Midterm Reflection

My view of creative non-fiction has expanded since the beginning of the semester in that I have learned about different fashions in which it can be written. I have certainly given more thought to the use of humor and sentimentality in my writing of both fiction and non-fiction, as well as the possible value of experimentation within these forms.
Reading the work of other creative non-fiction writers and learning more about creative non-fiction has definitely reminded me to keep a distance between myself and my writing. For years I have enjoyed reading and writing both poetry and fiction, but creative non-fiction is not a medium I can claim a total familiarity of. That being the case, the course has allowed me to sample a form of writing which I might not have otherwise examined so closely. I plan, for instance, to purchase Dave Sedaris's Me Talk Pretty One Day, a book I have seen on the shelf at Target for years but never knew enough about to examine further.
The blog assignments have forced me to think about the learning process I undergo throughout the semester, thus making the course more productive. The questions prompt me (hence the name "prompts," I suppose) to give thought to my work and guide me in thinking about how to improve it. The blog assignments will probably prove most beneficial when the time comes to revise work for my final portfolio.

A Memoir of My Basement

"For all I know I was conceived in my basement; I know my older brother was. My mother made us privy to this while we were out at dinner once with her and her old friends. I was raised in the home of my paternal grandmother, and my parents have been divorced for almost twenty years, so my mother hasn't seen the basement in which she conceived her children in a long time. 'Do you still got that pool table down there?' my mom's friend Joey asked me. I told him we did and that's when my mother matter-of-factly mentioned that my brother was conceived atop it."
I have lived my entire life in the same house and thus have spent much time in my basement (I am there right now), so writing about seems fitting.
I don't believe I have to explain anything about the piece. It should speak for itself if it was effective. I think that if I have to relate anything to the readers about the piece then there is revision to be done.
I cannot cite any outside inspiration for this piece other than the characters who are a part of it.
This piece does not feel complete even to me, so I could understand a reader critisizing it as such. Some coherence will be my main focus in revision.
Although the piece was about a particular place, I found the setting and the characters inseperable. Setting only finds importance by the characters who move through it.

Response to "Abracadabra"

Three sentences I found particularly poignant in Solwitz's memoir read as follows: "If the soul lives even ten seconds after death, [Jesse] had to have heard me" (673); "[Jesse] and Seth walking together along the sidewalk, bumping into each other, not as a dominance game but as an unconscoius joining, a return to their junction in utero" (674); and "But I fear madness without my audience, my readers, however imaginary" (676). Solwitz's writing style has its strength in her honesty--as when she blatantly acknowledges that she is in dire need of her readers--but its weakness is when she leans toward sentimentality. The death of her son is a perfectly morose subject on its own and needs no embellishment.
The character Solwitz develops for herself in her memoir is nothing out of the orndinary for a person experiencing the loss that she has: she is hostile toward others who remind her of her son, capricious in her personality, and neurotic. She captivates readers with flashes of creative experimentation and the humanity of her self-contradictions. She offers herself advice only to repudiate it in passages to come.
I imagine Solwitz published this memoir because she took her own advice: write for yourself. Readers are drawn to her piece's consistency throughout, knowing that her pain will not be assuaged but that she might grow from it. In this respect, this is more a memoir concerning Solwitz herself than her deceased son Jesse. He is the person to whom the piece is dedicated, but she is the one moving the piece forward in her constant attempts to recover from her tragedy.

Cameras, Shovels, and Horses

I am looking at a century-old photograph by Prokudin-Gorskii which depicts villagers, in what appears to be a mountainous Russian town, shoveling something into the backs of their horse-drawn carriages. Each of the two carriages in the photo are pulled by only one horse apiece, perhaps all the villagers could afford. An elderly woman sits atop her carriage in the foreground while a man donning a gray hat has his shovel plunged in something brown behind her, ready to fill the carriage. The gray hat is in style, perhaps a gift from a Siberian relative who came to visit months ago. A teenaged girl sits on the ground beside the old woman's carriage with a basket in front of her, not caring that her clothes are dusted with earth.
In the background stands another person weilding a shovel but the blurriness in his/her face makes his/her gender indistiguishable.
All four people are looking directly at the camera. This might be the first time one has ever come into their presence and it makes them a bit nervous and a bit mesmerized at the same time. They are on the cusp of a technological breakthrough. They are photogenic peasants.

Excerpt from My Vignette

"Rising from the carpet when I walked in, there we stood, face to face in his barren apartment. My dad explained to me that he was going to get professional help. 'I'd hug you but you're a man now,' he told me before I left. I have yet to comprehend how the preservation of masculinity could be strong enough in him to cause us not to embrace. Instead I settled for a handshake."
This story grew from some of my most easily-accessible--yet morose--memories. Ever present throughout my life, my father's drug and alcohol addiction proved to be ample material for writing a vignette. No person or event in the piece is a fiction; I neither exaggerated nor undermined the happenings therein. I will say, however, that reading the piece now, I feel it to be too sentimental, as I did not stress the events themselves but rather my feelings toward them.
I cannot rightly say that I had any particular writer or narrative in mind while composing my vignette, but if I were to allot credit to any particular authors whose style I might have subconsciously bore in mind, they would have to be the great confessional poets Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath.
Revising this piece attentively will not be a deviation from my usual methods of revision. As stated above, I will also try to weed out some of what I feel to be the piece's overly emotional sections and replace them with more concrete detail.
The writing of vignettes is similar to other creative writings in that the thought process I undergo does not change much. In all forms I aim to be exact and I search for le mot juste as diligently as possible, as arduous a task as that often is for me. I found the difference, though, to be that I must do battle with my urge to fictionalize what I write. On the other hand, having also studied and written poetry, I believe I am somewhat balanced.
I normally write by hand first and then transfer that material to a computer, but this piece (due to lack of time) was not done in that fashion: I forwent the first step and began immediately with the second.
Thanks for reading what I have to say.

Welcome!

Hello, my name is Steven and I hope you enjoy reading my blog.
I look forward to reading yours.