You Never Call, You Never Write

-
Last night was the first meeting of this fiction class I'm taking at Penn. I think I'll like it? The story assignments are really short--no more than 5 pages or 1,500 words. I have written a couple of short pieces, but it's hard to write a complete story with that word constraint. I will try. At least I'm not the oldest person in the class; though 90% of the students are in undergrad, two of us are older (plus the teacher). We wrote a couple of free-writes--we wrote about one of our favorite books as a child (Little House on the Prairie. Someone else in the class choose Eloise at the Plaza, another one my favs), and then later we wrote about our favorite movie as an adult (Annie Hall) and how the two are alike somehow. Our 1o minute free-write for each day this week is to describe a physical action in detail such as washing the dishes, mowing the lawn, plucking your eyebrows, eating spaghetti. This morning, I wrote about taking out the garbage, an activity I hate very much, mostly, as I figured out from the free-write, it always reminds me of how I didn't succeed the week before--you know, it has a wine bottle in it, frozen chicken I never made, moldy vegetables I also never made, discarded boxes of pasta, newspapers I'm too lazy to recycle, etc. But it's also because I dislike cleaning the litter box and that's something I have to do every Wednesday too. Here's the first line of the free-write (I'm using the Evie character): "her life would be so, so much better if Wednesday everything didn't always end with trash." I'm also trying to work on the noir story, but have written myself into a corner. Will have to kill everyone off immediately for it to work.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Candyman: Race, Class, Sexuality, Gender, and Disability

-
Candyman hits on almost all of the sections we discussed over the last six weeks. Let's start from the most obvious and move from there.   Race: A large part of Candyman confronts the anger and rage of the Black community after years and years and years and years of systemic racism. Candyman is an embodiment of all of the men who have suffered at the hands of whites (white police man, the white community, white systems that have set them up to fail such as the housing projects of Cabrini-Green). The monster of Candyman is a tornado of retribution, a hive of bees swirling angrily and containing the men who have been lynched or tortured by whites, starting with the original death of a Black male painter who dared to fall in love with a white woman whose portrait he painted. This monster, like the original, can be summoned by anyone who dares to say his name out loud in front of a mirror five times. Until the very end, the only people who do this are white--and every one of them is
Read more

Short story by Lauren Groff, "At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners"

-
Image
You have to maintain a much more focused attention when reading a good short story versus a novel, because if you skim, you might miss something.  For this reason, I find it a little more difficult on my brain to read short stories.  But if you're going to write in the form, you should read in the form (and others--I have yet to memorize a poem as was suggested in my workshop last week), so I've been trying. Lauren Groff has a story called "At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners" in Best American Short Stories, 2014. You might have read her novel The Monsters of Templeton, or her other short story from a previous Best of collection, "Delicate Edible Birds" (also the name of her book of short stories), I have a vague recollection that that story was about World War II or possibly World War I and a dinner party where the people invited are living it up . I seem to also remember a line about the crunching of tiny bird bones. The Monsters of Templeton
Read more

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

-
Image
It’s all about the recaps. It’s a show made of recaps from previous shows. I purposefully skipped the first 40 minutes. These guys are all a bunch of idiots. They are turning on one another. Wes has not shown up, because he will probably come in at the very end for some kind of surprise. They are all trying to humiliate Jake because he is too perfect and too sweet (however, he just referred to himself in the third person; kind of irritating). I don’t remember any of these guys, to be honest. Who are these women in the audience? Oh, okay time for a short break because the show has been on now for three minutes. You know what, I’m going to go ahead and time the difference between the commercials and the actual airtime of the show. >Show returns at: 8:47 p.m. Don’t forget the 20 minutes of clapping in between the scenes. I can’t tell you how much hair mousse has been used in the making of this show. Dave is the crazy dude who has decided to grow a beard for the recap Juan is being atta
Read more