The Story of a Suicide Response

I liked the way that this was worded. It came off somewhat as a newspaper article, as did both of these pieces really, but I liked this one's use of language more. It felt more like the author was trying to make it feel less like an article and more like a story. It had emotions in it and it was a lot more compelling than just the facts stated as they might be in something like this. That inclusion made it work a lot more than it might have otherwise. What's especially interesting is that I had heard this story before, but never in such detail (SO MUCH detail, too. Why was it so long? Why were either of them so long? It got boring way before the half-way point). Although it certainly wasn't one of the most compelling things I've read (I struggled keeping focus on it, in all honesty) it wasn't horrid.  There were definitely aspects of it that I found appealing and other things that I didn't like as much, but isn't that how it goes?

The American Male at Age Ten Response

I'm not sure I would call this piece 'effective'. The sentence structure was boring. It was the same sentence over and over again "We would..." and it didn't hold my attention, and then when that was over "He is..." for another paragraph. I think that was a downfall. I can see how it could have worked, if the piece was written in that child-like tone, but I think that it really failed here. Although, I do think that some of the humor worked well for it, but the writing itself felt really underwhelming and boring. It was a good idea, but it wasn't executed well with the style or tone of the story. I believe what I'm trying to say in a roundabout, long enough for the word count required way, is that I did not like this piece. I don't think that it worked so I would be hard pressed to write about how it was effective, because I don't believe that it was.

Response to January

What I found interesting about this story is that it did a subtle switch from present tense to past tense, and then it just ended. I didn't catch it until the second time I was reading through it, and it jumped out at me how subtle it was (which doesn't make the most sense, but I'm going with it). Another thing was that it just reminded me of home. When I go home, all my family talks about is the barn, and their horses. My mother and my little sister love their horses, and my mom and my stepdad fight all the time about the horses. It consumes their lives, so I think that even if I didn't understand first hand what she was talking about during certain parts of the story ("If you live with horses, you soon get used to the feel of a line lying across your palm and fingers...") I think that I can at least understand what it looks like in other people.

It was a short piece, and even after two read throughs, I'm still not entirely sure what it was about.

Muskgrass Chara

I found the sheer amount of detail in this piece to remind me of Ryan's piece. Both of them had an abundance of details that could just put you in the moment, and it really brought them together. There were differences, because Ryan's was in a specific scene, but Moore's focused on a lot of smells that came together in a story that worked out. Moore's piece was very poetic and beautifully written. Both of the pieces flowed like someone's thoughts, but worked in the same way that careful word choice does. And there was an emotional undercurrent that really held them together, and made them work.

Response: Two Or Three Things I Know For Sure

While not entirely similar, reading this story made me think back to Camille's untitled work. It was that similar sense of disappointment in the men in their lives, although they do have distinct differences. They both have a sense of growing up with that disappointment, and learning to live with it, even if they can't accept it.They do have those fundamental differences. Where Camille expresses this outright inability to accept what she's grown up with, Allison has a more subvert way of doing the same thing. She acts as though she can accept it, much as Camille does to her mother, and then at the end, she prays and hopes that she won't end up like her family. Even she has a hard time accepting it, and it's such a vulnerable thing to explore and put out there that they end up feeling very similar in that aspect.

The Lantern Bearers: Response

Perhaps it's not a response to the metaphor itself, but more what he was trying to say. I love a message in stories that I read, especially in non-fiction, but not so overt as this. There is a difference between trying to convey something that you've learned and trying to show it through writing and trying to tell people what they feel and how they should act. The essay makes quite a few generalizations (not to mention saying that all poets are men, which I understand is a product of the time, but makes me much less likely to take the rest of his advice, as misguided as that may be.

Rather than just telling a personal story and showing the readers what he has learned, Stevenson seems to be trying to make a rather large statement about what all people are like, what all people feel. "In nobler books we are moved with something like the emotions of life;..." I disagree, but he's stating this opinion as though it's fact. And 'nobler' is vague enough that I can't fully get what he means. Does he mean that they comply to his moral standards? That they write well? And the emotions that people feel are only 'like the emotions of life'? Does this emotion somehow differ from actually feeling something? No. A book, not even particularly well written, can make us feel emotions as if we were going through something to provoke it. It's the wonder of human sympathy.

I understand that a lot of this is time and the differing of societies, but this essay is so far from a personal essay to me. It's a man preaching to people how they should act and feel, and trying to shove his personal life in there almost as an afterthought. It's not particularly well done, and the story isn't compelling. I could barely force myself to read up to the point where he actually mentioned his life, let alone to the part where he finally started forcing this metaphor on us. It's cheesy, overdone, and not well executed. I don't think that the motive for writing this seems to be that he wanted to talk about an event in his life and see how it could help others, it was that he wanted to impose his own ideals on others. It's okay if it's done well, if it's presented as an option, as a revelation of the author's rather than an explicit order on how to behave.

The metaphor, then, wasn't something that seemed to come naturally. It was a way for him to go about this, it was a way that he was trying to disguise this as something other than what it was.

I'm A Hateful Being

I hate introductions. Particularly when they're significant in length. A few pages, I can handle reading that. I'm sure it was riveting to the middle aged man who wrote it, but sometimes his opinion is just...entirely too boring, too conceited for me to deal with. I'd rather just read the rest of the book, please.

I hate tortellini. It doesn't matter what the filling is, what sauce you try to disguise it in. I hate it. The texture, the taste, the shape of it is entirely unpleasant because all I can think of is tasting it on the way back up, combined with cherry, anti-nausea medicine that I'd choked down only minutes prior.

I hate my stepfather. I hate the things he says. 

I hate when people smoke while they're walking. I hate smoking in general, but it's especially rude when you're walking in front of other people, not caring what toxins you're making them breathe in or if they have a severe reaction to accidentally breathing it in. I've had to duck off to the side and throw up because I wasn't expecting someone to be smoking on the pathway.

I hate em dashes. I'd prefer real punctuation. 

I hate acephobia. I hate it the most from the LGBTQA+ community, and I hate it the most when people don't realize that they're being horrible about it. I hate being told that I'll "find the right person" that I "must be boring" or that I "must have been sexually abused as a child". I hate it when people claim that acephobia doesn't exist while hating on asexual people.

I hate that so many people think that women's bodies are public forum. I hate that people assume the motives of women and girls because of how they dress or act. I hate that I am expected to take up less space or cower in a man's presence and I hate that I am supposed to smile because my anger, my hated, makes me ugly in their eyes. I hate that I can't go through my life without being subjected to the whims of men, but men can go through their lives without thinking about a woman's existence as a person.

I hate that I'm so hateful.

Response: September

I'm interested in seeing what makes this story a personal narrative, about what this means to her. It's clear that she's drawing some connection with the small animal and herself and her own experiences, but it's left open and ambiguous. Perhaps the purpose of that is so that we can relate it to ourselves and feel a sense of connection with her, because we feel like we understand what she was going through, when in reality, we don't know.

To me, it speaks to a sort of sadness, to a willingness to be that cat and just sink back into the earth so that we don't have to feel anymore. It's quite a bit of emotion packed into just one paragraph, into a lot of what seems to be non-emotional sentences like "I learned it takes only days for a small animal's body to decompose at this time of year..." which is very try. It just states the facts. But when you put it together, there is a lot of imagery there, "To press its outline back into the soft earth..." and it is full of double meaning and hidden motives.

Response: Those Who Stay and Those Who Go

Something that happens in this particular piece is that the writer, Ann Daum, uses a certain, more clipped, blunt sentence structure. The effect that this has is that it lends itself to a more 'matter of fact' tone. She is, in fact, just stating what happens, and then elaborating very little on that. "Joy comes in small, daily pleasures. The incredible colors of the sunset here. Watching your son win a buckle at a 4-H rodeo. Neighbors helping your husband harvest wheat when he's laid up for a week with kidney stones. I could go on." She's explaining things in a very short tone, but rather than it seem emotionless or dull, it just comes off as run-down, like bleak acceptance of the fact that this is how life goes here. She still gets the idea across: this is the way of life, and it's either this way, or not at all (not at all being not the option that you die, but rather the option that you leave because you can't live there if you're going to live a different way from the rest of them.)
It works for when she continues to say that she doesn't fit into this dichotomy. She's in between, as she says, and the beginning helps set up the tone so that you know what that means for her, that you get the feeling about how it works out, or how the people of her community view her. That is also when the structure of the sentences changes; they flow better and it reads in a stark contrast to what she was writing before. In short, she accomplishes making you feel that same outsider's status that she did, and that's effective.

Response to: Signs and Wonders

The wonder of this story is that it's written in the first person, which is so unusual for nonfiction, or I would assume it is. It flows and ebbs and she doesn't end talking about the same thing she began, because we ended up taking a journey with her. It's raw and real and about discovering things--about yourself, about others, about the ecosystem that we live in--and figuring out what they mean, if anything. It's a ramble, but it's one that comes together and has meaning, and in the end, you don't feel like you wasted your time. You feel more like you've come to know the author and you feel like you understand something more about yourself, even if it's only in the most vague of senses.