No Poem Is the Only Poem. No Story Is the Only Story.
Ryan had decorated the dumpster with a bumper sticker of a line drawing of a fish. It's true that the simple fish had once been a secret way to let other Christians know you were Christian too, but when Ryan put the sticker there, he wasn’t trying to communicate anything about religion. He was saying, “Let’s go fishing.”
I have long been drawn to literature that explores the pressures on women and girls to conform to narrow gender norms. To name a few: Sula, Anna Karenina, Annie John, The Woman Warrior, and, more recently, Outlawed by Anna North. I used to be a Southern belle, and now I'm a feminist from hell, but either way, I pay for being female. So do Sula, Anna, Annie, and Maxine.
You never understood the appeal—brown and gelatinous, tasteless under its soy sauce dressing. Dog food, your classmates used to hiss in the cafeteria. You flung it into the trash, container and all. Go back to your country. Can you see anything, with those eyes? You thought you belonged in the garbage as well, safe among juice boxes and pizza crusts.
In truth, I was a timid child, submerged in judgment and unrealistic expectations. I tottered and swayed, shaped by the whims of others. I envied these characters their abilities to take up space.
I traversed the pages of book after book, seeking comfort in their nooks. Eventually, I placed my own pen to paper and reclaimed control over my narrative.
“The suffering is…it’s just sublime. Do you understand what I mean?...
...: I devoured fantasy novels as a teenager, high and low, Tolkien and Le Guin and McCaffrey and Mercedes Lackey and trashy Piers Anthony, and then I discovered even trashier historical romance novels and gobbled them down like Little Debbie snack cakes. This was tempered in turn by a diet of Literature (such as a marathon of E.M. Forster’s novels after falling in love with the Merchant Ivory production of A Room With a View)...