Why I write

“I wanted to explain that I am constantly overestimating and underestimating the human race — that rarely do I ever simply estimate it. I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant.” — The Book Thief, Markus Zusak

For a long time, my parents were sure I'd go to law school. They couldn't quite grasp why I wanted to study journalism and become a writer. To them, I might as well be pursuing a degree in poverty and minoring in hungry forever. So it's funny that part of the reason I write is because of them.

Famiglia di DiSalvo

Every family has its secrets, some more than others, some not at all. Being a part of an Italian family means that those secrets are multiplied. Everything and everyone is involved in your business, there is no thing kept private. In my case I have had the misfortune of the side of the family that isn't Italian, marrying Italian. Just in the count of first cousins I have 16, one who passed away in his youth. Each of my parents and grandparents had a number of siblings and children and so the size of my family is incredible. For us all to be involved then is almost a phenomenon.

Though things of the past have come forward over the years a secret was divulged to me that truly shocked me. My great grandparents came through Ellis Island to live in New York City during the 1930's. My grandmother was born here but her sister, Alma, was born back in their village. I had been raised with the knowledge that they grew up in the Bronx, each married well and had children of their own, however they never had a close relationship.

This past weekend I drove up to Phoenix as my grandmother flew in from North Carolina. Her sister at the age of 82 is slowly dying from dimensia. A horrible illness to say the least. My grandmother and I have always been very close, even from childhood she always treated me as a confidant, there was no family rumor that she didn't share with me. As we were each finishing our coffee and getting ready to go and see her sister for the first time she looked rather upset. I asked her if she was alright, and without any provocation she proceeded to tell me that she didn't know if Alma was in fact her whole sister. Something she'd never told another soul.

After my great grandfather served in WW1 he began to travel back and forth from New York. He came to the land of opportunity looking for work and a new life for himself and his young wife. He would work in the states for a year and then go back to Italy to see her and his family. But the last time he came home she had had a child. My grandmother says that her mother was beautiful, and was always admired for her looks in the village. When my nono came home and discovered a baby he could not believe that she could be his. As a good husband and caring father, he never pushed the matter and proceeded to bring them to America. Here my grandmother was born, and he knew without doubt that she was his.

As they grew older Alma was often ill, and weak spirited. Where as my grandmother was hell on wheels. There is no force on earth that could stop her from something she has in mind, just like my great grandfather. She told me that he used to say to her, "tu sei mi figlia, lei non é da me." (You are my family, she is not like me). He was convinced that because her social behavior was so different from his own that she must not truly be his daughter.

When I was a child my great grandfather, or nono, lived with us. He was 96 when he passed away and remember him more from photographs than actual memory. However, when we walked into that nursing home and saw her sitting there it was like looking at his face. Same nose, same eyes, same hair. Within seconds my grandmother broke down in tears, I think for the first time in her life she knew for 100% that this was really her sister.

Melody DiSalvo

Deep Life Thoughts About Bullshit and Candy

Freud believes that dreams are the key to unlocking the unconscious mind and discovering the treasure trove of hidden impulses, desires, or thoughts beneath.

Most people I’ve talked to think this is complete crap. The neuroscience textbooks tell me that dreams are nothing more than random images flashing through your brain in an attempt to organize neural firing of the day. My English teacher who believes himself not to be an English teacher but a great philosopher on par with Aristotle tells me that all of Freud and psychoanalysis is wrong and unfounded, so this dream theory must be flawed in some fundamental way. 

But I don’t believe this is bullshit.

October 24, 2011

I felt like I was drowning in sound. Every word my dad shouted at me vibrated on my eardrums and through my spine. I remember thinking I shouldn't have come home. After finding out I had traded virginities with Andrew, my mother had launched a full-on campaign against me that resulted in me fleeing into the home and house of my best friend. I stayed there for four days, trying to work up the courage to talk to my mother. I had no idea it wouldn't be her I'd have to brave.

I sat on the chair at the kitchen table, trying to swallow the lump in my throat so I could talk, and I felt like I was swallowing silly putty, sticky and thick and clay-like, choking me. I started to cry, softly at first, then more and more as my father says I'm a manipulative liar and that my tears are bullshit, a well-rehearsed act worthy of a shiny golden man-trophy sitting in a glass case. I open my mouth to try and explain myself but my tongue feels like it's being swallowed and I instead let out a small wail.

My dad throws up his hands, exasperated, and storms into the next room to watch Animal Planet. My mother, bewildered, retreats down the hall. And I realize I have been left alone, abandoned to my own devices, a test to see if I will walk past my father to get to my room.

I do not rise in body, but in voice. I taste iron coating my gums and teeth and tongue. Before I really know what my plan of attack is, I'm screaming at the top of my lungs into the next room, proclaiming that my dad does not care about how I feel; he only cares about Animal Planet and his business. He seems to be tuning me out, smiling even, so I force my lungs to let me scream louder, asking if he's listening.

He suddenly leaps to his feet, yelling at me to get my shit and leave, for good this time. I balk, face stark white I'm sure. He stomps out to the garage. I wish he was still smoking.

Desperate for a way to explain, I grab a pen and paper and confess to everything: the sex, the depression, the secret Vicodin addiction, all of it. My father comes back in, like a Minotaur, anger and rage burning into the floor and leaving blackened marks where his hooves touch. By now I have three pages, back to back, of confession.

He looks, scoffs, and crumples a page thin as a splinter, turning it into a rock before throwing it to the ground, "That's what I think of that." I bite my lips so hard my teeth turn red, but I keep writing, trying to be indifferent.

But I can't and I feel the blackness coming out of my throat; I direct it at my father. The layers of this bitter cake pile on top of each other until this Satan-fruit, this cherry on top, explodes in a red-visioned layer, filming over the world around me.

He jumps to his feet again, declaring he will go buy a gun and blow his fucking head off. He charges out the door, peeling out of the driveway and away. I feel something shaking me, a dryness in my lungs. My mouth opens as an attempt to suck in air, my mother is holding me, I am hysterical, wild adamantium tears falling from my eyes. My mother is calling the police, saying that her husband threatened suicide. For a moment I am afraid he would come back and shoot me.

As she is speaking on the phone, he bursts through the door. The police are coming, I say through a throat spider-webbed with choked sobs. He looks at me, sarcasm etched into the lines of his face, his hair, his blue eyes looking like the frozen lake of Judecca; his pupils have to be holding Satan. His face is expressionless except for the sarcasm that is driving him to laughter. He walks away and my phone begins to shake.

It's my mother telling me to come outside this very second because the cops are going to raid the house. I run out the door, only to find three police cars sitting in the driveway and on the road. A black angel of death, a police grade standard issue helicopter from hell, circles overhead.

I wonder if the pilot can see me in my green plaid skirt and blue shirt.

They drove my dad away to a hospital. He says he saw me there, reflecting in a patient's eyes as she huddled in a corner, rocking back and forth while adamantium tears forced themselves down her cheeks.

I can't get that night out of my head.

Non-fiction on the Writing and Wronging of Fiction

(Written as a critical response to the "Craft"of a short story for a Fiction workshop.  More of the world and less of the self. Warning: This is the rough draft--my dumb-ass didn't save the final--there are some grammatical errors; feel free to edit at your leisure!)

Can Almost Reach: An Inquiry on Craft

                A regional piece of New England fiction, Steven King’s short story “The Reach,” chronicles the trying times of the longstanding and somewhat isolated island community of Goat Island, Maine as it weathers through, in a very literal fashion, the mundane of the everyday and the mendacity required to discover worth in the embrace of so limited, so antiquated, a means of existence.  Comparable to the themes apparent in his predecessor, Jack London’s “To Build a Fire,” the conflict within “The Reach,” and the introspective tone King uses to bring that conflict to climax, is one less concerned with the inherent struggle of Man vs. Nature than it is with the eternal “conflict within”— Man vs. Self or Man vs. His Own Nature; the stories protagonist, Stella Flanders, has been, for nearly a century it would seem, her own most obdurate oppressor.  Through a series of zooming outs, King’s omniscient narrator expands upon the cloistered world, the arguably fear-stunted life, of Stella Flanders; compelling the reader to follow her through the quaint rural-Gothicism of her final year,  until she’s brave enough to cross the Reach.  

                The employ of third person narration is useful in not only observing setting and pacing the story— the passing of time, decline of Stella’s health and so forth— but also in providing for the reader a glimpse into the thoughts, feelings and, most importantly, the memories of Stella herself.  In the first passage of “The Reach”, a family conversation written as external analepsis, setting; “the last summer of her [Stella’s] life…Goat Island” and plot; “the summer before she started seeing ghosts” are established right away (709).  Through a verisimilitude of plain description—the naming of the months and use of their associated sensual experiences— the loading of Chekov’s Gun (use of event-driven foreshadowing on the part of the narrator) and passages of somewhat dialectic dialogue, the reader immediately becomes aware that Stella is passing through her last year and by the end of the story will be dead, having encountered the supernatural before her time is up (709-711).  Furthermore, thematic elements such as the impact of age on memory, or perhaps more accurately the significance of memory to the aged, are revealed through the use of this and subsequent dialogue between Stella and her grandchildren: “The Reach was wider in those days,” “What do you mean gran?” and then the first look into Stella’s inner monologue, “She’s [Lois, Stella’s daughter] forgot. Or did she ever know?(709)” The primal piece of dialogue with its titular reference, joined shortly after by the third person step-inside of Stella’s head, alert the reader, from the get-go, that they’ll be experiencing the story of the Reach from Stella’s point of view.

A Vegetarian Life

     I have been a vegetarian for over seven years now. When I first began, the tofu dogs resembled tubes of grain and plastic—hardly mimicking the normal look and taste of an all-beef, American baseball game dog—and the options were more limited than the water supply in a barren desert. I could hardly even find meat-free salads with the exception of a small house plate of iceberg lettuce and meat was always lurking in broths, dressings, and the like. I was forced to eat pure veggies (not truly a problem for me), breads, and cheeses.

Speechless

         I have never been a person that struggled to “find the words.”  My mother used to stop at Walgreens to buy earplugs before we went on family road trips so she wouldn’t have to hear me talk for the entire drive. My father was a big fan of the quiet game - you know, the one where you can see who can stay quiet the longest? I always lost.  I did, however, learn from an early age that people were impressed by my gusto. I called the radio station to request the “kitty ditty” at age two and a half, and my parents used me as a sort of party trick when I was three and could sing all the lyrics to every song on a Jackson Five album.

While my parents may have wished that I was a bit less talkative, it sometimes served me quite well. Giving toasts and speeches off the top of my head comes as a second nature and I often receive praise for my eloquent way with words at events and parties. It also led my mother to enroll me in the debate team in middle school and high school, and to this day I have never lost a debate. My mother thinks that I inherited the “manipulation” gene from my father, although I prefer the word “persuasive” to “manipulative.” My sister, the quiet one, is one hundred percent convinced that if I went to Hogwarts I would be in Slytherin because I am “more cunning than Tom Riddle.” Is it wrong that I took that as more of a compliment than an insult? Probably. 

It wasn’t until this year that I had any trouble finding responses to any question posed at me.  You see, my major is elementary education, and while I know that I am good with kids, truly enjoy teaching and don’t find it tedious at all to write lesson plans, it has challenged me in ways I never expected. 

In high school, I worked in a toy store and I never had trouble helping kids pick out the coolest toy or book and I could help any parent pick the perfect gift for any birthday party their child had to attend. After high school, I worked for a year abroad as a nanny to a two year old and a five year old, it was a dream job: good experience for my major, easy, and I got to travel a lot with the family. Luckily, the kids who I nannied for were angelic and content with drawing, reading, and ate nearly every vegetable I cooked for them. I left feeling extremely confident in my skills as an educator. It wasn’t until I started working in an actual elementary school that I started to realize that maybe I wasn’t as gifted with words as I had thought. 

You see, when talking to an adult, you can convince them of almost anything if you speak with conviction, passion, and you throw in some really convincing facts, statistics, or quotes. With kids...they call you out: they want an answer and they want it now. They don’t want your bull shit with fancy words and a quote from Thoreau, they just want an answer. And their questions and statements are generally ones that leave me coming up with nothing, for the first time in my life.

“Ms. Katie, why does it hurt when someone punches someone else in the ball sack?”

      I don’t know! I’m not a boy, it just does, so don’t do that! That is what I would have liked to say, because you can’t exactly explain to a kindergartener why it hurts, and what a “ball sack” is, I’ll leave that to their parents. Instead, after a long time finding the words, I settled on something super lame like “you know, we shouldn’t really be punching anyone on the playground because it will probably hurt no matter where you punch them.” Such a weak answer.

“Ms. Katie, there’s someone peeing in the sand box”

     Now, how do you handle that? Do you tell the little boy (who is in fact peeing in the sandbox, for an audience) to stop peeing mid-stream and move it to the bathroom? Do you yell at him in front of his peers? What happens to the sandbox now? Do we close it? Should I call his parents? I settled on a calm talk in the office, followed by being banned from the playground for the rest of the day, and a note sent home to his parents.

I still have a long way to go, but I feel like I’m making progress. The kids challenge me every day, but it makes me feel like a better person that when I give them answers, or take any actions, it’s after careful (albeit frantic) thought and it’s the most honest answer I can give them. And sometimes, I still come up with nothing. Like the other day, I noticed that a group of third grade boys were holding weddings for their lego people:

“Hey guys, this looks like fun... why are they all getting married?”

“So they can have SEX!”

I pretended not to hear. 

Typical Conversation with My Guy

(My sweetheart of a nursing student partner interrupts the reading of his takes-him-self too seriously most of the time English major. Just a little snippet of what occurs in my home-life daily--thought I'd share the conversation.)


Babe: (to himself) Whooooaaa cool. (looks over at me) Babe--Look at this!

Me: (nose buried in a book) What? What is that an X-ray?

Babe: No! It's a very thin slice of a frozen human cadaver...

Me: Eww!  Why?

Babe: It's from the same people who do "Body World".

Me: (Nose back in my book) Mmmm...it's still not right.

Babe:  I know babe...I think I'm gonna do that to you if you die first.

Me: No.

Babe:  Mummification?

Me: No.

Babe: Plastination?

Me: Only if you store me in a really fancy case with some cool old books.

Babe: Can I sit you on the couch for cuddles sometimes?

Me: Wha..? Okay...but only once in a while.

Babe:  I want a parrot.

Me: No.

Babe: But, they can talk.

Me: No.

D666: The Devil and First Grade Bingo.

After the ABCs and 123s of first grade lesson plans, Mrs. Carol Boucher often called the G24s and F36s of a typical bingo game. I was a crafty and diligent player; cheating my way to winning at least once every time we played. We wrote the numbers and letters on a card ourselves before the game started; if I left a few blank white squares and filled them in on an "as needed" basis...

"Bingo!" 

Hello...is anyone there?

Blogging to me is a bizarre concept. What is the point or purpose? You formulate ideas, write down your feelings, and send them into the void. Will someone read this? Will someone be intrigued? What if I become an overnight sensation! The Perez Hilton of the non celebrity world. Or what if I don't... To be a successful blogger I think you have to be a bit of a narcissist. You have to deep down believe that whatever it is that comes out of your finger tips is going to make someone stop Facebook stalking for a minute and read.

I am a child of the digital age, sort of. When I was little we had desktop computers, I played with gigapets, and Nintendo 64 was about as good as it got. Since then the world of technology has exploded. 9 year olds have iphones, infants have facebooks, and if you don't know what tumblr is then you are SO lame. Blog wasn't even a word until a few years ago, and now it is a way of mass producing your own writing. Everyone and their brother has a blog, but I stick to my guns about needing to be a little narcissistic to do it well.

The Not-So-Crazy Cat Lady (Blog #1)

I admit that I own three cats. The moment I tell someone that, the typical response is a small smirk, probably assuming that I had ordered a “Crazy Cat Lady Starter Kit” online. But like I try to explain to my friends that tease me, I am not a crazy cat lady. Or at least, I don’t think I am. I am a relatively normal person who likes to read, write, and play video games.

Anyways, I have loved animals as long as I can remember. Along with being a fashion designer, one of my dream jobs in elementary school was to be a veterinarian. That dream was short-lived when I realized I would not be able to deal with the sad parts that comes with being a veterinarian.

Welcome!

A conversation:

HEATHER: Hey Blog!

BLOG: Hey Heather. 

H: What exactly are you doing here? 

B: Well, Heather--allow me to explain. I exist to showcase the writing of students enrolled in English 201 at the University of Arizona. Think of me as a sort of collaboration between students. Think of me however you like. But don't think of me in the shower, I guess. 

H: Blog! I'm no perv. But you make a good point. You also make a good point about students and collaboration and those sorts of things. What sorts of things will be appearing on you, except, you know, those birds up in the corner? 

B: I'm not entirely sure yet. I'm sort of at the mercy of this group of 20 students. I guess you might see book reviews, interviews, observations, rants, raves, opinions, poems, music reviews, short essays, short fiction, funny stories about moms, sad stories about breakups, musings, photographs, cartoons, blah blah blah. Original content generated by students from diverse backgrounds. Comments. Collages. Collections. 

H: Wow, Blog. That sounds incredible. I can't wait to read more. Just one more thing...

B: Yes? 

H: I uhh... well, nothing I guess. I'm embarrassed. 

B: What? 

H: You've got some toilet paper stuck to your shoe.