Classmate Response 3: Week of 4/17/11

Joshua West: Break Up

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This was creepy-awesome-spectacular. I felt very disturbed as a woman reading it, but that's the thing, then: you nailed the narrator's voice perfectly. (So awesome. And creepy! And awesome.) One of the things I felt was very effective is that you didn't linger in any one scene for very long, but gave just enough information in the opening scene to establish the characters and relationship, the shadow outline of the grounds for the break up. That was very well done. In the second section, you also spoke around the direct violence in a way that I found more chilling than if you had described it in detail. It amplified the narrator's indifference to the violence taking place. It's like what we discussed about Buffy (writing in the space around the subject), only used to provoke terror and alarm rather than grief and sympathy. The only slightly confusing place was at the end, where there is the first use of a name (Mario). Is Mario the narrator, and we switched over into third person? That's the only place where I was thrown out of the story for a moment. Really well done.

p.s. Unfortunately, I can't think of a clever title. I'm not good at titles, either. Sorry!

Classmate Response 2: Week of 4/17/11

Jami Miller: Random Impulse


Skittles of the rainbow
dropping off
one by one into a dark maze
heading to the bottom
of the slate rectangle
that holds this candy
in the palm of it's hand
until it's all eaten by the shark
that controls it's taste.

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I loved this poem! The flow of the poem was served really well by the line breaks and the fact that it's a single sentence. It never felt like a long sentence or a short poem; it was the delightful bite-sized mirror of the candy. It was effectively bleak, too. The language about "dark maze" and "shark" and the aspect of its taste being "controlled" was a nice contrast in tone to the imagery of Skittles and rainbows. That reminded me of what we read for class about taking poems into unexpected directions. I think the only thing that was potentially confusing was the shark; it might be that I didn't read all of the layers of the poem but I was confused about exactly who or what the shark represents. But I hesitate to say "add more," because part of the beauty of this poem is its concise delivery. Anyway, great job!

Classmate Response 1: Week of 4/17/11

I don't know what to do about the Reading Response, since I already wrote a response to the last chapter in Steering the Craft, and there are no more reading assignments. So in lieu of reading responses, I'm going to do three classmate responses instead of one. I hope that's okay.

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Yeeva Cheng: Plain Jane

This is the story we covered in class, and I'm so glad to have a chance to comment further on it. It's such a beautiful story; you really did an amazing job. Something I thought was particularly effective was the use of stream-of-consciousness, which was a wonderful framework for the narrator's journey through several memories as they faded in and out. I think a more concrete structure to the narrative would have made the memories seem static and out of place, like exposition, but weaving the narrative in and out like that without clear cuts made the whole experience feel alive and fresh. I also loved how subtle you were with characterization, how you used character to establish settings rather than describing the settings and characters separately like blocks of information. Character, time and place all flowed together to create the atmosphere. Really well done. Aside from the topics we covered in class, I think the only thing I would mention is that perhaps the paragraph that starts "I blink a few times and frown..." could be cut down or even left out, maybe. That paragraph and the line "Before I could complete the recollection of that 'previous night,' " are the only places in the story where the transition from one scene to the next felt jumpy or displaced. Maybe they call too much attention to the shift? Anyway, this is a wonderful story. I love the language you use to describe everyday sights and sounds; you have a great grasp of just how much to tell and how much to leave to the imagination. Great job!

Classmate Response: Week of 4/10/11

Danita Pope: class exercise

Pulling into the supermarket parking lot.  The smell of tar combined with midsummer heat smelt like the mood I was already in.  Stench amplified from the hot hot heat.  Regretting the fact I left the windows down for the ride, instead of using the little bit of gas I had left for air conditioner.  Upon pulling into a space near the entrance, I sat there in the heat hoping the smell would pass.  The black parallel powerlines were blinding from the brightness of the sun.  I stretch my fingers thru my ponytail noticing the resemblance of color.  This makes me happy for reasons unexplainable to myself. I use this sudden urge of happiness like a wrecking ball swaying left to right.  And shifting to the right, then suddenly to the left, I use my body weight to open the car door-which is heavy.  (heavy as if its from my existential plight) which I suddenly break thru placing first my left torn up sneaker then my right onto the pavement.  This is how I get through Tuesday.

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I loved this piece and was left wanting to read more. The "bad news" of my critique is mostly just nitpicks, like the use of "thru" instead of "through" and the phrase "hot hot heat," which might not need the "hot hot" unless it is for rhythm. Some of the part about the "existential plight" might seem abstract, but I think you tied it in well with the very specific language about the power lines and your hair, and grounded the imagery. I really loved that you used the sense of smell, which is often neglected except when it's used for flowers and such. Something you nailed perfectly is setting; I got a very distinct sense of time and place, which seems critical for these types of exercises. Like the establishing shot of a scene for a film, it's all about putting the reader into that moment, concretely, and you did just that. Good job!

 

Classmate Response: Week of 4/3/11

Lucas Chance: Zoe

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Loved it, Lucas! Here is my critique. (Note: I tried to be more complimentary than insulting. I feel all self-conscious about it now, guys!)

Nitpicky stuff:

The bar conversation (which I’ll mention again down below) was excellent but for a moment when I felt thrown out of the scene a bit. After Bill leaves, the other three keep on talking, and you haven’t used any names or pronouns so far. We don’t have a particular POV in this scene. Then you wrote: “He takes a drink from his glass. He says in a stupor to Bill: ‘You wanna kill her?’ ” I wasn’t sure who “he” was, and I was confused by him addressing “Bill,” since Bill had just left. Was he just thinking out loud about Bill, or was he addressing one of the other men, also named “Bill”? It was unclear, especially later in the fight scene when Molotov Man bites the (flaming) dust, since that group consists of Molotov Man, Frank and Pitchfork. Earlier in the story, there was this sentence: “Her face was misshapen with a jutting chin that She did not mind being exiled from Brairsburgian life.” The first part looks like an unfinished sentence, maybe? (You need to finish it so I can find out what her chin does! Knowing you, approximately 80% of the people and their various parts have magical properties of a nefarious sort.) Also, in the paragraph following her failed attempt at selling Peter tomatoes, I don’t think you need to use the word “fear” as many times as you did. How you described their reactions to her illustrated that terror and revulsion perfectly. At the beginning, I think you might have overused the word “so,” just a bit. I do this all the time with certain words that I get attached to for the rhythm aspect, so if that’s what you’re going for, I wouldn’t change anything. The cool thing about “so” is that I can hear you reading it aloud, and that gives it a storyteller “voice” which punches the story forward.

Awesome sauce: 

This is going to sound weird, maybe, but I loved how indifferent the story’s omniscient narrator was. That was my second favorite thing about it. Particularly when describing how Molotov Man fell down the hill to his timely end (I suspect), the narrator carried on this blasé tone, as if he could have added, “And he was very much dead. Well, sort of.” The nonchalance made the townspeople so much fun to read. My favorite part of the story was the conversation in the bar between all of the (very drunk) plaid townspeople. It sounded natural and spontaneous, and I particularly liked that you didn’t try to explain who the speaker was every time or even once in a while. Handling a group of nameless characters (well, nameless but for Bill) speaking all at once is difficult enough; doing it well and making it sound like organized chaos rather than just plain chaos is very difficult. Your scene made me think of this quote from Amadeus, where Mozart is saying that in a play, so many people speaking at once is just noise, but in an opera, it’s a perfect harmony. You wrote the “perfect harmony” aspect just right. I also loved, loved, loved the Bill/Zoe sex scene fade-out “Noises are heard.” A+++. That whole short paragraph was just perfect. All of the character work was understated, playing humorously with reader expectations. The opening paragraphs, describing the life of the townspeople and the contrast between how Zoe behaves and how she is reacted to, were terrific. I loved the natural way you went from describing Zoe, to describing the village, to describing how similar the townspeople are, to describing just how this makes Zoe stand out even more, and so on. It had this gentle snowball effect, so to speak, again very understated though direct, where the picture fit into place without reading like exposition. I thought it was the perfect way to set up the tale.

Great job!!

p.s. I went through the entire story envisioning the townspeople as having plaid skin. Intentional?

Classmate Response: Week of 3/28/11

Katie Evans: Cindermanly

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This was a fun poem. I appreciated the irony of using a fairy tale perhaps best known for its themes of abuse and poor-made-rich to express the point of view of a man "enslaved" by his wife. (This is random, but it made me think of a common Japanese joke. The word for "husband" is "shujin." Lengthen the "u" sound to "shuujin," and you have the Japanese word for "prisoner.") I loved the cute way you used images from the fairy tale that we're familiar with (the Disney version, certainly) and how you included various phrases that added extra dimensions. "All I want is a night out with the boys" made me think of that song by KISS, which might or might not have been intentional but it adds this great macho layer to what he's longing for. I thought you captured his voice very clearly at times: "When did I become Cinderella?" and "Do all my chores, but don't tell my wife." Other times, the voice felt a little more general, "A land where a man can be a man / a place where I belong." I think you could take this voice even deeper to paint a picture of a very specific man with a very specific wife. "No singing critters" sounds like a very Southern dialect talking, so perhaps you could use that as a springboard to expand on his personality. Also, maybe you can work some of the irony into him addressing his "fairy godmother," which, given that this is a macho guy wanting to do "manly" things, is somewhat ironic given how he's likely to view someone he addresses as "fairy." Great job!

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!

Classmate Response: Week of 3/14/11

Surangi Perera: Random Impulse


The alarm has been ringing for the last half an hour. I finally get myself out of bed, get dressed, grab a coffee and head out. It was just another day. The weather was a lot warmer; I guess at least something is changing. I wave at Mr. Crickleton on the way to work. That’s quite the usual too, he is always reading the newspaper outside when I’m walking past. I picked up my green gloves on the way inside the farm and walked over to the cage in the far left. It was a routine now; I have done it for so long. I pulled out the chicken amidst the screeching and struggling. I’ve learnt that if you hold it just below the neckline, none of its struggling will ever work. The rest of my day is gruesome. I’ll spare you the details and just say there’s a lot of blood and awful smells. People always ask me how I can do this every day. They ask me, Hans do you no feelings? It’s a job, a job alone, I tell them. I can’t please everyone. I have to empathize with either the suffering chicken or my suffering family. The choice couldn’t be clearer. I leave at the end of the day, money in hand.

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I thought this was a very successful snapshot of the life of someone like Hans, who has to rationalize this occupation every day in his head and to others. You did a particularly effective job of giving us just enough information that we understand what he does and how he feels about it, without flooding us with needless details that detract from the succinct point of the story. You didn't glamorize him or vilify him but presented him as is, which is the perfect approach, I felt, for this sort of snapshot story. As far as things to improve on, maybe go back and check some of your punctuation and grammar. I like that you left out the quotation marks for the question people ask Hans and think the narrative flows very well without them, but like we discussed in class, keep in mind that some readers might be thrown off by it. Also, I think perhaps the sentence "The choice couldn't be clearer" isn't actually necessary in this context, since the sentences before and after both deliver the message to the reader. You could probably leave it out. Great job!

Classmate Response: Week of 2/28/11

Kacie Whaley: Like, How Very

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This is the poem we workshopped in class and time ran short, so we weren't able to give it as much time as we did the other poems. (I'm so sorry, Kacie!) This is a wonderful poem. One of the things that struck me immediately is how compulsively readable it is and what a conversational vibe it has. It just snaps through from line to line with a natural ease that is very effective and a joy to read. I loved how it feels exactly like the era in which it is set; it's a very good expression of a very specific time and place. Another thing that is done very well is the character's voice and the personalities of all of the subjects. It really feels like we're right there with them, listening and resopnding and becoming a part of this story. It leaves me wanting to read more and more. What could perhaps be edited is the last few lines. The abruptness works through the poem but there at the end, it ends on several abstract images that doesn't give the same living, breathing feel as the rest of it. I don't think these two lines need to be expanded in length, just edited with a different phrase that offers more specific imagery. Great job!

Classmate Response: Week of 2/21/11

Surangi Perera: Antoine Dodson Poem


I thought it was a bold choice to write from the perpetrator's perspective. There is a lot of musicality to the phrasing which I particularly enjoyed, and some startling imagery, unexpected despite knowing this was the would-be-rapist's voice, that added enormous punch to the poem. The awareness that the narrator had in his fateful influence over Dodson's life was a fantastic end, just beautifully done. My critique would be that perhaps you could fit more context into the break between the narrator running for his life and the onrush of the news media and the narrator's reflection on Dodson, after the line that ends with "leaving my signature behind." Perhaps another line or two at the beginning or else a title referencing the fact that the perp is the narrator, would help to give the reader more context as well. Since I know the story, it works wonderfully for me, but someone who doesn't know the story might not get the same impact. Good job!

Classmate Response: Week of 2/14/11

Danita Pope: Random Impulse

Your propped pillow now sits wilting
From the remote, a sign only I can see flashes vacancy,
the word seeming to extend in the air just long enough for me to catch my breathe,
then its gone.
Now the TV stares back at me wondering if he can run thru the channels as fast as before.
I attempt to surf with your previous speed, but I am only a warm-up.

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This was a wonderful concise snapshot of one moment in the narrator's life. The sense of yearning was very sharp, a beautiful contrast to the soft sounds of the words and phrases used. I love that the pillow's wilting is from the remote, and I love the last line, but I am only a warm-up. What particularly stuck out at me was the image of signs that flash and vanish before we can fully read them; how this image of the flashing signs (a sight we're all familiar with) was tied to the feeling of something out of our grasp (which is a feeling we're all familiar with) was particularly well done. The voice is very distinct. I think the only constructive criticism I have is that I want to read more; just one line or a few words to deliver context would make it a little easier to get into the narrator's space. Good job!

Classmate Response: Week of 2/7/11

Angela Lewis: Random Impulse

Throw your body against the machine

Disempowerment and voicelessness
what does that even mean?
make it stop
The man he yaks
half honest lies
maniac
Get on top of the man and stop him in his tracks
Yelling and fussing
attempts made mute by Smartassery
Put some ass into it
Halfassery
We're all bored and oversexed
So we play with puppets
Tugging on twine
What happens when you throw the puppet into the machine
We're all just a bunch of monkeys
Monkey wrenched
Wrench off with brute force i beg you
Throw your body against the machine


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I really love the flow of sound in this poem, how the words are crafted to beat against each other in a stutter-start, rhythmic way. I particularly enjoyed the lines "The man he yaks / half honest lies" and "So we play with puppets / Tugging on twine." There's a lot of musicality to this poem, which I feel pushes a sense of urgency through the content and gives it a lot of power. Very well done! If I could critique anything, I would suggest maybe spacing apart the three uses of the word "ass" or even taking out two of them, so the one "ass" that remains has more weight and punches at the reader a bit more.

Classmate Response: Week of 1/31/11

David Mathis: “Seagulls”


I simply loved the quiet loneliness of this piece. You didn’t burden it with too much detail. It was stark, like a black and white photograph, and just like black and white photography, it left me wanting to learn more about its subjects. The brilliance of it was that, even as I yearned for you to fill in the “colors” (so to speak), the very starkness of it allowed me to feel them freely. You didn’t force the direction of my mind, in other words, although the time and place and emotions of the piece were impeccably delivered. I was left feeling quite wistful for the narrator’s sake. My favorite line was: “It’s a silent observer now, no longer showing mighty ships the way and I wonder if it parallels my life with no direction.” That parallel was strikingly evocative, and I immediately understood how it felt to be in your narrator’s shoes. Just beautifully done. If I had any constructive criticism, it would be to trust the beauty of the quiet mood you’ve created and not to worry too much about adjectives or exposition. You have a wonderful ear for storytelling, and I can’t wait to get into our prose section to read more!

Classmate Response: Week of 1/24/11

Yeeva Cheng: Random Impulse Week 2 (January 29, 2011)


This really caught and held my attention from the first paragraph. I thought it blended movement (action) and imagery (scenery) perfectly to give the reader a specific sense of time and place from the get-go, as well as an instant emotional investment in the characters of the story. I felt the build-up to the scene in the school, the revelation of the photographs, and the quiet gap between the narrator's realization and the final lines was beautifully done, with a very solid grasp of pacing. It was a very concise scene, yet it expressed a great depth of emotion and for the narrator, a great range of emotion, too. That's very hard to do well, and you nailed it! In fact, I think you have such a well-balanced delivery of time and place that you could strip it down a little, use less descriptions, and build an even stronger atmosphere. I felt a few times in the third and fourth paragraphs that some of the imagery was veering a little into "poesy" prose. I felt perhaps the final line of the fifth paragraph could be trimmed, too, as it felt a little redundant. The imagery and symbolism had already been delivered so well that I felt this line wasn't necessary anymore.

This was a beautiful read!

Classmate Response: Week of 1/17/11 (late!)

Lucas Chance: Random Writing Week 1

when the hunter came back from hunting

without a drop to eat

the starvers went to starving

and took to chewing wheat

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I adored the whimsy of this piece. The brevity was the perfect match for the snappy nature of its humor. I half-expected it to be a playful ode to cannibalism, with the final word being "meat," so enjoyably nonchalant was the attitude. I have no criticism, really, other than to say that you show a terrific potential for black humor, and I'd love to see where you could go with this if you gave your imagination free reign.