I Fall to Pieces

Okay, I remained disappointed with my first two essays.  I think I was overly influenced by the sad, but otherwise excellent essays in the textbook.  This week’s assignments are a nature essay and a segmented essay.  Nature makes me sad these days, with all the destruction, so I went above and beyond to the super-natural!  Ha!  There’s nothing I like better than playing fast and loose with a writing assignment.

The segmented essay, though, drove me to despair.  Three times I thought I had a concept; three times it fell apart on me.  I finally cheated.  (Well, that’s what I get for sitting in the back of the class!)   I went through our family newsletters, of which I was the chief editor, and picked out various short articles that I thought I could string together.  The ones that worked, but only after I added subtitles and an introduction, were some conversations that I’ve had with men.  I think it’s pretty funny, so I’m happy with it.  Naturally, once the pressure was off, I thought of an original segmented essay that I could have written!  Typewriters!  I learned to type on a manual typewriter, and progressed with technology (electric, IBM Selectric, word processing, Microsoft Word [boo, hiss!]) to my present state of slitty-eyed resentment of any new iteration.   Don’t keep changing things, that’s what I say!  But it’s too late to write it now; I’ve already uploaded my essays.

Meanwhile, realizing that I am too easily influenced by the textbook and the excellent essays written by my classmates, I have decided to start my next two essays without benefit of instruction.  I.e., I have quickly scanned the definition of “literary journalism,” and started writing before I read the assigned examples.  This essay is going to be a lot of fun, incorporating an unwelcome change in my Blue Cross health insurance policy with enlivening examples from literature.  Dorothy Gale of Kansas and Saki come immediately to mind.   And I’m pretty sure I can work in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper.”

Meanwhile, I received some excellent advice from Professor K about my Kindle project.  I was bemoaning the lack of oomph in the titles of two of my stories.  One of them, “Sook’s Cake,” I felt would be particularly meaningless to anyone who is not familiar with Truman Capote’s childhood, and I was wondering about changing the title to something like “A Fruitcake on Hallowe’en.”  Professor K immediately wrote back and said, “Make it ‘Hallowe’en Fruitcake,'” and of course that was perfect.   Prepositions only weaken the horror.