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Being in university, we’ve all grown accustomed to reading research papers and academic studies. Unless you’re taking English or literature courses, your novels are probably collecting dust or waiting to be read during a break. But when that time comes around, you’re so tired of reading that you’d much prefer an activity that doesn’t involve consuming long passages of text for hours on end. Last year, when I was drowning in scientific papers and textbook readings, picking up a novel felt less like a leisurely learning experience and more like a waste of time — something that would distract me from my other courses. Reading fiction is often associated with entertainment rather than learning, however — as I have discovered — it is probably the most eye-opening and true-to-life literary genre.
The amount of reading required in our academic careers can be overwhelming. It’s easy to see why some people would underestimate seemingly superfluous genres. We think of fiction as basic stories of monstrous creatures and magical Greek islands, when really these tales have a lot to teach us about the world we’re living in today. The Odyssey cannot be reduced solely to a king battling various mythical monsters on his journey home. What are the lengths someone will go to return to their family? When a great hero is on his knees begging to go home, one can’t help but be reminded of the importance of loved ones. Fiction does not solely provide entertainment; it teaches us lessons about our world and ourselves.
It is probably the most eye-opening and true-to-life literary genre to exist.
Reading literary fiction can even improve our empathy. It asks us to step into a character’s life and understand his or her choices. In Frankenstein, the creature is presented as a monstrous being, undeserving of love from the perspective of his creator. The novel challenges us to consider the perspective of multiple characters, including the creature. We are asked to be active readers and assume different roles as the narration shifts from character to character. Despite subjective interpretations of the piece, every reader undoubtedly learns how to relate. If we can step into a fictional world and empathize with characters we come to know in the span of two hundred pages, we can apply that skill to our own lives. The way you form strong bonds with people and connect with others depends on your ability to see the world through their eyes.
So is fiction a waste of time? It doesn’t detract from your schoolwork. It enhances your perspectives and critical thinking by allowing you to see the world in a new light. You cannot come away from a few hours of reading unchanged. When you read fiction, consciously or not, you relate differently to your own life. Whether you have to escape to Ithaca, or pay a visit to Victor Frankenstein’s laboratory, you gain insight into humanity. Even if you may not recognize it, you are learning.
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Growing up, I always found it difficult to fully empathize with the leading characters in young adult novels. Often starring an ambiguously White female lead with a token Black or Latina BFF, the books of my childhood didn’t mirror my coming of age experiences. While most of these stories were set in some North American city or town, and I could often relate to that element, the plot lines were portrayed through White eyes and never touched upon the challenges I faced growing up, or the simple quirks and differences between my childhood and that of someone White growing up in a White home and a White world.
Now that I’m a grown adult who has constant access to the Internet, I’ve recently started to spend a considerable amount of my free time looking into books that feature lead characters that I can relate to. Below are four of my choices if you’re looking for a similarly diverse reading experience:
Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng
Set in 1970s small town Ohio, Everything I Never Told You tells the story of a mixed race Chinese-American family with three children. The story is centered on the family’s dynamics after the death of one of their children, alternating narrators between the parents and children. While I don’t come from a directly mixed race home, I did grow up in a family that has a long history of mixed race ancestry and what I’ve grown to refer to as decades of cross-cultural pollination. For this reason, the book did hit home. It touches on the intricacies of family and cultural burdens, and how the notion of acceptance changed across the family’s male, female, racialized and white characters.
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Born Confused by Tanuja Desai Hidier
This was the first book I ever read that was by and about a woman of colour. It is technically young adult fiction, and I did read it when I was 13, but that doesn’t make it any less well written and relatable. The novel follows the teenage journey of Dimple Lala, an Indian-American girl growing up in New Jersey in the early 2000s. It spends a lot of time addressing issues among social circles, especially those related to having friends from different backgrounds, and therefore being treated differently by peers. The book also spends a considerable amount of time reflecting on the choice to pursue a career in the arts when coming from an immigrant American family, and even touches on gender fluidity and cross-dressing. I recommend the book for all ages with an interest in intersectionality.
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The Star Side of Bird Hill by Naomi Jackson
Only released this past spring, The Star Side of Bird Hill tells the story of two teenage sisters from Brooklyn. They are uprooted from their home and sent to live with their grandmother in Barbados when their mother can no longer care for them. The story is relatable for anyone who feels they have two homes — the one where they grew up and the one that answers the question, “where are you really from?” The two sisters learn about their family history when they move to Barbados and are able to learn about aspects of their grandmother and mother’s lives they could never have imagined. But at the end of the day, they are torn between choosing which country is truly their “home.”
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If You Could Be Mine by Sara Farizan
I will admit, I have not actually read this book but it has been on my reading list for the last few months and I have read the pages in the Amazon free preview. If You Could Be Mine tells the story of two queer women living and falling in love in 20th century Iran. This book is different from the other three on the list because it does not directly touch upon North American culture and race relations. It does however deal with the queer identity in third-world communities, and eventually touches upon the prospect of gender reassignment surgery as a method to bypass unjust laws against same-sex marriage. This is also considered a young adult novel, but it is still on my reading list.
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A Partial List of People to Bleach - Gary Lutz
Paperback: $15.77
Kindle: $4.10
Length: 109 pages
Enjoy a colourful collection of short stories – we know you’ll need it after the snow starts to settle in. One of Lutz’s more recent collections, A Partial List of People to Bleach, is an assortment of stories, ranging from time spent with ex-husbands to a nameless narrator’s analysis of their aunt’s relationship. This one will be best enjoyed with a cup of Earl Grey under a heavy blanket.
Between The World & Me - Ta-Nehisi Coates
Hardcover: $30.00
Kindle: $13.99
Length: 176 pages
If Toni Morrison says it’s required reading, then we’re inclined to say the same. Coates has made his name as a writer working for big publications like The Atlantic, but here he takes a more personal approach that will draw readers in. Writing to his son in a tone reminiscent of Jame Baldwin’s prophetic collection of essays, The Fire Next Time, Coates educates us all on the racial history of America.
Crush - Richard Siken
Paperback: $17.95
Not available on Kindle
Length: 80 pages
The themes of sex in these poems will help keep you toasty warm while you blush through Siken’s poems. This collection made it onto this list with ease, with his accessible style and relatable experiences. From love to ruin and back again, Siken’s poems are sure to fill the quiet moments at your parents’ place this holiday season. I’ve put my copy of this collection in my pockets often, since I find it nice to have a comfortable amount of poetry on me at all times.
Good Old Neon - David Foster Wallace
Paperback: $24.59
Kindle: $9.99
Length: 336 pages
Return to a hot, wet August with David Foster Wallace’s short story, “Good Old Neon”. It’s a rather short read, running about 41 pages online. It is available in DFW’s collection, Oblivion, but if you want to get around to reading the rest of the items on this list, I’d suggest with sticking with this one. It’s certainly better than struggling through Infinite Jest.
Solip - Ken Baumann
Paperback: $18.15
Kindle: $9.99
Length: 200 pages
Like the flickering of your fireplace (screensaver), Solip’s structure is a rapid fire ebbing and flowing from capital letters to punctuation marks. This highly textured anti-novel is sure to be rich enough to make you swap out your hot chocolate for water. Don’t be worried if the first time through leaves you nothing but cold and confused, some stories are best read twice.
The Castle - Franz Kafka
Paperback: $12.67
Kindle: $4.64
Length: 352 pages
You can empathize with the protagonist, K, as both must deal with an unfair amount of snow and cold. Nothing makes suffering easier than knowing that you’re not experiencing it alone. This sentiment is sort of ironic in relation to the protagonist’s hardships, given that he meditates on his loneliness throughout the 300-and-some-odd pages. Kafka died before he finished writing this novel — but hopefully you won’t die from the cold before you finish reading it.
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By: Christine Chow/Lifestyle Writer
As a month, November sucks. It’s after Halloween, weeks away from the Christmas break, and usually filled to the brim with an army of midterms lining up to punch you in the gut. But for many aspiring writers, November, not December (although it comes a close second), is the most wonderful time of the year: it’s National Novel Writing Month.
National Novel Writing Month, more commonly known as NaNoWriMo, is a worldwide event that aims to promote pure, unfiltered writing in a 30-day, 50,000 word marathon. To put that in perspective, one month of 50,000 words equates to writing roughly 1,700 words or 3.5 single-spaced pages of words per day, every day.
Subjecting yourself to that kind of torture on top of midterms, academic essays and formal lab reports probably exceeds the ordinary scope of belief (and sanity), but I implore you to pledge yourself to the challenge anyway. All you have to do is sign up on their website (nanowrimo.org), which will grant you access to a profile for information about your work-in-progress, as well as a meter that can be updated regularly with the total number of words you’ve written so far.
Writers are perfectionists, and thus make the worst procrastinators. Memories of the English course I took as an elective last year all bring me back to the same nightmarish scenario. I would hunch over my laptop for hours in the early morning, squinting through the darkness at an awkwardly phrased sentence while my roommate continued to snore away happily in the background. When I finally finished, despite knowing I had done a relatively good job, I never once walked away feeling like it was my best.
The solution, then, seems obvious: just start writing earlier. But as a well-read writer, expectations we have for our own work are often unrealistically high. You care so much about what you write and how you write that often you end up writing nothing at all, if only because nothing, as a default, seems safer than attaching your name to whatever seemingly mediocre piece you’ll churn out. For academic writing, that equates to putting it off until the last possible minute, or writing at an unimpressive rate of one sentence per hour.
The beauty of NaNoWriMo is in its ability to force you to put aside that perfectionist mentality. You write mindlessly and terribly and everything you write is basically a load of crap, but the important thing is that your word vomit doesn’t ever have to see the light of day. Adopting this strategy gives you something to work with that might eventually become your chef-d’oeuvre somewhere down the road. Even if it doesn’t, the sheer demand of quantity from NaNoWriMo allows you to exercise writing as a skill, which is useful no matter what field of work you go into.
If you’re struggling to keep up with your daily word count, try incorporating writing into your regular routine by dedicating a particular time of your day just to write. Stock up on snacks, tell your housemates to leave you in peace and find some writing buddies whose word meters you can use to motivate yourself through a bit of friendly competition. As a fellow well-seasoned NaNoWriMo veteran, I say to you: on your marks, get set, write!
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By: Mitali Chaudhary
Recently, the market for the Young Adult literary genre has ballooned. Geared mostly towards the mid-teen to early adult demographic, their popularity is attested by the large number of movie adaptations, which become widely successful due to the huge fan base that the books amass.
Unfortunately, publishers know that any book labelled “YA” will sell well, regardless of the quality of the story. This has yielded a slew of cookie-cutter novels with the same paranormal/romantic/dystopian plots and one-dimensional characters facing the most overdone conflicts, all within the span of 350 pages.
The most disappointing aspect of these novels is the incredibly flat, teenage female lead. It’s as if authors flip a coin to pick which mould the character will be shaped from — either a dopey damsel who’s constantly in distress, or a hardened unsentimental woman who lives only to bring down the patriarchy.
I remember reading dialogue from Graceling by Kristen Cashore (which made it to Publisher Weekly’s “Best Books of the Year”) in which the main character, Katsa, states proudly that she hates dresses, and can’t imagine why others wear them. To provide further context, this came from an individual that spent the entire novel looking down on other women. These other ladies were always portrayed as dress wearing and meeker than Katsa; they worked menial jobs to make ends meet because they were meek and wore dresses and therefore were less than men.
Making that first statement in itself isn’t a crime (I can understand if dresses are just not for some people) but it does not immediately make one a feminist, as this novel would suggest. Another issue is how ‘tough’ some of these women are created — after a while, it becomes borderline creepy when the character doesn’t react to a given situation as you would expect a human to react. Moreover, authors don’t seem to realize that it doesn’t make a woman automatically stronger if she is ultra independent, sullen, sulky and refuses to show emotion or rely on anyone else for help even in the most extreme of situations.
In fact, crafting these overly “tough” female characters does nothing to help the feminist cause, as it just sends the message that you need to act less feminine and show less emotion to deserve the same respect as men. That makes absolutely no sense, and sends a very negative message about what the spirit of feminism is. Why can’t you wear a floral skirt and still care about pay equality?
Even worse is the portrayal of the weak, helpless girl. Another very popular novel, The Elite by Kiera Cass, starred one such teen, America Singer, who cried at the end of every other chapter. This is not an exaggeration. Most of her tears, of course, involved the state of her cringe-worthy love triangle (another annoying trend in YA literature). Both of the boys she’s “in love with” break her heart (and she theirs), but she never grows enough of a spine to break it off with either of them, choose which one treats her best, or refuse both of them (how about working to develop your own personality, America?). Such characters also consistently mope, run away from mental or physical work and require the constant support of a man, without whom they are useless — I’m looking at you, Bella Swan.
It’s unfortunate that these books are only a tiny sample of what fills up shelves across the country. The worst part about this trend is that these novels get insanely publicized, and are read by thousands of young girls that are forming their identities in a society that already popularises unhealthy depictions of women. Why make it more confusing for them by creating these unrealistic characters, which reduce complex individuals to black and white cardboard cut-outs? They are difficult to identify with because they’re not real.
Women can be strong and shed tears and wear pretty dresses and be scared and need validation and be feminists and get angry and be shy. One woman can be all of these things. It’s time authors start creating characters in YA that are realistic and multifaceted.
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By: Hess Sahlollbey
If Aziz Ansari’s specialty is discussing the problems facing millennials then Sina Grace proves to be the absolute master of drawing them out in his new graphic novel, Self-Obsessed. This especially rings true in the amazing way technology has transformed the way we, as a society, communicate with one another. We live in a world where, more often than not, rather than speak openly about what’s bothering us we would rather text about our problems. We communicate through short messages with our friends instead of talking about our problems with them in person. Sina Grace, however, bucks that trend completely. He doesn’t want to write or talk about his problems because, in his own words, he’d much rather draw them.
Taking more than a decade’s worth of doodles, drawings, essays and some new strips, Self-Obsessed by Grace is an unfiltered look at his psyche and insecurities. What truly makes his graphic novel striking is inclusion of his old work, in chronological order, with his new strips. The juxtaposition between the works he did early in his adolescence with the new material that he created for this graphic novel allows readers to effectively see not just Sina’s journey as a cartoonist, but also his coming of age.
And while some of his problems may have been difficult for this heterosexual reader to relate to, particularly the ones relating to Grace’s sex life, there was plenty that also echoed true for me. Self-Obsessed captures the emotional angst and turmoils that we’ll face at some point or another while we continue on this never ending process of “growing up.” This can best be seen in the way Grace’s art evolves in Self-Obsessed. I have to commend Grace for having the courage to open up, create and share this intimate work of art with us.
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Joey Comeau’s newest book, Overqualifieder, is the second collection of cover letters Comeau has put out, following in the footsteps of similarly titled, Overqualified. I picked it as a fan of the Canadian author’s other work, namely a web series called “A Softer World.” Despite my high hopes, I ended up disappointed.
When I opened up this little collection of cover letters, I was met immediately with the “Dear Reader,” where Comeau notes that every letter was sent to a real employer. I’ll admit that’s an interesting concept. Once I started reading the stories, however, I found myself bored, confused and annoyed. The entire project was rather juvenile. I didn’t find it to be funny or cute, but rather simply self-indulgent. Even the title is contrived. “Overqualifieder” is a neologism, meant to be a smart attempt to dub this as a follow-up to his first piece.
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy tacking suffixes onto every word I can but this one is not enticing in the least. Despite this fallacy, I think that it does exactly what a title is supposed to do: summarize what is inside for the casual bookstore browser. Be assured that the content of this book is just as trite as the title.
A lot of the content aims at jolting the reader. I have read Comeau’s other works, and I can distinctly recall another short story about the rape of a ghost. He did what he intended to do: he wrote a story that was scandalous enough to stick with the reader. I wouldn’t necessarily say that it stuck with me for good reason, though. A common theme for Comeau is to write uninteresting stories, with attempts at shock-value to intrigue the audience. He has an affinity for producing perverted postulations in the form of stories as a sort of catharsis. This would be intriguing if he were to be pioneering this sort of thing. Yet, he isn’t doing that at all — we’ve all read Guts by Chuck Palahniuk. We get it.
Don’t get me wrong — I love visceral descriptions and writings that discuss taboo ideas. The perverted descriptions of sexually exploiting people and killing yourself with electric radios in bathtubs aren’t what make this collection of writing awful. I’m the first one to talk about masturbation loudly in a public setting, but Comeau simply seems to lack any subtlety.
Comeau’s earlier work on the “A Softer World” comic series was reminiscent of this collection, but his style worked much better in a short format of only a few lines. Over the years, I found that the ASW comics were hit or miss – but mostly hit, which is what kept me reading for so long. It’s unfortunate to watch an artist do something different, but not succeed in the same way.
I’ve been thinking that maybe Overqualifieder is the type of piece that is more of a formative work like Catcher in the Rye. I mean, if you don’t read that shit before the age of 19, you’ll end up hating Holden’s whiney, bad fuckin’ attitude. But, then again, if that is the case, wouldn’t now be the right time to read Comeau’s book? I mean, I’m out here in my fourth year of university, mere months away from trying to find some mediocre job with my English degree, and yet this book still doesn’t strike a cord with me.
I found myself asking the same question throughout the entire collection: why did he actually send these letters? He’s just wasting the company’s time with these pieces, giving himself fuel, and content for his books.
Comeau’s Overqualifieder is the type of book I would see at Chapters, pick up off the shelf simply for the aesthetic of the cover and for the name printed on it, flip through a few pages, and then put back.
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There are few people in the world who can liken their 12-year-old selves to “a middle school Hare Krishna,” and make you go, “yeah, sure, I could see that.”
Mindy Kaling is one of these people. On the first page of her sophomore novel, Why Not Me?, Kaling begins to tell the story of her early life by describing her childhood attempts to please everyone around her (“I brought a family-size bag of Skittles to homeroom”) — a trait that has followed her into her adult career. The book of essays by the actress, writer and your dream best friend, is a fun, informative and hilarious tell-all about her personal life, the world of celebrity and Kaling’s early adventures manoeuvring through Hollywood.
Although styled similar to her first novel, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me (And Other Concerns), the book is still a unique treasure trove of stories told with her iconic blunt and self-deprecating humour.
The book jumps into her stories head-on with details about her relationships (both high and low-profile), lists chronicling double standards in Hollywood, and even includes a detailed collection of imagined emails that would exist if she didn’t go into television and instead became a high school Latin teacher.
With Kaling’s removal of the self-censorship that causes many celebrities to hold back details in their autobiographies, the novel is full of relatable anecdotes and honest experiences that address the question so many of us ask ourselves in terms of careers and relationships, “Why not me?”
After The Mindy Project was cancelled by FOX and received some mixed feedback from fans, I thought Why Not Me? May have been Kaling’s comedic swansong. Lucky for us, the show got picked up by Hulu (with hilarious new cast members and uncut Internet humour) and the book is far from the last we’ll be hearing from this talented actress. Kaling has already signed a $7.5 million deal for a third book that she will be writing alongside former The Office co-star and ex-boyfriend, B.J. Novak. The book will detail their failed romantic relationship, once again asking “Why not me” in the most lucrative way possible.
Overall the book is an entertaining read that can get most readers laughing. Kaling’s trials and tribulations make for good feminist fun and capture real-life emotions and challenges with a light-heartedness that she pulls off perfectly.
Without a doubt, McMaster English majors will have already had the pleasure of taking a class taught by James King and be familiar with his wry sense of humour and wisdom, while those outside of the program looking for a stimulating elective quickly become acquaintances with it.
Having taught at McMaster since 1971, King has become a fixture in the department for his amicable lecturing style and the bevy of influential works he has published. Since obtaining his PhD from Princeton, King has written a slew of well-received biographies on subjects ranging from English poet William Cowper to celebrated Canadian writers like Margaret Laurence and Farley Mowat.
Of late, King has been focussing his creative energy on polishing his prose through the release of five novels between 1999 and 2011. King’s latest work, Old Masters, was published Oct. 2014 and finds him toying with a different method of telling what might seem like a fairly conventional story.
As indicated by its title, the novel is concerned with the artworks of the celebrated Old Masters, European painters who worked before 1800. For those immediately turned off by the prospects of reading a poorly disguised textbook, fear not. The book does not concern itself with critical appraisals of said Masters’ works and shares none of the heft of a stuffy art history course-pack.
Instead, Old Masters boasts a compelling, tightly-wound plot that still leaves room for ample introspection over the span of its 202 pages. The novel’s protagonist — or anti-hero, depending on your own pessimism — is Guy Boyd, a struggling writer who is surprised to find himself appointed to the task of writing a biography, but is nevertheless encouraged by the hefty advance thrown his way.
Ever the cynic, one of the first thoughts that Boyd entertains after coming down from the high of being given a shot at redemption is that he must keep his newfound finances a secret, lest his ex-wife demand more in the ways of child support for their thirteen year-old son Jacob.
In the wake of the death of Gabriel Brown, a famous art dealer who was renowned for his ability to find previously undiscovered work by the Old Masters, Boyd is tasked with writing a slim volume concerned with the man’s life. Not much is expected of Boyd — a hundred pages would suffice given that the book would be accompanied with full-colour reproductions of Brown’s most famous discoveries — but he immediately becomes frustrated by the lack of any apparent juicy personal details that normally grace the pages of biographies.
Fearful of producing a work with nothing to say about Brown that everyone does not already know, Boyd eagerly takes up the offer of Brown’s secretary to move into the late Canadian expat’s London estate. Aside from aiding him in his task of writing the biography, the house also notably succeeds in winning the favour of Boyd’s son Jacob, who begins to look forward to the weekends spent with his father, if only to cavort through the halls with his friends.
While now a different man in the eyes of his son, Boyd is frustrated by the fact that there are no loose ends to follow in his project of fashioning Brown into a more three-dimensional figure. Rendered anxious by the comfortable interviews with Brown’s colleagues that break no new ground and financially bolstered by the generous advance, Boyd revolves to travel to Canada where both he and Brown hail from in the hopes of unearthing new material.
Boyd immediately unearths a thrilling development, whether he welcomes it or not. An unsuccessful probe into the University of Toronto archives leads to a chat with one of Brown’s cousins who drops a bomb on Boyd’s biography; the Gabriel Brown seen in obituary photos is not in fact Gabriel Brown.
Through further research, Boyd learns that the man in the photographs and who built his reputation as one of the world’s foremost dealers is named John Martin, and he was as honest in his dealings as he was about his name.
In his search as to how Martin made such a name for himself, Boyd discovers an unpleasant truth that would shatter the lives of those who thought themselves close to Brown, as well as blow the entire art world into shambles. Equally disgusted with Martin as he is amazed, Boyd now finds himself in a moral quandary: deliver the safe biography his publisher wants, or reveal the truth about Martin’s rise to fame. The struggle to choose becomes an all-consuming one that threatens to break apart Boyd’s carefully forged relationship with his son, and one that highlights the complicated relationship between artist and subject.
No doubt aided in the writing of the novel by his own experience as a biographer, King proves to be up to the task of turning this dual character study into an entrancing page-turner. King’s prose deftly skirts away from being too flowery while still leaving you with no doubts about the extent of his own education. Taking up a familiar topic in the middle-age crisis, King weaves an interesting metanarrative that is well worth picking up in the event that you have any spare time this semester.
Sarah Kay makes stories into poetry and poetry into therapy, a war cry for the fallen and a fireplace for the restful. No Matter the Wreckage is a collection of her poems which you may have heard spoken out loud at a poetry slam contest or during her iconic TED Talk. For those who yawn at the mere mention of a poem, Kay will change how you see poetry.
Kay shines a light into all the corners of life that are rough and cracked, the ones most of the rest of us try so hard to hide from. In one of her poems, Kay describes people as boats. Some of us are battle ships, others rowboats. Some of us are hole-ridden, but we still say we’re only a little banged up. But all of that doesn’t matter, because “no matter [our] wreckage, there will be someone to find [us] beautiful.”
She tells tales of love – motherly love, passionate love that consumes you, lingering love for a ghost of someone that has moved on, and unconventional love. In “Hands”, Sarah talks about hands holding hands, hands holding pencils, hands making fists. She says hands are about love, not politics, yet “each country sees its fists as warriors/ and others as enemies, even if fists alone are only hands.”
In a moment of anxiety, Kay frets about the importance of making our actions meaningful now because we don’t know how much time we have left. Which words will be our last, and will they be worth it? What about all of our constant doubt? We are so obsessed with the past and enamoured with the future, that we are surprised when the present has passed us by. “The Paradox” takes a look at our constant worry that there is something better that we could be doing, when really we should be thankful for all the things we did, or at least all the things we knew for sure we didn’t want to do.
In one of my personal favourites, “Hand-Me-Downs”, she compares hatred that makes its way down generations to hand-me-down clothes. At first the clothes fit a little loosely, but as we grow into them they mould to us, become a part of us. And so we are part genetics and part expectation, when maybe we should be a little bit less predetermined and always a size too small for our hand-me-downs.
The cover on my copy of No Matter the Wreckage is a drawing of a woman playing an accordion in a boat on choppy waters. Kay is the woman and the accordion her poetry, a dry haven for when the winds become wild and the waters are choppy. Kay should never worry if her last words will be worthwhile, because the words seen in this collection provide reassurance to anyone who reads them.
