Coming into this class, I wanted to fall in love with a place that was not my own. I wanted to love a place through the eyes of another, to connect with another’s unlikely love for a place. Bettisville seemed like the perfect space for me to explore this. I wanted to explore what made Bob fall in love with his own home enough to name it after himself, and what compelled his adoration for a politician with ideas I felt strongly opposed to. I wanted to do this through understanding my place in relation to his in the world. Bob and Judy were sweet and empathetic; they were human. But I think my piece says more than “Trump supporters are not all bad people.” I hope my piece reflects the internal struggle I felt when writing this piece, about how difficult it is to place words or categories onto humans. That the only alternative is to describe the facts, because, as Erica Heilman says, the truth “has this resounding, amazing sound.”
I was inspired by “The Act of Killing,” and how the filmmaker managed to evoke an extension of my empathy to these men who had committed horrible acts. Writing about Bettisville has a lot less at stake than that film, but misunderstanding is something that plagues our world as much as anything else.
In reflecting on my reading responses this term, I thought I’d condense what I extracted in a few lines, as an exercise of revision and reflection, since each piece I read or listened to or watched was influenced by the world I was living in and the events going on that week of my life. The free-form poem below summarizes how I read literary journalism in the past ten weeks:
The Last Days of the Baldock —
An author succeeds in explaining the complex relationship between these people
and their situation
and when I read Sarah Broom’s “The Yellow House,” I think of my grandmother.
She wants me to one day write an article on her mother –
I smile, even though she can’t see my face through the phone.
Erica says the truth “has this resounding, amazing sound.”
But even if I don’t say goodbye,
part of me knows it will never be just like this,
you can never go back to the same place
and time
and circumstance.
Blair is the type to repick at old scars until they’re pink. and silky.
Cumming’s sentences resemble the cadence
of an ebbing and flowing tide,
of the tide pulling in
and out, or waves crashing
and receding on a shore.
she desperately wants her to leave
but knows she can’t go back in time and she can’t inhabit a past-self
nor can she remember how thoughts
went through the girl in the photo
is lost, too young to have thoughts that could have transcended
to present day
The picture frame ended up shattered,
a big spidery crack
running through the plastic
I can’t remember how it cracked!
I wonder sometimes
if I had something to do with its shattering
I think that would be amazing,
if my seven-year old self had the courage to do that.
I don’t think I did, though.
the story wasn’t a “page-turner” for me
a slow revealing of the truth.
is her ability to use language to describe the indescribable,
to meditate in ways that reveal some but not all
each powerful scene was the result of thousands of hours of film.
if you stay with someone, or something long enough, you catch something.
Sometimes just a feeling is enough for a story.
The truth can be different to different people at different times
in The Warmth of Other Suns — my story was a story of the past, like the stories Wilkerson tells
“he followed the hyphens in the road that blurred together
toward a faraway place, bridging unrelated things as hyphens do”
watching this movie was torture.
we are standing beside him,
we are not completely detached.
equally frightening and difficult to confront
that the people in this film are people
just like me.
this time, remorseful,
he is vomiting. this is the remorse we have wanted
still trying to grapple with this
Wilkerson —
particularly graceful and delicate,
it builds in intensity, increases in speed.
repeated words and increasingly clunky syllables builds momentum
as the people of the Great Migration built momentum, and as the waterways
collectively
they start moving in the same direction,
, intersecting each other’s lives
through the pages of a book
the verb “frittering,” as in… “people were frittering away their lives
in a place like this”
Wilkerson, 176.
from the stories of names, and the things shared by strangers
who have never met one another but are connected
provide the backdrop for a history of his existence and coming into the world.
“Then nothing seemed to go his way.”
the casino is profiting off of George’s belief that
in the next game,
things will ultimately turn around.