Week 7 Responses: Group 2

Noticing details in "Penguins"

Jeffers seems to have found confidence in “Penguins.” It’s wonderful to see him in an element in which he feels comfortable. In this piece, he focuses his attention outward, rather than spending all of his time feeling awkward. The best way to learn about Jeffers in “Penguins” is to notice what he notices. Out of an entire zoo full of people and animals, he draws the reader’s attention to a “spot of bird shit on the black asphalt” that “looked like a raindrop running slowly down a window” and the feeling of the handrail against his butt cheeks. He notices the penguin that bites a little girl while his friend Mike is trying to see the main exhibit.

Jeffers sees subtleties. I like him a lot more now that he does things. Keep this up, Tom. It’s beautiful.

Expectations in "Opening for a story"

Tucker has such great expectations for age. It’ll be interesting to see what happens when he hits 25… One way to make his desires and frustrations more effective at the beginning of the story would be to progress his own age in 3-year increments. Instead of going from eleven to sixteen to twenty-two, we should see if he meets his expectations when he actually hits the ages he desires. And what happened when Tucker turned 14, 19, and 22? Was he disappointed by each birthday?

I adored the preparation he made in case anyone asked him about the patches on his jacket. It provides yet another small disappointment on top of everything else he has to deal with in being three years too young for his desires. This shows more about Tucker than the rest of the paragraph. Give us more of this gorgeous affect!

[Untitled] by Kate Schlachter

Unfortunately, despite the beauty of Kate’s writing, I had no idea what was going on in this piece. I gathered something about maybe a funeral and an apathetic guy named Charlie who has a sister and an annoyingly tactless mother, but I’m not entirely sure why he leaves his apartment.

The description of how Charlie sees Dale’s apartment building and feels in it, however, was beautiful. The image of a building that is “heavy against the sky” is so clear in my mind. The word choice in this paragraph is beautiful. Kate captures the feeling of coming in from the cold amazingly well. Again, the descriptive language is gorgeous, but we need some plot. Is this a complete piece? I hope you’re going to write more of it, and I’d love to read it if you do.

Demanding and commanding in “Elise” by Gillian Chisom

It was great to read a piece that takes place outside our era. Gillian has a wonderful command of Austen-era dialogue and language. The dialogue is all spoken very frankly; there’s no beating about the bush between mothers, daughters, sisters, or servants. The phrase “now leave me” was used at least three times as both a request and a command simultaneously. It seems there is no end of demands in Elise’s home. She is practically required to marry a stranger in order to save her family’s manor, and she acquiesces without a fight. Where is the reader’s sympathy supposed to lie? We know she has a mild internal struggle, but she gives it up quickly enough so as to discredit it as a legitimate argument, and resigns herself to her fate. I have no real emotional attachment to Elise during this massive change in her settled life. Perhaps we could meet this suitor in a dialogue or learn some more about him? This would give us more of an idea of how and why she decides to leave childhood behind and marry so young.

Rapid trains of thought in "Wynona Sketches" by Al Keefe

The beauty of Keefe’s writing lies in his understanding of not only how Wynona thinks, but what she says to herself as she thinks. She does not break up her thoughts into coherent, grammatically correct sentences because her mind moves entirely too quickly to follow the conventions of proper writing. This old woman’s mind-rants are fascinating, especially those about her childhood and her husband. As in the original Wynona piece we read, she ties several clauses and pieces of dialogue together in one thought with only commas and oddly placed conjunctions. Page five is filled with these strings, such as “Always Wynona is eight years old here, and always her father is the only miner with a Model T and rides for all her girlfriends but pick one boy Winnie, and her mother always in the front seat rolls her eyes and holds a smile.” Memory is a strange and meandering realm, and Keefe explores it very effectively. The slower thoughts tend to kick in when she thinks about more recent or saddening events. The sketch covering pages 1-3, the piece about Jack, is much slower and more articulated than Wynona’s childhood memories. She seems to be pondering these and examining them with the reader. It’s gorgeous. Will these all be tied together in one piece, or are they just explorations of a style and a character?

“Bill Raymond,” dealing with a legend

Dear God, I loved this piece! Again, David has shown that he is a master of the folk tale. This time, however, we are asked to deal with the truth and consequences of a living legend. What I liked best about “Bill Raymond, My Father” was the way David made the con-artist father so very believable to both Bill’s audience and the reader. The narrator casts no judgment on his father throughout all the dowsing procedures, and thus keeps us in suspense as to whether or not Bill is really a dowser. And time and again, the farmers never realize they’ve been had. There’s never a lynch mob out to get the man who impregnated the farmer’s daughter and didn’t really find water. As far as we know, up until the end of the piece, Bill could be an angel or a magician. Our suspension of disbelief is held in two separate dimensions. Well done, David.