LITR 3731 2008 final grade report

Pat Fargo

parsiflage@hotmail.com

281 555 5555

Absences: 11 March, 7 April

Quiz Grades: 1< 2< 3<- 4< 5</x 7<

Grade for workshop, exchanges, etc.: N

Poetry submission grade: N

Fiction submission grade: N

Final exam grade: N

Course grade: N

LITR 3731 2008 instructor’s response to fiction submission: "Fiddle Faddle"

I appreciated your frustration about the class's reaction to your fiction scene, Pat. In their defense, your piece is somewhat hard to classify. Some aspects are realistic, given the down-to-earth characters, but it's also somewhat surreal. This eccentric or in-between status can make a workshop pay attention to grammar and other details that they're surer of.

I appreciate the corrections you made. The story is easier to read if only because it doesn't ignore so many questions that naturally rose from the first draft. On the other hand, I could appreciate your feeling that these changes wrenched your piece out of shape and took it in some directions you didn't intend.

The kind of writing you're trying to do is difficult and always a kind of balancing act between pleasing and challenging an audience. Kafka is a good model, but you might also try the American author Nathanael West, esp. his Miss Lonelyhearts from the 1930s. If you like that, try his Day of the Locust. West at his best succeeds in balancing surrealism with gritty reality—you might recognize a kindred spirit.

The piece suffered from a few surface errors, esp. in possessive forms. Overall the piece was readable and pleasantly quirky, but it's not exactly compelling. As I suggested in the workshop, I think it needs more of a "narrative center" or point of view. It hops around from viewpoint to viewpoint, which only disorients the reader more. Conceivably you might have done it more from Plato's view, though of course that raises other issues. But I lost track of Plato on the way through, and after that I wasn't sure what to care about, though individual parts were prettily managed.

But sympathy for the difficulties with genre and audience—we academic readers want to think there are a lot of people like us out there, people who want to be intellectually challenged and amused by their reading. But in fact the numbers are small. Not to send you in either direction, but much of a writer’s career consists of figuring out an audience and then deciding how much to change for it.

LITR 3731 2006 instructor’s final grade notes: [including final exam notes]

Pat, your final exam needed more direct references to the Minot text, but the first half particularly captured the proper workshop spirit. The second half seemed like a continuation of your fiction revision account, which was interesting on its own account but seemed more personal than informative.

Your workshop participation was excellent all semester. In a positive way, we could always count on you. The good spirit with which you tried things out and reacted to responses was a model for the whole class, and kept us loose and friendly. I'll always feel grateful for your part in our class.

LITR 3731 2008 instructor’s response to poetry submission: "Frangipan"

The impressive aspects of your poem, Pat, are its musicality and the narrative or story-line that develops about halfway through. Your revision account tells its own remarkable tale about how you transformed a 21^st-century social situation into an archaic-sounding ballad. I can go along with the comparisons to Blake, especially where the language works directly and simply.

The only really wrong parts for me were where the language became too self-consciously old-fashioned, to the point where it sounded artificial, for example the use of "amongst." Also some parts sounded a little comical, e. g. "gently floated aesthetically" or "leaves to pine in brief romances." But looked at another way, those off-pitch parts suggest how much of the poem is actually on-pitch. It's not easy writing in such an archaic style, but enough of this works to reveal some real talent on your part.

I don't know how many more times you might fall in love, so maybe the experience is unrepeatable, but you should definitely keep writing poetry. And, even if the poem as it now stands is a true gift to your love, you might look at the poem afresh in a few months or years and try to make all of its parts as good and simple as its best parts. Thanks for a sweet read.