Readings for 02/25

ZZ Packer's Brownies was a really great story that I enjoyed reading.  The way the author slowly brought the awareness to race relations was done really well in my opinion.  I appreciated how it was brought out in dialogue through the characters, and not spoken on from the author's point of view or own words as an omnipresent narrator.  The dialogue is another extremely strong aspect of the story that I enjoyed very much.  The back and forth between the girls gave each character a true feeling of their own identity and made them feel like a very important, needed piece to the story's puzzle.  What I especially like is the mild-mannered nature of the narrator, so eloquently referred to as Snot by the other characters.  She is the perfect observer of the heightened characters around her and the perfect offsetting balance as well.  Like in the scene where they sang songs to cheer up one of their mothers who was going through marital problems.  It was the narrator who urged the mother not to leave and for the other Brownie troops to suck it up and sing even though they didn't like the songs they were taught.  It is a very good dynamic between the characters that gives the story balance and especially account for when the girls call out the other troop in the bathroom, unaware of their handicaps and the situation going on. I feel that the story had lots of strong elements that would be really good for us aspiring writers to learn from and incorporate into our own works.  To touch on it again, the dialogue is one of the strongest aspects of this piece in my opinion.  Being able to construct plot and scene through dialogue is a masterful trait, one I aim to hone and refine. Showing and not telling your readers could very well be the difference maker in how well your works of written art are received and understood. 

300 Words Creative for 02/25/18

The more skeptical, realist type of people don’t believe in things like I’m about to tell you, but I do.  They’d have you believe that my grandma’s death came from having to do really hard work while growing up and not being able to afford top quality medical care while being young.  Others, who are more open minded to odd happenings, like me, say that the following story could have had something to do with it.

Recalling from memory, this is what my grandmother told me.  When she was in her early twenties, she worked as a nurse at the West Georgia Medical Center hospital.  A lady who she didn’t know, but who apparently knew her, approached her in the lobby.  She talked to my grandmother for a bit and seemed to have something she wished to give to her clenched in her fist.  When my grandmother opened her hand to receive the trinket, the odd lady placed a quarter in her palm.  The moment this quarter touched my grandmother’s skin, a sharp, unbearable pain shot throughout her arm.  She immediately dropped the coin, and the pain subsided.  After looking up from examining her hand, the lady was gone.  Could the pain my grandmother felt have been a curse, or hex if you will, being placed upon her?

In a way, I believe both the first and second stories.  Whichever one you choose to believe, the grim reality is still the same.  My grandmother, for reasons beyond her control, unfortunately fell victim to a barrage of illnesses such as heart problems, diabetes, lupus, kidney failure, etc.

Once the hospital called that Saturday morning, I knew that instant what had been said to my mother by seeing the tears in her eyes.  When she told me, to my surprise, I did not cry.  I walked to my bedroom and began getting ready to go to my paternal grandmother’s house so that my mom could go to Atlanta to see about things with my grandmother’s passing.  I didn’t cry about it for years in fact.  Looking back, how clearly I can see the shock and denial inhabiting my mind over the matter. 

300 Words Creative for 02/18/18

Finesse

Readings For 02/18/18

Joyce Carol Oates Where Are You Going

300 Words Creative for 02/11/18

I hate giving to charity.  It’s even worse at the end of the year.  The loud bells ringing at every store entrance every holiday season almost ruins the whole season for me, it’s so annoying.  These people, campaigning for freeloaders, expect me to gladly hand over my hard earned money.  How laughable.  They should all work harder at getting a job.  That’s what my Old Man would say if he were still here kicking it with us.  That’s what he always said about beggars, the homeless, and any type of freeloading trash.

Have you ever noticed that needy people have a certain smell?  And I’m not talking so much about their literal, physical smell, though you can and will often quickly tell that they’re coming or have just left an area by their shouting aroma.  You can instantly tell that they aren’t wearing what we do on the Upper Eastside is all I’m saying.  Don’t judge me here; I’m just the messenger saying what’s on all of our minds.  But back to my point, I guess what I’m talking about is more so their energy.  I’m talking about how their energy reeks with desperation.  I’m talking about how their eyes are all full of dependence and squander, and self righteous entitlement when I tell them to piss off and go do some real work.  The nerve of them, I mean really.  How pathetic. 

If freeloaders put half as much energy and time into working as they did into begging, then they wouldn’t be in the position of needing to beg in the first place.  Good luck ever getting one of those hippies to ever see that though.  They want to be the victims, they want you to feel sorry for them so then that way they aren’t judged when they spend their time not working and freeloading off your dime and nickel every chance they get.  Feed the poor, don’t make me laugh.  That cup of entitlement looks pretty full from where I’m sitting.  

Readings for 02/11/18

I enjoyed reading Denis Johnson’s “Emergency” and “Car Crash While Hitchhiking.”  The two stories were very attention grabbing and not what I expected when I began both stories.  The character of Georgie in “Emergency” is especially uncharacteristic of a protagonist.  He is a klutz and endangerment to patients by not following protocol and procedure with things, as evidence when he pulled the knife out of the one man’s head right before everyone was prepping to do surgery to remove it.  Georgie is oblivious to his potential endangerment too, which makes him even more dangerous in my opinion.  He is a thief, which is shown when he steals the pills for him and the narrator to get high on.  He is an addict, which is also shown when he steals the pills and other things are mentioned in the story.  The way the narrator sums up the story though is very interesting in that he portrays a big difference between Georgie and himself.  He then goes on to start talking about picking up Hardee and taking him to Canada to escape being AWOL, and calling back to the baby rabbits, the last line, which was Georgie saying, “I save lives,” make you reflect back to him also pulling the knife out of the man’s head to thankfully no harm and realize that somehow this screwball really does save lives.  We get another unlikely protagonist in “Car Crash While Hitchhiking,” where the narrator is a wondering hitchhiker who gets picked up by a family on a stormy night.  He talks about sensing that something bad was going to happen before it did, and sure enough they all get in a horrible car accident.  The hitchhiker is unharmed, of course, and so is the baby next to him.  The mother is at first painted to have died in the front seat holding the passed out, moaning daughter, and the bloody father is frantically trying to wake them up.  Just when you think the hitchhiker is going to abandon everyone, he takes the baby up to the main road, flags down a semi truck, and calls and waits for help.  Both characters defy the readers expectations on what they are capable of and what a “hero” can look like.  They are classic examples of not judging books by their covers.

Readings for 02/04/18

I really enjoyed Jim Shepard’s “The Gun Lobby” & “The Mortality of Parents,” Stuart Dybek’s “We Didn’t,” Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried,” and Richard Bausch’s “The Fireman’s Wife.”  “The Gun Lobby” was a great story that took turns I never saw coming.  When you first start reading it, you would have never suspected that the narrator had been taken hostage for days by his beyond stressed wife.  There are many humorous moments between Sandy and the narrator, and many moments of the narrator realizing how he could have been a better husband, friend, etc.  It is a story of two people somehow finding their way to each other, even at the very end, because when the police bust in to end the hostage situation, the narrator is holding onto his wife and goes down with her.  “The Things They Carried” was a good war story.  It adequately captured how it could possibly be out in the field of battle, the desensitization that occurs to seeing death.  Getting lost in fantasies of home, the only things keeping you anchored in some sense of a real reality.  The listing of all the equipment and its weight was creating a theme I’m aware, but I found it to be a little much at times.  The story “We Didn’t” has been one of my favorite for quite some time.  I like how Dybek tells the story we all can relate to, our first love back in our high school days.  He perfectly captures the descriptions of the awkwardness between two young would-be lovers, as well as the eventual drifting we sadly experience with more people than whom we stay close with.  The scene of when the deceased pregnant woman washed ashore was an especially great scene as well.  This is because it was a great depiction of being able to paint an over the top, high emotion scene, without using the accompanying language one would expect in such a situation.  Dybek doesn’t allow “hot language” to play here, and very plainly describes the happenings of the police’s discovery.  He even uses the crudeness of one of the cop’s reactions to break the tension for the reader, which is a genius move in my opinion.  “We Didn’t” will continue to be one of my favorite short stories, being an example of some of the elements I hope to aim for in my own short story creations.

Readings for 01/21/18

I really enjoyed the stories of Sonny's Blues, Where I'm Calling From, and Cathedral.  I especially enjoyed the Cathedral piece.  In Cathedral, the narrator, who we can only best call by the name of Bub, is very jealous because an old friend of his wife is coming into town.  This old friend is a blind man who she used to work for years ago, during her first marriage.  Right away you can tell that the narrator has a hard time showing sympathy for other people, because he can't seem to realize that the reason why his wife wants him to be nice to her old friend is because his wife had just passed away.  The author does a wonderful job of bringing us inside the mind of the narrator by allowing him to describe the scenario and characters of the blind man and his wife.  It is here that we really get a glimpse into the heart and mind of Bub, and he comes off as not the nicest of people.  As the story progresses, the blind man, who is named Robert, the narrator and the narrator's wife all have dinner and have their fair share of drinks and a little smoke of some of the good stuff.  During this whole interaction you could really see some of the narrator's resistance and awkwardness in interacting with Robert. The narrator's wife falls asleep after smoking some and this is where Bub and Robert are able to actually start connecting.  This is the point of the story where Bub starts to let some of his walls down.  Robert asks Bub to describe to him what he's seeing on tv, which is this program about cathedrals.  Bub tries his best, but he soon realizes it's hard to describe something to someone who has never seen it before.  Robert comes up with the idea of having Bub help him draw it on paper, so he could get a better idea in his mind of what he was talking about.  Bub joins hands with Robert, and together they trace the picture of the cathedral.  Bub's wife wakes up very surprised at what she sees, because she sees her husband unlike she has probably ever seen him before. This is a story about a character learning how to change, learning how to show some type of feeling for someone other than himself.  It leaves you with hope that the character can perhaps continue to turn things around in their life and become better people to those around them.  It gives you hope for a happier ever after, as much of one that could be realized anyway.

300 Words Creative for 02/04/18

As we start walking up the driveway towards the garage a weight starts to fill my body, slowing me down.  It’s like my feet are made with lead.  My heart starts racing and no matter how deep I breathe I can’t catch my breath.  It all strikes me at once.  This is exactly how those dreams start off.  Or more like how that dream starts off.  It’s the same dream, every night, the same darkness.  I don’t want to go inside.  More blood and pain waits behind those doors. 

“Adam!  Honey, what’s wrong?”

The sound of my mom’s voice broke up the overwhelming fear that was starting to grip my body for a split second.  I hadn’t even realized that I had become frozen in my tracks.  I tried to say something back, something to let her know that I was fine, that everything was ok.  But I couldn’t muster any words from my vocal chords.  All I could do was shake my head back and forth, barely moving at that.  My mother dropped her purse and my bags from the hospital that she was carrying and ran over to me.

“Adam, tell me what’s wrong!  Is it your head?  Are you in pain?”

“It’s the dream… the dream… this is how the dream starts.”

“What dream, honey? What dream are you talking about?”

 What am I suppose to say to her?  I couldn’t tell her that every night for the past three months I’ve dreamed that she and everyone I love dies at a party like this.  That the dream started off just like this, and shortly after we walk inside I’d go on a murderous rampage, stabbing everyone in sight, everyone in my house, at the behest of my cat no less.  These are the kinds of things those questions the shrink stopped by to ask were looking for.  Specifically, “have you been having any night terrors?”  I just answered no to everything because I’d be damned if I spent another night in the God forsaken hospital.  I kept a brave face then so I can do it now.