The advice “Get the narrator, and you’ve got the piece” (123) struck me. I’ve read this book for two other courses, and it was interesting to re-read with a bit more experience. Last year, I resented Gornick’s tone when she…
Response to The Situation and the Story
I’ve read the Situation and the Story a few times now, and I always find Gornick’s clear definition of story helpful: “The story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come…
Response of reading “the situation and the story”
I am an apprentice in this field. I must admit that I seem to know what Gornick was talking about; but, at the same time, I don’t think I really know what she was talking about. I have a few…
Reading Response – 9/28
Throughout most of The Situation and The Story, Vivian Gornick deftly tightropes the line between subjectivity and objectivity: she illuminates the subjectivities of the writers, their narrators, and their personas; she objectively finds quality in works by writers that she…
For Wednesday, September 28
To prepare for Wednesday’s class: 1. Choose a passage from Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story that helps you think about writing in some helpful way. It might be a piece of good advice, the example of a writer…
Footnotes (Ingrid Sischy)
…when reviewing the many published remembrances written on behalf of Sischy in the Summer of 2015* *It must be asked: Why would Als highlight this period? It could simply be preference, considering Baron’s short stint at Interview. Sischy: “With…
A life in numbers reflection
When we read this for Bridgett’s class last year and re-reading it again now, I am struck by Bridgett’s ability to weave history and memoir–grounding the piece in time and making it seem larger than just a story of herself…
Collective Courage + The Numbers
Confession, first: Whenever I find an instance where Black isn’t capitalized, I want to take a pen and copy edit my library book. Yes, I know it was written before June 2020. I want to email the author, dead or…
Bit on Morrison’s Site of Memory
I wanted to write about The Site of Memory. I’ve always been fascinated with Morrison’s staging of “fiction” — as the image that comes to tell her what her memory’s about. She can’t write about her father but she can…
Footnote – Lenny Motsinger
In 1969, Leonard Motsinger traveled to St. Anthony-on-Hudson, a Roman Catholic seminary in Rennsselaer, New York run by the Franciscans. For one year he studied the first tenant of religious life, Postulancy – The practice of acquiring solace in religious…
