Week Four - Original Prompt

Owen sleeps in a mound of blankets between our feet. Henry sleeps in my arms. All the way across the Atlantic, there is turbulence; bulkheads shake, glasses tinkle, galley latches open and close. We are moving from Boise, Idaho, to Rome, Italy, a place I've never been. When I think of Italy, I imagine decadence, dark brown oil paintings, emperors in sandals. I see a cross-section of a school-project Colosseum, fashioned from glue and sugar cubes; I see a navy-blue-and-white soap dish, bought in Florence, chipped on one corner, that my mother kept beside her bathroom sink for thirty years. More clearly than anything else, I see a coloring book I once got for Christmas entitled Ancient Rome. Two babies slurped milk from the udders of a wolf. A Caesar grinned in his leafy crown. A slinky, big-pupiled maiden posed with a jug beside a fountain. Whatever Rome was to me then -- seven years old, Christmas night, snowflakes dashing against the windows, a lighted spruce blinking on and off downstairs, crayons strewn across the carpet -- it's hardly clearer now: outlines of elephants and gladiators, cartoonish palaces in the backgrounds, a sense that I had chosen all the wrong colors, aquamarine for chariots, goldenrod for skies. On the television screen planted in the seat-back in front of me, our little airplane icon streaks past Marseilles, Nice. A bottle of baby formula, lying sideways in the seat pocket, soaks through the fabric and drips onto my carry-on, but I don't reach down to straighten it for fear I will wake Henry. -- Anthony Doerr. Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World 

I'm all about juxtaposition and this "there's two sides of Rome" idea we have been playing with for the last month. I think this Anthony Doerr exemplifies the concept in a new way brilliantly and offer that as my prompt for this week. I love the way he weaves the old and the new together--not the excepted old and new, with cars zipping past monuments, for example. Rather, it is his own old and new: the newness of being a new father with this new experience of traveling and traveling with twins and moving to a new location, alongside all of the preconceptions he has had about Rome/Italy. Those, too, I think we could draw upon: he does not offer one single pre-image of Italy but instead a series of preconceptions, from emperors to coloring books. Prompt: Juxtapose a uniquely adult experience within/about Italy with a series of childhood/younger-self ideas and images about/of Italy.

Week Three - Response to Shaunna's "Part 3 of Pros"

Part 3
A Memory Named Joe
(Spolethome)
The track is wrong, it was 2-B not 2-A. The five of us beat our blistered bubble feet as we burn our legs to the train that was readying to leave. So desperate we wanted the hour and a half to pass so we could kiss the humid air of Spoleto. Leaping in the doors, as eager as the pigeon’s bobbing bread with their beaks, we scattered amongst the coach for a vacant seat. Mine lingered in the isle next to a woman with burnt curls, who hovered over her cell phone, chaotic in texts. The black man across from her stared out the nine PM window, at a reflection of himself. And finally the last of our four was a Roman who shocked the memories of elementary school play grounds and a classmate who, if not for this man’s lazy almond eyes and Spanish features, would have remained lost in the haze of my twenty-one year old timeline. Yet, I see this boy, let’s call him Joe, so clear in my dazed gaze out across the trains’ car, as I occasionally slipping eye contact with this stranger.  I see Joes’ slothful eyes, wet with tears from the toddler bullies who stole his chocolate Debbie cake. They tried to take mine but I was daring enough to take my plastic fork and award him Spiderman band aids from the teacher’s desk. Joe never did anything but cry and squeal. I remember those screams and snot drenched nostrils that bubbled with every exhale. No one in the classroom wanted to touch him in that state of chubby cheeks creasing his drowning eyes and mouth webbing with nose slush. The only thing we did was walk away till he realized no one cared about his stolen Debbie, or knocked over building blocks, and that no one was going help him out of the mud from the morning rain where the little shit of a seven year old shoved him. Joe, like me, was an outcast among outcasts, which meant we never received the new toys, we only ate the leftover oatmeal cookies, our naps consisted of the blanket with moth holes and heads resting on frigid metal air vents, and we never got to be on the good team for kick ball. I will never know what happened to Joe, or was it Jose, maybe Eduardo. Whatever was written on his third grade name tag I will never recall, however, Joe now has made an impact on me, for this hour of a sleep tempting train ride, he branded four sheets of my journal and ran my pen dry. 

If I am understanding this concept correctly, I love it. We see huge crowds of people here--why do we notice one or two in particular? Why do they stick with us? Connecting/remembering/recalling someone the speaker knew previously is a very smart move.

It could, of course, move a bit quicker. I would suggest you jump right into the description of the person you call Joe and cut out the scenery beforehand, including the other people. (Keep  lazy almond eyes and Spanish features for Joe, which I adore. I might go into the meaning of Spanish features a little bit more.). Then, dig deeper. What is it about this man that recalls a bullied childhood school friend? Maybe it’s the entire environment: Joe cries and squeals, a fact you remember as the train screeches on the tracks? What is it about the person sitting across the narrator that recalls her own bullying, and how does it affect her in this moment? How does it reach across the barrier—what kind of barrier is it? What cultural or other walls are palpable between the speaker and the subject on the train?—to touch “Joe,” both the real and the doppelgänger? 

5385: Daisy Miller

I'm interested in the gender dynamic in this piece because we have two Americans--a male and a female--acting within a foreign/Italian sphere, which offers, I think, a unique opportunity to consider the way the author treats the opposing genders. Clearly, the female gets the unfortunately awful end of the stick. Her flirty, flighty ways result in disease and death, while he--levelheaded and responsible-- warns against it. She becomes broken down, too, reduced to a series of body parts throughout the narrative: she has "a singularly well-shaped ear," and later she is "still showing her pretty teeth."

The question, of course, is how Italy factors into all of this. We could easily claim that Italy kills the wild, uncultured American. However, she begins to adopt Italy, too: Giovanelli is frequently described as "the little Italian." Immediately after Winterbourne sheds his interest in her after finding her at the Collosseum, the narrator describes Daisy as "the little American flirt" (while Giovanelli becomes "the fourtunate Italian"). So, does Italy kill her, or does she possess Italy? And, because the narrative often highlights the story-telling aspect, is the author, in a larger sense, damning Italy by killing the girl? I have no idea what to do with all of that--but given our interest in ownership, it's worthwhile to note.

Week Three: Image Junkyard 1-4

They stand guard one last time, these flattened soldiers corralled by glass. Their limbs are stone, more barrier than warrior. At home, my brother lays a green plastic man at the top of the stairs, perched to look out over the rest of the house.

At a bar in a gully of parking lots, fluorescent lights sprouting from the ground, we tuck into a pocket at the counter, more comfortable with our backs to the unknown language. Se Captain America. I can feel his Italian on my back. A man with hair slicked away from his face lays a double-layered shot on the counter, red, white, and blue.

Standing at the top of a staircase, it's a straight shot to the rest of the group as they, in a clump of striped shirts and fluorescent backpacks, descend to dinner. From here, I can hear their pigeon calls and laughter. I can see the way we look to the rest, how we travel in a pack of sound, in a beat of constant movement.

It's new, seeing me through him. It is rapid sketch, he says, dangling it in front of me. You want? You smile. I look like her, like the one before, like an Italian that's left him behind in a town of walled ruin and, for some reason, I am okay with this. She is hard lines, deep scratches, rough behind her head in a shadow of blue ink, this girl he has memorialized on graph paper beside the cash register.

Week Two - Original Prompt

I was super taken by the translation workshop we did today. I've thought about translation a lot but never had anyone really sit down and talk through the specific problems of translation with me. I was intrigued by the notion of translating the intent of the poem moreso than the specific words, while trying to retain as much  of the diction and form as possible. Translation is, of course, a key theme of our trip: learning the language, conveying our personalities appropriately to an audience that doesn't speak the same language as us, adopting the culture. The whole trip is translation.

I was wondering, then, about writing the same event twice: once from the perspective of yourself/a narrator, and once from the perspective of another party. For example, I might write about my first solo attempt in an Italian (German, actually) restaurant, where Sydney and I sat down, looked at the menu, realized no one in the building spoke any English, and made a hasty exit. I can imagine the potential pitfalls of this type of exercise--a writer would have to avoid characterizing the waitress as simply unhelpful and tired of Americans. Writing from the perspective of one of the Italians we meet--maybe Elisa, trying to teach Italian to a bunch of students who keep defaulting to Spanish--would, I think, open up interesting opportunities.

Week Two - In-class Calisthenics

I didn't expect to fully realize Italy, its crepe paper air and the impression of steep walkways, the way words hang like pearls slung against each other, or the coffee like the skin of a statue roughed against my lips only in that moment. It should have been, I thought, Juno 1949 etched into the Colosseum. It should have been the two year old boy skipping past my daily cappuccino, waving a balloon animal over his head. It should have been the bus driver angling his job down into the pavement, or American passing salami skewers around me in the lobby of Hotel Clitunno, or lining our English up in front of a classroom full of future tour guides and bartenders. It should have been one of those human moments, grainy beneath my fingernails, ragged and pinned to each other. The boy because he is my own little brother, barefoot on the front June lawn, thousands of miles across the ocean, a plastic sword in his fist. Juno, who is us, sixty years ago, seeing the same patched stone, only with one less carving.

But I never thought of the R's rolled down narrow alleyways or rain clouds dipped into valleys every day of the afternoon or a tour guide lining Italy with English. I thought of my grandmother--step-grandmother, my aunt would correct--with flour on her hands in a yellow tiled kitchen, every cabinet thrown open and wind whipping in the one, small Brooklyn window. It's of her, the way she peppered her stories with "ya know?" and her nails drummed against your shoulder, it's how she nicknamed all of her friends after pastries. It's that Italian Christmas she tried to cook right after marrying my grandfather and the bits of cheese that slung down the pavement when he threw the lasagna out of that one window, demanding pork.

Week Two - Memory

Seventeen, three months before my aunt and I board a plane from LaGuardia to Rome, I am sunk into a corner of the couch, hunched over my laptop exploring Turkey electronically. We have options, here, though the horseback tour of an Izmir beach is too much for her. The air conditioned bus ride of Istanbul, or the tour that drops us at the Grand Bazaar for three hours, opening up an expanse of hand-stitched purses and painted bracelets.

"We should be different people on the cruise," my aunt Shannon says. She's here in Georgia with me to see my graduation and help plan the finer details--excursions, transportation--for our upcoming two week trip to Europe. It will be the first time, in my memory, that we will spend a vacation with just the two of us. Every weekend of my childhood, my aunt Coll helped me tie my beauty pageant dresses or my aunt Tracy took me to Splish Splash. Shannon, though she lived in our basement apartment until we moved to Georgia two years prior, was loved but distant. On Christmas she would help me make donuts in a new Easy Bake oven. At Christmas parties, she tumbled down the stairs after too many beers. Some nights, she called me on the phone from the basement to ask I liked any boys yet, every word a slow slide into the next.

I don't understand what she means, that we should be other people. "Ya know, different people at dinner. Tell them you're--the daughter of a wealthy orange grove owner. I'm your publicist because you have a book coming out about--about the fashion company you started at fifteen that quickly went under."