Raven Girl by Audrey Niffenegger

 

 

When I saw that Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveller's Wife, had released a new book - this wasn't quite what I was expecting.  I had blindly ordered a copy based purely on my love of her previous work and when this landed on my doorstep I wasn't sure what to expect.  I certainly wasn't expecting to fall in love.

Raven Girl tells the story of a postman who falls in love with a raven.  The unlikely couple fall in love and conceive a child - a woman trapped in the body of a raven.  It is a story of change, of the raven girl never quite being happy as a girl or as a raven.  The story is told through images and words as you get swept away with Niffenegger's story telling.  The images are beautiful and tell a story just as strong, if not stronger than her words.  

It is an adult fairytale, with suspense, action, love, twists and turns.  It is beautifully told and portrayed.  It was such a pleasant surprise.   // bloglovin' :: goodreads

'Is the spring coming?'

    “Is the spring coming?" he said. "What is it like?"...
"It is the sun shining on the rain and the rain falling on the sunshine...”    F R A N C I S  H O D G S O N  B U R N E T T  

All images from Meg Fee's blog as a reminder to you, dear reader, that you should be following it, if you're not already, that is... ;)

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How Should A Person Be? by Sheila Heti

With a nomination for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and a place on the New York Times’ “Notable books of 2012” list you would be forgiven for thinking that How Should A Person Be? must have exclusively 5* reviews under its belt. On the contrary it's a divisive book with no mediocre reviews: it’s either wonderful or dreadful, and nothing in-between.

Sheila, a twenty-something playwright, has been commissioned to write a feminist play. Except that she can’t. Still recovering from her recent divorce, she leaps into intense relationships: her first female best -friend Margaux, and Israel, the most beautiful man in the city. She finds herself unable to write about characters anymore and instead uses her real life relationships as inspiration. Transcripts of conversations, emails, letters, and anecdotes replace the play she is commissioned to write and instead form the book you are reading as Sheila searches for the answer to the question which has plagued her life: how should a person be?

In choosing to write with a mixture of transcripts, emails, and prose the line between a self-conscious fiction and reality becomes increasingly blurred. These are real people whom Heti has written about; Margaux, her best friend, is Margaux Williamson – a Toronto based artist. The truthful quality of the book, however, does not derive from the characters being real people, but rather from the subject matter. We are lucky enough to be living in an era which allows women to write openly and honestly about their experiences of being a woman; something which Heti has longed for since her youth.

Aged sixteen Heti, inspired by Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth, began making zines; she wanted her writing to directly contradict the cookie-cutter stories in teen magazines at the time, to prove that “We CAN be political, we CAN be intelligent and edgy and emotional without the requisite angst, etc.” Heti met with a publicist at Random House and began work on a book which would collect the writing from girls all over North America; it was rejected by her publishers, Heti says because it was too risqué, as a lot of the submissions dealt with sexual violence which the girls had encountered. This would prove to be an invaluable experience for Heti, however, as she feels she would not have been able to write How Should A Person Be? without reading about the sex relations, feminism, and body image issues which those girls had experienced.

The cover, unsurprisingly, features a quote from Girls creator Lena Dunham, who calls the book an “amazing meta-fiction”; presumably because reviewers repeatedly liken it to Dunham’s creation. There are similarities, of course, Hannah is trying to be a writer just like Sheila; they’re both narcissistic and generally not particularly likeable characters as such. But for me it’s more like a reality TV programme as your curiosity overwhelms you, you feel the need to keep reading this thoughtfully engendered reality. The words you read might be fake but the people are all real.

This was originally posted on The Yorker; you are more than welcome to read my other articles there, which can all be found here.

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Sylvia Plath appearances in popular culture

Sylvia Plath: poet, wife, daughter, mother, student, author.

For some reason it's mostly teenage girls who can appreciate her writing?  Maybe because of the fascination with her personal life, her tragic life, which detracts from the significance and worth of her work.  Maybe because of a silly idea that her work isn't relevant or meaningful to anybody else?

Any mention of her in the press is due to a family tragedy, more gossip, more secrets being turned into books.  So even if it is only teenage girls appreciating her work on screen - at least someone is - and hopefully one day that'll because they know nothing about her personal life and just adore her poetry.  It is, after all, the same respect we award most authors.

Sabrina the teenage witch

The Simpsons

Ryan Adams

Gilmore Girls

Annie Hall

Ten Things I hate about you 

Please note: Boys are allowed to read The Bell Jar as well.

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English Lessons: The Death of Poetry?

I post poems here all the time.  Following the recent article in The Independent about the high culture which we introduce young children to; I recalled a conversation I had had with my fellow English students - who all hated poetry.  Largely because of the experiences that they had with poetry in English lessons.   English lessons are often the first contact-point people have with poetry.  An enormous responsibility is then put upon teachers, exam boards, and schools to choose the right syllabus.  A syllabus which will give its students a rounded view of what poetry, and indeed literature, entails.  My own experience of English lessons, however, largely consisted of teachers teaching what they were interested in.  Until I met Mrs Clegg - who would start lessons with poems, often crying whilst reading them, but it made you even more determined to love the poem - to feel as strongly about it as she did.
"I don't really like poetry..." is often followed by an admission that the only poetry someone has encountered has been that which they did at school.  There seems to be a mistaken conception that the poetry on a school syllabus is there to give you a taster of 'the best' poetry.  If you find nothing you like, therefore, among the best poems you must not like poetry at all, right?  I remember we had one teacher who was finishing her training and spent the best part of a month analysing the poem "Limbo" by Edward Kamau Braithwaite.  We did the poem to death.  I still remember the poem today - and not in a good way.  That poem is nowhere near what I would regard to be 'the best' poetry and I am lucky enough to have had alternative experiences with poetry, to not leave the classroom thinking all poetry was like that.  
My mother's generation, however, were learning Coleridge, Tennyson, Keats in their English lessons.  And by 'learning' I mean reciting the poems until many years later - they still know them all off-by-heart.  There are anthologies published entitled Poems we learnt at School - presumably because they bring back fond memories.  I still cringe remembering the English essays in which I would liken the sonnet form to a bomb.  Small but powerful.  My mother was shocked at the poems, or lack of, which I was learning in school and sat me down with a copy of The Nations Favourite Poems and we went through them all.  It is these poems, which I didn't dissect to death, over-analyse  just sat and read through with my mother which I remember with fondness.
I think there's so much confusion about how you should treat poetry, let alone teach it.  
Are you supposed to read it aloud or in your head?   How much of the imagery is supposed to be analysed? What purpose does a poem have? What significance does the form of the poem have on the overall impact?
And it is killing any enjoyment children could gain from poetry.
I just wish we could give children a chance to truly enjoy poetry before killing any enjoyment with over-analysis.  Just read a poem - don't think about it, just enjoy it, for what it is - a poem.  
Here's some of my favourite poems which I've previously posted.
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