TOW #24 - Letters to Sam

Since it's my last TOW, I figured I should talk about my last IRB. I recently finished Letters to Sam by Daniel Gottlieb, a story about a paraplegic grandfather giving a lifetime of advice to his autistic grandson. Gottlieb wrote the book because he knew he wouldn't be around for all of his grandson's childhood, so he figured leaving behind a physical copy of all the advice he would ever give him was the best possible choice. Personally, I really enjoyed reading this story, and I'm glad that I didn't gloss over it like I have done so many times before. It is filled with inspiring words of wisdom and mantras, one of my favorites being the grandfather's lessons about pain. (This 'lesson' really hit home for me.) He writes, "All pain is about longing for yesterday--whatever we had before, whatever we used to be." Upon reading this I didn't understand at first, but when you think about it it really makes sense. Longing for something we can never get back will only bring us pain. I took it as Gottlieb's way of saying to live for now and look ahead. This junior year of mine started off with life changes great in size and number, and I had trouble (I still am) not getting caught up in thinking about how things used to be. This is the biggest reason why I was so happy to read this book; it gave me a helpful reminder that we can't change what has already happened, only what will.

TOW #23 - "What You Learn in College"

This week I read a piece of creative nonfiction written by Karen Donley-Hayes to reminisce about her college days and the underlying sadness and anxiety of the memories of parties she attended. As she gets more and more into her story, she speaks directly to the audience and uses a form of anaphora to express these hidden feelings, which I found to be very effective.
Donley-Hayes squeezes in her anaphora between each paragraph (for a few paragraphs) as she relays an uncomfortable memory of her and her classmates playing a game of drunken strip-spin-the-bottle. This form of anaphora involved the repetition of an entire sentence, rather than the beginning word of a sentence. She writes "The bottle spins." After each paragraph with the start of the next paragraph expressing an increasing level of uncomfortableness and anxiety. Not only does this show the author's emotions in this memory, it projects them onto the reader and allows them to experience the same feelings she did in that memory. This was an effective way to tell her story because it allows readers to quickly identify the purpose that Donley-Hayes is trying to convey. She wants to show how not all 'going-out' nights in college are going to be good ones, especially if you are surrounded by people you do not trust, or have stepped out of your comfort zone.
Besides this projection of emotions onto her readers, the author also speaks directly to the audience by using pronouns like 'you' and 'we' when describing her reactions to reliving these uncomfortable memories. She ends her essay with a pondering, "But the regret isn't gone. It will never be gone, and you don't need to learn that. You already know it." By speaking to her readers this way, she is instilling a sense of personal attachment to her own memory, making it more likely for her purpose and argument to resonate with them. In other words, even though the readers did not experience these memories firsthand, they are still able to, through empathy, understand how/why the author felt the way she did during her own experience.

TOW #22 - "In the Grip of the Sky"

This essay by professor Sonya Huber takes the traditional non-fiction essay and adds a creative spin to it. She takes two topics of her own concern--her own chronic joint pain and global warming--and combines them into the essay to show how even though the effects of each can be crippling, we must be strong and find other ways to fix them.
She first uses strong imagery as a metaphor to compare the brewing storm in the sky (which caused her joint sickness to badly flare up) to the brewing pain in her bones. She says, "If [I] could map [my] pain, the constellation of joints would glow on the map, lit to follow storm fronts and hurricanes." It was interesting to hear her talk about her pain not only because lupus/rheumatoid/psoriatic arthritis is something I have not experienced, but also because of the fact that the weather going south made it worse. At first it might not seem that out of the ordinary; I know many people who get 'rain headaches', but when you think about it, being forced to succumb to your couch because of extreme pain every time there is a rainstorm must make one tough person out of you. Her use of the extended metaphor throughout her essay makes sense because it must be so unfathomable (I certainly know I had trouble wrapping my head around it) for others to understand her struggle. I think this was an amazing way to get her point across, and provided such an effective way of showing her readers what it is like to be in her shoes.