A Short One on Short Ones

A couple weeks ago, I asked third year students at the school I work at (students about 15 years old) to write short stories. Yesterday I started reading them and I've been surprised and pleased by the results. Some of them obviously copied off each other, a couple I suspect just put their favourite stories through google translate, and one student just copied Snow White verbatim. But several students made some really fascinating things that made me feel like I'm just getting to know some of them for the first time.

Several of the stories feel like dreams or nightmares. One girl, who I know spends a lot of time watching American YouTubers, wrote about the frustration of being lost in a forest where everything's fake. One boy wrote about a guy getting revenge on the owner of an orange tree by giving him a mysterious black orange.

Of course, several boys wrote about fighting while the girls wrote about princesses in distress. A few girls wrote about meeting idols or becoming idols. Mostly I'm just happy these kids seem to be having genuine fun with English.

Twitter Sonnet #1667

Across the sparkling surface ladies danced.
Resplendent rocks adorn the diamond moon.
Refined for purpose jewels were sure enhanced.
Her dazzled future filled a pewter spoon.
As sleep arose it buffed the blushing sprite.
Aboard the floating garden witches rest.
Against the beating waves a heart doth fight.
And little blinking tears inscribe a test.
Returning words approved a worthless dish.
Reversing food condemned the pipe to flames.
Quartets of chickens cheered the dogless wish.
Beyond the feather trail's a list of names.
Across a bridge of papers pencils crowd.
Released to-day, the felon band was loud.

Books and Stories, Read and Read

On Sunday I read the new Sirenia Digest which contained an exceptionally beautiful story from Caitlin R. Kiernan, a story she wrote in 2009 for an anthology in tribute to Robert Silverberg and his novella Nightwings. I've never read Silverberg but if his work is anything like "The Jetsam of Disremembered Mechanics", Caitlin's story, I'd very much like to. Set apparently in a distant future where place names have changed to just barely recognisable--"Perris", "Stanbool"--the story follows a "Flier", a woman who belongs to a humanoid species with insect wings and other, subtler, distinctive differences from humans. Once again Caitlin shows a great talent for creating a character for whom the strange experience (from our perspective) is normal, their actions and behaviour never saddled with exposition or awkward moments where the normal things are newly noticed by the characters. At the same time, the narrative is never confusing, it has that wonderful quality of diving into a strange but also strangely familiar and fully formed world, like the first Star Wars movie. The language used throughout the story is lovely, too.

For New Years, Caitlin posted on her blog a list of the books she read in 2018. It seemed like a good idea so I thought I'd do the same. I'm including here only books I finished reading in 2018--there are a lot of books I read sections of for research purposes. As far as I can remember I read . . .

Le Morte d'Arthur (1485) by Sir Thomas Malory
The Faerie Queene (1590) by Edmund Spenser (re-read)
Paradise Lost (1667, 1672 edition) by John Milton (re-read twice, currently in the middle of reading again)
The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748) by Tobias Smollett (re-read)
The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle volume I (1751) by Tobias Smollett
Tobias Smollett (1821, a biography) by Sir Walter Scott
The Pirate (1821) by Sir Walter Scott
The Prince and the Pauper (1881) by Mark Twain
Treasure Island (1883) by Robert Louis Stevenson (re-read)
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) by Robert Louis Stevenson
Milton's God (1961) by William Empson (re-read)
The Stuart Age (1980) by Barry Coward
Economic Expansion and Social Change: England 1500-1700 (1984) by C.G.A. Clay
The Literary and Cultural Spaces of Restoration London (1998) by Cynthia Wall
The New Milton Criticism (2012) edited by Peter Herman and Elizabeth Sauer

I can recommend all these books, especially Paradise Lost. I'm almost done reading Middlemarch by George Eliot. It's really good, more psychological than I was expecting, it seems more like a work by Dostoevsky than Eliot's British contemporaries. I've also been reading a lot of short stories, Caitlin's as well as bits from Yeats' collection of Irish folk tales. It's nice how there's always more to be read.