Senior Portfolio Seminar

 I hadn’t expected that the second chapter of Anything is Possible would not be about Tommy, an elderly man we’d met prior. Instead, we’re introduced to a new character, a character to whom I found myself expressing sympathy. If I am honest, though, at first I had  much different opinion of Patty. I thought as though she was judgmental, especially towards the Barton’s. In the very beginning, she mentions, when they were younger, that Lucy Barton’s house was tiny, and that it smelled. It wasn’t until later, perhaps somewhere in the middle of the chapter, that I felt sympathy for her. Patty describes in detail having witnessed her mother cheat on her father.  After having read that, I knew immediately why Patty acted the way she did towards her mother. Throughout the chapter, it becomes painfully clear that the people of the town, adolescent and adult, treat Patty with very little respect.

Again, I can say I found Strout’s writing wonderful, and clean. There was seldom a moment in which I wasn’t completely, and utterly engaged with the text. I loved that Strout explained the shame Patty feels towards her own body, after having seen her mother unclothed. Strout writes:

“Her mother was crying, gasping, shrieking, and there was the sound of skin being slapped, and Patty had run upstairs and seen her mother astride Mr. Delaney–Patty’s Spanish teacher!–and her mother’s breasts were swaying and this man was spanking her mother and his mouth reached up and took her mother’s breast and her mother wailed. And what Patty never forgot was the look of her mother’s eyes, they were wild; her mother could not stop herself from wailing, this is what Patty saw, her mother’s breasts and her mother’s eyes looking at her–yet unable to stop what was coming from her mouth.” (51)

Strout describes in prepossessing detail this crude and offensive sexual act. The language she uses is quotidian, and yet beautiful, nonetheless.

More so than Atwood, I am struggling to write about Strout’s work. The world is clear and intensely developed, but it isn’t fantastic. Strout has copied our real world, with all of its complexities and layers, and has copied it onto the page. I feel like this will become even more true as the stories continue and the links expand.

“Windmills” is poignant, and so was “The Sign,” but it is never sentimental. These characters are not living fully wretched lives. Patty misses her husband and her father, has a complicated relationship with her aging mother, and was verbally assaulted by a teenager at school, yet she still makes time to meet with Angelina. Patty has empathy, and knows that Angelina doesn’t want to hear about Patty’s problems, but she is okay with that. Patty is content with helping. It is repeated in her character with her husband, her mother, Lila Lane, and Angelina. Patty still recognizes the coziness of her home, even though she has had an awful day. She is okay.

These stories read like mysteries, and sometimes mysteries are revealed of which we weren’t even aware. The incident with Patty’s mother is not told until we are two-thirds through the story. Patty seems to be damaged by something when she is speaking to her husband on their wedding night, but it is unclear at that point if it is sincere or if she is just being kind. On page 38, it is mentioned that the Barton parents attended Patty’s older sister’s wedding, but it is never explained why. Perhaps it will become clear in a following story.

Like Tommy Gutpill, Patty Nicely is concerned with her appearance, her reputation, and the perception of her family members and students. She becomes obsessed with Lila Lane’s harsh words, reciting “Fatty Patty” to herself even in the privacy and loneliness of her own home. But the real link here seems to be a continued obsession with Lucy Barton. She’s written a memoir, one that we know little about other than its apparent darkness and sadness, which we could’ve gleaned from “The Sign.” I want to believe that Patty is so taken by the story because Lucy should have been more unhappy, given her circumstances, but emerges with love for her parents, love they may not have deserved. Her experience with Lucy’s writing is described as the sweetness “of having yellow-colored piece of candy, maybe butterscotch, tucked in the back crevices of her mouth.” There’s a strangeness in the way that Strout explains this sensation but its specificity makes that feeling familiar. It is particular to Patty and yet I can taste the butterscotch and the happiness, contentment, or maybe satisfaction she might have felt.

I’ll admit when I put this story down I wasn’t sure where to begin or what to say. There is so much darkness in Sebastian, Charlie, Lila, and Patty. Even the smallest characters have some inner life made available to us through town gossip or rumors. Charlie Macauley, for example, appears only briefly in the first story but we are told that he was in Vietnam and returned a different man. His wife, Marilyn, was once pretty and cheery and is now a much thinner, more “pinched” version of herself. It is made clear that Charlie suffers from PTSD but I began to wonder if perhaps all of these characters suffer from post-traumatic stress of some kind. Patty with her mother’s affair, Sebastian’s sexually abused childhood, and Charlie, who I imagine will come back in full force with his own story. Both “The Sign” and “Windmills” have dealt with characters who experienced some kind of trauma as children and developed into a particular kind of person — some part of them is damaged and we get to see the person they become.

I am also interested in Patty’s relationship with Sebastian. He’s not described as a particularly attractive man, with eyebrows that extend across his forehead, but there’s something about him that Patty likes. She doesn’t seem to think he needs fixing but it appears that some of his appeal comes from the fact that he would never cheat on her. Sebastian has made it clear that he will never recover from the abuse and it’s possible that Patty is comforted by the idea that she could never end up in a bind like her mother’s. They’ve agreed to be together without intimacy but their relationship is not without love. I found myself conflicted. Was it healthy? Was it beneficial, for either of them?

Discussion Questions:

1. What similarities do you see between Tommy and Patty? Should we be comparing them?
2. More than this small town in Illinois, what links do you see between the first and second stories?
3. The soybean field is specifically mentioned in both stories, what role does nature appear to play?
4. What kind of metaphoric possibility do the windmills have?
5. What do you think of Patty’s relationship with Sebastian? Charlie?
6. What role does Lila play? Why or why isn’t she an effective character?
7. Is this story a commentary on childhood and who we become?

“Revenant” seems like the masterclass for creating unlikeable characters. Gavin is, without a doubt, the most horrible character I have ever read, yet he is completely believable. Through a close third-person, Gavin’s voice transcends his quoted dialogue and is laced into the narration. It is hard to pick a few examples, as every word is intentional in creating this character. There is a very memorable juxtaposition between his elevated, educated language and his profanity-filled, juvenile diatribes. He is easy to hate, but has brief lapses of humanity. He is damaged by love, and damages others. He is awful, but vividly clear due to Atwood’s impressive choice and control of language.

The framing of this story is also interesting, as it begins with the mention of a memory that is further described at the end of the story. I am not sure if it is my fault as the reader, or intentional of Atwood, that the end scenes are unclear to me. If it is intentional, it seems to emphasize how uncomfortable this story is to read. Gavin’s mental state seems to become increasingly unhinged as the story progresses, and perhaps this is the “wicked” of this particularly story. Not that every story will contain a “wicked” element, but it is something that I would like to keep in mind as we think about titling work.

I first came across the work of Ada Limón on Good Reads, and later on the Twitter page of Kaveh Akbar, poet and fervent reader. I was, at first, unsure of what drew me in more closely: the book’s cover or its contents. After having read the first few poems in earnest, I’ll confess that it was the former, the book’s cover, which intrigued  me, and the latter, the book’s contents, which held my interest.

The poems I found most fascinating were “During the Impossible Age of Everyone,” “The Rewilding,” “Down Here,” and “How Far Away we Are.” If not only for their wonderful narrative language, I love Limon’s poems for the moments in which they reveal themselves. In the first poem mentioned, “During the Impossible Age of Everyone,” there were many lines that I found particularly beautiful; for example: “There are so many people who’ve come before us, / Look out at the meadow, you can almost see them, generations dissolved in the bluegrass.” (1-4) Further down the page, on the 8th line, Limon writes: “This fence is a good fence, but I doubt my own haywire will hold up to all this blank sky, so open and explicit.” (8-9) Both lines leave me asking why Limon chose the words she did, words like “dissolved,” “bluegrass,” “open,” and “explicit.” At these points the poem seems to open up and become more a poem about history and realization and less about those mundane moments Limón renders so beautifully.

The next poem I’d mentioned, “The Rewilding,” I enjoyed the 14th line, which read: “The day before me undresses in wet southern heat.” (14) In “Down Here,” I also enjoyed the wonderful description. Limón writes:

The dog does this beautiful thing,
It waits. It stills itself…

…

All the shouting before
was done out loud, on the street,
and now it’s done so shushing-ly. (1-9)

I love the words “still” and “shushing-ly.” (I also love the way Limón creates/divides the word “shushing-ly.” When I mentioned my love for “How Far Away we Are,” I was reacting, specifically, to the following lines: “I want to give you something, or I want to take something from you. But I want to feel the exchange.” (11-12) I can’t seem to distill what I enjoy most about these lines, but I can’t deny their weight.

As a disclaimer, I have read through most of the collection. Gerard’s choice to begin Sunshine State with “BFF” is clearer after having read the rest of the essays, and I believe it is meant to function as a thematic introduction to the collection. It also works as a stand alone essay. Particularly, as an example of mildly experimental structure in personal essay. The style of “BFF” does not match the traditional essays that follow, but the themes do: lies you are told, lies you tell, lies that you live, and the “detritus” of your younger years.

I think this is very clever, but I wasn’t smart enough to catch it the first read through. It illustrates that themes are universal, and that is the key to good, relatable non-fiction. Gerard remembers – in incredibly specific details – the tragedy and romance of an old friend, of their shared childhood. All of the lies and “detritus” of this human relationship are applicable to the environmental and political stories she tells later. In other words, the humanity of this one specific relationship is not so different than the inherently flawed humans that she writes about in political/environmental contexts, and these human created situations are not just happening in Florida. The point I am trying to articulate about craft here is that good essays are written about a specific situation, and the theme is broad. This is not something I have learned from Gerard, but she has accomplished it in a very nuanced way.

The second-person narration in “BFF” is uncomfortable. It has an epistolary feel, but the reader cannot help but associate with the “you” Gerard repeats. Again, I think this speaks to connecting many different situations and people based on the shared, and deeply felt, human experience. Gerard’s use of repetition seems to further this point. The friendship she recalls in “BFF” is surely repeated by others. The issues she reports on in Florida are surely repeated elsewhere. She repeats “love,” but begins with the past tense and moves to present (page 7). The repetition of human issues and experiences are past, present, and future.

As I began to read I noticed a distinct lack of emotion in  Strout’s “Sign.” Tommy Guptill’s farm has been burned to the ground but there’s no sense of devastation or upset. Chronologically, the order of the story is very strange. The story is told from the past tense, he’s old enough to have full grown grand-children, but we also receive glimpses of his past, when he was 35 for instance. Tommy is a simple man. Strout’s writing is not complicated or elevated; he’s bright but probably doesn’t have a Ph.D. God’s words to Tommy early on seem to articulate just how simple he really is “It’s all right, Tommy.” He is regularly caught thinking about his past life, and perhaps the voice of the tired but satisfied and content old man is why I believe him to sound so simple. Had we gotten the story from the 35-year-old Tommy, he might seem more energetic, more passionate. Or maybe he’d be the same.

Tommy is also a man who is concerned with his reputation and character. He worries about what people think of him and holds his family very dear. Strout’s choice to create Tommy as a janitor is one that allows him to be both “invisible” and observant. He contains so many of his own secrets and those of the students in the hallways. He realizes and tries to understand the sadness of so many of the people in this town: Lucy B. with her small and frail body and Marilyn Macauley with her nervous face and distant husband. He is also a man who confronts very real problems; we can relate to Tommy because experiences are not so distant from our own.

I’m interested in the presence of nature in this story with repeated images of trees — one that had been struck by lightning and now lay on its side and another that felt a breeze Tommy had not — but also the vine Lucy B. draws on the blackboard and the soil of the remnants of the farmland. These soybeans seem to represent new life and new beginnings in this small town, but it’s just not enough to create any real happiness. The image of the sun is repeated as well, especially while Tommy and Pete talk in his car. “The sun had grown so high in the sky it could not be seen from the car.”

I have so much more I want to say about this small story but finally, I’m struck and almost bothered by the presence of secrets. The story ends with a new secret, one Tommy can use to restore himself in some way. All of these people are so troubled and we see Pete as the tragic consequence of holding such a terrible secret for so long. He’s deteriorated, alone, and has struggled every day with the knowledge that his father may have started the fire.