Where Is It Written?”, by Adam Schwartz, is a story about a boy name Sam. Sam is tired of living with his mother and wants to live with his dad. Sam’s mother was known as always suing someone in the past and studies alot of law books. Sam’s parents were divorce when he was 4 years old and his father won the case. Sam first visitis and bonds with his father and actually enjoys it.…
Have you felt that your home was a beautiful and safe but then you started to realize that it was a beautiful heartbreaking and complicated place ? Well that’s how Jacqueline Woodson felt. As we grow and change, so do our perspectives on a variety of things that we experience in life. The central theme in the story When A Southern Town Broke A Heart by Jacqueline Woodson is that as you get older the way you see the world changes.…
Horrific traumas, loss, and death all impact life to immeasurable extents, but even if these occurrences do happen, flowers of beauty and happiness can still bloom. The structure of life is built upon a foundation of love effort, and the belief that no matter what happens, all will be okay. One man, Shane Koyczan, is given a beautiful yet tragic reminder of this very concept. Koyczan meets a gravely ill woman by the name of Sara, and through being burdened inevitable conclusion of her soon passing, she shows Koyczan what it means to love and be alive. In Shane Koyczan 's poem “My Darling Sara”, he provides us with an inside look at his short but emotionally compelling time spent with Sara.…
When Kyle French's father and clairvoyant mother die in a car crash that he alone survives, the question haunts him. Through his grief and survivor's guilt, Kyle looks for answers and tries to heal with his remaining family. A story about the choice of either running away from your problems or making the right decisions to carry on, Pamela Harju’s debut novel is an emotional journey about coming of age and moving on even as your world collapses around you.…
As I read Into Thin Air, I realized how grateful I am to have so many people I care about still in my life. I haven’t lost anyone that I was extremely close to and I don’t know what I would do if I did. The only person in my life that died was my aunt, and I was pretty young and didn’t know her very well. She lived in Minnesota and I didn’t see her very often so her death didn’t really impact me, as awful as that sounds. In this book, there are so many people that die and I can’t even imagine how their friends and family much have felt.…
After a loved one dies, which of the emotional repercussions is the most difficult to overcome? Is it the constant, pressing thought of how loving they were? Is it the daunting task of having to move on? In Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, the Salmon family faces the anguish of mourning after their daughter and sister, Susie Salmon, is raped and murdered by the neighborhood hermit. Prior to her death, Susie had been a precocious, brilliant, yellow-bell-bottom-wearing 14-year-old girl with a smile that was bright enough to light up a city block.…
She told me at age seven it was her mother’s mother who left this world. At age eleven, it was her grandmother and best friend who passed in her arms. When she was twelve, her grandfather died and her mother broke. At fourteen, she gave up and said “fuck it.” “I thought, and still sometimes think, that death follows me around,” explained Stephanie Rachel Guttenplan.…
Based on the real story, Anthony Hill wrote “The Burnt Stick” to represent the bad aspect of history - “The Stolen Generation” in 1960s. Being represented to one of the stolen kids, John Jagamarra never lost his identity and belonging. Opposite with the changing background, conditions outside, he still tries to figure out the differences of Pear Bay and his home to never forget. Also, his mom is the big supporter to make him remember about his own language and traditions of his own place. Therefore, by trying through the whole long time, he still keeps his own identity and belongings.…
Willow Chance was living a happy, normal life, until she was forced to move to California. Willow was adopted and she is different, she is a genius. But at school when she make a perfect grade on a standardized test, her teachers did not think he was a genius instead they thought she was cheating. Willow was forced to see a counselor, his name was Dell Duke. At first Willow had hated going to Dell Duke until she met Mai and Quang- ha.…
Experiencing great loss can leave families either torn apart or stronger than ever. “Answers,” a short story from “The Half-Mammals of Dixie,” by George Singleton and “Young Goodman Brown” by Nathaniel Hawthorne are two unforgettable stories that show how going through the loss of trust and faith can impact a person negatively or positively. In both stories, the readers learn how Goodman Brown, a character from “Young Goodman Brown,” and Ronnie and Alexis from “Answers,” handle the loss of trust and innocence; the stories provide unique symbols such as the woods and Job to reveal their sense of loss. In “Young Goodman Brown” and “Answers” the characters undergo the loss of trust and faith in their relationships, but they both persevere through…
Being forced to abandon a safe haven can cause one to hopelessly cling to the memories created there. In Gerda Klein’s memoir, All But My Life, she and her family are forced to leave their house. In this excerpt, she wanders throughout her garden for one last time. She then starts to reminisce about all the memories created there and realizes that her life will never be the same again, she has truly lost the innocence that her childhood once possessed. Through the use of concrete diction and juxtaposing imagery, Klein establishes a nostalgic yet sorrowful tone to illustrate how one can cling to their past yet cannot avoid the inevitable future, which causes them to see the world around them in a new light.…
In the short story The yellow wallpaper (1892), Charlotte Perkins Gilman is writing a warning to the dangers of prolonged isolation. Charlotte Perkins Gilman writes this story from her past experience with postpartum depression and the long sense abolished rest cure of which she endured extreme solitude and very little human contact. After her experience in the rest cure she was sent home and told to only spend two hours a day of intellectual time and to never pick up a pen, pencil, brush or anything of that nature ever again. Charlotte Perkins Gilman writes a nameless narrator who's going through the same postpartum depression as she did and is forced under go rest cure by her husband John who's as well her physician. Our narrator describes…
How is one supposed to view the world, if everything that they have counted on and loved was stripped away from them? The narrator of strayed is no stranger to loss. The ones she has loved and counted on most have left her side either by tragedy or by choice. The narrator’s inconsistent upbringing forces her to view the world and people close to her to be temporary, however a quest along the pacific crest trail will lead her to the self-reckoning she has always longed for, to view the world from an entirely new perspective. Throughout the life of the narrator, inconsistency has been a far too common theme.…
I sat in my car gazing through the window as the lightning violently struck through the air. My heart was drowning in the rain as I looked at the broken picture in front of me. I have no dad, at least not one present at the moment. I see a mom at her wits end trying, but I know it's all pretend, an illusion that doesn’t have an ending. Looking at our house, our doll house, with all its broken figurines I can see the lights are on…
Mistakes are inevitable. Time is unbeatable. The longer the clock ticks, the more mistakes will be made. Time and mistakes have a funny way of coassisting with each other. Time however doesn’t stop for a mistake it keeps ticking away.…