King of Shadows Reflection

I think that Shurin’s book is a good example of the fact that nonfiction writing can still be creative. A lot of people (myself included sometimes) tend to associate nonfiction with dull textbooks or tedious instructional manuals, but nonfiction doesn’t have to be full of vague, abstract words or scientific terms. Shurin’s work illustrates the fact that nonfiction writing can be just as imaginative and as beautiful as fiction or poetry.

One passage that I really enjoyed occurs at the beginning of the book on page 18 when Shurin describes the flower garden he rescues from the July sun. Besides using vivid imagery and concrete details such as the names and colors of individual flowers and the scent of chocolate from the cocoa mulch, Shurin also adds depth to the passage with his use of personification, making the plants seem to actually perform for him and to respond to his care of them. I really enjoyed the passages that show Shurin’s connection with nature and give the reader a glimpse into that experience.

Though some of Shurin’s descriptive passages border on being a bit too flowery and though some of the stream-of-consciousness passages seem a bit disjointed, I enjoyed the overall poetic quality of Shurin’s book. One thing that I would like to take away from my reading of this book is the importance of using literary techniques in nonfiction. Even if I’m not writing a story or a poem, my writing will be more effective if I include literary devices such as metaphor, simile, imagery etc. Though some devices apply more to certain types of writing, Shurin’s book showed me that good writing in every genre shares some of the same techniques, inspiring me to be more conscious of adding literary qualities to my own nonfiction.  

Response for The Writing Life

I thoroughly enjoyed reading Annie Dillard’s book about writing. She described her experience of the writing process with such a depth of detail and striking comparisons, and many of her passages, especially her description of the little sparrow mirroring the patterns of the stunt pilot, were constructed with rich imagery and beautiful diction that they seemed almost poetic.

There were so many insightful bits of wisdom about the writing process throughout the entire book, but the two passages that resonated with me the most were in the fifth chapter. On page 72, Dillard asks the question “Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaningfulness, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so we may feel again their majesty and power?” I really enjoyed the way that this quotation addresses the motivations and goals of both the reader and the writer. It was a good reminder for me to think about some of the reasons why people read and to keep some of those reasons in mind when I write my own fiction.

Another passage that was really helpful to me was the quotation on page 78. Dillard says, “One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better.” That piece of advice is one I would really like to mirror in my own writing process. I often feel that impulse to save an idea, an image, a piece of dialogue etc. for later on in case I need it somewhere else or in case I can’t think of any better ideas later. I really like Dillard’s advice about using everything you have when you have it instead of saving it, trusting that something even better will come along later when you need it. It’s hard to do that, but I know that if I try to follow that pattern, it will help to make my writing stronger.

Writer's Series 2/24 Response

I really enjoyed hearing Matt Bell, Steve Himmer, and Robert Kloss read from their work last week at the writer’s series. All three readings were excellent examples of fiction that is rich with vivid, sensory details and concrete imagery. My favorite part of the night, though, was the question and answer period at the end of the reading. It was so helpful to hear the writers talk about their own experience with the writing process (which fit in really well with this week’s assigned reading) and to hear their suggestions and advice about drafting and revising.

I really enjoyed the writers’ comments about being aware of the sounds in writing. Sound always receives such a big emphasis in discussions about poetry, but it was nice to hear sound being applied to fiction as well since it seems to me like it should be equally important for the words to sound right in fiction as for poetry. It was interesting to hear that some of the writers will even add an extra word or syllable to a sentence just to make sure it sounds right. I’ve done that before myself almost unconsciously if there’s something about the sound of a sentence I’ve written that bothers me, and it was interesting to hear an author talk about the sounds of words as being as important of an element of fiction as character or plot.

Of all of the good suggestions the three writers offered, the one that I think will be the most helpful to me is the goal of finishing one project first before starting another. So often, I get so excited about a new idea that I’ll get side-traced and drop whatever project I’m currently working on. And then, of course, a little while later, a new, exciting idea will come along, and I’ll get side-tracked again. Even though it’s fun to explore new ideas, it also means that I rarely finish a complete draft of a story before starting a new one. Rather than switching projects every time I have a new idea, I should start a notebook to write down ideas to come back to later when I’m ready to write about them. I also like Robert Kloss’s suggestion (I think it was his) to just put any new ideas into the book you’re currently writing while they are still fresh in your mind and then go back later on during the revising stage and take out the ones that aren’t working well.

Overall, a very inspirational evening!

Diction and Tone: Reflection on The Mixquiahula Letters

As I read through The Mixquiahuala Letters, the element that struck me the most was Ana Castillo’s use of diction. Throughout the book, the author chooses words that create a casual, informal tone that gives the effect of a handwritten letter from one friend to another. Though the content and style of the letters is a bit more poetic than the typical “how are you?” type of letters, the letters fit what the reader already knows about Teresa. Because the reader knows that Teresa is a writer, the eloquent yet informal style of the letters seems appropriate to fit her personality.

One of the elements that contributes to the casual mood of Castillo’s book is her use of capitalization. I was distracted at first by her use of the lowercase “i” for the first person pronoun. My eyes are so accustomed to seeing the capital letter that I had to get used to the unusual technique, but the more I thought about her use of capitalization, the more I began to wonder why she had chosen that form. It certainly added to the casual tone of the letters, giving them a similar informality to an email or a text message. I also noticed that she always used a lower case “i” when referring to herself, even when she was starting a sentence, but when the pronoun “you” was at the beginning of a sentence, she capitalized it as usual. It seemed as if, by using the lower case “i”, she might have been trying to take the focus off of herself and put it on Alicia, the subject of her letters.

Whatever the author’s reasons for the lack of capitalization, I find it intriguing that such a small thing as capitalization can contribute to the overall tone of a book. Castillo’s use of capitalization seems appropriate for the mood of a friend writing to another friend. If she had rigidly adhered to standard rules of capitalization and punctuation, the book might have seemed more like a collection of business letters than a communication between two very close friends.

The technique that I think would be the most applicable to my own writing is Castillo’s use of words that mirror the tone she wants to create. The sounds, rhythms, and connotations of words can have a strong influence on the tone of a piece. When I write, I need to make sure that my diction is appropriate to the tone I want to convey so that I don’t unintentionally suggest something else by the words that I choose. Another good exercise I can try is to write something with a more informal tone. I usually tend to write in the third person, but it would be good for me to experiment with doing more writing in the first person with a more casual tone.

The Apple Tree Magnet

Matt looked up from his place at the kitchen table. Kelly was staggering down the stairs, her yellow flip-flops smacking against the wood, her arms circled around a cardboard box.

“Found another one,” she said. She stepped into the kitchen and set the box down with a thud in front of him. All morning long she had been bringing down boxes from the attic, some the size of a shoe box and some so large she looked like an ant struggling to carry a crumb twice its size back to the ant hill. Early that morning, before the sun had even had a chance to rise, she had announced that it was time for spring cleaning. She had suggested they finally tackle the project Matt had been avoiding for years: going through all of his mother’s things up in the attic.

Matt’s mother had kept everything: empty coffee cans, bits of string rolled into a ball, stubs of pencils and pens with dried up ink, even used wrapping paper carefully folded so it could be recycled again for another present. “Never throw away anything that could be useful,” she had always told him. “That’s what you learn when you grow up during the Depression. You never know when something might just come in handy.”

“Most of this stuff can probably go right into the ‘throw away’ pile,” Kelly said, peering into the box. “If we can’t use it for anything and if we can’t get any money for it, there’s no use having it lie around the house gathering dust and taking up space.” She turned and left the kitchen without waiting for a response.

Matt sighed and delved into the contents of the box. Dish towels, aprons, olive green measuring cups with broken handles, and a bag filled with enough magnets to cover the fridge from top to bottom. Matt emptied the bag out onto the table. His mother had collected magnets from every gift shop she had ever gone to. There was the one from the Grand Canyon. Right next to it was the one from Niagara Falls. And there at the bottom of the pile, half buried beneath the Statue of Liberty was the one shaped like an apple tree.

Matt had gotten this magnet himself back in the fall when he was five years old on an apple-picking excursion with his parents. He couldn’t remember the name of the orchard, but the day had been glorious with a sharp blue sky and warm, dry grass so faded it looked like painting that had been left out in the sun for too long. They had gathered a peck of apples, filling the bag with only the Cortlands and Macs. Those ones were the best, his mother had said.

That day, Matt’s father had let him do all of the picking, hoisting Matt up onto his shoulders to reach the higher branches with the reddest, most sun-drenched apples. And then, just like his father, Matt had shined the apple with the front of his plaid shirt, rubbing it in a circle until gleamed. And then there was the crunch of the very first bite, the juice exploding from the crisp white centers, soaking the clean air with the aroma of cinnamon and sunshine and summer rain.

“That stuff’s all just junk, right?” Kelly said.

Matt looked up. He hadn’t even heard her come back into the kitchen. “Yeah,” he said. “You’re right. Most of it’s just junk.”

Once Kelly had left to go back up to the attic for another box, Matt put the aprons and dish towels and broken measuring cups into the junk pile. Then he brought the bag of magnets over to the fridge, placing the memories one by one onto the stainless steel, putting the apple tree magnet in the center, right at eye level where he could see it every day.

Snapshot, Coney Island: August 29th 1929

The world that August morning is almost completely drained of color. My mother’s gray eyes are nearly lost in the deep shadow cast over her forehead by her cloche hat, the one with the white band that matches her gray dress. Gray dress, black hair, white face – everything in somber shades of white and black and gray. My father, standing to her right, still hasn’t forgiven her for leaving the house yesterday morning with a head full of waist-length curls and coming back in the afternoon with her hair bobbed short in the new shingle style.

 Behind my parents, a group gathers near a popcorn stand, some rummaging through pockets and wallets for loose change, others cramming huge fistfuls of the white kernels into their mouths as if it were the last day before a famine. Off to the right, a roller coaster looms, a giant silver spider web, etching sharp shadows onto the ground.

My father isn’t looking straight at the camera. His smile is stiff. Maybe he’s checking to make sure my sister and I are still all right – we’re too busy riding the merry-go-round for the fifteenth time to come pose for the picture. Or maybe he’s still angry with Mother for ruining her hair. Or maybe, somehow, he knows already that the stock market will crash in two short months, knows that he will lose his job at the Ford factory, knows that we will have to leave our two-story house and move to a place outside of town that is little more than a shack. Maybe he already knows that a pot of chicken soup will have to last us for three nights or even more and that my sister and I will have to take turns bringing  food to school because there won’t be enough money for us both to have lunch on the same day. Maybe he knows that every day he’ll have to tell one of us, “I’m sorry, baby, I know you’ll be hungry, but you can’t have lunch today. It’s your sister’s turn.” And maybe he even knows that over and over again he will have to say, with aching eyes and a throat that burns as fiercely as if he had just swallowed acid, the three words he’s come to hate most in the world: “we can’t afford it. We can’t afford it. Oh, please forgive me, but we just can’t afford it!”  

Word Painting: Birds of America Reflection

As I read through Lorrie Moore’s Birds of America, the element of writing that struck me the most strongly was her use of details and imagery. Though her stories, for the most part, involve rather ordinary people in ordinary settings, Moore incorporates details in an unusual, often surprising, way, making her descriptions seem fresh and vivid and adding even more depth and realism to the everyday world she portrays.

Throughout the novel, Moore uses very specific, concrete words that leave strong images in the reader’s mind. Moore’s use of imagery includes descriptions of a baby’s abdomen being “stitched all the way across like a baseball” (240), a “tennis-in-Bermuda tan” (214), and a man’s face being “poppy-seeded with whiskers” (286). With these vivid images, Moore is able to convey a much stronger picture than abstract, general words would allow.

Moore also uses images in a fresh way that makes her comparisons even more striking. In one story, she talks about a “daughter’s frustrated artistic temperament bleeding daily on the carpet of their brains” (188). In another story, she compares Ireland to “a trip into the past of America,” reminiscing about “cow-country car trips through New England of Virginia – in those days before there were interstates, or plastic cups, or a populace depressed by asphalt and french fries” (30). With just a few well-placed, precise words, Moore is able to capture the essences of America’s past and present culture. Her images appeal to the reader’s senses, suggesting the sounds of cars speeding down the interstate and the crinkle of plastic cups, the salty smell and taste of french fries, and the sight of asphalt covering the ground, crowding out the dirt and the grass.  

Moore’s stories have reinforced in my mind the need for concrete imagery and details. Moore’s work has shown me examples of how one specific word can paint a vivid picture in the reader’s mind. Whenever I write, whether I’m writing fiction, nonfiction, or poetry, I need to remember the old adage that “a picture is worth a thousand words.” As Birds of America has shown me, one well-placed image can leave a more lasting impression on the reader’s mind than a thousand abstract words ever could.