To Ann from Jonathan

Ann, your work bristles with the realism and vitality. There is a certain intimate appreciation for how the normal, daily activities of life can be disrupted either subtly, as in your story about the protagonist in your 1st writing exercise, or the palpable tension that we experience through woman’s perspective who happens to live at the end of an isolated area in the woods in the 2nd exercise. Never overdone, the language is careful and observant, helping the reader to pay closer attention to those little aspects that are often more important to why we are afraid, or why life in the excessive temperatures and light in the Alaska climate change everything about the way we live. The defective mace canister is so effective because we have had that strange and aggravating experience of having something malfunction when we most need it to work, and combined with the tense circumstance of your story, what we feel is doubly effective. In exercise three in particular, I think you demonstrate that you are thoroughly aware or the world of you characters as well as their habits, faults, and quirks, like in your first exercise where she remembers “oatmeal stout bread pudding that she hadn’t ordered the night before. That would have soaked up the alcohol.” Writing exercise # 5 is filled with the richest and most memorable detail. How do you make an old man’s walk from a field to the entrance of a house captivating? Give us lots of striking and intimate details about him. I could see the little dog in his arms and smell the weeds and blackberries. I particularly liked the description of his skin, “Everything about him was loose, his skin, his clothes, even his long lanky limbs that reminded me of an old worn out scare crow after the straw stuffing has blown out.” Yours is the kind of writing that can easily pull a reader into your world before unleashing your talent for gripping tension upon them.