ENCW 452: Senior Portfolio Seminar

In Body Work by Melissa Febos, she mentions in the chapter “The Return: The Art of Confessions” the ties between love ballads/hymns (which she refers to them as “beggin-ass songs”) and personal essays. In many love ballads, there is this feeling of confession that gives a similar experience when writing essays about your personal life that […]

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Today I was able to finish I Can’t Talk About The Trees Without The Blood by Tiana Clark. The sections included consist of 1.) I Can’t Talk 2.) About The Trees 3.) Without The Blood. Throughout the final sections of this collection she discusses topics surrounding issues with her father, black pain, slavery, womanhood and, as […]

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WARNING: SA Mention Now that I have finished The Sleeping Dragon by Joel Rosenburg, I can say with certainty this book is a mixed bag. So let’s go over all of it. The Good: The characters and their interactions are done very well. A majority of this novel is conversation and internal dialogue based. The […]

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This week I have decided to center my focus around the poet Tiana Clark and her collection I Can’t Talk About The Trees Without The Blood. Throughout the first section of the collection, Tiana primarily focuses on  identity, racism, the black experience, and sexual assault. What I have been reminded throughout this process, of reading both Clark […]

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Women have consistently been portrayed as “emotional” and shamed into believing that their desire to bring attention to a topic that has deeply impacted them is nothing but, as many female writers call it, “Navel-Gazing.” However, the author of the book Body Work writes an entire chapter called “In Praise of Navel-Gazing,” which is meant to […]

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“Five Plots”, the fifth and final chapter of Trabold’s book of the same name, is split into five additional sections titled 1 through 5. Although I think I should’ve known better by now, I expected the fourth and fifth chapters of the book to tie back into the earlier chapters more than they did. Instead, […]

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The Yellow Wallpaper is a short story written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and published in 1892. It is formatted as the journal entries of a woman who, shortly after the birth of her child, has begun to suffer a mental decline. In an attempt to treat her condition, her husband has rented a summer home […]

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Writing a personal essay can, at times, feel repetitive if language is not taken into account. As stated in the book Crafting the Personal Essay, the author Moore states, “if writers followed only predictable paths, where would new ideas come from?” This quote resonated with me because though I know already how a memory ends, […]

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In chapter V of part one, Julia is introduced when Winston is having lunch with Syme and talking about newspeak. She is described as, “…the girl with dark hair. she was looking at him in a sidelong way, but with curious intensity” (Orwell 61). The way Julia looked at him was uneasy, and he noticed that she followed him around sometimes watching him. Winston […]

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By the third chapter of The Sleeping Dragon, the characters are sucked into their D&D campaign. That chapter is appropriately named “This Isn’t a Game Anymore” as the group wakes up and discovers what happened to them. They have taken on the bodies of their characters, the body housing the mind of both the character and […]

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The Bell Jar is the first and only novel written by renowned poet Sylvia Plath, who in February of 1963, barely a month after its publication,  cranked the gas on her stove and placed her head inside. She died at only thirty years old and left behind two children, aged two and one at the […]

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Erica Trabold’s “A List of Concerns”, which is the third chapter of her book “Five Plots”, explores her relationship with her sister and a nostalgic Nebraskan prairie. It is quite literally formatted as a list of concerns, which gives the whole chapter new meaning. It starts out fairly normally, listing things like “3. Glue left […]

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George Orwell’s 1984 thrusts the reader into a world in which both thought and freedom are punishable by death. Chapters one through four introduce Winston, who is well aware that he is being constantly watched and listened to. He must be careful of everything he does, as even the slightest shift in facial expression could […]

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George Orwell’s book, 1984, is a classic and well-defined post-apocalyptic dystopian story of the dangers that technology will provide to the government like surveillance. Orwell does an excellent job of building the world in the first part of the book and the imagery of a bleak, boring life through the main character’s experiences, Winston Smith. The day-to-day monotoned life that Winston lives […]

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After starting The Sleeping Dragon by Joel Rosenburg, two thoughts came to mind. ‘I can see how this book and series is considered some of his best work,’ and ‘Oy and vey, this is so 1980s but in some less than ideal ways’. Rosenberg clearly has a talent for crafting interesting settings and characters. One […]

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Today I dove deeper into Parker’s collection looking to find answers to previous questions that I held. I feel as though I am getting a better grasp of understanding her literary choices such as titles and even secret innuendos that hide between lines/stanzas. I am still finding the common themes of race, sex, violence and […]

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Erica Trabold’s Five Plots is composed of five parts. The first, “Canyoneering” slowly introduces the reader to the story of Trabold’s extended family in short sections separated by sections of lyrical writing about caverns and canyons. Although the stories are told side-by-side in the chapter, the meaning behind their connection is not made very obvious. […]

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As I move through reading There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce by Morgan Parker I find myself questioning where these poems are taking me and what their true intentions are. Parker touches on the topics of race, sex, beauty, and violence so far. Not only what it means to be a woman, but to be a […]

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After reading “The Gentle Art of the Personal Essay” and “The Personal (Not Private) Essay,” I have come to a fuller understanding of personal essays: 1. A Personal Essay can feel entirely different to any other genre of essays. 2. Structure is your friend to keep you on track. Regarding personal essays, the essays can feel extremely different […]

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