Forum Replies Created
-
AuthorPosts
-
in reply to: Patrick James Response: Ethics #886
Patrick,
I feel the urgency and stakes in everything you write – your pieces in class and your responses – and I also think that’s true for the way you respond to other’s works in the class. Being honest with others is extremely difficult, and I think the way you framed it as a necessity for being honest because you love and respect someone allows for a reconfiguration of ethics not just about telling the truth, but about respect itself. We talked a lot about stakes early on in the class, and I think this response is a perfect example of how writing – writing of any kind – can have large stakes.in reply to: Maggie_Response to WT Chapter 10 #885Maggie,
It seems that the struggle for most people in creative nonfiction is the balance between the emotions and the facts – which you’ve captured really well in describing your process of writing the memory chain and the revealing a secret. What you seem to have down, from what I got in your response, is the intent behind the writing. You set out to tell the reader the truth, whatever that may be, and I can see that struggle with the back and forth you described in the editing phase. I find interesting the concept of an aesthetic truth (which I got from the last part of your response – about being worried of violating the aesthetic code) and how that may differ from other truths…although I can’t really name what other truths that may be.What your response made me think of is how things are set up to be seemingly opposite, but as the story is told, they fold together. With this sense of questioning and digression there also seems to be purposeful contradictions in the story, that maybe have to do with questioning these binaries in the first place?
in reply to: Borkowski 1-4_Maggie's Response #661You know after reading your response, I feel a little better about him not returning to some points he makes earlier in the text. If I look at it from the lens of skipping around the text, it seems that what we find and what we learn about his life is sort-of arbitrary…and that what seems repetitive, is to make sure you get that trope as you skip around.
in reply to: Megan H first response to Borkowski #660Megan,
This is really interesting. I enjoyed the chapters as I read them, but after reading your response I’ve developed a deeper liking – and appreciation – for them, because of the way you described it. How did you feel about his circular story-telling strategies? Were there times you felt it was strained? I talked about how I was kind of upset when he wouldn’t return to a question asked or a point he was making…how do you feel about this tactic?in reply to: Lindsey's Response to Borkowski 1-4 #659Lindsey and Megan,
I’d be interested to know what you guys thought about some of the references to different literature. Did you feel it flowed well in the story, or did it feel forced? Did it feel forced because you knew he was an English professor?
I did find some of the different tropes kind of repetitive – like the ‘this moment changed my life’ and the ‘my parents kept telling me to put it behind me’ but I did find that there was this contradiction he was building into the narrative that showed how his life didnt change immediately, or that his parents were constantly mentioning it.in reply to: Daimys – Response for Chapter 5 #602Maggie, sorry for this crazy late response!
I was in this class that i ‘found’ my academic voice, so I was playing around with I a lot to see what I could get away with in my academic writing. I have found as the my semesters have come and gone, that I actually use a lot of I in my academic writing – and I think people enjoy it because it implicates me in the writing. It doesn’t seem like I’m saying some of the things I say in a vacuum. It also allows me to say things I wouldn’t normally want to generalize in. I think too much I is when it stops being about the reader, and starts being about the writer, at least in academic writing…? Not sure if this helps any!in reply to: Daimys – Response to "Hep" #600Patrick, I wish I could make a portable you and just take you around for motivational/poetic necessities! You should look into this.
Now that I think about it, I guess this would be a book written by you….but seriously!
in reply to: Joanna Siwiec Response: M. Pinard: "Hep" #599Joanna, I think your personal connection to the text is a really powerful way of thinking about a point Marguerite brought up in her response – the freedom to imagine. But maybe pushing that a little further, the power in imagination.- Maybe the power to escape, to learn, to heal.
in reply to: Patrick James_Response #597Patrick, I wouldn’t of thought this narrative as being unreliable. But maybe that’s because I feel like she gave herself an out from the beginning, when she said she didn’t know Ella’s story, and that she was using this space to find some options. I will say though, it raises questions of where the line is when you’re using personal narrative to push a larger maybe political message or agenda. This story, because it is bred from a scant amount of facts allows the writer to delve into deeper issues than family history, or discovery writing. But it does run the risk of muddling the lines of fact and fiction to an extent that may not be ethical for memoir writing.
in reply to: Lindsey's Response to Faery's Ella #596Lindsey, it seems like you connected with this story more, although you mention your direct connection in terms of experience to the other story. What do you think it is about this story that connects you to it? I also love this story, definitely more than the Pinard story, but I think it’s because this story speaks to my academic writing goals. The loss of the mother is so potent in this story – it isn’t just Pop who loses his mother when she walks out, Will also had to grow up without a mother, and then a father and lived a hard life because of it.
in reply to: Mary Pinard_Maggie's Response #592Hmm the idea of time is interesting in terms of your questioning the link between the movement you felt in other passages and the parts about the trapeze and the circus. Maybe it is that the parts you felt ‘with’ her were those moments described as in real time, versus some of the trapeze parts seem more distanced – either because they are journalistic or they seem to be almost clinical when described (she stood here the teacher did this, s/he held my belt v. the dialogue and poetic language of the aunts scene?
in reply to: Mary Pinard— Marguerite's Response #591Marguerite, 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.
in reply to: James Romberger's response to Hep #590James, your response made me think that it would be so interesting to write a piece where the narrator is a person watching/enjoying Pinard’s specific class, and describing Pinard from an outsider’s perspective. Both because it would be interesting to write her experience from a witnessing standpoint but also because it may be able to deal with this issue that you bring up about adults who should have known better. The narrator could be the adult who knew better, without knowing it!
Does that make any sense?
in reply to: Patrick James-Hep Response #589Patrick, ‘the conflation of grace, violence, and creativity’ is a great way to articulate not only the tone of the story, but the structure. After reading your response, it seems that her tone seem to mimic the cyclical structure of the piece, where she’s creative when she is talking about the more journalistic/informative aspects of her story, graceful when describing her experiences with trapeze and – not necessarily violent – but sort of mournful/pained when discussing her family history.
I wonder how the story changes if it is read through a different lens – grief, for example – than one of flight and freedom.
-
AuthorPosts
