Okay, I know it's a little late but I've changed my mind about doing a literacy narrative and I would like to do a multigenre project on Wikispace :) I'm really excited but I'm stumped on a topic. I'm going to think about this really long and hard right now and by Monday I should have a few of my pages complete!

For our last multigenre project I plan to write a literacy narrative about my experience in this class over the course of the semester. At the beginning of the year I stated to the class that I really never read and I even mentioned that in our first blog. During our first class meeting, Erinn asked us all to name our five favorite books that we've ever read and I could only list three. One of my picks was the Bible because I used to be really involved in church but I've honestly never read the entire book. The other was a book that I had to read for my english class last semester. Now, listing my five favorite books would be no problem because I've read so many this semester.
Not only did I grow as a reader, but also as a writer. I hope to write a little about that, as well. Writing has always been something I was naturally good at but now I can write in several genres and it feels like I'm doing it correctly. I wrote poetry a lot during this class and I was always taught that poetry is something that rhymes but still has meaning. Now, I love writing in poetry and I actually discovered that the haiku aspect of poetry can actually be fun and I'm not terrible at it (I actually feel like I might be good at it). I will be discussing all of this in the paper and I'm looking forward to starting it soon.

List of Thoughts

Eww, No, Grapes, Texture, Strings, Purple, Spit, Anxiety.
Poems, Denver, Children, Proud, Nature, Difficult, Pressured.
Alone, Miserable, Mourning, African Gods-Kwoth, Heaven, Depressed.
Death, Dark, Struggle, Anger, Soon, End, Old, Knowledge, Hopeless.
Country, Superstition, Sadness, Coincidence, Age, Strange, Resentment.

I sing myself, and CELEBRATE myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every love belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I praise and invite my soul,
I praise and lean at my ease observing a piece of summer grass.

My tongue, every atom of my blood, form'd from this air, this world,
Born here of parents born here from parents alike, and their
parents alike,
I, now eighteen years old in crumbling health begin,
Hoping to really live until death.

Creeds and schools in pity,
Thinking back a while ashamed at what they are, but never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with life.

The six poems that I chose were Barbie Doll(619), Leaving the Motel(620), Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminal Insane(624), To a Daughter Leaving Home(663), Sex without Love(692), and At the Hospital (714). My two favorites are Barbie Doll and Sex without Love. I think that both of them discuss issues that are very important, especially in our society, today. Barbie Doll talks about perfection and plastic surgery based on other people's standards as you can see when she tells us what one classmate said about her and then what everyone else saw, as too (619). She finally achieved happiness when she cut off her nose and legs and died because everyone else finally viewed her as "pretty" (620). Sex without Love is about two people having a physical connection without the emotional attachment. It tells us about the authors morals and beliefs, which I feel are very similar to my own because I can't understand how people can do/handle that. She discusses"God","religion", and "priests" (692). She doesn't understand either (you can tell by the first line) because she opens with "How do they do it, the ones who make love without love?" (692). I would also like to mention At the Hospital because it is only two lines long but it is so powerful and I have a personal attachment to it since my mom had cancer and was in and out of the hospital 5 years ago. I think it means that until cancer strikes you or a loved one, you can't fully understand it. She says "the cancer spoke at last", which makes you think that if cancer could speak what would it say? (714). "Finally clarified" in the last line tells me that it all makes sense now, which is how I felt too(714). I'm not a big fan of poetry which is why all of the poems I selected came from my Norton. I did read through a lot of poems and the ones that I chose were not random. I really enjoyed these.

Haiku Inventions

"Morning"
The pillow to my ear
like a fish in a pond.
Belongs.

"Afternoon"
America's Next Top Model.
As a bee has seen flowers,
I've seen 1000 times over.

"Spaghettios"
A volcano exploded
on the floor of the earth
at lunchtime.

"Evening"
One Eats-
lonely, like a duck
without a mate.

"Homework"
The world is spinning,
The clock is moving,
Due.

"Sleep"
Dark sky
on a chilly evening.
Eyes, stores, parks, and such must close.

PS-Haiku's are NOT my thing.

More Poetry

Love or Tragedy? One could only guess.
An opinion. Happiness toward one another
might be depression for the other.

Nonsense. Truth. Societal judgements.
Perfection in one person's eye,
for someone else to satisfy.

Murder. Crime. Revenge for Peace.
An oxymoron don't you think?

Poetry screams, opinions cannot be fact.
I hear the screams. I am me.
I see them as I do.
My ideas may be strange but don't judge.
Do I judge you?

Love

Obviously poems are meant to give feeling to the poem but these poems all convey the same emotion, with each poem having a different situation and perspective. Several of the love perspectives involve marriage. The Tally Stick (596), The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter (599), Married Love (600), To My Dear And Loving Husband (610), [Let Me Not To The Marriage Of True Minds] (611), and Wedding-Ring (613) are all about marriage in some way. They brought out feelings that reminded me of my own relationship with my boyfriend and either made me happy or sad but all because of the same feeling of love. My favorite was [Stop All The Clocks,Cut Off The Telephone] (609). The objects helped to produce emotion and they were all such ordinary, everyday objects that the poem struck me in a way that I would never have thought of these objects before. The simplicity of the objects helped me to understand and mourn along with the author. The other four poems didn't particularly stand out to me and just silently existed. I especially enjoyed the poems with a rhyme scheme because those keep me interested and help me to pay attention. They were all good because I love, love. It's an emotion that everyone feels or wants to feel, so I think anyone could relate to any of them.

Lucky Poem

You're not supposed to question,
You're supposed to just know.
When something is wrong,
You don't let it show.
When I am most scared,
how can you leave me to feel so alone?
These people act like I'm a freak;
They speak to me in monotone.
What don't you get?
I'm your baby girl.
Don't you believe me?
You don't know the world.
It's not like when you were a kid.
Life's not a safe place.
And because I was raped,
It shows on my face.
Don't be embarrassed when questions arise,
I'll answer them, but I will not tell lies.
It must be called RAPE.
Nothing else but what it is.
I didn't want this to happen,
The fault is all his.
I feel so betrayed by the ones that I love.
The feelings I have, they are forever void of.

Lucky Themes

I've been having many ideas jump out at me as a topic for my multigenre project. One idea I was thinking about reminded me of when I was a little kid. Children don't see or understand things the same way as adults. Alice brings this up when she says, "Until that day in the yard with my playmate I thought this was what fathers did" (45). So our project could be about Children's perceptions. Another idea, that Erinn actually came up with, was rape on college campuses. I've heard that Western is one of the schools with the highest percentage of rape victims in the United States. That can't be good but it would be nice to find out. She addresses this by saying, "At a small table near the door was the RSA-Resident Security Assistant" (23). I can't wait to hear what ideas the rest of my group members came up with.

Nonfiction

To me, nonfiction is common sense. Why would it not be literature? It is text. I would classify any form of text that isn't a story about something that could happen in reality as nonfiction, be it true or not. Any document, autobiography, poetry, etc. are nonfiction. I don't understand why it is being debated because I don't see a concrete argument that could be built besides anything other than the worldwide definition of what nonfiction is.

A Good Man is Hard to Find

John 3:16
For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life. John 3:16.

I hope the grandmother believed everything she said to "the misfit" about Jesus and praying because she became of victim of the reason she didn't want to vacation in Florida, although they were in Georgia. People often talk like that in order to soften up murderers when they're in that situation to save their own lives. Who really knows what the grandmother actually believed?

A Rose For Emily

I felt very sympathetic towards the character Emily, not only for the fact that she was portrayed to the readers as a lonely, pathetic old woman or the fact that the entire town viewed her as a mere gossip column and a sad excuse for a woman, but also because she perceived herself in the exact same way as everyone else. For her to be "one of Jefferson's finest" seems strange as you think there would be duties in order to remain known as one of the finest, such as being seen in public and maintaining a clean and pleasant household.
Her uncontrollable need to cling to the bodies of her deceased loved one's also seems a bit repulsive. Although you must feel sorry for her in the fact that she is a woman and didn't amount to much without her father or a husband in that time period, you can't help but think about the possibility that she may have mental problems, for keeping a dead body in your house is not exactly a normal thing to do(470). I didn't really understand why she had to murder Homer in order to keep him around either(474). Was it because he "wasn't the marrying kind" (471)? When stating that "He liked men" did that mean that he was gay or was there a deeper meaning that maybe I just didn't quite grasp (471)?
The story maintained my attention for a mere 10-15 minutes but is both challenging and time consuming for me to understand and analyze the basis for her thinking. Perhaps she did go insane like her aunt or perhaps she was just insecure with herself without a man in her life because of the time period in which she existed.

A Souvenir of Japan

Adoration or obedience? Resentment or respect?
Things aren't always what they seem.

Selfless or Selfish? Elegant or awkward?
Things aren't always what they seem.

Beautiful or tortured? Trashy or chic?
Thing's aren't always what they seem.

Culture and Heritage. Race and Religion.
Things are never what they seem.

The Yellow Wallpaper

Ever seen "The Number 23"? It's a movie about a guy whose wife buys him a book and he acts completely uninterested in it until he starts reading it and then everything about the story reminds him of himself. It talks about the number 23 and how it's in addresses, birthdays, important dates in history, and even in words. By the end he is completely obsessed with the number 23 and finds out that this is due to mental processes from the past. This story has proven that obsessions and insanities are not necessarily something one is born with but rather something one creates for himself, and in these cases, based on a likeness or strong interest. I couldn't put this story down even though it's way past my bedtime. It really got inside the readers' head and I think that's that is how the most intriguing stories are written.

How

This was a difficult story to read and yet so fun to do your best to keep up. The wording was impeccable, although I found the story to be so sad. Depicting the time going by so fast by continuously saying "a week, a month, a year" was brilliant. I never really understand symbolism or deeper meanings but I thought that was clever. I am also uncertain why they kept using song titles as regular words throughout the story but it was interesting, almost like a puzzle and I'm the one who couldn't solve it. After discussing the story with a friend I realized that I am not the only one this story nearly brought to tears, and I soon felt better. Creepy, the way the sadness lingers within after reading it, leaving a feeling of guilt and no one knows why. Perhaps this is because we know this story is commonly true. The actions and emotions expressed by the unnamed characters was worded so carefully, to get inside each reader's skin and cause their own emotion to come pouring out like beaded sweat drops, or better yet, the tears released after reading this. The layout and strange word choice reminds me of a poem. I often don't understand poems and somehow I managed to fall in love with this story. I would say this is the best story I've read in a very long time.

Sonny's Blue's

This story was hard for me to read because I often felt that I didn't fully understand what was going on. The lengthiness of it really helped me to understand the emotion of Sonny, his brother, and their mother. I felt that it didn't go anywhere but then again the details took me to a level of understanding of each characters personality. I grew up about 5 minutes from Detroit and although I don't spend much time in the city, my mom works there and I go there with her sometimes. When he was talking about getting "sucked in" and wanting to "get out" it reminded me of a lot of the kids I went to high school with (many of them lived in Detroit). We all talked about how we were going to "get out" and make something of ourselves and some of us have, or are, and it's sad to see the kids that were "sucked in" before we ever even graduated. I really liked how Sonny's brother learned to accept and understand his love for music by the end of the story. I think that both brothers appreciated each other more after they talked and revealed their feelings about where they've been, both physically and emotionally. Overall it was a good story, although I found it hard to get into and focus for so long on a story about an ordinary guy. I guess it shows that all of our lives are equally important and that someone cares about each of us, even in the worst of circumstances.

Jessica

Hi!! Im Jessica and I'm a really happy person. I'm easy to get along with and I love laughing. My bestfriend is my boyfriend....He goes to school here too; Steve Smith, Sophomore....He loves facebook (Be his friend!). My roommate is awesome. If you don't get it her name is Emily. She's in this class too. I don't really read that much but I took this class for some more English credit. I hope you guys all get to know me and that I get to know you too this semester. Byeeee :D