Special Announcement!

Sarah Howard's play adaptation of the short story, "The Appointment in Samarra," has been accepted for publication for "Mind Murals," a regional Sigma Tau Delta journal.
Congratulations, Sarah!

Kayla Franklin - Little Red Letter

The first time I realized I wanted to be an English major was my junior year in High School.  My English class was reading “A Tale of Two Cities,” and every day we would discuss what we read the night before.  My teacher, Mrs. Hicks, would ask us to analyze certain passages from the book and give a deeper meaning. I found that while I was analyzing I was actually enjoying it! Because I thought Mrs. Hicks was one of the most intelligent people I knew, I wanted to be an English teacher just like her.

When I was given the prompt for my first college paper I was so excited to get started.  The day it was due I couldn’t wait to turn it in and leave my professor in awe. Within the next week I was given my paper back with a little red letter written on the top right corner. Nothing says ‘reality’ like a ‘C-.’ Through the next few months my writing became better, but my hopes of being an English major were crushed.  However, I persevered and decided my patience could not handle watching children all day.

I ended up changing my concentration to Professional Writing with a minor in Journalism.  After taking some field experience classes and writing many stories I have no need to fear that little red letter on the top of my papers.

LeTriece Calhoun - Dualed by Elsie Chapman

I’ve had assassins on the brain, considering I devoured Dualed and Throne of Glass by Sarah Maas within the space of two days. These books have their differences but they both have something to do with awesome ladies who are prepared to do anything to win their freedom.

Dualed is set in the city of Kersh, where everyone has a genetic alternate twin, or Alt. Tailored to look exactly like them, each person has to kill their Alt in order to remain within the society. The whole idea is to build a city of soldiers to protect the city from the Surround, which is the rest of the war-torn world former United States. From age ten to twenty, each young adult in Kersh has the chance of being activated, in which they are given the origin point of their Alt and 30 days to kill them, or a code within their genetic makeup will kill them both. The main character is West, the last child still alive in her family.

The entire premise of this book sounds amazing, and it was a fun literary adventure! The execution was a little shaky with the shoddy world-building and somewhat wooden side characters, but there was plenty of action and intrigue.

One of the things that bothered me though was West’s narration. Is there such a thing as being too much in the head of the narrator? If so, that’s how I felt Dualed was. I enjoy knowing the thoughts and the motivations of a character, but it felt like too much. And that may be great for some people, but not for me. A character’s motivations should be present through their actions rather than in-head expository monologuing. I know the phrase “show, don’t tell” is too overused, but it is perfect in this case.

Other than my overwhelming desire to get completely out of West’s head because she sounded like a pull-string doll of a Female Dystopian Protagonist, Dualed was good for what it was. There were some plot inconsistencies that made me shake my head and go “but why would they do that?” but for the most part this book was a fun adventure. If you’re in the mood for even more gritty post(ish)-apocalyptic dystopian literature with female protagonists, then Dualed is another one for the lists.

Rating: 5/10

Elizabeth Fenlason - A Short Review for The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

As an English Major, I seldom read as much as I want. Especially outside of assigned readings for class. So, when I bought The Glass Castle in the middle of last semester, I knew I wouldn’t have time to read it until Winter Break. Since reading memoirs is somewhat of a passion of mine, I waited for the last day of class, anxious to begin a book that a former professor had suggested for me. When, by midterms, I had finished half the book in a state of procrastination, I realized it was time to put it down and get back to my class work. The next weeks I spent waiting for finals to be over so I could finish it.

One of the most interesting facets of memoirs is their attention to a specific theme throughout the subject’s life. In Jeannette Walls’ book, The Glass Castle, poverty and ignorance seem to be at the forefront of what she is commenting on. But in the beginning she seems to be not so much commenting, but describing her life. Only later, in the last half of the book, does her voice become stronger with indignation. Walls’ memoir surprised me with its simple honesty and relatable home-life depictions of family. In a small way, I could relate to the poverty surrounding her family, but I could not imagine living in a room with a hole in the roof above my head and no running water inside the house. What I’ve just described is only one of the many surface problems she faced during her childhood. Other, deeper issues existed in her family. Her mother, an artist, could barely be bothered to get out of bed most days. Her father, very much an alcoholic, spent all of the income that the children were able to gather on drinking and “business ventures”, better known as poker games. When, in her late teens, she was able to escape the small town in West Virginia to New York City, she found life in the big city liberating. Several years later, the rest of her siblings joined her there. A few years later still, her parents decided to move there, but lacking the gumption to work for their keep, they were evicted and became homeless. The children took the parents in, one at a time, but eventually the parents took over their homes. The children were forced to offer an ultimatum: clean the place up, or move out. The parents moved out. Still later, the parents found an abandoned building to “squat” in, and lived there for the remainder of the book. In the last few chapters, Walls discovers that her mother owns incredibly valuable land in Texas, but will not sell it. The land was worth approximately one million dollars. Her parents chose to be homeless.

Walls shows how complicated family life can be. She shows how alcoholism can wreck an entire family, but she also shows how sympathetic degenerative relationships can be. Her book spurred on my passion for reading and writing memoirs, and gave me some valuable information on how a good memoir progresses.

Alexandra Doria - The Paris Wife by Paula McLain, A Review

As a recipient of the Wentworth Scholarship this year, I have dedicated much of my recreational reading to biographies and interviews of Ernest Hemingway. To give myself a reprieve from my studies of a young Hemingway in Paris, as my own adventure in Paris approaches, I picked up The Paris Wife by Paula McLain. The novel is a historical fiction of Hemingway’s life in Paris and first marriage to Hadley Richardson.  While the book was not exactly the escape from my studies I had envisioned, I decided this would be a fun way to stay on task.

The novel chronicles the journey of Hadley and Ernest when they first meet in Chicago.  The story winds through the ups and downs of their marriage as the couple find there way through the streets of Paris and Europe, all the while with Ernest working toward his first novel, The Sun Also Rises.  The Paris Wife is a clear homage to Hemingway’s journey of becoming one of America’s greatest writers.  The novel is written from the first person perspective of Hadley, and the reader is sure to fall in love with McLain’s characterization of Hemingway along with her.  Although the reader must keep in mind that the book is complete fiction and does not in any way represent the true nature of Hadley and Ernest’s characters and relationship with one another, the book makes an important and interesting point; Ernest became the writer he wanted to be when he went on this journey to Paris with Hadley.  While my work for the Wentworth is to prove that the place, Paris, is what pushed and inspired Hemingway to finally publish his first novel, I realized while reading The Paris Wife that it was not just Paris that encouraged him to complete his novel, but the people in his life too, particularly his wife.  It’s the complete experience as a whole that is inspiring; the people, the places, the events, the feelings, and the actions; the very elements that Ernest himself wanted to capture in his own writing. 

McLain’s novel is a well-crafted fiction with all the accuracies of a true timeline to almost make the reader believe it is true.  As Hemingway himself said: “All good books have one thing in common – they are truer than if they had really happened.” I believe The Paris Wife falls under this category.  Whether you are a devout Hemingway fan or looking for a book to escape into, McLain’s novel is a woven tale of one of the world’s greatest literary giants, and paints a provocative interpretation of the beginnings of Ernest Hemingway.

Shannon McCabe - The Importance of the English Language

 For a final exam this semester, assigned for my ENG 321: The Structure of the English Language course, I was asked to write an essay covering why studying the structures of English was significant to my life. These basic structures, which most of us learned in Kindergarten, are used on a daily basis without most of us even taking notice to them. Throughout the course, we covered the basics of the noun phrase, the verb phrase, the adverb phrase, the adjective phrase, and the prepositional phrase. We also studied morphemes and phonemes and how these particular sounds and words contribute to our overall understanding of these structures. Not only is this knowledge used for various forms of verbal and written communication, but it is also information that I will use with me for my future profession. Being an English and a Creative Writing major, I encounter these fundamental structures day in and day out. With my degrees I plan to obtain a job at a publishing firm as an Editorial Director.  In order to edit manuscripts efficiently and send out necessary professional documents, it is necessary for me to understand the structures of English. The syntax of English establishes how a particular communication can be interpreted. Each of the phrases mentioned above can be arranged and compiled into various ways throughout particular sentences in order for various interpretations.

When I first took this class, I thought that it was going to be an abundance of insignificant information that I already had a solid grasp on from previous courses in English, however, I was proven wrong as the semester continued. This class spent allocated time on each phrase, in order for the class to fully grasp the importance that each structure provides to a sentence. Every day of class, someone would write a simplistic or complex sentence on the board and the class would construct a syntax tree that expressed each structure the sentence formulated. Completing these exercises allowed me to notice these structures more effectively and how the slightest change or rearrangement can change the entire meaning of the sentence at hand. Using these obtained skills for my editorial profession will allow me to become more open-minded and observant to the manuscripts that I’ll be presented with on a daily basis. This class takes the English language beyond just the fundamentals of grammar and pronunciation, and delves deeper into the arrangement of words and how humans use these aspects of communication to create meaning and purpose.

Juliana Stilwell- The Missing Religion, Christianity

Religion has been in our student’s textbooks since public education has come about. However, Christianity is slowly escaping from our student’s textbooks and being replaced with Muslim. In a school in California, students were forced to memorize verses of the Quran and dress up in Muslim attire and recite those versus to the class. However, the students did not review a single chapter on Christianity the entire semester. I am all for students learning about other religions, but public schools are not teaching our students Christianity. Schools are slowly taking Christianity more and more out of our kid’s educations. I am not religious myself, but I believe that if our kids are learning about other religions, then they need to learn about the religion that our country is based off of. Our Constitution and government was based off of Christianity. Our forefathers purposely put it into our Constitution of Independence. Now, our students are being taught other religions, without dedicating one day to The United States of America’s founding religion. It is important that students are taught every religion in an educational manner. They should be taught Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Muslim, etc. It is important that in order for them to be well rounded students that they learn every main religion in order to be accepting of others. If students are forced to recite quotes from the Quran, then why are they also not being forced to recite versus from Buddhism or the Bible? Christianity has become such a taboo topic in our society that our students are not learning it from a historical stand point. I believe fully that religion should not be in our public education system, but it is important from a historical standpoint that our students learn the history of it.