To Gritty Jess from Ann

Jess,

I appreciate the opportunity to read your pieces. These short exercises are nice, very different from looking over a whole piece in workshop. I enjoyed your writing.

In the first exercise, you did a fantastic job of establishing setting through subtle details. Iguana on the roof, gardens, sun, guava tree, Johnny-cake, Papiamento, yellow coconuts, slowly narrowing down location. The habits of your character became quickly evident through the dirt under her fingernails, the sweat soaked bandana, and the determination to finish digging all of the holes before lunch. We feel what it’s like to be her, to feel that heat, when you mention grit gently scraping skin and black hair that only took seconds to become hot under the sun.

Hands down, my favorite scene in this piece was the very last. I loved the ninety year old grandmother, her long white hair braided and pinned on top of her head, hurling little green fruits at the tourist bus with her wrinkled brown hands. Not only could I see her, and find great joy in the image, but I could imagine her wrath.

You used roughly the same scene for the second and third writing assignments, which presented an interesting opportunity to view these actions through two different ways of telling. In the second, you do a great job with dialogue, keeping it short and concise and moving the scene along. Again, you include great details, like the potato skins and chicken fingers with honey mustard, the little blue picture of a bulb illuminated on the dash, and the nice round rock with a white strip of quartz in it. Again, you finish with what I saw as the strongest scene, the boy vomiting in the grass while his ex-girlfriend’s car dips down into the ditch as she tries to pass his car, grazing and leaving a long silver line in the green paint.

I’m sorry to keep coming back to your use of details, but in the third that’s what strikes me again, right from the very first sentence with fingers curling around a rock, “cold and damp from the rain that had recently ended.” Not only can I feel the cold wet rock in my hand, but I can imagine the air around me, know what it feels like when the rain stops. Again, your character has grit on her hands, as they often do. It never occurs to me to do something with my characters’ hands, but often do that, and it’s wonderful. The ferns and trees, the black and orange salamander wiggling out of the grass, all of your descriptions of being on that road are fantastic. It was very interesting to read a continuation of the scene from exercise two, but at a different pace and gathering such different information. You said something about how amateur it was to include the Turtle Pond, and the girl that had died there recently. I don’t know what you meant by that, because it was one of the details I appreciated most, that made me wonder.

The fourth exercise told me so much in such a short space, both about the present and the past. Again, your descriptions stand out, the smooth brown walls were like big paper bags clustered together, unadorned and uneven, bare. This time the character’s hands come in at the very end of the piece, but with the usual strong finish.

And a side note.. I think the writing of yours that I enjoyed most was your response to Stu’s pieces. I laughed out loud, a few times. -Ann