Welcome and thanks for stopping by the Senior Seminar: New Writers, Newer Books blog.
Since January our small community of writers in Loyola’s Writing Department has been reading fiction, nonfiction, and poetry by contemporary writers and reflecting on what it means to be a writer today.
When asked to teach this course, I’d been reading James Wolcott’s commentary, “The Battle of the Book” (The New Republic, December 10, 2007). Reflecting on the familiar concern that digitalization of print books lead to obsolescence, Wolcott uncovers a deeper one: that “in house book reviewing has been eliminated, abridged, or downgraded.” This matters, he writes, because “When you deprive the coverage of books of adequate space and talent, you are declaring that books are not important.” Reviews matter, he suggests, because an “intelligent discussion of a book has the power to change its readers ideas about how he votes or who he loves—to furnish nothing less than a ‘criticism of life.’”
Many students, I knew, were familiar with Amazon readers' tips and authors' blurbs, but few had encountered a book review as the transformative experience Wolcott describes. Done well, Wolcott suggests, a review is “a formidable thought stream, and knowledge stream. It inducts its reader into the enchanted circle of those who really live by their minds.” In this view, the review is “a small but significant aid to genuine citizenship, to meaningful living.” Of the multiplicity of reviews meeting this gold standard, we enjoyed the reflections of a few stellar contributors to this genre--Angela Carter, Ursula K. LeGuin, Randall Jarrell, and Seamus Heaney—in addition to the many writers whose insightful commentary graces the pages of the Times’ Sunday Book Review.
In the next weeks, you’ll read reviews of the books the Seminar has been reading as well as reflections on reading and writing experiences that have shaped—and will continue to shape—the writers these apprentices are destined to become.
Reviews & Recommendations: College Seniors Have Their Say
Welcome
Thanks for stopping by the Senior Seminar: New Writers, Newer Books blog.
Since January our small community of writers in Loyola’s Writing Department has been reading fiction, nonfiction, and poetry by contemporary writers and reflecting on what it means to be a writer today.
You'll find book reviews plus reflections on writing and reading.
Check out the Writers' Workshop: Prompts and Possibilities to generate your own literary endeavors!
Since January our small community of writers in Loyola’s Writing Department has been reading fiction, nonfiction, and poetry by contemporary writers and reflecting on what it means to be a writer today.
You'll find book reviews plus reflections on writing and reading.
Check out the Writers' Workshop: Prompts and Possibilities to generate your own literary endeavors!
Reviewers
Senior Seminar student writers
Reviewers
Row 1 (l to r): Matt Anderson, Kendra Richard, Alison Koentje, Lorraine Cuddeback
Row 2 (l to r): Amy D'Aureli, Courtney Carbone, Raina Fields, Lorraine Wolters, Joseph DelGabbo, Christopher Varlack
Not pictured: Erin O'Hara, Janet Reuter
Row 2 (l to r): Amy D'Aureli, Courtney Carbone, Raina Fields, Lorraine Wolters, Joseph DelGabbo, Christopher Varlack
Not pictured: Erin O'Hara, Janet Reuter
Literary Icons
Poe: Baltimore's Literary Forebear Lives in Spirit
Writers' Workshop: Prompts & Possibilities
In the novel, Falling Man, by Don DeLillo, writing becomes a vehicle to memory. The Alzheimer patients, for instance, write down interesting occurrences as a means to reconnect with their experiences as well as with themselves. The claim is still made by DeLillo, however, that "writing is sweet music up to a point. Then other things take over" (60). Write about the various forms of expression (music, photography, painting, etc) that you are attracted to when writing fails to capture an idea. How does these alternate forms take over, allowing you to connect with an idea as well as yourself?
*Chris Varlack
Foreign correspondences: Many of us have traveled abroad. For those that haven’t, there has surely been a time when you felt like you were in a foreign place outside your comfort zone. Write about a time when you encountered a different culture or environment. Did you expectations match your actual experience? What surprised you? Which beliefs or assumptions did you have to reevaluate?
o Create a “what-if?" scenario. Take a moment in history, or in your personal life, and ask "what if this had happened differently?" Try to choose something where a choice was made, and imagine if the opposite had occurred. Think about how it would affect your personal life, your everyday habits, relationships, or society as a whole.
o Or write a few paragraphs with Chabon-esque dramatic metaphors. His is a fine craft between description, narrative tangent, and metaphor that keeps a reader engaged in the text. Think of a metaphor and run with it: use actions, not explanations to develop the description.
*Chris Varlack
Foreign correspondences: Many of us have traveled abroad. For those that haven’t, there has surely been a time when you felt like you were in a foreign place outside your comfort zone. Write about a time when you encountered a different culture or environment. Did you expectations match your actual experience? What surprised you? Which beliefs or assumptions did you have to reevaluate?
*Alison Koentje
Write as if you are telling someone you have never met, someone you may not necessarily identify with, a story from your past four years at college. Just as Changez communicates with the American man without illustrating this man’s perspective throughout The Reluctant Fundamentalist, ask this person questions, acknowledge his or her responses and reactions, and work towards revealing truths about yourself and your experience without changing point of view.
*Amy D'Aureli
In Edwidge Danticat's memoir, Brother, I'm Dying, Granme Melina told stories to children concerning death or other profound matters that were meant to teach a lesson. These stories involved mystical and often religious characters (the serpent and Angel of Death for example). Write a story in a similar tradition that pertains to one of the themes of the book.
* Joe DelGabbo
In Dave Eggers' novelistic biography, What is the What, Valentino Achak Deng observes: “When I know someone is listening, and the person wants to know everything I can remember, I can bring them forward. If you have ever kept a diary of your dreams, you know how the mere recording of them each morning can bring them forth in your mind. Backward from the part you remember most, you can recreate the night’s adventures and wishes and terrors, conjuring everything from when you lay your head on the pillow.” (29)
1. Write about an experience as if you were telling another person, someone who may learn or benefit from your explanation. It can be a dream, or it can be an actual event. Following Eggers/Achak’s advice, start from the most vivid part of your memory, and try to extract every detail/feeling from that experience.
2. Take a moment to think about a memory you have that you share with many other people, as Achak shares his story with thousands of other refugees. The stories are not exactly the same, but vary slightly from person to person. You may have heard other’s accounts of the story and may have become desensitized to certain details that seem to repeat (for example, Achak says “It was not interesting to us to hear more of violence and loss). Construct your story through a series of poems or a few paragraphs. Strengthen the description of things you remember most while blending memories not so familiar with the memories of others in your situation.
*Matt Anderson
In Dave Eggers' novelistic biography, What is the What, Valentino Achak Deng observes: “When I know someone is listening, and the person wants to know everything I can remember, I can bring them forward. If you have ever kept a diary of your dreams, you know how the mere recording of them each morning can bring them forth in your mind. Backward from the part you remember most, you can recreate the night’s adventures and wishes and terrors, conjuring everything from when you lay your head on the pillow.” (29)
1. Write about an experience as if you were telling another person, someone who may learn or benefit from your explanation. It can be a dream, or it can be an actual event. Following Eggers/Achak’s advice, start from the most vivid part of your memory, and try to extract every detail/feeling from that experience.
2. Take a moment to think about a memory you have that you share with many other people, as Achak shares his story with thousands of other refugees. The stories are not exactly the same, but vary slightly from person to person. You may have heard other’s accounts of the story and may have become desensitized to certain details that seem to repeat (for example, Achak says “It was not interesting to us to hear more of violence and loss). Construct your story through a series of poems or a few paragraphs. Strengthen the description of things you remember most while blending memories not so familiar with the memories of others in your situation.
*Matt Anderson
*Janet Reuter
Michael Chabon constructed the novel The Yiddish Policeman's Union with a range of stylistic tools. Take some time to explore his method. There are two options:
o Create a “what-if?" scenario. Take a moment in history, or in your personal life, and ask "what if this had happened differently?" Try to choose something where a choice was made, and imagine if the opposite had occurred. Think about how it would affect your personal life, your everyday habits, relationships, or society as a whole.
o Or write a few paragraphs with Chabon-esque dramatic metaphors. His is a fine craft between description, narrative tangent, and metaphor that keeps a reader engaged in the text. Think of a metaphor and run with it: use actions, not explanations to develop the description.
*Lorraine Cuddeback
*Courtney Carbone
In Infloresence, Sarah Hannah used her knowledge of wildflowers—a hobby she and her mother shared—as a way to enter into this memoir-in-verse. What has resulted is a rich account of her own memories and her mother’s struggle with terminal illness; the reader, in turn, receives a beautifully tragic character portrait of a woman grieving a deep loss. Using a subject or pastime most familiar to you, write a poem or a few paragraphs of prose reflecting on a loss you’ve suffered. Try to replace what would be an overzealous statement of emotion with an image pertaining to the pastime you’ve chosen, ultimately letting your personality come through to the reader without overstating or “telling” too much.*Lorraine Wolters
Write a series of poems (long or short) about someone or something mythical, biblical or even from fantasy or science fiction. Write the poems with the conviction that Judith Hall uses in Three Trios to create translations from the "apocryphal" poet JII. Try to play with interesting and radical line breaks or to play with punctuation. Allow yourself the freedom of accepting your own "apocrypha" as reality and creating a tangible voice for it. Give your fictitious character life, as if you took a story from the news and decided to write about it.
*Kendra Richard
Michael Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter greatly echoes the improvisational nature of jazz. Jazz is often fragmented, blending melodies and riffs that repeat in various places, sometimes random, sometimes expected. Try writing in a similar fragmented nature – blending historical events with fictional events, blurring genre lines. Use Michael Ondaatje’s method of combining myth, lists, lyrics, and your own personal voice to create erratic and thematically coherent writing.
*Raina FieldsIn Strange as this Weather Has Been, Ann Pancake Appalachian folk speech, perhaps running the risk of having her characters (and their thoughts) appear too "simple." However, as you come to understand throughout the novel, the language Pancake employs allows her to express characters' emotions much more freely. Her most poetic, striking, and beautiful phrases are often complex in their simplicity: "stunned golden inside with the dream and the crave and the new of that boy"; "we learned his new body together", and "the old house contains nothing but gone." Try to write a narrative--fiction or nonfiction--in a simple voice (if you're choosing to write nonfiction, perhaps your younger self), allowing yourself liberties with grammar and other restrictions and conventions that may normally limit you. Blend parts of speech, allow yourself to ramble, and see where it takes you.
*Erin O'Hara
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About Me
- poetjanes
- A 2007 reciepient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Literature, I'm the author of two books of poetry: Assignation at Vanishing Point (Elixir, 2003) and Shepherdess with an Automatic (WWPH, 2000). My essays have received the John Guyon Award, the Florida Review Editors' Prize, the Heekin Foundation's Cuchulain Fellowship, and the Gold Medal for the Essay in the 2007 Faulkner-Wisdom Competition. I'm nonfiction editor at Marginalia and review regularly for Antioch Review (poetry) and The Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering (nonfiction). At Loyola College, I teach nonfiction writing and poetry. This spring I'm working with a talented group of graduating seniors whose passion for reading and writing runs deep. This blog is our way of enlarging our conversations.