Thursday, July 14, 2016

KAREN RUSSELL

Students MUST post reactions ( minimum 250 words) to the assigned reading(s) linked below. Students are to pick ONE interview and ONE writing sample. Extra credit to those who read both interviews, both stories, and post two separate reactions. Students are encouraged (but not required) to additionally respond to other student reactions.

Click HERE to read the Interview Magazine interview with Karen Russell OR HERE to read her interview with Guernica.

"Ava Wrestles the Alligator" by Karen Russell: "My sister and I are staying in Grandpa Sawtooth's old house until our father, Chief Bigtree, gets back from the Mainland. It's our first summer alone in the swamp. "You girls will be fine," the Chief slurred. "Feed the gators, don't talk to strangers. Lock the door at night." The Chief must have forgotten that it's a screen door at Grandpa's — there is no key, no lock. The old house is a rust-checkered yellow bungalow at the edge of the wild bird estuary. It has a single, airless room; three crude, palmetto windows, with mosquito-blackened sills; a tin roof that hums with the memory of rain. I love it here. Whenever the wind gusts in off the river, the sky rains leaves and feathers. During mating season, the bedroom window rattles with the ardor of birds." Click the title to read the rest of the excerpt.

"The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis" by Karen Russell: "“Hey, you guys,” I swallowed. “Look—” And pointed to the pin oak, where a boy our age was belted to the trunk. Somebody in blue jeans and a T-shirt that had faded to the same earthworm color as his hair, a white boy, doubled over the rope. His hair clung tight as a cap to his scalp, as if painted on, and his face looked like a brick of sweating cheese. Gus got to the kid first. “You retards.” His voice was high with relief. “It’s just a doll.” He punched its stomach. “It’s got straw inside it.” “It’s a scarecrow!” shrieked Mondo. It was late September, a cool red season. The scarecrow was hung up on the sunless side of the oak. The tree was a shaggy pyramid, sixty or seventy feet tall, one of the “famous” landmarks of Friendship Park; it overlooked a ravine—a split in the seam of the bedrock, very narrow and deep—that we called “the Cone.” Way down at the bottom you could see a wet blue dirt with radishy pink streaks along it, as exotic looking to us as a sea floor." Click the title to read the rest of the story.

17 comments:

  1. “Ava Wrestles the Alligator” by Karen Russell

    Overall as a piece of writing itself my reaction to this was truly that it was captivating. I enjoyed how descriptive she is as a writer and how her choice of words are very straightforward yet deeper than the actual meaning at the same time. Through out the piece there are certain lines and instances that specifically stood out to me in which I will further analyze and what I perceived it as.

    “One such melting occurs in summer rain, at midnight, during the vine-green breathing time right before sleep. “

    This line I feel is compelled by so much descriptive language I can picture and almost feel what she is describing, which as a writer I feel is the goal to set the setting of where your story takes place.

    “That does it…in our silly pajamas.”

    This line specifically stood out to me because it almost became personal to me. Growing up as the youngest of three sisters, I almost felt connected to this line and reminded me of times where as a younger sister I would feel very excited to have a “girl’s sleepover” kind of night where my sisters and I would just spend time together watching movies and eating popcorn or homemade smores, and so this line specifically retrieved those memories for me.

    “Her body doesn't smolder…Then she moan’s softly”
    Lastly this line also stood out to me because as I read through out the piece and reached this point I was kind of shocked of what I had just read. I did not expect the piece to be describing this but for it to be something dark and scary, specifically because of the setting of the piece within miles of swamps and alligators. I found it beautiful somehow, how she managed to turn a piece someone might perceive something so dark and extraordinary into simply the emergence of puberty and sexuality within a sixteen year old girl. Specifically, the fact that she told the story in the point of view of her younger sister, in which things of this nature seemed of absolute horror and absurdity.

    - Julissa Peralta

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  2. “The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis” by Karen Russell

    My reaction to this piece was more of a spooked out reaction. When I think of scarecrows I think about a scary isolated field miles away where someone will get kidnapped or murdered. However, when I think of the scarecrow itself, I don’t think much of it, simply what it is used for. I feel that this piece almost got inside the mind of the head of a child with antisocial personality disorder, someone who will grow into a narcissistic individual in the near future. However, through my interpretation of the piece I believe that Karen Russell did an amazing job at conveying that. This line specifically stood out to me, “Scarecrows made fools of the birds, and smiled with lifeless humor. Their smiles were fakes, threads. (This idea appealed to me—I was a quiet kid myself, branded “mean,” and I liked the idea of a mouth that nobody expected anything from, a mouth that was just red sewing.)” With this she conveys the idea of the individual, or the child, in my mind I perceived the main character to be approximately 14 years old, enjoying being a mystery to others, in other words no one really knows his next move or step, and no one really knows what is going on inside of his mind nor does he express any of these emotions. Through this perspective, I feel that the child comparing himself to the scarecrow deeply exemplifies whom he sees himself as. As I mentioned previously, which I am sure that many others think the same about a scarecrow, in which although it is a bit taunting and creepy they don’t think much of it, much like the main character feels others may view him. With that said, I feel as if this piece conveys the characters inner conflicts and “inner demons”. Furthermore, one last thing that really stood out to me was at the very beginning, “ lashed to the pin oak in Friendship Park”. I think that Karen Russell use a combination of opposing words here which definitely plays a major role in the tone of the piece. “Lash” and “Friendship park”, when I think of lash I think violence and then friendship park I think peace, love and all other good things associated with friendship, which on the contrary are not at all conveyed within the piece.

    - Julissa Peralta

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  3. I read "Ava Wrestles the Alligator," and the interview in Guernica, and not in that order. I don't even know where to start with "Ava." It's as if it's written in another language. And it is in a way--it's writing that has been filtered through the subconscious and so has come out dripping with dream-like verbiage. There are a lot of sentences that don't really make sense if you think about them. The point is that you just kind of know at an intuitive level what she's talking about. I was slightly irked by her calling alligators "Seths," but also found it strangely pleasing in a way--you can feel a lot of these unusual words in your mouth as you read them. I suppose that it was in a way necessary for her to pass the story through the filter of the subconscious, as it dealt with the sexuality of a 16 year old, as told by a 12 year old. I generally like magical realism, and I liked this story. I don't know if I could read a whole book like that? Hers is not an easy world to get into, because it draws partially from that swamp which is very unfamiliar to me, and partially from her subconscious.

    I enjoyed the interview.JF

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  4. Upon reading Karen Russell's interview with Interview MAgazine, I have to say, the feel as though the interviewer sort of gets in the way of the author's answers. There is, of course, a back and forth between the two of them, but often he just inserts his ego in a way that doesn't coax much from her: "My sister read those books!"
    I found that very distracting, but beyond less than immersive interviewing, I find it fascinating how these authors have a certain language of their own to spring from and how it shows itself through the text. Reading the excerpt of "Ava Wrestles the Alligator," it is wonderful how vibrantly her Florida upbringing shines through, but what about this becoming a sort of platitude for the author, much like reverting to animals as "analogs to emotional states". It must be tricky, after having an established volume of work, to then need to spiral out from it. What luxurious hurdles I hope to face!

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  5. Before reading “Ava Wrestles the Alligator,” by Karen Russell, I decided to read her interview with Christopher Bollen. Reading the interview first provided some very interesting insight on Karen Russell’s personal background and the basis for her story “St. Lucy’s Home.” I chose to do that because I had never heard of Karen Russell or any of her work before just recently being introduced to her. It is nice to know that she got much of the inspiration for this work from her upbringing in Florida. The concept of the story is also different than many of the stories that you hear. An alligator amusement park? Who would ever think of something like that besides someone who grew up with alligators as a part of their daily life? While reading this excerpt she immediately is able to engulf the reader in this unfamiliar world where the narrator has to perform duties such as “stringing up the swamp hens on Live Chicken Thursdays, and pulling those gators out of the water” (Russell). Alligators are scary creatures and although I have never personally encountered one, I have no ounce of desire to ever do so. To have alligators play a role in your life must be very exciting nonetheless. In this excerpt, the narrator actually mentions a time where her father had to wrestle an alligator and he won! The whole time the crowd just watched in entertainment! It was also a good tactic for the narrator to have been engaging with her sister yet the whole time you are unsure of her physical appearance until the night she decides to stalk her sister in the swamp. Then she gives a description of her sister and gives the reader a more clear understanding of the whole setting.
    -Kyle Tortorelli

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  6. Okay, first thing’s first: I read Ms. Russel’s first response to the Guernica interviewer and I laughed out loud. It was out of left field and hilarious and I still don’t know what was going on, which brought out the magazine(?)’s point about not knowing what her work was about but still caring about it. I really loved her line “a certain distortion is used to get at the truth”. True, talk, I absolutely loathe writing the usual fiction, especially realistic fiction. Why write about people you read on the street when you could write about dragons?! I don’t need to read drama or misery happening in people’s lives; we’re all surrounded by real-life miseries and our loved ones’ miseries. If I wanna get real, real sad, I’ll turn on the news. When I try to write real, real people, I don’t want my characters in a grungy apartment because of the current housing crisis, I want them to be in a grungy apartment performing illegal witchcraft or something. I love her methods of using someone a little less…mundane…in order to reach something that feels more real. I also appreciate her touch on how she recognized that Magical Realism referred mainly to a specific movement in Latin American literature and wasn’t quite the genre people made it out to be. It’s nice to have an aspect of a culture recognized as something without the straight up assimilation of the word we see today. Homage needs to be paid, and sometime it isn’t.

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  7. I'm beginning to understand the significance of naming an item in a story. In this excerpt Ms. Russell's use of specific names of the plants, purple cattails, black mangroves, places and items, splash pines, big tree latrines, (All of which I had to look up) paint a more vivid image of the setting and mood of the story.
    The names of the father and grandfather seem to be Native American and are a part of the poetry in her writing. I particularly liked her remembering her mother through the rain drops on the roof.
    The imagery of the character talking about the "kingdoms" inside her sister as if they were actual entities that could accessed; you have to ask the right question or have a password to enter her sister's world makes the reader want to discover the right bridge to enter. Her description of her sister's natural experience in a spiritual like context romanticizes the encounter. The object of this encounter is a ghost, something dead is given a name and has the power to somehow make her sister feel alive. This dead thing also arouses jealousy in her as she feels she can't share in her sister's experience. The love messages from a ghost are in the form of flickering lights and falling dishes, attention getting symbols, but not intimate ones. This ghost has interrupted the private moment she is sharing with her sister. Is the chase after her sister real or symbolic of her trying to enter the particular kingdom her sister has now entered?
    I'm not sure why Ms. Russell then leaves this encounter with her sister to then discuss the mundane of Swamplandia.
    Ms. Russell seems so human in the interview, regular. She talks about her father's disappointment because the children didn't share the same love for sailing. Parents always want to live through their children, so she is like many of us.
    The realism of her camp experience and watching horror stories that made her leery of going to a regular camp is very identifiable.
    In real life she did not come to her sister's rescue, but in the excerpt from her story she is trying to get to the sister, perhaps to save her from the ghost.
    Her use of images and symbols inspire me to not be afraid to use the these things in my writing. Her exposure to scary movies as a child seems to have freed her imagination so she feels free to write through her fears.
    She has accomplished so much at such a young age.

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  8. I'm beginning to understand the significance of naming an item in a story. In this excerpt Ms. Russell's use of specific names of the plants, purple cattails, black mangroves, places and items, splash pines, big tree latrines, (All of which I had to look up) paint a more vivid image of the setting and mood of the story.
    The names of the father and grandfather seem to be Native American and are a part of the poetry in her writing. I particularly liked her remembering her mother through the rain drops on the roof.
    The imagery of the character talking about the "kingdoms" inside her sister as if they were actual entities that could accessed; you have to ask the right question or have a password to enter her sister's world makes the reader want to discover the right bridge to enter. Her description of her sister's natural experience in a spiritual like context romanticizes the encounter. The object of this encounter is a ghost, something dead is given a name and has the power to somehow make her sister feel alive. This dead thing also arouses jealousy in her as she feels she can't share in her sister's experience. The love messages from a ghost are in the form of flickering lights and falling dishes, attention getting symbols, but not intimate ones. This ghost has interrupted the private moment she is sharing with her sister. Is the chase after her sister real or symbolic of her trying to enter the particular kingdom her sister has now entered?
    I'm not sure why Ms. Russell then leaves this encounter with her sister to then discuss the mundane of Swamplandia.
    Ms. Russell seems so human in the interview, regular. She talks about her father's disappointment because the children didn't share the same love for sailing. Parents always want to live through their children, so she is like many of us.
    The realism of her camp experience and watching horror stories that made her leery of going to a regular camp is very identifiable.
    In real life she did not come to her sister's rescue, but in the excerpt from her story she is trying to get to the sister, perhaps to save her from the ghost.
    Her use of images and symbols inspire me to not be afraid to use the these things in my writing. Her exposure to scary movies as a child seems to have freed her imagination so she feels free to write through her fears.
    She has accomplished so much at such a young age.

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  9. I read "The Nature of Karen Russell" by Christopher Bollen as well as the short story, Ava Wrestles The Alligator. To be completely honest, I'm not a sci-fi/fantasy world type of girl but I did enjoy reading this excerpt. Her metaphors are thought provoking. She sneaks in vital information about the characters wrapped in a blanket of colorful language, so that you hardly realize you're being fed the character's name or age. In her interview with Christopher Bollen I loved her use of the window in the frontier novel. This further proves how much thought goes into her metaphors or maybe just how much comparison she can squeeze out of one. She is an elaborate thinker and her mind is able to go to far away places that mine rarely dreams of, if at all-- not to that extent at least. Russell incorporated special language into her story, something that we were taught to do in class. When she called the alligator "a Craig" instead of "the alligator" it brought so much more life to the story. And phrases like "stringing up the swamp hens on Live Chicken Thursdays." It made this different type of story more believable for a realistic fiction loving girl like myself.

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  10. The Graveless Doll-We don't put dolls in graves. Dolls are for play, part of make-believe families. The scarecrow as the farmers doll is an interesting image. New Jersey known for it's farms, is the Garden State. Ms. Russell does not seem to acknowledge this in this excerpt when she says this doll is thousands of miles away from the "I" states. Opening with the boys wanting to rescue this lifeless creature they think could possibly be a real boy tied to a tree humanizes the characters. I as the reader now expect an everyday story, but Ms. Russell will use this regular compassionate event to spin a fantasy tale.
    This scarecrow is many things to this farmer according to the imagery of Ms. Russell's writing. It is angelic with the halo of birds, a guard standing watch, a good luck charm, a slave who stays in place, works unending days and cannot speak, just smiles a fake smile as the farmer's doll.
    The interviewer and Ms. Russell have what I feel is a very private conversation. They discuss and reference many other writers that only someone interested in this genre would know.They seem to have a cult-like reverence for thees writers and their work. The interview does however give further insight into her awakening as a writer of these types of stories. She describes her need to hide her love of scary stories from her peers, but breaking free in college. Her sense of seeing her everyday life growing up in Florida as fantasy outside her door comical to me. I image her living in the center of a carnival and visiting a different exhibit each day;Florida as Fantastical Literature. She discovered her true voice in this genre.
    She is poetic even in her responses in the interview; "tail wagging joy", "Dan rode through town and handed me a literary family tree"!
    She feels so safe using family memories, real life catastrophes, her religious upbringing and then distorting these things in her storytelling;Sleep infected dreams. She takes grotesque turns in her writing to make a simple point. I guess that's why she wins awards.

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  11. I was only able to access the first paragraph of Graveless Doll, and I also read the interview in Interview [magazine]. My thoughts about the story are that I noticed that she focused on the scarecrow much in the same way that we have been focusing on objects in class. The narrator finds an expression of himself in the scarecrow, because he finds himself to be as silent as the scarecrow. I was curious to read on and see what she made of New Jersey. She did not really explain what kind of place Friendship Park is...i.e. is it a suburb, rural area, etc...

    On reading the interview, I was intrigued by the first sentence of the interview, where the author states that Russell is "not the first young writer to merge humanism and monstrosities in her fiction." I thought of Flannery O'Connor, who merged Catholicism and the grotesque in her fiction, which is also very regional. I like that Russell lives in Philly and not New York. Take that NYC! It make her seem more down-to-Earth. Her memory of catching a stingray and being slapped in the face by it sounds like something so fantastical and comical that it could have taken place in one of her stories. She also mentions another of her stories where a glass window figures prominently. This is another example of using an object to explore meaning. In my first post, I mentioned that I found "Ava" a little hard to read because it requires so much of the reader, especially the reader who has never been to Florida. Interesting to note that Russell talks about reading as a creative act when she talks about being a little kid and reading books and how hard it is to create those "landscapes of dreams" when you are that young and don't have many experiences to draw from. JF

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  12. Ok I read Ava wrestles with the alligator, I must say, it is very metaphorical, in that everything is described with a woodsy kind of description. It was ok but very hard to understand other than they must have been of native decent, and that Ossie was possessed by her boyfriend that died. apparently, he comes to her every night and takes her to a place to be alone with him which Ava does not like nor does she appreciate and who is a bit jealous of that relationship as she wished (even though she was younger), wanted to have experienced such a love or what she thought her sister had with this man. Nonetheless, it was a kind of confusing story to me. I really don't like these type of stories. but I did like how she described her mother's presence with the rain beating on the roof top. I never thought of that because my mom passed away, and that's a way of not really letting go, but holding on to something that is so precious.
    Rhonda

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  13. The graveless doll was a bit better to read than the last story. This was not so metaphorical and it was a story that you or anyone could understand. Since NJ is a garden state I could see where she embelished upon the scarecrow. They are sad and lonely looking creatures that are supposed to scare away the birds and animals that ate the seeds grown for harvest day and night. This put a picture in my mind of the scarecrow in the wiz with Michael Jackson and the old wizard of oz. This story also made me think of the scarecrow in my own mind just as we were asked to do in class with the objects brought in for us to write about and describe. All in all this was a good story for what its worth.

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  14. “Ava wrestles the Alligator”, by Karen Russell.

    The thing I noticed the most about this story are the parallels Russell makes with her own life. She draws heavily on her Florida upbringing to enrich the scenery. Somewhat unrelated to this story specifically, but I have noticed that authors choose unusual names for their characters. In my opinion, this goes with the themes Alex has been teaching during class. Somehow, by becoming more specific and unique, a reader is more able to extend past the pages and impose their own imagination on a story.
    Back to the author. Russell’s writing style seems to just roll off the tongue as a reader. I suspect a majority of this feeling comes from specificity of language. No sentence feels “extra”, and within the sentences the words are carefully picked and placed. The ease of the writers voice gives the story a vaguely informal feeling.
    Additionally I noticed that Russell spends the first two paragraphs just setting the scene for the story. Using very simple metaphors and similes Russell seems to paint a picture of a house that is unique yet familiar.
    Personally I did not fully understand the meaning of the story on the first read through so I was forced to re-read a few times. Still I don’t get it entirely, but do have an appreciation for Russell’s techniques while looking through the lens of a week’s worth of class.

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  15. While reading "Ava Wrestles the Alligator" I could see how Russell's floridian background influenced her stories. Words like “slash-pines”, “cattails” and specifics about the alligators really draw from her experiences there, whereas someone from NJ couldn't draw that information from their mind. It is a good way of using life experiences to create a story that is far from the ordinary, she uses things that are known to her and uses them to dive into the unknown. Her words paints a vivd picture of the stories; I could imagine myself following my possessed sister into the wilderness in the middle of the night, and could picture the bellowing of an alligator on a silent night. In the interview with Interview, Russell mentions how people were surprised to find out that she used real places in her book. This proves that she is able to use her words to fantasize things from the ordinary to the extraordinary, an important skill for writers to capture.

    I thought her works were interesting, and had great imagery- but “Ava” was kind of hard to follow. It took me a while to realize that her sister was actually possessed (?) and they weren’t just playing a game-but I am interested in seeing if her possession develops further in the story or leads some type of plot point. But in the excerpt the possession just seems like some type of fantasy added into the story for fun. The story jumped from Ossie’s possession to Ava cartwheeling onto stage and holding an alligator’s mouth shut, and it was hard to follow the exact place and time these things were happening; although that may be what Russell hoped to achieve.

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  16. "Ava Wrestles an Alligator" was a perfect example of what was talked about in the interview with Bollen. The title of course, is a dead giveaway that there would be some animal hi-jinks going on in the story. Though even truer to form Russel also fell back on her Floridian origins to further envelope the reader in her tale of two sisters, though it clearly focuses on the younger on. What she thinks of her older sister’s late nigh liaisons with her boyfriend. We’re privy to thoughts that fill her innocent head that’s provoked by her sister’s feverish late night adventures. Being the youngest in my family I mostly related to how the existence of the alligators factors into the story. Your older siblings always dump on you. Ava had to clean up after and take care of the gators and I’m fairly certain was used as child labors in the shows. I can totally relate to all that, with the distinct exception of the child labor. Thankfully that never happened to me.
    As for the interview itself I found it rather up lifting. I remember taking an acting class for which it was mandatory to go see a play, specifically “A Clockwork Orange”. And of course the professor’s son had the lead role. And I remember writing a review as though I were actually a critic. I compared the mannerism that the son put on to embodied his some-what out there character to what Heath Ledger had done for his portrayal of the Joker in “The Dark Knight”. What I had specifically said was that the son hadn’t copied a performance but it seemed as though the performers had possible looked at the same source material for the inspiration of the how to get their bodies into character. So when ever some engaged in an artful endeavor lets others in on the inspiration I, as a rule, always consider it to be a treat.

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  17. I read "Ava Wrestles the Alligator" and read her interview in Interview [magazine], "The Nature of Karen Russell" by Christopher Bollen. Short stories, novellas, etc. are always more powerful when you can draw from your life when crafting it. Russell integrates her Florida roots into this story, even if the characters aren’t directly based off of her real life experiences.

    Truthfully, I don't understand how the main character Ava can find alligators beautiful instead of terrifying, "up close, the Seths are beautiful, with corrugated gray-green backs and dinosaur feet." When I was around 14 years old, I fell into a gator tank from Gatorland during my vacation in Florida. To further cement my fear, I was forced to sit on a baby alligator after it was wrestled, and tied up, for a damn photo-op.

    However, her use of language was absolutely gorgeous, that is what saved the story for me in my honest opinion. “Strange lights burn off the swamp at night. Overhead, the clouds stretch across the sky like some monstrous spider-web, dewed with stars. Tiny planes from the Mainland whir towards the yellow moon, only to become cobwebbed by cloud.” It flows from the tip of her pen, and dangles around our minds.

    She effortlessly creates this universe, albeit rich and strange, connecting with the reader instantly. Suddenly, we care about Chief Bigtree, the drunken (?) father, and the two sisters alone in an old bungalow surrounded by wild gators.

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