I just finished teaching a two week creative writing class, to middle school age kids. It was wonderful.
They were eager and smart, creative and funny. They had
enough umph to be ever present, but not so much that they were hard to handle.
Needless to say, I had a tremendous amount of fun teaching them.
During the course of the teaching, we discussed the
question, “What makes a piece of writing good?”. I posed this question to the group and
listened carefully to their responses. Some students commented on picking a
good character or theme, while others commented on the importance of using
interesting words. All the students brought up excellent points, but were
effectively circling what I considered to be the more central answer.
A good piece of writing elicits an emotional response from
the reader. This response may be happiness, sadness, anger, frustration,
intense curiosity, or intellectual stimulation. The reaction needs to be
present or the reader will simply be bored. And not every piece of writing
appeals to every reader. James Michener has been around for ages, earning a
decent sized popularity over the years. I, however, consider the best possible
use for his novels to be the cure for insomnia or fuel for my fireplace in
wintertime. I could not find his writing more boring. It simply does not reach
me. And that’s ok. Others disagree with me and they are entitled to do so. More
copies for them.
I just finished reading a novel called “unorthodox” by
Deborah Feldman. It’s the story of a woman who escapes from her life in a
Hasidic Jewish community. I just finished the book, and I will tell you this. I
spent the entire book consumed with the desire to jump into the book and hug
the main character. Seriously. She’s miserable. She’s confused. She’s trapped
in her life, unable to express herself, and she sees no way out. Every moment
of her life that she has anticipated to be joyful turns bitter and she is left
profoundly disappointed and feeling unworthy of happiness.
Have I mentioned that I just want to hug her? I want to hold
her and tell her that she will be alright. That she is not strange or demented.
That she is simply ill fitted to the world into which she was born. I want to
inform her that some women are liberated from her life of restraint and
limitations. Happily, the book ends with her successful escape from the
community, taking her young son with her.
Ironically, I was mentally planning this blog while I was
baking pies. It was a Sunday afternoon and my family and I had gone berry
picking that morning. The farm did well by us. We bought blackberries, onions,
tomatoes, peaches and potatoes. We bought so many blackberries because we love
them. Especially my husband. He is nuts about them. He also loves crumbles, so
instead of making traditional pies, I was making crumbles. He had “suggested”
that maybe crumbles would be nice to make. Hint, hint, hint…
So there I am, baking crumbles while he mows the lawn and
the kids are playing outside on a beautiful summer day. Go me, liberated woman.
I should be the one to talk, right?
I suppose the equation needs to be balanced by the fact that
I love to cook and bake. I find it satisfying and before kids I would spend
hours in the kitchen by choice on bad weather weekends. I adore the instant
gratification of a meal or dessert in its finished form, a concrete result of
the hard work. I find comfort in the sound of food sizzling and knives chopping
on cutting boards. It’s a Zen thing, culinary therapy at its best. My choice of
afternoon activities would have much larger implications if the opposite were
true.
But still, I have to wonder. Do I love to cook because I was
raised that way? Because my mom cooked and society told me that it was my duty?
Is my desire to cook and bake well simply a symptom of my desire to fit into my
role or would I have loved it anyway?
It’s an interesting question, with no possible way of truly
answering.What I will tell you is this.
It was a good book, a great story. And it made me feel
something significant. Congratulations to the author. She achieved her goal and
should be proud.
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