Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Life Update & Bookstore Nerd Alert

Original version of this post was published on my Tumblr. Yes, I'm aware that this is inexcusably lazy.
I've been buried in non-required reading for weeks trying to finish up my last project for college before I start back at work with the kiddies next month. Still no word on exactly where I'll be heading after the summer job ends, but I've been applying for teach abroad/nannying positions back in England AND all across Europe in the hopes of having something solid worked out sooner rather than later. So, we'll just have to see how that goes. All I know is that I need to get the heck out of my hometown before I go crazy and start forgetting that the world's a much bigger place than small town, Washington, U.S.A. The motivation is there guys. Believe me, I won't give up until I've given myself the chance to see if I can really make it on my own elsewhere. It's been nice being home, but I can't (won't) stay here forever. So, I guess it's off into the great big world with me once this business wraps up and I earn myself some traveling money. No matter how scary it will be when it comes time to move on, I know from experience it's the only way I'm going to figure stuff out. Until then, have a humorous slice-of-life post while I attempt to sort through my existential issues & avoid eating too much ice cream in the process. 
     So, I came across the amazing 25 Signs You're Addicted to Books list a few days ago and discovered that I'm definitely guilty of the following: "You've even developed a crush on a bookstore employee based solely on their staff picks."
     You guys: I am so DAMNED GUILTY of this, I'm almost blushing right now. Seriously, I think I may have a problem. I mean, I may or may not do this at video game/comic stores as well...
SHUT UP. I'm nerdy & single; I do what I want.
 ANYWAY: The last time I was in one of my favorite local shops to pick up another copy of Ready Player One (which I'd just finished) for one of my friends, I couldn't find it on the main shelf and wandered around looking for it until I noticed one last copy being featured under Mr. Cute-and-Obviously-Nerdy bookseller's staff favorites. 
     Naturally, I took the opportunity to casually pluck it off the shelf and ask him (who was serendipitously manning the register at the time) if he thought it would make a good gift for a guy friend of mine whom I'd been slowly trying to convert into more of a habitual reader. 
Yeah, right: 'casually' my ass. I was probably being completely obvious.
     My actual level of awkwardness notwithstanding, he agreed and said he thought it was a great pick and we ended up having a nice conversation about how often people assume book-devouring and gaming are mutually exclusive hobbies and how that's JUST SO NOT TRUE. Hence, of course, our mutual appreciation for the nerdtastic Ready Player One-- basically a video game in novel format with a punch of fun the size of Kilimanjaro.
     Needless to say, I was pretty happy with how the potentially embarrassing attempt to strike up a conversation with attractive Mr. Bookseller turned out! I successfully purchased a copy of Ready Player One for another of my video game-obsessed, but not-so-readerly friends IN ADDITION TO getting my recommended dose of nerd-cute for the week. Now that's what I call a success story!
BOOM! Successful social interaction engines are GO! 
UNSOLICITED LIFE TIP OF THE DAY: Seriously guys, I swear the best place to pick up potential dates is at the bookstore. It works at least 5x better than the video game shop and 10x better than your local comic hangout (statistics courtesy of my own personal experience; particulars are probably best explored in a future blog post)

SUMMARY: So, TRY IT. You never know! :)


Lots of love & plenty of existential angst + social awkwardness,

Torey


Saturday, March 9, 2013

More Thoughts on Glaciers, by Alexis M. Smith

When you really think about it, I probably shouldn't have been so surprised.

[start/quote]"
  
   If I'm going to be really honest: my feelings for "Glaciers" are slightly more complicated than I generally like my feelings for books to be, particularly because I've pressed myself to spit out a what-out-of-what-stars rating and review... A style of assessment I've found to be seldom honest or all that representative of what a book is or could be to me or anyone else when it really comes down to it.
     I'm a fairly straightforward person, inclined to the critical and often cynical side of things probably more than is expressly healthy for a 22 year-old. So that leads me to conclude that my uncharacteristically muddled feelings are either expressive of the huge amount of stress I've been under recently as a soon-to-be graduate or, in fact, are a testament to Ms. Smith's ability to evoke the same kind of romanticized and achingly bittersweet nostalgia and longing in me that her narrator so often relates to everything from melting glaciers, not-quite-found-and-too-soon-lost loves, and the 'perfect dresses' of the world that (when reasonably considered) will most likely never be seen by one's true love... That is, at least not on the first date. 
     Again with the being honest, but... I didn't actually connect with Isabel very strongly for about 3/4 of the novel. This is usually a huge problem for me and the main factor which very much applied to my less than average enjoyment (if we're going by general internet buzz standards) of "Where'd You Go, Bernadette" later this month. And so, you might imagine how surprised I was when I discovered that this distance from Isabel seemed to impact me hardly at all as I powered through "Glaciers" with more 'heedless pleasure' than I ever did poor, yuppy, for-some-reason-not-very-funny-to-me (probably because I was trying to take it, like everything else in my life, a shade and a half too seriously) "Bernadette." 
     So, despite my initially not-so-strong emotional connection to the thinks-very-hard-about-every-little-detail Isabel, it was the language and Smith's particular turns of phrase and expert way of painting pictures across the page that really kept getting me invested in visualizing one recollected memory after another past association after another childhood retelling after... You get the gist. 
     I honestly *could not* get enough and am now convinced that I would eagerly eat up a collection of Ms. Smith's short stories with a spoon and lick my fingers afterwards with minimum embarrassment whether said finger-licking occurred in public or no.
The thing I loved best about "Glaciers" is that you really *do* get the picture. Perhaps not entirely of Isabel herself (although I'd argue that the last 1/4 of the novel goes a long way towards rectifying that in a very short amount of time), but of her memories and the associations she's built that surround the significant objects which so populate and characterize her daily life, giving it a color and dimension that in my mind resembles watercolor paintings still wet to the touch.
     Admittedly, this book paints a very much romanticized picture of Portland, the 'vintage' label, relationships, books, and... Okay, basically everything, but which remarkably at the same time is the very thing about "Glaciers" that makes a certain type of person (see 'prone to nostalgia' or 'one who already has a fondness for endlessly romanticizing the past') fall head over heels for it.
     These little stories of Isabel's are both artistically and strategically knit together so that they run seamlessly back like little rivers to "Glaciers" unifying theme of love and eventual loss, taking you on a Dalloway-like journey that ends (but doesn't really end) in bittersweet longing for something set just out of reach. And perhaps it's because I'm one of those closet romantics (albeit an extremely unsuccessful one) who is easily beguiled by anything with a charming history that made me fall just a little bit in love whilst peeping through these little rose-tinted windows into Isabel's world of memories.
     An unabashed love letter to sentimentality and romance surrounding all the temporary wonders we encounter every day of our lives, I give "Glaciers" an unapologetic 4/5 stars for the genuinely surprising amount it was able to make me feel over the course of a few short hours on a Tuesday afternoon.
"[end/quote]
     
In any case, this is what I ended up writing in the little Goodreads' review box this morning. Who'd have thought I'd had so many more nebulous thoughts floating around inside of me about it. I guess it really did get to me more than I thought!
And again, I probably shouldn't have been so surprised.

Until I get up the courage and the wherewithal to review Where'd You Go, Bernadette,
Torey

Wednesday, February 20, 2013

Margins Review: Wild, by Cheryl Strayed


Hold on to your pants, girls; it's gonna be a wild ride!
  Disclaimer: a version of the following review was originally written for publication 
in Issue 19 of  The Willamette Collegian (@WUCollegian).

     This may come as a bit of a surprise to anyone who knows me, but I’m not a girl that’s caught crying over movies or books all that often. No matter how moving the scene, how compelling the plot, or how wibbly-wobbly I may really be feeling on the inside, my eyes remain blissfully dry nine times out of ten. The only reason I’m telling you this is so that you know exactly what kind of a mortifyingly big deal it was to have a friend surprise-interrupt me as I was in the ugliest phase of a middle school style emotional meltdown while reading the last quarter of Cheryl Strayed’s brilliant memoir.
     After her mother died of cancer at 45, Strayed was left alone and parentless at 22. Finding herself separated from her husband, living in a tiny apartment, working as a waitress, shooting heroin and feeling “as low and mixed-up as I’d ever been,” she decides to take on the Pacific Crest Trail in search of what she calls “radical aloneness.” So, equipped with only an overstuffed backpack, ill-fitting hiking boots, a few dollars and very little experience, Strayed sets off to reinvent the life she feels she’s already lost. But my waterfall of tears and the resulting revocation of my ‘cold & heartless’ reader badge notwithstanding, I don’t mean to imply that Wild is any kind of a downer, because it’s definitely not! What it actually is, though, is one hell of a heart-wrenching, pillow-punching, yell-at-your-friend-to-leave-so-you-can-pick-up-the-broken-pieces-of-your-shattered-dignity good read. Strayed spends much of the book recounting her bizarre adventures in the wilderness as well as her strange interactions with the people she meets along the way, writing with fierce prose and sharp humor about some seriously dire situations which involve everything from her being pitted against the elements, wild animals and her own inexperience, to her tragic inability to afford a cheeseburger.
     Desensitized by heavily jargoned theoretical readings and eye-bleeding amounts of thesis research, I came to Wild with a heart that beat more out of habit than feeling. Strayed’s captivating tale of self discovery and healing in the Pacific wilderness repeatedly stomped on that listless contraption and gave it a good kick to the proverbial curb. Somewhere in the process of reading about this brave, reckless, and grieving young woman’s trials, my reader-self was transformed into something that felt more like it wanted to start exploring the wilds and damn the consequences rather than spend one more evening watching the world passively walk by a cafe window.
     Even in the life of the most prolific reader, there are only so many books you can honestly say have really made an impact on you or changed the way you thought about the world. For me, your typical jaded and cynical college girl living in the era of text-message breakups and melodramatic blog diaries, Wild is one of those rare mind-altering exceptions. It tells the insanely personal story of one individual’s much-needed spiritual regeneration found through the complete surrender of past identities and a deep immersion into nature in all its brutality, a life experience of Strayed’s that turns out to be indirectly responsible for unleashing a powerfully influential voice upon the literary world 17 years later.

And so, without reservation, I give Wild... 
... five red-laced, kick-ass Raichle hiking boots out of five!

* * * * * 
5 / 5

Thursday, February 14, 2013

On the Quintessential English Major Aesthetic

      

     C'mon guys, let's face it: English majors have got to be some of the hardiest people out there in the bloodthirsty world of academia. They are the subject of constant ridicule, faced with at least twice the amount of reading required of most other majors, and most importantly— they have had to endure years of exposure to some of the most pretentious individuals that have ever had the gall to stick their pinched little noses in the air.
     At the beginning of this academic year, I was still an English and Anthropology double major (yes, yes— boo hiss to you too, I'm one of those girls). In fact, technically I'm still considered as such. However, only a month and a half ago, I was still grappling with the then difficult decision of "shall I make my senior year hell by still trying to double major, or should I actually do the sensible thing and drop one? But then, which one?!?"
     My history as an English major and just English majordom/classes in general have always been touchy issues for me. And not just because of the exorbitant amounts of reading because, let's face it, it's not like a whole lot of reading is going to scare me off of anything anytime soon. No, it wasn't the reading. And no, again, it certainly wasn't the subject matter (I love me some archaic prose, artistic run-on sentences, and convoluted narratives, yo!). However, there was one thing that just kept on digging at me and digging at me and that was jabbed painfully in between my ribs over and over again like a stitch in my side that every so often, when I was least expecting and most unprepared for it, kicked into high gear and caused me to limp sullenly off the field.

Ugh.

     It's the people, folks, the people.
Or, rather, a distinctive and annoying subgroup that's attached itself like a parasite to the larger wonderful, open-hearted, intelligent 
(albeit forever economically impoverished) English Major culture.

You know the sort: the holier-than-thou, new-age hipsters all the low-brow collegiate newspapers poke fun at in just about every issue except, you know, of the more literary variety. They tie their scarves with such artistic flair that you are tempted to ask if they've yet called on the Darcys of Devonshire this year and sport a side part or bob that rivals the do's of the most fashionable social climbers of the Roaring 20's. They strive to be the artistic avatars of their own tastes which, while admittedly the purpose of clothing and fashion in general— is exaggerated to the point of caricature by these individuals. And so they exhibit their tastes and express their ideals in such a way that their initial aesthetic appeal is overcome by the sheer height of the ivory tower atop which they so obviously see themselves standing, staring down at all the little people as if we were tiny specs upon a toy globe they painted in the 4th grade and which they no longer find amusing or worthy of their attention.

They are those that give the loud and proud nerds, the devoted bookworms, and the unapologetic lovers of everything literary a bad name.
   
And I am sick and tired of every single goddamned one of them.

Seriously.

     The worst part is that these types aren't even reserved for students... universities actually hire these pompous toads in hordes for some inexplicable reason I can never hope to fathom.

Believe me, it's true; I've had classes with them.

That is all.

Torey

Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Margins Review: Glaciers, by Alexis Smith

The following review was originally written for publication in The Willamette Collegian (@WUCollegian).

          To begin, “Glaciers” is not a story about melting icecaps or old ships wrecked at sea. It’s about a young woman who is beginning to understand that life as we know it is only temporary and will one day become the distant past, leaving behind only remnants to be remembered by. Isabel is a collector of these remnants, and the plot of “Glaciers” is fueled by her desire to find the perfect vintage dress for a party that she believes will play a decisive role in her future. Populated with just as many beautifully constructed sentences as dresses, “Glaciers” is an eloquent love letter to the antiquated charm of times gone by and a work that stresses the symbolic importance of preserving the past. But, before I delve into any more of that, let me introduce you to the narrator.
          Isabel is a 20-something Portlander who lives on the second floor of a rambling Victorian house with only her cat and an eclectic assortment of old-fashioned knick-knacks to keep her company. Working in the dimly lit basement of a public library, it’s her job to tend the ‘wounded,’ or damaged, books and knit them back together again after years of being neglected. Reminiscent of “Mrs. Dalloway,” the novel’s main plotline follows Isabel’s mental journey as it unfolds over the course of a 24-hour period, broken up by a series of snapshot-like scenes featuring past conversations and reflections on memories from her childhood in Alaska.
          The cast of characters is small, but includes Isabel’s co-worker and forlorn love interest, recent war veteran Spoke. Smith’s subtle way of portraying their restrained, but quietly hopeful relationship is both insightful and endearing as she painstakingly constructs the little moments that work to bring these two lonely people together as well as those that persist in keeping them apart. Mid-way through the narrative, Isabel muses that to experience infatuation is to enter into a kind of heightened “awareness” that “suddenly sharpens your senses, so that the little things come into focus and the world seems more beautiful and complicated.” This description also serves as an accurate representation of Smith’s overall writing style as she utilizes poetic language to transform seemingly mundane scenes into inseparable parts of the overarching message; namely that moments, when studied carefully, are like photographs that allow us fleeting glimpses into the lives of others, and so deserve to be cherished and remembered.
          Essentially, this is the kind of book you can have a brief, yet satisfying romance with without having to worry too much about time commitment or being thrown into any kind of emotional turmoil. It’s the literary equivalent of a glass of wine after a long day and would serve as the perfect palate cleanser for a reader caught between best sellers and draining reading assignments. 
  
And so, since it’s definitely the kind of sweet & sentimental read well suited for getting into the Valentines Day spirit, I’m giving “Glaciers” a solid...

 ... three and a half lovely vintage dresses out of five. 

~ * * * .5 ~

____

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

On Reading and Writing: A Creative Commentary


Hello, there! Long time, no see eh?

     In truth, I'm still a bit conflicted over what exactly I want this blog to be, so just take this as my way of testing the waters with a stab at a different kind of submission. Hitherto, I haven't thought to post any of my academic work, but seeing as the content of the following essay so aligns with what I at least have come to associate this blog with (my personal thoughts on writing, reading, and etc.), I figured I might as well try and give it a shot.
     So, getting right down to business then: The following is the final essay I wrote just recently for the creative writing class I've been taking whilst abroad. Unlike most of the required essays I write, this one I rather enjoyed. In it, I cover my original literary influences and consider my own history as a reader before delving into a more in-depth discussion of the creative work I've turned out this semester. I'm still considering whether or not I'll actually post those pieces which I make reference to in the body of the essay, but haven't yet decided either way.
     In any case, here it is... Mainly for the purpose of making sure it's not entirely forgotten in the constant jumble that is my Macbook's documents folder.

So... lead on, MacDuff!
___________________________________________

     In the beginning, I think everyone starts out as an effortlessly unique being armed with an avid imagination. When you’re a kid, you’re allowed to spin out impossible tales at the dinner table or narrate entire expeditions to lands unknown to yourself in the backyard. At that time in life it’s both normal and accepted to express yourself creatively, and oftentimes it’s encouraged. However, at least from my experience attending high school in America, this creative indulgence seems to dwindle as your education advances. The use of imagination and what you might call ‘style’ don’t have much place in the five-paragraph essay world, and most often for good reason, as the central purpose of an essay is to clearly demonstrate a student’s argumentative powers in support of their ideas. Freedom of expression in regards to the representation of those ideas is something that isn’t widely practiced or encouraged during most of these formative years, and I think that’s why it struck me as almost unnatural that at the beginning of this semester I was confronted with a blank page that I could fill in whatever way I wanted.
            The practice of creative writing for me, then, is largely a playground; an area in which I can experiment, do as I like, and hopefully learn from my mistakes in the process. However, I think before you can know the writer, you have to first become familiar with the reader. To take a quote from Stephen King that serves as #1 in my own personal writer’s gospel, “If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write." The opening lecture to this course, if I remember correctly, echoed this statement, and so a discussion of my history as a reader will act as an introduction to my analysis of my own writing.
            My love for reading began at the age of seven, directly after my first change of schools and entrance into the 2nd grade. Like most young, transplanted students that also happen to be a little bit introverted, settling into a new environment and making friends was an ordeal that proved very frustrating for both myself and my parents. As a result, I became a pretty anxious kid post-relocation, and one that didn’t get to sleep very easily at nights. One thing my book-loving father thought might help was if we struck up a nightly ritual of relaxed, before-bed reading together. I was skeptical at first; hearing my dad drone on in a monotone about fictional people didn’t sound too exciting, so I remember sitting down to our first reading almost determined to be bored. However, as we started with C.S. Lewis’ “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,” that was very quick to change. By the time I hit third grade we had made it through the entirety of “The Chronicles of Narnia,” Ursula Le Guin’s “Earthsea” trilogy, and “The Hobbit.” And, with the advent of Harry Potter, I began taking my first steps towards becoming an avid reader myself in 1999.
            When considering that these were the first stories to really capture my interest, it seems only natural that I count them among those that were the most formative in my development as a writer. To this day, writers that seem to have boundless imaginations and who turn out tales of alien worlds and situations that are far removed from my own realm of experience are some of those I hold in the highest esteem. Just like so many of my generation, my young mind was inundated with pumpkin juice and the endless possibility of magic and adventure at a very impressionable age, and so multiple works belonging to the genre have stayed with me. Although I would not exactly call many of these examples of high quality literature, they are still ones of unquestionably high-quality imagination, which I deem to be at least equally important.              
            The second chapter of my reading history and the one that is most influential on my writing in regards to style began during my middle school years between the ages of thirteen and fifteen. Prior to this point, my literary palate had mostly consisted of fantasy or science fiction novels, very few relating to a world that bore much resemblance to my own. However, as I continued my education, required reading lists and English classes that challenged me to pay more attention to what I read and how I thought about other’s writing forced me into entirely new reading territory and away from my preferred genres. A subset of one of my English classes entitled “Reading the Classics” introduced me to the Bronte sisters, Dickens, Austen, and Wilde, among many others. These were to become the new giants of my reading world, and their penchant for long, descriptive sentences and prose that was near to bursting with adverbs entered my literary heart and left its distinctive mark on my writing... much to the chagrin of some of my future professors.
            As a result, my absolute favorite reading cocktail has become something of a marriage between the imaginative telling of tales that focuses on the unreal or surreal aspects of life alongside descriptive prose and a character-driven narrative. However, what I consider to be ‘good’ writing is much more fluid, though consideration of an author’s power of description and language still rank as highly important in my evaluation of their work. Among the more contemporary authors I admire, Neil Gaiman is one that scores high in most if not all of these categories, making him a good example of the kinds of topics I like to explore when I choose to write of a more fantastic and less realistic world. Another of my favorite authors, American writer Ursula Le Guin, champions the importance of language choice in creative fiction when she says in her manifesto that “A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it… they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls”… and, presumably, the ‘soul’ of their work. Over the course of the semester, I tried to take this passage to heart and even hung it up on my wall for good measure, hoping it would serve as a constant reminder to be more self-aware as I wrote.
            In the first piece I sent in for submission, “The First Descent,” I set out to use one of the plot devices I appreciate most from the literary world: A Gaimanesque twist in which the reader is introduced to the narrator in a setting that initially appears quite familiar, but some unexpected event experienced by the protagonist opens his or her eyes to what hidden secrets might lie beneath the guise of normalcy. Secondly, I wanted to incorporate some elements of the elevated style used by my favorite Victorian writers to give the narrator a unique inner voice that would come probably across as sounding a bit dated to modern readers.
            On the first count, I think I was largely successful in my portrayal of the event that would act as the catalyst for the narrator. Comments I received surrounding the scene were favorable at least in regards to my visual depiction of the destruction of the classroom, for example. However, my original intentions concerning the not quite possible, dream-like qualities of the event didn’t come across quite as clearly as I’d intended, engendering varying levels of confusion in my peers. Was it supposed to be a natural disaster? Was it the apocalypse? Did all the other classmates die? My answers of ‘no’ to each of these questions only seemed to raise more eyebrows and merit further explanation from myself, which seems to indicate that I evidently did not represent my intentions clearly enough to make them recognizable. In my description of the event, I had meant to maintain some level of obscurity in my avoidance of specifying the exact cause of the chaos, as I intended for the narrator to later have the chance to discover the source for herself. However, on some level I think I may have underplayed the level of impossibility I’d meant to convey to the point of confusing my readers more than was absolutely necessary. Also, what further complicated the issue was that each time I sat down to write the scene immediately following the narrator’s journey to the window and it came time to reveal the source of the noise, I panicked. The elaborate style in which I had written the beginning of the story combined with the plot that had grown too complex and unwieldy to fit into the strict parameters of a short story proved too daunting a task for me to complete. Perhaps when I get the time to really sit down and work out a comprehensive outline, I might be able to puzzle out which direction I want the story to go and then work from there. For now, it remains a slightly confusing beginning to a project that became much larger than originally anticipated and one that I hope to return to later.
            However, apart from my private concerns centering on the plot of “The First Descent,” I received very critical feedback regarding the writing style during its first round of peer reviews as well. I know I shouldn’t have been surprised, seeing as I’m fully aware that I’m a naturally verbose writer who always needs several solid editing sessions before my prose is fit to be seen by public eyes, but even so, I was. As another anecdote from Stephen King goes, “the road to hell is paved with adverbs," and that was exactly the case with the first draft of “Descent.” During this initial workshop, my writing was characterized as ‘overly heavy,’ ‘weighted down,’ and ‘unrealistic for a teenage narrator.’ Many insisted that a seventeen to nineteen year old no matter what parallel universe she was in could never realistically manage to chronicle her bizarre life experiences with such an ‘extensive’ vocabulary. And while at the time I begged to differ and will now admit to feeling a bit insulted on behalf of the many intelligent teenagers I’ve known, I did of course see their point. Although I persisted in maintaining the elevated style, in the initial draft there were indeed too many words and, as always, at least a third of them needed to go. It was actually after the final editing of “The First Descent” that I decided to submit the poem included in my portfolio, whose first draft also met with positively biting critique vocabulary-wise, although I think the final product, “Walking in the Woods,” is one of my better attempts at the form. 
            In my second attempt at a short story, however, I tried to do something different; something smaller, more manageable, and less expansive in scope than the first. I decided to draw from my own experience as a student studying in a foreign country, which is exactly the position the narrator of “Transitions” occupies. As I anticipate moving into my very first apartment next semester and am already acutely aware of the various emotions involved in being young and on one’s own, I wanted to explore some of the tougher moments that go along with returning to an empty, cold apartment after an extended stay back home. “Transitions” is definitely very different from “The First Descent” in both form and content, but where I think it differs most is its narrative voice. While both are written in first person, I meant for the “Transitions” narrator to come across much more personably. I wanted the tone of the story to strike a conversational, almost confessional note, one that read as if the reader was hearing the story from a close friend or perhaps had happened upon a personal journal entry written by the narrator herself. I tried to evoke emotion in a much simpler way this time around with little slice-of-life details that I hoped would be fairly relatable for almost everyone, and I think for the most part I succeeded. This story is much less formal than the last one, and it certainly falls within the realm of my own personal experience, so it’s a fairly unexplored genre of writing for me that I think I would like to try again.
            Although as I get older I begin to gain a clearer perspective as to what sort of writer I am and what sort of writer I’d like to become, I can’t exactly pin down a specific phrase that summarizes where my writing stands or where I hope it will one day land on the map of contemporary literature. Stephen King, who says “I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries” may be able to pinpoint where he is on the map, but I’m still busy romping around the imaginative playground that’s my blank page, trying to figure out what I like to do best and what works for me personally. As my creative writing portfolio for this semester shows, I like to try working in different genres and styles to see how the metaphorical glove fits. Short stories have proven a challenge for my long-winded prose style, but are great for forcing me to focus my narratives and wind down the dial on vocabulary, making poetry an even more difficult medium. Overall, I believe this course allowed me room to test my writing in ways I hadn’t previously had occasion for, and I can honestly say I learned more from the failures that were pointed out to me (sometimes repeatedly) in class than those I privately decided for myself behind a computer screen. Through my work this semester, I’ve learned that I write to experiment, to explore, and to challenge myself to do better each time. I write to exercise; to stretch my imagination in different directions and see how far it can go before it pulls a muscle, and I hope that regimen will someday help me get to the point where I can say what kind of writer I am. But until then, I’ll keep playing.
_______________________________________

Okay, folks: That's all she wrote!

See you next time!
Torey

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Note on a Bookfession: Children's Books & Why I Buy Them


I definitely think about this far more often than I should.


Okay, confession time:
     If I happen to stumble upon a particularly lovely copy of a book I adore, I feel almost obligated to take it home with me, cherish it, and then keep it in pristine condition so I can then pass it down to my children and my children’s children. I also like buying wonderfully illustrated, well-written, and imaginative children’s books for this same purpose. I just can’t help but imagine myself one of these far off days, sitting on some threadbare (and it will be threadbare, I care far too much for things that haven’t the slightest chance in ever making me any substantial amount of money, ever) couch somewhere in a cozy little house with a little boy or girl curled up in my lap as I read to them, and so I just can’t help but feel the need to stockpile now so that I can have a treasure trove of wonder to dip into when it comes time to really use it. I just want my children to grow up with books, to learn to treat them as they would very old friends as they go about finding their way through the world with the benefit of a richly fed imagination to keep them company.
     Ridiculous, I know… But with each passing year I seem to come more and more to terms with my persistently romantic, often overly sentimental nature. Nowadays I do my best to take it in stride, buy the darn book if it isn’t too hideously expensive, smile a little as I put it someplace safe and think in my heart, someday.
     Okay, I promise to stop rambling now.
Love you all,
Torey