A Poem that Mirrored my Mind

By Jaidyn Eardley

Though I had always loved literature, I tended to avoid poetry as something silly and insubstantial-- until I heard a poem that resonated with me.

I sat encased in a room of dusty red curtains, glossed wooden floors and beams. It was a building that came from another time, filled with people who wished that they did too.  A girl stepped to the podium with a mixture of abashment and confidence. Her poem, unlike the previous readings, was too well-known to be particularly interesting to very cultured people. Thankfully, I was not one. As she began to read, I was entranced. “Let us go then, you and I...”

You and I. Me, my freshman year of college: good enough at everything but not good enough at anything. I take classes that spark interest but not passion, and find myself part of the unseen and unheard majority of college freshmen; I don’t know what to do. 

The True Meaning of Screwtape's Letters

By: Caroline Parry

Screwtape writes letters to his humble servant, Wormwood, about bringing people's souls to "Our Father Below", but is that truly the meaning behind his famous letters? 

Dear Screwtape,

My affectionate teacher, you taught me much about, “Our Father Below”.  A lot which was new to me and something which I never would have thought about before.  It is written that, as humans, we have the power to turn to the light or the dark.  There is power for us to choose and fight for our side in this great war.  You wrote about this in context with prayer: “Whenever there is prayer, there is danger of His own immediate action” (17).  You don’t write who we should pray too, but we have the power to pray and choose, whereas, I choose to pray to Our Father Above, dear Screwtape.

Screwtape, you taught me about the power of people, as a whole, “We want the Church to be small, not only that fewer men may know the Enemy, but also that those who do may acquire the uneasy intensity and the defensive self-righteousness of a secret society or a clique” (33).  I grew up in a family who loved, Our Father Above, and we don’t see Him as the Enemy, but in your teachings to Wormwood, you tell us to band together and teach others about Him, so we can conquer the Father Below.  There is great fear in numbers.  You know that, and we do too.  It is our earthly goal to grow our numbers to fight off you and the power of down under.  I spent eighteen months of my life working in Bolivia to bring people to the Real Father, and I would do it again if I knew that it would mean there would be fewer of you. 

A Dream In Letters

A Personal Essay by Rowen Bahmer

A novel approach to understanding poetry

Perhaps fantasy, as a genre, has been overused in modern writing. The fantasy model, with its massive inheritance of preconstructed world-concepts and philosophies, is a relatively easy genre to create in, and is almost guaranteed to be appealing to a wide enough audience to be profitable. Yet sometimes it is beneficial to rejoice in the typical; sometimes the everyday, average literature is not just worthwhile, but necessary. Sometimes even a genre as overdone as fantasy has something worthwhile to offer.

When I lived at my Grandparent’s house in California, Patricia McKillip was as much of a household name as any author could be. At any given time, a book of hers could be found next to a couch or lying on a coffee table. I loved reading, and I loved fantasy, but an eleven-year-old me with little interest in romantic or “feminine” literature was never interested in the frivolous stories the art on the cover of a McKillip novel implied. It was only after my mother and I moved across the country, and our collection of books decreased exponentially, that I began to contemplate reading one of her books.

The Bards of Bone Plain relies heavily on a much-belied literary strategy: the flashback. The primary story, occurring in the “present,” focuses on Phelan, a student of a bardic college who must write his final paper in order to graduate. The flashbacks focus on the topic of his research: Nairn, a famous bard who became lost to history and should be an “easy A” for Phelan. In this manner, the flashbacks are not of events already known to the characters, but of events as the characters are learning them. As the characters in the book become more entrenched in their research, McKillip shifts the reader’s focus from the story in the “present” to Nairn’s story, submersing the reader in Phelan’s experience as he performs his research. As Phelan begins to make connections between events in his time period and the research he performs, the audience becomes anxious to understand the next piece of history that will move the story forward. The flashbacks are therefore not awkward pauses in the storyline, providing exposition the audience should have already had access to, but a natural progression of the story.

Writing that Vibrates With the Soul

I don’t remember ever reading McKillip's writing for the first time- it seems to me now as if her words have been ever-present in my soul, an inherent part of the creation of my being. Some authors are capable of vivid, intensely visual action. They concern themselves with emotive details that lead the reader to react and feel as if they were “actually there.” George R. R. Martin has often mentioned his focus on intense detail in his writing, which results in a harshly realistic, distinctly physical narrative. McKillip seems to take the opposite approach-her writing focuses primarily on internal features of the plot. Never in first person, but constantly perceived through the lens of the thoughts and feelings of whatever character happens to be the focus, McKillip’s imagery feels more like an impressionistic painting than a harsh reality. McKillip’s writing isn’t something I could react to, because I was completely absorbed in it.

I never understood the value of poetry until I read McKillip’s prose. Describing a lover’s feeling, she states “She spoke, and his heart started up again, erratically thumping. Low and melodious, her voice sounded like some fine, rare instrument” (McKillip 56). The words in this phrase are nothing new. Descriptions of nervous hearts and similes between music and the spoken word are common to love, be it poetry or prose. Here though, McKillip creates a juxtaposition between the two that emphasizes the lover’s feelings regarding his beloved. It is not just in the obvious descriptions of people that McKillip emphasizes the lover’s inadequacy: the very form of the sentence highlights the disparity between the two characters. Nairn, the lover, describes himself with a short, stopping sentence. He then describes his beloved, Odelet, with a sentence that flows rhythmically from one idea to the next.

Formalism before Formalism

I didn’t realize it at the time, but as I learned the function of poetry, I also learned the value of the formal qualities of writing. Most of McKillip’s stories are only about three hundred to three hundred and fifty pages long, and yet each story contains a depth and scope, both of plot and pathos, that I have yet to see in the longer works of other authors. Through prose so artistic it waxes poetic, McKillip makes sure that not a single word is wasted. Her stories are efficient, but not in the way a textbook or manual is efficient. In the final pages of the book, McKillip reveals that one of the characters is immortal. She does this with the use of a name, and the statement “Phelan glimpsed the shadow of the endless road in his eyes” (McKillip 324). Rather than casually observing details of the event, I was part and parcel of it. I observed, with Phelan, the "endless road", and in that instant, I felt like I almost understood the pain of immortality. McKillip never needed to tell me what immortality was, she never gave me an extensive monologue from the character about his experiences traversing the Earth for hundreds of years. Instead she just gave me one character’s view of another’s eyes and a metaphor, and that was all I needed.

The Beauty of Dreams

I don’t know if words can accurately describe the experience of reading The Bards of Bone Plain, Od Magic, or In the Forest of Serre. Like Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I feel like saying “I have had a dream-past the wit of man to say what dream it was” (Shakespeare 4.1). What I can say for sure is that I have experienced thoughts and feelings in McKillip’s prose that taught me that words have power. In the frivolous halls of speculative fiction, I found the doors of poetry that had been shut to me no matter how much Shakespeare, Frost, or Eliot I read. There’s nothing wrong with literature, or the literary canon, but there is something exquisitely beautiful about a book I don’t have to be “taught” how to love.

Write Longer Not Faster

Exploring the reasons why I write and what has inspired me.

It is perhaps impossible to determine where my love of reading has stemmed from. Some mixture of genetics and early experiences is perhaps the easiest solution. This love of reading has been an integral part of my life almost since I was born. I can vividly remember reading Green Eggs and Ham with my mom after my parents got divorced and perhaps this has something to do with it. I can remember getting in trouble in school for reading in class, only to read more during my timeouts. It could almost be called an addiction that not even high school could put a stop too. In high school though, my experience with reading changed.

The Tales That Really Matter

A personal essay by James Dosdall

The story of how The Lord of the Rings touched my heart and gave me hope. 

“Far above the Ephel Duath in the West the night-sky was still dim and pale. There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.” J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings.

When I first read these words, I couldn’t understand why they struck me so hard. I didn’t know why they seemed to resonate with my soul. I was young, barely entering the turmoil of adolescence. I knew nothing of the epic conflict between good and evil, light and darkness. Yet I knew that these words meant something.

Exploring General Sources for Literary Study (Assignment)

My students are practicing writing literary criticism, and doing so is going to require the ability to do different kinds of research, to draw on different types of sources, as they interpret and make claims about literature.

Too many students hurry along into literary databases finding scholarly criticism of their texts. Such sources are indeed important and appropriate, but they aren't always the best to consult first. So, I'm having my students do an assignment in which they can come to understand what a general literary source is, how that differs from scholarly literary criticism, and in which they can practice finding and applying these introductory sources. They'll write up this as a blog post. Here's what I want them to do: