Creative writing: week 10

This week in creative writing we are taking a look at essay packet 2.  I will discuss and comment on three of the essays in the packet. They are; An Unspoken Hunger, The Art of Sighing, and Crumbling Expectations. I chose these three essays because they are written by three different authors and are written in varying styles as well.

The first essay I will talk about is also the first essay in the packet called, An Unspoken Hunger. It is a very short essay but it is perhaps the most vivid one I have ever read. As I read it I could literally see the knife slicing and swishing through the air cutting the avocado. It also painted a kind of scary picture at the end when he talks about eating the avocado with sharp silver blades.

Bernard Cooper wrote the second essay, he also wrote our beloved Maps to Anywhere. The way he weaves breath and breathing and life throughout this essay was masterful. I also loved at the beginning where he talks about trying to cup your hands together to hold a lake in it. It is a very deep and profound essay and you can tell he took a lot of thought writing this one. It is one of the better ones I have read by him.

The final story I wanted to comment on is Crumbling Expectations by Zach Savich. I liked this essay even though I found it a little strange. I thought it was neat how he titled it after a book his father wrote and then went on to describe the book in detail. It felt like a very personal story to him and I found it a little darker than some of the others for some reason. 

Creative Writing: Week 8

This week in creative writing we started the first half of the book "Maps to Anywhere" by Bernard Cooper. This is a series of essays written about his life. He uses humor as well as vivid description to talk about his life and significant memories he has. I will talk about a couple areas in the book that I found interesting and why I enjoyed the passages.

The first section that I enjoyed was called "Capiche?". The main thing I took away from this passage was one simple sentence which I found very profound. It reads, "But lies are filled with the modulations of untranslatable truth, and early this morning when I awoke, birds were restless in the olive tress." I thought that this was a beautiful sentence that read almost like poetry. It was quite mesmerizing to read.

The next section that I enjoyed was "The Biggest, Most Beautiful Balcony in the World". In this section I loved how it was titled, even though the point of it was that it was not the biggest and most beautiful balcony. He was not satisfied. He wanted something bigger and grander. He wanted a more "ornate balcony to gaze up at". You can really feel how unsatisfied he is.

My favorite section of the whole first part was the larger section called "The Wind Did It". This is a series of essays revolving around him and his father. On page 48 he said that he could divide his fathers history into three phases. I liked how he stated this. You do not usually divide your parents like into phases. The other thing that I loved about this section was the humorous banter between him and his father. My favorites were the one about the trip to Machu Pichu and the discussion about the mole on his arm.

Creative Writing: Week #7

Over Mid-Winter break I ready the preface, editors introduction, and the first chapter to In Short: A Collection of Brief Creative Non-Fiction. This was a shorter piece but it was packed with information. I will first talk about the preface, then the editors introduction and finally the first chapter.

The preface to In Short was written by Bernard Cooper. He starts out the preface by talking about a Salvodor Dali painting. It provides a great introduction to what turns into him having an appreciation for fine arts and starting to write poems. He goes into more depth about his own writing struggles and processes then displays gratitude on being included in In Short. It is clear that he really looks up to and is inspired by the authors in this book.

The next part was the introduction by the editors. This part i found to be the most interesting. Mainly because it went into the history of Shorts and how it came about, as well as different writers that have influenced it. They also discuss how in this collection of shorts they tried to get all different kinds to show the variety of them.

The final thing we were given was one of the Shorts by Annie Dillard titled "Lenses". To be completely honest I did not care for the content of the story at all. However, she has a striking way of describing things in a very visual manner. In one paragraph she describes looking at the swans through her binoculars and she describes them perfectly. You can see what she has written almost right in front of you.

Creative Writing: Week 6

This week in creative writing our assignment was to write a blog post on a story we had done. I am going to do it on the Polaroids story/article. This was a very interesting and helpful piece that talked how writing a draft was like a polaroid camera. It takes awhile for the picture to become clear but, slowly but surely it gets more and more clear. The most helpful information was in the rest of the story with character, plot, and dialogue.
The first section on character opens up saying "Knowledge of your characters also emerges the way it takes time for a polaroid to develop: it takes time for you to know them." I found this a very helpful way to state it. It is shows that you should be learning about your characters as the story progresses. You may not even expect them to do what they do sometimes but it will just feel right. Characters are very tricky and they are a huge part of writing, you have to have characters that people want to read about.
The second part of this piece of writing talks about plot. The author states that "plot grows out of character." This was also helpful, the author goes on to say just worry about the characters not the plot and the story will write itself. When I have tried writing I have often been too focused on what the plot is and how it will end up but, I should have been worrying more about the characters.
The final section in this piece is about dialogue. The most helpful thing I read in this part was when the author talked about how you should be able to identify each character by the way he or she talks. In my own writing I need to work on having the characters have a more distinct tone to each of them so i should not even have to introduce them each time they are speaking.
All in all this was a very helpful piece of literature and it should help me in my own writing in the future.

Creative Writing: Week #5

This week in creative writing we were assigned to read fiction packet three and do a blog post on it. I am going to talk about three of the stories. The first one is the first section titled “When it Rains it Rains a River” by Peter Markos. To be honest I am not sure what some of the things meant in this story but they were a lot of themes that kept popping up. One of them for instance was mud. I thought this might be a metaphor for all the bad stuff that boys can do. The other two things that came up a lot were brothers and girl.

The next story I found interesting was “The Falling Girl”. From what I understood from this story it was talking about suicide. You are first in this girls perspective who is falling and she is on her way to the ball and people are reaching out to grab her and stop her. At the end of the story however you are in an older couples perspective and they usually hear the thud when the hit the ground. It was well written and it was a very vivid story.

The third story was probably my favorite it was called “The Fifth Story”. The thing I liked most about this story is it changed the way it told the same story each time. It always starts out the same “I was complaining about cockroaches”. Then each subsequent story adds some sort of detail in it. I thought it was really cool how it was done I would like to know what the author means by the title of the fifth story  “Leibnitz and the Transcendence of Love in Polynesia”. 

Week 4: Short Stories

           This week in creative writing we started our section on fiction writing, specifically short stories. We looked quite a few of these stories. I am going to talk about what I learned in three of them.

           The first story that I found strangely interesting was survivors. It is about a homosexual couple that is arguing about who is going to die first from aids. I liked the way it was written, It was very descriptive. My favorite line is at the end where he says, "Let me die first, don't let me survive him". I thought this fit in perfectly with the mood of the story.

           The second story i found interesting in this packet was "The Colonel". I had no idea what this story was about until we discussed it in class. It was powerfully written and is probably more realistic than some of us think. I love when he drops the bag of ears on the table and how that symbolizes what would happen to people in the revolution.

           Finally, the last story that i felt we covered well in class and that i found interesting was "The List of Famous Hats". I personally think that Napoleon is a fascinating historical figure so I felt this story was actually pretty funny. I just imagine Napoleon in a white rubber bathing cap and it makes me laugh. The author did a great job with this story to make someone as feared as Napoleon seem rather silly. 

Week #3

Here are a couple poem assignments I did for our Creative Writing class.

Rue. The young carboniferous Serif
she striated and was livid when
the tong fell in the fissures
the trilobites were also screaming "Martyrdom!"
mirages of unrequited gorgonzola cheese
haunted the palisades of  verbana
the turbulent bling bling was destroyed
in the sessile spindrift
carbonaceous villanelles were also destroyed
End.



Livid mirages took over the sessile palisades in the dead of night
The turbulent martydom of the carboniferous tongs were unrequited
Villanelles striated the carbonaceous spindrift where the trilobites were rue
fissures smelled of gorgonzola and verbana scented bling bling
Serifs overtook the carboniferous tongs and the world stopped turning

Week 2: Fluorescence

              This week in creative writing we started the book Fluorescence. This book was written by Jennifer K. Dick and is a bunch of poems that tell a story. I had no idea what this story was until reading the back of the book where it says how it is about a train crash and explosion. It is a very short book but there is a lot of things to unpack on each page.
              The first poem in this book starts at the beginning. The first line is literally "I want to begin at the beginning the beginning of begin and just begin". After this poem the next one is titled "Anatomy" which was one of my favorites. It read almost as a journal entry, I especially liked how it opened talking about different body parts. The next poem is entitled "Identification". This poem introduces you to the train wreck in more detail even though it is still hard to figure out what exactly happened.
              The second chapter of poems actually didnt have any titles. It was a trickier section of poems of read but you can still pick up some things. One of the things she talks about is an explosion and how the bomb squad came. My favorite section is page 21 which is very spaced out for dramatic effect. It reads "Sometimes only a body is necessary. Sometimes only the body is. Sometimes my hands hold tight, so that". I am not really sure of the entire meaning behind it but I believe she was talking about a body in the explosion.
              The third chapter we went over is the shortest one so far. It was probably the most depressing out of the three chapters. She also spaced out in this one for dramatic effect as well as used paragraphs occasionally. I found it to be my lest favorite of the three chapters mainly because I could not understand it as well.

Week 1: Poetry & Sonnets

               This week in Creative Writing we went over some sonnets and poems. We first studied several poems written by a variety of authors in a variety of styles. Some of the poems were darker and morbid like "Where it Passes Untouchable". In this poem the author seems to be talking about a murder and says that "Blood powdered my fingers, speckled my cuffs. There were also poems that talked about things like the ocean and were able to make it come alive. In "Geology of Water" the author does just that when he says things like "plates shifting in their cobalt sleep".
               One of my favorite poems from this handout was "The Scent of Verbana" by Hinako Abe. This poem was really well written and very interesting. The pyramid shape it is in immediately caught my eye, it also looks like an hourglass. The other thing I love about this poem is that it is unpredictable. For instance, when the author talks about how the other person will be in a metal coffin being pulled up a hill by dogs.
               The other packet we discussed in class was the one about sonnets. These also had a variety of authors the most famous of them being Shakespeare and Ted Berrigan. Both of these authors had very different styles mainly due to the fact they were written in completely different time periods. My favorite Shakespeare Sonnet we read was 118. In this sonnet I thought it was very interesting how he framed the whole thing around the stomach and appetite and sickness. He used words like sweetness, ills, sick, poison, sweetness, palate, appetite and other words to illustrate this.
               Some of the other sonnets we were given were written by Ted Berrigan. We noticed in class that sonnet XV was actually written to be read first line then last line then second line then second to last line, and so on and so forth. I wouldn't have noticed this unless we had in class. It made the sonnet make complete sense and I actually enjoyed it then .

Intro

My Name is Landon Cook. I am a transfer student from Washtenaw Community College and I am currently attending Eastern Michigan University. I am currently doing sales at a gym. I am going into business/marketing.