Mary Pinard— Marguerite's Response

[Marguerite Van_Cook]

#584

“Hep” by Mary Pinard.

Mary Pinard’s story holds the readers interest through a mixture of personal observation and historical details, which adds complexities of value to her narrative. Her explanations of the word trapeze, leotard and circus are announced with the enthusiasm of a barker, or a Barnum and Bailey. Through this series of little sideshows, Pinard, who is showing us amazing facts, holds the readers interest. I found her introduction of concepts and fresh idea to be clever, since she demonstrated different mental jumps and heps of the mind that matched the narrative of the trapeze.
Beyond this, the essay is lyrical and manages to merge her attraction to risk as a flyer with her approach to writing. It is a clever way to say, I have always been a writer, rather than beginning with the dreaded and turgid lines, “I always knew that I would be a writer.”

Since our last class I had been thinking about the idea of what’s at stake in teh personal essay and here, I felt, Pinard makes her issues clear: “I also understood that these flights of fancy were better kept to myself—there was no telling what kinds of limits the adults in my life might impose on me should they ever discover what, literally, I had going through my mind”(26). Her personal stakes are enormously high. The line is also highly relatable and translates her personal secret into something universal—something which concerns us all— our freedom to imagine. Of course, the death of her mother and the notion of heaven are woven throughout the story so that memory and imagination are containers and platforms from which to leap. The micro-theme of the weather, “cloudless cornflower-blue sky” is also used effectively to signal change and add to the referents of flight and the beyond.(29).

A technical aspect that stood out in her writing was her good paragraph linking, which Pinard accomplished through her transitional last lines. For example, she finishes with ” Success in this case eluded me, but I was undeterred. I pursued other flight endeavors”(27). This before she moves to discuss her interest in birds. The poem which frames the essay is also used to great effect, by indicating and affirming the layers of meaning and narrative that are nested in the story. It too is another demonstration of Pinard’s ability to link ideas.

[Website Services Admin]

#591

Marguerite, your response takes the language of flight to a whole other level! It’s so great! I didn’t think of the poem at the beginning as yet another ‘nesting’ of her ideas in the story.

[Sondra Perl]

#610

Marguerite, I like your framing of the “journalism” in Pinard’s story as sideshows. Thinking of them that way makes it easier for me to integrate them into the piece–they are beside the narrative, not a continuation of it. There doesn’t have to be continuity, only contiguity.

[Author]

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