Janie’s Scrapbook

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I found something buried in one of my bottom shelves today and I thought I would dust it off a bit and share. Back in high school, I took advanced placement English classes that not only required a lot of reading and essay writing, but a lot of creative projects as well. One of these projects was putting together a scrapbook for the character Janie from the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. On the pages, I tried to capture several of the most significant scenes, themes, and images in the book. I’m glad I still kept it. It was probably one of my favorite projects.

Carousel #8

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(A somewhat late carousel. I found a lot of things last week, but I just forgot to keep track of some of them. Sorry!)

  1. No Pulitzer Prize was given out for the Fiction category this year. It was quite hilarious to see the deluge of sarcastic and infuriated comments by writers about the Pulitzer committee on Twitter. But here’s Ann Patchett’s much more reasonable reaction to it.
  2. I like this post about pseudonyms and writers’ identities, especially as someone with a half-pseudonym kind of thing going on.
  3. Speaking of pseudonyms, a writer who goes by the internet name of xTx has a really great story in The Collagist (which is probably my new favorite online lit journal, by the way).
  4. My sister has been pressuring me into reading The Hunger Games for a while and I caved. I’ve just finished the first book of the series and I’m beginning to read the second. At first, I wasn’t sure whether it would be something I would enjoy, but I have – more than I expected to, anyway. There’s also this great personal essay by Roxane Gay that helped to persuade me as well.
  5. This story by David Foster Wallace is very chilling. I think it will stay with me for a while.

Rebels Who Refuse to Rebel: Zazen by Vanessa Veselka

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So I guess this is technically my first ever publication in anything! This week, Paste Magazine ran my review on the novel Zazen by Vanessa Veselka. It’s featured in Issue #42 and on their front page in the books section. Exciting. It’s a book review (about a fairly inscrutable book), but I also discuss rebels, dystopias, and Never Let Me Go.

You can read it here.