tulipopera

Opening scene - Introduces protagonist, setting, tone, and core wounds. At any given moment at least twenty-two thousand particles float in the air around you. On the second Monday in April, 1998, these translucent menaces encircled Cap and I like vultures, shoulder's back and perched to dive. All day it felt like the flowering trees of spring erupted at our fingertips, coy pinks pushing past woebegone whites. We ran in circles playing zombies. But when dusk descended those menaces materialized, surrounding us in a thousand motley shapes. I put my hands in the air. "We surrender!" Cap stared and put his pointer finger up (Boink!). I don’t know if he saw the particles or just happened to poke the air at the right time. That’s one of the many rare things about Cap: he’s semi-clairvoyant. Like, he’s tapped into some other realm, but only partially. He still picks his nose, for example, definitely an our realm sort of thing. The first time I noticed the particles I sat on the foot of Cap’s bed. His electric blue carpet matched the flawless sky and I felt as though the bits formed a gateway of sorts. Portal, if you will. I’m a bit obsessed with them. I stood and stuck my head through the ring like a goose. Expecting to disappear; or, at the very least, pretending to expect. I should say, at the easily-forgotten age of eleven my ability to believe in anything like magic already bordered non-existent. Often these particles vanish as quickly as they appear. They scattered especially quickly when our mom coughed (Mff, ack!). Quite a few times I caught sight of them in a passing wind, dangling in the kitchen or soaring through with the sun. But that hack filled our house like a heavy perfume, vanquishing everything (Mff! Mff! ack!). Sometimes, though, these little guys stick around—heaving themselves across that sound you hear when all else is silent. Needless to say, I didn’t disappear into a magical realm, I just stood there with my neck out, relieved no one was there to see it. But the particles were never menacing until that Monday evening. Whatever happens on a Monday night? Even our old brick house felt haunted. Mostly because it was hard not to think of her. That’s probably what we went there to do. Think of her, pay respects, as they say, like respect is a form of currency you can offload. I stared up at her old window as Cap ran circles around me. For what felt like hours into days Caroline laid near completely still in her bedroom. It was as though time didn’t exist. With, at intervals, of course, that relentless cough. When I dared to peek in her bedroom she almost always rested on her side, staring vacantly at the green and white swirling wallpaper. It was easy to imagine her still there. Have you ever seen the Andrew Wyeth painting, Day Dream? A woman lies still in an almost entirely white room. She is sprawled across a bed, naked. You can’t tell if she is sleeping or dreaming. A sheer sheet shelters her from the rest of the room and, in this cocoon, she passes time. Anyway, that was my mom. I thought perhaps her occupation was the same as this beautiful woman in this beautiful painting.

Assignment one In Aliquippa, Mae Brehany is the protagonist. As she prepares to graduate high school and contemplates what to do next Mae decides the only way forward is bringing her father to justice. After he left her family when Mae was in elementary school her mother slid into a debilitating depression she never quite recovered from. While leaving Mae and younger brother Cap to reach for the peanut butter and jelly in the pantry she would lay in bed and stare out the windows for hours. Her mother’s untimely death confirms Mae’s desire and she sets out on a road trip that she thinks is to find her father and make him face the wake of his departure. Assignment Two In Mae’s first person narrative her father is the antagonist. First, he left the family when Mae was still in elementary school. This ultimately death led to her mother’s spiraling depression prior to her terminal illness. Mae’s father is more often presented in the novel as a non-present character. He is presented through her memories and the impact he had on others. Ultimately he was a person unable to sit with hard things, unable to sit with his own shame and the difficulties of raising two young children- one severely autistic with a wife who struggled with a mood disorder and left. Ultimately Mae wrote her father off early for herself but can’t let go of what he did to her mother. Mae’s goal in life from a young age is to capture her mother’s attention, as her mother drifts into a deeper depression after her father leaves, this makes him the ultimate enemy as her mother becomes less accessible prior to dying. Mae’s father is also somehow very elusive. First he moves from the first address she finds for him leading her on a further chase across the country, eluding her a second time and extending the setting for the novel across the entire country. However we realize as the audience that while Mae focuses all her anger on her father perhaps her mother, Caroline, is the real antagonist for Mae, forever making her work for crumbs of attention and raising her brother alone. Assignment Three Aliquippa How long is impossible In the air around you Assignment Four The astonishing color of after by Emily X.R. Pan for incorporating young adult genre and contemporary fiction with magical realism. Jandy Nelson - When the world tips over A history of love Nicole Krauss - Nicole Krauss for the honest first person narrative and simplistic childlike way of dealing with grief and loss. Assignment Five After graduating high school Mae Brehany can’t think of any way to move on with her life except avenging her dead mom by finding her deadbeat dad and forcing him to face what he left behind. Assignment 6 Primary conflict: The large conflict exists between the core wound Mae has from the abandonment of her father and the neglect of her mother. She has taken on the core wound of her mother’s abandonment to confront her father and her mind; this is the core conflict. To find her father and bring him to justice through forcing him to face his shame at leaving them and what it did to them. However, the true conflict is hidden from her until the end when she realizes her core wound goes even deeper and deals with why her mother could not see beyond her own depression to give her and her brother what they need. It addresses her resentment at her mother’s inability to rise out of her depression and realizing that this is not actually Mae’s fault, or perhaps, even her father’s. And yet, it is one that can be forgiven. At the end of the novel Mae realizes that her father has already been brought to justice by the cruel vagaries of illness and she no longer needs to be the hammer that confronts him. She stands up having crossed the country to realize that neight her father’s leaving nor her mother’s depression were her fault. That the responsibility to avenge her mother was not her own. She can now move on with her life as a young adult acknowledging these truths. (of course this may be a lesson she has to learn again and again in her life. It’s one she feels victorious of at the end) Secondary conflict There are multiple secondary conflicts throughout the book as Mae goes across the country and meets many characters that force her to see new aspects of herself. First she has to leave her younger brother Cap who she has been in a codependent relationship with as his primary caregiver since she was young. She develops her first crush on a girl. She has sex for the first time (with a boy). She attempts to deliver a hitchhiker from her abusive boyfriend only to drop her off when the girl wants to go back. She finds and adopts a new dog and then has to care for him after he is bitten by a rattlesnake. She meets her father’s sister and she forces her to try to see her father’s story from another perspective. Perhaps the largest of the secondary conflicts is Mae’s relationship with her childhood friend Dylan who has had a crush on Mae since they were kids and who Mae has yet to acknowledge that she may also have feelings for. Setting As a road trip novel the setting is varied and changing. It starts out in the small run down blue collar city of Aliquippa, Pennsylvania which causes Mae to ruminate on the nature of roots and how shallow many people in Aliquippa’s relationship with their own roots are compared to the native people that lived on the land before them. The name of Aliquippa is a good jumping off point to these ruminations as it is named after the native queen who met George Washington and about whom much is speculated but little actually known. The setting then shifts to the midwest as Mae attempts to find her father only to realize he moved some years before to the west coast. This changes the setting yet again as she goes through the prairie and stays there for a time before romping through the desert to combat wildlife and finally ending up on the verdant shores of Washington State, in another blue collar small town, for her final showdown with herself. In each setting Mae has some interaction with the animals and vegetation of the place. Perhaps one of my final settings to write is one I’ve spent a lot of time in and that’s long term care. I know many people would put this as one of their least favorite places to go and live. And I get it I don’t want to live in a long term care facility as many of them exist in the US at this point either and yet they are verdant grounds for people confronting their lifelong demons, saying the most inane and vulnerable things to strangers and in the case of Mae’s story is where she meets her father’s father and realizes he knows who she is and that her father is in deed living in the facility as well. ‘ Of course the care and the road and I-80 itself is the setting. The thing I loved thinking about I-80 as I was writing was that unlike other highways that cross the US, I-80 actually began outwest and returned east. Which is ultimately perhaps going to be the second part of Mae’s journey which I am open to writing as a sequel.