StoryStudio student Jenene Ravesloot has just published her first books of poetry. “Loot: Stolen Memories & Tales Out of School” features dream-like memories of childhood, poignant observations, and a layering of images that immerse readers into the work.
Jenene has been working with StoryStudio instructor Paige Warren on many of the poems in the collection; Paige describes Jenene’s work as “at once familiar and foreign.”
“Loot” is available to buy through the Book Cellar in Lincoln Square. Here’s one of the poems to whet your curiosity:
1
It suits you
to be arbitrary
to paint the day
with inky fingers
make a blank
of things.
2
Has the moon
taught you Mandarin?
Now you speak in
lacquered tones
fold the night around you
like a Coromandel screen.
3
Your eyes are wild cranes.
Your arms reach out
and feather
hesitate and fly
silently you glide
into sky.
Told through emails, newspaper excerpts, family genealogies, and traditional narration, Cris Mazza’s latest book, “Waterbaby,” follows Tam Burgess, an epileptic woman and former swimmer who heads to Maine to help her sister with a family genealogy project. While there, she becomes entranced with the fate of an ancestor, Mary Catherine, daughter of a lighthouse keeper, and the identity of the town ghost said to haunt the shore.
“Waterbaby” explores the ways we construct histories – from personal histories to larger histories – and how this aids in forming identity, for better or worse. By the end of the novel, Tam has a different relationship with many of the characters in the book – her brother, with whom she was intensely competitive, her ancestors, and her self.
Mazza fills the novel with information about lighthouse keeping and the role of women in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. These historical facts, however, are blended into the narrative in such a way that particularly intrigued me – as someone working on a novel set in the past and loosely based on family history, I learned from the way Mazza’s uses histories to speak back to and intertwine with the present action of the story.
The novel’s use of some unconventional forms of narrative also makes it a pleasure to read. Through emails, we see the way families speak passed each other, never piecing together the full story or interpreting the story to fit their own reality. The excerpts from old newspaper articles, books, and genealogies show that history is constantly being written and re-written, some facts included, some left behind, and some transformed to hold new meaning.
This week, we have TWO StoryStudio peeps featured in the Huffington Post.
First, SSC teacher Ranjit Souri is interviewed about his 52 Open Mics project: Weekly Date With Mic for “Siblings of Doctors” Comic
and then, SSC student Adrienne C’s review of Paul Aster’s book Pitch Black is published.
Way to go, Ranjit & Adrienne!
Although everyone’s probably seen “The Dark Knight” (it did gross a record-breaking $155 million its first weekend), I’ll be careful not to write any spoilers or give away any major plot points.
To me, The Dark Knight was really a movie about the Joker – Batman, while important, seemed more like a secondary character. Perhaps that’s because of Health Ledger’s scene-stealing performance (there’s talk about giving him a posthumous Oscar nomination). But I do think the Joker is the more intriguingly drawn character, a character whose philosophy of chaos drives the entire film.
The writers of The Dark Knight accomplished so much – they compel us with a character we know very little about. We never know the Joker’s motivations because he lacks motivations. We never know anything about his origin, and the stories we do get about his past (i.e. his facial scars) are contradictory. His face paint, too, unsettles – we never know why he wears it, but are constantly reminded of its presence as it runs, smears, and fades mid-scene.
In writing, we are always told to give our characters motivation. Why do they do the things they do? Where do they come from? What is their past and their history? The Joker contradicts all this, and yet still compels us, still draws us in. Perhaps he is so intriguing because he violates these expectations.
I’m in the middle of my summer reading list, and I’ve just read two novels by British writer Kazuo Ishiguro.
Ishiguro is best known for “The Remains of the Day,” for which he won the Booker Prize, but “An Artist of the Floating World,” published three years before, is just as fantastic.
Both books deal with men in their twilight years, looking back on their lives and hoping they have always done what was right for their times and positions. Stevens, the protagonist of “The Remains of the Day,” believes he has lived a good life by serving a noble Lord; however, as Stevens’ narration subtly reveals, Lord Darlington proves to have shady political affiliations in an England on the cusp of World War II.
The protagonist of “An Artist of the Floating World,” Masuji Ono, is a former pro-Imperialist painter reconciling with the ways society has changed in post-World War II Japan. Ono wants to believe he had done right in his past, helping create an identity for Imperial Japan through his art. But, in a changed world, he struggles to coming to terms with the new Japan and take responsibility for his past actions.
It’s been quite a learning experience to read two novels by the same author that deal with similar themes, although in very different ways. The first-person narrators are self-deceiving much of the time, and readers are quickly taught to question everything said. But what I find most arresting about both books is that they explore something so integral to the human condition – the need to believe we have done right by our lives. After all, why do we write?
