The Book of My Life (Reader Response 20)

While I love reading the Chapters in Imaginative Writing - each one explaining aspects of the craft in different ways - I had a lot of trouble siting down an committing to talking about one of the stories in this chapter besides Tandolfo the Great, which I responded to earlier this semester.

After a lot of deliberating, I decided upon The Book of My Life, partly because of it being creative non-fiction, which I don't often get to read, and partly because the way the narrator described his Professor reminded me of a teacher I had in high school.

Technically he wasn't a teacher yet.  He was still a student, a paid assistant to our teacher on who would soon be on maternity leave.  It was months into the semester, her reactions to students growing harsher with every day her child swelled in her belly.  When she left in the middle of the year to tend to her newborn, it was as if the class had been freed.  All we had was our class assistant, Mr. X [Let's just assume his last name was actually X...].  Mr. X became our teacher the remainder of the semester.  But we didn't really call him Mr. X.  We called him Saint X.  To his face.  I have to admit it's a ;little embarrassing, and he insisted it wasn't right, but he was an angel compared to our teacher and he understood us, and helped us out of hell.  I remember a joke shrine in the corner of the classroom, and the liberation of having a teacher who still remembered what it was like being a student.

He taught us, without a fight.  He showed us he supported our passions and the causes we cared about - even if it meant buying boba for a fundraiser when he hated the drink. He promised to take some of us surfing.  He passed out phone numbers in case any of us needed someone to talk to.  He let us carry on with our hero worship because he understood us.  he was closer to us in age than anyone in authority really ever had been.  And he care about each of us in a way many of us don't get often from complete strangers.

I find the little slip of paper where he wrote down his first name every once in a while, remembering that over 5 years ago he promised to accept any friend request once we graduated.  Whenever I see it,  I think about what he meant to us, then and now.  But he's a human being.  And just like running into a teacher outside of school, we would one day surprise ourselves by realizing he was more than what we had seen.

I'm sometimes terrified to think of who are heroes really are, all their faults and fumbles and beliefs that they held back from us.  The problem with heroes is that most times we don't know who they are.  Not really.  Unless you limit your heroes to your immediate family or your best friends, you won't know.  And even then, you still really can't.

Mr. X is still a saint to me.  But I call him Mr. X now, because it's what he preferred and I owe him that much.  But I never reached out after graduation and I still haven't gone in search of his Facebook.

In the non-fiction piece, the professor turns out to be someone dangerous, who taught with a mind full of things students don't learn in a classroom - ideologies and justifications that teachers usually never share.  And that's a good thing, probably.  But it prevents us from really knowing the kinds of people who inspire us and shape us.   And that is a dangerous thing, too.

How to Date a Brown Girl (Reader Response 19)

Let me just start by saying that Junot Diaz is really important to me.  I have a long list of favorite authors and favorite books, and he is very high up on both of those lists.
Two years ago, I wrote a short story unlike anything I've ever written.  I won't call it great, because I don't know if it is or not.  I wont even call it the best thing I've written, because I don't know how to judge these things.  But it is my favorite piece of all the stories I've ever written.  I had just finished reading This Is How You Lose Her, one of many works I devoured that summer, ravenous after years of required readings and ignoring my own long list of stories I really wanted to enjoy.  That summer, I remember by the books.  I remember Father's Day, nestled on the couches of two of my grandfathers' homes, zen noise app playing sinister chimes as I worked back through the Giver series.  I remember sitting, dehydrated and ill in the backseat of my mother's car, unwilling to get out or get a drink of water  or get some fresh air until I finished the next chapter - No, now the next chapter - No the, fine, I'll get out but I'm reading it as I walk.  The summer was filled with stories that I held as if they were the blood in my veins, tracing the spines like they were alive.  They felt so alive.  This Is How You Lose Her was the first book I read that summer.  I saw a photo of the cover once online, thought it was poetic and tragic and lovely looking.  Two weeks later I came across the following quote:

“Instead of lowering your head and copping to it like a man, you pick up the journal as one might hold a baby's beshatted diaper, as one might pinch a recently benutted condom.  You glance at the offending passages.  Then you look at her and smile a smile your dissembling face will remember until the day you die.  Baby, you say, baby, this is part of my novel.  This is how you lose her.” 

I was hooked.  I got the collection the moment the opportunity presented itself.  I did not take my eyes off the page, even when I was coming off as rude or anti-social.  I couldn't pull myself out of the stories if I tried.  And it killed me, because the character was the last person I ever would've imagined myself rooting for and I still did and I loved Diaz the more for it.

But I get carried away.  The moment the book was ending, when I felt the stack of pages growing thinner by the minute, I let the writing carry me away.  I closed it after the last page, set it down and grabbed my laptop.  And I wrote.  I wrote with reckless abandon.  I wrote with a full head and a full heart.  I wrote as if it was breathing.  I hardly knew I was doing it, but I knew I had to.  At ten pages, I found myself happy with an end.  I had characters I loved and characters I hated and words I loved and something I was proud of.  I've had two professors give me feedback on it, and no one's said it sucked yet, so I'm hopeful I got something right with this one.

I digress.  Junot Diaz is one of my favorites.  He writes beautiful and insightful stories that I can't break away from.  This story is no exception.  It features Yunior as the story's voice, the same Yunior I learned to love in This Is How You Lose Her, revealing pieces of himself from within his dysfunctional relationships.  The voice is incredibily strong - perhaps that is why I am so enamored with these stories.  Yunior's language brings Spanish, slang, and unique colloquialisms that somehow are incredibly particular but work with ease.  Reading This Is How You Lose Her exposed me to this in higher frequency and intensity, and I was stunned by it.  Speaking both English and Spanish - albeit, the latter only semi-fluently - I found myself weaving between the languages freely, without any hinderance, not even realizing these switches until I looked back later, quoting it to a friend and realized she didn't fully understand some of the sentences I read to her, even though she found them as lovely as I had.  But I think that speaks to the way Diaz writes, that he creates a character that is so rooted in his culture and community, but still universal that anyone can read him and form a firm image of his characters.

Plus, Diaz is a master of second person, something I've always found incredibly beautiful.  I can't read Diaz without wanting desperately to write my own masterpiece.  I love his work, not necessarily because his style or characters are things I want to emulate in my own works, but because he captures life and beauty and pain and everything about our world in his words and it's poetry and magic and something I can't put words to.  I mean, I might be biased, but it's hard not to want to write, to want to make something beautiful, when I read his work.  

So, you could say I kinda liked this story, I guess.  

Missed Connection (Reader Response 18)

She had fallen in love with far too many strangers.
The old woman selling vegetables in the family-owned market by the Finsbury Park tube stop.
A Moroccan man in the Costa by Trafalgar Square.
A child watching with wide, curious eyes from the window of a daycare center by her flat.
A teenager watching her phone as she meandered down High Street, looking away from it until she reached the crosswalk.
Then there was the man on the subway, the one who clutched his briefcase like the world would fall apart if anyone saw inside it.  She pictured the two of them, two brown-eyed children grasping her hands, as he kissed them goodbye each morning.  She saw him coming home, disheveled and worn, lost in his own world.  He didn't kiss her hello, only goodbye.  She took off her ring and had considered custody arrangements by the time he got off at his stop.
He was her favorite daydream.  The one she got lost in at work.  She saw him that once, but so many faces looked like his and she couldn't separate any person from the person they weren't.  She promised herself if she saw him again, she'd strike up a conversation.  But he was never there.  She thought about posting fliers, but that seemed silly.  She tried to look up him LinkedIn, but she didn't have a name or a business or anything helpful besides what train he took to work, and that's when it hit her.

Missed Connection
We sat across from each other on the Victoria line on October 15th.  I got on at Finsbury Park.  Your eyes are deep brown like chocolate, but nicer and your briefcase matches your shoes and I want to know what secrets you were guarding.  You had a book in your hand that you tried to read between the bumps, but I never saw the cover and I really wish I had.  I didn't know you were gone until the doors were closing at Green Park.  I missed my stop and had to get off the next stop and trace a new route, and I was running behind and didn't get a chance to grab a coffee, but I think if I got to see you again, I'd consider it again.  I'll be in the third car.

A Mistake (Reader Response 17)

I really liked Akhil Sharma's "A Mistake", and the way the story captured so many different kinds of experiences.  The main character's new life after immigrating to America brought about a conflict that allowed for the author to compare each character's background and the new changes that this kind of life brings.

At times I was unsure if every character in the story was dynamic or if the narrator was so changed that he saw changes in everyone because of his own changing understandings of his family.  It felt, perhaps a little like both.

My favorite aspect of the story was the family dynamic, and how the narrator began seeing these changes.  The way he interpreted his parents' role in his life an in the home before and after was very interesting, moving from one in which his father appeared to assert his equal role in the family life, when they had thought their mother was the sole decision-maker and the only authority they would listen to in the home.  Birju's overconfidence after his acceptance to the prestigious science school reveals other changing character dynamics, as Birju acts disrespectfully towards his mother and holds himself in a way that demeans others around him, especially his younger brother, our narrator.

The ending, while I liked it and felt it fit, seemed a little predictable to me, at least in certain elements. I didn't feel as concerned for the characters in the moment - I wasn't as empathetic at the end as I had hoped to be - which made me like the ending less, and drew away from some of my appreciation for it.  

The Story (Reader Response 16)

The Story, by Amy Bloom, might just be my favorite so far.
I mean it.

Not just because the characters were recognizable and strong.  Which they were.  Not because the narrator was intriguing and I understood her and identified with her.  Which she was.

I think it was because there were so many stories woven into one narrative.  There was the story.  Then there was the reality.  Then there was the writing of the story.  And "The Story" was candid and intriguing before the narrator came clean about the details, before she started talking about wanting to tell the story and all the details she found necessary.

I found myself rooting for the story and the narrator.  And the author.  I'm still not certain if the narrator at the end was the author or not.  I hope she was, and I hope she wasn't.  On one hand,  I hope that the awful things Sandra did were punished.  On the other, the entirety of "The Story" makes a compelling work of fiction on it's own.  I don't know if it's all fiction, or half fiction and half non-fiction, or what it may be.  All I know is I loved it.  Every second of it.

The blur between reality and fiction as the story began to reach it's ending was exciting and, I think, really captured the process of writing a story that is rooted in a personal reality in huge ways.  At least it felt like that to me.  I have difficulty writing stories based on people I know or direct creative non-fiction. I always need to add a detail to separate my story from reality.  Something like making stained glass windows instead of statues.  Or being a psychiatrist, specifically, not a therapist.

Little details like that do a lot.  First, they're great for filling gaps.  Second, and more importantly, they allow for the expansion of empathy a reader needs.  By adding fictional details to creative non-fiction, blurring our reality with our story, we can see into the minds and experiences and motivations of characters, based on people we know personally and with whom we can never have that level of understanding.  Being able to understand a fictional character better than we know people we have known all our lives is one of the most magical things about fiction.  Whether it is all fiction, or half and half, or whatever balance it is, Amy Bloom captured that for me.  And, like I said, All I know is I loved it.  Ever second of it.

Plus, that last line speaks to me on a spiritual level, and it's just another reason to love the story even more. As if I needed another one...

Chapter 6 (Reader Response 15)

I'm really glad we were assigned Chapter Six of Imaginative Writing, because it got me off my butt and focusing on paying attention to the chapters in a way I hadn't been during the semester so far.  But it  had a lot of solid advice and interesting perspectives on explaining the process of writing the story and elements that make it captivating.
Here are a few of my favorites:

• "If the story succeeds", readers will have their "capacity for empathy enlarged by having lived in the character's skin for the duration".
• Looking at a story's beginning, middle, and end as "conflict, crisis, and resolution" instead.
• the pattern of connection and disconnection (particularly when it was traced out piece by piece with examples to show the shifts)
• And, on that point, how ending with connection or disconnection helps determine the story to be a tragedy or a comedy.  

I'd never read or heard any of these phrases before, and I think they helped me understand the concepts better than previous ways they'd been explained.  Especially the connection and disconnection.  That one is going to haunt me every time I read something.  But in a good way.  Not all hauntings are necessarily bad, I think.  It's just like the first time someone told me we breathe through one nostril at a time.  Now that I know, I'm aware of it and think of it sometimes when I'm not overwhelmed with anything.  It annoys me, but I'm grateful for it.  It reminds me that something is working right. 

One day I really want to write a story that doesn't fit what a story usually is.  It won't be about a journey.  Or a stranger coming to town.  Or two worlds colliding.  Or a love story.  And it won't be a slice of life.  It'll be ages before I find a way to do that, but I think it might be fun to push the boundaries of the kinds of conflicts I write.  The kinds of stories I portray.  This chapter made me want to try that.  And it gave me a new way to look into a story's conflict, to read it closely and sectionalize it.  I just wonder what advice and ideas I've been missing by skimming the other chapters.  Guess I know what I'll be rereading this week.

Victory Lap (Reader Response 14)

Victory Lap, by George Saunders, was a difficult one for me to easily jump into.  I found the first narrative voice, that belonging to (or perhaps just focusing on) Alison Pope, to be confusing, her trains of thought hard to catch.  The jumping around caught me off guard.  I think my favorite line, though, is below.  I found it amusing first, then felt it fit the character's voice very well.

"Egads! One found oneself still standing on the top of the stairs.
Do the thing where, facing upstairs, hand on railing, you hop down the stairs one at a time, which was getting a lot harder lately, due to, someone's feet were getting longer every day, seems like."

Though the story's voice at this point was not very easy to follow or understand, I still found it interesting and worth pursuing.  But just as I got the hang of the style, BOOM!  Another point of view.

The next character, Kyle, was easier to follow, his voice being both clear and distinguishable.  The inner workings of his mind felt natural, and I found his background more enjoyable to piece together, seeing clear correlations between his actions and his history.  While Alison had been a fun challenge to read through, Kyle's perspective made the story more interesting to me and kept me invested so that I could remain gripped as the story approached it's climax.

After Kyle's section, the point of view changes felt natural and the voice for both characters was clear.  I don't know if this clarity was because I was now used to Alison's voice, or if it was less of the fun disjointed quirky voice from before.  As the plot came through both of their voices, and they each battled with their internal monologue, trying to deal with a terrifying experience, I found myself captivated and feeling certain I knew who these characters were.  And I care, which I think is a more important point.  I cared by the end in a way I hadn't when Kyle started talking.

Gusev (Reader Response 13)

Of the stories I have read for this class, Gusev, though interesting, would not be amongst any of my favorites.  Perhaps it was just because it didn't capture me the way other stories have.  Perhaps it was the vagueness of the ending and that I had to read it twice to realize what had happened on a surface level.  Perhaps I was just irritated that Pavel Ivanitch's name was always fully stated, never shortened, and he was never referred to by first or last name alone.  Whatever it was that bothered me, it was of no fault of Mr. Chekhov.
Chekhov's prose was beautiful.  Particular sections left me wanting to write about sailors on the high seas and capture a spirit of living a life among the waves.  I did once before, about a daughter whose father, though long dead, left her itching to follow waves as he once had, just to understand what he loved about it.  But, perhaps, it might be worthwhile to do something with his character.  But that's a project for another day, I suppose.  I already have a long list of stories I want to write and character I haven't gotten around to exploring yet, and I feel I owe them something.
I think, maybe if I wasn't so tired for the past couple weeks and I took my time with the story (significantly more than necessary, I mean), if I focused on minute details and did a close reading, I could find a lot about the story I loved.  The dialogue was well put together, and I did enjoy that, but those little details that kept bothering me were the things I fixated on in my reading, and they inhibited my full enjoyment.  Maybe I can read it again in the next couple weeks... revisit the story.  Get to know the characters better.  I think I'd feel a lot more for them than I do right now.

Roy Spivey (Reader Response 11)

I really enjoyed this story for so many reasons and I don't have enough time to share them all.  I thoroughly enjoyed the serendipitous circumstances of the narrator's encounter with Roy Spivey and the dialogue became a whimsical representation of an exciting moment and connection that would leave someone absolutely starstruck.  The characters themselves were a little bizarre in a fun way, what with them biting each other and sharing personal information so immediate in the conversation.
I adored the narrator.  Her fixation on the number Roy had her memorize, thinking about it year after year when her life became difficult, reminded me of the little things we all hold onto in times of need.  There was also this pervading hope that she might give the nanny a ring and reconnect with this stranger, although by the time she found the number again and was ready to call, it was far too late.
I read this piece when I was supposed to be working on something else and focusing, but I couldn't resist reading every bit before I got back to my work.  It was captivating and held me trapped both times I read it.
I don't know what to make of the last paragraph, but I loved it.  Something about it feels hopeful, but still regretful, a set of feelings I felt permeated the piece.

What We Talk About (Reader Response 12)

In What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, I loved the dimension of the characters far more than I liked the dialogue.  The narrator, Deb's husband, perceived his wife's guests in an interesting way and his perspective made for an interesting representation of their situation.
One of my favorite parts of the story was how the husband continues to refer to Shoshana and Yerucham as Lauren and Mark, a choice which makes each piece of dialogue feel like part of a conflict between him and his guest, and their choices and his own.  This comes as an indictor of his personality and reveals a form of discomfort he feels in being surrounded by these people as he cannot adjust to their names, or anything else bout them.
His emotion in the story takes the main stage and shows us this discomfort and takes the reader along with him as he learns things about his wife, her friends, and his son at the same time the reader does.  The dialogue and the information revealed within, as well as the perspective he shares between these moments, portrays our narrator as a man who is an outside in his own home and his own family, which made for an intriguing point of view in such a dialogue driven piece.

Hills Like White Elehants (Reader Response 10)

I can't even remember how many times I have read Hills Like White Elephants for my classes, whether in high school or college.  It is one of those stories that I go on loving more and more each time I read.  Sure, I see it in a whole different light, knowing the ending and knowing the meaning, but never once have I found myself not thoroughly enjoying it.  The Great Gatsby is like that for me, too.  The two are among the very few things I've been 'forced' to read for classes and actually loved.  Every single time.  And the reason why I love them changes every single time.
If I was asked what my biggest weakness is in my writing, my answer would be dialogue.  Somedays it is better than others.  Other days it is an absolute nightmare and I can't even fathom why nothing will work together.  I wrote a story last year about a person I used to talk to all the time, for hours on end.  I never saw his face, but his voice was a constant in my life.  It was a beautiful, but disturbing experience.  Writing the piece, I couldn't figure out how to make it work, even though the words I wrote were the same words we said to each other.  Even though it was a real conversation, the dialogue didn't feel right.  Something about it didn't fit.  But now, I am proud of that story, nearly entirely dialogue but still, I think, a cohesive representation of a time in my life that matters.  It was my story, so I am happy with how I represented it, but my dialogue always needs more work.  Always.
Reading this story is also a reminder of how to improve my own writing.  The dialogue is smooth, and easy to follow, but nothing is expressly stated.  It is easy to fall into the trap of trying to self-explain in dialogue, to use it as a source of information or as something that needs to mediate between the story and the reader's understanding of it.  But no real conversation does that.  Real conversations are vague and confusing to a passerby.  They are reliant upon previous discussions and are a reference to those conversations.  Real conversations don't exist in a vacuum and they don't grab random passersby listening in by the hand and say 'This is what we are talking about in case it wasn't clear'.  That would be ridiculous.
I'm not inclined to be writing ridiculous things.  I'd like my work to be a reflection of life.
It's just another thing I'll have to work on, but it's okay.  

Tandolfo the Great (Reader Response 9)

Part of what I really liked about this story was that it illustrated very clearly a point I made in my last post -  'Fiction allows for us to see the internal life of a person, to know with near certainty their motivations and find ourselves rooting for people we might never support in the outside world, hoping beyond hope that they will succeed or be happy or just survive.'
When Tandolfo has his mental breakdown and succumbs to poor behavior, he tells us that,

"he wants to let them know he's not like this all the time; wants to say it's circumstances, grief, personal pain hidden inside seeming brightness and cleverness; he's a man in love, humiliated, wrong about everything".

This scene captures the difference between characters and people, fiction and reality in a way.  We can see that Rodney's behavior comes from a variety of problems he's facing in his personal and professional life, which drive him to drink before his performance and behave so inappropriately at his show.  The reader sees and understands this, feeling compassion and hoping he will get his act together.  His actual audience, the fictional group of parents and children watching him perform, however, see his actions only, not inferring his circumstances or even questioning his reasoning.  Therefore, in the eyes of the reader they might be seen as uncaring.

The reality however, is they serve as a representation of the reactions any sane person might have.  If you were met with Tandolfo, and he showed up drunk at a party you hired him to preform at, how would you react?  Probably not with the same personal connection as if he explained his day and why he what acting so strangely, as he did in the story.  We understand his internal life, and therefore we are best able to see his experience as justified.  We see the scene through his eyes, not out own.  Therein lies the magic of character.

Beyond the brilliant illustrations of internal perspective, the imagery is beautiful in this story too.  The description of the sad cake, sitting on the sidewalk and Rodney, sitting in his car, staring at it, the picture of derangement, just waiting for a car to pass by and splatter it, helped to create an ending that captured Rodney's character.  This image, depressing and disturbing, but brilliantly vivid, helped to devise an ending that lent itself well to furthering the character.  By the end, I was certain this could be the only possible ending, and that Rodney, in his breakdown, could only find closure and satisfaction in the cake's destruction.  I couldn't see it ending any other way than with the reader waiting and hoping in the passenger seat of Rodney's car, eagerly watching the street for any sign of a car that would destroy that awful, miserable cake.

Character Essay (Reading Response 8)

Character is the life-blood of writing, no matter what kind of creative writing (perhaps even academic writing, too...) you do.  Sometimes the character is human, sometimes not, sometimes it is just an object in an empty room.  The character is someone or something that drives the work.  It gives it life and intrigue, without which the story could not be as interesting or as valuable.

A reader might forgive an author for a sup-par plot.  They might forgive unclear setting or language that doesn't match the voice.  A reader might even forgive god-awful writing, so long as the character is given the necessary attention.  What reader would ever forgive an author for writing its characters with no development, no fine weaving into the text, no dynamic journey?  It is a part of what we cherish most, the thing that give fiction some of it's greatest value.  Richard Bausch puts it well when he explains that:

"We know these people, therefore, better than we ever really know anyone in life".

 Fiction allows for us to see the internal life of a person, to know with near certainty their motivations and find ourselves rooting for people we might never support in the outside world, hoping beyond hope that they will succeed or be happy or just survive.  Some of my favorite books captured me by showing me characters I would likely never befriend, and showed me their world, their fears and experiences, letting me understand and connect with them emotionally.

Without character, we wouldn't be able to make these connections.  Think for a moment of a tv show you've loved.  Perhaps you watched it religiously.  Perhaps you wrote stories based off the characters.  Think of why you loved it so much.  What drove you to keep watching?  If you didn't feel that way about television, what about movies?  Books?  What captured you the most?  It was probably the characters.  Something they did, things they said, their feelings, their masks, something made them more real than any person you might've ever met.  It's why we love stories so much.  For all the things they show us of our world, they tell us a million more about people.  About who we are and why we do the things we do.

That is life.  That is magic.  That is art.

It's All Downhill From Here (Reader Response 7)

In "Downhill", a story published in the New Yorker in 1975 and a part of her New Yorker compilation, Ann Beattie writes about a woman whose paranoia and imagination run away with her.  Capturing her downward spiral and self-doubt, the main character's relationship with Jon is paralleled against her relationship with her dog, who despite her worries and fear that Jon has left her, seems to be her truest companion.
Beattie's language is absolutely beautiful and captures her characters emotions and movements in a way that turns something sad and dismal into a beauty that shows the full extent of her spiraling out of control.  Her fear that she will cease to exist without Jon is both a gorgeously romantic thought and terrifying representation of her perspective and mental state.
It's this interior monologue of hers that takes us through this loss, and eventually his return, showing exactly how she shrinks back into herself when she's left only with her thoughts, how her imagination runs wild in awful, beautiful ways.

Therapy (Reader Response 6)

I wouldn't call myself a fan of Lena Dunham's work.  I just don't feel passionately about it.  Some days I find certain works interesting, other days I just don't invest my time.  That's all.  I do other things.  Watch and read other things.  "Difficult Girl" is one of her stories I did find interesting, particularly because although it reveals a very personal experience, which I don't fully identify with, its candor and voice is still captivating and makes for a good bit of reading.
Lena's story drew us into her experience with vivid imagery that took the reader by the hand and showed us the way she grew up perceiving the world, the kinds of things she noticed and the things she got stuck on.  In many ways it is one of the better representations of mental illness that I've read in a long while.  She also captures emotions without definitions in beautiful ways.  A particular favorite of mine came when she stopped working with Lisa.

I miss her the way I missed our loft after we moved in seventh grade: sharply, and then not at all. There is too much unpacking to do. 

I said I didn't fully identify with her story, although I'm certain a few would, but little bits and pieces reminded me of moments I've experienced and feelings I've shared.  Her hypochondria and self-diagnoses spoke to me not only measures about what she went through, but also how I see the world and the things I am afraid of.  I could count on one hand the number of times I've sat down with a psychologist - a fact that makes me feel both regretful and satisfied - but I can understand the sentiments Lena shares about her therapists.  Her descriptions are raw and revealing and it's difficult not to feel like you understand her experiences, when it is laid out so clearly and openly.
So I guess you could say I liked this one.

Standing By (Reader Response 5)

It was May 19th.  I was onboard a flight to Heathrow, sat in my seat, eagerly awaiting the flight waiting for me in England, one which would bring me home after nearly 5 months away.  We still had not gone toward the runway and already at the point in time when we should have landed.  Me, I was freaking out as usual.  Layovers give me an awful bout of nerves.  I get restless and concerned and my heartbeat feels all wonky and even the slightest delay off schedule is a moment of high concern.  So a full hour delay?  That's a damn catastrophe.
When I say catastrophe, I know it isn't really.  But it sure feels like the end of the world.  I don't really know why it seems so important in the moment, or why I sometimes still complain about it.  But that day was already a long day and it was only noon.
I hadn't slept the night before and that hadn't helped the situation.  So when the pilot informs us we will be clear to arrive at Heathrow in approximately two hours, mere minutes before the gate for my flight home would close, I was a mess of tears and panic and everyone around me looked like I was a bomb ready to go off, unsure if they should do something or if that would only make the explosion come sooner.
Once the flight landed and I was just about done with tears, I had to wait in a 4+ hour long line to be told that no other flights would be leaving, and that though the storm that delayed my incoming flight was still there, it didn't delay any of the several outgoing flights to Los Angeles that day, and I would have to take a flight in the morning.  But after wallowing in misery and watching as customers yelled, some for a full hour, at the counter attendants, I couldn't help but try and be nice.
They say you catch more flies with honey.  And it's true.  Sometimes it's sweet for the trapper too I guess.  

Bullet in the Brain (Reader Response 4)

Very infrequently do I find myself showing little compassion for the protagonist of a story, or even the antagonist.  I kind of liked being thrown off guard with this one.  I felt strange reading Bullet in the Brain by Tobias Wolff, mostly because it was concerning to me that I felt no compassion or pity or anything for Anders, from the moment he walked through the door of the bank all the way until the bullet hit him.  Even through the beginnings of describing the moments he didn't see flashing before his eyes, my feelings were minimal and simple.  But as it went on, things changed.

I believe that the things that aren't said, shown, or suggested are the things that matter most.  The arguments an essayist doesn't discuss speaks volumes of their character if you're paying enough attention.  Perhaps that is why I liked reading about all the things Anders didn't think of as he died.  Those moments, lining up an Anders that the author didn't show us, a less jaded and critical Anders, made the piece for me, as I believe it was intended to.

Approaching the moment he did think of, I started to feel something different.  I felt the regret I thought Anders should be feeling, a wish to take it all back and try again.  I felt some sorrow that he had been living, but not truly living, becoming just a hollow shell of the character he once had been.  The shift in my emotions still left me with no pity for Anders at the time of his death.  But perhaps it was because it seemed to me that Anders had died a long time before, but was still somehow breathing.

Find and Replace (Reader Response 3)

I had not read any of Ann Beattie's work when I sat down to listen to her reading of Find and Replace for Narrative Magazine.  I was not surprised to find I liked her work, and found myself wrapped up in ways Ann represented her interactions, not only with her mother, but also with the stranger she encountered.
Ann's mother and my mother having nothing in common really.  My mother and I are close.  If I was one of Ann's friends, I would be one of the ones she mentions visits their parents every weekend.  Or one of the ones that calls every day.  When I lived in Ireland, I FaceTimed my mother several times a week, for hours at a time - and that was when I was restraining myself.  That's just how I function with my parents.  We talk constantly and about everything.  I don't have problems with telling them everything most days.  Heck, my friends tell them just about everything going on in their life, even when it's borderline too private a thing to share. [you know who you are].  It's just the type of people we are.
Still, I found myself amused by Ann and her mother's relationship.  Familiar, but strained, it was easy to see how their relationship had developed over the years even though the story was limited to only one major moment.  It was very showing.  I think perhaps it was Ann's delivery, but as a credit to her, her writing exudes her own voice, a brilliant, take-no-crap, sarcastic tone that permeates the entire piece.  It would have made it difficult not to like her in that moment.
I think it's critical to maintain a real voice when writing.  Sometimes I read my own work and wonder if someone might recognize my work without my name attached, that It would speak for itself and remind them of something of mine they'd read before, in a new exciting way, but still sounding like me.  I am still looking for my voice I guess.

Ducks in a Row (Reader Response 2)

I cannot begin to explain how much I enjoyed reading Danielle McLaughlin's In the Act of Falling.  From her stunningly real characters to her way of presenting the world around her, McLaughlin captured me from beginning to end.

What grabbed me most throughout the piece was the unabashed, but still understated Irishness of the piece.  McLaughlin made few references that would pinpoint the reader's attention to Ireland, but she captured a spirit that lingers in contemporary Irish fiction.  Having lived in Dublin, her descriptions of St. Stephen's Green and her description of their Portlaoise home brought me in and kept me grounded in my memory of living in Ireland, making the story feel so real.  I could picture myself walking past the LUAS stop, visiting the ducks and pigeons before my walk back to Rathmines. (I was surprised she never spoke of those pigeons - I swear they were horrifying most days.  And probably plagued, too.)

Her story, bringing in Bill's unemployment and their struggle following the crash in 2008 captured a hesitancy and fear that seems to envelop a lot of Irish life.  Having read works that preceded and followed the crash in either setting and composition, it is always intriguing to see how the economic climate affected this generation of literature, a change which McLaughlin wove into each aspect of their lives.  From the frivolity that marked the boom, seen in Bill's fancy shirt and their home, to the plummet which finds them struggling and living in a home which for all intents and purposes seems to just be another old Irish home falling apart and not much more livable than those abandoned in the 1960s.  In a way, it is another reminder of how their lives, and their family as a whole, is falling apart at the seams. 

And it seems like our narrator is the only one who knows.  Besides the last line, which hits us with the macabre tone McLaughlin uses throughout, the scene in St. Stephen's Green captured our narrator's place in the story, the knowing victim of an awful trap of a life.

If she hadn’t cut through the park yesterday morning, if she hadn’t taken lunch here today, she might even have thought, next time she visited, that they were the same ducks. There was trickery of a sort at work, a sleight of hand that suggested that the first ducks had never existed, and only she alone, in silent witness, knew better. 

The fixation with birds, and Finn's desire to catch them in the act of falling really piqued my interest, since I've always had a fascination with birds, though not nearly as macabre as in this story.  Still the fixation on death, with the birds being the harbingers of death, only made the piece fit better into the realm of contemporary Irish fiction, drawing on the theme to grapple with the internal problems of the family and the narrator's own insecurity and anxieties.  Is the story dark? Yes.  Is Finn's attempted dissection of a 'plagued' bird borderline terrifying?  Without a doubt.  Did I love every second I spent reading this story?  Absolutely.  

And now I miss Dublin all the more for it.

Collecting Things (Reader Response 1)

Ever since I was small, I've collected words.  Little bits and pieces.  Advice, prose, a verse of a poem, a moment of poignancy.  It didn't matter.  If I thought it was beautiful, I wrote it down somewhere for safekeeping, some inspiration for a rainy day.  These days, I've been finding scraps of paper as I clean through old homework and notebooks, little bits of advice and love from a younger version of myself.  perhaps that's why I love listening to the advice of writers.  It is like finding those papers, but this time, they are collected and more refined.  What I'd expect from myself if I could send the little papers back in time and instead was finding notes from me in twenty, thirty, or forty years.  Neil Gaiman and John Steinbeck, two authors I read growing up, offered advice that really resonated with me.

Gaiman's advice is a step by step model, how to start writing and never stop.  How to take criticism and how to approach your own writing.  How to deal with what you've created and move towards that satisfying near-perfection you've been striving for.  I think his eighth bit of advice hit me most.

The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it ­honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.

It's never easy to write.  I won't try to pretend otherwise.  But writing with confidence can feel next to impossible.  I self-correct constantly and question what I'm trying to say and wonder if I'm any good constantly.  It doesn't take much to get me off track.  But sitting down and saying I am good enough and ignoring all the comments I'm making in my head, that is strength.  In rare moments when I can do that, I feel like I am writing my masterpiece.  And it doesn't matter that I'm wrong.  At least I can feel it.

John Steinbeck's words of wisdom help create a mindset that can help to develop a better creative mentality.  My favorite piece of advice is on finishing.

Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.

I like to surprise myself.  To defy my expectations.  I like to call it cautious optimism.  A friend told me she likes to 'walk in hope'.  Regardless of what you call it, expectations, especially your own are the worst kind of pressure.  Losing yourself in the writing and the feeling you have is a stronger foundation for your work.  Or at least it is for mine. His advice urges to forget the audience, the advice, whatever else might clutter our minds and write for the sake of writing.  This list, put up against his earlier anti-advice advice portrays to me the significance of determining what advice and criticisms are useful to us and discarding anything that does not help us.  No one is going to find that every person's advice to them is helpful.  There are too many contradictions, too much to focus on, that we will never finish out work if we fixate on it.  Instead, gather together the parts that make you better.  When I was younger it was scraps of paper.  I collected words.  I like to think this is kind of the same thing.