The truth?

Wow Wow wow. I truly can’t say enough about this story. Wow!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Where do I begin? Is it a non fiction or fiction? I am going to say it is non fiction. Just for the simple fact that fiction couldn’t be that good. The human element in the story is what makes it non fiction, you can feel his pain. The words jump out at you and its almost as if he’s telling you the entire story personally. At the end of it its almost like you believe what you want. It still doesn’t take away from the fact that it happened or maybe it didn’t happen. This story speaks about or touches on the inhumanness of war but it also demonstrates how war makes some people human. There is no right answer no yes or no, no correct or incorrect, no truth or false; what makes this story incredible is the story itself. Like Diana said “most likely, even the people who lived through the experience can't tell what parts of their story are true or not, if in fact the story was meant to be true), the "truth" this story is valuable because it delves into the psyche of human beings under these types of situations. It is human nature to repress traumatic experiences”. When it comes down to it even thought every single detail might not be true or maybe it might? It is very possible this story happened at one point or another; because this story didn’t necessarily have a moral and it wasn’t really entertaining. It just spoke about the human element of an event. But truly who knows I’m just a twenty year old ignorant kid from jersey. God I’m so confused! if i go on ill explode.

Blog #4 What is "Alive" and "Westbury Court" about?

Sincerely speaking the point or main idea of “Westbury Court” is a bit difficult to capture or basically to point out one particular thesis is somewhat problematical and challenging. Nevertheless I thought the essay was written and structures beautifully; it definitely kept me interested throughout the entire essay. So let’s decipher this essay if we can; the author Danticat foreshadows that by the end of the story he is no longer going to be living in Westbury Court, and the reason he gives in his first paragraph is because of a fire. He continues the essay by describing the fire and he gives the who, what, where and why. He takes us, the reader through a very detailed account of the experience what he was feeling at the time so on and so forth. He goes on with the essay wondering what it would have been like if he were one of the children in the show General Hospital, maybe he would’ve had to have lived through such an experience because “the nanny would take care of it”. Danticat then writes of what happened to the apartment that caught fire ant the new tenants that moved in. then he states everything wrong that went on in the vicinity of the building three after the fire and before they moved. The end is where the story gets interesting. This is where I think you can take two main points from the story. The first being the even though there terrible events occurring around the building he states that people die in other places other then their apartment building (bad things happen everywhere) and he really loved where he lived. He makes this statement when he writes “It was an elevated castle above a clattering train tunnel …… It was home”. Now that can be one point but another one can be the quote that he finishes the story with which he mentions twice. This is when his mother says “Sometimes it is too late to say, ‘I shouldn’t have”. This is the moral that the brothers learned from the horrific fire. So which one is it I don’t know you decide, LoL. Otherwise the structure of the essay is very clear he writes in a descriptive fashion and includes a lot of detail and feeling into the story. Now, does the structure help getting the point across, I would argue that it doesn’t for the first one and it does for the latter, because the fact that he loved where he lived isn’t clear until he mentions it and I think that gives clarity to the story or an epiphany. For the second he only mentions in the beginning of the story very, if I may say, quietly and then throws it at us again at the end; so for me it doesn’t work so much.

For “Alive” all I can say is wow. The essay is almost like experiencing being chased. I love story where the author gives lots of details as the events are happening, this allows the reader to really dive into the story and use our imaginations to relive the events that are flying off of the page. I am not a woman, but it must really suck to feel like you are being harassed every time a “creepy” guy looks at you. I wonder, do women really think like this are they paranoid all the time? The point of this essay is a bit easier figure out; and it is “I am vulnerable simply because I’m alive”. This is true, everybody is vulnerable to some type of horrible death or dreadful experience, what can I say it is part of the human condition, or animal condition for that matter, or any living thing to be real general. However, a person cannot live in a state of paranoia, people have to come to realization that we are all going to die one day, but for as long as we are here we might as well make the best of it, because if not then why even go on living. As I mentioned, I really like this story because the way she structured it giving examples of the kidnappings and then putting us, the reader, in a tense state because we don’t know if she is going to be abducted or not, this really captured me.

Blog # 4 "My Father Always Said"

I think to me this essay of Creative Non-Fiction “My Father Always Said” has two main ideas that it is trying to portray. The first idea being that it is crucial, in order to truly know oneself, to know your past and where your parents and ancestors histories. The second point that Mimi Schwartz is trying to make in this essay is that parents usually know best; she was finally able to appreciate the reasons why her father always tried to remind her that “In Rindhiem, we didn’t do such things”. With the family trip in 1953 and with her own trip in 1993, Mimi understood more clearly that what her father’s favorite statement, after they came from Rindhiem in1953, “You are a lucky girls to be here” in reality signifies a lot more than a simple understatement.

Even though the essay as a whole made great sense, each section does reflect on a different idea. For instance, the first section reflects how she thought her father just wanted to be a strict father because he had nothing better to do. The second section is Mimi’s beginning to understand where her father came from, and the type of life he had before Queens; the third section she is reflecting on how much the Jews of Rindhiem had to go through. In the fourth section Mimi is reflecting on how she would have felt if she were growing up during WWII in Rindhiem. Fifth section Mimi is reflecting on the somber emotions she felt in that graveyard. The sixth section Mimi is reflecting on how much she has grown as a person after this experience. Overall the essay had a phenomenal flow, and it all made sense at he end; it would be really interesting to develop an essay in this format.

Blog # 3

Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant” is different than any of the other “Contemporary” creative non fiction essays that I have read, because as I read it, it seemed to have the feel of a fiction short story. The way he developed the story with speaking about the way he felt about the imperialism and later connecting that to the way he felt when the crowd was expecting to shoot the elephant was contradicting, and ironical, which are things that you find in fiction as the write reaches a resolution; however that does bring back to one of the points which Lott made in his essay, that CNF is about putting things in order so that they make sense to you, that CNF is about finding your own truths; and in that case I believe Orwell accomplished that with tremendous accuracy. He did accomplish what he set out to do by writing this piece; he found his truth, which was that the reason he killed the elephant was simply to not look like a fool in front of Burmans.
In Montaigne “That Men Should….” definitely is a first because in this story he doesn’t use his own life but uses examples of History. This essay is not so much a life story or a narrative, but more of a reflection of ones of lives most intriguing subjects’ happiness. I ask myself if this could even truly be called a CNF piece of writing, after all the man is not writing about his own experiences. However one can see how CNF has developed, the latter pieces we have read seem to connect to specific story or event in a persons life; CNF has developed from a simple reflection about life, to an understanding and an unveiling of the events that caused that understanding.

Enhancing definition of CNF

Bret Lott's essay on "Toward a Definition of Creative Nonfiction" Enhanced my conception of what nonfiction creative writing is and what it should be. Every life no matter how uneventful it might be is worthy of writing about. What matters the most is "piecing together the events" that truly matters, for it will give you more insight into who you truly are. Another aspect of the essay I found interesting is the fact that we should make up or reorder what happens in our lives not to make sound good or to satisfy the reader, because what we are truly after is not to entertain as in fiction writing, but to "understand what is that has happened". However the most appealing concept I took from this essay was the fact that in writing creative non fiction we are exploring a continent which has not yet been explored before, ourselves. The truth is that one shouldn't be shy or feel weird about writing nonfiction because the self is the subject we know most about and by writing about it we are discovering things about ourselves that we didn’t know before. Even if we write not to publish the rewards as Lott mentions are great because we will more deeply "understand" who we truly are.
Kinkaids "Biography of a Dress" is a hilarious narrative (well at least to me), it is also a provoking story which doesn’t have much significance (not even to the writer). However it demonstrates that creative non fiction doesn’t have to be enlightening as long as the author his or herself is enlightened. The essay is definitely very unique, (I personally have never read anything like it). the author is simply "exploring" what she remembers of her second birthday. The narrative is a diary that was written thirty two years after the occurrence. However this story is one which you can not put down until you finish it maybe because it has a plethora of run on sentences or maybe because it is compelling and one as a reader only wants to know what happens next. And that is what makes it a good peace of writing, and a worthwhile reading, you might not find the meaning of life in this story but it brings you a couple o steps closer (or maybe it doesn’t) LOL.

My definition of creative non fiction writing

To me creative non fiction writing is a personal narrative with descriptive language. For instance I could write about the day of my high school graduation. "My graduation", would consist of how I was feeling that day, the jitters and the excitement I felt through the ceremony, and I would finish describing the exuberant night and the end of the day.