Writing About Something I've Come Back to: Our Rooms (to be continued)

      My room was always smaller than Kayla’s. Somehow, even though I’m the older sibling, I got stuck with a room almost half the size of hers. [add something here about coming from the old house that I don’t remember]. I guess she needed the space. While m room was cleaned and organized at least every weekend, Kayla’s progressively got messier. There were rare occasions when I could see her floor or make my way across to her closet where I would hide a plastic snake. Those were the times when Mom would bring up a few trashbags from downstairs, come into Kayla’s room, and threaten to start throwing away anything that wasn’t organized or put away. Sometimes they would clean her room for two days and still end up with three bags of trash to throw out. Most of the time, though, I didn’t venture in there for fear of stepping on something important buried deep within the layers of worn and unworn clothes. She had a massive work desk in the back corner of the room where she made “concoctions.” She would mix dish soap, hydrochloric acid, radishes from the garden, some body lotion, candle wax, brown sugar, and dandelion leaves into a bubbling new “skin care product.” She always made me try it. 

Treehouse: A Place Writing

We had a massive tree house in our backyard. Whenever I made a new friend, I just told them my house was the one with the castle tree house, and they’d be over that night. Dad built it by hand in 2001. I remember going to some scrap metal yard and getting two long metal playground slides to go along with our rope-net and wooden swing. Dad started sawing off pieces of the big oak tree growing next to our garden in the backyard until there was nothing but the trunk left, and he cut the top of the truck straight across to lay a 15 by 15 foot square wood floor on top. In the end, we had a castle. It was perfectly square and painted with grey bricks on the outside with four real-opening windows. Overtop, a white tarp was spread in a triangle like an old fashioned tent. We had two entrances: a ladder going up to a trapdoor entrance in the middle of the floor, and a front door that led out from the castle onto a balcony of think rope-net.

            From the net, we could climb left down the rest of the climbing net or go straight down the metal slides. The slides were attached to each other, the end of the first to the front of the second to reach the ground. We had to go slow down those slides because when the first one leveled off, the next one started to dip again, so we could fly right off the first slide and smack our tailbones on the bottom of the second if we weren’t careful. Mom warned us almost every single time we played on it not to hurt our butts. But dad was crazy with us. He would gather all the balls—basketballs, soccer balls, Wiffle balls, rubber bouncy-balls, the blue rubber football—and throw them at us while we dodged, hiding in the top of the castle. We would retaliate by throwing them back through the windows and out the front door. Sometimes we used water balloons, but that got the slides wet, so we always hurt our butts on the way down after that, and Mom would yell at Dad for being irresponsible.

            On warm nights, we would camp out in our sleeping bags in the castle, under the white tarp. Our dog, Shiloh, learned how to climb the ladder up to the trap door. We would hear a thump from under the floor and open the door to see him waiting there for us to let him in to cuddle. Dad would always let him sleep in his sleeping bag with him. But Mom never came out to the tree house. She would watch from the inside window and wait for one of us to get cold during the night and scurry inside to fall back asleep over top of the heating vents in the dining room. We would wake up with a blanket and pillow, or sometimes miraculously in our actual beds. 

Kim & Kevin - an attempt at backstory

When he was 9, my dad found a .22 lying on the table and carried it outside while Norvel and Dorris were arguing. There was some movement in the tree next to the sheep pen, so he shot over to the tree, aimed, and pulled the trigger. He’d hit an adult squirrel.

            “Dad, I shot a squirrel!” he told Norvel proudly.

            “You didn’t shoot no damn squirrel.”

            “I did, he’s a’right over there!” he pointed to the small tree by the pen.

            “Well alright. Go grab him and skin him down then,” said Norvel as he handed Kevin a gutting knife. Kevin ran back to the tree, climbed halfway up, found the squirrel and grabbed it. It was still alive. It wasn’t alive after it hit the ground though, and Kevin diligently skinned it and handed over the pelt to Norvel. He was pleased.

            “Alright, now why don’t you run down into Peoli and grab me some smokes?” asked Novel. So Kevin stood on his tippy-toes to grab the keys from the hook, started up the old red farm-truck and drove into town for cigarettes.

***

            Kevin was 16 when he started to experience puberty. He only got the muscles though, so he was still five-foot-five with no facial hair and a baby face. Out in the Peoli farm country, the hills are steep and the flat ground is sparse. Kevin and his brother Kyle would run full-bore down the steepest hills they could find, always challenging each other. As the youngest Kevin felt obligated to win every dare. They would run closer and closer to wooden and wire fences before sliding to a halt, and then one day, Kevin didn’t stop. He tucked in a front flipped right over the wooden farming fence and just kept running. He’d bet Kyle he could catch the deer out in the distance. He chased it relentlessly into the nearby patch of woods. He lost it for a second, cut through some bushes, and burst out into the small green clearing. Directly in front of him stood the deer—a large buck with massive and elegant horns. Instinctively, Kevin shot out his arm and grabbed hold of the nearest horn. The buck jumped into the air with all four hoofs off the ground, came down planted, and jerked his horn out of Kevin’s hand with an unparalleled force. Kevin reeled back, and the buck dropped to its knees and army-crawled through a patch of bushes. Kyle came up running from behind and never believed a word of it. Later, Kevin dumped a bucket of tar on him with Vince’s help. They all got covered, and Doris scrubbed them red and raw in a bathtub full of gasoline.

***

            People say Mom looked like me when she was young. At 16, she was 111 pounds of scrawny, with long, bushy red hair. In all the pictures I see, she wears a familiar goofy grin. Kim was the middle child, but always the smallest. Sue learned how to push Kim around by the time they could both walk, and Wendy, her younger sister, was born with Giantism—there was no hope for equality. Kim’s first name was Carolyn, after he mom, but the one thing she did manage to call her own was her middle name.

***

            Get up before the sun cracks over the horizon off far in the distance. Look out the window to see the red turn orange, and the orange turn yellow, and the yellow shine on green—or brown on the far fields. Clothes on, bite to eat, out the door. Mom made eggs today: no fighting until at least lunch time. Walk out to the red garage barn closest to the house. The sheep are down the hill again. Get them after midday. Hop on the new tractor and hook up the bailor. Drive out to the far field and turn that brown back to green.

            Come back for lunch. The dogs are pestering the chickens again. Yell, smack in the head, deep growl and pin to ground.

***

            Kevin left home at 16 in his 67’ Oldsmobile. He became a Jehova’s Witness and wholeheartedly believed in his message. He went door to door. He handed out flyers. He biked or ran and left his Oldsmobile by the Amish house he rented a room from. 

“Three Spheres” by Lauren Slater from Creative Nonfiction Magazine

a.      Techniques: Begins with “Initial Intake Notes,” which would not be written from her perspective but from someone else’s which she is now assumedly reading for the first time as we are. It begins the piece bonding the reader and narrator together and peaking interest in a unique way.

b.      Tone: Slater writes the first section to begin a tone of separation. She separates herself from the patient, especially in the notes at the beginning and continues to use speech that creates the “me” and the “other.” This tone switches when she lets the reader into her past in the mental institution. The tone of otherness fades away, but unwillingly, giving us the perception of growth or mental change. Slater uses more professional vocabulary toward the beginning to separate herself from the patients and uses more simple speech toward the end, which joins her back with her patients symbolically.

c.       Structure: There are 11 sections including the beginning intake notes section. Each section is a mini-scene, some more related to each other than others. But the scenes always start anew to give the narrator a fresh take on something. The sections always seem to do a pause and reset on tension or awkwardness.

d.      Tension: the tension is vague and unclear but always building toward the beginning. The reader doesn’t know why she dislikes Mount Vernon so much at first. Her anxiety about it puts the reader on edge as well. The tension has lulls and spikes as she has experiences like going to the bathroom where the patients should go.

e.      I will take from this piece the strategy of changing the vocabulary or jargon I use to write with throughout a piece to chow transformations or changes in my thought process.

f.        Q’s: Is this written as real non-fiction or as a part of a “metaphorical memoir” like the title of her earlier book? Why the birthing woman analogy at the end?

Craft Notes: “Once More to the Lake” by E.B. White

a.      Techniques: immersion into the experience. He paints vivid images as soon as the piece begins, but not before he puts it in context. Summarization  - quick summaries of backstory to be developed later. He picks out the most minute details like the dragonfly and a fork and a bait box and gives special meaning to them.

b.      Voice: Open and honest. He lets us into the process of remembering and re-finding the place. He lets us into his mind and what he’s thinking and how he feels like his father.

c.       Telling: He tells at the very beginning. It is interesting enough to keep me focused for the second sentence, which contrasts the telling with vivid imagery. “I felt dizzy and didn’t know what rod I was at the end of.” He tells there, but it is such a bizarre statement that it engages us.

d.      Form: simple paragraph form, but each paragraph serves a purpose. 1-Backstory, 2,-remembering, 3-lake description, 4-I am my father, 5-Lack of passed time, 6-trusting the lake, 7-changes, 8-painting the town, 9-travel, 10-boat memories, 11-father-son adventures, 12-storm description, 13-Feeling the feels of his son. The middle to end sections give less poignant insight like deciding that he is his father, but give us more details and imageryo the entire endeavor, so by the end paragraph when he makes the final connection to being his son, we have a very vivid picture placed within a larger scene we can also place.

e.      Weird and cool stuff: He doesn’t mention that there are other campers at the camp except in passing during paragraph 6. No mention of his wife or other family members. “The waitresses were still 15,” he doesn’t specify that certain things are false or imagined. “No loud wonderful fuss about trunks.”

f.        Q’s: The piece is separated into general sections of back-story, meaning and insight, and imagery and description. Which section was your favorite? Could I have stood alone or how does it rely on the other parts?

What was the value of leaving out other family details? Leaving other campers until certain points of the text and mentioning them in passing? Do we get a greater (but false?) sense of their solitude?

g.      Write about: A time or place where/when you felt like you were living in another person’s shoes, associating your actions with someone else’s, just as White associates all his actions with either his father or his son. Think of places once dominated by someone close to you that you now dominate or fill. 

Craft Notes: ‘The American Man, Age Ten,’ by Suzanne Orlean, from “The New Kings of Nonfiction” by Ira Glass.

a.      Structure: Moves from the kid-life immersion experience writing style to a writing style that references Colin as a child, to an analysis section where Susan begins to put meaning with the way Colin lives his life, and then moves to a research based section where her research on various subjects like Street Fight II inform her points of meaning, but then she goes back to the kid-style writing again to show that kids can’t hold onto this deep stuff for too long.

b.      Voice: Mixes the voice between her own and Colin’s. There are key places (the opening parahraph) that are written from his voice, then there are analysis pieces and more reflective sections that Susan writes in her own voice, which is a voice of contemplative amusement—looking at his life quizzically.

c.       Telling: A lot of the telling she did was about statistics for boys, games, etc. It was clearly not image-provoking, but it was interesting and held my attention.

d.      Style: Some of the story seems to be written like a research paper on children and others like a personal essay and others like a journalism piece. The parts where she reports on what the teacher and the students do and includes interviews with the kids and their opinions on matters are like journalism. Whereas the parts where she uses data and knowledge that she wouldn’t know otherwise is clearly research based and even has a thesis aura to it sometimes. And then the parts where includes herself in the story seems like personal essay.

e.      I will take from this the skill of writing from a different voice. I’ve never tried that before, and now I think it might be cool to write from my Dad’s voice on a short part of my long piece.

f.        Qs: Why the reference to sex in the first paragraph? That was just bizarre to me. I didn’t want to think about a grown woman and a child having sex, even if she was negating the idea. Such a weird part of the intro. And did she use specific phrases from Colin’s repertoire to master coining his voice?

Craft Notes: ‘The Hostess Diaries: My Year at a Hotspot,’ by Coco Henson Scales from “The New Kings of Nonfiction” by Ira Glass

a.      Tone: Blunt and open. Not afraid to negatively portray herself. Tells it like a dramatic story, like casual story-talk.

b.      Images: Gives us a great image of the restaurant, the first and second floors, the outside door, the bouncer. Then when something exciting happens, she doesn’t waste time describing the places; she knows we already have the images of place in our heads.

c.       Form: Intro scene; Star Jones story; first getting the job and back-story; importance of clothes (with Naomi); the Bush Daughters; Leaving: six sections.

d.      Meaning: There doesn’t seem to be some inherent meaning or moral to the stories here. They are interesting and a good read. They keep our interest and give us insight into her life. If anything, we see a young and immature woman decide that she must move on and grow up.

e.      I will take from this the idea of writing a story as an insight into my life, not necessarily a moral or a lesson that must come out of it.

f.        Qs: What does she do now? Is she prolific and experienced as a writer, or did she stay in the pop culture scene? This would give it more meaning for me.

Freewrite: Ironing Board

Blue Folding ironing board, folded haphazardly against the wall. I would leave for the banquet soon. I needed my red dress shirt.Mom scurried downstairs with that oversized red shirt, popped open the ironing board, heated up the iron, and got to work.

            “Anyone else need something ironed while I’m down here?” she would yell up the stairs, but no one ever responded. Dad kept on his ‘Red Nose Run’ t-shirt and pulled a burgundy sweater over top. Kayla would put on all her makeup at once, and Mom would where black dress pants and a work shirt.

            She finished spraying the shirt with the purple and clear water bottle. 

Freewrite: Burgers

I was flipping burgers with the arm-length metal spatula, scooping them onto to warming grill to keep for just 2 minutes. I fried spicy and home-style chicken, six chickens to a basket, and then down into the greasy oils it went. Every hour, I placed new potatoes, wrapped in tin foil, into the industrial oven. I made six pans of bacon whenever we were running low, and helped put down fries and chicken nuggets when the fry-guy was getting slammed. No one needed to help me though; I had a system.

            That system entailed keeping the burgers on the heating grill for up to five times longer than regulation decreed, but it worked. I kept at least four junior and four single patties on the grill at all times—double that when the rush came in, and triple that when a sports team came through. But sometimes it was impossible to tell when I’d need more burgers. I’d be chilling out with my usual four-count of burgers around 2:30 (that middle time when no one comes for lunch or dinner), and some carful of teenage boys would come through the drive through and order 16 junior cheeseburgers. I didn’t like having to tell people to wait.

            When there weren’t any customers to serve or potatoes to bake or chickens to fry, I was supposed to throw water on all the grills and scrape the grease off them, but instead I just listened to people. Cassidy always seemed to have such a dramatic life for living out in the country. Once, I heard her yelling out the second drive-thru window at a customer and then ran back into the freezer bawling. Apparently someone had broken into her house and killed her dog. 

Place Prewrites: Places that are gone.

a.      I used to have teal blankets on my twin bed. I used to cuddle up under them with my Winnie the Pooh as you sat next to me. We used to read about Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever, every night. You would read. I would listen under my fuzzy teal covers.

      Sometimes after we finished the chapter, you’d stay with me in bed, and I’d curl into a ball and you’d curl around me. I always faced away from you. One night, after an especially emotional chapter, I realized that I slept turning away from you every night. I ran downstairs to find you and mom at the kitchen table doing bills. I told you both I loved you, and that when I slept turned away from you, it didn't mean I didn't want you there. You understood. But pretty soon, you stopped sleeping there anyway.

b.      We had the coolest treehouse in town. On top of a giant think tree in our backyard, stood a wooden castle, complete with a tent-style tarp roof, trapdoor leading to the metal ladder, front castle doors leading to the climbing net, and the two metal slides. The problem with the metal slides is that they were combined into one big slide—end of one to the start of another. So if you were going fast enough, you would fly off the first one and land halfway down the next, which hurt pretty bad sometimes—but we didn’t care.

      We were popular back then. If anyone wanted to come over, we just said “Our house is the one with the massive castle treehouse in the back,” and they knew where to go. We had parties in it, campouts in the rain and in the snow. We had contests and taught our dog Shiloh to climb the metal ladder into the fort. Sometimes we’d open the trap door to go down, and Shiloh would be sitting right there, waiting for us to let him in.

      One time we made a whole city of boxes underneath it. We had the coolest tree fort and ground fort too! The boxes were all duck taped together so that there were tunnels leading everywhere. It took up almost our entire backyard. Some parts even had a second floor, but the second floor didn’t last long before caving in under me. That eventually came down, but we always had our treehouse.

      I don’t even remember when it came down. I remember Dad telling us it was rotting, and that it wouldn’t last much longer. I remember getting too busy with school and sports to play in it anymore, so I must have at least been in middle school. Maybe 7^th grade. I didn’t even pay attention to it until it was gone. And then it was gone, and I felt like I’d lost part of me, but I couldn’t explain it to anyone.

c.       That basement has been everything. It used to be my hideaway. I would explore the cubby hole, conceal myself in blankets. Then it was the family room. We got the big TV and the couches and watched movies and superhero shows together. When I got older, I brought my friends down there, and it became the party room. We had Yu-Gi-Oh tournaments, air hockey games, Crash Bandicoot Playstation Marathons, Pokemon trading parties. We never left that place. We would stay up for 24 hours playing against each other, sleep for the next 18, and do it again.

      My first winter break during college, I reopened up the basement, and Brandon and I watched five seasons of “Smallville” consecutively, almost never even leaving that basement even to eat. But the next time I came home for break it was different. Kayla was graduating soon, and she wanted her own apartment. The basement was hers from then on. Sometimes I’d venture down to that old spot without thinking and get kicked out, up to my own room. My friends don’t hang out there anymore—we’ve moved off to other houses, other basements full of binge playing and sleep deprivation.

      Sometimes Kayla invites me down for a Lord of the Rings marathon. 

Craft Notes: “No Man’s Land” by Eula Biss from ‘Notes from No Man’s Land’

a.      Structure: Bolded sections (8 total). Different versions of the ‘no man’s land.’

b.      Techniques: Uses a book, her past and present interpretations (fiction!). Personal encounters turned to scenes. Insights thrown in from herself and her husband.

c.       Images: At the beginning of ‘On the Border,’ she does nothing but paint an image of her Chicago and then harshly contrasts it to Evanston.

d.      Phrases: “This is what white people do to each other, they cultivate each others’ fear.” 93% of murders are by men is “mass pathology.” “These are the murders that allow us to be afraid of who we want to be afraid of.”

e.      Themes: Fear (and its infusion in our lives as violent to others); water (used as a symbol of freedom and openness, but also of fear of the unknown and being limited); Race (the divisions of race in Chicago, but in Rodger’s park not. The idea of pioneering overtop of the black citizens. Being afraid of them, which hurts them and us.).

f.        Questions: Why Little House on the Prairie? Was saying “This land belongs to God” an attempt to generalize and tie up loose ends? It seems a little too easy that way.

Craft Notes: “Black News” by Eula Biss from ‘Notes from No Man’s Land.’

a.      Techniques: Throws the reader into the story (via another story). Abrupt scene switch. Comparison of NY to San Diego. Tons of examples. Super-short summation of entire childhood. Gun as metaphor for unimportant crime of the past.

b.      Words / Phrases: “Another.” “When I wasn’t the only white person at the events…” ‘Perhaps now that we believe nurture plays at least as much a part in child development as nature, we simply take children away from black women instead of sterilizing them.’ ‘I’m not sure at exactly what point I lost heart…”

c.       Form: Loosely chronological, story-oriented. Less obvious sections. The story about Ms. Johnson carries throughout and her interjections about things as a whole appear spread throughout.

d.      I will take from this: The power of getting angry about something. The fluidity of writing when you’re vulnerable and open about the injustice you’ve seen. We’ve all seen injustice somewhere. Some of us have lost heart because we’ve seen so much. I can talk about that.

e.      Voice: Angry. Fast paced and emotional. Honest and vulnerable. Showing the loss of heart.

f.        Questions: Did she ever seek justice on her own for these people? What were the levees?

g.      Group discussion Q’s: 1. This was a very emotional and angering piece. At what point did you feel most connected emotionally to Biss and her experience? Try to give a section and then a specific quote that stood out. 2. What did you think of the weaving structure of Ms. Johnson’s story? Was it powerful done in this way? 3. What do you think the tone and voice were like? Angry, downtrodden, rebellious, critical? 4. Here we find out more about Biss’s childhood and family past than we do in all the other essays combined, and she gives it in one page length. What about this form made the background effective? What (if anything) made it hard to follow or seem dysjunct?

The Peruvian Potato: First Draft

          I sat with perfectly erect posture at the old wooden supper table. There were two sliced palta and a bag of white bread in the center—the real food was one the way. I waited alone at that table until it came, and it was potatoes. Some other edibles were present as well—a fried egg, some white rice—but mostly just potatoes. It turns out Peru had about 5000 different types of potatoes to offer me. I would probably eat about 20 of them over the next three months, and I liked some of them. The yuca potato, for instance, is a slightly sweeter and softer form of the potato that also happens to be filled with cyanide. They’re really good once you cook out the toxins.

            Sadly, we weren’t having yuca that night. We had yellow potatoes that we peeled with our fingernails (eating the skin is bad for the stomach). As a side, my host dad gave me my choice of about 10 different types of corn he’d harvested just last week from his chakra across the field. I decided to pass up the exotic purple one for some regular choclo—a starchy (yes, like potatoes) white corn. We ate in silence that first night, except to offer me seconds, and thirds, and then dessert. I found that dessert means hot tea in Peru, and oddly enough was served to me in a massive white-plastic thermos. “Oddly” because it was placed within a house with bare cement walls above the first floor, on a table of hand-carved wood, next to eggs collected that morning, and between a family that’s main income came from Celestino’s 12-hour days in the chakra and Sundays leading the small church service. And then there was the American plastic thermos. When we didn’t have any tea bags left, we just mixed cane sugar and the hot water together for flavor. It was still called dessert.

            The flood thing was actually a crazy story. In 2010, a torrential amount of rainfall hit southern Peru, about 67% more than normal—and it didn’t stop for weeks. Eventually all the nearby rivers started overflowing, which wouldn’t be too big of a problem, except that the majority of homes in rural Peru are made of adobe, a tough mixture of clay, mud, animal poop, and straw. So when the water level rose around the houses to about the first floor, they simply melted and fell apart. Over 28,000 people lost their homes during that storm. The famous Machu Picchu attraction was shut down and the government used helicopters to rescue stranded tourists. Luckily, my host family had just finished building one of the first cement houses in the town. But water levels were rising, and they had nowhere to go when the flooded river’s new course led straight into and around their house.

            They were on the roof, praying to God for help, when the members of the village church appeared on the high ground. They made a human chain leading into the raging brown river around the house. One by one, the members of my host family had jumped to join the human chain and were pulled back to the high ground. 20 people died in that flood, but the Cutipa family survived because of the people who loved them.

            People in Huacarpay and nearby Lucre lived in donated tents for months before the government built every family a one-room cement house on the other side of the river. People migrated to the new town, rebuilt adobe houses, and tried to salvage possessions, and then I showed up and ate potatoes and choclo. They’d housed Sammy Rosario for SST before me, and they’d welcome dozens more students into their home after me. I started talking, started slouching, and had my first drink of alcohol with a family I’d come to love, but I knew I was just one potato of 5000. 

Story Ideas

                  Upon reading ‘Journalist Takes to Sledding; Brings Home Tips and Tricks,’ by Quinn Brenneke on Goshen Commons, I started thinking of looking at the snow story under a different light. My first thought: interview the guys who drive the plow trucks and clear the roads for us. What was their experience? Did they have to do overtime on the extra-snowy days? Was it dangerous?

            I read a few ‘Life After Goshen’ features like ‘To Hollywood Through Goshen: Monica Sherer’ and ‘Monkey See, Monkey Mind Controls Arm’ (which was super cool!). out of these I thought: What about a Goshen grads that stayed here? What is the “just-graduated young adults” crowd like here? How are they using (or not using) their degrees to make Goshen a better place or to just make ends meet?

            I’m leaning toward the first one. I think that would be really interesting if thy are still plowing a few weeks from now. 

Craft Notes: “Goodbye to All That,” by Eula Biss from Notes from No Man’s La

a.     Voice: Story-telling. Opening up. “I remember” a lot. “I need to tell you,” very informal, like she’s sitting across from me telling me about her life. Destroys fourth wall. Occasionally talks about herself in third person as “the heroine.”

b.      Structure: Chronology—keeps resetting to the beginning and telling the story in a different way. Like she doesn’t know what story to tell yet.

c.       Images: The refrigerator too heavy to carry upstairs, the rank apartment with terrible smells, the ice skating on dull spoons and slush. Threatened by a guy with a lighter. Sexually harassed by an 8-year-old. Leaving New York with not even a bed, no more plants, or snapshots of family.

d.      Phrases: “the myth of New York,” “Just go home/ Do it again.” The apathy and repetition. “I remember the moment when I realized exactly what it had already cost me.” “It’s difficult for me to separate my experience in New York from my sensation of finding the limits of my own independence.” ‘By the time I left New York, I knew that success and failure are silly terms in which to speak of living a life.” “the heroine is not convinced she in the heroine.”

e.      I will take from this the voice of writing like I’m telling an informal story, just searching for ways to say it.

f.        Questions: What was Joan Didion’s essay about (I suppose I find out when I read that one)? Was this story before or after she got her Master’s degree? Or her bachelor’s? 

Craft Notes: “Land Mines” by Eula Biss from "Notes from No Man’s Land"

a.      Images: The first paragraph gives several images of undesired child behavior.

b.      Poignant quotes: “and established public education in America as the method we use to manage large populations of our own people who frighten us.” – suddenly relating to separated ideas. “universal, tax supported, free, compulsory, bureaucratic, racist, and class-biased,” describing the school systems.

c.       Voice: Authority position (having worked as a teacher). Compassionate voice. She wants to help; she wants to figure this out. Critical voice. She has an opinion and wants to prove it.

d.      Techniques: Juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated ideas (fear of children with fear of African Americans, creation of school system with controlling the African American population, “universal” and “bureaucratic”). Examples of children’s writing to show harsh themes of their world. Personal anecdote and personal interpretation of what it means.

e.      Structure: Somewhere between 8 and 10 sections. Each section mixes the personal and historical (unlike other works by her that switch sections as she switches from historical to personal).

f.        Is the reference at the end to 911? Does she mean her role as a teacher in the end was to keep kids there? I feel like that cuts it short. 

Hug-it-out

 I                I had something for her. Finally, something to give. Kayla was waiting for me when I got home. I started handing out presents: a fuzzy hat for mom, a leather cap for dad, a knitted Spiderman beanie for Brandon—authentic sheep’s wool—and then Kayla. The glass turtle was beautiful. She had collected turtles for as long as I could remember, and this one would top them all. Hand crafted in Colombia, and proof that I had thought of her on this trip. Proof that I cared.

            I began unraveling the carefully stored present, but then I saw it, the prefect glass turtle slipping from its packaging. It fell to the ground and shattered at Kayla’s feet. We just stared at it for a solid minute. We both knew what it was. It was a peace offering. It was a way of forgetting the past and moving on, trying to become friends again. She almost cried. She just looked down at the pieces—I saw her heart breaking. And I felt my own do the same.

a.      [Second Try, Same exercise] Kayla is my little sister by two years. When we were kids, she’d follow me around everywhere, watch Batman with me instead of Barney, be my side-kick on neighborhood adventures. And she was my backbone. I would stick up for a bug’s right to live on the playground, but I wouldn’t stick up for my own right to not get beat up. That’s when Kayla came out swinging for me. When I came home crying because I’d try to sell our garden tomatoes to the neighbor for a dollar a piece and he’d taken the whole lot for that dollar, it was Kayla who went with mom to get them back.

      Kayla was stubborn, sassy, and sarcastic. She was blunt. You wouldn’t want to be anywhere near her when she came home from work. She was mean sometimes. I couldn’t stand mean people, so slowly, we edged out of each others’ lives. But now I had a gift. I wanted our relationship back. It would start with this gift: the glass turtle handcrafted in Colombia. We would hug-it-out like we did when we were four and six.

      I walked in my door, and she was there waiting for me. I started handing out gifts: a wool hat for mom, a leather hat for dad, a Spiderman beanie for Brandon. As I was unwrapping Kayla’s turtle, her eyes got wide. She would love it. Then it fell—plummeted to the ground right in between my feet and hers. We both watched it shatter. We just stared at it for a minute. I felt like crying. Kayla’s eyes betrayed her for the first time, showed her devastation. I went upstairs to try to fix it. We never hugged-it-out. 

First Draft: The Cubby Hole

1.      I wiggled my way into the tiny, square hole in the wall. She followed. A “cubby hole” mom would call it. It used to be the base of our upstairs gas fireplace, but they didn’t like it. So they carved it out and coated the red-brick walls with the same pink carpet from the upstairs living room. There wasn’t enough, so the brick was showing on all the corners.

            The entire wall containing the hole was bare brick. Above the hole on this brick wall, Mom’s small wooden shelf was perched. On it laid a bi-fold wedding photo, a big, white, unused candle, a golden goose with a small bowl for a body, and a pair of massive toe-nail clippers sitting sideways inside the bowl-body of the golden goose. The hole was plenty big enough to fit my 8-year old body through—barely capable of allowing a full adult passage into its domain.  The room inside the hole was a strange shape—like a rectangle with a trapezoid on top of it and extra squares off of the sides. Despite being a tiny room, it was about eight feet tall (all the way up to the next floor). It was a secret place. A spying place.

            When Dad got home from winning another “3 on 3” tournament with Feeba, Ryan would follow me down into the cubby hole. I could put my arms and legs on the sides of the trapezoid part and Spiderman-climb all the way to the top, where the leftover metal tubes from the fireplace still dangled down on my head. Through the holes and tubes above me that led to the living room (which still appeared to have a fireplace in it), I heard every word Mom and Dad and Feeba would say to each other. I would climb down to my enamored friend and report the topics of discussion.

            They talked about Dad’s 3-point shot. They called him Dr. Nay. He almost never lost. They said he could have gone pro when he was younger. Dad was silent after that. They talked about us kids. They tapped on the fireplace when they knew I was listening. Mom never said much. She was glad he was home. Glad they had won. Sometimes, after Mom left to make supper or wash dishes, Dad and Feeba would talk about wives. I guess Feeba wasn’t very happy with his wife, and Dad would say encouraging things. He would say “be patient,” “they’re all the same,” “you got to learn to deal with it.” He would suggest they go out for a drink to let off steam.

            When they came for us, I climbed to the top and hid. Ryan curled into a tight ball in the right or left square, but parents’ hands could reach the squares. Feeba would drag her out and tickle her on the ground outside our oasis. I stayed hidden. No one could reach me there. I was safe. I had control. I would listen for the screen door to click closed from upstairs, still listening through the metal tubes and vent holes.

            One day, Ryan came running down to the basement yelling about Mommy and Daddy kissing. We were suddenly perplexed by this. We’d seen it a million times, but just now we thought of it. We thought of ourselves—a boy and girl just like Mommy and Daddy. We climbed into our secret space. We looked at each other, and we kissed. We were very proud. “Daddy! Me and Kolton kissed!” she exclaimed while voluntarily venturing out of the dark cubby hole. They weren’t quite sure what to say.

            A few years later, Mom thought the basement was too cold to do anything in. They installed a small furnace over the opening of the cubby hole. I tried to squeeze through once. I didn’t fit anymore.

Craft Notes: “Three Songs of Salvage” by Eula Biss from Notes From No Man’s Land

a.      Techniques: Starts in the middle of a scene. Uses “the escalator” and “the Fifty-first Street station” opposed to “an escalator” (generic escalator). It gives immediacy and specificity to the opening image.

b.      Tone: Blunt. Recounts sad story after sad story, doesn’t reveal the connection between. “God bless you” repeated over and over. We don’t know how she feels about religion at the beginning. Admittive (saying sothing for the first time out loud feel) “And this is hard for me to admit”. “Born Again.”

c.       Structure: Numbered Sections. Different chapters starting with her experience and morphing to other family members. Section 2 in kind of a full flashback, but not really. It’s an abstract flashback.

d.      Important points, phrases: ‘I haven’t spoken yet,” describes an interesting fact that we seldom think about but always take part in: when do we say our first word each day? “God bless you, sweetheart”: we start to establish her feelings toward religion, as complex. “Obatala, is the father of both insanity and wisdom,” creating connections between the two. “Save” so many meanings.

e.      I will take the technique of creating immediacy by usinf “the” instead of “a” as articles. Also open-ended questions throughout. It’s intriguing and hinting.

f.        What does it mean?  I still feel ambiguous. She thinks we must be born again, but how does that apply to the specifics in her life? She feels new beginnings are good for us. New directions. 

Craft Notes: “Relations” by Eula Biss from "Notes from No Man’s Land"

a.      Tone/voice: Personal and informative. Court Cases, history lessons, like a newspaper story in its beginning—telling us what happened like a newscaster. Interesting flair to the piece: “epic tale of blood and belonging.” Changes to personal tone, uses first person.

b.      Structure: Starts out as a news story. Moves into the personal with the doll stories. To the general with Black/white doll stats. Back to the personal story with her doll. A short section broadening it back to the general again. Staying with Cousins. Back to the original news story, but in a personal way now. It’s a braid of many different elements, none of which come to a real conclusion until the end, so it keeps us interested.

c.       I will take the suspense from this for my own writing. The idea of broadening a personal story with elements of world news or historical fact and leaving each part of the story open-ended until the end. I will use that to make my pieces more interesting.

d.      Words that bring in the focus: “It isn’t easy to accept a legacy of whiteness as an identity.” “Topsy-turvy doll” “refused to be white.”

e.      Style: it’s like a mix genre between historical non-fiction, news writing, and personal essay. The beginning seems like the news writing, and the facts and history of the dolls seems like historical non-fiction. Then she adds in the personal essay throughout.

f.        Q’s: I wonder whether she started with the personal essay idea and expanded the historical and news-y pieces around it, or if she thought the news story was interesting and then as a second thought was able to connect it to her own life. Was the piece heavily research-based, or just knowledge she kept somewhere in her brain and later used?

Craft Notes: “Introduction” by Ira Glass from "The New Kings of Nonfiction"

a.      Telling: “I don’t see anything wrong with a piece of reporting turning into a fable.” “They either find a new angle on something we all know about already, or—more often—they take on subjects that nobody else has figured out are worthy of reporting.” “I think you’ve really only got two basic building blocks. You’ve got the plot of the story, and you’ve got the ideas the plot is driving at.”

b.      Images: photocopies of photocopies, piles of old stories. “Random issues of a Canadian magazine a friend edited for a while.” “You can knock your head against a wall for days,”

c.       Tone: Very informal and friendly. Cusses, informal vocabulary, talks to us like we’re talking over coffee. “trying his damndest.” “I say Phooey to that. This book says phooey to that.” “trots”, “hokum”, “this passage just kills me,” to introduce a quoted text. “I think it’s for losers.” Very comedic and entertaining. Tells us how she feels.

d.      Structure: Her opinion and images, a passage from a story, “telling” the importance of the passage or of that person. Stars to separate sections of more specific focus.

e.      Questions: Are all the passages from the intro later in the book? I hope so. Also, What would Ira consider a line between news features and larger non-fiction stories, if there even is one?

First Draft of "Looking for an Upgrade"

There’s always something newer. In 8^th grade, I traded in my first cell phone—a brown old Motorola flip-phone—for a shiny new Razr. A year later, I got a blue slider-phone with a full keyboard. Junior Year of high school, Mom bought us all iPhones, and I kept that for years. I thought I had something substantial, something that could change how I lived a little. I utilized every aspect of the phone: I used it to keep my schedule, to wake me up, to document important moments, and even to shop cheaply. Sitting on the toilet was no longer wasted time—l could be productive at any moment. I sunk into the iPhone as it sunk into me. Wasn’t it good? Everyone else was moving onto the iPhone 4s, but I was still content with my 4. I was proud of that. It wasn’t the newest, but it was still the best.

            In 8^th grade, I broke up with Rachel, my first girlfriend—my first kiss. I dated the preacher’s daughter, and we had fun. A little better than last time, I thought. I dated one of the hottest girls in school. It was new and fresh and exciting. A few months later I wanted someone more substantial. I dated an older girl. A little better than last time, I thought. I dated a band geek. Almost, I thought. Almost. Junior year of high school, I dated a Mexican girl, and we stayed together for years. I thought I had someone substantial now. She changed the way I saw the world and how I lived. We were together at every moment. We utilized every second together: we studied Spanish together, watched kids’ cartoons, debated the theology of prayer, made out on old country roads. I had no time to waste—her problems were mine to fix. I sunk into her as she sunk into me. Wasn’t it good? Everyone else was moving on new loves, another crush, but I was still content with her. I was proud of that. She wasn’t new, but she was still the best.

            Everyone at college had iPads. They were new and fun and exciting—so much more useful! I held on to my iPhone 4 for a while. The screen cracked around the edges. The battery life dwindled. The camera stopped working. It was falling apart. I couldn’t stand to see so many people with great new technology while I was barely able to communicate with my iPhone. I bought an iPad. I used it for homework; I watched movies while I biked; it changed the way I lived in its own small way. It was new and exciting.

            Every girl I saw at college was brilliant. They were different and new and exciting—so unique compared to the girls I knew in high school! They had goals and passions and strong opinions. They were strong. My sweetheart and I, we stayed together for a while. We stopped talking to each other. Our energies dwindled dealing with each other. I couldn’t see her as beautiful anymore. We were falling apart. I couldn’t stand to see so many young women full of life and energy and love while I could barely communicate with her. We broke up. She dropped out of college. Three months later, I gently kissed a PJCS major. She wanted to help others, save the world, change the way we lived. She was passionate. She was new and beautiful and exciting.

            I’m running out of money. Looking for the next best thing takes a toll after a while. I want to live with what I enjoy, not what society tells me I’ll enjoy more. This habit still aches on me.

            It’s been two years. I cannot keep looking for the next best thing. I want to live with who I enjoy and love, not she who society tells me I could enjoy or love more. The habit still aches on me. 

Craft Notes - “On the Fine Art of Literary Fist-Fighting” by Lee Gutkind

a.      He uses techniques like sliding between scenes, sometimes tears apart, but they always have something related to join them together. He switches back and forth in time, not going straight chronologically. He weaves other people’s stories in with his own.

b.      The voice is conversational. He tells stories like he’s sitting across from me, reminiscing about the past. He uses informal words like “newish” and seems to trust the reader with the intimate details. He doesn’t make a big deal out of them, like he’s told it all before, and maybe he has.

c.       Every time he slides to a new topic or scene he creates the image of the scene. Like when he starts talking about living in Pittsburgh, “I walked around my neighborhood with my guard up.” He gives us an image to look at while he lays the big stuff on us, like the heavy amount of discrimination and violence there was toward him because of his Jewish religion.

d.      There are five sections: an intro, a section on getting started in journalism and the “newish” type of writing, a section about how creative non-fiction became a focus, a section about starting the literary journal, and then how he feels about the journal. The overall sections are chronological through his life, but the stories within them often aren’t.

e.      I will take with me the idea of having an overarching chronological work of non-fiction, but within the chronology, using different times and parts of my life to build on each other by theme rather than time-relation.

f.        Questions: How is this supposed to be a part of a memoir? It seems way too condensed to be part of a memoir. What was a defining nationwide occurrence that sparked the idea of Non-fiction being worthwhile?

Craft Notes on 'The Father" by Mary Jones

a.      The voice is matter of fact. There is no telling at all, just showing. Maybe the end is telling: “they did not see him on the first Sunday, or on any other day, any more.” That ending line doesn’t give us an image, but it creates an emotion. All through the piece, she is just letting us absorb all these images, and then BAM, at the end we have to feel something, and it germinates from the images we’d just absorbed.

b.       This quote and phrase, “I don’t care about my kids,” the father said. And he closed the door and ate the spaghetti,” show me the kind of man the father is in a very small space. It makes the whole piece. We catch glimpses of who the father is throughout, with the repetitiveness of the actions, the fact that they only saw him once a month, but that phrase shows what’s actually happening between him and his kids.

c.       The piece holds together because it is extremely short and to the point. It borders on matter-of-fact sometimes, and that’s what keeps it going. They do the same thing every month, ans it’s told in a fast-paced matter of fact way, and we are waiting for something to change. When it does change, it hits us hard because of what the meaning is, but also because the format changes from matter-of-fact showing to a final telling sentence.

d.      I take with me the idea of accompanying changes in the content of a story with format changes or style changes as well. By changing the format and the content and the style all at once, I can create a bigger impact on the reader, and it will be more noticeable. In this way, I could also call attention to certain aspects the reader should notice.

e.      The form is simply an intro of the repetitive happening with the father, a scene with the father and the man at the door, and the ending sentence. The children never have voices of their own, which is interesting. It almost seems like the story is told by the mother about her ex-husband. The father has his voice in the second part along with the salesman. The mother, if the author, would be the one telling of their activities in the narrative section. The kids never get a section. They are silent passive agents to the movements of their parents.

f.        I also read: “How to Fall in love For Real” by Kent Shaw, “Balancing Act” by Lisa Knopp.

Dear Dad,

            Do you remember when I jumped off the boat? I was probably four or five, just sprawled out on our inflatable green raft. I was playing with the nightcrawlers we’d picked up at the Turnabenie’s drive-thru. I think you and Mom were getting along—just there, fishing together.

            I remember looking out over the edge to see the water. It was dark green, almost black. I leaned—not at all cautiously—over the raft’s edge to touch it, and I plunged in head first. You told me later that I barely made a sound. That all you heard was curplunk, and I was gone. I remember it was peaceful down there. I saw only dark liquid everywhere; I didn’t move at all. I just sank deeper.  I let myself go. But do you remember when you grabbed me? You grabbed me around the waist. You tilted me up slowly and changed my path, until we both popped out of the water back into the air. You asked me if I had fun. Of course you would. With a big smile, I said yes, and I saw mom frantically flailing toward us from behind.

            Do you remember when you left? Because I don’t. I wasn’t there. Mom and Kayla started jumping off the boat. They went head first and didn’t move. They were sinking, and I had to catch them, guide them back to the air myself. But eventually, I jumped too. And this time, I just kept going. I kept falling further and further away from it all. I let myself go. Mom jumped in after me, thrashing around in the water hoping to find me. She’s still there, thrashing in the water. You’re still gone. I actually did pretty well underwater. I learned how to swim. But one of us is still sinking. Please catch her.

Love,

Kolton

Dad as a teenager

Dad was “Kev” growing up. He was short, slim, and scrawny with not a hair on his body save his dirty-blonde locks. He was a pretty-boy—one of those faces that made the girls swoon despite his height challenge. But at home, he was the runt of the guy, senior only to his little sister, Kim. When he was about 15, he came outside in his blue Cavs tank top and gym shorts looking for his older brother Vince. He had a plan. Together, they rigged an elaborate trap for their older brother Kyle in the barn. First came the bucket of tar, then the chicken feathers, fresh from the chickens in the back yard. By the end of the prank, they were all covered in tar, so their father, Norvel, threw them in the tub one by one and dumped gasoline on them. Doris rubbed them raw with a hard foam scrubber. Once their skin was raw, Norvel gave them each a few good slaps and sent them to the Hilltop Market to get some cigarettes. Dad ran down into the fields instead chasing deer. He promised himself he’d catch one someday.

My First Memory

I remember sitting in a green rubber raft. I was playing with big, fat nightcrawlers in a blue plastic container we’d picked up at Turnabenie’s, the drive-through market on our street. I remember putting down my wriggling worm and peering over the side of the inflated green sides of the raft to see us surrounded by shimmering dark water. My parents were both on the other side of the boat fishing, but I paid no mind to them. The darkness of the water beneath me was fascinating. I remembering reaching for it—I so wanted to touch it. I wanted to explore the new exciting expanse below my bobbing raft. I leaned a little farther over the edge of the raft, reached a little farther to that shimmering dark green. I remember slipping forward. My hand entered first, it was a rush of cold and wet and new and I loved it. I let my arm and head follow it into the new land. I remember my whole body being underwater, and I was just urging myself down deeper. I didn’t move my body, I just sank and observed. I remember feeling my dad’s hands come to rest softly around my waist. I knew they were meant to be there. He tiled me forward, then up, and then we both surfaced out of the water. I remember Dad turning me toward him and asking me if I liked it. I just smiled. I remember seeing Mom in the background frantically splashing her way through the water toward us. Dad pulled us back to the raft.