What Grosses You Out?
This is what we talked about in our fiction writing class last night. I asked the participants to do a free write on two things--something that they were scared of and something that grossed them out. We were going to be discussing two pretty distressing stories ("The Shawl," by Cynthia Ozick and "First, Body," by Melanie Rae Thon) and I thought it would be good to have them start thinking about how to exorcise some of those fears/anxieties/grossness in their fiction. These are some of the things they mentioned on the gross scale: bodily fluids, snot (see "bodily fluids"), milk (because she grew up in Poland and mile their came in these strange cartons, and was never refrigerated) and hair on plates (this from someone who waits tables and so really does have to face this ick on a regular basis). In the scared of part, people talked about: rats (one guy has a rat problem in his kitchen. This brought on a whole slew of stories about rats. We suggested he r...