The workshops in this course ask you to compose responses to the drafts your group members write. It's important to take the writing of these responses seriously, because they are important in many wa

Hey, congratulations on writing a really awesome story! I was with you the whole time. It was fully relatable. The reason it was relatable was that there were images and interesting sentences. I am glad I read this. Thank you for sharing it.

Your first piece, Back and Forth is the story of a man convicted of possession of hallucinogens. What’s unique about this piece is that it is told from two perspectives: that of the criminal, who seems to think of it almost like his wedding day, and that of the warden, who tells the story how it actually happened. Censorship is a metaphor for/reference to many things in our society that are deemed unacceptable of hearing, seeing, or knowing about. Parable of Oil tells about the clearing of a forest for lumber from the perspective of the animals that live there. Dichotomous is about someone who is caught between two sides that are at war. The narrator is trying to get the two sides to come to peaceful terms, but they refuse. Heresy of Change is about a wizard, but I had a little bit of trouble following the plot line and didn’t understand much besides that he was making some announcement to the public, and ended up being killed. Lastly The Modern Morrigan is about a shape-shifting god. However, I also got lost in this one and don’t really understand the plot.

Overall, you did a nice job with these pieces. I really liked your idea for Back and Forth and enjoyed the juxtaposition of the two points of view. I also particularly enjoyed your two poems. Censorship definitely makes a statement with the way that you put slashes instead of words. I also like the underlying meaning in Dichotomous and the way that you put the underlying concept to a story.

My biggest suggestion for you is to make the plots of Heresy of Change and The Modern Morrigan more straightforward and obvious for the reader. They are very poetic stories, but I think that is part of the reason why I had trouble understanding them. Keep in mind that “fancy” sentences aren’t always better. An additional small note is to make sure you’re using dashes instead of hyphens because using the wrong one disrupts the flow.

Thanks for letting me read your work!

Upon first reading the Noah’s prose, I did not necessarily understand what his overall message was. Some of the thoughts seemed to be spontaneous and discontinuous. However, after reading through the prose a few more times, I began to understand his intent. The prose is entitled “Double” which I first thought had little relevance to the poem but now I understand it is the key to understanding the piece. It is the piece that completes the puzzle. I liked his use of intricate adjectives, they help relay his message about loneliness in the middle of the poem. Noah is sitting in a car and his lonesome “peace” is removed when his friendly double enters the car. He seems to be happy about his arrival and is more than willing to compromise his peace and quiet for his friend, teammate, and therapist.

The poetic device he uses most effectively is alliteration which he uses sparingly but effectively. If he had used it more and made it a more prominent feature in his poem, I think it would have contributed nicely. The poem is strongest at the end when he leaves the reader to imagine what scenario he is in with his double and how he is interacting with him. It is weakest in the beginning where he spends a marginal portion of the space explaining his relationship with his double, it seems like more of a list of activities and synonyms for friend. Overall I think he did a very good job and the poem was impactful and insightful.

Thank you for sharing this piece with me. I have to be honest with you, I liked the end best because it got me out of reading this! It was really confusing to me. I’m glad it was so short. I don’t know whether you are planning to make a living as a writer but you might think about another career because I think you are either not using your talent or not getting it across to the reader somehow. The part about the red dress being smelly was actually even maybe offensive. I made inferences at the beginning that you may not have intended the reader to have, you should probably bear that in mind. There were also a few parts that I wanted to mark when it came to wording or sentence structure. There’s a lot I want to say, but I don’t have much time to do it so I will talk about it in class.

I admire that the first poem, Monster, is very short because the reader can analyze it in different ways and take it in in many different directions. It also is relatable is many real life situations which makes the reader connect more with the author. In the second poem, Wonder, the line “To see yourself stripped bare of all illusions?” stood out to me because many people put on a fake appearance of who they truly are, hiding their true selves. I like this this line because it makes you question whether or not you are comfortable with your “bare” self, or if your “bare” self in one of your insecurities.

I enjoyed the poem, Rescue, because it left me with many questions, which made me give the poem an even deeper meaning, even if this wasn’t the author's intention. I wondered, “Why is the devil crying?” and “Why is the devil doing the rescuing?”. Then I thought about how in life, drugs are a metaphorical “devil” and people give in to the “devil’s” lies that the drugs will help them, but in the end they do more harm than good. Maybe this is why the devil is crying. The devil knows that in the end the person that he/she is trying to help may be worse off than they were originally.

The poem, Unanswered, was very retable, which I appreciated. It has a strong message relaying how many people sin to forget the reasons why they are unhappy with themselves. I admire the way, Regret, starts off with one’s motivation to do good, and takes a turn with their loss of motivation, resulting in their misconception that destruction is easier than protection. Grief is another poem that resonates with me because I, like many other people, fear losing people around me for I would hate to end up alone with only the memories of the people I once loved.

Lastly, the poem, Sins, was one of my favorites that the author has written because it analyzes the line between being a sinner and being a go getter. It also explains that sins can have very different meanings and intentions to based off the way you perceive them. In the author’s questions, she asked if it was necessary to include periods at the end of stanzas. Personally, I believe this is the author’s choice. The way the author punctuates her poem adds to the poem’s uniqueness and can change the way the poem is read. She also asks if the poems in the collection go well together and if anything should be added or changed. I believe the collection of poems work very well together because they have common themes including reality, facing one’s true self, and tragedy.

They also all have double meanings, leaving an open interpretation for the reader. If the author were to change something, she may want to lengthen some of the poems, like Monster and Rescue, in order to fully express her intended meaning of the poem. As I stated before, I enjoyed the shortness of them because it let me create my own meaning for the poem, but it also left me wanting more. For example, the author states that Rescue was meant to express defeat and sorrow, which is does very well. But, if she wanted to add more to it in order to touch upon the type of defeat she had in mind while writing the poem, that could possibly grab the reader’s attention even more.

Rescue left me with many unanswered questions, which made me wish I had more to read. Lastly, the author questioned the format of her poems. As a writer, I write very similarly to the author and enjoy reading poems when they are written in stanzas like the author did here. Personally, I like when poems are centered, which most of her poems are not. I believe centered poems make the poems look cleaner and more eye catching. Overall, the author did a very nice job expressing her intended themes for this collection of poems and I liked the hint of mystery added to it as well.

The first section of your workshop was very interesting; I liked it. It was deep and made me wonder, too. Just Your Average Tuesday was about a walk to this class actually, which was funny to me but you had good rhythm there. The story A New Beginning was just amazing. It told the story of how you met your girlfriend and what you were thinking too. It was followed by From Her Perspective, which was really cool to hear the other side of that story. Both of these moved very well and were just so cute! Just Breathe was a poem about having anxiety and how it feels. Soda Pop was about the party scene and culture of Miami, which was again, very relatable. The Ride starts with a normal scene of a boy riding his bike then seeing his Dad. As the story progressed, it turns out that that wasn’t his father and he wasn’t riding a bike. He was in a hospital.

I absolutely loved the Just Your Average Tuesday poem. It was very relatable, actually. I know you said no one gets it, but I do!! I love putting in earbuds and just being in your world on walks around campus. It makes me so happy and honestly makes me pay attention to my surroundings, which is hard sometimes when everyone’s just looking down at their screens. I’m glad you do this and appreciate it too!

Okay you are amazing. I LOVED the story about how you met your girlfriend. It’s so not cliche and definitely unique and I don’t know, it’s just so personal and cute! I liked how you remembered all the little details of her outfit and such, after you didn’t really remember meeting her. It was quite a good story for being like real life. I wish I had a story like this!

I loved how personal some of these were- I definitely enjoyed reading your works!