]

A Phone Call To The Future by Mary Jo Salter

Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light by Joy Harjo

Just Finished:

The Tea Dragon Tapestry by K. O'Neill ★★★★★

I’m Afraid You’ve Got Dragons by Peter S. Beagle ★★★★

The Lumberjack’s Dove by GennaRose Nethercott ★★★★

Gideon The Ninth by Tamsyn Muir ★★★★★

The Mysterious Study of Doctor Sex by Tamsyn Muir ★★★ [K]

Heartstopper Vol. 4 by Alice Oseman ★★★★

Heartstopper Vol. 5 by Alice Oseman ★★★★

DNFs/Try Again Later:

Word of Mouth by Catherine Bowman (full dnf this was the 3rd time I tired reading this poetry collection)

General Reading Thoughts:

The slump appears to be over thank the bookish powers that be!!! Tons of poetry in progress which is always a delight and a spate of very good reads have me feeling more myself. Let August be kind to this bookworm!

Happy Reading!!!

Current Reading Tag || General Original Content || 2024 Reading Page

#reading journal #booklr #current reading #2024 reading #not out of void but out of chaos

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thinklio · 3 years

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English 207 Essay #1 Topics Choose two or more of the readings that we’ve covere

English 207 Essay #1 Topics Choose two or more of the readings that we’ve covered so far to write about in your essay. Naguib Mahfouz’s “Half a Day” (short story) Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” (stort story) Langston Hughes’ “Salvation” (excerpt from his memoir) Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (play) Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” and “Birches” (poems) Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess”…

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deestielluvdeivycol · 3 years

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English 207 Essay #1 Topics Choose two or more of the readings that we’ve covere

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bettsfic · 4 years

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This is kinda random but I just felt compelled to ask since I saw this idea floating about. Someone said that not all transformative works are fanfiction (a distinction I can get behind) but then explicitly went on to say characters railing each other is like the distinctive factor which I mean.... Come on. But marinating on the idea I couldn't really pinpoint a distinct qualifier to separate it (medium aside).

So I guess my question is, are all narrative transformative works fanfiction and if not, what is the line between them? And what would you call the "others".

apologies for sitting on this so long. it took me a long time to think about. it’s something i’ve been dwelling on since i first started writing fic, and i think i only now can answer it.

this really comes down to being an issue of genre, and the purpose and function of genre as a craft concept rather than a marketing tool. very often a work’s paratext primes us for what we’re about to engage with. paratext is all the information around a given work. for example, the cover of a book gives you an impression of what’s inside the book. finding a book in the general fiction section of a book store gives you a different impression of a text than what you would find in the cookbook aisle. all of these paratextual details set your expectations for what you’re about to read.

so what happens when you have no paratext? how would you know what genre to place something into? you’d have to use the text itself. but sometimes, the text is not so clear.

for example, one of the first pieces i teach every semester is Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl.” and the first discussion question i ask is, “what genre is this?” (it’s a short piece, and i recommend taking a look at it if you haven’t read it before.)

a lot of writers don’t like the idea of genre because they find it confining, and obviously i agree. art isn’t meant to be boxed in, and if a piece can securely fit anywhere, it probably isn’t very good or interesting.

however, if we consider genre as a lens instead of a box, we get a far more useful tool for inspecting work.

would you read “Girl” differently if i had told you before you read it that it was a poem? perhaps you would have entered into it with all your existing understanding of poetry. perhaps you would have paid more attention to the way it’s been laid out on the page, and the punctuation, and the order of the words. maybe you would have noticed it doesn’t look like the common understanding of a poem, so maybe you would have wondered, is it really a poem?

and if i told you it was a fictional story? maybe you would have entered into it with your understanding of a story. you would have paid attention to the characters and conflict. but, like a poem, it doesn’t exactly fit our common understanding of a story, either. there’s no inciting incident or rising action or climax. we’re not in a concrete time or space. and maybe you would have wondered, is it really a story?

“Girl” is actually a lyric essay. how would you have read it if you knew that? if you had never read a lyric essay, or didn’t know what a lyric essay was, this piece would then define that genre for you, and you would read future lyric essays thinking back to “Girl” and framing your impression from there.

this, of course, begs the question: what happens to our reading experience when we enter into works with an existing impression of what they are, and therefore what they should be?

we all engage with art bringing with us all our existing perspectives and preferences, and those shape our perspective of quality. some people believe that all melodrama is bad. by “melodrama” i mean, conflicts and emotional reactions that are over the top. however there are many genres that employ melodrama as a function of that genre. if you watched a soap opera without melodrama, for example, you’d think it was a pretty shitty soap opera.

this brings me to the idea of genre not as a categorizing device, but a means of affordance and constraint. melodrama is an affordance of a soap opera. soap operas are allowed to be melodramatic. length, by contrast, is a constraint of a soap opera. a soap opera is not allowed to be over X minutes long.

when we bring affordance/constraints to fanfiction, i think we can all agree that explicit sexual content is an affordance. it’s not the definition of fanfic, but it is something that is both common and in some cases expected. when we talk about fanfiction as a genre of idealizing and indulgence, we’re talking about the affordances of fanfic. yes, many fics concern themselves with emotional catharsis, but not all of them. many fics contain shipping, but not all of them. many fics employ tropes, but not all of them. many fics are written by hobbyist writers working in fan communities, but not all of them. and yet all of these things are so common that when we enter into a fic, they’re expected. they’re allowed. but they are not necessary in order for a piece of writing to exist in the genre of fic.

conversely, fanfic has very few constraints. in fact this is the question that took me so long to answer this ask. and i realized, the single constraint i could think of is that fanfiction always knows and acknowledges (in the paratext) that it is fanfiction.

if you file off the serial numbers? not fanfiction. if you write a creative response to an existing canon but then publish it without acknowledgement of that canon? also not fanfiction. if you get inspiration from another work and acknowledge or cite that work somewhere in the text, but are not actively transforming the canon text or naming it as fanfiction? not fanfiction.

these types of works may have the community spirit of fanfiction, and the work they do may overlap with fanfiction, and they may begin as fanfiction, but they are not and cannot be fanfiction.

when you write fanfiction, you always know it is fanfiction, because fanfiction is something that happens with intention. you might start writing a story that you intend to be fantasy but after 40k you go “oh damn this is actually horror.” but you can never get 40k into a story and go “oh fuck this is accidentally fanfic.” (although you may think, “this shares many affordances of fanfiction” which, go you.)

so finally, after actual years of thinking about this, i have a definition of the genre of fanfiction:

to write fanfiction is to openly and intentionally respond to an existing text, and to acknowledge the original source material in the paratext of the work.

#fanfiction #meta #writing advice #n-talia-a #genre

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endesuch · 3 years

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English 207 Essay #1 Topics Choose two or more of the readings that we’ve covere

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flamintango · 3 years

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Taming the Shrew, Gaming the Rules: Domestic Space as a Site of Transgressional Mother-Daughter Homosociality in Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl”

Jamaica Kincaid’s "Girl" (1978) portrays the painstaking confines of domestic space for women in the Caribbeans in a tersely crafted short story. Despite the impression, I would argue, the motherly narrator’s unending tirade signifies less a ruthless drill of patriarchal disciplines, but more an interwoven fabric of mother-daughter bond and female coalition. The idea of girlhood and mother-daughter homosociality of Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” has been the subject of widespread scholarly intrigue for decades. Adopting the approach of rhetorical features analysis, K. Jayasree’s “Linguistic-Literary Camouflage in Jamaica Kincaid’s ‘Girl’” anchors its critical emphasis on the rebellious potential of the female homosocial subtext in the story. The essay maintains that “Girl” tactically utilizes the common textual format (i.e. the “oral tradition”) in which patriarchal values effectively disseminates in order to issue the “call to arms” (82) that likewise instills transgressive ideas into girls.

“Wash the white clothes on Monday and put them on the stone heap; wash the color clothes on Tuesday and put them on the clothesline to dry; don’t walk bare-head in the hot sun; cook pumpkin fritters in very hot sweet oil; . . . this is how to sew on a button; this is how to make a buttonhole for the button you have just sewed on.” (320, italics added)

As the extract above illustrates, the lines roll rhythmically with a string of alliterations and unrelenting imperatives and structural repetitions, rendering the tone almost sermonic. The incessant use of colons in lieu of sentence-ending punctuations (e.g. periods) or meta-language represents the disciplining tone of the narrator who assumes a mother’s voice in a relentless mantra penetrating into the daughter’s head. “Girl”’s writing falls in line with the oral tradition not only for its conversational nature, speaking exclusively to the girl with the second-person “you,” but also for its quick-paced, fragmented sputter of sentences inflected in such a way that Rabea and Almahameed would call it “poetic” and “genre crossing” (157).

Denise De Caires Narain’s “Naming Same-Sex Desire in Caribbean Women's Texts: Toward a Creolizing Hermeneutics” aims to tap into the queer undertow of familial female homociality in Kincaid’s text . It laments the uncontested heterosexual norms in Caribbean literarures by female writers in the 1980s, despite their continuous effort to challenge the conservative male canon. In its analysis of Lucy and The Autobiography of My Mother, on the one hand, the essay recognizes that Kincaid’s depiction of heterosexual sex as detrimental to women, and merely a tool for male to assert virility and dominance. On the other hand, it positions the mother-daughter tie prevalent in Kincaid’s theming as a “strategically defensive one” against men that “orbits around the heteronornmative,” and conceptualizes it in the form of mother’s control over “the girl-child’s life script” (204). The homosocial bond between mother and daughter equally courses through the thematic vein of “Girl” for its vehement, moralizing narrative. In the short story, the mother effectively micromanages her daughter’s existence down to the hairsplitting details of her day-to-day with sermonic mantras that seek to indoctrinate patriarchal, lady-like virtues into the girl at first glance. The girl’s day is arranged for her from “Monday” through “Sunday”, and her life is held to miscellaneous household duties, interpersonal interactions, and female etiquettes: “wash” the white and colored clothes on Mondays and Tuesdays; “cook” the pumpkin fritters; “walk like a lady” to reject “a slut that you’re bent on becoming”; never sing benna in “Sunday schools”; never speak to “wharf-rat boys” (Kincaid 320).

On the subject of the postcolonial context in Kincaid’s work, De Caires Narain notes that Kincaid exhibits a literary tendency to employ little to no Caribbean creole in her writing, which is executed mostly in standard English. Despite the linguistic choice, Kincaid still successfully communicates Caribbean specificity and postcoloniality through subtle sprinklage of cultural references. For instance, “benna” is a type of Antiguan folk song that largely features raunchy rumors in its lyrics, helpful in spreading folk news across the streets. In “Girl,” meanwhile, it is the same song that the mother cautioned the daughter against singing in the Christian Sunday school that symbolizes colonial heritage. The slut shaming of the female body that the mother casts derogatively onto the daughter here ties thematically with the baudy benna prohibited in the imported religion—the remains of colonial heritage from the West and the symbol of civility in public.

From an alternative angle on postcolonial discussions, Betty Joseph signals an invitation to problematize the subject from the globalization perspective in her essay, “Gendering Time in Globalization: The Belatedness of the Other Woman and Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy.” Joseph’s grounds the analysis on the notion of time-lag in cultural exchange due to “crony capitalism” (67), a geopolitical framework under which the social-cultural and economic capital is distributed in inequity across the globe due to geopolitical limitations. The essay admonishes Euroamerican feminist criticisms to diverge from their traditional view that evinces an “implicit discourse of progress” (69) of culturally diverse female subjects towards Western apotheosis.

Likewise, the Westerncentric feminist activism inspired attempt to read the mother as an idle mouthpiece and her preaches as patriarchal propaganda fails to account for the transgressive hints that the mothers slips into her teachings. Positioning the narrator as a mere fathering figurehead who indefatigably preaches female behavioral decorums is a tempting reading strategy. It may easily interpret the mother’s disciplining as instances of male oppression. Nonetheless, the expedient reading ignores the male-excluding feminine specificity that charged the story. It also disregards the transgenerational female alliance that is rendered accessible by the gendered lived experience produced in the domestic context, and relayed from mother to daughter. Any prominent masculine role is barely present in the story, barring a metonymic "father’s khaki shirt" that the girl is commanded to iron, the nameless "wharf-rat boys" from whom the girl is distanced, and the "men" to whom the mother alerts the girl about bullying (320-321). By dissolving male figures into the background, “Girl” places a major feminine accent on the inherited experience of womanhood yet to be shared across generations. For example, she holds the daughter to nurturing maternity by teaching her how to “make good medicine for a cold.” Even so, immediately in the next line, she effectively backpedals that didactic gospel by instructing her how to make “good medicine” to “throw away a child” (321), an act that stands in diametrical opposition not only to traditional Christian values, but also to conservative womanly virtues imbuing the ethos behind “Girl.”

The multidimensional tensions between the lines unfold with such linguistic, narrative, and social-realistic density, it renders the short story a suffocating yet complex depiction of Caribbean womanhood. The narrator’s character deepens and expands in multiple directions in a nonlinear fashion: she represents the seasoned woman in a conservative, male-dominant society; she embodies the voice that she may have been attuned to throughout her girlhood; she manifests protective maternity for the sake of the household that she has been maintaining, but for the girl against male aggression, to which she imparts motherly love and attendance. “Girl” is a woman’s bildungsroman in contemporary Antigua. It is a tender tale of a cross-generational sisterhood.

Works Cited

De Caires Narain, Denise. "Naming Same-Sex Desire in Caribbean Women's Texts: Toward a Creolizing Hermeneutics." Contemporary Women's Writing, vol. 6, no. 3, 2012, pp. 194-212, MLA International Bibliography, doi:10.1093/cww/vps027.

Joseph, Betty. "Gendering Time in Globalization: The Belatedness of the Other Woman and Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy." Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, vol. 21, no. 1, 2002, pp. 67-83, MLA International Bibliography, doi:10.2307/4149216.

Jayasree, K. "Linguistic-Literary Camouflage in Jamaica Kincaid's "Girl"." IUP Journal of English Studies, vol. 13, no. 2, 2018, pp. 81-87, Humanities International Complete.

Kincaid Jamaica, “Girl.” The Story and its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction. 6th Ed. Ed. Charters, Ann. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003. 320-321. Print.

Rabea, Reem Ahmad and Nusaiba Adel Almahameed. "Genre Crossing in Jamaica Kincaid's 'Girl': From Short Fiction to Poetry." Advances in Language and Literary Studies, vol. 9, no. 3, 2018, pp. 157-165, ERIC, http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,shib&db=eric&AN=EJ1185919&lang=zh-tw&site=ehost-live&custid=s5650286.

#imma free the drive but need somewhere to dump mah English homework don't mind me

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travelinginliteratureadriblog · 6 years

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Essay #2: La casa de Charlie

When I was a little kid my parents used to work a lot. So, most of my childhood I spent it with my grandparents, in their house. I used to spend there the whole day. After coffee hour, which was religiously at 3pm, my grandparents used to take a nap. When my grandfather woke up he would take me to buy candy to a place called “la casa de Charlie”.It was like a magic place for me. He would let me take all the candy I wanted. I remember taking ice cream, gum, lollipops all the same day. The rush and the joy I felt were amazing. Now that I think of that time I realize how happy I was and how I thought that place would stay there forever. I will go back in time and take you with me as I recall the journey I used to take with ‘abuelo Miillo’, as I used to called my grandpa, when I was a little girl.

We go out the house and he takes me by the hand making me feel the safest girl on earth. We start walking and as a kid I remember asking all sorts of questions and after every answer I used to ask “but, why?” like a million times. And a million times he would answer each one of the questions. The sidewalk was really bumpy and messed up so I remember we were careful and watched our steps. We used to count the cars that passed on our way there and as we heard the sounds of cars approaching we would predict what color was the car going to be. It was so much fun, but the memory feels so vague. On our way to “la casa de Charlie” there was a pond and we use to stop there just to watch the water. He would joke around saying he was going to throw me to the water and I screamed so hard (wishing he would do it but knowing he wasn’t).

My grandfather was a man with character. He was serious but so sweet at the same time. He had a tough life, he was abandoned by his parents because they didn’t have enough money for all the children. Due to this he was left with his grandmother who raised him. When he was 18 years old he was called into war and decided to join the army. He was there a couple of years, but he hated it. So, he came back to PR, and met my grandmother. They got married and he opened a colmado just were “la casa de Charlie” was. That went well for some time but the he had to sell it and it became “la casa de Charlie”.

La casa de Charlie was a red house with two doors at the front. There were always two men sitting down at front of the place drinking beer and playing domino. They seemed to like a lot the place too. After I grew up I realized the focus of the store was never the candy. They actually had almost everything you would need at home: bread, milk, canned food, beverages, ham, cheese, etc. But as a kid I seemed to focus only on the candy. There was candy of all sorts: ice cream, cake, caramels, chiclets, lollipops, all you can imagine. My favorite was an ice cream I have never found again. My grandpa used to buy some candy also for my grandma and then he wouldn’t let me eat any of until we got home.

Trying to think about what was so special about the place I can’t seem to find physical reasons. The place was not appealing to see, it was plain, plain red. What was special was the experience I had, the journey to get there, the walk, the conversations, feeling safe, feeling loved and without a single worry. I would give so much to go back in time and take a walk with my grandfather I would say so many things I didn’t know how to express before. It doesn’t seem like that many years has passed by, but my grandfather left the world when I was 13. After he died my grandmother wanted to take us to la casa de Charlie but it just wasn’t the same.

Now, you may wonder…who is Charlie. Well as a kid I was always confused I never knew if Charlie was a man or a woman and I never asked. Now that I think back it seemed more of a woman I guessed I was a little confused by the way she dressed. She was always very serious I think I never saw her smile. I would give her the candy and I remember she used a calculator to let my grandfather know how much he owed for the candy.

One day as I looked to her fingers I noticed she was missing one of them. As a kid, innocent and ignorant, I asked her why and my grandfather yelled at me. I never asked again and till today I don’t know what happened to her. It wasn’t so long ago that my father told me Charlie closed the business and went to the US. Since my grandmother had also died I didn’t have a reason to go to the place or near. It wasn’t until past month that I visited the place.

There was nothing left of “la casa de Charlie”. Now it’s a house where a family lives and close by there is a food place where they sell typical Puerto Rican food. I decided to take the walk I used to take with my grandpa and nothing was the same either. The pond dried, the vegetation decreased significantly, I no longer felt safe, I felt empty, and alone. I wished I would have appreciate it more when I could. Now I know that in simple things lie the biggest of joys. I know I will never feel the same way, the place is not the same and neither am I. This will sound weird, but I am glad I don’t have pictures of the place. It forces me to remember every detail, even things I never thought I would be able to remember.

Thinking of the reasons why I loved so much going to that place my mind went all the way to the discussion of the text “A small place” from Jamaica Kincaid. I realized that when we are kids we have the spirit of a tourist. One example of the way I felt is reflected in this quote: “You emerge from customs into the hot clean air: immediately you feel cleansed, immediately you feel blessed (which is to say special); you feel free”. Although going to la casa de Charlie became part of my weekly routine I always saw it with a tourist eye. By this I mean I always saw it with excitement and amazement. As a kid, I could never see bad characteristics about the place I always focused on the good. “A person at home at your own skin” but as Jamaica expresses with this quote I might have felt this way because I was treated as extraordinary.

My grandfather made sure, I felt special so that is what made the place amazing for me. For my grandfather, probably, the place had nothing special about it. Thinking on the readings we have discussed in class I remember the text “A small place” by Jamaica Kincaid. Reading the text, I noticed that Charlie represents the citizens of Antigua and I am the tourist that enjoys too much that doesn’t realize the bad characteristics of the place. Charlie was at the store every single day so as Jamaica said in the text “they are too poor to escape the reality of their lives; and they are too poor to live properly in the place where they live” he was a native to that place. He could never see it with the eyes of a tourist as I saw it. For me going to her store was an escape for her it was the day to day. Maybe he was serious all the time because she wished to have the “ability to turn their own banality and boredom into a source of pleasure for yourself” a Jamaica said. Going back to la casa de Charlie and seeing it wasn’t there anymore made me nostalgic, that place I saw with tourist eyes every time I went had disappeared and its never coming back.

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