Classmate Response: Week of 3/21/11

David Mathis: Yes

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I really enjoyed this piece, and I’m going to try to explain why. I have very little criticism for it, but I’ll go ahead and get that out of the way. There were a few times when you used a few too many adjectives, I think. Specifically, describing the old man, you used “scraggly” and “contorted” and “creased” to describe his face, the latter two appearing together in a sentence. I think just one would work to give us a picture of the man’s face in our minds. Also, “ceaseless stream” might be redundant; I think just “stream” would work to describe what the narrator is walking through. The sentence about the bluebird might be a little unclear. I think there needs to be a little more context to show why the bluebird’s song disrupted the mundane sounds of the city and took the narrator back into the past. When you get to the child, I think I would tie in that we’re reading about the child specifically rather than, say, the bus driver or someone, by writing something like “I could see the child’s little hand” instead of “his hand.” Also, I don’t think you need the specific word “naiveté” in the sentence about the child, since the reader is already likely to associate that quality with children.

Anyway, enough with the bad news. This was so beautiful and just the sort of atmospheric piece that I’m always drawn to. Perhaps you meant that it could be any city, because I wasn’t in any particular city but in a city of my own memories. I could easily place myself in the narrator’s shoes and feel the people around me and see the visions that he did. I loved your sentence flow here, from long to short: “The wind blew leaves into my face as I quickened my step—the crosswalk sign was fading, flashing a warning hand. Halt.”  I loved, too, how you used imagery we’re all familiar with to emphasize how sharply this man’s face stayed in the narrator’s mind: “His gaunt features etched themselves into my mind like the aftershock of lightning on the horizon.” I could see that so clearly. The segment with the child was my second favorite section. I loved how you described him and what he was doing, or likely to do. Again, I could easily see this image in my head, and sympathize with how the narrator felt, seeing/imagining this child. My favorite section by far was the end: “People once thought that pesticides were safe for the environment because after being sprayed, the fumes disappeared from sight, only, it didn’t work that way: the fumes were still there, but invisible to the naked eye. Maybe my breath was the same way.” And “Maybe all the world was covered in exhaled breath and insecticide.” I’m so jealous that I didn’t write that. It’s just glorious. (My only slight critique would be that I think you need a semicolon between “sight” and “only.”) And as someone who also uses repetition, I really liked the cold concrete theme there at the end, how you repeated the imagery without repeating the line word for word. Just beautiful. I loved it to pieces!