Charles Dickens and the Lowell Mills

Fall 2014

by Courtney Carroll

Charles Dickens is well known for his close examination of working conditions in 19th-century London in his works of fiction. Forced at the age of 12 to work at a boot black factory and repay  his father’s debts, Dickens in later life scrutinized and criticized the labor conditions, specifically child labor conditions, in notable works such as Oliver Twist and David Copperfield.

Charles Dickens Charles Dickens

In 1842, Dickens embarked on a four-month excursion through America that included a visit to Massachusetts.  The resulting  work, American Notes, is infamous for its criticisms of America and Americans, but less noted is the fact that  Dickens found America’s factories laudable in many respects, including the treatment of workers.

Dickens visited several factories in Lowell, Massachusetts, where he was given tours of the factories “in their ordinary working aspect, with no preparation of any kind, or departure from their ordinary everyday proceedings.”

Ladies of the Mills

 Dickens described the women of the mills as “well dressed” and wearing “serviceable bonnets, good warm cloaks and shawls.” The author also remarked that these women were “healthy in appearance” and that they “had the manners and deportment of young women, not of degrading brutes.”

Dickens was impressed not only by the appearance and comportment of these women, but also by their literacy. Many  subscribed to the lending libraries often provided in the boarding houses, and some contributed to a periodical called The Lowell Offering. Dickens lauded this periodical as comparable “advantageously with a great many English Annuals” and bought a copy for himself, which he read all the way through. For the time period, this publication was a great feat for working-class women and was an achievement largely unimaginable for the workforce in Dickens’ native England.

Despite the fine dress and mannerisms, many of the women seen by Dickens came from humble backgrounds on Northern New England farms. According to Thomas Dublin’s analysis of the women in the Lowell Mills, 74 percent of the workforce in the Hamilton Manufacturing Company was female and 96 percent of those women were native born. The City of Lowell website states that the average age of a woman working in a mill was 24, with ages ranging from 10 to 30. In her account of working in the Lowell Mills, Harriet Robinson remembers country girls arriving at the corporations in covered wagons, often speaking in a “nasal Yankee twang” that was “almost unintelligible.” These country girls had little, if any, education, and no formal education was provided to them in Lowell. Instead, Robinson recounts, “the severe discipline and ridicule which met them was as good as a school education, and they were soon taught the ‘city way of speaking.’”

Not all women in the mills were of a rural descent or uneducated; some lived comfortable lifestyles but had been taught that “work is no disgrace.” According to Robinson, many came to Lowell for the social or literary advantages in Lowell, including the lending libraries and other luxuries.

Many of the women working in the factories lived in boarding houses on the factory property. These houses became centers of learning, culture and worship for their residents. Harriet Robinson recalls her stay in the boarding houses as “very agreeable” and described living with 50 to 60 women from all different backgrounds. In one article published in The Lowell Offering, the author recalled her 13-member “family” in the boarding house consisting of women who were “Calvinist Baptist, Unitarian, Congregational, Catholic, Episcopalian, and Mormonite, one each; Universalist and Methodist, two each; Christian Baptist, three.”

The residents were strongly encouraged to read, learn, and worship regularly, no matter what their denomination. Popular literary choices included novels, newspapers, bibles and periodicals, and many of these works were provided by a lending library for a small fee. These books would be the basis of learning for many of the women working in the mills.

Working Conditions

Upon touring three factories in Lowell in 1842, Dickens was fascinated by the order and comfort of the work stations. He described the factories as having “much fresh air, cleanliness and comfort as the nature of the occupation would possibly admit of.” Dickens also believed that the labor of these women was fitting of their delicate stature and that they enjoyed it, noting that their work was “cheerfully done and the occupation of tomorrow was cheerfully looked to.”

Dickens may  have been too willing to believe in the workers taking so much pleasure in their labors. In 1845, 2,139 factory workers from across Massachusetts submitted a petition to the Massachusetts House of Labor for better working conditions. Of these, 1,159 were workers in the Lowell mills and a very large proportion of these were female. The main concerns of the workers were long hours, poor health as a result of unsatisfactory working conditions, and the brief time allowed for meals during the working day.

In the petition, Eliza R. Hemingway, a mill worker in two factories, complained that the “hours for labor [were] too many and the time for meals [were] too short”. The average working day for women in the Lowell mills was approximately 14 hours, with work starting at 5 a.m. and ending at 7 p.m. In summer, only 30 minutes  wereallowed for breakfast and 45 minutes for dinner. In winter, The time allowed for dinner decreased to 30 minutes. During these breaks, women had to walk to their dormitories, eat, and walk back to their workstations.

Many women testified that long hours and unsanitary working conditions contributed to their poor health. Judith Paine worked for a year and a half in the Merrimack Cotton Mills before having to leave for seven years due to serious health concerns. After returning from her illness, she worked in the Boott Mills for seven more years, but was too sick to work for a full year of her employment there. She attributed her poor health to “long hours of labor, the shortness of time for meals, and the bad air of the mills.” Similarly, Sarah G. Bagley of New Hampshire testified that “the health of the operatives is not so good as the health of females who do house-work or millinery business,” suggesting that the health problems experienced by the Lowell mill workers were a direct result of the mills themselves. Sarah Bagley would later go on to form the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association to improve the working conditions for women in the Lowell factories.

Data taken by the Massachusetts House of Labor reveals that the most significant illnesses suffered during this period were consumption, inflammation of the lungs, cholera infantum, scarlet fever, measles, dysentery, inflammation of the brain, and croup. It should be noted that of these seven ailments, three are infectious and can be spread amongst people in close proximity. Three mill workers testified to the House of Labor that the air in the mills was considered “not to be wholesome” and “bad on account of the small particles of cotton which fly about.” The mill workers were in this atmosphere for fourteen hours per day, six days per week while they worked at very hot, humid, crowded workstations that served as a breeding ground for infectious diseases.

A Good System?

While Dickens was only in Lowell for a day in 1842, he was impressed by the mills of Lowell and the women who worked in them. By all appearances, these mills were clean and ordered and the ladies who worked there were happy and literate. However, the poor working conditions and long hours suffered and articulated by the mill girls differ greatly from Dickens’ account.

The discrepancy could have been due to many factors, the first being that Charles Dickens was only present for a brief visit in 1842, while the Lowell Mill System existed was an important element in the New England industrial economy for much of the nineteenth century.

According to Professor Joel Brattin, a Dickens Scholar at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Dickens had a fondness for Massachusetts, despite his strong criticisms of America. In his American Notes, Dickens condemned Ameri
ca for its ongoing institution of slavery, tobacco spitting, and overwhelming greed. Despite his displeasure with many aspects of the American culture, Dickens had positive reviews of his visit to Boston and Lowell. While this fondness may not have directly swayed his review of the Lowell mill conditions, the fact remains that Dickens thought highly of Massachusetts.

In the final section of his review on the Lowell mills, Dickens states that he does not wish to compare the mills of Lowell to the mills of  London due to “many of the circumstances whose strong influence [had] been at work for years in [England’s] manufacturing towns had not arisen [in Lowell].” Dickens erroneously believed that the manufacturing towns such as Lowell had no permanent residents, as many of the mill girls would come to Lowell to work and then return home for good after a few years. While this may have been true for some, others toiled away in the mills for many years to support their families.

As a resolute proponent for better labor conditions in England, Dickens might have found it difficult to compare and judge fairly  the working conditions in both nations. Whatever the reason, Lowell turned out to be one of the few things about America that Dickens chose not criticize.

Reyhan

Fall 2014, Uncategorized

by Akriti Sharma

The girl before me has straight black hair, a bob cut with fringes.  Her skin is olive and her lips are thin. She is wearing black sunglasses and is motionless. She is seven years old.

“Mero naam Reyhan,” she says.

I look down, and blink, “Your name is Reyhan?” It is a boy’s name.

“Yes,” she says. She stands a bit straighter, maintains a poker face.

I turn to the caregiver in the room to re-confirm; maybe I had misheard. Before I open my mouth, she says, “Yes, her name is Reyhan.”  I turn back to the girl, and tell her that I am pleased to meet her. We sit in a circle. There are nine children in the center with my four friends and myself around them. We are volunteers from the local high school.

The caregiver tells us we are to first help the children with their homework before getting to the other activities. Some of the children are older and don’t need help with homework. The younger ones begin playing games without even opening their books.

I am soon sitting with another young girl, trying to figure out fifth-grade science. I notice Reyhan is the only one sitting alone. She is in the corner, silently doing her work. I ask her if she’s okay.

“I’m fine,” she says.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m doing English.” It’s clear she doesn’t want to talk. I give her space.

The caregiver tells me that Reyhan was named Riya by her parents. Pronounced “Ree-yah” but with a dozen different spellings, it is a very common name for Nepali girls.

Reyhan is an uncommon name for Nepali boys. And it is never used for a girl.

The next week, the children are eating in the dining room. One by one, the room empties as the children finish and go to the common room to start their homework. All my friends have gone upstairs and I find myself alone in the dining room with her. Reyhan has finished eating, yet she’s sitting at the table alone. I ask if she wants to come up with me and she answers yes.

“I just have to wash this first,” she says. She navigates her way out onto the back porch where there is a low sink, kid-sized. She is washing her hands when I tell her to join the other children. “I will do your dishes,” I say. “It’s not a big deal.” I reach to take the plate off the sink but she snatches it from me.

“I said I will do it,” she says. “What makes you think I can’t do this myself?”

I apologize. She’s quiet again.

“Please wait for me,” she says.

                                                            ***

When we join the other children upstairs, Reyhan opens her book to begin her homework; she surprises me by calling my name.  “I need help with this,” she says, pointing to a page in her science book.

“Is it question 3?” someone from behind asks. “I don’t understand it either, how are we to answer this?” 

I take the social science book from Reyhan’s table and look at it.

Q3. What is the National flower for Nepal? What are its colors and what does it symbolize?

I look up at Reyhan who is running her fingers over the words as she waits for my response. My throat has a lump. I don’t know how to handle the situation.

 “Well, our national flower is the…” I begin.

“The laliguras, I know that,” Reyhan interrupts, referring to the Nepali term for rhododendrons. “But what are the colors?”

 I glance at my friends, who look as dumbfounded as I feel.

“I heard they are rato,” a little boy from the other end of the room answers.

“Yes, he’s right, they are red,” answers another girl. “I read it in a book”

“Rato” Reyhan repeats, the Nepali word for red. “I can’t remember, what does rato look like, Akriti?”

I scramble for words I can’t find. The caregiver enters the room. “Red is the color of festivals,” she says, smiling pleasantly. “Now please stop getting distracted and finish your homework so you’ll have more time to play.” She turns to me and takes the book from my hands. “Do they really have that question in here?” she asks rhetorically. “What the hell were they thinking?”

That evening, after my friends and I say our goodbyes, we walk the fifteen minutes to the bus stop in silence.

                                                ***

I volunteer at the blind children’s rehabilitation center. The students there are independent with a passion for life. They teach me more than I teach them. Science and math and English can all be learned. I’ve read books with the same descriptions of the solar system in English and Nepali. And in braille. I’ve run my fingers over the same content in braille while these children sat doing their homework. Knowledge is available to anyone willing to learn. 

I am lost as to how to describe this little girl. Once, when she was using her pointed stylus and slate to punch out letters in braille, I saw her prick her little fingers over and over, but she kept going. Persistence. When she fell in front of me, she refused to let me help her up. Independence.

Entering a room, she could recognize me by my voice, and even sense my silent presence there.  I marveled at the resilience of her brain and spirit.

I could not begin to imagine what this child had endured. Reyhan was not born blind. In fact, she had become blind less than two years before.

One afternoon, after the children are done with their homework and after a long game of Telephone, Reyhan asks to touch my face.

As her steady hands cup my face, feeling my nose, my eyes, my forehead, and chin, she speaks: “I used to be able to see. Then I got cancer.” She smiles. “That’s why I wear these.” She gestures at the sunglasses she always wears.

 “I’m forgetting what I look like,” she whispers, frustration in her voice. “How do I look?”

I tell her that she has straight black hair, fringes typical for a girl her age, and a little bob cut. That she has an olive hue to her complexion that gives her a nice glow, that she possesses a very nice smile, that she is a pretty young girl.

“I’m not a girl,” she said. A bit too loudly. “And I’m not pretty.”

Before I say anything, she gets up and storms off.  I don’t see her for the rest of the afternoon. At home that night, I ask my father, an oncologist, what kind of cancer could turn a young child blind.

Retinoblastoma, he says, is a common cause of blindness in children under five, if not treated early. He explains it to me, but what I really want to know is how I had offended her, and I doubt my father’s copy of Bailey and Love’s Short Practice of Surgery has the answer to that. 

                                                            ***

The following days are routine; Reyhan never brings up the incident and neither do I. The months pass quickly and I am accepted into college. Soon it is time for us to say good-bye.

My friends and I decide that before we leave we will bring some toys and gifts for the children. They must have known we wo
uld do this, since later that evening, as we were walking out, they yelled, “Don’t forget us!”

It only struck me then, that these gifts—the hair clips, spinning tops, dolls, marbles—were to the children reminders of the many 16-year-old volunteers who come and go in their lives. 

That afternoon, I buy a pack of hair clips for the seven girls in the group. One of them had said they liked the hairpin in my hair. I let them feel all of the clips and pick out the ones they want. Everyone but Reyhan has clips now and they begin braiding each other’s hair and giggling. I go to Reyhan.

“Would you like a clip?” I ask.

“No.”

“Are you sure?” I am tentative.

She shrugs and says okay and asks me to put one in her hair. Her fringes are growing and her hair has grown too. I put two into her hair.

“There, you look really nice now,” I smile, careful not to say something that might set her off.

“Really?”

“Yes, your hair looks really nice like this,” I say. “Maybe you should keep it long, Riya.” I slip. The second I say so, I know I’ve made a mistake. I watch her face contort as she gets up and runs out.

“DO NOT CALL ME THAT. I am NOT a girl, I don’t WANT to be one,” she yells. I don’t expect her to start crying.

I run after her. At her room there is no one.  I knock on the bathroom door. No answer.

Outside, the balcony is deserted. I head downstairs, to the common room, when I hear sniffling. Sitting curled up in a ball on the staircase is Reyhan, tears streaming.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

She looks at me.

“I’m sorry,” I repeat. “I didn’t mean to offend you.” I sit on the stairs beside her. She stops crying. “I have an older brother and a mother,” she begins. “I love them very much and they love me. I have a father and I love him too, but I don’t know if he loves me.”

“My father always wanted sons,” she says. “But after my brother … I was born. And it was okay … until I got cancer.”

She’s quiet again and I hear her heavy breathing. The tears come once more.

“It was the first surgery, then the other,” she says. “Then I became blind, and I couldn’t do anything. I became a burden.”

Burden.

I became a burden.

This from a seven-year-old child. It shouldn’t shock me but it does; I have grown up in a country where children with disabilities are considered lucky if they are sent off to boarding schools. This is not always because families reject them. Most often it is because parents can’t afford them.

We sit on the dingy staircase and I try to console her, though my words are meaningless. I know nothing of how she feels, I know nothing of what she’s gone through. I cannot imagine what it must be like to have something that you take for granted snatched away from you.  She is distracted now, reminding me she still is a child. Her parents and brother are to pick her up for the holidays in a week. She can’t wait to see her brother.

“I want you to meet him one day,” she says. “He’s my most favorite person on the planet.” I tell her that I will, one day.

That evening while we’re leaving the house, she stops me.

“Akriti,” she says. “I want to ask you a question.”

I smile, “Yes?”

“Will you forget me?” she asks, looking up at me. “Promise me you won’t forget me?” She holds out her hand to touch mine.

I hug her and tell her, no, I won’t forget you, ever. 


0
0
1
32
188
WPI
1
1
219
14.0

Normal
0

false
false
false

EN-US
JA
X-NONE

/* Style Definitions */
table.MsoNormalTable
{mso-style-name:”Table Normal”;
mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;
mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;
mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-style-priority:99;
mso-style-parent:””;
mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt;
mso-para-margin:0in;
mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:12.0pt;
font-family:Cambria;
mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria;
mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria;
mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;}

0
0
1
32
188
WPI
1
1
219
14.0

Normal
0

false
false
false

EN-US
JA
X-NONE

/* Style Definitions */
table.MsoNormalTable
{mso-style-name:”Table Normal”;
mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;
mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;
mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-style-priority:99;
mso-style-parent:””;
mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt;
mso-para-margin:0in;
mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:12.0pt;
font-family:Cambria;
mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria;
mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria;
mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;}

Akriti Sharma is a senior at Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts, majoring in Economics. She grew up in Kathmandu, Nepal, and has been volunteering many years. She loves books and dogs, and she greatly misses her two German Shepherds back home. 

If Ignorance Is Bliss, Why Aren’t There More Happy People?

Fall 2014, Uncategorized

by Warren Singh

It’s 10 am, and I’m fairly sure that I’m getting strange looks. It turns out that sitting by yourself and alternating pensive looks with hysterical laughter leads to sidelong glances, even if you have a book in front of you.

The book in question is If Ignorance Is Bliss, Why Aren’t There More Happy People? by John Lloyd John Mitchinson, published by McGraw Hill. And the contents are just as amusing as its title, if not more so.

It’s a collection of quotations on various topics by a wide variety of people, from such people as Nobel Laureates Richard Feynman, Marie Curie, and Albert Einstein, entertainment figures like Groucho Marx and Steve Martin, and even Al Capone and Miss Piggy.

Separated into sections by subjects (‘work’, ‘love’, ‘popes’, ‘potatoes’), quotes are placed in no particular ordering scheme, not alphabetically by subject, opening word, or author. Simply scanning the book leads one to believe that it’s not required, or even designed to be read in a linear fashion. For instance, I’ve been having great fun simply opening to a random page and reading whatever is there. Occasionally, this random ordering makes for a delightful incongruity: Samuel Goldwyn’s opinion that a hospital “is no place to be sick” is followed by Victor Hugo defining imagination as “intelligence with an erection.”

The book is like a party favor bag whose contents were provided by the most interesting people that you know. On one page you’ll see Joseph Heller on work: “While none of the work we do is very important, it is important that we do a great deal of it.” or Will Rogers on time: “Half our time is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save.” Turn a few dozen pages back and you’ll see H.L. Mencken on stupidity: “There is no idea so stupid that you can’t get some professor to believe it.”

It’s all quite a hodgepodge, and that’s what I find so charming about it. Collecting quotes is like meeting interesting people and only hearing the most amusing or insightful things that they have to say. It’s ambrosia for my brain. Before, I’ve only dabbled in quotations recreationally, but with the addition of this book, it’s developed into a full-blown habit. Someone call the paramedics, because this volume is getting mainlined.

 

The fact that there are contradictory quotes all over doesn’t bother me; two quotes on the same page might directly cancel each other out, and I still enjoy both of them. It’s probably because I just like having my think bone tickled, and this tome is quite the thwack. I’m laughing, thinking, and then laughing some more.

If any of this sounds appealing to you, the book comes highly recommended. Its segmented quality makes it easy to read it in bits and pieces, even if you won’t necessarily want to put it down right away.

Ignorance may not be the way to bliss, but if you’re looking to get some bliss in your life, the eponymously titled book is a great place to start.

 

Wonderland: Re-entry Not Permitted?

Fall 2014, Uncategorized

by Paige Tortorelli

Lewis Carroll’s six-year-old Alice, stranded in Wonderland, bleakly reminds us of the irretrievability of our childhood personas: “I can’t go back to yesterday because I was a different person then,” she explains to the Mock Turtle.

Alice’s theory holds true. Regressing to the persons we were yesterday, or, even more implausibly, to our six-year-old selves, would be not only nonsensical, but also counterproductive, since it would deprive us of our ability to couple our imaginations with the knowledge age provides. The aim, then, perhaps should be more modest–to preserve our interest in the world’s endless possibilities, so that, as the White Queen counseled Alice, we can “imagine six impossible things before breakfast.”

We have to grow up. Adulthood grimly beckons. But, in growing up, must we be distanced from the imaginative glory of childhood? As we grow older, we are preoccupied with escaping reality and assuming it tarnishes the imagination, and even though children and adults exist in the same world, the reality we experience as adults sharply contrasts with the one in which our childhood selves fashioned fictitious characters and improbable fairy tales. So what changes?

W.B. Yeats’ poem, The Stolen Child, laments the world of weary and saddening realism: “Come away, O human child!/To the waters and the wild/With a faery, hand in hand,/For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.” Pervading these lines is the notion that children must be removed from the world’s influence in order to achieve happiness. The child’s separation from society, however, does not require a physical displacement, but a mental one. Children, Yeats argues, are not called to be recluses; rather, they are challenged to transcend the mundane aspects of the world by exercising their imaginations. The realm of the imagination enlivens the child’s interests and restores a vision of the world’s virtues.

But these imaginative escapes forged during our fanciful childhood years seem to dwindle as adulthood approaches, severing us from the child’s natural proclivity to perceive wonder and excitement in the world. No longer able to evade the monotony of the world, we become captured fugitives, shackled to a dull version of reality. In his “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” William Wordsworth mourns the adult’s inability to perceive wonder in the world: “But yet I know, where’er I go,/That there hath pass’d away a glory from the earth.” Although adults maintain the ability to see the aspects of nature, such as a rainbow, that once sparked their childhood imaginations, these objects are now lackluster – their “glory” goes unseen. Something that occurs during human aging, therefore, divorces adults from a divine connection with nature.

I sometimes wonder if the taking of standardized tests, which all emerging scholars must endure, forces us to concretize our understandings. Tests prompt children to take out their No. 2 pencils and systematically select an answer demarcated by the choices A, B, or C. These tests have become mainstream, and few escape them, especially since new educational standards mandate that all students be held to the same standard. While the system is no doubt convenient and efficient, it essentially provides a black- and-white education. When there are only three possible choices, the individual can neither invent nor expand upon those choices, and some of their imaginative faculties are lost. When there is nothing to create or imagine, adults become complacent and lax, seduced into the lethargy of selecting from a prescribed list, and thinking it a real choice.

When this exposure to standardization is coupled with a heightened awareness of time passing, adults are even less likely to exercise their imaginations. And then there is the contemporary consumerist frenzy, which unapologetically narrows our desires to consumption and profitability and insists on the notion that time should be useful; hence, “time is money.” Under these pressures, there is, in a very real sense, no time for nonsense.

But nonsense (non-sense), as Lewis Carroll well knew, can be hugely important to creativity and the imagination.  Perhaps we should all take the White Queen’s advice and start imagining the impossible.

Immigrant Journeys

Fall 2014, Uncategorized

by Michelle Addai

I was born in Italy, and as an infant I was sent to Ghana, my parents’ homeland, where I was placed in the care of an aunt. My parents’ plan was to work in Italy and send money home to take care of us. Then eventually they could both return to Ghana and we could live together as a family.

That plan did not quite work out as intended. My father ended up immigrating to the United States, where he believed he could find a better job, and my mother stayed in Italy, while we kids stayed in Ghana. The entire family was torn apart among three continents–we kids in Africa, our mother in Europe, and our father in America. We lived like this for years without seeing our parents, and eventually my mother decided to return to Ghana to be with us. By the time I was 15, I had lived with my dad for only the first two years of my life and the few months he visited Ghana.

Two years ago I immigrated to the United States to join my father, who thought we kids would get a better education here. Like many immigrant parents, he wanted his children to have the opportunities he never had. My mother is planning to join us here eventually, and when she does we will be at last a complete family again.

This move to America was an abrupt change for me, and the world as I knew it was no more; the community, the culture, and the educational system were wholly different from what I was used to. Even the differences in climate were extreme. Going from the pleasurably warm weather in Ghana straight to the freezing cold winter of New England was a difficult adjustment.

The first few months proved challenging. I found many of the students disrespectful towards teachers and adults in general, which really disturbed me. Once, just a few yards from my school, a couple of students attacked a police officer and broke his leg. This kind of violence made me very fearful.

That was another thing, the fear I felt. I was so intimidated by everything around me that I could barely contribute in class. Furthermore, because I was from Africa, some students mocked me, saying mean things and claiming I ate lions for breakfast. I laughed with them to mask my true feelings, but it hurt.

At first I was able to at least looked forward to the weekend, when, as a Jehovah’s Witnesses, I could share the good news of God’s Kingdom with others. Little did I know that my evangelizing would result in more culture clashes. In Ghana, people are more accepting of this kind of volunteer preaching, but in America, well, not so much. Many people blatantly rejected our message, and slammed doors in our faces. Once, a few summers ago, when I was still a relatively recent immigrant, I joined a few members of my congregation to go to a town in Central Massachusetts to preach. At one home, I pressed the doorbell and heard the occupant yell that she would be with us shortly. When she came, however, she accused us both of having entered her house, and she called the police.

My heart raced when the police arrived and started yelling at us. An officer of the law had never before confronted me, and it was a frightening experience. We explained the situation to them, but one insisted that we be summoned to court. We were asked to leave the area, which we did without hesitation. It was a major relief for me when we found that we would not need to go to court.

These few years in America have been very challenging for me, but I continue to have a positive outlook because l know that no condition is permanent. My family and faith have been a support for me through my difficulties, and I strive to achieve academically because I know how hard my parents are working to give me this opportunity. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. Being a teenager on the road to adulthood is in and of itself hard; being an immigrant teenager makes the journey even tougher.

The Mountain

Fall 2014, Uncategorized

by Dylan Dodd

0
0
1
108
533
WPI
16
4
637
14.0

Normal
0

false
false
false

EN-US
JA
X-NONE

/* Style Definitions */
table.MsoNormalTable
{mso-style-name:”Table Normal”;
mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;
mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;
mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-style-priority:99;
mso-style-parent:””;
mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt;
mso-para-margin-top:0in;
mso-para-margin-right:0in;
mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt;
mso-para-margin-left:0in;
line-height:115%;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:11.0pt;
font-family:Calibri;
mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri;
mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri;
mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;}

                                    Photo by Wanbin Li

                                    Photo by Wanbin Li

During the spiral climb
A small town begins to shrink.
The summit makes it a model
Crafted well, with near perfect design.
Sounds from below become faint,
Gone when you feel the pressure change.
The air is different up there;
Breathing in won’t make you choke.
Not a trace of pungent perfume,
No flattened skunk on a highway,
No need to worry about
The rancid fog of tractor-trailer tailpipes.
Only newborn air, untouched
By a rushing world below,
Blowing through frosted patches
Of grass and earth. Breathe it in—
Introduce your lungs to a delicacy.
Extend your arm to catch the clouds
That forever ride the wind.


Dylan Dodd studies English at Worcester State University. He loves nature, the arts, and the way life works. See more of his work here

Bollywood: A Primer for the Confused and the Curious

Fall 2014, Uncategorized

by Bansari Kamdar

  Alam-Ara (1931), the first Bollywood talkie

  Alam-Ara (1931), the first Bollywood talkie

   We Indians love our clichéd three-hour long movies featuring big Bollywood stars, catchy dance numbers, and memorable melodies, movies often set in exotic locations that are pretty but entirely irrelevant to the story, lots of romance and action, and–last but by means the least – a happy ending.

 

For the average Indian, Bollywood movies offer a perfect escape from the daily grind. How beloved are these movies, you ask? One of them, Diwali Dulhaniya Le Jayenge, has been running continuously in some Indian theaters since its release in 1995, and is still going strong. The title, by the way, translates in English to The Brave-Hearted Will Take the Bride, which alone tells you all you need to know about the plot.

 

For the outsider, this is all very puzzling. Bollywood produces about 1,000 movies a year, which is twice as many as Hollywood, but the genre is still largely unknown by the average western movie-goer. So I’ve put together a few of the more common questions I’ve been asked by my American friends about Bollywood movies.

 

Why are Bollywood movies so lo-o-o-ng?

 A test match in the beloved sport of cricket in India can last five days, and Indians will carefully follow every ball. An Indian wedding lasts three days. So a three-hour movie isn’t that big a deal for us.

 

Why are there so many songs?

 Bollywood movies are indeed rich in musical numbers, and, while many present-day movies are slowly moving away from this trend, it was not very long ago that 10 musical numbers in a movie was the norm. The numerous songs are a part of the escapism theme that Bollywood has always openly embraced. We’re not talking realism here. Bollywood uses musical sequences as a tool to depict the characters’ emotions and as a backdrop for the action.

 

There are plenty of movies coming out of Hollywood. Why watch Bollywood movies?

 Why order Chinese takeout? Why eat falafel? They both have something new and different to offer. The same with Bollywood; it has its own flavor, and, for someone who loves exploring, it can be a unique and precious treasure.

 

Why so many clichéd plots?

 It’s true that Bollywood produces many commercial “masala” movies (masala is a seasoning made of many kinds of spices, and, likewise, these movies often blend many different popular genres—musical, comedy, action, etc.)  These films are often melodramas topped with action heroes, damsels in distress, and one-dimensional villains, and are commonly served with a healthy serving of sweet happy endings. But there are many other forms of Indian movies. Art cinema and experimental cinema has been ever-present since the conception of Indian cinema. Today, we are seeing the return of social activism in films, a movement that was particularly strong in the 1950’s and 1960’s (known as Bollywood’s Golden Era), and young directors today are trying to capture what it means to grow up Indian in this ever-shrinking world. With changing times, Bollywood is also changing and reinventing itself.


           

 

More than a Fish Story

Fall 2014, Uncategorized

 

by Nick Porcella

Even just a few years removed, high school is a blur to me. But I do have some general memories: physics exams in uncomfortable chairs, crushes that went nowhere, never once buying school lunch and never once being ashamed of that, sweaty dodgeball gym-classes, and the most remarkable production of Les Misérables I have ever seen.

There is also the not-so-traditional memory of getting so excited by an odd piece of nineteenth-century short fiction that the rest of my life suddenly seemed to have new purpose.

My life might reasonably be broken up into two parts: B.B. and A.B., Before Bartleby, and After. “Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!” These final words of Herman Melville’s short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” which I first read for  Mrs. Evers’ junior-Honors English class, altered the course of my life.

I couldn’t begin to explain why the quirky narrator and his cohort of workers captured my attention as they did. But something about the writing style—its poetry and fluidity—made the novella-length story a joy to read.

The English-majoring, poetry-writing bibliophile that I am now did not exist B.B. Before Bartleby, I wanted to go to engineering school, do math and chemistry, and build things for a living. That was not the path A.B. “Bartleby” suddenly added a jolt of passion to my life that high-school-me previously lacked. I immediately shared “Bartleby” with my book-loving mother. She read it. We talked about it, why we liked it, and what those haunting final words meant to us. That was the first time my mom and I ever had a true book-club moment.

When I was growing up, my mom taught me to work hard, embrace fun, and treat people with kindness first. She tried to teach me a love of reading, but that did not stick until Mrs. Evers’ class. “Bartleby” was the story that started it all, in that it allowed me to have more in common with my mother. Ah Bartleby! Thank you!

The summer before my senior year, I went to Barnes & Noble pick out a book for summer reading. The process was always stressful for me. Should I pick a short book and spend more time writing the essays or take on a larger tome and impress the teacher? Then I saw “Herman Melville” in white letters in the foreground of a cadet-blue cover. The dauntingly long Moby-Dick sat on the corner of a shelf. I thought of my mother and smiled. In a moment that freshman-year-in-high-school-me would have found batshit insane, I grabbed the book and, without opening it, went to the register, not  giving my selection a second thought.

If A.B. got me to like reading, then it was A.M-D. got me to major in English in college. I loved this massive book. And, contrary to what my high school and college friends call Moby-Dick, it is much more than a “fish story.” Call me hooked!

I tried to get anyone and everyone I knew to read Melville with me. My mom turned out to be the biggest enthusiast. I created a series of discussion questions for us, as she read the work for the first time, I for the second. She and I talked all summer about Ishmael, Ahab, Queequeg, the crew of the Pequod, not to mention the elusive yet symbolic white whale. This shared summer journey stands as a precious memory, especially now, when college has made it more difficult to see my family regularly.

Today, several years past the foundational After Bartleby period, I have an extensive collection of Melville writings, containing more than fifty-five volumes. What makes my collection even more precious is the fact that the people I love are embracing Melville with me (or at least humoring me). My friend Kaitlyn, who is a talented artist, creates a Moby-Dick work for me for my birthday each year. Last year she made a white-paper cutout of a sperm whale, which hangs in my room. My friend Molly bought me a Moby-Dick poster she saw at an online store. I had it framed and hung on my bedroom wall. My friend Susan gave me a very old movie poster of Captain Ahab which shows the captain bleary-eyed, looking for revenge. My aunt found me a Moby-Dick t-shirt which I wear to my American literature classes. My whole family keeps an eye out for all things Melville. My grandfather sends me newspaper articles and e-mails me when Melville is an answer on Jeopardy!

And my mom’s influence did not stop at encouraging my passions; she actually helped me acquire many pieces of my collection, through dumpster diving. She and I used to travel to transfer stations nearby and pick through the used book recycling bins. We were not supposed to be there, but my mom also taught me to break the rules a lot, especially if no one will get hurt. The way I saw it, all these Melville books would have been lost had I not hopped into the dumpsters full of books. I guess I became a Moby-Dick rescuer.

My proudest achievement for the collection is that I recently placed first in a book-collecting contest. I can now say that my collection is award-winning, a phrase I always preface with a laugh and the phrase “I mean this in the least pompous way imaginable.” I do not plan to stop this madness anytime soon. The only way it will end is if I share a fate with Ahab or Bartleby.

After Bartleby, my life has changed for better and for worse. I don’t have my mother anymore. Over a year ago now, she passed away after a long battle with breast cancer. My memories of her, including the times we spent reading Melville, mean more to me every day.

For many reasons, I am grateful I found Bartleby.

 


0
0
1
30
171
WPI
1
1
200
14.0

Normal
0

false
false
false

EN-US
JA
X-NONE

/* Style Definitions */
table.MsoNormalTable
{mso-style-name:”Table Normal”;
mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;
mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;
mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-style-priority:99;
mso-style-parent:””;
mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt;
mso-para-margin:0in;
mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:12.0pt;
font-family:Cambria;
mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria;
mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria;
mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;}

0
0
1
35
203
WPI
1
1
237
14.0

Normal
0

false
false
false

EN-US
JA
X-NONE

/* Style Definitions */
table.MsoNormalTable
{mso-style-name:”Table Normal”;
mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;
mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;
mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-style-priority:99;
mso-style-parent:””;
mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt;
mso-para-margin-top:0in;
mso-para-margin-right:0in;
mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt;
mso-para-margin-left:0in;
line-height:115%;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:11.0pt;
font-family:Calibri;
mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri;
mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri;
mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;}

0
0
1
54
309
WPI
2
1
362
14.0

Normal
0

false
false
false

EN-US
JA
X-NONE

/* Style Definitions */
table.MsoNormalTable
{mso-style-name:”Table Normal”;
mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;
mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;
mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-style-priority:99;
mso-style-parent:””;
mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt;
mso-para-margin:0in;
mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:12.0pt;
font-family:Cambria;
mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria;
mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria;
mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;}

Nick Porcella studies English at Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts, and intends to teach high school. His passions include Herman Melville, rap music, photography, and writing. He is completing a memoir, Getting to Say Goodbye. See more of his work here.

 

Descent of a Species: The Evolution of Godzilla

Fall 2014, Uncategorized

by Sasha Kohan

Earlier this summer, Gareth Edwards’ take on the classic Godzilla broke records for the best opening weekend of any disaster movie and creature feature, raking in $93.2 million in the United States alone. One wonders, however, how many of those millions of American viewers were aware that this film would not exist were it not for a critical moment in our nation’s history.

It was, of course, the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan in August 1945 that served as the inspiration for the saurian creature that has become the mascot of Japanese pop culture and the inspiration for multitudinous movies, books, comics, television shows, and video games. With songs dedicated to him and statues built in his honor, Godzilla has even won an MTV Lifetime Achievement Award, one of only three fictional characters to do so.  

In the sixty years since Godzilla’s conception, however, the meaning behind his story seems to have changed. Japan’s original 1954 Gojira is not what we see in Edwards’ most recent adaptation (although this may not be entirely bad – the CGI creature we see now has come a long way from the delightful campiness of the original monster-suit). How has Godzilla changed with time, and will he ever become irrelevant?

The allegorical journey of Godzilla began in spring 1954, when Tomoyuki Tanaka, producer for Toho Motion Picture Company, was challenged to make Japan’s first major monster movie and decided to work the film as a metaphor for the atomic bomb.

Japan is the only nation ever to have suffered a nuclear attack. Between 60,000 and 80,000 people were killed instantly upon Little Boy’s detonation over Hiroshima in 1945, with some bodies vanishing completely from the heat of the explosion and thousands of others dying from long-term effects of radiation exposure. The death toll would eventually reach 135,000. Three days later, more than 40,000 were killed instantly in Nagasaki, with total casualties reaching upwards of 50,000. It is not difficult to understand why so much of Japanese culture has revolved around the nuclear theme.

The idea for Godzilla, however, was not inspired by these incidents alone. The opening scene of Ishiro Honda’s original Gojira, in which a fishing boat is suddenly struck by a beam of bright light, is based on the March 1954 incident when the Japanese fishing boat Lucky Dragon 5 was exposed to severe radiation and nuclear fallout from the United States’ Castle Bravo device test on the Bikini Atoll. The explosion was more than twice as powerful as the bomb designers had expected and more than one thousand times as powerful as Little Boy. “Godzilla dramatizes nuclear horror unlike any other film of its period,” says film critic Steve Biodrowski, “because the fantasy element is clearly standing in for a reality too horrible to contemplate directly.” For audiences in America and around the world, Godzilla is and has always been a fantasy, an amusement, an entertainment; for the Japanese audiences of 1954, the film struck close to home.

In the 1956 American version of the film, significant alterations were made to Honda’s original. Along with the insertion of additional footage of actor Raymond Burr as an American reporter, these alterations included the cutting of several scenes that alluded to Godzilla’s connection with the bomb. Among the omitted sequences are references to the bomb being a threat to Japan and a realistic political debate over whether the public has the right to  know the truth about Godzilla, or whether they should be protected from it. The most significant reference cut from the 1956 version, however, is much smaller and more poignant, occurring when two strangers aboard a train are making small talk about the latest Godzilla news. One woman laments the headlines and the idea of confronting another tragedy. “Not after I survived Nagasaki,” she says. Another man joins in with a reference to the firebombing of Tokyo, saying, “We have to evacuate again?” Even in this fictitious universe, Godzilla is not a just an allegorical stand-in for the bomb; he is a supplement to its reality. American film editors in 1956, however, were not comfortable in this universe. Moments of truth were omitted, and Godzilla’s American legacy grew as mere fantasy.

In the half-century following the creation of Godzilla, the Toho company produced 27 sequels to Honda’s original, and a sense of patriotism eventually became associated with the giant monster. “Godzilla,” writes professor of Japanese literature Susan J. Napier, “began as the ultimate alien who, as the series continued, became a friend to Japan, an insider, ‘one of us.’” While the 1954 original depicted a Japan in panic, Godzilla showed a traumatized audience just how much they had managed to overcome. The film’s view of science, nature, and humanity remained grim and pessimistic, but the creature became a mascot for a nation devastated by war and the following period of uplift and hopes for peace. According to Napier, “The series’ reassuring subtext remains the same throughout: even if famous monuments such as Tokyo Tower or the new Tokyo City Hall get trampled on, they can always be rebuilt.”

Considering the enormous significance of Godzilla in Japanese popular culture, Gareth Edwards’ recent hit remake is all the more curious and, perhaps, problematic. Even the notion of America adapting a film and legacy which was only created because of the thousands of lives lost and despair caused by Americans is uncomfortable, to say the least. Although Japan-U.S. relations are currently stable and civil, it seems somewhat problematic for the superpower that crushed another nation to ask to borrow a most beloved icon for our own enjoyment. However, Roland Emmerich had crossed this line already with his widely criticized 1998 version, hated among critics and Godzilla fans alike, and even rebranded and essentially disowned as “Zilla” by its parent-company, Toho. In licensing the film to Legendary Pictures, Toho set certain conditions under which the film was to be made, including that Godzilla was created from a nuclear incident, and that the film be set in Japan. While these conditions were basically met, it is certainly questionable whether Toho’s expectations were. Although Godzilla’s radioactive past is often referenced in the movie, it can hardly be said that this Godzilla really has anything to do with nuclear anxiety. While the basic structure of any Godzilla film is there, it is so loose and ambiguous that it simply becomes another monster movie: huge, uncontrollable creatures suddenly wreak havoc on densely populated city and destroy cultural (American) landmarks while cookie-cutter human melodrama happens in between battle scenes. Throw in some radiation, don’t forget to mention Japan, and BOOM – Godzilla movie, done.

Prior to its release, writer Frank Darabont was asked whether the new version would uphold the original nuclear allegory or “represent a different kind of metaphor, something we’re dealing with as a culture,” only for Darabont to respond saying that, in film, there is always “a margin of interpretation.” While this is already clear to the majority of movie-watchers, Edwards’ Godzilla seems to have rather a large margin.

In a somewhat contrived effort to remind audiences that they are well aware of Godzilla’s background, the 2014 filmmakers mention the events that started it all in a quick somber scene with the lone Japanese character of Dr. Ishiro Serizawa (Ken Watanabe). Dr. Serizawa shares with a confidant (and the audience) a remnant of his traumatic past: a watch that survived Hiroshima and belonged to his father. Unfortunately, the scene is so quick and out of the blue that it feels more like a forced moment of silence before the big games starts than a sincere acknowledgment of the past.

In fact, Watanabe’s entire character appears to have been created to preserve some remnant of the true spirit of Godzilla and the culture in which he was created. By simply being Japanese, mentioning Hiroshima, and uttering the tag line, “The arrogance of man is in thinking nature is in his control, and not the other way around,” Watanabe’s role is essentially objectified and confined. The tag line is misleading, however, or at least ambiguous, in that it may delude viewers into thinking it refers to the more topical, less edgy issue of global climate change.

What stands out most in Edwards’ Godzilla, however, is the distinct Americanness in which the original Japanese story has been soaked. The only scenes set in Godzilla’s homeland occur in the first half of the film, most of which, rather ironically, take place at a nuclear plant (not to mention the opening recreation of the very same hydrogen bomb test which led to the Lucky Dragon incident, perhaps included for fans of the 1954 original. This change of emphasis also begs the question of how appropriate it would be for even Japan to produce a Godzilla remake at this time.  Beginning in the early 1970s, nuclear energy has been a national strategic priority of Japan and has come to provide a significant amount of the nation’s electricity. However, following the devastating tsunami in 2011, which killed nearly 20,000 people and triggered the disaster at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, Japanese public opinion on nuclear energy has largely reverted back to what it was following Godzilla’s original release, with polls finding up to 80 percent of the Japanese population were in favor of discontinuing the use of all fifty-four of the country’s nuclear reactors.

With this in mind, it seems as though the remake of a significantly anti-nuclear-powered allegory like Godzilla might have been met with slight confusion and discomfort – no more, however, than the U.S. version we were given leaves us with. Not only does the remake cloud Godzilla’s enormous significance in a potentially offensive “Americanness,” but it also does so in a way that so strangely seems to criticize itself that one could easily read the film as ultimately un-American. The main theme of this version, as embodied by Bryan Cranston’s character and his mission, is government distrust.

It is difficult to come away from this film without questioning the politics behind it. Ideas of democracy, unity, and peace are tainted by doubt and distrust. As we watch this American version of the Godzilla story, we are only reminded of our nation’s shortcomings, historic moments of horror and regret. While at times the film seems to be an attempt to charge American audiences with pride in their nation (not unsubtly done with the recurring image of Godzilla destroying Chinatown – representative of another world superpower with which we seem to consistently compete), the movie actually instills a sense of guilt and shame for our past. The 1954 original’s sense of patriotism and reassurance is twisted by sixty years of history, and viewers walk away from the remake wondering what else we don’t know. The message is emphasized more than anything by the inclusion of an old Elvis song – and what could be more American? As “(You’re the) Devil in Disguise” plays in merry irony over the destruction of Las Vegas, suspicions that we should start being more suspicious arise, solidified by the ominous still-water ending.

While little else is clear, Godzilla viewers everywhere can at least be certain that the legacy and evolution of Japan’s beloved monster is far from complete.

A Fine Romance Writer

Fall 2014, Uncategorized

by Bansari Kamdar

Romance writer Susan Elizabeth Phillips

Romance writer Susan Elizabeth Phillips

Best-selling novelist Susan Elizabeth Phillips has been crafting funny and beautiful love stories with smart and sassy heroines, highly desirable heroes, and happy endings for more than a quarter of a century. Her latest novel is Heroes Are My Weakness.

 

You are considered among the top authors in the genre of contemporary romance novels. What draws you to this genre?

That is what my natural voice is. I think if you want to be successful you have to write into your own worldview and you have to work with your natural voice, and that’s mine.

How would you describe a romance novel, and how do you distinguish a love story from romance?

You can kind of distinguish in a way between a love story and a romance. I think a love story doesn’t have to end happily and the romance is going to have a satisfying ending. The hero and heroine will get together in the end and they will still both be alive. In a love story you can have a tragic ending like Romeo and Juliet. In romances, on the other hand, you don’t find that very often.

Many romance novels after a while can become clichéd; how do you overcome the stereotyping often associated with the genre?

[Stereotying] is associated with all kinds of genres in popular fiction. If you are writing a mystery, the mystery is going to be solved, and if you are writing a thriller, the serial killer will not be caught [right away]. Same way, if you are writing a romance, the hero and heroine will end up together. There is a sense of order in popular fiction that you don’t get with literary fiction. It is a sort of recipe and it wouldn’t be romance if the order weren’t followed.

There is also some bad publicity associated with romance novels. How do you respond to people who belittle the romance genre?

There is no bad PR about it anymore. That kind of went away with the popularity of the books. I haven’t had to defend the genre in a while. Not since the 80’s and early 90’s and not when you see the incredible success of so many romance writers. It’s difficult now to decide what romance is and what isn’t, because the genre is so flexible.

You have remarkably strong female protagonists in your novels from female presidents to owners of football teams and startup business owners to bestselling authors. The strength of conviction and character is often common in all these women, but what is often endearing is that they are not idealized and they also have their flaws. What is your thought process behind these characters?

You see, they achieve all this by the end of the book. My heroines since the beginning have strength of character, but are often at a low point of their lives. The process of my stories is the process of them becoming everything and the best they can be. This is an issue for a lot of women and one that interests a lot of women. [The] journey of my books is the journey of the heroine finding herself. If you look closely, the male protagonists in my novels are not perfect either. They have their flaws, and you often see them grow too, throughout the novel. If the hero is perfect and the heroine is perfect, you have no story. That is where the conflict will come from, the characters’ weakness and their needs and what they need to face about themselves.

How would you describe your ritual of writing?

I write almost every day unless I am travelling. I don’t like to take time off, even if I write just an hour a day; it keeps the work fresh. I work just like anyone works a job. I go to work in the morning and I write and I deal with all the social media things that come along. I follow a regular writing schedule.

Writers block is often a writer’s worst enemy. How do you overcome it?

Well, it’s a job. You just sit there and do it. I probably have writer’s block over twelve times a day, and so I just stay in my seat and keep working until I get through it. If it were easy we wouldn’t call it work.

Do you have any advice for other writers?

It’s hard work, and the only way you can get anything accomplished is by actually doing it. That’s the hard part. It is easy to go to workshop and meetings, but sitting down in the chair and doing the writing is when it actually happens. So my advice always is “Write, just write. “

What do you do in the time you are not weaving romances on paper?     

There is always hiking and travelling. We also have family close by so we do a lot of family gatherings. And of course I love to read.

So, what would you say would be your 3 favorite books?

No, I am not answering that question. It’s just too hard.

I just finished reading The Great Escape last month, and, as an ardent follower, I am wondering what is next in the books for Susan Elizabeth Phillips?

As you must have read on my blog, I am coming out with my new book Heroes Are My Weakness. A sneak peek of the novel is available on the author’s website.)

The Chicago Stars series, with its football-playing heroes and daring heroines who fall in love with them, is a public favorite, and two of my favorite books are also a part of these series. Are there going to be any more Chicago Stars books after Natural Born Charmer?

I have always said that I have written my last Stars book, but if I get an idea for another one I would definitely write it. I just have to be able to bring something fresh to it.

I remember reading It Had To Be You in high school and how motivated Phoebe made me feel, and I am sure a lot of women around the world associate themselves the same way with many of your characters. What would be your advice to these women who are still on the journey of seeking themselves?

My advice would just be that, keep testing yourself and keep growing.

 

Family Feud: The Three Cousins Who Led Europe Into the First World War

Fall 2014, Uncategorized

by Noah Keates

Imperial War Museum via Wikimedia Commons

Imperial War Museum via Wikimedia Commons

           

A century ago, on June 28th, 1914, Slav nationalist Gavrilo Princip assassinated Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo, and many historians would concur that this was the ember that was blown into the conflagration of the First World War.  But although the archdukes assassination may have been the catalyst for the subsequent war between Austria-Hungary and Serbia, the eruption of war on a continental scale may have been caused by other factors. Decades of political distress and foreign alliances had set the stage for the behemoths of European military power–England, Germany, Russia– to take up arms.  And at the center of this stage stood three cousins, King George V of Great Britain, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, whose complicated family relationships partly fueled the international animosity that led to the horrors of The Great War.

George and Wilhelm shared a common relation through their grandmother Queen Victoria, while George and Nicholas were bonded through their mothers, the two Danish princesses, Alexandra and Dagmar.  Nicholas and Wilhelm shared no blood relation, though they became cousins-in-law when Nicholas married Wilhelms first cousin, Alexandra of Germany.

The three cousins grew up under great pressure from the past, and the political leanings of their predecessors molded their opinions and ideas as they rose to power.  Though tension existed among the three nations in the decades preceding World War I, the young cousins remained in contact with each other, partially driven by the expectation of courtesy from their common relations, yet also due to a genuine interest in the lives of their social counterparts.  However, through the first decade of the 20th century, the bonds among George, Wilhelm, and Nicholas began to be strained.

Queen Victoria acted as one of the strongest influences on two of the young boys, as she grandmothered both George and Wilhelm.  Victoria ruled in Great Britain for 64 years from 1837-1901, and acquired the name The Mother of Europe due to the number of thrones occupied by her descendants.  A special bond quickly developed between the Queen and her first-born grandchild, Wilhelm, in whom Victoria keenly inculcated the appeal and successes of British culture and policy. Wilhelm would acquire great power in adulthood, and Victoria intended to capitalize on the mutual affection with her German grandson to influence German political policy in a direction favorable to Great Britain.  However, although the Queen guided Wilhelm towards British influence, she did not encourage the friendship between Wilhelm and the one person who could have cemented the Kaisers positive relationship with her island nation, her younger grandson, George, the future king.  Victoria disliked the idea of her grandchildren mingling together and kept a general policy to avoid having more than one set of grandchildren staying at any one time, according to historian Miranda Carter.  Consequently, Wilhelm and George did not form any real relationship as children, which might have induced a stronger bond between the two rulers as they rose to power.

Victoria was not the only one to discourage this friendship.  Georges mother, the Danish Princess Alexandra, still harbored resentment towards Germany stemming from the brutality of the Prussians towards her kingdom in the Dane-Prussian War of 1864. Otto Von Bismarck, the German chancellor, had orchestrated this conflict to aid in the unification of the German state and to cement a political alliance with Austria, who offered military support in the struggle.  Alexandra also fostered the bond between George and her sisters son, Nicholas II. Nicholas made the long trip across the continent with his Danish mother, Dagmar, to visit his British cousin, and the two quickly developed a strong bond that would persevere through the hostility between Russia and Great Britain in the final decades of the 19th century.

Through the Danish sisters and Queen Victoria, a social dynamic quickly formed among the three cousins, in which Wilhelm constantly found himself on the outside, isolated on both sides by anti-Prussian feelings.

From the early years of their reigns, a game of influence and power quickly developed among George, Nicholas, and Wilhelm, each looking to seize the political advantage over the other. Wilhelm grew to favor Russia over Great Britain, deeming it a necessity to form an alliance with one of these countries in order to prevent an alliance between Great Britain and Russia that would leave Germany flanked to the east and west by two of the strongest military forces in Europe.

 

Nicholas and George (via Wikimedia Commons)

Nicholas and George (via Wikimedia Commons)

Wilhelm (via Wikimedia Commons)

Wilhelm (via Wikimedia Commons)

Illustration by Noah Keates

Illustration by Noah Keates

Wilhelm, for his part, saw an opportunity to capitalize on younger Nicholas’s political inexperience and influence the recently crowned Tsar.  Although some hard feelings existed between the two young men due to their common romantic interest in Alexandra, who became Nicholas’s wife, the Kaiser overcame this envy in order to attain a Russian alliance.  Wilhelm aggressively forged a friendship Nicholas, soaking him in compliment and flattery, and tired to mold his political ideas, according to historian Robert K. Massie.  At first, Nicholas embraced the support of the older more experienced Wilhelm, seeing him as a mentor.  However, as the years passed, and the tsar accumulated experience in the political world, he began to find Wilhelm’s influence as more overbearing than helpful.  Nicholas had a greater interest in maintaining his relationship with his long-time friend George, a friendship that became increasingly difficult as Great Britain and Russia’s always tense relationship stretched thinner. However, guided by similar influences as children and similar interests as adults (each was extremely fond of his nation’s navy), the relationship between the two remained cordial.

While Nicholas and Wilhelm had obtained their thrones as young adults, Georges father, Edward VII, remained king until almost the eve of the War, meaning that the friendship between George and Nicholas did not factor into the politics of these rival powers. But when George ascended the throne, this bond became crucial in the arrangement of pre-war alliances. And as George and Nicholas forged a bond between Russia and Great Britain, Germany became more isolated.

By 1907 the Triple Entente had been formalized, officially forming the political alliance among Russia, Great Britain, and France.  Three years later, upon Edwards death, George at last acquired his throne and he and Nicholas could meld their life-long friendship into political reality.  At the same time, Nicholass growing annoyance at the Kaiser escalated to contempt.  Encouraged by Wilhelm, Nicholas had waged war with the Japanese in an effort to acquire a warm-water port on the pacific, but this military campaign ended in catastrophe, with Russias seemingly superior forces decimated by the smaller Japanese army. This was the final straw for the Tsar.

To make things worse, this defeat in the east along with a host of social and economic issues caused a growing animosity towards Nicholas in his own country. With the deterioration of this relationship between Tsar and Kaiser, tension emerged between the two nations.

There is no doubt that numerous factors contributed to the rising animosity among nations that erupted into World War I.  However, the social dynamics of Wilhelm finding himself the odd-one-out in the family from an early age and his struggling to join the previously existing friendship between George and Nicholas may also have played a part. It is amazing, and saddening, that the projection of a familys dynamics onto the global scene in the form of shifting national alliances could have consequences as global and as horrific as the First World War.


Noah Keates is a junior at the Bancroft School, Worcester, Massachusetts.  His interests are history and politics, especially concerning Europe, and he hopes to study political science in college.

 

 

0
0
1
30
171
WPI
1
1
200
14.0

Normal
0

false
false
false

EN-US
JA
X-NONE

/* Style Definitions */
table.MsoNormalTable
{mso-style-name:”Table Normal”;
mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;
mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;
mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-style-priority:99;
mso-style-parent:””;
mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt;
mso-para-margin:0in;
mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:12.0pt;
font-family:Cambria;
mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria;
mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria;
mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;}

 

 

 

Pole Dancing to Gospel Hymns: The Poetry of Andrea Gibson

Fall 2014, Uncategorized

0
0
1
820
4679
WPI
38
10
5489
14.0

Normal
0

false
false
false

EN-US
JA
X-NONE

/* Style Definitions */
table.MsoNormalTable
{mso-style-name:”Table Normal”;
mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;
mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;
mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-style-priority:99;
mso-style-parent:””;
mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt;
mso-para-margin-top:0in;
mso-para-margin-right:0in;
mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt;
mso-para-margin-left:0in;
line-height:115%;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:11.0pt;
font-family:Calibri;
mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri;
mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri;
mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;}

by Sarah Leidhold

 I heard the poetry of Andrea Gibson before I read it; and I’m not sure if that is considered cheating, like giving one’s eyes the pleasure of watching the movie before the more satisfying labor of earning the narrative through the exploration of reading. A crony of mine posted a link of her spoken word session on Facebook, making a bold statement about her brilliance. Because I respect the opinion of this friend, my fingertips instructed the mouse to click, and, as requested, I turned up the volume.

What I heard then was something I never forgot. It was Gibson’s piece, “Maybe I Need You,” about the prickling nostalgia of having your hands ache to hold someone who is entirely too gone to fathom. I myself wasn’t hurting at the time, but when heartbreak did befall my soul, I craved the sound of her rhythmic vocalizations and the piece’s exactly on point descriptions of the rollercoaster of human emotion.

I sought out her writing more and more, finding my own writing muse gaping at her creative insightfulness and begging that my words would try to mimic it. As cliché as it may sound, Gibson was my compass through a summer tangled with the dark disillusionment of love lost. And since then, I have made her my poetical goddess, referring to her when I need a wisp of inspiration or when my heart is feeling hollowed out or much too full. Last year I witnessed her reading live and I completely saturated the basins of my cheekbones with saline–crying for the incomprehensible beauty that I was witnessing.

Gibson’s book of poetry, Pole Dancing to Gospel Hymns, was published in 2008 by Write Bloody Publishing. with  a new edition coming out in 2010. Featuring illustrations by Anis Mojgani, the book was awarded the DIY Book of the Year and was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Pole Dancing to Gospel Hymns contains 26 poems, most written in free verse, with some sporadic rhyming.

Within these texts, Gibson stares into the face of the forces of evil that are cloaked in propriety or tradition in our world and gives us the gory details: patriarchy, warfare that slaughters children on US dollars (“El Mozote”), the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder that soldiers bring home from war, mental health issues, the horror of rape, the injustice of laws that do not allow gays to marry, the wrongful assumptions of sexism, the avarice inherently interlaced with our consumer culture, and more. She dexterously contrasts the stark blackness of these horrible truths with the saving grace of much more gentler forces like forgiveness, love that spans across boundaries of gender or race, the innocence of children, the unrelenting promise of pacifism, and, above all, the power of altruism as the guiding force for human harmony.

Gibson juxtaposes two opposing images of mankind: one as a monstrosity that employs indiscriminate violence to satisfy its bottomless greed under the guise of religious convictions, and the other a creature capable of breathtakingly profound descriptions of the specificity of things, both internal and external, that make the human race such a beautiful species, one that harbors more potential for compassion than it is capable of realizing.

Gibson fleshes out images/instances of both love and hate: personifying both empty clichés about romantic relations and stark facts about the horror of war. Her poems speak with the breath of human life by painting portraits of people, things, and emotions with a crafted realism. But Gibson also whispers into the reader’s ear idealistic ideas that fill one with hope that the world can be improved, as in “See Through”:

“And Jesse this

is not just a picture [of] our history,

not just a picture of our past.

We’ve been hundreds of years

Measuring the size of their hearts

By the size of our fists,

Erecting our bliss on the broken backs of dark skin.

The present is far from gift-wrapped”

Besides being a poet, Andrea is an activist who urges us not only to be aware but also to work for change. Again, from “See Through”:

“I don’t believe we’re hateful.

I think we’re just asleep.

But when we wake we can’t call up the dead and say,

‘Sorry, we were looking the other way.’

There are names and faces behind our apathy,

eulogies beneath our choices.

There are voices deep as roots

thundering unquestionable truth

through the white noise that pacifies our ears.

Don’t tell me we can’t hear.

Don’t tell me we don’t hear.

When the moon is slain,

when the constellations disperse like shrapnel,

don’t you think it’s time

something changed?”

The title of Gibson’s collection, Pole Dancing to Gospel Hymns, suggests a rebellion against traditional principles and authorities, but not all of Gibson’s work focuses on extremes of human pain and injustice. She also has pieces that completely focus on the bliss of finding harmony in relationships, especially romantic ones, as in “Love Poem.” She also discusses the heartache of relinquished connection with another in writing that moves one’s heart.

Gibson’s writing often makes allusions to history, current events, and other literature, as well as employing metaphors and extended metaphors.

 Anyone who picks up this book should prepare to be moved, to heave open one’s heart. This writer’s words have become for me the poetic equivalent of Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense”—it’s a call to arms, a pamphlet that reminds me of the necessity to rebel against the thoughtlessness that keeps the veil over our eyes in this culture. 


Sarah Leidhold, an overzealous student at Worcester State University, harbors a pervasive addiction to both producing and absorbing poetry. She especially enjoys the uninhibited spilling out of inspired sentiments in the all-accepting form of free verse. More of her work can be found here.

Randumb and Dumber

Fall 2014, Uncategorized

by Warren Singh

 

J.D. Salinger once noted that a good book was one that made you wish you were friends with the author. By that measure, I’m reading a good book, even if Nassim Nicholas Taleb is coming off as a bit of an ass. Well, a lot of an ass. But that’s okay, because, apparently, so am I.

I’m just finishing up Fooled By Randomness, a 200-something page book published by Random House that Taleb describes as a personal essay, intended to be read for fun, about “the hidden role of chance in life and in the markets,” as the subtitle has it. Taleb weaves in threads from psychology, economics, philosophy, finance, history, classic literature, probability theory, and anecdotes. In short, the book is an unconstrained story, going wherever it pleases, sprawling out around a central theme like an aerial view of London at night.

What’s the theme? Taleb writes, “I have been periodically challenged to compress all this business of randomness into a few sentences … it is: we favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible; we scorn the abstract.”

It’s simultaneously discomfiting and liberating to consider Taleb’s central point is that randomness is fundamental in much of our lives. Throughout the book, he expounds on the idea that we are so much less in control of what events occur than we think – we correct our past predictions in hindsight to appear more correct to ourselves, we convince ourselves that we are solely responsible for the good things that happen to us due to our actions, and we become married to our first ideas and beliefs, defending them against any and all incoming evidence to the contrary.

Taleb doesn’t argue that life’s underlying randomness is good or bad per se, he argues for its deep-running nature and indelible impact on our lives, and expounds on this idea that we cannot see it because of our inborn psychological patterns and fallacies. We are, if I may use a neologism, randumb.

Writing in a distinctive, personal voice, Taleb spins out this idea into its many facets, from financial markets to our personal lives and decisions, ultimately musing on the bad (and good) aspects of being so inextricably bound to the vagaries of chance. In the end, Fooled By Randomness is a conversation with an uncle at a family gathering, one who is unashamedly opinionated and iconoclastic, bordering on overbearing – and yet, entertaining, thought-provoking, insightful and very much worth the time.

The Things That Live On

Fall 2014, Uncategorized

by Sean McCarthy

As I follow my grandfather into his garage, which is stuffed with old furniture gathering dust, gardening tools, kitchenware, and old board games, a musty smell reaches my nose. He grabs the short stepladder that I am too small to carry and motions me to follow him into the backyard. The sun has warmed the air on this pleasant June afternoon. We stop at the edge of the woods, and he sets up the ladder. With a basket in hand, I nervously climb up a few steps, grabbing onto his open-collared shirt. He places his hand on the small of my back, the face behind his wide-rimmed glasses full of calmness, a constant easiness. Assured, I let him guide me to the top step. I reach out and grab a fistful of blueberries.

                                                            ***

Some years pass. I’m in church. The priest begins his homily, turning my attention from the way the wood is stained on the pew before me. I lean back in my seat, eyes on Father Bill, the man of the hour, literally. All of his stories begin the same way, starting with some recent event that links to and illustrates the Gospel reading. I don’t really care how much is invented. It isn’t a lecture. He is sharing with us, teaching us what makes life so worthwhile. It is the same consciously peaceful, caring attitude of my grandfather. For the most part, it’s the little things, the things you don’t usually notice, that end up having the biggest impact on our life. These seven-minute tales pull me away from the monotonous bore of church, reminding me of the unspoken closeness I share with my grandfather. It may be that I took these stories for granted early on, but, as I age, I listen ever more attentively to the smallest details—and then one Sunday we are told that Father Bill is ill.

Bill is also my grandfather’s name.

                                                            ***

I’m sitting with my family in Norwood Hospital. My grandfather lies quietly in the bed. Flipping through the channels, my mother starts to ask if the Sox are playing today. He tells her which channel to turn to before she has finished asking the question. There’s nothing about baseball, and especially Red Sox baseball, that my grandfather doesn’t know. The Parkinson’s hasn’t take that away from him.

It’s been a long time since we picked those blueberries.

                                                             ***

Mom tells us kids that it’s time to leave the hospital. I take off my Red Sox hat as I approach his bedside and lean over, my grandfather looking up at me. With a kiss to his forehead, an “I love you,” and a squeeze of his hand, just to make sure he knew I was there, I turn towards the door. Dad wraps his arm around my shoulder as we walk out. But just as we are leaving, my grandfather’s new roommate is being rolled in.

“Father Bill?” Dad asks, turning around.

And so it is. His Bible sits at the end of his bed. He smiles and shakes our hands. I wonder if he recognizes me. Whatever nervousness I had begun to feel as I left my grandfather’s room dissipates. I had heard of how Father Bill was being moved in and out of different hospitals. And now he’s here, with my grandfather and with my family. And that’s just a funny thing.

    ***

 Since my grandparents’ move to Walpole from Falmouth—where we picked the blueberries–and, in turn, my grandfather’s passing, the only trips I make over the Bourne Bridge are to visit him at the Massachusetts National Cemetery. It’s the first anniversary of his death.

He has rubbed off on me. He even taught me how to care for my grandmother, cracking a joke at the perfect time, just so she knows I love her. I stand by the grave, my grandmother’s hand in mine, as I think back to his last year. As his nervous system deteriorated, and his walking slowed, and his back arched, my grandfather kept going. His stubbornness, that I know all too well in myself, kept him fighting that stupid disease. I knew he would never stop the fight. Even when walking to the end of the driveway to get the newspaper became a huge physical and mental test, each step a battle and the stairs a mountain, he always persevered.

                                                                  ***

 It’s a cool day on the Cape. My grandmother stands beside me. The wind dries the tears as quickly as they come. The moment feels surreal, to realize the impact of my grandfather’s life, as I recall times we shared. I look to my left, noticing blueberry bushes lining the woods.


Sean R. McCarthy attends Worcester Polytechnic Institute, in Worcester, Massachusetts, pursuing a degree in Interactive Media and Game Development with minors in English and Entrepreneurship. He is influenced by the imaginations of Jim Henson and Walt Disney.

Tending My Grandfather’s Garden, and First Visiting His Grave

Fall 2014, Uncategorized

by Samuel Hark

JDTWJ

JDTWJ

And at this moment, when the rasp sun slices like a sickle through the wisp of scant clouds, I cannot help but think upon the words of that particular peculiar named poet,

So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow glazed with rain. All in truth except for that sweet respite of rain, I muse to no one but myself and the weeds, as I, the green-thumbed reaper, eradicating

the unsightly root-rotted shrubs, heaving their dusted remains in my heavy red-rusted dead wagon, that has no doubt been long depended on, clearing for your stout stemmed thinnings, long since overgrown,

And when I first came to see you, my hands, slicked wet with sweat and guilt, could no longer bear the weightof your absence, with none to keep by your side, expect for

untended flowerbeds that birth none but the blossoms of my dread, but I have since learned that it is best not to dwell, as so much depends on these days that dare to lend me this dust.

He’s Mine

Fall 2014, Uncategorized

by Nick Porcella

The subject-matter was challenging, even uncomfortable: racism and derogatory language. My task as a mentor was to engage in a dialogue (“a constructive dialogue”) about the topic with my group of high school sophomores. We were to break up into small groups, and right away I looked at Angel, hooded and head down in the back of the room.

“I’ll take him,” I said.

In dodgeball selection Angel always got picked last. Why not change things up and go with the underdog? Even if that underdog had a lot of bite. Angel would be a part of my discussion on racism. He was going to be in my group and I would succeed at instilling in him the dangers, for one thing, of throwing around the word “faggot” so carelessly.

I had made a claim on Angel at a workshop earlier that day. I felt a deep pull towards him, all the time. His jagged edges somehow brought me closer to him than to the other students did. It’s not that I enjoy playing with broken glass, but something about Angel made me both like him and despise him. I don’t know if I felt threatened by him or if I just felt some inherent desire to see him succeed against all the odds working against him (not the least of which was his personality).  Working with Angel, you always wanted more and less–more effort, more care, less sass, less blaming.

Today I wanted more of something. I wanted respect. All I had to do to get Angel to respect me today was to talk to him on his level, man to man. Only, Angel’s just a kid, fourteen years old. But he says he has family in a gang, and he acts like more of a man than me, his masculine aggression not afraid to show through. Not sure how that should make me feel; not sure how he intends to use that information about the gang business one day; not sure if I’m translucent or transparent to him. He would hate me calling him a kid. He’s bright and he’s got all the tools to be a great leader. Angel does nothing to be the leader. He never has to, no one pressures him.

Am I jealous?

But back to dodgeball. “He’s mine. In fact, all you guys can work with me,” I said, addressing a few boys in the back, all sitting with Angel. These boys were always talking, texting, and mouthing off, but for the most part they showed up every week. They never behave well, but eventually they get work done. Our supervisor keeps telling us  mentors that our program really is for students like these. I can’t disagree, even though they were pretty stressful to work with. But by now I had committed myself to working with “the boys in the back of the room.”

Ambition. Macbeth is dead, after all.

Angel was quick to express himself: “Mister, why we got to do this?”

I ignored this. I gathered together  the gang I had so fervently fought for. Right away, they wanted nothing to do with me. Sure, they sat in a circle like I requested, but they did not want to hear a word I had to say. They talked over me, calling each other out: “You Mexican!” “Stop staring at me, a-hole!” “He’s pushing me!”—ironic of course because these were the very things I was trying to address. The noise was intense and all-encompassing, putting me in a stupor: Why did I sign up for this? But then everyone except Angel was talking. My chance. He’s mine.

“Angel, why don’t you talk to me? You’ve shut down.”

He said the activity was dumb. He hated it. Then he added that he was tired of me not listening to him. That one hurt. But was it true? He gave me a powerful stare—dark, pooling eyes and an ascending lower lip—as if he wanted to push my head through the wall. The gaze seemed familiar.

I was looking at James Dayton. I was paralyzed for a roughly two and a half second eternity. A reflex-driven eyelid snapped me back to see Angel. James Dayton, though, mattered to me now, even if I hadn’t thought of him for years. That was on purpose. James Dayton was the high school bully when I grew up. He made me fearful to turn corners in high school, thinking he’d call me a faggot or fake me out with a spectral punch. He owned me; I was his.

“You’re a faggot.” This time it came from Angel, but directed to a friend in the group who could only laugh. I glared at Angel. I wanted an explanation.

“What? He’s my friend,” Angel snapped. I did not know what to say. Calling him out would do nothing. He didn’t have to be here, but he came anyway. What did that count for? I unexpectedly realized that I was engaging with a reincarnation of what I hated and feared most just a few years earlier.

We could never have been friends in high school, I thought. But how can I tell you that? How in the world can I expect you to understand that?

Angel. Angel Dayton? Now I’m teaching you? Now I’m engaging with, talking to, and otherwise building a professional relationship with something I used to despise when it held another name and walked a different walk? I am working in a group with a student that had I been five years younger would have bullied me in high school? Just five years …

I think what was so particularly potent about James Dayton—James Dayton—was that he saw right through me. He knew what to say to hurt me most at any given time. He was talented at that. Raw and extroverted, like Angel. Unfiltered. Uncaring—something I remember both envying and loathing in another human being. I felt threatened then and I realized, in this group of five other guys and a conversation on racism and derogatory language that was heading nowhere, that I felt threatened here, too. I was just a boy.

In high school, when James Dayton was getting ready to pelt me with footballs in gym class, I sometimes thought about how my life would change if I had knocked him out, or even shot him point blank in the right temple. I wished him more animosity than anyone else I had ever known. There were surely people who said that about Angel now. Not me, though, I’m a whole five years older.

Why me? I asked of James Dayton, even though I was far from the only target.

These were not the feelings that I had for Angel. No, I wanted him to succeed, because I knew how bright he was. I knew he could succeed. Angel, though, had the unfortunate combination of extreme intelligence and extreme immaturity. He hadn’t grown into his brain yet, like some kids haven’t grown into their bodies. “Don’t give up on him,” I was told. “Everyone else has. But one day he’ll get it, he’ll blossom, and he’ll be invincible. He can’t do it without at least a little support.”

What if this was James Dayton? Where even is James Dayton today? I mean, last year I laughed at him because I learned that his family had lost their home. That was safe for me, like poking a bear with a hundred-foot poll. James Dayton couldn’t touch me anymore. I had no idea where he was. In a way, I felt (or at least I had convinced myself) that I owned him now. I wouldn’t even know if James Dayton had utilized all that raw ability that was mummified under his being a complete asshole. If I met him at my first class reunion and he was some kind-hearted, remarkably successful philanthropist, I’d probably hate him even more than if he was some conniving, sleazy, bully. His actualization of potential would make the old James Dayton a façade that didn’t have to be. No matter what, I’d find a reason to hate James Dayton.

But now, Angel.

I panicked. Could I teach the next Angel I met? Could I, one day, comfortably talk about literature with a classroom full of James Daytons?

Now that I had had this realization there was no turning back. I would surely see Angel every time someone made fun of another student. I worried for my impartiality. When Angel shines, as many have predicted he will, could I be fair—could I give him a grade of  “A” if he earns it? Just as I had so wanted to say
“he’s mine” to James Dayton, myself throwing a punch and shedding my quiet introverted skin, would I become obsessed with finding a way to own these students, these Angels? I had no desire to become a corrupt teacher, taking out three years of scared corner-turning onto generations of young people whom I didn’t even know. I didn’t even know Angel, did I?

Maybe it wasn’t that, none of that. Was I forgiving James Dayton as he lived vicariously through Angel? Were my constant attempts to work with Angel against all odds, and all fears that I had of him, merely a subconscious desire to forgive James? Maybe it was like the time that a college roommate took something from me without asking; I’d forgive him, but it would take some time, and he may not be a part of that forgiveness.

I wonder if forgiveness can be a selfish thing. I wonder if I can do it alone. I had no intention of telling James anything; I hoped to never see him again. But from a distance, I could forgive him, maybe.

I have always had this sensationalized dream that James would come knocking on my door when we were both forty to say he was sorry for what he did to me in high school, like I saw on a television drama once. When I think about it now, it seems silly, adolescent even. In my own little world, I wanted to own him and I wanted a reason to hate him. When I thought about it like that, none of that was how I felt for Angel—Angel is different. Angel I could still work with. He doesn’t need forgiveness because he doesn’t have that history with me.

But James, though, James is mine to forgive or not.


0
0
1
54
309
WPI
2
1
362
14.0

Normal
0

false
false
false

EN-US
JA
X-NONE

/* Style Definitions */
table.MsoNormalTable
{mso-style-name:”Table Normal”;
mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;
mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;
mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-style-priority:99;
mso-style-parent:””;
mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt;
mso-para-margin:0in;
mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:12.0pt;
font-family:Cambria;
mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria;
mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria;
mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;}

Nick Porcella studies English at Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts, and intends to teach high school. His passions include Herman Melville, rap music, photography, and writing. He is completing a memoir, Getting to Say Goodbye. See more of his work here.

I Am Like You I Am Not Like You

Fall 2014, Uncategorized

by Hannah Yukon

JD

JD

America. The land of the free. The land of multiple brands of peanut butter and endless supply of saturated fat. America. Where my father roamed the streets of Memphis on his yellow bicycle with his best friend Marcus, who was both his neighbor and the only Black kid at his school. America. Where he was forced to attend Sunday school and learn Hebrew. America. Where my father majored in Geology and sacrifice, where he worked in the French Quarter with my Uncle, until he escaped to his Fishing Camp alongside the Mississippi River. Where he got a job working on an oilrig in the middle of the Southwestern Pacific Ocean. New Zealand. Where he fell in love with the whispers of open roads and calibrated data. Where he decided to travel and discover the other parts of himself that he never knew existed. He found other neighbors. Australia, Indonesia, Singapore. And just like Marcus, he was the only one. The only White man in his company. The only White man who rode the bus to work, who ate at the spicy, sweaty, hawker centers, with his blue jeans and scent of foreign. Singapore. Where he met a woman at a library who caught his heart and attention discussing Greek mythology and how the cheese in Switzerland doesn’t taste like the Swiss cheese elsewhere. Now, in his red pickup truck, he found a new friend. The distance between the islands created a chasm…a reaction, and now there was another. New Zealand. Where my father became a father. Where he wore his pants on his waist, instead of underneath his belly where they hang now. Where he decided to raise his daughter near her mother. Where he set sail and finally departed for East Asia. Singapore. Where she grew up Catholic. Where she spent the next 19 years of her life not knowing anything else except constant humidity and lackluster dreams and drainpipes that made too much noise when it rained. Singapore. Where she found herself strung between two poles of identity but where she was only allowed to have one. Countless boxes checked ‘other’, because there wasn’t a space for Mixed American Chinese Catholic Jewish girls. Singapore. Where they didn’t teach us about the Holocaust or Slavery because they were too busy teaching us to be similar and to tolerate the differences, if there were any. Singapore. Where she finally decided to sail West for America, with hopes of re-connecting with a part of her that had been squeezed into a box labeled “other”. America. The land of the free. The land of multiple brands of peanut butter and endless supply of saturated fat. America. Where my White roommate asked me why I speak English so well, or what my ‘real name was’, because ‘Hannah’ wasn’t Asian enough.  


Hannah Yukon enjoys the beach, cats, and guacamole. Born in New Zealand and raised in Singapore, she pursues her mission of something more she doesn’t know yet, in Worcester, Massachusetts. She can be contacted at hannahyukon@gmail.com.