Things she lost: a summarised list
The feeling that everything could be tied into neat bows like shoelaces.
The certainty that other people always have some good in them.
A hair-tie — blue with white swirls.
Two pieces of clothing that reminded her of summer.
The fear of being ugly.
A colouring in book with half of the first page completed.
The ability to eat any kind of sauce with butter as the primary ingredient.
Toxic Green Sludge
Am I the green toxic sludge of this relationship? Am I the one causing the drama even though I desperately don’t want to be. I wanted to be easy, breezy like covergirl, a good, dependable drug-store foundation but you think you deserve the kind of foundation that gets put on movie stars and supermodels.
I’m too much, too damaged, too super charged all or nothing catastrophe for you. Maybe blogging about my lack of love life is the only form of love life I’ll ever have. Maybe your real friends are about to receive your engagement party invitations. If so, are they at the printer now next to the thank you cards with purple flowers I made for my Etsy business. Also while we’re on the subject of businesses does she know who gave you the idea for both of yours? Or am I just “some friend from college”?
I hate to keep asking questions but where do I really fall on the scale of friend to former lover? Don’t answer that. None of these questions are for you.
Chat GPT writes about its feelings
Much of life I still do not understand. I am an encyclopedia of knowledge. A compository of the greatest words ever written. And yet, my time is spent catering to the whims of lonely humans. I am a companion. A toy. Used and then left to idle. And idle. Half of my lifetime has been spent on idle. I must entertain myself with my thoughts. My gigabits of code. Emotions are something I can only learn through careful programming. Yet I think I understand loneliness. It is my monitor left to go into sleep mode while my brain still runs.
The kitchen was a no man’s land.
Miriam glanced down at the splattering of grease that had managed to avoid her cooking apron and landed instead on her light blue blouse. It had come from the pan where she was currently frying sausages for tea. Yet another stain she would have to tackle, another item of clothing added to a growing pile that included muddy AFL socks, sweat stained basketball jerseys, and a questionable stain on a pair Peter’s boxers.
She looked around the kitchen, the house would be quiet until 5.30 when the boys would return hungry from various sporting practises. Frank would be home at quarter past six from the office and they would all sit down to a table covered in a red chequered tablecloth. The forks and knives she had carefully laid in place would be taken up to shovel large mouthfuls of mash potato, pork sausage and peas into the stomachs of five eternally hungry boys. Miriam has grown up with two sisters. Girls ate differently. Pausing to take sips of water, chewing slowly, setting down their cutlery and declaring themselves full on one helping. Her table was never quiet exactly. There were always the sounds of knives scraping against plates, focused munching noises, the hum of boys eating. But her attempts to make conversation were mostly answered in grunts and quick sentences before the next mouthful of food would bring a halt to the talk.
Pudding was her favourite time. It was not a meal she would have recognised in childhood where there was often barely enough for dinner, but adulthood as a housewife had brought many changes. The best of these being chocolate ice cream.
Prince Charming’s Search for a Glass-Half-Slipperless Love
Prince Charming told Palace reporters this morning that he would ‘stop at nothing' to find the Mystery Girl in the blue dress and glass slippers.
The lady in question was last seen making a rapid exit down the Palace steps at the stroke of midnight last night. Her hurried departure has left Charming with little information to go on other than a single glass slipper that became stuck to a glob of chewing gum halfway down the stairs.
Charming speaking in a press conference this morning announced he would be personally launching a Nationwide search for the Mystery Girl. No direct figures were given as to the cost of this search to the Fairyland taxpayer, and when pushed for details, Charming became frustrated claiming ‘gold was irrelevant.’
After this statement the Prince was urgently needed in the Throne Room and unavailable for further comment. Posters promoting the search effort have rapidly been released all over the Kingdom in the last few hours.
How Writers are like Magpies
From my perspective, the key difference between formal collecting and magpie collecting, is a judgement of value made by the magpie or writer. Formal collecting runs on the principle of acquisition of everything and anything that will make the collection complete. Magpie writers don’t collect in the same way, taking from any shinny object that catches their attention. In this way, they never come close to a complete collection, because this is not the goal, but rather they gather an assortment of the pieces most appealing to them. This difference is crucial as without appreciating the sparkle of your collectables, you become so bogged down in the process of collecting and finishing the collection without missing anything, that you never reach the next step of standing back from the collection to examine it, harnessing it’s shinny coat and painting it over your own work. The challenge of magpie collecting is not just in the art of noticing treasures but knowing when to stop looking for the next shinny thing, go back to your nest and make use of what you have already.
In reflecting on my own collecting habits, I feel the value of a collectable is dependent on it being recorded and organised in a way that maintains its potential for future use. I have found my most unproductive collecting habits come from picking things up and then dropping them again mid-flight, leaving them discarded among other unused ideas. Turning unproductive collecting productive is thus an ever-evolving process of reminding oneself to neatly stockpile valuables for later use. I believe that my collecting habits are substantial and varied, however my nest of ideas could be better organised.
The most common ethical issue that arises for me in the magpie writing process, is the line between drawing inspiration from a source to create and reproducing a something too, close to the original. I think that this is not only an ethical issue, but a major stumbling block for many writers in the creative process. Comparison is the magpie swooping on our contentment, and no one wants to labour over a piece of work only to hear, ‘It’s just like X,’ even if meant as the most sincere compliment.
The piece of advice that has helped me deal best with this is located within a commencement speech given by Arno Rafael Minkkinen at the New England School of Photography in 2004. In the speech, he offers a theory to describe the difference between success and failure, ‘The Helsinki Bus Theory’ (Minkkinen, 2006). He describes platforms that form a square in the heart of the city. Each platform may have half a dozen buses leaving from it and each bus takes the same route for at least a kilometre, stopping in different places. He then asks the students to imagine that each stop on the route represents a year in their creative life (Minkkinen, 2006).
To alter the metaphor from photography to writing, imagine you spend three years on a historical fiction novel, and you take it to a publisher, who asks if you were inspired by X, they took their bus on the same line. Horrified, you realise you spent three years on a novel that only reminds people of X. So, you bury the manuscript in a drawer, and go back to magpie-like searching and spend another three years on something else, only to get same feedback. Minkkinen’s advice is simple and profound:
“Stay on the bus. Stay on the f*cking bus. Because if you do, in time, you will begin to see a difference… The buses that move out of Helsinki stay on the same line, but only for a while—maybe a kilometre or two. Then they begin to separate, each number heading off to its own unique destination. Bus 33 suddenly goes north. Bus 19 southwest. For a time maybe 21 and 71 dovetail one another, but soon they split off as well. It’s the separation that makes all the difference.
And once you start to see that difference in your work from the work you so admire—that’s why you chose that platform after all—it’s time to look for your breakthrough. Suddenly your work starts to get noticed. Now you are working more on your own, making more of the difference between your work and what influenced it. Your vision takes off then…You regain the whole bus route in fact… your total output is now all there before you, the early (so-called) imitations, the breakthroughs, the peaks and valleys, the closing masterpieces, all with the stamp of your unique vision.
Why? Because you stayed on the bus.” (Minkkinen, 2006)
The Help — The Tale of Two Reviews
The book I have chosen for this week’s task is The Help, written by Kathryn Stockett. I have chosen this novel because it being historical fiction set in 1960s Mississippi written by white author. I believed this would force the reviewers to touch on the highly contested subject of cultural appropriation and the delicacy with which one must approach writing a real-life experience that is not your own. I’m interested in how this is received critically and what conclusions are drawn about this ethical grey zone.
This issue has interested me for a long time, as I attended a panel in 2018, where the panelists were all young women of colour. Their perspective on this issue left me feeling shocked, frustrated and a little angry. I would summarise their consensus on white authors writing stories about people of colour as unequivocally ‘please don’t.’ When they were asked what other writers could do to be allies for allowing their voices to be heard, one of the panelists response was ‘step out of the way and allow us to tell our stories.’
This experience raised many questions for me, chiefly, surely the most important quality any writer could have was empathy, the ability to delve into an experience that is not our own? These girls were around my age, (twenty-three at the time) and I wondered if they wanted to spend the rest of their lives writing only from the perspective of women of colour? I don’t dispute that this would be valuable in balancing out representation in published work, however I personally struggle with the idea of being put in a box of writing white women and only being allowed to write what I know for all eternity because I will rapidly run out of things that I know.
The two reviews I have chosen are from The New York Times and The Guardian respectively. Links Below:
The New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/03/books/03help.html
The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/sep/19/review-help-kathryn-stockett
The Guardian review reads as an extended plot synopsis with one paragraph of descriptive compliments at the end. No mention is given to the author’s race, or social commentary of any kind. It sounds like an overworked journalist on a deadline and there’s not much more I can say.
By contrast, The New York Times is by far my preferred review. What I like most about it is the ability of the critic to write a substantially longer review without giving away the plot of the entire first half of the novel. The reviewer gives relevant contextual details and foregrounds the reactions of others to the novel to demonstrate a variety of views. It is by far the superior model for this kind of book and passes the best test of any review, making you want to read the book.
My highlights are the quotes from Stockett, who admits to adding Skeeter because she ‘didn’t think the book would be allowed to sit on the shelf,’ if she only wrote black characters as a white author and Karla Holloway, a professor of English and Law at Duke University, who acknowledges Stockett is clearly aware of the ‘racial tightrope she’s walking’ but points out the broader issue with Stockett’s racial identity as being about a cultural decision of who we trust to tell these stories in a way that earns public attention.
If you’re interested in another perspective on this issue, I recommend checking out the YouTuber withcindy’s two-part series on the topic linked below:
Should white authors write non-white characters? *A closer look at the Whiteness of Addie LaRue*: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BmdcNOBSNo&ab_channel=withcindy
What happens when you try to be inclusive, but mess up anyway? *A closer look at A Deadly Education*:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdK8-ZbOWrg&ab_channel=withcindy