Reading
Schedule: Please have the stories read by the date listed on the schedule. Each week we will focus on a different aspect
of craft. Expect to specifically discuss
that element of craft connected to the stories.
***
(9/4)
“A Temporary Matter” by Jhumpa Lahiri – Characterization
Contrasting traits, desires, fears, all that jazz. The first five minutes have been spent
discussing the pronunciation of Shukumar and Shoba. So, we’ll talk about naming our characters, I
suppose. It’s the second week of
class. There’s an energy that reminds me
why I love teaching. One student says she almost cried when the lights came on
for the final time in the story. That makes me so goddamn happy. There’s a
serious disagreement over whether the protagonist cares about getting his Ph.
D. “Why did he have to tell her about
their dead child?” someone asks. “Yeah,
that’s kind of harsh,” I say.
(9/9)
“Xmas, Jamaica Plain” by Melanie Rae Thon – POV
Emile is dead on the bathroom floor. The narrator
flees, leaving her friend, maybe the only person she loves, there, dead on the
floor with water seeping under the door. They are young, addicts, prostitutes, broken
in so many ways, and my heart breaks for them more and more every year because
I get older and those characters stay kids. “I would never leave my friend,” they all
say. “Really?” I ask.
(9/11)
“Car Crash While Hitchhiking” by Denis Johnson – Unreliable Narrator
“This is messed up,” they chant in unison. I don’t
know if I’m happy that they read it or devastated that they didn’t love
it. I sort of just want to call it a day
and do what a Denis Johnson character would do in this situation.
(9/16)
“Pilgrims” by Julie Orringer – Plot
“So, let’s just plot this out as simply as we can,”
I say. “When do we get to the end of the beginning?” The class agrees that end of the beginning is a strange
concept. They’re right, of course. They also agree that the end of the beginning
is when the family—cancer-stricken mother, a husband grasping at any sign of hope,
and two scared kids—makes it to the broken-down house. With a beginning like this, they know it’s
not going to end well.
(9/18)
“Bullet in the Brain” by Tobias Wolf – Pacing
“Does every story have to have someone die?”
“I think so.”
(9/25)
“Wickedness” by Ron Hansen -- Setting
At one point, I have all the students tallying up
the number of dead on each page. They sit,
scattered around the room, making little marks on scratch paper. One page
contains nine dead. There are more dead
people on that page than live students in this room. Our community college has
almost 9,000 total students. And we can
barely run a single creative writing class.
Each semester it’s in danger of being cut. In an English department of 22 full-time
faculty, we run a couple electives a semester.
The scene with the father taking out his family is tough to handle.
(9/30)
“The Ceiling” by Kevin Brockmeier -- Theme
The students are hung up on the ceiling. “Everything is so normal otherwise, and then there’s
this ceiling,” a student says. “Why don’t they do something, like shatter it?
It’s like the narrator doesn’t even care.” The whole right side of the room
hasn’t done the reading. This has been obvious for roughly 20 minutes. I’ve
always liked this story, but it’s always left me a little cold at the end.
“It’s just depressing,” says another student. I’m pretty sure these are the
only two students who read. I feel like
I understand the story for the first time.
(10/2) Begin
first round of student workshops…
The first story is about a Zombie Apocalypse that
begins with a single case of Ebola coming to the United States. The students
turned her story in last week and had been working on it for two weeks. Yesterday
the first reported case emerged in Dallas.
In her story, the case gets referred to the Mayo Clinic, which we can
see from our college. People go
ape-shit and love every single sentence of the story. By
the end, you don’t even care about the Zombies.
It’s a love story, and probably one of the coolest takes on “Zombie Lit”
that I’ve heard of. I think we all feel proud of her, for her, the author who was
terrified to read a word aloud. She is beaming.
The next story features landed gentry who carry
ipads around, joust, go through the drive-through at Wells Fargo, and say
things like “My lady, whilst though take my hand so we can get away from this
asshole and take a ride?” Yeah, we're having fun now.
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