Reader Response to "My Father's Chinese Wives"

When I was looking up this story to try to find it online (I don't have the book! The copies were much appreciated) I stumbled upon a few sources that said that it was an autobiography, which I'm not certain I can trust because it didn't seem like that to me from reading it but it still could be true. Which might actually be a kudos to Loh's writing style, because when writing non-fiction I would say one of the biggest fears is that the story isn't going to be exciting enough, and I was engaged the entire time with this story. Unfortunately, or maybe I should say fortunately, my father isn't crazy and seventy years old and petitioning for wives from China, but everyone has a story to tell and we shouldn't second guess whether it's exciting or not - anything can be exciting if the story is told well enough.

First of all I feel like the writing workshop thing is much too real and that might be me in twenty years. I also feel as if almost every workshop class I have been in has at least one Fred in it. Please, people, if you're reading this, don't be Fred.
I think part of the success of the story is the way it is so dryly told. It does not marvel at the things that are happening, even though they're pretty crazy. It just tells them in a straightforward manner and lets the events speak for themselves:

"And 47-year-old Liu - the writer of the magic letter - is the lucky winner! Within three months, she is flown to Los Angeles. She and my father are married a week later."

  She doesn't waste any time going what in the world my elderly father just flew a woman overseas and doesn't even know this person and just up and married her in a week's time how crazy is that what is my life - she just states what happened and lets us infer that this is probably what shes is thinking, because that is what most normal people would think under such circumstances.

They probably have a healthier relationship than some of the crazy ones I've seen between friends and acquaintances, but that's beside the point.

The point comes at the end of the story:

"The song has nothing to do with him personally: it is from some old Chinese fable. It has to do with missing someone, something, that perhaps one can't even define any more.
...we are even sitting our home, and we long for it."

The entire story is of searching for something, of trying to find our place in this big planet, where doing crazy things might not seem that crazy if it helps us find out where we belong.

Reader Response to "Convalescing"

First of all can we take a moment to talk about how Joyce Carol Oates basically looks like Professor Trelawney in her author portrait. You do you, JCO. Anyway.

Things that I underlined:

"Life was a joke she hadn't caught"

This is such a simple statement but says a lot. I feel like I know a lot of people like this - it's just saying that some people take things much too seriously, while also giving a little insight into David's perspective on the world.

"The first question had panicked him because he did not know the answers."

This struck me because the questions the girl was asking were not difficult questions at all, which shows a great way how to reveal something was wrong with David before saying precisely what. It also glimpses into David's thought life and the importance of describing the way a character is feeling.

"Her name was Eunice, not David's idea of a name for a baby girl, but now she had grown up into a Eunice and dragged her cello off to a music lesson every Saturday..."

I absolutely love the idea of someone growing into the way their name sounds. I knew a Eunice once. Sadly to say I feel like this is completely true.

"He loved her but could not truly believe in this love."

Again, showing that something is wrong without saying precisely what it is. Such a sad statement.

"The emotions faded, the events could not be remembered - and where, in such a puzzle, was a fixed point?"

I didn't dislike this story, but I don't know if I particularly enjoyed reading it either - not because it was poorly written, but because it was well written. The whole way through I was just sitting there going "errrrrrrghhhh" (in my head, not out loud, we all hope) because David's situation is just so disheartening and groggy, and it made me feel that way throughout as well. Sometimes I like to write about sad things, but JCO writes so powerfully that it makes you feel that way through to your bones.

Circle Writing

For Ice Cream

It was the absolute perfect day.

Clouds etched against the sky in brushstroke wisps, the sun a willowy pinprick of yellow. The city of Orange today was the city of blue skies and brown brick buildings, the downtown plaza tickled by the slight breeze and toddlers skirting the sides of the big water fountain in the middle, balanced on tiny tiptoe. Bird cut through the air on red-tipped wings. People ate their brunch wearing trendy hats at hole in the wall cafes, chattering about their to-do lists and dinner plans. Palm trees, rose bushes, magnolias lined the red brick sidewalks. Nothing possibly could disturb such an idyllic, quaint town.

TJ was engaged in the most difficult battle of his young life.

Daddy had been holding his hand while mommy held his younger sister Sara in her arms when he’d first heard it.

The dulcet tones of the song, getting louder as the truck came closer. The wheels on the bus go round and round, it played. He had never heard anything sweeter, literally and figuratively.

Ice cream.

He had to have it.

“TJ, wait!” Daddy called after him when he realized TJ had broken free from his grasp. But TJ had a head start, Daddy had been preoccupied with talking to an older couple admiring Sara in her pink headband.

“Yes, she’s something, my daughter,” he’d said proudly, just as he’d noticed his son racing off on stubby legs faster and disappear around the corner, faster than he thought possible.

We’ll have to put that kid in soccer, he thought.

If TJ made it back alive, of course.

TJ. Five years old. Clad in Ked sneakers, blue button down shirt, green eyes, sunglasses. Mission - ice cream truck. Acquire ice cream. Obstacle - every foreseeable object in his path. Parents heavy on his heels. Mission accepted.

He reached the roundabout in the town center. Problem - so had the ice cream truck. Even though his stubby legs were fast, the V4 cylinder engine of the truck was faster.

For a split second TJ watched as it turned, like slow motion, along the street. It was painted with colorful sloppy stick figure children smiling lopsided blue and orange smiles. It was playing Twinkle twinkle little star now, and there were popsicles and ice cream sandwiches in its belly.

TJ started to run. He needed them in his belly, too.

Target: ice cream truck. Location: Chapman Avenue roundabout.

Being but five years old, to TJ the avenue was not yet a place of rampant danger, pick-up trucks and sirens and buses all the precise size necessary to squish a young child.

No, it was the location of the ice-cream truck so TJ hopped off the sidewalk and sped toward it. His stomach audibly rumbled as he did so.

Well, it would have been audible but for the two cars that abruptly smashed into each other while trying to avoid the little boy stepping out into heavy traffic.

Parents, this may be a lesson why not to feed your children broccoli for dinner two nights in a row.

Target - in sights. Almost in reach. TJ looked behind him. All the pesky cars had piled up behind the two smoking sedans. A siren sounded in the distance, mixing with the tune of We Wish You a Merry Christmas.

The street was now entirely clear, because everyone was rushing to look at the scrunched up hoods of the Toyota and the Camry. Perfect.

The ice-cream truck was pulling to the curb now. If it had just done that in the first place, TJ thought, he wouldn’t have had to hurry so quickly.

He stepped up to the window, panting, starving, thirsty, hair all angles on his head.

The stickers on the white door swam before him. Cherry rocket, lemon swirl, Oreo sandwich, dripping with syrupy anticipation.

He walked up to the window. The man in the driver’s seat was on the phone. Sweat beads were dripping from his forehead.

“I’ll take the limesicle,” TJ said.

Then he realized without Daddy he didn’t have any quarters for the limesicle.

First Line Story

Sunflowers in Heaven

The letter was unexpected.

First of all, it was the only handwritten letter Amy had gotten in years. No one handwrote things anymore. It was all text messages - hey, you on your way, bring a sweater, where you at. Even grocery lists were tucked away into virtual notes on phones. Dear blank, how are you? was no longer heard of.

Yet there it was, two skewed stamps in the righthand corner, circle postmarks stamped all over them from across the world. The return address - New Zealand.

Second of all, she thought he was dead.

What else could it have been? After a whirlwind of two years, watching mom and dad pass away right after each other; Dad went first. The cancer spread faster than they’d thought it would. Mom was always a fighter. She didn’t have cancer, but she didn’t have Dad after that either, and Amy thought that’s what really led her in the end to slip peacefully into his arms in heaven. The doctors say heart attack. She said heartache.

But those two hardest years was what really brought them close. Growing up they had always eaten dinner at the family table together and gone to each other’s soccer games, sure. When the two parts of their lives went missing that had been such a certainty, they bridged the missing pieces with phone calls, about how Dad always ate his peas one by one, mom’s favorite pair of dangly earrings and how she would even wear them when she would garden in the early mornings. Her favorite was sunflowers. She liked to think that heaven was full of sunflowers.

So there were long phone calls, short phone calls, visits. But never letters.

The phone calls had stopped. One day they were laughing at Dad’s attempt to lure a bluejay into their backyard by making what he deemed professional bird calls, the next there was absolute silence. And then the next day, and the next. For the last ten years.

Amy -

I guess you are probably wondering where I’ve been.

Soft tears, gentle, running over the wrinkles of her face that had formed while he had not been there to see. The wrinkle that had formed at the place in her forehead when her husband Tom told her he was going on a business trip - two, three, four business trips. The laughter lines when he second, current husband David and her stayed up late watching the cars pass outside their window because they both had a chronic addiction to coffee. The little beginnings of crow’s feet around her eyes that started when Layla would cry in the middle of the night and “your turn” was David’s favorite phrase after the coffee finally wore off.

He had missed her daughter growing up. He wasn’t there for the first time her son blew out the candles on his cake.

I don’t know if there a point in saying sorry. Sorry is an empty word people say when they want to feel better for whatever thing that’s eating their conscience. It’s up to the other person to realize the person saying sorry feels truly sorry about what they’ve done. I’m going to say it anyway though. I’m sorry.

Can a single word cover ten years? Sorry he’d said when both of her front teeth had fallen out at the same time and he made fun of her gappy smile. Sorry when he spilled the hot chocolate on her stuffed seal Sealo Blue. They weren’t even supposed to be up but they wanted to watch funny videos on the internet. They told mom and Dad sorry too. Sorry for taking her bike to the beach without asking, sorry for never washing the car when he said he would, for missing her violin recital because Jessie the pretty new girl at school needed homework help.

Sorry for missing her first marriage, her second marriage, the birth of her daughter, the birth of her son, and all the life that happened in between.

The world had a finite amount of sorries and his might not cover all the pathways of her life.

He went on to say

I’ve never been good at goodbyes so saying bye mom, bye dad, was something I was not very good at. When I got offered the job I just went. I didn’t think I could stand saying goodbye to anything else. I thought, everything will be here when I get back, and that’s enough.

He never did come back, so she spent her life filling in the empty spaces where spaces should not have been.

He went on to say

Every day I told myself I was fine. I was lying to myself. No matter where you are, if something’s missing, something’s missing. It just took me this long to tell myself the truth.

It was three o’ clock in the afternoon and her hands trembled as they held the plain paper. The sun wafted through her pink daisy curtains. The mailman was making his rounds and Mrs. Anderson’s rottweiler was barking at him.

Now I realize that saying hello can be even harder than saying goodbye depending on who you’re saying hello to.

He went on to say some other things about why when what who and how and then said

For now I will just start with hello.

How are you?

-Matthew

She stood up from the kitchen table. Her chair scraped the linoleum floor. There was stationery in the second drawer of the cabinet, mostly for to-do lists that never got done. It had a cat in the bottom right corner of the paper curled into a circle, three letter Z’s rising from its pointed ears.

The only pen she could find was orange. It matched the cat.

Dear Matthew, she began.

From down the hall she heard her son wake up from his nap, knowing the quiet sounds he made before her really started to cry.

“Coming, Matthew,” she said as she stood up to go to his room.

She left the letter lying on the kitchen table.

Picture Response Story

Vanderbilt’s

I hate Yolanda.

Not only have I been sitting here twiddling my thumbs while she has spent the past thirty minutes making her hair look “totally ridiculous” - which to be honest I’m not sure whether that falls into the category of good or bad - but she is making me go out to this stupid bar in the first place. And on Thursday, of all nights.

Thursday used to be our night. Aaron and I.

Notice how I say used to be. And how I am instead going out with Yolanda and Emily, who is also late, but not because she is making her hair look ridiculous but because she is trying to decide just how short her dress can be without creating potential for getting arrested.

I say it used to be our night instead of is our night because it was the night where he didn’t have night class and I wasn’t working a night shift. Because he would hop on his drums and I’d bust out my saxophone and we’d jazz up his tiny garage to our hearts content then order Indian food, falling asleep to the black and white slides of His Girl Friday on Netflix until we woke up the next morning and had to fall back into the rhythm of regular life, school or work.

I say it used to be our night because as the months passed, so did Thursday nights, but less frequently Thursday nights where we were together. I should have seen the red flags going off everywhere, but instead what I saw was him, in the few hours when he said he was available. Extra shifts at work was the excuse. I never thought not to believe it. My favorite jazz piece we would always play was Take Five but we really should have been playing Good Morning Heartache.

I say it used to be our day because I found out that on days that were not our day, when he didn’t have night class, he was waking up in the morning with some other girl.

So that is why on Thursday, our day, I am sitting twiddling my thumbs in my favorite red pumps waiting for Yolanda to make her hair ridiculous and for Emily to find the happy medium between sexy and porn star.

About three hours later they both emerge from their respective bathrooms in our apartment, Emily teetering on white platform shoes in a yellow cutout dress and Yolanda’s blonde hair looking admittedly ridiculous, but in the good category.

She says, “You hoes ready yet?” which I know is an endearing term because Yolanda only calls people she hates nice names like sweetheart. She steps out the door and is calling us a cab almost before I can grab my bag and hop in. Emily teeters right after us and closes the cab door just as Yolanda is yelling, “To Vanderbilt’s!” followed by a bunch of “woo!”s. Emily follows suit. I think she might already be tipsy. In fact, I think I might have never known a time when Emily wasn’t a little tipsy.

Vanderbilt’s turns out to be this trendy little club built where the old Vanderbilt Theater used to be before they demolished it, according to a little plaque outside the door. It also says was built during the Great Depression. I find this oddly fitting to my current state. I am starting to warm up to Vanderbilt’s.

We are here because Yolanda’s father hates this sort of place, and Yolanda likes to do things her father hates. Her man friend is also meeting us here, and Yolanda likes to do her man friend. Her man friend, Bobby, likes to go to bars. When he actually does show up.

However, from the outside looking in at Vanderbilt’s, I’m not entirely convinced they ever finished demolishing it and building a new one. It kind of just looks like back in 50’s when they were tearing it down someone just shrugged their shoulders and left in the middle of the job, then fifty years later someone decided to stick a nightclub in it.

Still, no matter how beaten up it may appear from the outside, and how much I don’t want to be here, I can’t help but notice it’s still beautiful in an ugly kind of way, which I know probably makes no sense at all. Seashell blue paint peels on scalloped balconies, Victorian era reminiscent columns scale the walls. The entrance gate is made up of spiraling steel bars. I’m just thinking that maybe we’re all a little like Vanderbilt’s, beaten and bruised blue but beautiful if you look close enough, when Yolanda drags both me and Emily out of the car and arm in arm we walk through the spirally steel gates. Then the only thing I can think is this is probably the kind of place where chainsaw murderers hang out.

The inside of Vanderbilt’s, at least to the untrained eye, doesn’t look like the kind of place where chainsaw murderers hang out. It seems like the kind of place where twenty to thirty somethings who all have an advanced degree in art history or peace studies or just looking really cool all convene to talk about cultured things. I run my fingers through my hair. The most cultured thing I can think of are the cheese sticks in my fridge.

I turn to Emily, because I predict I will need a drink soon and Emily is the expert. Aaron wasn’t exactly a hipster, but he liked to wear a sarcastic tie every now and then and I’m seeing him in the face of every guy here. Emily, though, is already in the corner chatting up some guy who is a cross between a college art professor and a model. It took her all of ten seconds. The swanky interior must have thrown her off her game of the usual five.

So I turn to Yolanda but she is just staring at her phone waiting for Bobby to text her.

The song in the room ends, the music sweeping out from some circular speaker contraptions on the walls that remind me of traffic lights. The next song is Saturday in the Park and as the notes spread across the floorboards I can’t help my fingers from playing, my leg the imaginary keys of my saxophone. When I first started taking saxophone lessons back in middle school when I thought rainbow bands on my braces were cool things to have, they were on Thursday nights. Then playing with Aaron, it both gave me a glimpse into my past and a peek of what I thought my future with him would be like. Maybe in my head I will always be playing the saxophone on Thursday night.

The walls are lined in velvet purple and there’s a couch in the corner and at the bar there are shelves full of bottles of alcohol in so many shapes and sizes I can’t decide if it’s the world’s greatest sculpture or an avalanche waiting to happen.

Yolanda is doing that thing where she flicks her fingers, so that probably means Bobby stood her up. While I stare at a man wearing an actual beret, I say, “Bobby’s got some interesting taste.”

“Mhm. The sweetheart just texted me he’s not coming,” she says, then turns around and orders three shots of vodka. This is usually the way that Yolanda deals with this.

So I sit on an empty stool at the bar which by the look of it most likely came from an antique store somewhere back in the ‘50’s with floral engravings on the faded wood. I watch Yolanda take sloppy shots while I think about how I still hate her for dragging me here on a Thursday night of all nights. For the past few Thursday nights I have sat burrito style in my snuggie in my bed and watched old movies while slurping slushies. I am particularly missing the snuggie right now. And the old movies. And my bed. And the slushies. And Aaron.

I drift back into reality and notice that another art teacher film director type is sitting next to Yolanda, buying another round for her. I think that some man come up to me and offers to buy me a drink but I’m too busy listening to the ending of Saturday in the Park and wondering if Yolanda is ok, that I don’t even pay any attention to him.

The song ends and changes back to some techno beat. People start to dance. Emily is talking to a different guy now - well, less talking and more recreational activity if you catch my drift - and I’m only watching her for one second, but when I look back Yolanda is gone from the bar.

I scan the room of swaying people and cool mood lighting, and catch a glimpse of Yolanda’s blonde ridiculous hair in the back of the room going around a corner, following art guy. I get up from my antique stool and follow.

“...tore it down in the fifties but they kept a little in the back here if you’ve got a key…” Art guy is whispering a little too close to Yolanda’s ear. He has some kind of accent that I can’t put my finger on but want to describe as “upper class.” Yolanda laughs a tinkly drunk laugh and they both push through a green door that blended into the velvet walls and shadowy lights.

If Aaron were here he would tell me that if this was a horror movie, going into that room would ensure that I would be the first to die. But it’s Thursday night and Aaron isn’t here to tell me that, so I got through the door too.

The door shuts behind me and the pulsing beat of the techno music stops instantly. Heavy silence fills the room.

There is no light but the little that is seeping through the crack under the door. When my eyes adjust, my mouth hangs open. It was right thinking that whoever demolished the Vanderbilt didn’t do such a good job. Because I am looking at what’s left of it.

One wall that now makes up the bar on the other side splices the room in half, but there are still rows of weathered sloping seats, half a balcony. Thick red curtains drape over the dusty half-stage, and I can see it when it was alive, full of applause and music, ringing with laughter. Even the ghost of something can tell the story of what it once was if the thing was great enough.

Then I remember Yolanda.

“Yolanda?” I call out. It almost feels like a violation, to cut the silence of this place.

“Yolanda?”

There is nothing. My voice unsettles the dust in the air. The empty seats stare at my in the dark.

I stare back, thinking they might be the saddest things I have ever seen, once so full but now empty forever, while also thinking that I’m not sure I’ll be hating Yolanda so much anymore, because I’m not sure Yolanda will be around to hate.

I step back into the safety of the club and make two phone calls while the strains of Georgia on My Mind play over the speakers. One is to the police. The other is to Aaron.

Postmodern Prompt Response

Naptime

I have now encountered the two thousand one hundred and sixty-seventh second of my naptime and believe I have reached a different conclusion about the meaning of life about half that many times, before a new and fully fledged hypothesis formed in my neural capacity, the likeliest of these multiple possibilities being -

hungry hungry milk hungry hungry food hungry applesauce hungry

Pardon me I seem to have momentarily lost my train of thought due to an unpleasant sensation occurring in my abdominal region. However it appears I can do nothing to appease the discomfort beside lie on my posterior and await the moment that an older member of my familial unit appears in my room to attend to my needs.

The older units have on several occasions mentioned my room is called the nursery. I still refer to it as my room, because once I age, it will no longer be a nursery. It will be called a room, and I do not think terms should age as we do. If one thing that has a supposed certainty is so fluid to change, what of the rest of the world? We are alive and then we are dead. There is no inbetween.

So as I do indeed lie upon my posterior in my room the view is

shiny! spinny spinny whrrr whrrrr ooohhhh colors swirly swirls zoom zoom swwsh

My apologies once more. My attention seems to have been briefly captured by the object that has been referred to by the older familial units as the crib mobile. On occasion one of them enters the room and presses a button on the side of this crib mobile device and the entire object begins to spin, which is admittedly quite mesmerizing.

The mobil is composed of various african animals including a wide array of pachyderms and my personal favorite ungulate animal, the giraffe. I enjoy the evolutionary circumstance of fighting off other rival ungulates that lead to its extended neck length. When the mobile begins to twirl through propelled motion, it blends together the pachyderms and the ungulates and dusts shadows onto the blue walls of my room that are like a dark dance of primal instinct which makes me think of

scary scared dark dark dark dark momma

Excuse me please. Now I remember one of my original hypotheses, before I was interrupted from concentrating by the unfortunate abdominal sensation. I have postulated that the older a familial unit gets, the slower its cognitive processes become. For instance, I have judged that I myself have the most complex trains of thought, and the second youngest familial unit has digressed considerably but not to the extent of the ones who give me the sustenance that calms the abdominal discomfort. Then the wrinkly ones are of course the least advanced, and I believe somewhere along the process of development they forget their previous level of cognitive ability and allow themselves to lose whatever it was that made them special.

And here is the older female familial unit now. Once again I shall commence in my endeavour to communicate these facts 

Gahhhh wahhh boo ahhhh blll blll vrooo vroo

Reader Response to "Events at Drimaghleen"

Diary of Maureen McDowd, recovered three days after the incident

May 21st, 1985

It's not fair.

I told Lancy we have to stop seeing each other today. I've tried to find a way around it for weeks, the problem churning in circles in my mind. Every day at church I pray for a solution.

But it's his mother. She's as stubborn as a fence post.

We could run away. But neither of us have money. I haven't even brought it up to Lancy. I doubt he would even consider it.

We could just continue to date no matter what his mother says, no matter how my own parents feel. But I don't think that's an option either. In addition to being as stubborn as a fence post, I think his mother has a few marbles missing.

So tomorrow I'm going to bike over there and tell him in person. I already sent him a letter but I don't think that's enough. I just really hope his mother isn't there when I do. I really wish his mother was never there at all.

I keep thinking that there's a hunting gun we use that could make all my wishes come true, but I could never do it. It would be the ultimate sin. But still, I wouldn't mind if the good Lord came to take her sooner than we all anticipate.

Reader Response to "Admission"

So I'm going to post my reactions to this story as I go along page per page. Kind of like live tweeting, but not as cool. Depending on how you view the entity that is Twitter. Anyway.

Page 1: I hate interviews. I literally have one tomorrow and I can think of 180,000 other things that I would rather be doing than answering, "What is your proudest moment?" "What is one thing that you would like to improve about yourself?" One thing that I would probably like to improve about myself is not wanting to smash my head against a wall during interviews.
I like this opening though. It immediately sets up intrigue. Ooo the letter was unexpected - that leads to the question why was it unexpected. I don't really know what the Institute for Early Childhood Development is but the narrative ball is already rolling. I guess I'll keep reading this story.

Page 2: I don't like Duncan. I want a mango.

Page 3: Cassie is staring at the back of Duncan's head and it looks "egg shaped and vulnerable" - does she want to hit him or something? I would. He referred to their child very impersonally and told Cassie she should be working while he's sitting there eating a mango. I still want a mango.
I also drive an old Subaru! Me and Cassie would be friends.
I like what Senna is doing with the intrigue surrounding the institute. We don't even know who Cassie's kid is yet, but there has to be something special about her, perhaps like a super smart Rory Gilmore-esque kind of situation.
There is also a lot of telling, not showing, about Cassie and Duncan's jobs and backgrounds, but that's okay because it's straightforward and necessary.

Page 4: We find out the kid's name is cody. Ok so maybe he won't be like Rory, since for some reason I assumed the kid was a girl.
Being Google-worthy is a frightening concept. I may have just googled myself.
Duncan stop complaining about the work you have to do when you were just sitting around eating your mango.
I also can't tell if we are in the past or the present now which is kind of bothering me.

Page 5: Now I can't tell if Senna views the school in a satirical light, because that celebrity question was pretty satirical.
...zaftig? Back to Google I go.
Esther Vale. I'm curious how other people think of names when they write because when I make up names, either I just think of one off the top of my head that would fit the character or I actually put meaning into it. Esther Vale just sounds like Senna might have been trying to think of something upper class-esque.

Page 6: "The crowd around Cassie seemed to thrum, silently, with excitement and desire." I just don't like this sentence. I always am wary of using "seemed" because why did it seem to thrum instead of actually thrumming? How do you thrum silently? What is thrumming anyway? How do you do it with excitement and desire?
Why do I feel like the token racial images are ones that could totally appear at Chapman? And someone talking about a generous financial aid program?
I think Senna is being satirical with Esther Vale's speech, too, but I'm not sure to effect.

Page 7: Is Julia Roberts actually supposed to be there...Isn't Richard Nixon dead...?
If I was given edamame when I was a toddler I would probably just throw it at a wall.

Page 8: There's a lot of layers here, with Cassie saying she's looking at the institute just to write a play, but getting sucked into the glamorous lifestyle that she once sought to satirize; Senna is satirizing and also pointing out how people lie about the things they want.
Also, they never think of asking Cody what he wants. That might be cool to consider.

Page 9: Ooooohhhh Cassie and Duncan are black? I missed any other tells of this information, but I'm wondering if this is going to turn into an affirmative action piece - the only reason they are getting asked back to interview might be to have the token black kid at the school. Not cool.
I have no clue what "the dew is off the rose" is supposed to mean but I feel like that is some kind of horrible insult.

Page 10: WASPs? Why are there so many words and acronyms in here that I haven't heard of.

Page 11: I feel like Cody probably has more words in his vocabulary than I do.
I like Duncan more now. He is becoming the voice of realism in his story.
Also not gonna lie I just realized this story was 33 pages long and I really want to watch the SNL 40 year thing in fourty-five minutes even though I like the story. So I might just combine some pages.

Page 12-13: I had no idea there was an ethnic barbie named Kira. With stuff like that, I always feel like making the doll in the first place is just trying way too hard to be racially sensitive, but there's really no way around it I guess.
We still really have no clue what Cassie's playwright career entails.
"Why had there been so many fire-related tragedies?" Ok usually if I throw a sentence in like that, it means that the only example I could think of were fire-related tragedies and I just rolled with it.

Page 14-15: I just realized how ridiculous it is that Cody's two years old and they're already worrying about school. I didn't go to school until I was five. What's going to happen next, the kid gets sent straight from the hospital into a classroom?
Okay I googled Sneetch too.
"Neither father nor son saw her where she stood in the shadows." Woah okay that is a little different from the rest of the tone of the story, but it makes sense that it's getting a little darker because Cassie is starting to feel sucked into society.

Page 16-17: Cassie doesn't really care about Cody at all. She only really cares about the status that he can bring her.
Ok I am officially team Duncan now, sorry we got off on the wrong foot. He actually plays with Cody and doesn't care about the school.

Page 18-19: I also googled acerbic.
I wonder if I would have known what acerbic meant if I went to a fancy school when I was two years old.

Page 20-21: "She felt the blood slamming against the inside of her head." I really like this sentence because it sums up basically exactly what a stress headache/getting in an argument feels like without sounding cliche.
"I've almost made it to the other side" this is sad, she finally says what she's been thinking the whole time. What is so wrong with the side she's on?

Page 22-23: Now I'm really curious why they want Cody at their school so badly, which is a sign of a good story. If Senna doesn't let his readers know afterwards I'm going to be annoyed. I didn't expect Cassie to turn down the offer to go to the Institute.

Page 24-26: Ah. Iconoclast. Hi again Google.
That's a really clever bully.
Cassie's motivations for wanting to be on the other side are kind of cliche to me. She didn't have what the other people had growing up. I mean, that's a perfectly plausible reason but the rest of her character seems less stereotypical than this explanation.

Page 27-30: (The SNL 40 year anniversary is hilarious by the way)
Why do they want Cody at the institute so badly? Something is fishy here.
Okay now it's turning into a weird creepy version of When a Stranger Calls -not that that movie isn't creepy anyway. If we don't find out why they want their family to go to the school so badly I'm going to flip a table.
I think Nedra would be the reason the character has issues.

27-33: WHAT WE DON'T GET TO KNOW WHY PENNY IS SO CREEPY AND DESPERATE AND SHOWS UP TO THEIR DOOR IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT WHY
Are we supposed to just guess and interpret it to find the deeper meaning agh no I don't like that.
I think when it comes down to it we're supposed to realize that in life when we're given two choices of things, we should all take into account Cody's question of whether the school has swings.
They both have swings.

Reader Response to "Snow"

     I want to quote basically the entire second half of this story, but I guess I'll try to look at just a few lines:

"Any life will seem dramatic if you omit mention of most of it."

     I will be sure to remember this if anyone ever asks me my life story.

     The second half of the piece after the huge paragraph is the part that really hits home. The first part, I know, is necessary. It's the part where the speaker is falling in love, living out those unique experiences that lead to the not so happily ever after. The not so happily ever after is the really beautiful part, because it's so sad and so relate-able. I think maybe as a society we thrive on those sad endings because we all know that life isn't always made up of happy endings. We've all had our own fair share of sad endings and we're selfish so we want to know that other people out there are having them too because if we can't live happily ever after then no one else should get to, either.

"Somebody grew up, fell in love, and spent a winter with her lover in the country."

     Three things happen here - in case you didn't notice. Somebody grew up. Somebody fell in love, and somebody spent time with the person they loved.

     That somebody spent a winter - just one winter - with her lover in the country, and that implies that the love story had a time frame and did not go on forever. That fact certainly is sad. The falling in love part isn't really that sad, depending on who you are and what your viewpoints on love are. The line "somebody grew up" is the one that twists the little knot of emotion located somewhere in between our hearts and stomachs that the anatomy books fail to mention.

     Looking at the word somebody, the reader can put themselves into the shoes of the speaker, because it's so universal. And everybody grows up. But tying the two lines of growing up and falling in love together makes the impact so much greater, because now we're imagining a little girl in a princess outfit playing with dolls and making up stories, stories of how one day her prince will come. And well, when she grew up, he did, but it ended. I think when people talk about falling in love they imagine two older mature people living out their lives. But that's not it at all. We're all still just the little kids we once were, waiting for the stories we made up to come true. Back then we didn't know there were other things than happy endings.

"Who expects smalls things to survive when even the largest things get lost?"

     Because when we grow up we're so busy in the ups and downs of the grown-up world that we forgot the dreams that we had when we were young.

"People forget years and remember moments."

     Twenty years from now I'm not going to say "I remember the exact date and year we carved our names into a tree in my favorite park," I'm just going to remember that it happened, and it meant something to me. That's why people forget their anniversaries - it's not like they don't remember their wedding, it's just the timing of it that's not as important as we think. We don't think in linear thoughts. We think in feelings and color and sounds and not always with our heads, but with our hearts.

     There's nothing I can say about this next one that's going to be better than what it already says, so I'll end with:

"Love, in its shortest form, becomes a word."

Reader Response to "Letter to a Young Writer"

(Side note: professor Bausch, what is a "rather shabby" reason to start writing? I hope that I am not being shabby, but I am rather curious.)

     I have read many lists similar to this list. For the most part they all evoke the same response.
     Me while I'm reading: Oh my gosh this is so wonderful I want to go write the world's next greatest novel and I am going to follow all this advice to a tee and read and imitate and dream and when I do I will emerge as one of this century's greatest writers!
     What actually happens: Oh look, a blank page.

uhhhhhhhh

what was that thing they said to do again?

     Following all this advice is not the easiest thing one can do. I'm glad this point is mentioned in number ten, saying that not everything works for everybody.

     Something that did work for me was #8 - Do not think. Dream. You are trying to recover the literal vision of a child.

     Lately I've been thinking about how different writing is now as opposed to when I was younger. When I was younger I would spend hours writing novels, not worrying that the talking animal thing had been done before, that the poem I wrote about the dragon sounded stupid, that people would think it was dumb that my heroine was eating a cheeseburger. I would just write because it was fun. I didn't care what anyone else thought. They were probably never going to see it, so why worry?

     Now my more or less adult brain, even when knowing no one is ever going to see what I'm writing, goes "Har har har you actually think you can get away with that line about the daisies? Nice try, dumbo. Rewrite that one ten times until it actually sounds worthy of the intelligence of the average rock."

     When it all boils down do it, basically, writing is hard. I will read lists like this and advice until I'm swimming in knowledge but then sit down to a page and feel like I am pounding out the world's worst story. I think it's both a combination of honing the writing craft, taking a deep breath, and crossing your fingers in the hope that something comes out of your brain that other people will connect with, too.

Reader Response to "The Story of an Hour"

     Ah The Story of an Hour. So we meet again.
     It's been a while, old friend. I think the last time we sat down together was about three years ago in my senior year of high school. The time before that was in sophomore year of high school. 
     You have not changed since then. But I have. I've always thought it was interesting, that praise that some stories are simply timeless. Are stories timeless, or are we?
     Back during the first time I read you, you seemed a lot longer than you do now but in truth you have not changed a bit. My judgement of what counts as a long assignment has changed, which would probably not delight the 10th grade me, but the current me is totally okay with. Tenth grade me did not understand you at first. How can something be

"a joy that kills?"

     That did not make any sense to me at the time, but for some reason I knew that line was the winner of the story. I did not understand the paradox of a joy that could kill. Joy is supposed to be joy. It's not supposed to kill. So for the assignment I had to do I just talked about the beautiful lines like 

"She breathed a quick prayer that life might be long"

because I thought that was pretty and

"The delicious breath of rain was in the air"

because, well, I like rain a lot and that was a good example of personification. 

    To be honest I don't even remember the assignment twelfth grade me was doing with this because I think I was more concerned with my tennis match and prom and big looming things like life after high school.

    My memory of the assignment is something along the lines o

Blah blah The Story of an Hour Blah by LilyAnne Rice blah blah analysis.

     I probably had not consciously realized it at this point because I was, unfortunately, naturally capable in the area, but I hated doing literature analysis.

     I wondered if there was ever going to be a concrete reason to me having to write a ten page paper about a theme explored in the dense literature we were exploring. Because I could not help thinking

What

is the

point?

     Ok, ok, I see the point a little bit now, it's to train your brain to look at things deeper and believe my my brain was trained but it's not like I'm ever going to look at the papers I wrote back then and get some mind blowing revelation. Mostly because they really weren't that good. I'm not discrediting others' abilities to write papers like this. For the most part, though, I can't help but thinking - boooring.

    Anyway, after that long-winded explanation, current me is reading The Story of an Hour for the third - or maybe even more than that- time, and without the constraints of having to write a paper on it and maybe the fact that I have hopefully grown up a little, I can saw now I get it in a way I didn't before. A joy that kills makes so much sense now after I've gone through heartbreaks and struggles and just living a little more time on this planet.

     That last line is ambiguous - are we supposed to think that the joy that killed our dear Mrs. Mallard is joy about finding that her husband is actually alive, or the joy that she had experienced thinking that he was dead was too much for her and caused her to kick the bucket?

     Ambiguous endings kind of used to drive me crazy. We'll never know. But hey. All endings are kind of ambiguous, if you look at it in a certain way. It's like they say - everything will be ok in the end. If it's not okay, it's not the end.