Reponse to Our Meeting with the Writers

Skyping with Daisy Johnson

Skyping with Rebecca Schiff

Word count: 552

This week we were assigned to read “A Bruise the Size and Shape of a Door Handle” by Daisy Johnson and “Sports Night” by Rebecca Schiff. While I did enjoy both short stories and found them interesting in different ways, I personally enjoyed reading Daisy Johnson’s piece a little bit more. I enjoyed the style of both authors, but the language, subject, and setting of Daisy’s piece was able to draw me in quicker and keep me hooked throughout the story. However, it is all a matter of personal preference and depends on the kind of stories you tend to be drawn to. In the end, I thought both authors were very good within their respective genres.

Daisy’s piece was a dark short story about a young girl named Salma who moved into her father’s house when her mother died. The story follows her as she grows into a woman, falls in love with a girl named Margot, and the role the house plays in the rise and downfall of it all. Everything about this story drew me in; the protagonist, the love story, the eeriness, the metaphors, etc.. I just loved all of it.

 

Something that surprised me about the meeting with the authors was how intimate and informal it was on their part. They were just at their desks in their studies in their homes in Oregon and Oxford. They gave us a small tour of the room, Rebecca even going as far as to show us her kitchen, her sink, and the inside of her fridge which I found amusing. You could sort of see how exposed they felt having to speak publically in a place where they privately work.

Daisy and Rebecca both spoke about their writing processes and each gave us some advice for our own writing.

The first piece of advice that Daisy gave to us was to read and write outside of the genres that we know. While I normally don’t write very much for fun in general, I will be taking that advice when it comes to what books I decide to pick up. I used to be a big reader, but for the last few years I haven’t been able to find a genre that interests me. Maybe I need to just branch out and read more genres that I normally am not so familiar with. 

One thing that I found very interesting about the styles of the two writers was how differently they approach familiarity and strangeness in their writing. 

On the one hand, Rebecca likes to take familiar things and make them strange. In her stories, she likes to focus on mundane things, like a school newspaper editor or a popular cheerleader, and then adjust them until they become strange to the reader. She writes and morphs them until they've lost their familiarity. 

Daisy Johnson does the opposite. She creates these strange subjects or story lines in her pieces to begin with and shapes them as if they are completely normal things in everyday life. Take the house in “A Bruise the Size and Shape of a Door Handle” for example. The house is literally just another living thing within the story. The familiarity comes in when we see Salma embracing and accepting it, even when it swallows Margot whole.