Welcome to the blog for Prof. John Talbird's English 221 class. The purpose of this site is two-fold: 1) to continue the conversations we start in class (or to start conversations BEFORE we get to class) and 2) to practice our writing/reading on a weekly basis in an informal forum.

Tuesday, April 12, 2016

Sh'khol

I like how the author did such a great job of creating the emotion and suspense in this story. I wonder how much of the feeling we get comes from the setting of the story, like this small place where everybody sees her and the kid, but instead how much comes out just through the simple emotions throughout the text. I felt a mystery through the character the little boy, it almost would seem throughout the story that he wanted this art of freedom, and the mom was rally attached like when he almost drowned in the beginning of the text. When she went into the water to save him, almost felt as if he was disappointed and wanted the freedom to save himself. The author was very descriptive in bringing the scenes to life, this is a story that you can’t really read just once or straight through. It's short but filled with many different scenes, either you would need moments of going back, or reading the text over again. Something that has been drawing my attention is characters, and characters... How we get to really know the character well. Sh'khol sets the story for us, answers the questions before the story begins to unfold. Who is this character? Is she married? Why is the boy deaf? So they answer our questions before going deeper, into the story. What I notice in my drafts at times I tend to leave those blank spaces, not bringing a character enough existence for you to even feel his/ her emotions. This is important and it sticks out to me, because when we read stories we read them from our world, draw in our own experiences personal baggage experiences, and live them through these characters. But if you don’t give your character this substance then we can’t really live through them. 

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