Introduction

Introduction
To start this all off, I want to describe the events that transpired in the duration of my
nine semesters at OWU. That’s four and a half years of built and burnt relationships, of pure
contentment and depression, of struggles fought and goals achieved. I learned so much and I
think nearly every bit is important to my development as a person, thus as a writer. But the most
imperative rule is this: Don’t dwell.
At the start of Fall 2009, I had a gorgeous vision for the next four years to come. I wanted
to learn to write stories. I wanted to read every book my professors assigned me. I wanted to ace
every paper and have every submission I sent in published. I didn’t foresee withdrawing from
any classes, especially an English one. I definitely didn’t foresee being a fifth-year senior. I
didn’t foresee doubting myself.
My very first college English class was with Dr. Disler, the theme on Virginia Woolf. I
had never heard of this author; I walked into class and kept to myself. Reading her novels,
journals, and biographies, I experienced a writer—an influential and significant writer—using
their personal life for an artistic vision. I had never read an autobiography framed within a
fabricated setting. It was quite a change from the way I had previously viewed the distinction
between fiction and nonfiction. And I was hooked. I remember reading To the Lighthouse, then
later in Moments of Being, some journal entries which referenced Woolf’s experience writing the
novel. She admitted it had been her mode of coping with the death of her mother, using the
fictional character Mrs. Ramsay to grieve and connect until she could let go.
Woolf’s strength to hang her dirty laundry out, indifferent to the public’s knowledge of
her private sphere, left me in awe. I couldn’t imagine writing any type of veiled autobiography.

The following semester, I registered for another class with Dr. Disler, this time Writing Essays.
High school had taught me to write a concise thesis-driven, five-paragraph essay with little
hesitation. I believed there was only so much fun an essay could be when every statement had to
be true. Woolf’s texts slow-boiling on the backburner, I found an ease in writing from the pit of
my stomach as opposed to the forefront of my mind. The more I wrote with emotion and
adrenaline pumping, the more victorious I felt each time I slapped down my drafts despite six,
four, two hours, or a complete lack of sleep. Every essay was as honest as I could write it. It was
like therapy, but free and it counted for college credit.
Unfortunately, the adrenaline, the honesty, the therapy—it was addicting. My feelings
and emotions seeped into the papers for all of my other classes. Whenever I was able to dismiss
them and focus on a purely academic pursuit, I ached for the opportunity to write creatively. It
didn’t stop with the end of ENG 260. Now registered for Writing Fiction, I learned it was just as
simple churning out eight pages of slightly fictional memories. I wrote four stories for Fiction
and none of them are devoid of the events of my life at the time; every character’s voice reflected
my own. Once I entered the Advanced Creative Writing Workshop, I became very afraid I would
graduate without having put myself to the fiction test. My goal was to depersonalize my
storylines and practice developing concrete and complex characters distinct from the people in
my life.
During the class, however, forcing myself to dismiss the mental conflicts was like trying
to ignore a child’s constant question of why, why, why without punishing their thirsty curiosity.
Forgetting my goal, I attempted to comprehend and analyze events of my life I couldn’t control
the best way I knew how. After I didn’t achieve it, I refused to remain disappointed and
concluded that Playwriting would be my last chance to truly challenge myself. I have yet to

reach the level of progression I ideally should have made in four years, but I will not dwell. Now
more than ever, I am sure of my post-graduate objective.
Despite each assignment becoming a battle in the war for compartmentalization, I learned
more and more about myself by having my characters mirror my intentions. It is now apparent I
have a major interest in the gender continuum, an issue with which I wasn’t particularly
motivated to become familiar three years ago. Conversely, I’m also aware of a deeply ingrained
inclination to categorize people into one extreme or another. Logically, I understand and can thus
apply the notion that a person’s actions or beliefs yesterday can contradict their future choices.
Recognizing my characters could not be absolute, I wanted to practice by describing real people
in my stories in order to later apply that same mode of development.
Without input, there can be no result. As much as I gathered personalities and
atmospheres from my social life, Dr. Allison’s Critical Methods course came to be my reference
library. Not only did I read intellectually and socially significant texts, I discovered a passion for
contextualizing the concepts I learned from literary critics such as de Beauvoir, Sedgwick, and
Derrida and applying them to whatever piece I was handling at the time. Each theory is a face I
overlay upon mine, peering through a new set of eyes a story I think know well. Prior to this
class, I lacked decent exposure to this form of reading and I was pleasantly surprised I had a bit
of a knack for it. Rather than having to construct a solid argument from the ground up using only
my personal inferences of the text—a theory in and of itself, the theories were already built like
structural frames ready for the analytical façades I would paint. Familiarizing myself with these
theories’ faces as I do with acquaintances’ will allow for more focused and effective edits of my
stories and essays. I will be able to highlight the aspects of my pieces which strongly support one
type of analysis while determining portions which may lack or oppose it if viewed from another.

So, in the 36 months I’ve spent in and out the English classrooms of OWU, I’ve learned
five major values to writing. One: life is from where words grow. Two: strength is built from
determination to achieve notwithstanding personal or academic struggles. Three: doubt comes
from the inability to observe limitations. Four: theoretical criticism can be used to either destroy
or construct. And five: never dwell, because failures are the perfect models for how not to
proceed.

Menu of English Courses
FRESHMEN YEAR
2010 Spring Semester
ENG 145 Readings: Viriginia Woolf
Dr. Disler
ENG 180/182 Narratives: Short Stories and Longer Forms
Dr. Hipsky
SOPHOMORE YEAR
2010 Fall Semester
ENG 150 Introduction to Literary Studies
Dr. Caplan
ENG 260 Writing Essays
Dr. Disler
ENG 330 Medieval Literature
Dr. DeMarco
JUNIOR YEAR
2011 Fall Semester
ENG 362 19th Century American Literature
Dr. Poremski
SENIOR YEAR
2012 Fall Semester
ENG 314 Writing Fiction
Professor Olmstead
ENG 395 History of the English Language
Dr. DeMarco
ENG 480 Advance Creative Writing Workshop
Professor Olmstead
SUPER SENIOR YEAR
2013 Fall Semester
ENG 318 Playwriting
Dr. Gardner

ENG 145
Dr. Disler—Virginia Woolf
With stark honesty, I cannot recall very much of this class without reading the 15 pages
of journal entries Dr. Disler assigned for the final project. Organically, I remember there were
many Women’s and Gender Studies majors who all enjoyed discussing aspects of feminism with
which I was not at that point familiar. I remember the day Dr. Disler brought in her dissertation. I
remember having class outside, a lot.
The week before classes began, I read what Wikipedia had to say about Virginia Woolf. I
was excited to learn about this woman who had drowned herself with stones in her pockets. The
first day, Disler proclaimed that if anyone was there to solely discuss the why and how of
Woolf’s death, they should not remain. She spoke of Woolf with such admiration, a curiosity
desperate to be satisfied filled me that day. No longer was I going to search for the reason Woolf
felt the desire to end her life. Rather, the class would be a chance to investigate why Woolf alive
is more interesting than her death.
I was surprised to be reading more or less an equal number of texts written by Woolf and
about Woolf. The more I learned about her life, the more bemused I felt over never having heard
of this woman. The influence she commanded in the literary circle of her peers was impressive,
as was her determination to be educated even if she the student required herself as the teacher.
While I did not have prior knowledge of feminism, by the class’s end I felt comfortable
discussing the concept of androgyny and how Woolf personified it in her life.

Erinn Colmenares
Dr. Disler
Reading: Virginia Woolf
15 January 2010
Virginia Woolf Journal Entries: January 2010 – April 2010
February 8 – Moments of Being
Today, there was a little bit of a discussion of Woolf’s ability to work through her mother’s death
by writing her novel To the Lighthouse. The novel, from what we’ve read, describes it as a pretty
good documentation of how life was for the Stephen family. There is the St. Ives cabin, an
intellectually obsessed father, a mother who does all she can to keep her family happy. The novel
is also renowned for helping Woolf through the issues she had with her father, though they were
still present after its publication. In the book we are reading, Moments of Being, Woolf writes
that before writing Lighthouse, she heard her mother’s voice speaking to her at random
moments, but when she had finished the book, she no longer heard it. She could still think about
her, sure, but she wasn’t constantly reminded that, Oh right, Mom’s dead. I can absolutely relate
with this—not, of course, voices vanishing from my head once I’ve written something about
them, but writing out what is in my head in order to work through a problem. Just recently, I
wrote out an entire letter addressed to a friend of mine telling her everything that I wanted to say
and reasons explaining the things that I wanted to say. It helped so much. Before that, I tried
talking but nothing would come out because I didn’t know where to start. Thinking of nothing
else, I wrote it down as if I was going to send her a letter about the entire thing. And even though
it still wasn’t the most organized piece of writing—my writing is never as organized as I think it
will be—it was definitely clearer. It makes me think of why writing is so therapeutic. I mean,

people create lists, outlines, and notes for everything they have trouble with saying out loud.
They write essays, prepare proposals, or create contracts for when they don’t feel that their
power of speech is enough. I feel like there is a part of counseling that sometimes asks for
writing. And writers themselves are able to fight their writer’s block by writing anything that
comes to their mind. There are others, obviously, that are better at portraying their feelings in
other forms, such as painting, or exercise, or just talking about it to someone that they trust. But I
think that maybe Woolf could not sit down with her siblings and just talk about her inability to
focus on her life with her mother’s voice in her mind. Perhaps she felt like her siblings had other
ways of coping and if she had spoken about it, it would have interfered with the others’
recuperation. I know that I probably would have taken that into consideration. It’s also possible
that Woolf had no intention of trying group therapy and she figured out for herself that writing
about her mother in the form that she loved her most would be enough. Luckily, it was. To me, it
is interesting that an entire novel, the novel that she is perhaps known the best for, is devoted to
getting over her mother’s death.
A topic in class yesterday was of George Duckworth, Woolf’s half-brother, and his role in the
Victorian Era that he grew up. According to our reading, Woolf believes that he is the cookie-
cutter male citizen during this time. He went to prestigious schools, which meant an excellent
education; he cared about the town he lived in; and he had no real talent for anything other than
mimicking the men he was around constantly. Conversely, Woolf had not experienced a true
education in the walls of an actual school—she studied on her own by reading Greek plays,
translating papers, and working her own pieces. It didn’t seem that she really cared at all about
the politics of the town around her aside from those that pertained to her publications. She

probably only cared about the fact that she—a writer who knew that she had talent along with
other fantastic attributes—could not formally educate herself due to her anatomy. Woolf knew
that if only she were a man, she would be welcomed into society with a red carpet rolled out.
Instead, she had to prove her worth every step of the way until she was received, slight bemused
expressions greeting her.
There is a paragraph in our reading today that astounded every person in the class today. In this
paragraph, Woolf is describing a cabin her family owned and pointing out a few key items that
she could remember from her childhood. Woolf wrote a good portion about a “looking glass”
that she had in her house at St. Ives. She loved looking into it, she admitted, but felt shame about
that joy because for a time she had considered herself a tomboy; but she looked into whenever
she could without being discovered and honestly just liked looking at herself. This was, of
course, an odd trait for a self-proclaimed tomboy. Then, out of nowhere it seems, Woolf slides in
a pretty intimate secret about her childhood. She went to explain why she still felt shame about
feminine activities, even years after she had stopped being a tomboy, and then brought out to the
open that her half-brother George had molested her on a few occasions when she was quite
small. She had gone through a couple sentences, putting a vague image in the reader’s head,
when she switched back to her explanation of how much she loved the looking glass. And then
she moved on completely, never mentioning either incident again for as long as we’ve been
reading it. The discussion topic in class revolved around possibilities of why Woolf didn’t go
deeper into the issue of George. Why would she randomly bring up a topic and then back away
from it almost immediately after surfacing it? As a writer who was known for choosing words
carefully for anything that she was writing, especially a piece that was eventually going to be

published, what was the reasoning behind her small insight if she was not going to go into it? In
class, many feasible theories circled around, some getting tossed and others going onto the
board; but as interesting as some of them were, none of them seemed to really get at the matter. I
realize that we will never truly know unless someone unearths a new diary that Woolf had not
published that explains the entire episode being Woolf and her half-brothers. It just amazes me
that this writer is so conscious of her choice of words, making certain that she is saying and
giving the image that she sees in her mind a description and having her description create that
exact image in the mind of her readers. If she is so intentional in her vocabulary, and what
subjects she highlights to support her point, how is it possible that a Freudian slip could happen
without her seeing it before publication? Granted, the fact that this is her diary and not a novel
or essay specifically designed to turn the world on its ear needs to be considered. Yet this diary is
meant to be for publication. Woolf wanted people to read this diary and see her life for what they
made of it. And so this fact should negate the previous statement that marks the writing as
something that is personal and therefore is “allowed” to have Freudian slips. At least, whenever I
write something that I know isn’t going to be judged or reviewed, I just write anything that
comes to mind and my hand or fingers move as quick as they can so that they can catch each
thought in its entirety. My point is that generally Freudian slips, or parapraxis (according to
Wikipedia), are when one is speaking and they accidentally stubble upon a thought and say it
before their mind can filter it. And this can also happen when writing out something in a way
that is similar to talking, but the chances of it being caught are much higher when the writing is
going through the publishing house and someone places a red flag on it. To repeat myself, I truly
can’t see how Woolf missed these few sentences during her surely vigorous revisions, just on
accident. There has to be a specific and real, almost tangible, motive for why she kept this insight

but did not go further into the matter. My best guess is that she wanted people to know her life,
and what made her believe and think about the things that she does, and she wanted to give her
readers the reasons for why she was the way she was, but no more.
According to Woolf, there are two paths that adulthood can take a person once their childhood is
over, including their stressful and liminal teenage years. As a child, every experience, decision,
perhaps even thought, seems to be as life changing as a new job, marriage, or baby is for an
adult. Every choice has the potential to light a child’s world on fire. But as time goes on and
one becomes older, experiences can become one of two things. The more mundane an event is,
the less complex it is, and (my observation) the more boring your life is. The other path could
be that with your increasing self-awareness about the world, your experiences tend to feel more
complicated and life altering. The latter is indeed more hectic and chaotic, but it’s also better
than having an uneventful life where nothing interesting ever happens. I suppose the question is
how can you tell which path your life will take once you get to this fork in the woods? If one
had the choice, I would absolutely fix my gaze on the path that takes me to the more complex
slice of life. Woolf, from what we’ve read of her memoir, had been guided to this side of the
road as well, with all of the death in her family increasing her sense of self-awareness and
resultantly creating a world filled with angles of interpretation—which, when put together, is
part of what makes her such an excellent writer, once you think about it. To write about the
different situations that a novel could contain, a writer must have some kind of experience in
living in these situations. Or at least have the imagination to place themselves within the
character that is currently enduring the situation and sense what they would be feeling, similar
(but not exact) to what an actor does to research his role. Actors, if playing the part of an actual

person, find biographies or autobiographies, find old friends, or interview the only themselves to
understand their personality and how they felt, or would feel, in a given condition. I’m going
off on a tangent now, but these kinds of careers and lives are what I assume would come from
having gone down the path of the stressful yet exhilarating stretch of life. And, no offense
intended for those people who have the jobs and lives that I’m about to list off, but the people
who choose careers such as banker, researcher, computer scientist person, etc.—they seem to
have gone down the, yes, less taxing, but also less stimulating, path. Again, I mean no
disrespect to these careers and life choices seeing as I could never them and will never
experience them for what they are, but truly: what is exciting about researching the same topic
for several years where there is a possibility that your work will never end in accomplishment,
only in passing down the tradition among coworkers? I just see no enjoyment in that sort of life.
I digress. The point of this entry was to discuss why it is that as children, we love every shiny
object, every living thing that is presented to us, but, as our bodies get wider and longer, we no
longer see the beauty in the simplest things and search for the next thrilling incident. Actually,
that’s not what I wanted to ask (though, I do like this question). My question is how you can tell
where your life will go, once you reach that time in your teens or early twenties. Is there a way
to come across it before you get to that crossroads, the fork in the woods?
[…]
February 26 – A Writer’s Diary
Continuing a little of the topic of Woolf having bucket loads of talent that could be considered
inhuman, we began reading A Writer’s Diary this week. This work is a compilation of all of
Woolf’s journals where Leonard Woolf went through every single entry and cut out the pieces
that referred to writing. Everything from what she was thinking about writing, what she thought

of others’ works, and her worries about the reception that everyone will have to her new novel or
essay were published in this paperback. Leonard had wanted to protect Woolf by not having
every little thing she wrote typed out for the world to see, but I believe that he left in a good
portion of what her journals contained. In class, we more or less defined what “private writing”
is: journals, letters, and/or diaries that are not meant for publication. We talked about how
throughout the book, Woolf states that this is her “scribbling.” Scribbling. I am not a literary
critic but I am pretty sure that this “scribbling” is just as good, if not better, than everything that
Woolf has written. And it seems that even the literary critics think that A Writer’s Diary might
just be Woolf’s best work. I am now trying to think of why that might be. I know that I am
really excited when I figure out that a novel is based on a true story (when it’s realistic—I can’t
get my mind around My Sister’s Keeper) or when it’s semi-autobiographical, such as To the
Lighthouse or Old School by Tobias Wolff. It makes me think as a reader that the author is
putting some truth into their work, that they have been through the turmoil or distress that their
characters are enduring, so they know how it is. It is akin to how Someone would feel if a close
relative had died and then Somebody Else who also had a close relative die at around that age, or
even recently, told Someone that they knew how they were feeling. Because they had gone
through that same emotional wreck. It must be stressful for Someone to be told by Somebody
Else that it would blow over soon when Somebody Else has never undergone what Someone is
now. So maybe that’s the reason that readers love A Writer’s Diary—because it has the sense of
honesty that readers want and somewhat expect from a book. The fact that the book is basically
a diary strengthens the notion of the honesty radiating off of it.

March 17 – To the Lighthouse
My question for this entry will be, as it usually is, a topic that we discussed in class today. We
talked about why Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay are seemingly incapable of verbalizing “I love you” to
each other. We also talked about the lack of equality of effort that both of them put into their
marriage. Mr. Ramsay is relentlessly wrapped up in his need to prove his “genius” and
establishing the rules of how a “genius” should be treated and why—and Mrs. Ramsay is right
there behind him supporting all of it. If Mr. Ramsay does not feel well, Mrs. Ramsay cooks up
his favorite meals, brings him tea, soothes him down from the make-believe bridge he’s going to
heave himself off of—all while entertaining the kids and keeping them busy. But, if Mrs.
Ramsay does not feel up to doing anything that day, I can only imagine the size of the gasket Mr.
Ramsay would blow if he did not see dinner on the table at precisely six o’clock. Why is it that
Mrs. Ramsay puts every bit of effort into the marriage to keep her husband happy while Mr.
Ramsay can barely keep his temper if something goes wrong? There was discussion in class that
perhaps Mr. Ramsay did not know how to say that he loved his wife, that he was not the most
affectionate person in the world. And, since Mrs. Ramsay is more than just a housewife, she does
not want to admit to her husband, or herself, that she needs him more than she lets on. I believe
that. Maybe she’s afraid that he will become confused. Or maybe she’s afraid that if she admits
it, he will not respect her and she won’t respect herself. I feel like it is similar to how women in
careers think. They go all out and risk everything for their jobs, knowing they need to make
themselves known and prominent in their field before thinking about hiding out at the house with
kids. They may want kids, yes, but they would rather have them at a time where they can
actually take care of them instead of trying to juggle work and the children’s needs and possibly
letting them down. I think that Mrs. Ramsay would be incredibly depressed and disappointed in

herself if she was ever told by her children, or found out on her own, that she had not been the
mother they needed. My point is that Mrs. Ramsay most likely feels that her main job is to take
care of her family and, if that job is ever completed, them she can take care of herself. Notice:
she can take care of herself, the jobs do not reverse. Mrs. Ramsay was a modern woman in the
era that needed her to know where her job was. And she knew it well, and performed it well. Mr.
Ramsay’s job was to be the head of the household, the brains of the operation, and Mrs. Ramsay
squirted oil onto his squeaky joints whenever he required a check-up.

ENG 180 and 182
Dr. Hipsky – Narratives: Short Stories and Longer Forms
I’m quite upset I had only one class with Dr. Hipsky. He was a complete pleasure to
listen to in class, though I remember mainly the times he mentioned his daughter and his
attempts to incorporate her teen slang into his vernacular. Hipsky was always excited to
introduce the next story because they were his favorites. I remember during the Longer Forms
section, we read The Lover even though it was a translation from French, which he said was not
encouraged for an English class. I personally did not enjoy the short novel, but I think
translations should be allowed because I don’t feel the Humanities or Classics should be
restricted nor distinguished from an English class due to the origins of the texts. A book’s a
book, a story’s a story.
The most memorable story we read in this class was called “The Fat Girl”, the author
Andre Dubus as confirmed by the internet. It was about a young woman attempting to appease
with a well-meaning though superficial mother. From age nine, the daughter is scolded for her
love of sweets and told she would never find a boyfriend with a chubby figure. By college, the
young woman has developed a need to hide candy bars under pillows and in drawers to be
brought out at bedtime. Her roommate assists in dissolving these behaviors in favor of a healthful
diet and decent exercise routine. Being picked up at the airport at home, the family sees a thin
version of the daughter. Her mother is pleased; her father replies, “Now there’s less of you to
love.” The daughter struggles to maintain her acquired figure, but she finds a handsome husband
and her mother is satisfied. The newlywed daughter becomes a mother, the baby weight as
difficult to shed as it is for her to keep herself from going back on old habits. The story ends
without the husband’s understanding but the woman’s new mission to raise her son with

unconditional love and nothing else. The relationships in this story and its end brought home the
notion my writing should attempt to be truthful, it should show real love. The father not
commenting on his daughter’s drastic weight loss, the college roommate becoming a source of
security and motivation in a time of extreme change; these are all displays of devotion toward the
main character’s happiness. This story has stuck in my mind because I have a severe desire to
live up to expectations that I may not fully believe in. The Fat Girl’s ending gives me hope that I
will find the person I am okay with being.

Erinn Colmenares
Hipsky
Narratives: Short Stories
6 February 2010
Interpreting an Alcoholic’s Nightmare
The motives for someone to begin drinking and to continue to do so are numerous, as are
the cases in which this plot is told throughout film and literature. Characters have at least one
issue that needs to be resolved, no matter where the issue lies—family, money, loneliness,
depression, etc. Unfortunately, alcohol gives people an excuse to shy away from the topic rather
than come at it head-on. The “beautiful blurred world” (17) it produces is much more attractive
than sitting down and thinking about the facets that make life complex and difficult. Richard
Bausch, the author of “All the Way in Flagstaff, Arizona,” tells the story of an antihero whose
exploitation of liquor creates a refuge away from the memory of his past; Bausch uses less than
one page for pathos to defend the character and his actions.
“All the Way in Flagstaff, Arizona” begins with a man reminiscing on a picnic trip his
family had gone on two years ago while he is sitting in a church, thinking about the day that
never fades from his mind. The man, Walter, who is hung over, and his five children spend the
entire day at the park at the request of his wife, Irene. Walter watches the kids play together and
converses with his wife about his eldest son, William, who is planning to become a priest at the
ripe age of fourteen. Throughout the conversation with his wife, Walter anticipates the taste of
liquor he is devising to surreptitiously retrieve from the car. Eventually, Walter cannot wait any
longer for a drink and—under a flimsy cover of checking a tire—he walks toward the car where
he encounters his youngest daughter, Carol. As his plan is delayed, Walter becomes more and
more irritable with Carol, until she begins to cry; even then, Walter ignores her. Irene calls him

out on his secret, diving into a disagreement that has been played out before; Irene announces
that she will leave him with the children in tow, and Walter promises to sober up. Just before the
meal is underway, William states that grace should be recited. His younger sister Susan, the
second-born, teases him by first arguing that it is too late, and then proclaiming that she is going
to be a nun, annoying William with her lack of concern for her decision. Walter and Irene both
attempt to end the bickering, but William rouses it again when he says a prayer after Walter has
said “Jesus” in vain.
Tensions climb as Walter tries to exert his authority by slyly defiling William’s
devoutness, and William refuses to back down. Irene suspends the conversation for a moment,
until Walter tries to apologize to William on behalf of the family. William ignores him and
Walter cannot take it anymore. For a third time, Irene stops the escalating argument and finally,
everyone takes part in keeping the peace. Walter messes around with his kids for the remainder
of the day and continues on as the family leaves the park and arrives home. With about half the
bottle swirling inside him, Walter’s perception of the world becomes even more distorted, until
he realizes that his kids are cowering with fear, unsure of whether to run or stay. Irene ends the
night with a firm ultimatum and Walter attempts to do anything he can to keep his family. The
story goes on to show Walter’s abusive childhood and his reasons for drinking while his father,
ironically, had never touched alcohol. But the hold that the addiction has on Walter is too strong,
and his family eventually leaves him in Arizona, where he is sitting in a chapel contemplating
the thought of speaking with a priest or simply asking for food.
Although it is Walter's ultimate dream to be the perfect father to his children, an opposite
of his own father, his alcoholism prevents him from achieving what he craves and helps to prove
him an antihero. According to Abrams’ Glossary of Literary Terms, an antihero is a character

who is “petty, ignominious, passive, clownish, or dishonest,” and who displays a “non-heroic,
lowly protagonist” (14). As much as the reader could and would like to sympathize with Walter,
his faults are too obvious to discount. Aside from the line in the introductory paragraph that tells
the reader that Walter is recovering from a night of drinking (“Walter is hung over…but [Irene]
will not hear of it” (13).), Walter exhibits all of the aspects of being an antihero in some way or
another.
To represent this pettiness, Walter creates a feeble ruse in order to rummage around the
car’s trunk for his bottle, and then once he is obstructed from his reward, he is incredibly rude
with his daughter Carol, telling her to find her mother because she had been calling for her. Once
sitting again with his wife, Walter deflects Irene’s declared intention of separating from him
without as much as a flinch of emotion on his face. Walter continues his drinking which results
in a more lighthearted playmate for the kids. Bausch writes:
He made two more trips to the trunk of the car, not even hiding it now,
and in the end he gets Carol and James to laugh at him by making faces,
miming someone sliding off a bench, pretending to be terrified of his food.
Susan and William laugh too, now, as he does a man unable to get a hot dog
into his mouth. (24)
This passage shows Walter’s daffy and silly antics that perpetuate the antihero characterization.
When leaving the park, Walter is substantially inebriated and, under the impression of feeding
his children’s enjoyment, “he calls out to people out the window of the car, funny things, and
they are all almost hysterical with laughter” (24), most likely humiliating Irene.

Not only does his meager fib about the car’s low tire prove his dishonesty, but also when
Irene points out his lie, he defends it in a way that is, for the most part, unique to someone not
telling the truth:
“You think that’s it? You think I’ve been—you think that’s what I’ve
been doing, huh.” He is nodding, looking away from her, trying to control his
voice. “You think—on a beautiful day like this, when I’m with my family—
some—a bottle of booze in the trunk—”… “Just something I found and—you
think I haven’t been sick at heart for what I’ve done, Irene…. I didn’t even
think anything about it, honey—you think I’d do anything to hurt you or the
kids—something—some bottle or something that’s supposed to be hidden or
something. Like I planned it or something. I swear I just remembered it was
there—I didn’t—didn’t want to worry you, Irene—Irene—” (18)
Within this dialogue that Walter spits out in his defense, his physical ticks, such as attempting to
keep his voice from becoming suspicious and not making eye contact, are classic signs deceit.
Walter’s inability to firmly stand by one justification or effectively disable Irene’s argument,
coupled with his evident stuttering is another large indicator of his untrustworthiness in this
situation. Later, he tries to validate his actions by leading Irene through a guilt trip, exclaiming
that he is appalled that she could “think [he]’d do anything to hurt [her] or the kids.”
Near the end of the story, there are two paragraphs that detail Walter’s activities for the
rest of the year that it takes Irene to give up and leave him. Within these two paragraphs, three
sections seem to be the best examples of pathos, “a scene or passage that is designed to evoke the
feelings of tenderness, pity, or sympathetic sorrow,” to show that Walter may have a reason for
the mishaps he has undergone (242). Pathos is like a defense for a character that has a possible

opposite side to him and may prove him a round character, rather than a character that does not
experience a change. The first section that gives the reader a better understanding of Walter’s
past describes a memory that he conjures when he is visiting his father’s grave. He is seven years
old and his father has ordered him to urinate on his mother’s collection of roses. Walter admits
that this is not the worst that he, or any other child, has endured, but the psychological trauma of
being used as merely an instrument of wounding is something that makes his mouth go dry (26).
The second segment is after Walter has come back from his father’s gravesite where Walter’s
psychologist wants to explore his reason for drinking: Walter “believes he wanted at first to
show his freedom” and then “to relieve some of the tensions that build in him” (27).
The last example of Walter’s pathos has three sentences that are key to the character of
Walter. The first is a statement that Walter has known verbatim for a long time: “He has always
been paralyzed by the fear that he will repeat, with his own children, the pattern of his father’s
brutality” (27). Once he has offered this to the psychologist, Walter hopes that there is proof that
this will never happen, though he knows that a guarantee cannot be granted. The psychologist
sends Walter home with his diagnosis of the main flaw in Walter’s personality: “The problem is
that Walter is afraid to take responsibility for himself” (27). Walter takes this realization and tries
to rectify it. Unfortunately, Walter cannot control his need and his family leaves him. Lastly, as
Walter is dictating the most terrifying memory he has of his father, of the “night dances” he was
forced to participate in, Bausch gives Walter his view of the chief aspect of his character: “He
talks about the ancient story: the man who, in the act of trying to avoid some evil in himself,
embraces it, creates it” (27). This is an obvious reference to the Greek tragedy of Oedipus Rex, a
king who, attempting everything to save his village from a terrible fate, realizes that he is the
source of the plague.

Walter is an interesting character to read due to his knack of keeping the reader from
categorizing him too easily. Though it seems obvious that Walter is an antihero, the pathos of
this story makes it difficult to say for sure. Readers may want to stay with the non-heroic label,
where Walter chose to have his life end without a family; or they could give him room in saying
that there was no way that he could change the outcome of his life relative to his past, similar to
Oedipus. The reader is left with the question of whether the pathos changes the rest of the story
and whether, depending on the answer to the previous question, Walter had the ability to alter his
fate.
Works Cited
Abrams, M.H., and Geoffrey Galt Harpham. A Glossary of Literary Terms. Ninth Edition.
Boston, MA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2009. Print.
Bausch, Richard. “All the Way in Flagstaff, Arizona.” First Edition. Picador, London, Great
Britain: Random House, Inc., 1994. 13-28. Print.

Erinn Colmenares
Narratives: Longer Forms
Hipsky
20 March 2010
Does Truth Really Set Us Free?
In the novel Old School by Tobias Wolff, the class of 1961 of an elite all boys prep school
becomes entangled in a literary contest in which Ernest Hemingway will choose the best story from a
large batch of nominees. The author of Hemingway’s favorite will sit with the renowned writer to talk
literature uninterrupted, a dream for nearly all of the senior boys. The main character and narrator for the
novel, an unnamed Jewish student at the school, is one of the contenders and decides to veer away from
his typical plot of “props in an act” (110). Rather, he would like to try a different approach: writing a
piece that would give no doubt to the reader of who the author was. Struggling to find a topic, the
narrator comes across a story that makes him feel as though “from the very first sentence he was looking
himself right in the face” (125). He copies it, knowing it only to be the perfect story to proclaim his true
self with, and not only does Hemingway choose it, it causes dangerous ripples throughout the school.
The narrator must face the consequences of his plagiarism, weighing the lack of a diploma in his hand.
The book ends with a switch to the dean of students, Arch Makepeace, and the story of his career and
life at the prep school. Wolff encourages the ideas of snobbery and truth with the interesting quasi
epilogue through the use of parallels between the narrator’s and Dean Makepeace’s stories.
The implied facts of these two men’s lives is the first parallel the reader can draw from the last
chapter of the book. As stated earlier in the novel, the narrator had been raised Catholic but had found
out the year before that his father was a Jewish man. Feeling uneasy, he felt even more isolated from the
rest of the population since he was also a student who was supported by a scholarship. He felt slightly
proud that he had never outright lied to anyone, but the more he kept his mouth tight, the bigger the

bubble of seclusion he formed around him. Dean Makepeace was in a similar position; he had also dug
himself a splendid hole. The last chapter opens with, “The problem started at one of the headmaster’s
teas, when a boy asked Arch if he had known Ernest Hemingway during World War I. He couldn’t
recall exactly how he’d answered but came to accept that he had not been clear in his denial” (179).
After this tea, Dean Makepeace grew to be glorified as a friend of Hemingway. This assumption granted
Arch authority, respect, and a certain taste of “the great world,” and he justified it, just as the narrator
did, by believing that he had merely “dozed off in his attention of the truth” (181).
Both characters assume themselves to be in the position of a helpless victim of gossip and conjecture
and therefore do not feel it is entirely necessary to own up to the mistakes, even if they feel guilty each
time the topic is brought up. The narrator and Dean Makepeace have a feeling of social inadequacy of
their real lives. The passage reading, “Arch had left room for doubt that day at the headmaster’s tea, and
he knew why, or thought he did: some hidden yearning to be… important, even by association” (181)
reinforces this theory. If the narrator were to reveal his Jewish background, his persona as a boy who
discounted his advantages could possibly unravel, exposing an average teenager wanting to be more. If
Dean Makepeace were to reveal his lack of connection with Hemingway, all of his influence and value
could be lost and label him as an ordinary English teacher. Their perceived levels of less than
astonishing selves threaten their desire to be anything but. Yet, knowing that they are truly absent of the
prestige they crave, as each day the opportunity to fix the blunder passes by, the mound of guilt in their
stomachs grows.
Despite their longing for prestige, “the truth wanted to be sought after but it would let itself be seen
now and again” (181). The narrator had seen his truth; he molded it for his intentions and set it loose for
his world to see. The thought did not resonate deeply enough for him to recognize the story was not his
to dress up. As soon as the narrator’s actions rose to the surface, Dean Makepeace, in an effort to show

his true self, left the school willingly, while the narrator was expelled for his violation of the Honor
Code. Both of the characters’ leave of the school brings new hoops for them to jump through in order to
land on their feet. The narrator skips from job to job, never earning a degree, but eventually reconciling
with the school and the girl from which he stole the story. By the book’s end, he does not seem to regret
his actions, knowing that he had done the lesser of two evils: stealing to tell the truth, rather than playing
by the rules to keep a façade intact. Dean Makepeace has a full year of unhappiness, soon realizing his
truth had not been as raw as he had imagined it. He missed his students and the sense of awe he knew
they had for him. After that year, Dean Makepeace had only two conditions to abide to be welcomed
back: he would no longer be dean and he would have to let go of the Hemingway issue.
The narrator and Dean Makepeace are two characters that seem to be tethered due to their incredibly
similar storylines and they make an excellent pair for Wolff to connect. The final chapter is meant to
capture two main themes of this novel: truth and snobbery. Snobbery is exemplified through Dean
Makepeace and the narrator’s urge to be part of the world they feel exists above them. Truth, the more
implicit theme, is given its place in the two characters’ actions to tell the truth about themselves, in the
face of their craving to climb up in society. Yet, the differences between the characters’ reactions, the
narrator accepting his repercussions and Dean Makepeace backtracking and erasing his actions, give the
reader two paths that one could follow on the topic of proclaiming truth.
Work Cited
Wolff, Tobias. Old School. New York: Random House, Inc., 2003. Print.

ENG 150
Dr. Caplan—Introduction to Literary Studies
I expected Dr. Caplan to teach us literary theories to be applied to the novels or short
stories we would read. I was ready to be challenged and given new lenses through which to
analyze the themes and characters of authors I had never heard of. Instead, I remember being
underwhelmed with the information of Caplan’s lectures. While there were some stories
assigned, the class focused substantially on poetry, in which I did not have any interest. Though I
now regret my stubbornness to read and learn only about fiction at the time, I continue to feel
Caplan failed to emphasize its place in the course.
The organization of each class meeting seemed like a soapbox Caplan built in order to
tell us the meaning of the texts (poems) we read. Rather than opening the discussion for anyone
to lead, Caplan read the poems aloud, asked a few pointed questions he would answer himself,
then moved on and repeated. Any time a student tried to argue a distinct meaning, Caplan
seemed to dismiss the notion after the second stutter. Perhaps I was intimidated as a sophomore
in front of a professor with a PhD and each student’s botched attempt felt like a personal failure
to understand the correct meaning. The manner in which Caplan led the class, it felt like he was
challenging the students to disprove as opposed to discover. So I stopped trying and waited for
the answers I knew were coming. I believe I would have learned more from this course if Caplan
had allowed the students to form their own analyses of the texts, engaging them to explain the
ideas openly and discuss how else the text could be read.

Erinn Colmenares
Caplan
Introduction to Literary Studies
16 December 2010
• According to the authors we have read, is it possible to understand another person? If so,
how is this understand achieved? If not, why not? Ultimately, whom do you agree with?
To truly understand another person is a very complicated matter. One must trust each
other, be honest with one another, and plan within their mind their next move in a certain
situation. Understanding someone is to be able to know how they are feeling, most commonly
through their actions or body language; it’s to know why they have reacted in a specific way,
despite one’s own opinions. According to James Joyce and Anton Chekhov, the characters that
they have created are not designed to have the capability to enter their romantic interest’s minds
and comprehend the thoughts that are whirling around.
In Joyce’s short story The Dead, the main character Gabriel is traveling to a hotel with
his wife Gretta and merrily reminiscing on the moments they have shared throughout their
marriage. As he looks over to his wife, seemingly worn out from the party they have just left,
Gabriel is strategizing on how best to playfully overtake her once they are settled into their hotel
room. Joyce writes: “She mounted the stairs behind the porter, her head bowed in the ascent, her
frail shoulders curved as with a burden” (380). To the reader, she is a little more than just tired,
as Gabriel figures earlier on. Almost perfect to the scene of the room in Gabriel’s mind, Gretta is
carefully “[taking] off her hat and cloak and was standing before a large swinging
mirror….Gabriel…watching her” (380). Before Gabriel can move forward, he senses her
distraction and asks her to tell him what the matter is. “Then she said in an outburst of tears: ‘O, I

am thinking about that song, The Lass of Aughrim.’ She broke loose from him and ran to the bed
and….Gabriel stood stock-still for a moment in astonishment” (381). Gabriel had not anticipated
such a reaction from the woman he knew to have been enjoying herself only a few hours prior.
He tries to consol her out of her apparent sorrow but to no avail. While he has been thinking of
having alone time with his wife without any distractions or concerns, Gretta had been pondering
about the song that would eventually crack her exterior and immerse her in a pool of tears.
Gabriel had absolutely no inclination of what his wife had been experiencing during the cab ride
to their hotel.
Just after Gretta’s wave of emotion, she offers Gabriel an explanation about why the song
had had such an effect on her.
--I am thinking about a person long ago who used to sing that song.
--Someone you were in love with? he asked ironically.
--It was a young boy I used to know, she answered, named Michael
Furey. He used to sing that song, The Lass of Aughrim. He was very delicate….I
used to go out walking with him, she said, when I was in Galway.
--Perhaps that’s why you wanted to go to Galway with that Ivors girl?
She looked at him and asked in surprise:
--What for?
--How do I know? To see him perhaps.
--He is dead, she said at length.
Gabriel felt humiliated by the failure of his irony and by the evocation
of this figure from the dead, a boy in the gasworks. While he had been full of
memories of their secret life together, full of tenderness and joy and desire, she had
been comparing him in her mind with another. (382)
It seems that Joyce believes that empathy is a large part in knowing a person and, therefore,
foreseeing their emotions. Gabriel has a terrible sense of compassion, such as some have a
useless sense of direction. He clearly has no idea about the series of undisclosed sentiments
challenging Gretta’s loyalty to her husband. Yet, while Gabriel is organize romantic ideas, she is
mourning—very likely not for the first time during her marriage—her first and possibly only

love, aside from Gabriel.
Anton Chekhov’s The Lady with the Dog, published in 1899, begins with a married man
meeting a married woman while both are on vacation away from their respectively boring and
tiresome spouses. They begin an affair, which is new for the woman and a habit for the man.
Eventually, they part but Dmitry, the man, is unable to stop thinking of the woman, Anna. As
time passes, they both agree to continue seeing each other while Anna’s husband seemingly has
no qualms about her bi-monthly trips to where Dmitry lives. It is when Dmitry journeys to visit
her in the hotel that has become their rendezvous point that he begins considering the fact that he
literally has two lives. One contains all of his standard customs: reading three different
newspapers each morning, entertaining well-known and key people in his home, and eating an
entire serving of his usual dish. This social identity was his mask, ensuring that not a soul knew
more than he wanted them to. The other “flowed in secret….everything that was important,
interesting, essential, everything about which he was sincere and never deceived himself,
everything that composed the kernel of his life, went on in secret” (121). Excluding his lover
Anna, Dmitry kept his reality in which all that was vital to him was protected completely from
his mask of a life. The story describes the belief that it is entirely impossible for observers to
know more about a person than the person concerned. Chekhov makes the point with these two
characters that only a selected few can know the private lives of another, though it seems that it
is only when the two secret lives are entwined. Everyone else is ignorant to the furtive lives of
their neighbors and acquaintances, and most likely, even of their friends.
Personally, I do not believe that there is ever a time where any one person fully
understands another person. Even best friends and family members have boundaries that are not
crossed for some reason or another. It is possible to get close enough to a person in order to

predict their actions and conclude their motives of these actions, but it takes much longer than
what the characters of these two stories had. Gabriel and Gretta were married and, to the rest of
the world besides Gretta, in love. However, Gabriel, as it has been established, had only
scratched the surface of what could be within the life of Gretta before she became his wife.
Dmitry and Anna have a better chance as they both share a complicated and profound path which
has brought them to where they are. Nevertheless, both Chekhov and Joyce agree that there
needs to be a deep emotional voyage that goes further than the general social norms the
population assumes will bind the two in question by the hip before anyone could correctly
assume that they understand any one person.
• How do the authors we have read define “love”? Does the experience of “love” make a
person better or worse? Does it inspire delusion or knowledge? Ultimately, whom do you
agree with?
There are several different meanings to the word or experience of “love”. No matter how
many definitions there are, they all say a rendition of one thing: be happy. However, love can
also get one into trouble by making things more complex than they should be. It could also
enlighten life and create a better person out of whoever is experiencing it. Anton Chekhov,
James Joyce, and JM Coetzee all have their own distinctive implication of love; within their
respective stories, their characters go through either the positive or the negative side effects of
this powerful emotion.
In Chekhov’s The Lady with the Dog, the author’s message of what is mentioned while
Anna, the woman Dmitry is having an affair with, is leaving the vacation spot and going back to
her wifely duties. Chekhov writes, “She had insisted in calling him good, remarkable, high-
minded. Evidently he had appeared to her different from his real self” (116). Anna’s idea of

Dmitry, the serial adulterer, has become flawed due to the feelings she has for him. The illusion
she develops is evidence that the writer’s definition of love would be something along the lines
of seeing someone for who they could be, not necessarily for who they truly are. Later on in the
story, Dmitry is astonished over the fact that nearly every woman he has ever seduced has gone
through the same cycle. He wonders to himself, “Why did she love him so? Woman had always
believed him different from what he really was, had loved in him not himself but the man their
imagination pictures him….And afterwards when they discovered their mistake, they went on
loving him just the same” (121). It seems that Chekhov does not honor the criteria of truth while
in the throes of love, or at least until the women have already become committed to him. This
perhaps sheds light on the thought that it is more important to love one’s significant other as the
surprises come along rather than to know them inside and out before deciding to love them. The
women in Dmitry’s life are not the only ones letting their emotions fog the reality of their
situation, Dmitry is a perpetrator as well. After parting from Anna, Dmitry is not able to lift her
from his mind. He remembers that “she seemed to stand before him in the flesh, still lovelier,
younger, tenderer, than she had really been, and looking back, he saw himself, too, as better than
he had been in Yalta” (117). Not only does he create exaggerated recollections of his lover, but
also he smoothes down his own rough edges. Love has the effect of delusion, but also having a
more positive outlook on oneself and one’s romantic interest. Near the end of the story, Dmitry
and Anna have mutedly chosen to find a way out of being stealthy liars, “as if they were thieves”
(121). By attempting to escape from the lives, they are not happy in and endeavor to be together,
Chekhov shows that love can also be a force through which to better oneself. It can be argued
that the characters are not actually doing this for the spouses they have been deceiving, yes,
however, it is still a lesson in compassion. Dmitry and Anna desire to be with one another and

only one another. Lastly, while on his way to meet Anna at their usual hotel, Dmitry realizes that
he is not alone in hiding a private life from the public sphere. He theorizes that everyone he
knows, his neighbors and acquaintances, most likely have their own secrets to hide, lives that
make their purpose on earth a little more worthwhile. Dmitry considers as he sets eyes upon the
familiar street in a new perspective, “he…no longer [believed] what he saw, and always
[assumed] that the real, the only interesting life of every individual goes on as under cover of
night, secretly” (121). Despite the many actions that others would judge as wrong, Dmitry
learned something very motivating during his escapade: everyone has a secret to hide; without
Anna and the love he carries for her, he would have never grasped this concept of life.
The fictionalized biography by JM Coetzee titled Summertime is about the life of an
author also named John Coetzee and his biographer’s interviews with various people in
Coetzee’s life that he considered to be important. Throughout the book, the five people
interviewed, including his cousin and a few romantic interests, all tell the reporter that Coetzee
was an awkward man who did not have very strong connections with anyone at all. When asked
about the relationships that Coetzee had with them, the women who either bed or entranced him
deemed his personality just short of asexual and too deep for comfort. The most potent person
who treated Coetzee close to the scum of the earth was a Brazilian dancer called Adriana who
Coetzee had become infatuated with the moment he met her. According to the biographer,
Adriana had been a very important part of Coetzee’s life and, arguably, had written her into a
rather pleasing main role in one of his novels. Adriana scoffs several times at the biographer’s
implications that Coetzee had honestly been in love with her, stating, “That is what you say. But
the truth is, if he was in love, it was not with me, it was with some fantasy that he dreamed up in
his own brain and gave my name to” (174-75). The character of Coetzee only has his earthly

possessions such as his books in order to defend himself, but in Adriana’s view, Coetzee merely
had the delusion of love, not the true experience. Another woman was also special in Coetzee’s
life, the married Julia he partnered in an affair. There was one incident where Coetzee excitedly
came to her house, clutching a tape cassette of music by the composer Schubert. He explained to
Julia that he had wanted to experiment having sex in rhythm with the music, in order to see how
the post-Bonaparte Austrians did so. She mocked him and he eventually left, mildly frustrated
that she had not found his idea as fascinating as he did. There was one last woman that Coetzee
was close with, though not romantically as the other two. His cousin Margot had let the reporter
record her telling the story of the specific year that Coetzee had come back to South Africa after
taking advantage of an educational chance in the United States. She, at one point, mentioned
what Coetzee believed love to be in his mind. Margot takes Coetzee’s place in the past
conversation with her cousin: “What the actual words were I don’t recall, but I know I was
unburdening my heart to you, telling you everything about myself, all my hopes and longings.
And all the time I was thinking, So this is what it means to be in love….And ever since that day,
being in love with a woman has meant being free to say everything on my heart” (97). The both
of them had been six years old at the time, though Coetzee seemed to be consistent to his
younger self’s concept of what love is. In the case of Julia, he had wanted to conduct some kind
of trial with Schubert’s music, perhaps to see the effect that the composition had upon their
hearts. Whatever his reasoning was, Coetzee had his music-sex research on his heart and he
desired to share it with the woman he loved at the time. As for Adriana, she tells the biographer
that Coetzee sent her numerous letters, some that she never opened and only kept in an absent
drawer, though she remembered a few of their contents: “One letter was about Franz
Schubert….He said that listening to Schubert had taught him…how we can sublime love as

chemists in the old days sublimed base substances” (175). The musician obviously had a pleasant
pressure on the man named John Coetzee; an affect that he craved to share with the women he
thought would accept his interests.
The definition of love that I believe to be the closest to my own meaning of such a hefty
notion would be Coetzee’s. In my opinion, love, not only in the form of romantic significance, is
about being yourself and having happiness presented to you by the person who accepts who you
are, and you returning it to them. Coetzee longed for someone to understand his passion of
languages and the diction of words, along with other odd principles he had picked up throughout
life, and to at least support him in his strange ideas of how to impact the world, if only by
refusing to pump the machine of the modern economy in which no one man does his own work. I
understand and recognize his rendition of what love should entail more than the explanation
Chekhov created with Dmitry and Anna. Not to say that loving someone for who they could be is
a bad choice. However, those who adhere to this connotation of love run the risk of loving
someone who does not and may not ever exist.

ENG 260
Dr. Disler—Writing Essays
Reflecting on this class, I label it a milestone in my development as a writer. Prior to it, I
only knew essays as the form in which students proved to their teachers they had read the book
assigned. They had an introduction with a thesis, three body paragraphs of arguments, then a
conclusion restating the thesis. Dr. Disler redefined the entire concept. Not just a concise
presentation of statements written for a grade, an essay is an attempt to explain. I learned that a
well written essay did not require a sophisticated topic, such as literary analyses or biographies
of influential figures. For our first assignment, we were to write an epistolary essay. I remember
asking Disler on what the essay should be. She answered, “Anything.” I wrote an angry letter to
the author of Twilight, and I tried to fit in every possible reason why I believed she was
undeserving of her fame. Disler and the class reinforced my emotional rant, entertained with the
outrage I let lose.
This class allowed me to express thoughts I harbored but could not formulate into an
academic paper. I found I could create a platform from which to scream injustices either
influential or inconsequential—it did not matter. No longer were essays strictly color-by-number
portraits, the results clear before even opening the paint. Rather, my essays were doodles in the
margins of newspapers, yearbooks, novels, and class worksheets. Sometimes they became
sprawling intricate designs, presenting patterns I had not meant etch. Other times they remained
raw and simplistic. Each was an attempt to explain a subject sustentative to my soul.

Erinn Colmenares
Dr. Disler
Writing Essays
9 December 2010
SpongeErinn CopyPants
Everyone has quirks, those little personal habits that at times are better to keep close to
the vest. Most are pretty tame, like collecting buttons or disliking feet. Others are a bit more
unique: saving one’s eyelashes, composting, being incredibly religious or anti-religion. No
matter how odd they are, these tendencies normally identify a person for who they are to the
general public (The Cat Lady, Paste Eater Kid, Stan the Stamp Collector, etc.). I have the
qualities of a sponge—this is my quirk, and it’s a nasty one at that. I tend to absorb certain traits
of others in my life, such as friends or family. It ranges from how I eat food to how I dress
myself to interests I’ve developed. The worst part is that after a short time, I feel as though the
behaviors are organic and completely mine to claim. I have to trace the origins of one habit or
another and usually I must admit that I stole it from a friend. This exact event happened the other
day when I declared that a mannerism had come from a show I had seen a few weeks ago. My
friend refuted this, arguing that I had taken it from her. Like every other instance, I thought about
it and remembered the cited day, which forced me to retract my previous statement. It got me
thinking about this habit of mine, and I felt like a compilation of songs from various artists.
Regrettably, they are not covers that give the songs new, distinctive sounds—they’re just copies
of the original piece.
As I mentioned before, some of the tendencies are just things I picked up from old

friends, nothing crazy. I watch particular shows because my friends recommended them and
even after the friendship has loosened at the seams, I continued to watch the show. Most of my
music comes from others telling me that I should listen to this or that band. In eighth grade, I got
my first iPod and had nothing to put on it. As a favor, my friend Sara uploaded a good many
bands that she figured I would enjoy, and they are still on there. This is how my taste in music
(mostly indie, alternative, punk-esque tunes) was generated—not because I tested each genre and
eventually found just the right one, but because I had no music aside from the Hispanic love
ballads I grew up with. I figured the singers my parents listened to would not be the best door to
step through and join supports on the other side. Every once in a while, I rediscover the artists
Sara plopped into my lap and it takes me back to middle school. Later, I began to find my own
music by attending local concerts with another friend, but I still ask for music from certain
people (my taste, however, has not much changed). I tell them that I’m a coloring book of sorts;
that they need to culture me in what I am missing. If the relationship eventually deteriorates, I
still have those relics to remind me of those people or that time and place.
Sadly, many of my assorted beliefs are from people who do not exist in my personal life.
In the movie Following, a character declares that everyone has a box, a small storage container in
which they preserve all of their emotionally delicate, though generally invaluable, items that they
have collected throughout their life. Anything, from movie tickets, shoelaces, and cigarette butts,
to pages from books and photos, are kept safe from the public world. And just to mess with the
people, the character ransacks them but takes nothing. The television series House is constantly
packing into the viewers’ minds that “people do not change.” And I firmly and continually give
that smidgeon of advice to anyone who expects the people in their lives to change. They will not.
After a certain age, about 13 to 16, the personality one observes from the people in their lives

will hardly alter from one decade to the next. I am not sure from where this next guideline is
from but it is ineffably true all the same: you cannot have a broken heart if you have never been
in love. In other words, you cannot feel the one of the deepest types of sadness unless you have
felt one of the most satisfying types of happiness. The spark for the sadness is not there if the
wood for the happiness has not been extinguished from the flames of being in love. I recall a
short animation from WB that was put out when I was a small child focusing on the meaning of
Christmas. My mom watching it with me on the couch, I sitting on the ground in front of her, and
we watched the journey of a piece of wrapping paper personified: the pride of being chosen at a
gift wrapping store, the rejection of being thrown away minutes after being torn apart to reveal
the desired toy, then a humility having being picked once again from a garbage can and gingerly
smoothed around a late Christmas present by a less than affluent man to be given to his young
son. It was a simultaneously emotionally arising and draining ending that my mom and I took to
heart. From then on, we try to never mistreat a piece of wrapping paper in case someone else has
to recycle it. It is an unspoken, strict law when the era of presents is among us. I have never seen
that short film again, but I will arrange that my children will understand one of the lessons of
Christmas.
There are other points where I am downright copying another person’s actions. When I
was younger, my older brother was really into watching an anime show called Dragon Ball Z
after school. Typically, I would sit down in the living room with him while I ate my snack and if
he had gotten to the TV before me, DBZ would be on. No other option was really presented, so I
watched it with him. On good days, we would bond and I would ask what happened to specific
characters if I missed something and he’d tell me a condensed version. However, a lot of the
time, he would get possessive of his show and tell me to stop copying him. Obviously, I denied

this accusation and continued to sit until he got under my skin enough for me to tell our mother
he was being a jerk. The good days, though, were nice. I tried not to talk much and stay out of
his line of vision so that he would not get aggravated, and I liked spending time without him
annoying me. I have to admit that he was dead on about me being there, but that did not stop me
from calling in my mother’s opinion on the situation (much to her displeasure). My shoe
selection when I was younger also echoed the style of my brother’s. I just could not help it—he
chose awesome shoes. Lucky for him, my feet were frequently too small for even the tiniest of
sizes the store offered, so I would have to look for others. Happily, though, my feet eventually
grew to a size where I could buy a pair of Sambas or Pumas and walk around proudly at my
school with my “unique” shoes. My brother would whine and pout, but it didn’t matter. I had
won until the next shopping trip concerning shoes.
On the subject of appearance, I also took some inspiration from the movie Juno in junior
year. It began with people randomly coming up to me at my new school to make the comparison
between the character and my own personality. They would start with, “You remind me of
someone…,” and I would stare blankly at them, at loss for what to say. After a moment, they
would grin wildly and proclaim that I had “Juno-like qualities.” I had no idea what that meant as
I had not yet seen the movie, or even heard of it. The association was made so many times that
one day I finally went to watch it with my family and a friend. Once I got out of the theatre, I
found several links and my family was raving that I indeed had strong characteristics similar to
that of Juno MacGuff. Seeing as I didn’t completely detest her, I embraced it, even considering it
something of a compliment. Therefore, some of my clothing was, like I said, influenced by the
movie, and from then on, I could fill in the blanks of acquaintances’ thoughts. It got old after
about a year, but, thankfully, it gradually stopped. As bothersome as it became, I still used it to

my advantage and attempted to keep up my Juno-ness. Fictional characters, ones that I admire at
least, usually have this kind of effect on me. I gnaw on my lip because the protagonist of Speak
bit her lip when she was uncomfortable. I used to drink hot chocolate anytime of the year
because a supporting character that I found to be the most levelheaded in the online romantic
short story (considering the people she spent most of her time with) I read was known for it. I
sometimes microwave bagels slathered with cream cheese before eating them due to a text
interchange the internet showed me. My love of reading was set in motion basically once my
mom took me to Borders with her a few times. I wanted to browse for books, as she did, so I
gravitated to the teen section. The affinity grew when we bonded over watching the show
Gilmore Girls and the character Rory, a clever teenager on her way to Harvard, loved reading
books that were not representative of most girls’ reading choices. She mostly read classics;
literature that was expected in English classes. These two sources motivated me to be well read. I
relished in telling bookstore employees that I was looking for a certain book, having them ask
me if it was for school, and replying, “No, I just wanted to read it.” Even though my mom and I
read totally different genres, my brother, mother and I have that connection of taking pleasure
from the simple act of reading.
I took creative writing in junior year, a real class where all we had to do was write stories.
Our opening assignment was to read the story “Everyday Use” by Alice Walker, choose a
character, and rewrite the piece in that character’s point of view. We got the story back a week
later and my teacher had penned a small note at the bottom of the top page, something along the
lines of, “I feel like I’m reading another part of this story written by Alice Walker!” I took this
comment and filed it away in wonderfully encouraging compliments so that I could look back
upon it from time to time and remember that in 2007, I had somewhat impressed an English

teacher in Howell, Michigan. The mood I had for the rest of the week was one a sun eclipse
probably could not have covered. I was an ace of spades at that point. In retrospect, however,
could this have been my very first sponge-ism episode in the literary world? It was a positive
remark, similar to when this same teacher wrote on a poetry assignment that I wrote with parallel
topics as my friend, which I also enjoyed. But would my future readers expect certain tones from
my work later on, not just the voice I produce myself?
The character Chandler Bing from the 1990s show Friends is one of my favorite
characters of all time. He and my brother were big in my decision to be as sarcastic as I can, and
therefore the development of my sense of humor. Sure, I adore the classic Jim Carrey-Chris
Farley-Adam Sandler comedy (which my brother and father also enjoy), but dry, sarcastic, multi-
layered humor is where it’s at. House, Arrested Development, and 30 Rock essentially make me
happy. But my first love was Chandler. His humor is rather obvious, but his exaggerations and
tone of voice kill me. My brother was also discovering the wonders of sarcasm and—in a way to
keep up with him for survival purposes, along with just finding it funny when it was not
unleashed on me—I learned this verbal sleight of hand. Nowadays, new friends have to get used
to my voice, figuring out when I am joking and when I am serious, and even veteran friends
sometimes question my intention. Perhaps it is cruel of me to gain delight from messing with my
friends, but it makes conversations where they fight back all the more entertaining. My inflection
is regularly reserved for storytelling or jokes, but there are times when I am monotone because I
am not totally confident on how to act around someone I do not know well. This quality I also
soaked up from my brother, who is not the most sociable person. It is rare that on the first few
occasions I am comfortable in amusing the people I am with in my customary way, so I keep to
the basics and hope they eventually give in to my rather mean and dry humor. Another tone of

voice is one I use when I am excited or happy, whether genuinely or not. I emit a high frequency
sound that is sometimes difficult to comprehend, as I talk a bit quickly in my thrill. Gilmore
Girls influenced the speed of my speech, but the tone is purely my best friend Cally’s fault. It is
yet an additional method to scramble the meaning of my words, which, I admit, can get
exhausting.
In the fall of 2009, I became very close with one of my roommates, Cally, something I
am still amazed at to this day. I had never connected with someone so quickly or strongly before
and I will always be joyful that it happened. Unfortunately, that means that she is pretty much
my latest target for my sponge-ism. It has gotten to the point that people refer to me as her copy
or vice versa (though, it’s absolutely me taking mannerisms from her). My current vocabulary is
the result of spending so much time with her; my daily inflection of voice is due to her; and even
some of my laughs are exact replicas of her own. Cally is my partner in crime in making fun of
our friends. She goads the joke and I bounce off her, and it continues until it naturally ends.
Some of our friends are actively on the offense and ready for a fight, knowing, if they see us
together, the attack that may be pending. My sense of humor has heightened since her
introduction into my life, which I believe is only for the better. She is extraordinarily funny on
her own and it is tricky to create a smart enough joke for her to laugh out loud. Therefore, it has
become one of my goals to produce at least one giggle from her every day. It’s like trying to
outfox a friend who lives for knowing a topic backwards and forwards—the whole “student
becomes teacher” bit. I savor the days that she announces that I am on a roll, cracking her up
with nearly everything I say. Interestingly, these are the days I am most stressed or annoyed with
things, but it gets the job done.
I have had it mentioned to me before I have a very expressive face. This is both a

compliment and a curse since I am hardly ever able to hide my irritation but it is very practical
for my jokes, which are repeatedly reaction based. The most noticeable trait—and consequently
the most infuriating for Cally—I have stolen from her is a specific facial tick that I virtually
ripped off her face. We refer to it as the “nose twitch,” even if many people describe it as a
movement of the mouth. Cally most often uses it when she has a thought that she would rather
not mention out loud, though there are only a handful of times in a given week that it is actually
about the situation at hand. I, conversely, very rarely utilize it and, in almost every trial, it is a
notion that is directly related to the conditions in which I am concerned. Another difference is
that my spasm is nearly always explained since I am not at all sneaky in its execution. It drives
Cally up the wall when someone points it out on my face and he or she gives me the credit,
rather than her.
My eldest brother Danny is a man with an open face, comparable to mine. He has a
certain expression that he creates when there is something being said that cannot be proven false.
It is an accepting look, a face that simply says, “Yup.” My parents have thus dubbed it the “Yup”
face that Danny and I share. I remember the day that my mom pointed it out, astounded at the
similarity between his expression and mine. I was ecstatic that I had a bond with him despite the
fact he is nine years older and I never spent all that much time with him before he moved out. If
anything ever changes between the two of us, I know that I will always have that face to remind
me of Danny.
The last of my recognized faces comes from the Americanized version of The Office with
Steve Carrell. The character that I wish I were most like in this series is Jim Halpert, a paper
salesman that could not care less about his job at Dunder Mifflin. He keeps most of his emotions
to himself, only giving the camera or other characters particular looks to show what he is feeling.

His trademark glance is a smirk he gives that generally means, “I find this funny and/or
interesting.” Similar to the circumstances revolving around Chandler and my sarcastic persona, I
deliberately decided to incorporate Jim’s smirk into my collection of expressions. He is an
amazingly straight-faced comedic icon that is diverse to most of my inventory of people I dream
to be.
With all of these copied mannerisms and habits listed off one by one, I find myself in awe
of how small of an actual individual I am. I wonder, if I were to take away all of the traits I have
both accidentally and actively accumulated, what would be left? Yes, I would have my love of
writing, the knowledge I have gained from my experiences, and the genetic composition of my
personality I have no control over…but aren’t these items what everyone has to fall back on?
One distinct talent and/or interest, their experiences, and their genetic makeup compliments of
their parents. These are the building blocks of personalities and uniqueness. My question is how
certain people continue to build on these stepping-stones and rise up into the ultimate level of
distinctiveness. I go back and forth: is this force innate in all of us, or are some people are just
born special? Without my pilfered ticks, I do not know if I am truly just my own person or a
shell of someone who never socializes.
As the debate is battled out, I content myself in mapping out what actions, beliefs, and
characteristics are strictly original and which are influences from the people in my life. I like to
think that perhaps my sponge-ism is my “special force” and that, with this technique, I will
create a person that is able to launch a movement through words. I theorize this because I do not
feel that I have enough organic material to achieve what I would like to without the supplies that
people have donated (or I have stolen). Remembering the junior English class event, I cannot
guarantee that my future novels will have not only my personal style, but the style of the writer I

am reading at the time, which I am on my way to accept. No matter what, I intend to scratch off a
goal that I have created solely for myself and therefore, I can be happy with the paths my life has
taken. In other words, I can accept that for all of my life, I absorbed random tidbits of people and
I know that they helped in perpetuating my notions. But for now, I will continue to be self-
deprecating to at least garner a laugh from my small group of readers.
Class—I have many doubts about this essay, but the boldest one in my mind is the ending.
Should it try to be funny or keep with the serious tone? Let’s be honest, people, this is my
intended career we’re talking about here. Thank you.
—Erinn
PS-Sorry to Demitra for taking your idea. Serious, I’m a sponge.

Erinn Colmenares
Dr. Disler
Writing Essays
26 October 2010
Writers’ Block: The Treatment, Things I’d Rather Do, and Coincidental Events
My paper has 18 hours to be written, one way or another. There is the easy way, which
entails me effortlessly finding a topic that has more than pure frustration fueling it. The result is
relatively painless, letting me have maybe a bit more than two hours of sleep before somewhat
speed walking toward my class at 10 in the morning. My neurons during these mental processes
receive a respectable amount of exercise and I tend to keep to myself for the next day to rest.
There is also the hard way. This choice knocks me to my metaphorical knees, begging any and
all presences that control the universe to lend me an idea to write about for a substantial length. It
has its effects on me, effects that I would rather not have as a nineteen-year-old college student
who is barely able to decide anything more important than what to drink with meals generally
would. Mainly, these effects consist of a messed up sleeping schedule, dependency on vitamin B
and caffeinated drinks, poor social skills, and a half-baked essay. Unfortunately, plan B is my
usual strategy. Obviously, I would love to have my perfectionist genes shine when it came to
school assignments and such, but I somehow just cannot force myself to be the adult I am going
to have to be once college is over. Alas, I continually place myself in my desk chair hours before
deadline to churn out words that hopefully make sense to readers. That is the hard way, and it
seems to be the only way to pump motivation and determination into my veins.

Until about eight in the evening, I normally never have the sense of urgency in my mind
to sit down, shut up, and concentrate. At six, I sit and quiet down, trying to come up with a
theme that is interesting, fairly significant, and that contains a humorous spin I can use so that I
do not bore myself, because who wants to read an essay even the writer hates? I can only think of
stressful situations of the past few days, which are too fresh to make fun of, and deep secrets that
I prefer keeping to myself. I explore the idea of placing myself in a writer’s shadow through my
friends’ notions of what a writer should be, but I have written recent essays all pertaining to my
love of literature. I grow weary of even thinking about attempting to bring people into my
thoughts on English for a third consecutive occasion.
Killing time with online episodes and food, it becomes nine at night and I have only one
egg in my Easter basket, which happens to be cracked. My iPod and a thought-clearing walk
through campus could help. The New Pornographers sing sweetly into my ears as I travel from
my dorm to the library. I decide that surfing online where people are studious might encourage
me to get my rear in gear. On the way, several faces are half hidden from the streetlights. I am
nervous an acquaintance or kinda-friend will walk by and I will not recognize them, but I only
encounter strangers doing their thing. The night chill is refreshing and the starless sky is just as
tempting to enjoy. I wish I could lie on the grass, my music swaying through my mind, staring at
the nearly invisible clouds and just be. A friend from class calls me as soon as I walk to the
computers and asks if she can borrow my textbook to study from for the upcoming exam. I jump
at the chance to check off two wants (procrastinating and not letting others procrastinate) with
one good deed, and stroll back to my dorm to pick up the book. Two girls on their stomachs are
watching a computer screen on the grass, covered in darkness aside from the monitor’s light. The
irony they have created somewhat sparks inspiration, but I cannot get past just finding it funny

that they are outside, yet on the internet.
I decide that I could try smoking to highlight a subject lurking in the back of my mind
and figure out the optimal chain of events. First, the school convenience store for an energy
boost and a transportable notebook. Second, my textbook and a pen. Third, supplies to smoke.
Fourth, drop off the textbook and onto the smoking destination. While achieving the third
objective, three different classmates remind me that I have responsibilities aside from writing an
essay. I rage throughout the third objective, keeping myself from lunging at several passersby
with my music’s beat. My notebook is letting my pen ink words onto its skin about the world
around me from moment to moment. I believe I can still pluck an acceptable topic that still has a
catch to it by writing anything that comes to mind. If all else fails, I have two back-ups, but they
are back-ups for a reason. The fourth objective is the last to be attained as I wonder if I can have
friendly banter along with hunting for my perfect subject. The answer is absolutely not as I have
a revelation that too much stress does not lead to a funny, or even chuckle-worthy, Erinn. For a
good five minutes, I hate myself for letting my mind have too long of a leash. With this latest
meeting, I endeavor in feigning confidence in my ability to complete my task before deadline in
order to maintain control of my words and actions that generally go wild with freedom on these
types of nights.
Entering the residence of my soon-to-be smoke buddy, I am inconsolably uncomfortable
while searching for my friend. I get three distinct directions on where to find him and, finally, a
member of the house opens the door to him. The mantra “Kill Control” is repeated over and over
while I stand awkwardly behind two boys playing a video game. One of them is undoubtedly my
future smoke buddy and the other is just as inarguably his roommate. I wait patiently for their
game to end, knowing from experience with my brother that I risk my head being chewed off if I

speak. I practice describing the room, generating more and more assurance in the thought to
discuss my process in getting an essay done as my essay’s focus. Although there were many
options that could bring light into the room, the boys chose two huge computer monitors
currently projecting their game. I saw Christmas lights lining the window, a cup with a vampire’s
face painted on, and both a Kazaam and New Moon poster, along with a poster or painting of a
furry white kitten. In the corner, there hung a rubber chicken that had apparently committed
suicide. The bed situation appeared more like the construction of a fort: the mattress lay on the
ground and the woodwork created an arch, the top of which was littered with jackets, shoes, and
other nonsense. Near the previously depressed chicken, there was a birthday card that read, “For
your birthday, I have vanquished the beast.” The boys had idle gamers’ chitchat, which sounded
forced on account of a non-gamer standing behind them, possibly judging their lack of
conversation. As they finished their game, the sounds of potential farts but hopefully chair
squeaks were magnified by the sudden vacuum caused by the lack of gun shooting and control
clicking as the two grabbed more cookies from the half-eaten package and led the way out.
My friend steered me outside to the porch and lit up a cigarette while motioning for me to
sit. Not straying far from my notebook, I leave the silence undisturbed for a bit; I could hear him
breathe in the toxins and breathe out his frustrations. He asked what my purpose was and I asked
how committed he was to doing an exemplary job on his work tonight. He beat around the bush,
as his nature was, and eventually came to stop on a rejection to my invitation. I proposed that he
would be helping me academically, as ridiculous as it sounded, but he explained that his
homework was “too much science” and that smoking would not help him in the same way. He
seemed to be apologetic, but I wasn’t too sure. We talked for a little more, me getting bit by bit
less relaxed and him smoking away. He offered me a cigarette and, with maybe ten seconds’

consideration, I took it and figured it was better than nothing at all. Continuing our talk, I quickly
got power hungry on my abuse of my beliefs and the judgments of my friends and began circling
conversation pieces that would either strengthen or loosen our ties. Before I dug my rather
beautiful hole too deep, his roommate walked out and sat down next to my friend to also enjoy a
cigarette. Even though the conversation between my friend and I had diminished as soon as we
were gently interrupted, my desire to find out some truths under these two people’s masks still
beat in my temples. After some time, I figured that I was not strengthening my relationship with
either of these gentlemen at all and took my leave. Securing my notebook and pen, and
discovering it to be rather difficult to deny a second cigarette, I walked back to the school
convenience store to buy some sort of drink to wash out the tobacco’s taste from my mouth and
nauseating feeling in my gut.
The decision to prolong my journey with another impromptu visit was both simple and
thorny. But I knew that I would need some sort of calming environment before essaying, as my
first choice was being either lazy or studious, and so I underwent the expedition in tracking down
my friend. The man is rather popular with virtually everyone he has given two moments’ glance
to; therefore, he could have been anywhere. Luckily, I knew that his academics were most likely
pinning him in the confines of his room. Eventually, after a few misleads, I injected myself with
extreme comfort, lethargy, and ease, and slowly spread out on his decorative rug. The room was
a mess as always, the futon was in its couch position, and my friend suggested a carrot to gnaw. I
was a fool to avoid this room and this aura, I thought, as my friend went on about his business as
if he was entirely familiar with a female lying on his floor. The relationship the two of us share is
something I appreciate and do not want to mess up. These are the times—days where even if I do
dig my own grave or if the grave is dug without my knowing—that I am most happy with our

relaxed connection. His room is nearly always open for me to fester in my energy until I am able
to go out into the world again without the want for a reality lacking in consequences. I think to
myself about the night’s events and wonder if I can really pull off an essay about them.
My friend coaxes his ukulele, which I have named June once I realized she did not have a
name, to sing tunes I do not recognize; I stare quietly at the ceiling, enjoying and breathing. The
carrot crunches every time I bite. Words bubble up into my throat as the music sticks to the four
walls; I suppress them with more carrot. Selectively reading my mind, June starts up the opening
notes to “I Will Follow You into the Dark,” a song that always reminds me of my friend. The
beat is faster and has more bounce than the original, which my friend’s voice complements. A
year ago, he mentioned that he would love to enrich the song with a more upbeat message,
knowing that fans of the song’s writer would most likely be appalled. I feel that he is silently
updating me on his progress toward the goal. Suddenly, a thought hits me: the contrast between
my smoke buddy and the person whose room I am occupying. It is still in the evolving stages,
but essentially, I act a certain way with my smoke buddy where I am pumped for drugs, alcohol,
what have you, and the atmosphere I am in now promotes choices that would make those who
observe my life from afar pleased. One is associated with less healthy, flying-by-the-seat-of-my-
pants behavior, while the other revs up my conscious without any thought at all. However, I
know I have made mistakes and commendable judgments in both of their company. My thoughts
are broken once my friend brings conversation to my attention. Nibbling on my carrot, he finds
music he wants to introduce me to and it turns to Radiohead for a while.
I flip over onto my stomach and say, “I have some of their stuff on my iPod but most of it
freaks me out.” He agrees that there are a few songs that are incredibly creepy. He plays one
while perusing my iPod’s collection of Radiohead music and announces that I do not have the

best of their albums. While basically requiring me to view a video of the band playing live, he
states clearly, “Tom York could fuck any woman he wanted.” After a glance, he continues, “He
would just seduce you with his amazing voice. Then you’d be on your back, legs spread, and you
think, ‘I have no idea how this happened, but I’m into it.’” My friend asks me in that tone of
voice that tells the listener that there is no room for rebuttal if I thought Tom York was attractive.
I judged him as he sang and moved around to the creation of his music and admitted that the fact
he was oh so into his career was enticing, but if I saw him on the street randomly, I would not
have a reason to look again. Although my friend waited for my common sense to straighten up
and say I would totally bone York, I stuck to my conviction. I added that if I knew more about
the band, there would be more admiration in my response, but it still was not the answer he
wanted.
The hour is near the end of my “research period” and I am lingering contentedly in the
room until that time arrives. My friend does not mind a bit and we carry on with random topics,
all the while my back against his floor, my head resting on one of his pillows, and his voice
drifting above me before I capture it. He questions about the process of being an English major,
wondering if we usually write down our thoughts and practically procrastinate until the candle’s
wick has almost burned out. I answer that I hardly ever do this, the thought writing part, but I
have nothing else to write about sufficiently. At this point, I am ninety percent positive that my
style of writing has the capability to truly and honestly pull the wool over the deadline’s eyes.
I am all jitters from the cigarette, the energy boost, and the waiting fruit energy drink, but
I am convinced I can do it. The sick feeling in my stomach comes through in waves as I carefully
stand up to reveal to my companion the self-assurance I have concocted in his room. He is all
smiles and agreements, which I timidly think is more from the prospect of me leaving his room

than my eventual success. I ignore the insecurity and heartily hug him goodbye and good night.
His embrace is warm and captivating, persuading me to stay a few minutes more. But it is now
long past midnight and the deadline has now slithered up eight hours. Quickly, before any other
deceptive cues filter through my mind, his door clicks and locks itself, and I gather myself
enough to sit down, shut up, and concentrate.

ENG 330
Dr. DeMarco—Medieval Literature
Dr. DeMarco is an incredible professor, able to form a complete atmosphere with her vast
background knowledge of the medieval era. Due to her fascination with linguistics, DeMarco is
so ecstatic to inform and explain the implications behind writers’ choices to include this or that
part of the culture generated from a single word. The classroom’s chalkboards would be full with
seemingly random snippets of our discussions, DeMarco sailing from one to the other to
figuratively bridge two concepts with her piece of chalk. The readings in this class seemed to be
written in code for the first few weeks, a frustrating aspect for not only me but the entire class.
Fortunately, DeMarco’s enthusiasm each time we were able to crack it made the assignments
feel like games as opposed to oral exams. Her encouraging disposition also allowed for a gentle
pad to fall upon whenever a certain portion appeared impossible to comprehend.
The course revolved around the themes of vengeance and justice, which I recall finding
enthralling because I had been fixated on the gray area of morality at the time. I cannot
specifically reminisce on the first time I read Chaucer’s The Physician’s Tale or John Gower’s
Tale of Appius and Virginia, yet I feel a flame of familiarity as I reread the morals I ascertained
from both texts. Struggling with the thesis, Dr. DeMarco worked it over with me in her office
despite not having an appointment scheduled. Graded, it is not a paper I would place on the
fridge. Presently, however, I am now satisfied with its substance. I do not cringe at it; I respect
the effort put forth by my past self. The fact I can engage this two-year-old mindset is an

important sign of consistency, giving me hope I will feel much more at ease when revising my
most recent papers.
Erinn Colmenares
Dr. DeMarco
Medieval Literature
12 April 2011
The Laws of Morality
Geoffrey Chaucer, Chaucer’s physician, and John Gower have different, though
connected, views of what is important to emphasize in their telling of the noble and worthy
knight Virginius, his beautiful and virtuous daughter Virginia, and Virginius’s plan to avoid her
imminent dishonor. Chaucer’s main intention is educating the common folk about the morality
of justice and mercy through entertaining stories focusing on exemplary characters of good and
evil among humanity. Gower chooses to teach myths and legends about past political leaders to
his readers, most of them future people in charge of delegating and pursuing the law and its
justice. By highlighting their mistakes and achievements, the eventual kings and princes can
learn the wrong and right procedures of their roles in society. The physician, the storyteller of
Chaucer’s version of this famous plot, attempts to bring innocence and virtue of children’s
upbringing to attention and keep parents accountable for their actions and the examples their
children will perceive of their lives. Scholars John Michael Crafton, Lianna Farber, Michael
Uebel, and William Kupersmith also have their own analyses of what Chaucer, Gower, and their
characters have meant to do through each authors’ edition. The scholars’ articles will prove to

either support or argue the previous statements.
Lianna Farber’s The Creation of Consent in the Physician’s Tale does a wonderful job in
going over some basic differences between Chaucer’s and Gower’s translations, such as the
journey introducing the characters. Through the mouth of the physician, Chaucer begins the
story with Virginius and his status and good character that eventually frame the story (153).
This is also a difference between Chaucer and his unstated but more used source (as opposed to
the cited Livy) Roman de la Rose by Jean de Meun. Not only is this evasion of matching his
source not apparent with Gower’s story that starts with Apius Claudius, but as mentioned, Gower
does not have the physician’s lens of innocence as a virtue to look through that Chaucer chooses
to include. Chaucer then moves to explain Virginia through the eyes of a personified Nature
who has done her best to put in every virtue and attractive aspect into her masterpiece. Gower,
on the other hand, barely discusses two facts of the gentil maide (l. 5135) so fair a lif as sche (ll.
5138-39) before his plot begins. Farber points out that “Virginia’s manner and character are
presented as possibly her own” and her “polite ways to excuse herself from inappropriate
situations,” which occur in lines 41-48, are especially important because this section is the only
part where Virginia is chiefly responsible for her choices rather than a factor carefully
constructed by Nature (154). With this, it helps to foreshadow her capability to literally voice
her personal decisions such as her death (l. 238) while Gower takes that control away from her
and gives it to her father (ll. 5149-53). The physician then speaks up with his own values about
children’s innocence at lines 72-82, speaking directly to governesses and later parents (l. 93)
about their duties to the children of their lives (154). As most of his listeners were illiterate and
gathered in front of a reader, Chaucer’s main intentions to teach his listeners moral

responsibilities is blatantly promoted through the physician. As referenced before, Chaucer has
“Virginius quite clearly present his daughter with an either/or decision: either death or shame”
(158) shown in lines 213-15 rather than forcing him to think hastily of his choices, as Gower
portrays, before acting out (ll. 5243-45). Virginia chooses to avoid dishonor in lines 248-49
after suggesting to her father that Jephtha’s daughter was just as proud to die in order to keep her
virtue (ll. 240-44). These differences that Farber accentuates in her article show that Chaucer’s
inclusion of Virginia’s voice rather than keeping her silent as Gower does has a positive effect on
the moral. Instead of focusing on the injustice and lawlessness of Apius, Chaucer brings to light
the ideas of virtue and decisions based on virtue which force the characters toward one action or
another. Overall, the differences between the two writers’ versions separate the intentions of the
stories and make strong evidence for the notion that Gower and Chaucer had differing schemes
when writing their adaptations.
In his article titled Public Fantasy and the Logic of Sacrifice in the Physician’s Tale,
Michael Uebel argues that instead of a moral choice to kill Virginia, Virginius kills her to poke at
the flaws of the justice system. Rather than emphasizing the underlying morality in Virginius’s
mercy killing, Uebel states that Chaucer is criticizing his town’s justice by beheading his
daughter. Virginius’s violent act and then taking his daughter’s head to court is genius: “he
adheres to the law to subvert the law” (32), which is a nod to Virginius bringing Virginia to court
but not in the state that was required. Uebel goes on to say, “It is in fact violence to the justice
system masquerading as moral choice,” (32) which support Gower’s main intentions of
highlighting the laws over the virtues. This reading of the story supports that of a Gower telling,
which instead should read that Virginius adheres to the law of his moral duty as a father of

protecting his daughter (and is bound to the merciful killing) and beheads her to show that there
must be a better way. John Michael Crafton, however, rebuffs Uebel’s view and offers that
Virginius’s choice to protect his daughter’s honor is akin to Christ’s sacrifice to save humanity
(9), which lets the reader assume that there is indeed a more justifiable way of dealing with the
situation. In the first essay of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, the notion of two
schools of morality is defined as separate entities that infinitely feed into the other: the noble
morality and the slave morality. The noble morality “grows out of a triumphant affirmation of
itself,” while the slave morality, termed as the French word for resentment (“ressentiment”), is
realized through the finding of compensation by an imaginary revenge of the noble morality
(22). Nietzsche explains that slave morality comes from Judeo-Christian standards such as
humility, intelligence, sly and cautious acts and has the noble morality complement it by valuing
strength and domination by direct actions. As mentioned before, perhaps bringing up the
parallel between Christ and Virginius was in order to show that there was a more peaceful
solution than killing her. Crafton’s argument of equating Christ’s sacrifice of his life to
Virginius’s sacrifice of his daughter may be evidence that the slave morality was a possible state
of mind in the medieval times, and thus evidence that Chaucer had wanted to encourage
Virginius and Christ’s view on morality.
The noble morality, also called the aristocratic morality, and the slave morality are also
implicitly described in William Kupersmith’s Chaucer’s Physician’s Tale and the Tenth Satire of
Juvenal. Within Kupersmith’s parallels that he brings forth between the two texts, he makes a
significant point to recognize Virginia being a victim of her own beauty (22). The Tenth Satire
is the compilation of tales showing that having everything that most men desire is not as

wonderful as it may seem. After citing a passage from Juvenal that tells the reader beauty can
also be an aspect not worth trading “a sound mind in a healthy body” (21), Kupersmith notices a
small reference to Virginia that assumes the reader’s previous knowledge of the plot (22).
Virginius has all of these things, according to Chaucer: wealth, powerful friends, honor,
worthiness, and a stunning and virtuous daughter (ll. 2-8). To keep these items of status and
influence, however, Virginius must kill his daughter to preserve her virtue. This is the price in
blood he must pay for achieving every man’s goals. Thus far, Kupersmith’s article is supporting
the slave morality of highlighting humility and piety over the aristocratic morality that is more of
an individualistic view of achieving goals by any means necessary. By stressing an alternative
cause for Virginius to reach the conclusion that he has no choice but to behead his daughter,
Kupersmith conversely stirs up suspicions. Instead of adhering to the physician in Chaucer’s
story and acting to the extreme within his fatherly duties which force him to protect his daughter,
Kupersmith brings up a substitute thought process that supports Nietzsche’s aristocratic morality.
“In making [the reader] respond to the story of Appius and Virginia as an exemplum of the tragic
consequences of gaining what we most desire,” (23) Kupersmith is perhaps telling the reader that
Virginia’s murder was in fact a murder, not a merciful killing to preserve innocence or virtue at
all. Virginius killed Virginia to preserve his own trophies of his life’s achievements, an
aristocratic reading that creates a brand new characteristic in the knight filled with “honor and
worthiness” (l. 3). With this unspoken revelation behind Virginius’s potential motives,
Kupersmith has perpetuated evidence that goes against what Chaucer’s (and the physician’s)
most likely main intentions were when writing The Physician’s Tale stated earlier in this essay.
Kupersmith, fortunately, proclaims that there is no true verification feasible for where Chaucer

had come up with his ideas behind certain passages that seem to have no origin:
the narrator’s [physician’s] digression on Nature,who takes credit for
forming so beautiful a creature as Virginia; the excursus on Virginia’s
extraordinary chastity; and the admonition to governesses and parents
against letting laziness or bad example corrupt children…. indeed I
assume that Chaucer invented these additions. (20)
Taking into account all of these cases that Kupersmith knowingly or not includes in his article,
he will be classified for the purposes of this essay under a neutral stance that provides
confirmation of both Gower’s and Chaucer’s basic aims while writing their stories of Virginia.
In sum, these four scholars, one philosopher, and this essay have positioned several
distinct readings of how Gower’s, Chaucer’s, and Chaucer’s physician value conclude in
different morals. Gower’s purpose is to alert kings and princes to the possibilities of falling into
failure during their time of power by turning to inappropriate and unlawful vices, such as Apius
Claudius who lets his lust for Virginia blind him and lead him to wallowing. Gower also shows
through Virginius’s speech to the higher court in Rome “that betre it were to redresce at hom the
grete unrihtwisnesse, than for to werre in strange place and lese at hom here oghne grace” (ll.
5269-72). Chaucer’s objective is to tell of entertaining legends to the frequently uneducated that
show both the scourge and the saints of humanity, emphasizing the arguably Judeo-Christian
morality he prefers. Specifically in The Physician’s Tale, Chaucer and his physician both agree
that of all treasons, the most pernicious in the betrayal of innocence (91-92). A common thread
that weaves through all of these bottom lines of honorable ethics is the notion of a do-or-die

situation; the characters can either abide by the morals or lose their reputations and/or lives. An
important item to point is that Virginia, in both versions, does indeed stand by these morals and,
though she dies, her reputation survives past her death to inspire others to do as well as she.
Works Cited
Crafton, John Micheal. "'The Physician's Tale' and Jephtha's Daughter." ANQ: A Quarterly
Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews 20.1 (2007): 8-13. MLA International
Bibliography. EBSCO. Web. 30 Mar. 2011.
Farber, Lianna. "The Creation of Consent in the Physician's Tale." Chaucer Review: A Journal of
Medieval Studies and Literary Criticism 39.2 (2004): 151-164. MLA International
Bibliography. EBSCO. Web. 30 Mar. 2011.
Kupersmith, William. "Chaucer's Physician's Tale and the Tenth Satire of Juvenal." English
Language Notes 24.2 (1986): 20-23. MLA International Bibliography. EBSCO. Web. 30
Mar. 2011.
Nietzsche, Friedrich, and Douglas Smith. On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic. By Way of
Clarification and Supplement to My Last Book Beyond Good and Evil. Oxford University
Press, USA, 2009. Print.
Uebel, Michael. "Public Fantasy and the Logic of Sacrifice in The Physician's Tale." ANQ: A
Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews 15.3 (2002): 30-33. MLA
International Bibliography. EBSCO. Web. 30 Mar. 2011.

ENG 362
Dr. Poremski—19th Century American Literature
The book I best recall from this class is Hope Leslie, mainly due to the enjoyment and
pleasure it was to read. It was difficult to put down, as the stylistic word choices allowed my
eyes to glide across paragraphs from one page to the next. It felt so good to effortlessly read an
assigned text, a sensation I had not experienced for a time period longer than I care to remember.
It had also been a long time since I could lose myself to the characters of a novel, aligning
myself with the protagonists and fighting for them by any means against their antagonizing
counterparts.
For this revival, I thank Dr. Poremski and her palpable enthusiasm constantly present in
each class. She aptly invigorated her lecture topics and encouraged the class to challenge and
question her at any point. From the beginning, Poremski’s energy substantiated the notion that
she was in her element, that teaching was the profession in which she belonged. I feel fortunate
to have had the privilege of taking a class with her. Her passion for Native American literature
and culture affirmed the importance of discovering a niche for myself, at least one interest that
ignites the warmth of happiness regardless of mitigating circumstances.

Erinn Colmenares
Nineteenth Century American Literature
Dr. Poremski
11 December 2011
Melville Uses Emerson’s Americharacteristics
Ralph Waldo Emerson writes in his essay “The American Scholar” that Man Thinking,
the optimal state of being for American Scholars, has three influences that coincide with four
duties that he is bound to perform. The American Scholar embraces the influences of nature,
theories from past scholars, and his life experiences to put forth original theories of the world for
the benefit of others by which to be influenced, continuing the timeless cycle (Emerson 2-5).
Along with these influences—which merely identify where the Scholar finds his muses—he is
meant to be self-trusting, self-reliant, introspective, and to minutely examine and break down to
its elements any topic that he discusses (Emerson 7-9). Emerson’s qualities of Man Thinking are
also in line with the values of the American people in the nineteenth century: respecting nature;
using the past to enlighten the future; having confidence in one’s notions; counting solely on the
self; delving as deeply as possible into an idea to comprehend it; and observing oneself honestly.
The American Scholar’s ideals have thus been slightly generalized to measure not only the
Scholar, but also the American character as a whole, which is written into several texts
throughout said century. Herman Melville’s two-part story “Paradise of Bachelors/Tartarus of
Maids” is one such text that exemplifies nearly every feature in the American characteristics
based on Emerson’s essay as well as supplies an additional feature, that of practicality.

Melville’s depictions of the Bachelors’ lives in London and the maids’ employment in a
New England paper-mill complement one another in such a way that the two parts enhance each
other’s significance only when read together (Baym 1853). One story mirrors the other in either
format or theme; they also contrast each other in the same way. Similarly, Melville echoes pieces
of Emerson’s essay through which important aspects of “Paradise” are analogous to essential
elements of the American. One such aspect is the role of the different food and wines that the
narrator enjoys during his time among the Bachelors, or Templars (Baym 2359). The narrator
goes through each course, describing the meats, sides, and drinks that were consumed before and
after; he then recounts the subsequent courses the waiter brought out until the end of the meal
(Baym 2359-60). Although the narrator defined various topics that he and the Bachelors amused
one another with, they were “pleasant stories [and] choice experiences” (Baym 2360), implying
that the men had discussed other, perhaps more serious, items as well. If one were to place the
waiter on the same level of a teacher, as Melville does (Baym 2360), then the food and drinks of
meal, therefore, are parallel to the ideas that teachers present from books and other such
academic texts. This is because certain truths affect the persons in differing ways (profoundly,
mildly, etc.), as do foods and wines, albeit in the stomach rather than the mind.
“Paradise”, as aforementioned, demonstrates several Emersonian-based qualities vital to
the American’s character. First and foremost important is the axiom that “The world is nothing,
the man is all”, to which every person adheres (Emerson 9). This means that one can rely only on
oneself, which in Melville can be found in the passage describing the requirement of how a non-
member of the Bachelors can rest within the walls of the Temple:
To be a Templar, in the one true sense, you must needs be a lawyer, or a student at the
law…[However, if] being, say, a lounging gentleman and bachelor, or a quiet, unmarried,

literary man, charmed with the soft seclusion of the spot, you much desire to pitch your shady
tent among the rest in this serene encampment, then you must make some special friend among
the order, and procure him to rent, in his name but at your charge, whatever vacant chamber you
may find to suit. (Baym 2358)
While this passage does not necessarily radiate the strictness that is present in Emerson, the
fourth duty is present as well. The Templars do not actively recruit new members in the
corresponding strategies of a fraternity or sorority; no one takes an interested person by the hand
to explain thoroughly the procedures or the requirements that must be met. The person must use
their own skills to attract the friendship of a member and thus have them acquiesce to the desire.
It is an exclusive club to be sure, but it is simple enough to join.
During the dinner in the presence of nine Bachelors, the narrator states, “You could
plainly see that these easy-hearted men had no wives or children to give an anxious thought.
Almost all of them were travelers, too; for bachelors alone can travel freely, and without any
twinges of their consciences touching desertion of the fireside” (Baym 2361). This sentences
indicates how simply these men, who are self-sufficient and contingent on only themselves, can
live. They have no worries as the Benedicks do, their foreheads creased with the insufferable
thoughts of how to afford this and how to pay off that (Baym 2356). Emerson writes in his essay
that these men, the unmarried Americans, have a sense of “natural respect” in which they wrap
themselves in order to feel that the world is theirs, completely (Emerson 9). Thus, according to
Melville, without the self-sufficiency and natural respect to build one’s street and carriage to
drive into the land of wishes, one is without a fundamental element that means to be an
American.

Melville creates an analogy between the Templars and the American guided by Emerson
through which the principle of utilizing the past to enhance the future is displayed. Emerson
writes that the best example of the past is books that the Scholar leans upon to influence his
future ideas (Emerson 3) while Melville contemplates the role of the Templars as honorable,
though “struck by Time’s enchanter’s wand,” has led to relabeling extant Templars “Lawyers”
(Baym 2357), however similar they are. With this information, it is logically argued that the
Templars are to books as Lawyers are to the American Scholar, also known as the American.
Melville’s additional characteristic that “every sensible American should learn from
every sensible Englishman”, is practicality, which is defined in the narrator’s description of his
Bachelor host’s apartment (Baym 2359). In order to have the quality of practicality, the furniture
must be comfortable, authentic, and unpretentious (Baym 2359). The lack of prickly
luxuriousness, the existence of warm leisure, and the concern for lushness is represented only in
an environment which invites guests to sit under low ceilings (Baym 2359). With these ideals,
any room presents a sense of sheer contentment, which opposes the “glare and glitter, gimcracks
and gewgaws” most Americans mistakenly feel necessary (Baym 2359).
The last of Emerson’s American Thinking feature prevalent in “Paradise” is the
enjoyment and respect of nature. After the drinks, the dinner, and the after-dinner drinks, the
Bachelor host brought out a type of Jericho horn that, by covering its two openings and inhaling,
the instrument produced an aroma of pipe tobacco to wrap up the evening’s festivities, to which
the narrator absolutely approved (Baym 2361). The most important part of the closing event of
the night was “The remarkable decorum of the nine bachelors—a decorum not to be affected by
any quantity of wine—a decorum unassailable by any degree of mirthfulness…though they took
snuff very freely, yet not a man so far violated the proprieties” (Baym 2362) as to embarrass

himself or his companions. Melville shows the respect to which Englishmen, and to which
Americans should, conduct themselves, no matter the intoxicants or relaxants these men
entertain. He also provides the authorization to indulge oneself in these activities with no
contingencies other than that which has already been stated.
Within the text of “Tartarus of Maids”, Melville presents an extension to one of the
presently defined American qualities, stating that one’s knowledge manifests itself into actions,
and actions into knowledge, indubitably. The narrator of “Tartarus” asks Cupid—a boy
gregariously unknowing of the maids’ misery that it comes off almost impolite, yet is pardoned
due to his obvious youthful ignorance—if the grand machine that yields the essence of the paper-
mill ever becomes congested or stops for any reason. “No,” Cupid replies. “It must go. The
machinery makes it go just so; just that very way, and at that very pace you there plainly see it
go. The pulp can’t help going” (Baym 2370). The machine is a metaphor for the mind in that
whatever “pulp”, or idea, is given to the mind, the product, though more defined and more easily
handled (Baym 2369), is composed of the same “pulp” first fed. Therefore, if any singular
concept is served to the mind constantly and unchangingly, it follows that the mind will
continually and unceasingly circle the concept back to its beginning. This is, unfortunately, the
fate of the employed maids (Baym 2368).
Melville uses this scene in the room lodging the great machine to demonstrate the duty
Americans have to disentangle as fully as possible the copious nuances that surround any one
subject in order to wholly understand it, to “see every trifle bristling with the polarity that ranges
it instantly on an eternal law” (Emerson 8). Inviting the narrator to test the nine-minute mark that
Cupid gives as the time needed to make paper from start to finish, the narrator slowly follows the
slip, inch by inch, through the endless cylinders, pauses, and disappearing acts (Baym 2369).

And finally, to the “paper-fall” the slip flows until nine minutes to the dot have passed; he is
observing the conclusion—cheap writing paper etched with his singular scrap of which it was
now, inarguably, a piece (Baym 2369). The narrator states, “My travels were at an end, for here
was the end of the machine” and the end of his journey into the mystery of the paper machine
and its facets (Baym 2369).
At the beginning of “Tartarus”, the narrator explains why the paper-mill not far from
Woedolor Mountain in New England is his destination, despite there being one in the next town
(Baym 2363). His reasons are two-fold: “For economy’s sake, and partly for the adventure of the
trip, I now resolved to cross the mountains, some sixty miles, and order my future paper at the
Devil’s Dungeon paper-mill” (Baym 2363). This quote is representative of actively searching for
experiences to live in order to have them become theories for future generations. Even if the
narrator does not keenly make an effort to create a future concept, Emerson writes that it will
stay in his mind for a time and once it is “a ripe fruit”, the experience will develop into a
conscious thought; hence, it will be ready to float into the world as its own being (Emerson 6).
The key is lack of observation (Emerson 6).
The American must be self-trusting, a concept that is fundamental to the Emersonian-
based qualities that all people must perform to be considered concretely American. In the closing
dialogue between the narrator and Old Bach, the owner of the paper-mill, the stranger wonders
why the employees are labeled girls since he feels that at least a number of them should be
referred to as women (Baym 2371). As a response, Old Bach says that he will not allow married
women to work in his paper-mill, seeing as “they are apt to be off-and-on too much” (Baym
2371). The preferred status of the girls is evidently correlated with the steadiness of their work
ethic, despite 72 hour weeks, according to Old Bach (Baym 2371). Married women are

analogous to the bachelors of “Paradise” in that they are free to choose whom to spend time with
among the other married women. Following this, the maids of “Tartarus” are then parallel to the
Benedicks. Ironically, this logic concludes that the maids are the ones who stand up against the
opposition of what is expected of them (marriage, etc.), trusting their ideals despite negative
connotations.
All of the above discussed qualities are American due to their obeying the central concept
of what Emerson listed as those required of the American Scholar, regardless of the
generalization that made possible the measurement of all Americans. By removing the “Scholar”
from the list, the physiognomies have merely matched those that were proposed or unconsciously
idealized by the American people as the standards of their character in the nineteenth century
texts, including Melville’s “Paradise of Bachelors/Tartarus of Maids.”
Works Cited
Baym, Nina, ed. The Norton Anthology American Lit. 6th ed. New York, New York: Norton &
Company, 2003. 2355-2371. Print.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "The American Scholar." American Transcendentalism Web. American
Transcendentalism Web, n.d. Web. 13 Dec 2011.
<http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/transcendentalism/resources/index.html>.

ENG 314
Professor Olmstead—Writing Fiction
It took me four consecutive attempts to successfully register for this class. It was worth
the wait. The most my storytelling had progressed in the two years prior resulted from Writing
Essays. I was ready to prove my worth in fiction for a collegiate environment. I soon came to
realize the toil I faced in trying to create people from thin air. I felt inadequate—how could non-
fiction be easier to write than a story in which I controlled every variable? In the attempt to
remain in the parameters of fiction, I inadvertently restricted a viable source of inspiration. I
remember complaining to friends, wondering if the class, if Olmstead would notice how true my
stories were. As much as I would have enjoyed the sense of accomplishment in rising above the
struggle and completing three stories from scratch, I have to accept that I did not. The stories I
did write, however, I do not regret. For each one, its origins were a memory or an emotion that
tugged at my chest like a junkyard dog. I now feel an exquisite absence where it had been
chained. Even better than a verbal rant from which my words could fade away, these stories keep
my memories, my thoughts safe.

Erinn Colmenares
14 December 2012
Professor Olmstead
Word Count: 2,078
Spectatorship
“Goo. The air is goo slathered all over me.” Exhaling, cigarette smoke illuminated by the
porch light surrounds her like an aura. She stands in it without much temperament.
“It’s the humidity,” the tall one answers. He also sucks and blows out smoke.
“Of course it’s the humidity. It’s always the humidity!” The aura dissipates as she waves
her arms, suddenly energized. The humidity stays, unperturbed. “If there’s one thing I know,
humidity is always the culprit of a shitty night’s sleep.”
Tall One giggles. “You could always sleep naked.”
“Oh yeah, so that the goo can get everywhere. Not just on my arms and pants and in my
hair, but everywhere. That sounds perfect.” Like conducting an orchestra, her gestures fracture
the light’s rays and her voice shrieks and rumbles in harmony.
“All right, let’s calm down. There’s no need to scream. Besides, aren’t you used to
having goo-like substances around when you’re naked?” He and Smoking Girl stay silent for a
moment, cigarettes burning close to their fingers.
Deadpan, I hardly heard over the train, “That was weak, a disappointment.” Smoking Girl
sucks and blows out. “But, I am more disappointed in our decision to let you into the house.”
Tall One laughs and breaks the rays as he teeters in front of the light. “If this is the kind of shit

jokes and puns you’re pulling out the night before school, we’re all gonna have a rough
semester.” The last seven words are chuckled, soft percussion to the conversation. Both ring out
laughs in earnest together, a grand finale with the door whining out its last note. The light is
whole again and my show outside is over.
The house hums with what could have been anything as far as I, an outsider, knew.
Walking past, there is no party but the good times are palpable. Curiosity is smeared over the
façade (not unlike the gooey air), and any student could feel the weight of an unresolved
question, an unrequited matter. Sticky and bemusing, the Small Living Unit (SLU) life
uncaringly oozes into my dreams.
Throughout the week, I find it’s obvious their rituals were placed but not rigid.
Preferences is the word, not rituals. They eat in a certain area, preferably at a shady table. Social
butterflies flitter all around and inside the group each day. Those missing are missed, not
grieved. The afternoons they spend lazily reading, studying wordlessly though conversations
were not discouraged. All full of contradictions that couldn’t bother them less. Access to their
world is invisible to the outsider, which couldn’t bother me more. My grasp slips on the helve of
my ideology, the only tool I possess to make sense of the unanswered question. Without it, I’ll
falter, fall, and fail.
They dominate class discussions, interested and interesting. Their passions aired out with
their responses like the next-door-neighbor’s laundry in the backyard; they were unabashedly
transparent about their everyday and they synchronized it smoothly with studious topics. Trotting
to Daniel’s Delicatessen in a group, I observe a slacker boy teasing the Smoking Girl about a
current tirade and she shoots back literary criticism theories. Slacker Boy’s flip-flops smack the
concrete as the two analyze the day’s discussion between chomps and gulps of their dinner.

From my position on the curb a ways away, I see a slim girl with a shaky stance behind
the pair. I hear her ask, “What’re you guys talking about?”
Turning, Smoking Girl greets her warmly and whacks the curb next to her. “Sit on down,
girl. We’re talking about what Alberts was saying about formalism in our class today.”
“Oh cool, tell me. What’s formalism?” Cross-legged for the moment, Slim Girl nods the
two along as they explain the theory. With each question, Slim Girl’s knees come up in
anticipation and flatten out again after the response. It was no lecture; this girl absorbed Slacker
Boy’s and Smoking Girl’s ideas. They, too, want to discuss her thoughts.
“Another way to think about it is with house interviews. When we were interviewing you,
we were pretty good friends and I did mention that I thought you were a good guy, but we’re not
as focused on that as much as how well you’d be for the house. It’s great if everyone likes having
you around and shit,” she chuckles, “but your replies and the snippet of personality we get in
those twenty minutes are your saving grace, which is analogous to what the author gives us—the
text.” Slim Girl’s red hair sways back and forth between her companions. “We can’t go around
and interview your friends and read your journal to figure you out just like we can’t read the
author’s biography, read other published works, and read a history of the time period. No, it’s on
the author to give us clues. Whoever’s interviewing needs to tell us the things they think are
important for us to hear, no one or nothing else.”
“That’s always something that I haven’t been totally on board with,” Smoking Girl
mentions. She strokes her chin pensively before continuing. “It’s not really fair for someone to
come hang out with us and make that relationship happen and then it be ignored when the time
comes. I mean, what’s the point if it’s not gonna help you get into the house, you know?”

I smile as I listen to this sound young girl play devil’s advocate.
“But then if we do use that as evidence,” Slacker Boy interjected, “it’s unfair for people
who might be intimidated to come in and hang out even if they super want to interview. Also,
can I bum a cigarette, pleasies?” He grins obnoxiously when handed a smoke and light. Smoking
Girl and Slim Girl followed suit, sans grinning. I wonder how smoking might feel, maybe I can
ask….
“They shouldn’t be intimidated,” Smoking Girl continues, smoke and words drifting into
the lavender atmosphere of dusk. She swiftly dismisses the beginning of Slacker Boy’s counter.
“I mean, I’m sure some are; I definitely was. But I think that the ones that swallow it and put
themselves at our mercy are the ones we want.”
Stepping back, I circumvent the crowd to keep hidden. I temporarily leave earshot of the
conversation but follow Slacker Boy’s flip-flop slaps. The thought occurs and worry strikes of
their knowing my presence. Can they feel my straight arrow gaze, perceive my frustrated sighs
or anxious pearls of sweat? I leave soon after the group meanders away, perhaps to a new
adventure.
“Fortunately, we don’t have to worry about this shit right now since we have enough
people this semester.” Slacker Boy and his cohorts smile happily to each other, arms linked and
strides equal.
This line goes almost unregistered; it was almost too quiet, too calm. It almost didn’t
make the journey around the corner, through a dirty, almost dusty exhaust cloud, and to my ear
almost blocked by music. I nearly didn’t hear it, nearly didn’t trip on a bag, nearly didn’t form a
plan when I barely acknowledged the moans of something I hardly believed to be there. Yet I did
hear Slacker Boy’s voice a moment before I walk alone and plug my ears. Indeed, I trip and

follow a trail of strewn about items that begin with a backpack. I know, definitively understand
the animalistic sounds once I arrive at the trail’s end. With more confidence and force than I’ve
ever felt, I seize the helve of my sanity and shatter the barrier barring me from the answer to my
unresolved question.
--
I breathe deeply and stare into myself. My shirt is mussed and stained, my hair is on end
from constantly wiping away sweat, fear, anxiety. Leaning on the sink, I breathe and wash my
hands, my arms, my neck then snatch a towel and clear my foggy glasses. I watch my hands as
they methodically swab my view of my world, blink the adrenaline away and focus my sight.
These clothes will have to go. At my old university, I knew how to hide my excursions due to the
anonymity the mass of students allowed me. Unfortunately, the sudden transfer has kept me from
preparing for these off hours but I’m not worried. From my observations, this school strives to
patch each student to the others as a quilt maker does: unique and individual in their own right,
yet together they form a warm atmosphere away from the cold, cold world. Where they come
from does not matter as much as where they are going, what they are doing. It will be simple to
deceive in a place so desperately desiring decency, so trustworthy and pure.
Within twenty hours, an email spreads a report of a girl’s launch from the nest into
adulthood. There is no evidence to suggest foul play, thus acquaintances and professors believe a
film-inspired story; better than nothing. Too enlightened to stay in a regimented environment, the
girl packed some clothes, books, and food into her backpack and set off into the night. Most
figure that she’d taken her bike to the nearest truck stop, dumped it and found a friendly trucker
to start out. Others wonder if last year’s scandalous break up tweaked her so much that she
wanted to erase and write over it. Maybe she realized the world (or heaven) was too enticing to

wait for and jumped headfirst. Whichever it is, only I know the truth and no one has a whiff of
anything except bleach.
Utilizing this emotional hold the girl had on their community, I chip away at the
obstruction formed from grief that surrounds the SLUs, learning about the small blonde everyone
missed so dearly. They’re happy for her initiative, but saddened by her desire for secrecy and a
midnight flight. Critical thinking, diverse perspectives are what mortar the white house on the
corner; it confuses them to know that the blonde did not wish for their last words, did not require
their acceptance of her goals. I note the skills and concepts she brought to the house, clothe
myself with the girl’s ideals, and mask my face with the glasses she’d left behind.
The following semester, when the campus is buzzing about finding a new member, I am
ready. I write in her answers and signs up for an interview. My stiff bones creak while stepping
down from the porch, sweat accumulating on my neck. I study the bushes from where I’d first
watched my new friends on the last evening of summer. Gnawing at the filter (the brand of
cigarettes the blonde had preferred), I perch behind the bushes and reminisce on the night that
had started my plan, the plan so near its final phase.
“Fortunately, we don’t have worry about this shit right now since we have enough people
this semester.” I slow my walk when this sentence hits me, not realizing my ankle has caught on
a strap. The evening breeze is gentle, caressing my hair and face as I turn to see what had
caused my stumble. The backpack is familiar but the trail of school supplies on the ground, the
notebook paper somersaulting in the wind nabs my attention. I hear a soft groan down the alley,
follow it.
Crumpled and defeated, a petite figure lays in the grime and dirt. I step forward as the
creature whimpers once more. Her clothes are ripped, her shoes absent, her hair streaked with

dark red clumps, essentially naked save for her torn shirt and socks. My next step crunches the
gravel and the girl weakly murmurs unintelligibly. I stop. I recognize her from a class; she’s a
member of the white house. The backpack, her blonde hair—and her glasses are near the wall,
cracked and irrevocably ruined.
Slacker Boy’s words echo in the alley. This is a novel experience though not unrelated to
my prior experience. Before my mind consciously decides anything, the girl is silent and
unmoving. In my hands is a stone splattered with tiny white fragments stuck to some red liquid. I
slump to my knees as exhaustion engulfs me; I feel alive, invigorated, and productive, though
almost completely drained.
After a few hours of janitorial work, I ignore my roommate’s lewd grunting in the next
room and wash my hands and face in the bathroom. I am now closer than ever to understanding
the SLU factor, to becoming one of them.

Erinn Colmenares
13 December 2012
Professor Olmstead
Word Count: 1,872
Free Falling
“Brian, this is difficult to say: There are some issues that have jeopardized your
professional relationship with this company.” Mr. Maddison won’t meet Brian’s eyes or face.
Brian’s brow sinks low, his mouth stretching like taffy toward his chin. “Wha—I’m
sorry, what issues?”
Maddison sighs. His large hand opens to offer, “In the past few months you’ve shown a
dip in your productivity.”
“I’m sure of it; I told you it would happen. But I believe you mentioned I had the full
support of the company,” Brian interjects.
“Correct.” The manager pauses; he shuffles papers in his mind. “That is true. But you
haven’t shown much of an improvement since that discussion.” Maddison clears his throat, stares
just past Brian’s shoulder with his fingers laced. “All I can tell you is your productivity rates no
longer justify keeping you as an employee. The company expected higher rates by this time and
they didn’t see them.”
“I’m being fired?”

Brian ponders Mr. Maddison and the morning in the bar across from his and his
girlfriend’s favorite restaurant. He’s coming back later in the evening to dine and drive his car
home. He shoots two more Jack Daniels down his throat then slides his change into the bus’s
toll. By six, Brian steps into his apartment he shared with his four-year girlfriend Maddie; he
found her in the bedroom getting ready.
“I enjoy the sparkles,” Brian comments, ignoring his unemployed status, and relishing in
his committed relationship.
Maddie’s reflection smiled over her shoulder. The deep red sequin dress flowed at the
bottom and let Brian peak at her ankles whenever she took a step. When she was all done up,
Brian sauntered over and kissed her cheek. “Happy anniversary, Maddie. Give me one second.”
Brian grins across the room with his gift behind his back. Maddie makes him want to be
goofy just to have her giggle; he gallops to her and presents the velvet jewelry box like a
sacrifice. Their mirror image looks pretty good with Maddie’s new ruby bracelet against her
paleness, Brian’s arms framing her scarlet form.
“It gives you another reason to wear red,” Brian chuckles.
“More like it gives you another chance to see me in red. Also, you should stick a pin in
that nickname, at least for tonight.” She pecks his cheek gratefully. “Happy anniversary.”
Brian follows her out the door after changing and grabs a taxi as they are walking onto
the main street. “What, you’d rather me say ‘Ms. Madison?’ It’s too close to…” Brian’s retort is
left hanging after a wave of tipsy splashes over his brain, stopping him from remembering work.
Madison didn’t comment and Brian let it go.

The couple sits alongside each other in the booth Brian had chosen on their half-year
anniversary. Madison positions her knees toward Brian then takes a long sip from her wine.
“Brian, this isn’t easy to say… We need to talk.” Madison avoids Brian’s face, only
staring at his neck or chest. Brian fingers his glass tenderly. Madison sighs and continues, “In the
past few months you’ve been really down, Brian.”
“Yep,” Brian interjects, “and we discussed this. Work was really kicking my ass; I
haven’t been excited to do much of anything when I’m not working. I’m pretty tired, as you
probably are, too.”
“Yeah. Well, it’s been a while since we talked about that.”
“Like three months, right? Yeah.”
“And you haven’t gotten much better.”
Brian states matter-of-factly, “I believe it; I told you it would happen, Maddie. What did
you expect besides what I told you to expect?” Brian figures that a breach of contract is a ledge
thick enough to clutch on to, the darkest abyss below him filled with uncertainty, humiliation,
and failure. The plans for the future hover over the abyss, out of reach. “This is like being fired
all over again…”
Madison shot her head up. “Fired all over again? What does that mean?”
Brian is stone: his eyes wide, lips a straight line, breath encased with no relief.
“This is exactly what I’m talking about, Brian. You don’t tell me the important stuff…”
Madison sighs. “I think we should break up.”

Brian frowns as deeply as he ever has in his life. His voice is stern only to counteract the
shakiness. “Are you fucking serious?”
Madison swirls her refilled wine glass to keep her hands busy. “We’ve barely spent time
together lately, or not talked about your work. And now, you didn’t even tell me you were
fired—”
“It happened this morning! Did you want me to ruin our fucking anniversary?” He pauses
within Madison’s silence. “I guess you beat me to the punch, huh?” Brian glares at the woman to
his right. They have no bodily contact at this point.
“What’s wrong with you?” Madison attempts to calm Brian down, for decency’s sake.
Brian thinks about leaving before his self-control counts down to zero.
“What’s wrong with you?” His neck feels moist, cold, from his sweat and fear. Heaving
the exit door open with a snort, Brian crosses the street to his car, Madison nipping his heels.
“I—I understand this is frustrating.”
Brian frowns, steam blowing out his nose. “Do you, Madison? Just a few weeks ago, we
talked about how well we’d be as parents. How do you fucking want me to react? This was not a
conversation in the works—we were okay! Now you’re telling me you’re done without giving
me a chance or this four-fucking-year relationship a chance to be fixed. For me to try and fix it.
Do you understand how frustrating this moment is, Maddie?” He spits out the nickname; it left
betrayal on his lips.
Madison sighs again, shifts in her heels. Her figure sparkles under the bar’s parking lot
lights. Brian feels a high school reunion nametag slapped on his chest reading, Hello, my social

status is: Unemployed, Single, soon to be Loser. He smacks his palms on his car’s window,
whirls around.
“Do you still love me?” He toes the gravel.
“Yes.”
“Are you in love with me?”
Madison’s sad eyes swing between Brian and his car. Her hesitance shrivels all of his
organs to raisins. “I don’t think so.”
Brian falls back hard against his car, deflating as his hands slide off his month-length
beard. “So, you create an expectation and want me to take care of it without telling me. Is that
what I’m getting? I’m pretty sure that’s what I’m hearing from you, please correct me.” Despite
his begging, his face is a scowl. He chucks his glance at Madison. “Is there someone else? Did
you cheat on me?”
Madison drops the glance readily. “No.”
“How do I know you’re telling the fucking truth?”
“Brian, stop it.”
“Why the fuck should I? I can’t tell you to stop what you’re doing.” Brian only reacts to
the injustice of the situation in the same way people scream out profanities for stubbed toes at
unyielding furniture. He wants Madison to realize what she’s doing, to say Happy belated April
Fool’s Day. “Why are you doing this?”
“This wasn’t a choice I expected to make.”

“You know all the plans I have in my mind with you in them, with you as my future?
You’ve got to; I told you all of them. We wanted to go places, remember, after we got all settled
for a couple years? Now I can’t do that stuff. Where do I go now, Madison, huh? I can’t go
anywhere. What the fuck do I do with my life now? You are—were the center of it, the steps I’d
eventually take with you holding on. That we’d eventually take. I had a full picture of it; now
there’s a huge fucking chunk missing. You ruined it, you ruined everything. Four years, four
years, Madison… It was just building a home on sand. There’s nothing left here, Maddie…”
Madison isn’t anywhere when Brian raises his head after a long time. His cheeks, neck,
and eyes feel sore, his mind so close to quitting time. Brian’s suit jacket keeps him hidden in the
backseat from the bar’s employees.
Brian and Todd have drinks in the same bar across from the same restaurant to celebrate
the weekend. In their shared apartment, Brian keeps a coaster under his shirts to count the weeks
away. There are 39 coasters lining his drawer; at some point he needs a new aloof method.
Almost everything is the same.
“Why’re you looking over there?”
Brian turns back. “Why wouldn’t I?”
Todd swigs his beer. “Do you want to leave?”
“It’s fine.” Brian looks back at him. “I’m fine. It sucks that it happened, but I’m not
gonna talk about it right now. I’m fine.”

Todd keeps the air clear, waiting. Brian chugs his beer so the words might wash away.
Like the beer in his stomach, Brian’s words bubble up, then are burped out: “Why didn’t she tell
me anything? It’s bullshit.”
“It is bullshit.”
“Communication—” Brian begins.
Todd joins in, “—is the most important part of any relationship.” Brian glares. “Also,
jinx; fuck you, Brian, I’m talking now.”
Brian nibbles on his beer’s glass lips.
“You need to move on, Brian. You’re becoming the worst and that’s after the benefits of
being dumped, of the length of the relationship, of being dumped on an anniversary, and of also
being fired that same day. You get that you have a lot of pity buffer, right?”
Brian nods.
“Good. You’re a great person and you need to remember that and believe that about
yourself. Madison was fun and lovely, but it didn’t work out—and it doesn’t matter why. Ah,
you’re still jinxed, shut your mouth. I’m not done.” Todd orders two shots and two more beers.
“The finest and damnedest in the place, please. The point is that there’s nothing you can do to
change it. Stare into that gap, the abyss you’re always talking about: Either you can clamber
around for some exception from gravity to save you from falling, or you can find a way to fly
down like a hawk or something. Which do you want to be, the hawk or an egg destined to be
demolished?

Todd pauses as the drinks come to their table. “Thank you, my dear, greatly appreciated.”
He stares back at Brian’s poignant face. Brian welcomes the soft grip on his forearm, though
does not move for a few minutes.
Todd continues, “My point is that you had goals before Madison and you still have them.
And now you have room for more goals, new goals. You know what I mean?”
“You’re right, you’re right. Now I just want to drink about it, since you—we brought it
up,” says Brian draining his beer down.
Todd grins. “I figured as much. We’ll do a couple of these; sleep it off on the bus, and
then… Well, okay!”
Brian had cut him off by doing his shot and wiggling his eyebrows over his beer, egging
Todd on like a kid.
On the bus, Brian takes his own row and Todd naps behind him. Even though he can’t
remember exactly what Todd told him, he gets the gist.

ENG 395
Dr. DeMarco—History of the English Language
This class made me recall my high school teachers’ claims about the calculated ratio of
class time versus the expected homework time: for every hour in class, a student should spend at
least three hours on the assignments. I should have taken heed of their warning. Dr. DeMarco
also cautioned me, telling me the several viewpoints the class would explore—geographical,
historical in art and in politics, as well as linguistic. According to a former student, it is
comparable to Organic Chemistry. Luckily, a number of my friends surrounded me each day, a
comfort I could not appreciate more. At least I was not alone in the struggle. The project I most
enjoyed was the etymology of a word presentation. For my chosen word—author—I was to
exhibit its development in spelling and definition, observing any historical events which may
have influenced its course to the present day. While DeMarco had not lost a bit of the enthusiasm
I so enjoyed from taking her Medieval Literature course, I regrettably fell behind with the
assignments. For each class, the workload continued to grow into a mountain I could scarcely
hope to overcome. Fortunately, the final project arrived and I was able to place every ounce of
motivation into it, if only to finish and never have to do it again.

Erinn Colmenares
History of the English Language
Dr. DeMarco
22 December 2012
Pre-Modern Libraries and Book Collections
Present day libraries developed from the ruins and scraps of pre-modern libraries and
personal book collections dating back as far as the 23rd century BC (Casson 8). As the book itself
went through stages of diverse forms before it had its current appearance, libraries did as well.
Frederick G Kilgour in The Evolution of the Book portrays a history of the library highlighting
the language shifts that had likely influenced the book’s transformations. Lionel Casson, the
author of Libraries in the Ancient World, sees the library’s progression as dependent on high
literacy rates and a widespread avid interest in learning. Lastly, Raymond Irwin’s The Origins of
the English Library describes a geographical and chronological report of all libraries for which
there is either physical or literary evidence. Through these authors and their distinct approaches,
this paper attempts to give a broader, more enveloping account on how the contemporary library
came to be, largely focusing on the ancient libraries of Ashurbanipal and Alexandria.
Classical ancient libraries from the 23rd century BC to the fifth century AD began with
archives in underground storage spaces attached to royal palaces, such as the discovery of Ebla
in Syria from 1980 (2-3). Similarly located in Assyria, the private collection of Ashurbanipal was
“founded for the ‘royal contemplation’”, which meant due to his high authority in “scribal art,”

the 7th century BC ruler could peruse his library whenever and however he pleased (Kilgour 13).
Ashurbanipal was learned in the reading and writing of cuneiform and “helped himself to tablets
in the temples” in Babylon 648BC (Casson 11). A compilation of both Sumerian and Akkadian
cuneiform clay tablets innovatively organized into five subjects, the enormous stock had several
texts that assisted Ashurbanipal in his ruling duties mainly as interpreter of the laws (Kilgour
20). There were translated vocabulary lists of Sumerian, Akkadian, and other contemporary
languages, which likely facilitated his ruling throughout the kingdom despite the variety of
languages. Incantations, prayers, wisdom sayings, and fables comprised a section perhaps to
exemplify certain verdicts; the subject of ancient epics may have also been used for this purpose,
similar to Biblical parables (Casson 13). Another section consisted of mathematical and
scientific articles, though omen texts of daily observations such as civilian activities and the
weather were the main basis of Ashurbanipal’s interpretations (21).
Clay tablets were the best choice for permanent records in this era of the book because of
the location of Ashurbanipal’s kingdom. Alongside the Upper Tigris River, Assyria had an
abundance of wet clay from the river’s bottom, meaning an inexpensive price to produce, buy,
and sell (9). The material was compatible with the cuneiform used in the area, its texture prior to
being baked allowing a thin sharpened stick to form long angular characters. Its durability was a
major advantage, especially during raids and attacks destroying buildings with fire, further
solidifying the text (Kilgour 14). Unfortunately, the king’s library was not impervious to the
crumbling rubble of the buildings, which crushed several of the clay tablets and shuffled the
fragments away from the rest (Casson 11).
Despite the huge advantages the clay tablets give to modern researchers attempting to
have textual evidence of this period’s written records, the decline of this method began

approximately in 2000BC (Kilgour 24). The West Semitic almost-alphabet syllabaries were
introduced, which managed a much less significant number of characters than cuneiform. By
1100BC, the Greeks designed their 22-character alphabet, decreasing memorization of hundreds
to less than two dozen symbols (Casson 20). This narrowing assisted in the spread of literacy in
Athens; however, it remained at a relatively small percentage due mainly to the lax focus on
producing literature at that time. With the sixth century, papyrus began to take hold as the
preferred writing support. Even though clay tablets were not completely replaced from one day
to another, papyrus definitively took the majority by the second century AD (23).
Half a century later, the Egyptians had a similar situation with papyrus and the Nile River
that Assyria, clay tablets, and the Upper Tigris River had. From about the 24th century BC, the
Egyptians slowly developed a monopoly on the papyrus plant growing down the length of the
Nile and found it to be useful for several centuries, in part due to the dry atmosphere of the
region that promoted papyri storage (Kilgour 26). Derived from hieroglyphics, the hieratic and
demotic scripts were developed by 700BC and were painted with brush pens onto the thin,
fibrous papyrus (24). These scripts were continually designed for easier and faster writing, vastly
streamlining the service Egypt was serving at the time as the producer of all national and Greek
books lasting 1500 years. The use of red ink helped readers find information within the text
through bolding, isolating, separating, and differentiating certain words in titles, headings, and
the first paragraphs and sentences (25). This process of rubrication is a feature seen in much of
the surviving professional domain papyri fragments from the region, such as the pre-Greek
medical Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus document (29). For the most part, those extant fragments
are archives of legal or administrative records; their content and present-day case records lawsuit
trials suggest the Egyptians would have kept hefty quantities of record files (30).

However, there are no major Egyptian papyri collections, the lack of which is largely
owing to the material’s poor withstanding against the elements (30). Papyrus had to be handed
delicately for its fragility and stored in jars away from damp spaces to deter bacteria. It is known
chiefly through records of the Greeks—centuries after the Egyptians lost empirical power over
much of southeastern modern Europe—how tedious and tender the care of papyri book
collections was and the form of the “book” (31). The stiff, thin material curled into itself in one
direction, forcing scribes to utilize only one side. This limitation influenced the length of a
papyrus book, amounting to two to four books of a Homer epic, thus the number of jars, buckets,
or other cylindrical containers needed for a book’s storage (Casson 14). Scholars of the time who
travelled at least occasionally required their personal collections near them, and the jars of texts
were likely obnoxious to carry around.
The Museum of Alexandria and its library was “an ancient version of a think-tank”, its
creators (the Ptolemies) hoping it would become both a place of inspiration for intellectuals and
the best resource for such people searching for the exact book they may need for whatever
research (Casson 31). Kilgour discusses the likelihood of many rumors’ validity as to the size of
the library based on known dimensions of an average papyrus roll and the huge proposed amount
of 700,000 volumes stored within the library’s walls. In a 30”x6.25” shelf, 120 rolls of 1.25” in
diameter would be held; each bookcase would have nine shelves, amounting to 1,062 rolls in any
one bookcase. For the library to hold 700,000 rolls there would need to be about 660 30-inch
sections, meaning approximately 1,648 feet for its perimeter. The calculations serve merely to
make the point that if the Library of Alexandria were such a massive storage place, Kilgour
argues there would have been evidence found (32). This is not to say the library did not or could

not have existed; it only suggests perspective on hypotheses concerning its capacity to efficiently
and successfully store several hundred thousand books.
Parchment had begun to be used prior to the complete abandonment of papyrus, which let
other civilizations break away from their dependence on Egypt for its papyrus in preference to
parchment (40). Made from the flesh of almost any animal, parchment could be produced
anywhere animals were present; by this time, the Egyptians had run the papyrus plant into near
extinction. With the new writing support, a new form of the book came to being that was clearly
preferred over the jars of papyrus roll—the codex. Its origins date back to the first century AD in
a Pompeian wall painting showing a man with both a papyrus roll and a polyptych, wooden
tablets bound together with leather straps through holes drilled into the margins (49). The
codex’s design was based on the functionality of polyptychs; they could be almost any size and
were used for both professional and daily activities. The codex served, and continues to presently
serve, as a much more durable structure which allowed for a vast amount of information to be
collected into one volume (52). Parchment could be written on both sides and the wooden covers
secured the pages as well, if not better, than either clay tablets or papyrus rolls. This outer layer
also provided protection from damage to the pages, though they remained vulnerable to raids and
vandals (55).
Between the ancient Greek and Roman libraries and later medieval sets, there exists no
clear connection as to how the architecture came to be so alike (Irwin 56). The classical
institutional libraries were mainly designed for intellectuals to read aloud together in the daylight
as literacy was not so widespread and artificial light was either dangerous or ineffective (58). To
facilitate reading, teaching and meeting in groups, many of these libraries had cloisters, an open
space where one could spread out and sit with the books in the sun until night fell (60). By that

time of day, libraries had colonnades designed to protect the books from thieves and assist in
controlling the weather for the libraries’ patrons; the colonnades also provided privacy for all at
once (53).
Libraries in ancient Greece were used for myriad services in conjunction with any
building that would have needed a place to store records. Casson, as mentioned before, states
Ashurbanipal’s reasoning to have a library of his own as professionally requiring the source
close enough so to quickly reference a tablet as opposed to continually fetching the texts from a
more centralized location (12). But the heyday of the Greek library was after the fourth century
BC in which literacy was common among the growing group of men who wanted to possess
knowledge and acquire it without the hassle of, for instance, apprenticeship (54). Once
intellectualism and pleasure-bound reading and writing became frequent activities, personal
private libraries rose in popularity and, more importantly, in scholarly necessity. Similar to
Ashurbanipal, Aristotle amassed a large collection of texts, one so sizeable that it needed a
system of organization, a feature still developing (56). Aristotle’s assortment eventually became
a source to base future libraries’ stocks upon, especially considering the popularity of public
plays performed during the philosopher’s lifetime (57). An Athenian law was written stating the
requirement of an authoritative version of all Greek plays to be kept on hand; actors were thus
legally obligated to never deviate from their scripts (57-8). This law shows the commitment the
Greeks had toward accuracy in the literature in which they involved themselves, resulting in a
respect to evidentiary support first within the subject of theatre then later subjects across the
board.
In conclusion, the modern library derived from the need of recording and distributing
information to anyone who may find use for it and the desire to learn different aspects of

knowledge in order to be intellectually similar, if not equivalent, to professionals in a given field.
The lack of libraries in a civilization could suggest a true deficiency in the value of history and
knowledge from those who came before the present, even if the only information recorded would
be administrative in nature. Kilgour, Irwin, and Casson were able to pinpoint a specific feature in
their reports, yet it seems more useful to combine their features together to form a
comprehensive study on the origins and growth of the library, as Ptolemy I envisioned for the
Library of Alexandria.
Works Cited
Casson, Lionel. Libraries in the Ancient World. Ann Arbor, Michigan: Yale University, 2001.
Print.
Irwin, Raymond. The Origins of the English Library. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1958.
Print.
Kilgour, Frederick G. The Evolution of the Book. New York, New York: Oxford University
Press, 1998. Print.

ENG 480
Professor Olmstead—Advanced Creative Writing Workshop
The common emotion I felt for the duration of this course was overwhelming anxiety.
Since discovering the creek of inspiration consisting of my relationships in Writing Essays, I
couldn’t stop trying to make sense them on paper. Every story I tried to write about characters
distinct from myself or my friends would stop dead after a page. It was usually the night before
my deadline I would sigh and decide yet again to pose my personality and experiences onto the
protagonist and set her within a memory. There was no other way I could finger-force words
onto the computer.
I felt cheap, unskilled; an aspiring novelist with a bland imagination. I listened to the
stories around me, written by my peers, my closest friends, and I wished I could create the
environments they seemed to so effortlessly create. Not only did they make it look easy, they
were also taking chances and challenging their skills, breaking away from familiar college
backdrops. When had the bar been set so high? I spent most of this class feeling sorry for myself,
comparing my quasi-autobiographies to what seemed like my friends’ germinating seeds of 21st
century classic American novels.

Erinn Colmenares
Adv Creative Writing—Fiction
Professor Olmstead
Word Count: 2046
Fuck Me
I’m a bull facing matador Bugs Bunny and my beastly, heaving body is steaming red
anger.
Will frowns, sighs, paces. “What do you need to leave it alone? What do you want so you
can move on?”
Pulling my hair at the roots painlessly, head shaking pensively, “I want to know what I
did wrong, what changed her mind. I can’t get over it; it doesn’t make sense.” My eyes start to
bulge out as my brain overflows with all the possibilities.
“Tina, stop. You can’t have that. What’s second best?” He is determined and tranquil. His
eyebrows are dark against red hair he’d chosen two weeks ago.
I deflate. Next best, next best. “A fuck buddy. No, 25. I want to fuck 25 people.”
Will’s mouth, chin, nose, and eyelids go through a series of emotions, reactions,
confusions before responding. He blows his cheeks out and crinkles his forehead; his eyes on my
feet, his hands serving imaginary silver platters.
I cross my legs and toss the ball to him with a waft of my wrist. His hands settle two
inches above my knees. I swallow air. I feel five-day-old whiskers on my closest friend’s chin; I
could hardly see them three minutes ago. Will kisses me gently. I place his face against my neck
and glance down. He already has a boner. We lie down on his bed and he quickly picks up his

pillows to form a foothill behind me. He kisses me again so I let it happen. If it’s this easy, I’ll be
done before the end of the year.
Will’s tongue is not what I expect. It’s very large and slippery, and my mouth can’t
accommodate. There is hair where I’ve never seen it on Will’s chest and belly. When we get to
the point where the bee’s stinger will somehow give the bird its gift, Will and I both stop and
wait. I can’t really tell for what reason yet the moment lingers with no control.
“Oh, fuck, that’s right.” Will leaps off me and delves his arm into a drawer. An
exclamation, a small struggle, and Will is back between my legs. I try very hard not to imagine
sausage links. “All right, good?”
Nodding, I stare at the ceiling as I wait for synchronization. Will pokes and nudges and
jabs around. My hand attempts guidance but apparently Will’s got it. I curl my toes to stop any
tapping movements.
“A little lower,” I mention. He says nothing but then there it is. And like driving a screw
into cork, it is a slow procession through downtown. Before Will goes for another dive, I get his
attention.
“This is weird.” I stare at the green eyes.
“Yeah?” Indecision lifts Will’s voice like helium.
“Come on.”
“You come on,” he retorts just to expend sexual frustration. “Just the tip?”
I chortle. “I know, I’m the worst. I’m sorry. I’ll make it up to you.”
“No, I get it. Just blue balls, you know.” Will’s head pops into his shirt and after boxers
he plops at his desk. Tying my shoes, I hear moaning above me. Will blocks a third of the porn I
am right now just realizing is playing while I am in the room at this very moment.

“Why? What is wrong with you?” I yell out. He doesn’t even completely turn around to
address me.
“Did you not hear me? Blue balls.”
I smash the door shut, throw down a few shots, and call it a night.
The weekend began with plenty of anonymous party people to be fucked encompassing
me. Unfortunately, I cannot ooze sexual appeal as flowingly as I would prefer, so I decide to
knock off those friends for whom I could now overtly show interest. A chance opens up within
the hour when Will’s old dorm mate Danny offers three cigarettes for two shots of my Captain
Morgan. Outside, the wind whispers to me, whisking up the ends of my hair to do so. The
Captain swathes my face, chest, and stomach, blocking rejection from possibility.
Danny leans on the porch railing and puffs his cigarette. “You havin’ a good time?”
“It’s all right, yeah. Still early enough for something else.” I apprize his lengthy stature,
following his legs to his shoulder then his face. His shoes are falling apart and he needs a better
haircut.
We’re in my room sharing a thin joint and getting ready to watch one of my favorite TV
shows. The lights are off, my roommate is gone, and I settle my shoulder right into the crook
below Danny’s arm. He lets it fall behind my neck, wrist and hand limp. Throughout the show I
find new ways to get parts of my body touching or overlapping his. The most in reply I receive is
a few sniffs and grunts.
“Isn’t this show great?” I check for an opportunity to kick it off. There is a freckle on the
edge of his chin.
“It’s good, yeah. Really funny.”

The Captain urges me to be direct. Danny obviously doesn’t know what I want from him.
Rather than grasping his hand to gently crack open the door, I roundhouse kick it off its hinges
and start to unzip his jeans. He grips my wrist before I get an inch undone.
“It’s fine, I want this.” I smirk with hope.
Danny shakes his head. “Nope, I’m not doing this.”
“The fuck? Why not?” I counter.
“You won’t like it.” Danny crawls over me and leaves me on the bed, towering above me
more than usual.
“You don’t know me,” I reply one part in jest, another part definitely insulted but not
wanting to admit it.
“I’m not going to do this. You’re hurt and it’s not going to help,” Danny mutters.
“Stop patronizing me. I can make my own decisions on how to deal with my life,” I say.
The anger teapot in my mind is softly whistling.
“Tina, I’m gonna go before someone says something stupid.” Danny is frustratingly
reasonable and I hate every bit of his good nature.
“Danny, no, it’s fine.” I don’t know how to plea less pathetically. It doesn’t matter two
minutes later when I flinch at the front door’s reiteration of Danny’s decision. Avoiding the
acidic taste of rejection and loneliness, two joints from Danny’s stash cradle me to sleep.
Weeks pass in which I can’t pursue my mission as vigorously due in part to schoolwork
festering on my desk, along with the strain of constant disappointment. Blind dates with
freshmen I’d met early in the semester would end in handshakes. I was starting to go broke
buying my own drinks. There was also mounting fear of carpel tunnel positively correlated with
my increasingly unsatisfied libido.

“What is wrong with the guys in this city that refuse to fuck a desperate, heartbroken
girl?” I throw out to Hannah perched on the opposing armrest of our couch. I spill the tiniest bit
of mimosa on my lap, which I try to lick up, which forces me to leak more onto the carpet. I
ignore it and wait for Hannah’s answer.
“Stop worrying about it,” she says finally.
Lighting up the room, a kids’ TV movie attempts to teach us the value of friendship.
“Easy for you to say. Just look at you, all pretty and shit.” I gesture vaguely to her
features and drink more. I wish those teary-eyed scenes would work. Hannah says nothing. “You
could at least acknowledge my compliments, you bitch,” I bark.
“Thank you, Tina.” She pats me on the head. Realizing how puppy-like I seem sitting
straight in front of her lap, I stifle my offense and move away. Hannah accepts my arm on her
shoulders and I reel her in. Knowing she has a weakness, I nuzzle her ear and deflect her one
flailing hand as I move in for a slice of her neck.
She is a fiddle giggling and her vibrations tickle my nose. “Get out of here, Tina, stop.”
“That laugh tells me other things,” I quip easily.
My mimosa is safe from the struggle but Hannah’s is violently jostling despite her
attempts to waste not one drop. She fails and screeches when the chill sinks through to her waist.
I snicker almost evilly as Hannah stomps back, clothes exchanged. She fiercely points her finger
at me. I cut her off.
“One, that was not intentional. Two, Hannah, sex with a girl is ridiculous. And I’m
really good at it. What d’you say, huh?” I close with a wink, loosely framing my arms to
encourage a peek of my stomach under rumpled shirt.
She drops her hand, plunges into the couch. “It’s not happening, Tina.”

“But why?” I whine.
“Because I don’t like girls,” she returns in the same tone. “Also, you’ve wanted this for,
like, a year now. I’ve literally switched boyfriends and yet you continue this joke.”
“Who’s says it’s a joke, Hannah? What if I really, truly, deeply want you to consider me
as your next mating partner?”
Her eyes pierce me, waiting for more than 30 percent seriousness from me. I allow
gravity to leaden the atmosphere. I let my shoulders sag below the mound of frustration, doubt,
and general upset I’d come to accumulate. My head is suddenly too heavy for my neck; my
hands now hold it above my lap. I don’t feel too much regret at the image of it rolling off my
legs, resting in the center of the room. Without any more pressure to synthesize random events
into patterns from which to learn and live, I’d be fucking free.
“The men you’re trying to fuck are your friends who care about and respect you,”
Hannah remarks. “None of them are going to let you do one thing to them if you just want to feel
good for a couple hours.”
I avoid her gaze and pluck away lint. I’m scolded and desire nothing more than for the
past three months to be an awful dream full of anxiety and pearls of sweat. Swallowing my
forgotten mimosa, eyes tracing our loveseat, I attempt to end the conversation with a concluding
gesture.
I clap. I clear my throat and crack my back. I blow out a big gust of breath. I am waiting
for a feeling of rejuvenation, an undeniable epiphany which will evict the sense of foreboding
blistering my neck, chest, and face. Hannah smoothes my hair, soothing, then resuming.
“It’s going to take a while, Tina. And you’re not weak or dumb or pathetic or ridiculous
for not moving on immediately. There is no one who has had a long-term relationship who does

not sympathize with you. And even sixth graders empathize with losing one of the loves of your
life.”
“She was the love of my life, Hannah.”
“Absolutely not. What about blue whales? Or Fahrenheit 451? Or me?” she asks
playfully. “You have so many loves of your life that there isn’t just The Love.” Hannah shrugs.
“And it’s not like you still have the same depth of love for all the stuff when you were a kid. It
shifts and changes with its beholder.”
“You’re awfully all-knowing. Chinese for lunch?” I haphazardly chuck the joke at the
wall; it does not stick.
“Quiet, I’m talking now.” Giggling wisely, Hannah bops my nose and plants a cigarette
between my lips. “I don’t know what else to tell you, Tina. Just quit trying to fuck your friends
and try to be as happy as you can.”
An early morning fog cloaks the two of us, freshening my heated skin, drying my teary
eyes. Our cigarettes’ smoke assimilates rapidly as I ignore the flood of incessant telegrams
telling me to move on, get over it, let it go. It takes effort, but tonight I’m content smoking with
Hannah.
I tried to take Hannah’s advice as more than a kiss to my boo-boos. The forced inaction
was as irritating as slowly peeling band aids. I couldn’t just sit on my hands, waiting. At the bar
the following night, I chat up Jamie, a sweet girl who trills like a flute both on streets and within
bed sheets. My second tally was on the board; who would be next?

ENG 318
Dr. Gardner—Playwriting
This class is the most challenging I’ve ever taken. It was this or Screenwriting with
Professor Olmstead. I wanted something new, a different way to create characters. I figured it
couldn’t be so distinct from fiction that I should be nervous crossing the theatre threshold. I had
thought I had a secure handle on how to write dialogue. I knew the difference between the
perfect word and the convenient word. I felt safe until I read a quote on the white board on the
first day: something like, “Playwriting is closer to writing poetry than it is to writing fiction.”
Fear stirred inside me for the rest of that day and still churns around each time I go into class.
I told Dr. Gardner I wanted to learn whether I could write a play. With this class, I could
challenge myself with a form in which I’d always been interested yet never had the chance to
attempt properly. While writing creatively had always come relatively easily to me, this class
kicked my butt to such an extreme that I became afraid to go. I was terrified of the lack of
progress I saw within myself from week to week. Despite my poor attendance, Bonnie has been
determined and encouraging from the beginning, for which I could not be more appreciative.
Bonnie worked hard to convince me that anything I was able to write was indeed progress and
should not be discarded for absence of precision.
The play I wrote is incredibly personal and is still difficult to even look at, let alone edit.
For weeks I let it sit unfinished. It was not just a dramatic scene between two arbitrary characters
grown for merely a grade; it is a still unspoken conversation between my mother and I.
Accordingly, going to class did not only mean letting my classmates critique Samantha’s and
Eleanor’s actions. It felt much more as if they were judging me. I finally wrote the resolution

within hours of the Play Readings. I still do not think the play is finished, nor do I think its
ending is the one it needs. Because of its very real source I want the ending to be equally
realistic, which right now tastes of sugar-coated subterfuge. However, I am determined to be
proud of it, no matter the level of editing I believe it still requires. I am now one draft closer to
publication.

11/2013
DRESSING UP
A Short Play
By Erinn Colmenares
SYNOPSIS
DRESSING UP opens with Eleanor mistaking her daughter Samantha for a man as she runs into
the bathroom wearing a suit. Eleanor tries to convince Samantha to change into a proper dress,
just for the day, while Samantha avoids the churning of larger issues in their relationship over
her life choices and identity.
CHARACTERS
SAMANTHA Maid of Honor in older sister’s wedding, 23
ELEANOR Samantha’s mother, 54
SETTING
The present. Women’s bathroom of a local church, minutes before the wedding ceremony.

DRESSING UP
ACT ONE
Scene One
SETTING: A modest two-stall, two-sink restroom. It is cleanly, and decently lit. There is one
horizontal mirror above the sinks large enough to hold two reflections.
AT RISE: Midday. A middle-aged woman with long curly hair pinned up stylishly dressed in an
expensive-looking though simple magenta dress and three-inch heels stands in front
of the mirror above the sinks touching up her makeup and hair.
A young woman in her early twenties with short hair whips open the bathroom door
and rushes into a stall. She is wearing a black suit with a white corsage pinned to the
lapel, white button-down shirt, and solid magenta tie. She locks the stall door too
quickly for either woman to recognize the other. The older woman bends down a little
to look under the stall.
ELEANOR
Young man, this is the women’s restroom!
SOUND: Toilet flushes.
SAMANTHA comes out of the stall
and walks to the sink to wash her
hands.
SAMANTHA
(Slightly uncomfortable.)
Hi, Mom. You look great.
ELEANOR
(Harsh whisper.)
Samantha Rosalyn, what are you wearing?
SAMANTHA
(Playing dumb.)
What do you mean, Mom?
ELEANOR
I hung your dress on the closet doors this morning. How could you not have seen it?
SAMANTHA
I saw it.
ELEANOR
And where is it?

SAMANTHA
Mom…
ELEANOR
Don’t tell me you threw it away or gave it to some stranger. Like you did with the
cashmere sweater your grandmother sent you for Christmas.
SAMANTHA
(Unphased.)
I was eleven, Mom. And no, the dress is at home, safe in your closet. But, we should go.
The ceremony’s starting soon. I have to find whoever’s walking with me and so do you.
ELEANOR
(Horrified.)
You’re not going out there in front of everyone like that.
SAMANTHA
Monica asked me to be her maid of honor. I wasn’t going to say no because I didn’t want
the dress. So, yeah, I’m walking in a suit. I got the color right, see?
SAMANTHA waves around her
magenta tie then tucks it back in
place. She steps toward the door.
Come on. These things last forever already without starting late, am I right?
ELEANOR
Your sister’s going to be so disappointed.
SAMANTHA
(Forced smile.)
It’s a little late to change. Monica is perfectly okay with how I am. She saw it this
morning.
ELEANOR
She wha—She saw you this morning? Putting that on?
SAMANTHA
Yeah, she’s fine with it. Come on.
SAMANTHA puts her arm around
ELEANOR to shuffle her out.
ELEANOR
That dress cost a lot of money, young lady. You’re not wasting your father’s paycheck
just to avoid one-inch heels.
SAMANTHA
You’re right, I’m not wasting Dad’s paycheck. It’s all fine.

ELEANOR
I am not an old woman crossing the street; please stop guiding me and tell me what
you’ve done with your dress. This instant.
ELEANOR stamps her foot hard on
the tile.
SAMANTHA
I... It’s probably better if you don’t know.
ELEANOR
Samantha.
SAMANTHA
(Sighs.)
We’re returning it. Tomorrow.
ELEANOR
But it’s tailored. They won’t take back a tailored dress.
SAMANTHA
Nope. It was never actually altered or anything.
ELEANOR
How? I was at the fitting.
SAMANTHA
They took out the pins after.
ELEANOR
But we bought it months ago. It’s got to be past the return policy time limit.
SAMANTHA
Since no one wore it, we get 80 percent of the sales price. (Pause.) It was kind of easier
this way.
ELEANOR
(Disbelieving laugh.)
I’m glad lying to your mother is so simple. You know, this is so like you, making up this
elaborate plan to get what you want in the end. I’m so happy it worked out for you.
SAMANTHA
That’s why I didn’t want to tell you! Not here!
ELEANOR
Not here? When then, on my death bed?
SAMANTHA
(Mutters.)
Ideally.
(Clearly.)
Mom, I’m sorry. We shouldn’t have…hoodwinked you. I’m really sorry.

ELEANOR
(Pause.)
(Negotiating.)
You know what. There’s a department store down the street. Let’s go very quickly, pick
out a lovely dress and some flats—I promise nothing too bad. Your father can tell the
priest that there’s a small delay, no big deal. It’ll take twenty minutes, at most.
SAMANTHA
Mom, no, we can’t make everyone wait—
ELEANOR
There’s plenty of time, don’t worry. Your sister will understand.
SAMANTHA
No, I don’t think she will.
ELEANOR
Don’t be silly. She wouldn’t start without us.
SAMANTHA
Mom! Please stop it. This is what I’m wearing. Deal with it.
ELEANOR
You are a piece of work, Samantha, you really are. If you want to go out there and
embarrass me, then there’s nothing to stop you.
ELEANOR goes toward the door.
SAMANTHA
Wait, wait, wait, embarrass you? What the hell does that mean?
ELEANOR
Do you know how many people I described your dress to? How many times people told
me they couldn’t wait to see you? They are all expecting a beautiful woman they haven’t
seen for months.
SAMANTHA
I…
ELEANOR
Is this some kind of punishment?
SAMANTHA
Punishment?
ELEANOR
Tell me what I did wrong to make you act this way!
SAMANTHA
Tell you what? What are you--? There’s nothing to tell.
ELEANOR
You’re my daughter, Samantha. You’re a woman.

SAMANTHA
Last time I checked, yes.
ELEANOR
Look at yourself! You look like a man!
SAMANTHA
Just because I’m wearing a suit—
ELEANOR
Don’t make me come out like some sexist stranger, Samantha. You’re my child, so I’m
allowed to tell you what I think.
SAMANTHA
(Sarcastic.)
Oh! Because you haven’t already? You haven’t already mentioned maybe a thousand and
sixty times in these two days how much you miss my long hair? How gorgeous I’d look
if I put on makeup? How easy it’d be to find a guy if I just tried a little harder? Every
damn time I come home, Mom, it’s the same thing. I’m sick of it. (Pause.) Please. Either
you deal with who I am, how I dress, or… or, I’ll just stop coming home.
ELEANOR
That’s not much of a threat; you barely visit now.
SAMANTHA
I wonder why, Mom. You think I like making you feel like this? That I enjoy how guilty I
feel for not being who you want me to be?
ELEANOR
That isn’t fair.
SAMANTHA
None of this is! I hate arguing with you. It’s exhausting. You deserve my effort. But,
Christ Almighty, I’m close to giving up.
ELEANOR
(Thinking aloud.)
How did this happen?
SAMANTHA
Nothing happened, Mom. It just is. Please believe that it has nothing to do with you.
ELEANOR
I don’t want you making life harder for yourself. You refuse to see the real world: what
man is going to marry himself? Who proposes when you’re both wearing suits? What
will you do when you’re pregnant? Who’s going to take care of you when your father and
I are gone?
SAMANTHA
Wow. Okay. First, I will take care of myself.

ELEANOR
Is that right? Who’s going to hire someone like you?
SAMANTHA
Someone like me?
ELEANOR
Who’s ever going to take you seriously? (Beat.) You’re lying to yourself and everyone
around you.
SAMANTHA
I’m lying? I’m the one that’s lying? (Scoffs.) I can’t even… You lie every day to yourself
about who I am.
ELEANOR doesn’t respond. She is
staring off to the side.
Your sly encouragement is you ignoring every bit about me you know.
ELEANOR
(Tenderly.)
I want people to see how beautiful you are.
SAMANTHA
Maybe I don’t want to be “beautiful”. Maybe I’d rather be “handsome.”
ELEANOR
What are you talking about? Of course you’re beautiful—
SAMANTHA
Listen to me. Just—(Sighs.)
ELEANOR
Samantha.
SAMANTHA
(To herself.)
You know what? Fuck it.
(To ELEANOR.)
Mom, you’re right. I… I should tell you something and you’re not gonna like it and I
didn’t want to do this but, Jesus Christ, I just see (Deep breath.) no other option, oh god,
okay. (Deep breath.) Mom. I—I don’t know if I’m really a woman.
ELEANOR says nothing.
I’ve never felt comfortable doing “girl things”, you know, and—and, well, I get along
with guys better, I understand them better. I think like them more than I think like you or
Monica. (Beat. Smiles.) And with dating, well, I want to be the chivalrous one.
ELEANOR suddenly goes straight to
SAMANTHA and smacks her across
the face.

SAMANTHA
Shit, Mom! What the hell was that for—
ELEANOR
Pull yourself together, missy. You are my daughter, I gave birth to you. I know you
better than anyone. You have breasts, you have a soft face, a high voice. You will not
change who you are just because of some setbacks—just because you’re afraid.
SAMANTHA
Afraid?
ELEANOR
You’re afraid of men.
SAMANTHA scoffs, grinning in
disbelief into the mirror.
For some reason, you’re insecure and this (motions to SAMANTHA) is what’s coming
from it, but we can fix it.
SAMANTHA
Fix it? You—you’re just gonna fix me like a car?
ELEANOR
Everyone has rough patches.
SAMANTHA
How do you think that feels to me, Mom, huh? You’re always thinking I’m broken
when—when this (motions to herself) is the closest I’ve gotten to… what I want to be.
(Beat.) Why can’t you just…
ELEANOR
Sweetie, I will support you in anything. But I don’t think this is the right—
SAMANTHA
It’s not your call! If you’re gonna support, then listen. I’m making my own decisions
now. My point is that I am secure with myself. I’m the starving artist working at a donut
shop and I don’t care, and you know why? Because you told me I could be whatever I
wanted as long as I was happy and worked hard. (Beat.) I’m gonna dress like this, be like
this until I feel like it’s not me anymore. Okay? Do you get this, Mom?
ELEANOR
No, Samantha, I don’t get this. I don’t understand why you would do this to me. To your
father, you sister, all of those people out there.
SAMANTHA
I’m not doing anything to anyone!
ELEANOR
And that’s where you’re wrong.

SAMANTHA
I disagree. How am I hurting anyone?
ELEANOR
Me! You’re hurting me!
SAMANTHA
I’m not!
ELEANOR
You are ruining this day! (Beat.) Look around, Samantha. Look what you’ve done.
SAMANTHA
What I’ve done?
ELEANOR
This was a day for our family to be together, for us to celebrate your sister’s marriage to a
good man who will be there for her. Now, it’s this ridiculous argument from which you
cannot back down.
SAMANTHA
You can’t say that to me. You just can’t.
ELEANOR
(Continues.)
And now you’re telling me, what? You’re not a girl? You’re a lesbian? You’re a cross
dresser? What am I supposed to tell people, the family? Our friends?
SAMANTHA
I said I didn’t know.
ELEANOR
Then what do you know?
SAMANTHA
I know that this is exactly why I don’t tell you things. I know that this moment right here
will never happen again. I’m not gonna let you yell at me for something you have to work
on. (Beat.) I can’t convince you that I’m still me even if I’ve changed this (motions to
herself), then fine. I’m not gonna waste my energy.
SAMANTHA walks to the bathroom
door, slightly opens it.
Tell the family whatever you want. Monica knows I’m here for her. That’s all that
matters.
SAMANTHA turns to ELEANOR,
waiting for her to follow. ELEANOR
stays.
(Sighs.) I am sorry I didn’t wear the dress. (Beat.)

SAMANTHA leaves.
ELEANOR is beaten. She looks in
the mirror for a moment. She
straightens up, takes a breath, then
walks toward the door.
SAMANTHA bursts in again.
SAMANTHA (CONT’D)
You know what? (Laughs.) I’m not sorry. I’m not sorry about the dress. I am sorry that
you want a nice, clean-cut family and it’s never gonna happen. I’m sorry that I can’t
make you happy the way you want me to, and I’m sorry that I wanted you to deal with
something you can’t. (Beat.) And I’m saying this now because… (Sighs.) I’m not going
to be around anymore. I don’t want to do this (motions between the two of them) ever
again because this is fucking stressful. (Beat.)
Okay, I’m going to go.
ELEANOR
Don’t go.
SAMANTHA
I have to go, Mom.
ELEANOR
Please don’t. (Beat.) It’s not easy being a parent. With so many different things that can
happen. And now, the gay stuff and the trans…whatever—
SAMANTHA
Transgender.
ELEANOR
Transgender stuff. I’m sorry but it’s scary and I didn’t want to deal with it. My parents
didn’t teach me how to deal with that. (Beat.) Please don’t leave, Samantha. I couldn’t
bear it.
SAMANTHA
I’ll help you deal with it. Come here.
SAMANTHA embraces ELEANOR.
Okay. Deep breath. Ready?
SAMANTHA holds the door for
ELEANOR.
LIGHTS OUT

Jeff Parker
October 26, 2012
It was packed in the Bayley Room; I snatched a seat next Dr. Livingston. There were
three introductions by students and they were all in my Writing Fiction class. Jeff Parker stepped
up to the podium, walk and dress casual. It matched his attitude when he genuinely and
specifically told the room to be comfortable, not to hesitate. After his reading, I asked him how
he felt when he was first published. He replied, “Relief. I hadn’t wasted all of that time…I did
my time in the trenches.” With that, I felt reassured I would eventually have the same
experience. Having a published and popular author like Parker admit so freely the doubts he had
once felt within himself made him not exactly less legendary, but much more accessible as a
person. I felt far more at ease applying his accomplishments as soothing ointment to my scalding
insecurity.
Another statement Parker made stuck with me: “What makes writing art is that the writer
doesn’t know what will happen next.” I couldn’t stop myself from nodding wholeheartedly. This
man was not a writer because words came easily to him. He writes—rather than paint, sculpt,
draw, or direct—because he feels his future characters inside himself before he can even
construct a situation for them to be molded. I felt a warm kinship with Jeff Parker and any writer
for the rest of the day, sensing their characters’ impatience to be heard.

Anne Makepeace
November 7, 2012
Anne Makepeace’s documentary We Still Live Here is an excellent supplement to ENG
395, History of the English Language with Dr. DeMarco as it encompasses the struggles of a
culture politically and physically forced into isolation and how its members move to defend its
remaining pieces, very much in Scot warrior spirit. Makepeace led the coalition in way of
earning a linguistics degree to uncover the remnants of her native language for herself. She
admits that the spark was the younger generations after the war oscillate between blaming their
ancestors and themselves for not fighting against this level of oppression. The movie follows as a
community study group formed in which she supports and teaches the language. Makepeace
recalls the lack of opposition she faced in the group beginning stages, “Nobody said no. Nobody
said, ‘I’m not interested.’ Nobody said, ‘don’t do this.’”
At one point, the film states a fact I’d never heard: The first publication of the Western
Hemisphere was the Wampanoag Bible. Older generations were humiliated by missionaries for
participating in their own culture. Their children were told to learn English and to speak it well in
order to gain any respect. While it is so exciting to learn the branches of the English linguistic
family tree in class, I can’t help but feel guilty finding even intellectual pleasure in tracing the
descent of this beleaguered tribe knowing that “my” language dominates and was the cause of
their downfall.

Dr. David Caplan
February 12, 2013
There’s no other professor on this campus I have seen who rivals Dr. Caplan’s passion
for poetry. While I myself am not someone who interacts very much with poetry, I love when I
am warmed by the fire in a speaker’s heart from my seat. The topic intrigued me because Dr.
Caplan seems like a conventional man, and this lecture showed me how a conventional man can
break from a tradition-ridden art form. The lecture began with a quote from Tobias Wolff’s Old
School, a novel set in the era Walt Whitman, which wrote off rhymes in poetry as nostalgic and a
source of deception—the poem “always sounds out of time”. Caplan explained, while
modernism did not abandon rhyme but instead reworked it, the notion remains that it is old-
fashioned; a retreat from a challenge.
Caplan believes there to be immense value in the ability to rhyme, arguing that
contemporary rappers and hip hop artists use it as a status symbol. Rather than a copout, these
musicians want to show up their competition by using the same rhyme but better. My favorite
example was rhyme’s value as a tool of seduction—the more difficult, the more skilled the
rapper is at sex. Not only does it apply to the present, but Caplan pointed out a scene in
Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing where Benedict’s spoken verse is lacking, meaning a
struggle to acquire a wife. Rappers often compete to rhyme well enough to steal another rapper’s
girl, which also parallels Shakespeare’s love triangles between two men and a woman they both
desire. Caplan argues these plots are less about the relationships between the men and woman;
the men’s interactions are much more significant.

At Q&A, someone asked what Caplan’s motivation was to analyze hip hop as he would
poetry. First, he replied his students over the years have attempted to discuss this idea with him
but he found himself short on information. As a student at the university in which Caplan
teaches, I was excited to be reassured our professors try to remain relevant to the popular culture.
His second answer was the desire to remind us that even contemporary poetry has its limits, a
viewpoint counter to popular thought but nonetheless valuable.

Natasha Trethewey
February 20, 2013
This year’s poet laureate Natasha Trethewey has created a realm of relatively safe
discourse for herself by writing down her thoughts and sharing them to an open public. The
audience is not there to judge nor manipulate her experiences and opinion. The space is guarded
with support and understanding from those who listen. Trethewey says she wants her work to
chart the space between the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement. She highlights the year
1862, the year President Lincoln issued the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. Thankfully,
Trethewey defines this action as when Black soldiers began to be accepted into the Union Army.
Her first poem is about a freed slave ordered to write letters to dead soldiers’ families during the
Civil War, taking the form of journal entries from 1862 to 1865. The entries detail the narrator’s
duties and daily activities, and they come to the conclusion the Black soldiers are treated as if
they were still slaves, as if they still had no value. By writing this and other poems about the
treatment freed slaves endured, Trethewey sustains a sense of refuge among her listeners and
provides a place for others to also feel secure and supported to share their own experiences and
thoughts.
One theme in Trethewey’s lecture was the concept of researching in order to write. For
example, Trethewey traveled to her native Mississippi. Surrounded by the setting of such history
that hit her at her soul, I can imagine the energy the area must have felt to her. This process is
appealing to me; it is a perfect source of authenticity. It makes sense: A place marks you, you
want to mark it, too.

Alan Heathcock
February 27, 2013
This is the most memorable of English Event Readings for one stark, fierce reason: my
own SLU moderator Natasha Franczyk is introducing Mr. Alan Heathcock. Unsurprisingly, she’s
done her homework (she read Volt a few weeks prior). Natasha focuses on Heathcock’s
characters: they are “more a part of nature than of civilization”, “gritty”, and “not heroes. They
are people.” Now Heathcock has to step up to follow; I don’t envy his position. This disregard
toward a 1000+ list of items I would do to be in published author Heathcock’s exact position
lasts for one breath. Heathcock is more than a man garnering my awe from just earning an ISBN;
he has done so with Professor Olmstead as his platform. While the memory he shares has aged,
neither Olmstead’s words nor influence has faded.
Heathcock tells us about his mother’s great-to-the-fifth-grandfather, a farmer, who wrote
a 10-page short story in his diary. He jumps with emphasis and admiration at the fact his
grandfather had no formal education, had no reason to publish. Heathcock spent 8 years in
graduate school fine-tuning his writing. The men’s connection comes not from their training—
proper or otherwise, but from the matching compulsion to write out the words bubbling within
their souls. While the present and the former Heathcocks share genes, I feel a gurgling in the pit
of my stomach, the sensation of which I decide is not hunger but a stoking of camaraderie.

Literary Awards 2013
April 17, 2013
I did not submit any pieces for this year. As it follows, I did not walk up to accept any
awards. Excitingly, some of my closest friends did so with smiles and blushes flashing brighter
than Ms. Sharon Schrader’s digital camera. I was so proud to be the friend of a handful of award
winners—Natasha Franczyk, Mikala Back, Claire Paniccia, Chris Marshall, Emma Buening,
Jenn Fox, Jordan Ahmed, Anni Lui, and on! Maybe their output will help me generate something
of my own; a la monkey see, monkey do. I truly believe in these men’s and women’s talent and
skill. I envy their motivation, their self-control, their desire to accomplish everything in reach. I
felt like I was among the literary heroes and pioneers of my age, so privileged—though not
without a visitor’s badge on my suit. Without that reminder, I might’ve been a party crasher.
I can’t compare myself to all of these people. If I do, I will never accomplish anything as
impressive, believing myself to be inadequate. The only reason I am not an award winner is for
lack of trying. What connects my friends as inspiring figures in my life despite their disparate
personalities, voices, and experiences is their common belief in themselves. Rather than wishing
I were as smart, well-read, or motivated, I must take heed of their example and find pride for my
own life.

Erinn Colmenares
eecolmen@owu.edu
3869 Whirlaway Ln
Howell, MI 48843
2489533502
December1,2013
To Whom itMay Concern:
If you are lookingforatalented,intelligentandenergeticyoungprofessional withexcellentwork
experience, Imaybe justthe candidate.A 2013 graduate of OhioWesleyanUniversitywithaBA in
Englishwithaconcentrationincreative writing,Iamactivelyengagedinajobsearchto findjustthe
rightopportunity.
Most recently,Iam workingasa SalesChampionandHostat Bob Evans.Through thisexperience,Iam
speakingdirectlywiththe managersof all levels,includingthe general managertoimprove oursales
withdoctors' offices,schools,anddrugrepsviacateringand fundraising.Iamcurrentlysettingthe bar
incommunicationandcoordinationbetweenmanagementandthese clientsatmyrestaurant.
Let me share withyouwhat I thinkmakesme a unique andwell-qualifiedcandidate:
• Six yearsof workingexperience duringwhichI’ve demonstratedstrongplanning,organizational,
leadership,communication,andcustomerrelationsskills.
• Strongacademictraininginediting
• A high-energyspirit,strongintellectual capacityanddrive tosucceedthatI know will serve me well
as I furtherbuildmyprofessional career.
I’mlookingforan interesting,excitingandrewardingprofessional opportunityandwouldwelcome a
personal interview atyourconvenience.Ican guarantee youthatmy workethic,qualityof performance
and commitmentwillproudlyrepresentyourcompany.ThankYou.
Sincerely,
ErinnColmenares

Erinn Colmenares
3869 Whirlaway Ln ‡ Howell, MI 48843 ‡ 2489533502 ‡ eecolmen@owu.edu
SUMMARY
Recent graduate who combines a creative flair with analytical assessment to
secure focused and comprehensive texts. Special interests and skills in editing and
organization. Available for full time employment and will consider project work
with full time potential.
EDUCATION
Ohio Wesleyan University, Delaware, OH
Bachelor of Arts in English, concentration in creative
writing - 2014 GPA 2.95
Recipient: Diversity Award
CREATIVE DESIGN Print Promotional
Fliers Email Advertising
Brochures
Newspaper Articles
AND EDITING
SUMMARY
EMPLOYMENT Taco Bell Howell, MI 10/2007 - 5/2009
Crew Member
• Work part time between 30 and 35 hours per week at helping and cashing
out customers
Ohio Wesleyan University Phoneathon Delaware, OH 9/2009 - 5/2010
Caller
• Work part time between 5 and 15 hours per week at calling alumni
Canton Chinese Restaurant Delaware, OH 1/2010 - 6/2013
Waitress
• Work part time between 4 and 20 hours per week at serving
customers • Brief period managing employee schedules

Ohio Wesleyan University English Department Delaware, OH 10/2011 - 3/2012
Secretary Assistant
• Work part time between 5 and 10 hours per week at copying and printing
professors' assignments, securing the building, managing outgoing and
incoming department mail, and helping students
Subway Brighton, MI 6/2013 - 8/2013
Sandwich Artist PRO
• Work part time between 20 and 35 hours per week at helping and cashing
out
customers
Bob Evans Restaurant Howell, MI 4/2014-present
Host
• Work full time between 30 and 37 hours per week at seating customers,
cleaning
tables, register work, running meals, and counting and stocking retail
Sales Champion
• Work part time between 2 and 8 hours per week at calling or emailing
potential
clients and sales calls
RELATED Two Dimensional Design
Writing Essays
Writing Fiction
Advanced Creative Writing Workshop
Playwriting
COURSEWORK
Organizational Behavior
COMPUTER SKILLS Mac OS X and Windows XP, Me, 2000, Vista, and 7
Microsoft Office Suite
Picks up new applications with ease
CAMPUS ACTIVITIES Small Living Unit House Member, House of Thought 2011-2014

Introduction

More Related Content

What's hot

Similar to Introduction

Introduction