Assignments, and Tigers, and Bears! Oh, My!

Hello again!

"Light Reading"

After looking over the core assignments and the extra credit assignments, I am looking forward to the work for this semester with a mixture of excitement and apprehension.You know that feeling of reading something you wrote a long time ago? The one where you cringe a lot? I am having that feeling currently and we haven't really even started writing. While more enjoyable reading and creative writing will be a welcome change to the routine of my normal semester, it has been a while since I have had to really sit down and write anything worth reading. So I hope you can all bear with me through this experience and hopefully provide some feedback, so we can all cringe a little less in the future.

Wish me luck!

Photo via flickr by quattrostagioni

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Reading Notes: The Man in the Moon and Pygmalion

Hello! I couldn’t quite decide how to start these notes, so I decided I would stick with that theme and take style notes over how the stories in the anthology were started. Many of them started with some form of “ once upon a time,” or “one day” this included the stories in, The divine, Tricksters, and the Fairytales sections. This is a beginning I think a lot of us are familiar with from fairytales and has almost become a cliché in some ways. Unless I was going to write a fairytale, I don’t think that I would use this tool to start a story and even then, I might not. The other stories in the anthology had what I called a “ cold start ,” to distinguish them from the stories that used the “once upon a time” start. There were a few similarities that I noticed. The stories in the Origins section were a very cold start. For instance, “ The Man in the Moon ” only states that there was a blacksmith that didn’t like his job. We don’t learn anything about who he is as a p...

Reading Notes: Japanese Fairy Tales, Part B

Hi! I missed the second reading for this week, so I am making it up today with these reading notes over Japanese fairy tales. This reading included three stories, one of and Ogre, a Goblin, and a Princess not unlike the story of Cinderella. All three of these are from Japanese Fairy Tales by Yei Theodora Ozaki, who is pictured above with her husband. Out of the three stories, I liked the story about the Princes Hase the best, so I took notes over that story specifically. Here are those notes. The story of Princess Hase is told from a third person perspective. In the story there is very little dialogue. In fact, the only dialogue in the pieces, is that of the step-mother right before her poisoning attempt backfires and at the end when Hase’s father finds her hiding in the mountains. I think that this sparing use of dialogue at the worst and best point in the story is an interesting style choice that creased a stronger connection to the story at those points. I think that ...

Reading Notes: Persian Tales Part A

Hello! This week I chose to read the Persian Tales unit and was not disappointed. Some of these fairy tales like “The Boy Who Became a Bulbul” and “The Wolf-Aunt” reminded me of the Brother’s Grim Fairytales in their more original forms. The others seemed a little more child friendly like we might expect of fairytales today. Thinking of my story for this week, any of them could make a fun base for writing, but I think that the ones that would be the best to work with would be “The Boy Who Became a Bulbul,” “Nim Tanak,” or “Muhammad Tirandaz, The Archer.” For “The Boy Who Became a Bulbul” I would make the circumstances of the boy’s death make more sense to a modern reader, not just based on a bet with his father that he willingly submits to. I would also want to somehow bring the boy back, maybe instead of the Bulbul growing out of the stalk, he does. Or maybe his father doesn’t kill him but hides him instead. Either way I would like for the boy to live. For “Nim T...

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