John: Your lede is a great piece of work because it plays with my expectations superbly in the space of a few words. It all centers around the phrase “leaving me with one elastic night that lords over my past like a thick, morning bayou mist.” Describing the night as “elastic” makes me understand how it stretches across that era of your life, and aside from it being a delightfully atypical use of the word, I am led to assume you'll ram the point home with a verb like “stretches” to build on the elasticity. But then, shock! For the night does not stretch but it “lords,” and the night takes on new dimensions of domination, transcending its elasticity to become nigh omnipotent. I love words. Also I am a complete sucker for intense descriptions like “thick, morning bayou mist.” Some people say descriptions like that are overwrought and allow the reader none of their own substitutive imagination, but I'd like to hear them say that when they read that phrase and their lungs feel like they're full of heavy damp air.
Myles: You write about something that few people are willing to confront, even though it is a reality throughout the country. The history of this country is so wrapped up in race that it often feels like it is impossible to grasp it, that it is too big to look at all at once—so it is better to just pretend it isn't there. Maybe we used to be a racially tense country, but that all got ironed out during the 60's, right? No—and because it is such a huge and hugely important subject, I'm glad you start out small, in your high school's locker room. You zoom us out some during the course of the piece, but by the end we're still dealing with relatively small parameters—your hometown and its neighbor. This is a good thing. We get no answers, even though you proclaim at the end that “Saint Joseph must change,” but hell, we're not going to get a systematic solution to American racial tensions in 900 words anyway. You've made us see, or reminded us of, the reality by the end of the piece, and that is sufficient.
There is a similar dynamic in the San Francisco Bay Area that I was reminded of while reading your article. San Francisco itself is on the Peninsula, on the west side of the Bay, and while it is of course a multicultural city the Peninsula taken as a whole is more affluent and more white—taking San Rafael on the other side of the Golden Gate into account, this is especially true. The East Bay, by contrast, is a relative concentration of poor blacks, especially in the cities of Richmond and Oakland. Even San Jose to the south, in the heart of Silicon Valley, has a prevalence of Asians and Indians. Anyway, I was once listening to the blabbers on some local morning radio talk show blab away about the blacks in the East Bay, and they were skirting a very obvious matter—that the East Bay blacks were by and large also the Easy Bay poor—until their astute guest simply came out and said so. The hosts, their pathological self-delusion shattered, could do nothing but agree.
Wow that was way longer than it should have been.
Andrea: In our workshop it seemed as though we came to a conclusion—or at least a group consensus of sorts—about everybody's piece. Our time focusing on your piece concluded with Marin urging you to narrow the focus of your piece down to your relationship with your father which you immediately resisted, saying you'd tried a dozen times already and would rather run from the prospect. I agree with her that the real story of your piece is that relationship, and I want to take this opportunity to echo her suggestion. This piece is about that relationship; it can't not be about it. Basically, if you're going to write about this experience that changed your entire relationship to pain (which is a phenomenal thing to say on its own, hence slanty-worded emphasis), you are going to have to address that paired relationship, the one with your father. This isn't a biography of him, so at least you don't have to take it on directly. But maybe try to catch a glimpse of it in your own peripheral vision (as we can sometimes see things more clearly that way) and then communicate that glimpse throughout your piece; stress how strongly your father's character is reflected in the way he calmly commands you to literally come back to life. Start with that scene, I say. Plunge yourself and your reader into the deep end from the very start.
Jessica: I was confused by your conclusion at first, and wondered if you left out the part where everything got fixed. But that's societal training, right? I'm not conditioned to accept when somebody simply accepts that they have a problem; it's got to get fixed. And therapy does that, right? This subtle subversion of our assumptions pervades your piece, and it is why I ultimately liked the piece. This story isn't really about your eating disorder, after all; it's about your experiences with therapy—namely, how it didn't work for you. Hell, you really own your problem; you figured it out yourself, and even tried working on it yourself. Figuring out that you had an eating disorder was the last thing you needed help with, and that really helps you to assert yourself over it and not make you a victim of your problem. It makes your conclusion possible, but maybe focusing less on the strict chronology of your disorder and more on your reflections on therapy from both a personal persepective and also as kind of a psychological institution would make your final verdict more convincing the first time around.
Simona: Your piece made me—a lifelong American citizen who had not been out of his country in any appreciable way until study abroad—feel the anticipation of coming to America. I already knew how it was going to end, of course, having grown up in this twisted country, hating all its faults and taking all the good parts for granted. Nevertheless, I couldn't help feeling like a five year-old Romanian child myself when reading your piece, and found myself relating to a sort of anticipation that I have never experienced myself. Without a doubt, your dialogue communicates these feelings most effectively. Maybe it is helped by the fact that from an early age we, as children of a nation of immigrants, are saturated with the archetypal immigrant's story and so my response is a trained one. Maybe I want a better sense of where you—and, by extension, I—are coming from, a sense of the place I am leaving behind. And of course I cannot wait to see how you heighten the tension and tragedy of the ring, and transform it into a truly powerful metaphor for your American experience.
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