CREATIVE WRITING
Mr. Quigley
In his essay “On Reading ‘The Rocket Man,’” Michael Chabon writes, “The most important short story in my life as a writer is Ray Bradbury’s “The Rocket Man.” I read it for the first time when I was ten. I was making my way, with pleasure, through a collection of Bradbury’s stories called R Is for Rocket. I had been an avid reader for about five years, and at first the pleasure I felt was the familiar pleasure I derived from the flights of an author’s fancy, and from the anticipation and surprise of plot. Then I came to “The Rocket Man.” It’s the narrative of the young son of a rocket pilot whose father is to him at once an ordinary, ordinarily absent father, puttering around the house on his days off, and a terrible, mysterious demigod whose kingdom is the stars. The danger of the father’s profession, the imminence and immanence of death, lie upon the family like the dust of stars that the narrator lovingly collects from his father’s flightsuit every time the Rocket Man comes home. During one of the father’s leaves, the family travels to Mexico by car. One evening they stop along a rural road to rest, and in the last light of the day the son notices bright butterflies, dozens of them, trapped and dying in the grille of the car.
“I think it was when I got to the butterflies—in that brief, beautiful image comprising life, death and technology—that the hair on the back of my neck began to stand on end. All at once, the pleasure I took in reading was altered irrevocably. Before now I had never noticed, somehow, that stories were made not of ideas or exciting twists of plot but of language. And not merely of pretty words and neat turns of phrase, but of systems of imagery, strategies of metaphor. “The Rocket Man” unfolds to its melancholy conclusion in a series of haunting images of light and darkness, of machinery and biology interlocked, of splendor and fragility. The sense of foreboding is powerful; the imagery becomes a kind of plot of its own, a shadow plot. The end, when it comes, is at once an awful surprise, and inevitable as any Rocket Man, or those who mourn him, could expect.
“I have never since looked quite the same way at fathers, butterflies, science fiction, language, short stories, or the sun.”
Please choose ten of the following twenty-one short stories to print, read, annotate--and study (you will teach the class one of these ten stories with two peers during the first full week of school). While reading, please write five (one paragraph each) character descriptions and five (one paragraph each) setting descriptions (feel free to experiment--and/or imitate the style/voice/sentence structure of authors from the summer reading list you admire). A character you create might (eventually) fit into one of your settings--or not (something else for us to try...). As you read, please mark any passages where you feel the writer achieves the kind of language Chabon stumbled upon when reading Bradbury’s “The Rocket Man,” passages constructed “not merely of pretty words and neat turns of phrase, but of systems of imagery, strategies of metaphor,” places where you find “haunting images of light and darkness, of machinery and biology interlocked, of splendor and fragility,” the kinds of places you like to revisit and get lost in for a while as a reader—sentences, scenes, and paragraphs that make your chest ache and inspire you to write—places, to paraphrase Chabon, where the hair on the back of your neck begins to stand on end. When you find one of those spots, read it out loud and listen to it, roll the words around, note how they feel coming out of your mouth. Then think about why the writer used certain words and phrases, why the sentences are laid out as they are, how the paragraphs flow, how the rhythms are engineered. That is, of course, what the focus of our readings will be throughout the course.
Enjoy.
Mr. McCulloch and Mr. Q.
“Barbie-Q” by Sandra Cisneros (flash fiction/vignette) https://cottonenglish.weebly.com/uploads/1/9/7/1/19711205/cisnerosbarbieq-2.pdf
“The Bingo Van” by Louise Erdrich (fiction) http://faculty.gordonstate.edu/lsanders-senu/The%20Bingo%20Van%20by%20Louise%20Erdrich.pdf
“Bloodchild” by Octavia Butler (sci-fi) https://onezero.medium.com/bloodchild-802bd34ce721
“End Game” by Nancy Kress (sci-fi) https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/end-game/
“Everyday Use” by Alice Walker (fiction) https://harpers.org/archive/1973/04/everyday-use/
“The Fixed” by Annie Dillard (memoir–nature)
https://dayonecomptwo.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/dillard-the-fixed.pdf
“Girl” by Jamaica Kincaid (flash fiction) https://www.bpi.edu/ourpages/auto/2017/10/14/55813476/Girl%20Jamaica%20Kincaid.pdf
“Good Country People” by Flannery O’Conner (fiction) https://repositorio.ufsc.br/bitstream/handle/123456789/163600/Good%20Country%20People%20-%20Flannery%20O%27Connor.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
“Hands” by Sherwood Anderson (fiction) https://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/Hand.shtml
“Hills Like White Elephants” by Hemingway (fiction) https://www.rvclibrary.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/May-Short-Stories.pdf
“How to Become a Writer” by Lorrie Moore (metafiction) https://www.sfuadcnf.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/How-to-Become-a-Writer-Lorrie-Moore.pdf
“Light Like Water” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (magical realism) http://wphoto.pbworks.com/f/light-is-like-water.pdf
“No Name Woman” by Maxine Hong Kingston (non fiction) https://learning.hccs.edu/faculty/nicole.zaza/engl1301/1301-readings/no-name-woman-by-maxine-hong-kingston/view
“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce (fiction)
“Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin (fiction) https://learning.hccs.edu/faculty/selena.anderson/engl1302/readings/sonnys-blues-by-james-baldwin/view
“The Swimmer” by John Cheever (fiction) https://loa-shared.s3.amazonaws.com/static/pdf/Cheever_Swimmer.pdf
“Thank You, Ma’m” by Langston Hughes (fiction) https://www.chino.k12.ca.us/cms/lib/ca01902308/centricity/domain/1689/thank%20you%20%20ma%20am.pdf
“There Will Come Soft Rains” by Ray Bradbury (sci-fi) https://www.btboces.org/Downloads/7_There%20Will%20Come%20Soft%20Rains%20by%20Ray%20Bradbury.pdf
“The Third and Final Continent” by Jhumpa Lahiri (fiction) https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1999/06/21/the-third-and-final-continent
“Us and Them” by David Sedaris (memoir–humor) https://legacy.npr.org/programs/morning/features/2004/jun/sedaris/usandthem.html
“Where Are You going, Where Have You Been?” by Joyce Carol Oates (fiction)
https://www.ndsu.edu/pubweb/~cinichol/CreativeWriting/323/WhereAreYouGoing.htm