An update from our thirty-third book club meeting! On February 26th, we discussed Esperanza Rising by Pam Muñoz Ryan. This uplifting and beautifully-written novel follows thirteen-year-old Esperanza Ortega. She has a charmed childhood as the daughter of a wealthy ranch-owner in Mexico, but a tragedy causes her to flee to the United States with her mother. In California, Esperanza and her mother become farmworkers, and must navigate poverty, racism, and labor strikes with the support of new friends. Everybody said that they had really enjoyed Esperanza Rising, and we all shared our favorite moments in the book. We started our discussion by talking about the evolving relationship between Esperanza and her friend Miguel. Back in Mexico, when Miguel was Esperanza’s parents’ servant, Esperanza had said there was ‘a deep river’ between them. We discussed what we thought this river symbolized, and agreed that it meant the gulf of wealth between them, which made Esperanza unwilling to have a relationship with him. We also agreed that it was satisfying to watch this dynamic change over the course of the book. Then we had a debate: would we have chosen to join the labor strike if we had been farmworkers like Esperanza? Most people said they would have been too scared to join the strike, out of fear of being deported, but one student said she would join the strike because she wanted to work for better wages. It was interesting to hear everybody’s different opinions! Next we talked about proverbs, or sayings, like the ones that Esperanza’s father and grandmother always told her. It was fun hearing proverbs from different people’s families. Last but not least, it was creative writing time! Since Esperanza Rising was based on the life story of the author’s grandmother, students had a choice to write down a story they remembered from a grandparent or other elderly person in their life. Or, they could write about a fruit harvest, like in the novel, using all the different senses to make it come alive. Some students chose to share out their writing with the group. It was lovely to hear about people’s grandparents, and the way they described the harvest with detail. I really enjoyed this month’s book club meeting, and am looking forward to next month, when we will be discussing The Wolf Wilder by Katherine Rundell. Our next book, to be discussed March 26: The Wolf Wilder by Katherine Rundell
Workshops
How Stories Work—Writing Workshop #27: Parables & Paradoxes
An update from the twenty-seventh Writing Workshop with Conner Bassett A summary of the workshop held on Saturday February 12, plus some of the output published below This week, Conner chose to focus on the miniature literature of Daniil Kharms and Franz Kafka in the form of parables and paradoxes. The entirety of the workshop was spent on the writing of Kharms and Kafka, beginning with Kharms, a Soviet era Russian avant-gardist and absurdist poet, writer, and dramatist. We began by reading “Man with Red Hair,” in which a red-headed man is introduced and subsequently stripped down to non-existence body part by body part until the speaker finally says “So it is probably best not to talk about him anymore.” This piece set the tone for what the rest of these parables and paradoxes would do: namely, make us laugh! We also read “A Story,” “The Old Woman,” and “7 or 8,” all by Kharms. From Kafka, we read “A Little Fable,” “Give it Up!,” and “The Departure.” The Participants: Nova, Amelia, Emma, Josh, Lina, Ellie, Zar, Quinn, Alice, Chelsea The Challenge: Write a parable or paradox à la Kharms or Kafka. To watch the rest of the readings from this workshop, like Zar’s below, click here. Zar, 11
Writing Workshop #58: Sense of Place
An update from our fifty-eighth Writing Workshop A summary of the workshop held on Saturday, February 12th, plus some of the output published below William started off the workshop by having a journal reading from Ananya. Then, he invited participants to read passages from books they were reading that captured a sense of place. Peri and Agatha both read passages from books they were currently reading. William continued with a review of another topic he’s covered in Writing Workshop: Ekphrasis. He emphasized that using sensory details and thinking about how different characters might react to an environment. We looked at examples from Jack London’s Call of the Wild and Willa Cather’s My Antonia. Then the writers did a short exercise where they wrote for 5 minutes where they could either write a neutral description of a place or an emotionally charged perspective through the eyes of a character. The Challenge: Describe a place through the eyes of a character, with all the bias and emotion that they might have. The Participants: Agatha, Sophie, Peri, Kate, Liam, Anya, Ananya, Lauren, Lena, Rachael, Alexandra, Yueling, Iago, Elbert Yueling Qian, 9Chicago, IL The Barn Yueling Qian, 10 I look at the old barn. It is dark red as if it was painted like that to make me feel worse. The wet mud sticked to the bottom of my shoe. I could hear the ugly squelching sound of it. The cows mooed furiously. I look at the tall yellow crops. It looked like they all hate each other, and they wanted to outgrow each other. The horses kicked their hind legs staining the perfectly white fence. All the delicious yellow corn has fell on to the gross wet mud. The ugly rotten corn remained standing. The sunflowers drooped like the sun meant nothing anymore. In fact, the sun didn’t mean a thing anymore. Peri Gordon, 11Sherman Oaks, CA The Hill Peri Gordon, 12 Twenty-two hills. We had scouted twenty-two hills, and not one was right for the film. Too tall, too short, too large, too small…why bother with a twenty-third? We would never find the perfect one. The overgrown shrubs of Hill Twenty-Three crowded around us, blocking our way. The dull green of their leaves resembled a watery, disgusting stew, which, suddenly, I could practically taste. The clouds above obscured the sky in long, pale streaks, as if a child had smeared the atmosphere with white paint. In the feeble light, it could be seen that the hill was pockmarked with stones covered in moss—or was it mold?—and the grass stuck up like thousands of blades waiting for someone with bare feet to come along. A rancid smell wound its way down from a looming, moldy chunk of rock to the threatening grass, worked its way around a few trees that shielded the hill, and wafted into my nostrils, at which point images of sewers flashed through my mind. I was sure I could feel the moist, mushy ground beneath my feet beginning to cave in under the weight of my body, and I jumped back in alarm, smashing my legs into a bush woven with thorns. As I tried to recover, the clouds suddenly parted, making way for devilish heat that practically set my back on fire. I ran down the side of the hill, attempting to get away from parts of nature I could never escape, my shoes slipping off and allowing the sharp grass to torment my feet, doomed to run to yet another hill, all for a movie that would never be made.
