DigitalCommons@C.O.D.

Katsion, Claire

The Prairie Light Review
Volume 41 | Number 1 Article 71
Fall 12-1-2018
Untitled
Claire Katsion
College of DuPage
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Recommended Citation
Katsion, Claire (2018) "Untitled," The Prairie Light Review: Vol. 41 : No. 1 , Article 71.
Available at: https://dc.cod.edu/plr/vol41/iss1/71
Untitled
follow me along with my delusions
chase me along with my shadows
trace my whispered dreams
and trap the echoes of my sobs
It’s so refreshing to hold your hand
so cold and fragile
compassionate but restrained
the subtle warmth you leave behind
dissipates softly like your voice
and I cherish every second
I long to touch what cannot be felt
but only by the most pained
heart and soul
do you keep me near
to quell the pain
or to remind
to cherish a life
distant, unlived
for fragmented illusions
related but broken
or just to say
this is me but
not really in
an intimate
sort of way
Claire Katsion
Fall 2018 Journal .indd   42 1/3/19   4:36 PM
Untitled
follow me along with my delusions
chase me along with my shadows
trace my whispered dreams
and trap the echoes of my sobs
It’s so refreshing to hold your hand
so cold and fragile
compassionate but restrained
the subtle warmth you leave behind
dissipates softly like your voice
and I cherish every second
I long to touch what cannot be felt
but only by the most pained
heart and soul
do you keep me near
to quell the pain
or to remind
to cherish a life
distant, unlived
for fragmented illusions
related but broken
or just to say
this is me but
not really in
an intimate
sort of way
Claire Katsion
Fall 2018 Journal .indd   42 1/3/19   4:36 PM
1
Katsion: Untitled
Published by DigitalCommons@COD, 2018


English

Untitled

The Prairie Light Review
Volume 41 | Number 1 Article 73
Fall 12-1-2018
Gratitude
Follow this and additional works at: https://dc.cod.edu/plr
This Back Matter is brought to you for free and open access by the College Publications at DigitalCommons@COD. It has been accepted for inclusion
in The Prairie Light Review by an authorized editor of DigitalCommons@COD. For more information, please contact orenick@cod.edu.
Recommended Citation
(2018) "Gratitude," The Prairie Light Review: Vol. 41 : No. 1 , Article 73.
Available at: https://dc.cod.edu/plr/vol41/iss1/73
Gratitude
We are grateful for programming support from Dr. An Rondeau, Dr. Kirk Overstreet, 
Barb Groves, Dean Chuck Boone, Dean Sandra Martins, and Cathie Walker. We applaud 
the constant nudging from faculty, who encourage their students to submit work, and we 
offer gratitude to the teaching staff, who help students revise and perfect their creative 
submissions. Thanks to Chuck Steele, Shannon Hernandez, Jelymar Mejia, Nicole Plum-
tree, Paolo Mazza, and the Office of Student Life for their constant publicity and support. 
Also, thanks to Bailey Kovac and Doug Wade for their knowledge, patience, and printing 
service at Alpha Graphics in Lisle.
Colophon
Twice a year for publication in the December and May issues, all students, faculty, staff, 
and the College of DuPage District 502 community are invited to submit up to four cre-
ative works per entrant of original fiction; nonfiction; vampire/mystery/fiction; essays; 
poetry; graphic essays; black and white and color photography; and 2D and 3D artwork of 
any medium. A class of student editors who are enrolled in English 2210 reads blind en-
tries before making final selections through a numerical voting system. The class is guided 
by a faculty advisor, who additionally leads the hiring process for the officer positions of 
Editor-In-Chief, Production Editor, and Marketing Editor. Over the course of the semes-
ter the Editor-In-Chief leads the team and supervises all operations, including assisting 
Marketing Editors as they work to advertise upcoming deadlines and events and oversee 
PLR correspondence, and assisting the Production Editor as they put together the maga-
zine. Final edits are approved by the editorial staff before the finished product is sent to the 
printers near the end of the semester.
Cover: 80 Pound Matte Paperstock
Design: Adobe Photoshop CC 2015.5, Adobe Indesign cs6, Adobe Illustrator cs6. Com-
posed on a custom Windows workstation.
Finance and Operation: The publication is funded through College of DuPage’s Student 
Life.
Publishing: AlphaGraphics, Lisle, Illinois.
Paperstock: 70 Pound Matte Paperstock.
Photography: All photography in this magazine is provided by the residents of district 502.
Vector Designs: Istock Photo.
Typography: Perpetua, Zapfino, and Lithos Pro. All fonts are open source and free to use, 
or paid for by Student Life.
Fall 2018 Journal .indd   44 1/3/19   4:36 PM
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et al.: Gratitude
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Gratitude

The Prairie Light Review
Volume 41 | Number 1 Article 75
Fall 12-1-2018
Back Cover
Follow this and additional works at: https://dc.cod.edu/plr
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Recommended Citation
(2018) "Back Cover," The Prairie Light Review: Vol. 41 : No. 1 , Article 75.
Available at: https://dc.cod.edu/plr/vol41/iss1/75
1et al.: Back Cover
Published by DigitalCommons@COD, 2018


Back Cover

Dituri, Nico

Why Good People Commit Evil Acts

Staron, Audrey

ESSAI
Volume 16 Article 27
Spring 2018
Fictions and Fragments: Autobiographical
Inclusions in Ruth Ozeki's Work
Audrey Staron
College of DuPage
Follow this and additional works at: https://dc.cod.edu/essai
This Selection is brought to you for free and open access by the College Publications at DigitalCommons@COD. It has been accepted for inclusion in
ESSAI by an authorized editor of DigitalCommons@COD. For more information, please contact orenick@cod.edu.
Recommended Citation
Staron, Audrey (2018) "Fictions and Fragments: Autobiographical Inclusions in Ruth Ozeki's Work," ESSAI: Vol. 16 , Article 27.
Available at: https://dc.cod.edu/essai/vol16/iss1/27
73 
Fictions and Fragments: Autobiographical Inclusions in Ruth Ozeki’s Work 
 
by Audrey Staron 
 
(English 1102) 
 
 
 
uth Ozeki is a Japanese-Canadian filmmaker and novelist who explores a range of topics in 
her work, predominantly cultural intersections, environmental justice, and the responsibilities 
and relationships between storytellers and audiences. Many of her works are semi-
autobiographical, and these metatextual references serve to enhance understanding of and 
engagement with the complexity of postcolonial identity, for both the creator of each work – Ruth 
Ozeki – and for her audience. In this paper, focus will be primarily on her second documentary, 
Halving the Bones, and her first three novels, with some references to her less prominent works as 
well. Though one of the works discussed is a documentary, Ozeki will be referred to as the “author” 
or “writer” of all her works, and the audience will be referred to as the “reader.” 
 Halving the Bones (1995) tells the story of Ozeki’s Japanese grandparents: her grandmother 
was a "picture bride" who was sent to Hawaii to marry; her grandfather was an artistic soul who lived 
through a Japanese internment camp. Partway through the film, Ozeki, (who narrates throughout), 
admits to having made up parts of the story she just told: she explains that she barely knew her 
grandparents, and though she knows some facts of their lives, she feels no connection with them. By 
adding fictional elements to their stories, she feels emotionally closer. By extension, though she is 
half Japanese, she feels estranged from the culture because she was born and raised in the United 
States. 
 In her debut novel, My Year of Meats (1998), one of the novel's protagonists, Jane Takagi-
Little, is a Japanese-American documentarian who takes a job directing episodes of a Japanese TV 
show meant to stimulate meat sales and consumption. Throughout the novel, Jane struggles with how 
to reckon her job promoting meat with her growing convictions regarding the dangers of the meat 
industry. Jane bears several significant similarities to Ozeki, such as in race and occupation – in 
interviews, Ozeki explains that much of My Year of Meats was based on her own experiences 
working in television. Interested since high school in the ways the world is represented in media, and 
the corporate influences on that representation, Ozeki was often bothered by the things she was 
required to do in her television job to satisfy corporate sponsors. In the process of writing My Year of 
Meats, she researched the meat industry to investigate the saying “you are what you eat,” exploring 
questions of identity, feminism, and capitalism. 
 Like Jane and Ozeki herself, the protagonist in Ozeki’s 2003 novel All Over Creation is also 
half-Japanese, and continues to explore the themes of My Year of Meats. Yumi Fuller grew up on a 
potato farm in Idaho, and from childhood has been considered a “bad seed.” She returns to the farm 
25 years after running away from home to be with her dying parents, and falls into the middle of a 
boiling controversy surrounding genetically-modified potatoes. Like Yumi, Ozeki returned to her 
parents’ home in adulthood to care for them at the end of their lives, and cites this as a significant 
influence on her works; her mother, like Yumi’s, experienced dementia. 
 In 2013, Ozeki published her third novel, A Tale for the Time Being, which is the most 
explicitly autobiographical of her novels. 16-year-old Nao writes a series of journal entries in Japan, 
and the journal is later found, washed up on a Canadian island, by struggling author Ruth. Ruth is 
trying to write a biography of her mother, recently passed away from Alzheimer’s disease. Nao is 
bullied at school because, though she is Japanese, she lived most of her life in California and is thus 
different from her Japan-born classmates. Over the summer, she visits with her Buddhist nun great-
R
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grandma, who teaches her about the nature of time. Three years prior to its publication, Ozeki had 
become an ordained Zen Buddhist priest, and in addition to her usual motifs, Buddhism has a large 
influence on this novel. 
 Ozeki’s autobiographical fiction is partly the result of a literary trend in recent decades: in the 
postcolonial era, there has been a growing audience for authors with marginalized identities. For the 
first time, the stories of racial, ethnic, and other minority members are given space to be told, and 
audiences are interested in hearing those stories. In her book Autobiography, Linda Anderson 
discusses the influence of postcolonial analysis on identity and autobiography. She posits that for 
many postcolonial writers, identity is based in dynamic movement and a constant need to reinvent 
one’s self and story. Because one’s origins may not always be clear, the self is “assembled from 
fragments”: bits of rumored history and stories passed down through generations, in conjunction with 
one’s own subjective experiences and observations. Identity is never complete, but is constantly 
being modified: “Within the language of dispersal there is a need, according to Stuart Hall, for 
‘arbitrary closures,’ points at which the infinite flux of differences is brought to a halt temporarily. 
Hall sees these ‘arbitrary closures’ which are ‘not the end’ as necessary fictions which make both 
identity and politics possible” (Anderson 115). In a sense, each of Ozeki’s works can be seen as one 
of those “arbitrary closures”: they are a product of her experiences up to a certain point in her life, 
and are influenced by her beliefs and motivations at the time of creation. The characters of Jane, 
Yumi, and Ruth are very different from one another, yet all are unmistakably versions of their 
creator; each is a “necessary fiction” created to explore various questions that weigh on Ozeki’s 
mind. 
 Additionally, Ozeki, like many postcolonial autobiographers, is compelled to seek out 
fragments of her identity by turning to her ancestors. In her book When Memory Speaks: Reflections 
on Autobiography, Jill Ker Conway points out similarities across postcolonial autobiographies, 
noting that there is a common theme of “craving to reconstruct a parent’s life in order to negotiate the 
identity issue of their own adulthood… [which] tells us something about the difficulty of life 
transitions when directions are obscured by unusual patterns of race and religion, or by myth and 
silences about the past” (Ker Conway 163). This can be seen in each of Ozeki’s works: in Halving 
the Bones, she is working to understand her grandmother’s life; My Year of Meats places importance 
on the relationship between Jane and her Japanese mother; All Over Creation closely follow’s 
Yumi’s changing understanding of her parents as they age; the protagonist Ruth in A Tale for the 
Time Being is struggling to write a memoir of her mother, and Nao is attempting to write a biography 
of her Japanese grandmother just as Ozeki did in Halving the Bones. Ozeki repeatedly engages with 
the (fictionalized) stories of her parents and grandparents throughout her body of work, continually 
re-negotiating her own identity in each creation. 
 However, one might ask, “Why choose fiction?” If Ozeki is interested in exploring these 
questions of her personal history and identity, writing a clear-cut autobiography seems a more 
traditional, and perhaps more sensical, route to take. Ozeki herself talks about how the narratives one 
tells about their experiences are often considered to be more “real” (perceived by the audience to be 
more truthful or valid) than the sorts of stories put into a novel. However, she believes these fictional 
stories are no more or less real than any others (Nixon). To Ozeki, identity is a collection of stories 
that one chooses to tell about oneself. The tone of each story, its plot points and important characters, 
change over time, and are informed by both experience and conscious reflection. Rather than writing 
nonfiction, she chooses to write fictionally, saying that her years making documentaries and 
television revealed to her the challenges in claiming to represent “the truth.” “It seemed to me that it 
is more interesting to… not boil down a complex network of truths into one definitive statement that 
claims to be true. And I think fiction is in many ways truer… it allows you to perform a different 
kind of truth-telling,” Ozeki explains (Wong). She points out that unlike in other genres of art and 
media, writers still tend to adhere to strict distinctions between fiction and nonfiction; though self-
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75 
portraiture is an established convention in visual arts, it is strange for a fiction reader to come across 
a “self-portrait” of the author in a novel. Often, it may feel uncomfortable to confront the idea that 
one’s identity is less a matter of fact and more one of interpretation. For Ozeki, however, openness to 
interpretation is not only “more interesting”, but truer to reality, especially from her perspective as a 
postcolonial multi-racial author whose origins often appear clouded and whose identity feels to be 
constantly moving. 
 In a sense, Ozeki’s books are very personal; they are very much about herself and her 
experiences. However, as an author, Ozeki is also very aware of and interested in the writer-reader 
relationship that exists when any of her work is made public. The writer’s experiences and intentions 
when writing is not the only dynamic worth exploring: the reader’s experiences and intentions when 
reading matter, too. In her article “Hybrid Vigor”, Leah Milne examines the manifestations of author-
reader power dynamics in My Year of Meats by examining the ways in which the two protagonists, 
Jane and Akiko, relate to Sei Shōnagon’s The Pillow Book, the character of Joichi Ueno, and their 
own authorial power. Milne frequently references Roland Barthes’s essay “The Death of the Author,” 
which argues that the authorial figure in a text is tyrannical and limits the agency of the reader, and 
should therefore be overthrown. He also believes that modern authors do not create original works, 
but assemble and blend pieces of other writings. Across her works, Ozeki displays a rich 
understanding of the value of collaborative authorship: she frequently incorporates “found objects” 
into her cinematography, and the texts of other authors into her books (such as using The Pillow 
Book as a framework for My Year of Meats, as Milne observes). Incorporating fragments of her 
personal history is another means of blending old stories into a new creation. 
 In her essay, Milne argues that throughout My Year of Meats, both Jane and Akiko learn from 
Shōnagon “what it means to be a modern, cosmopolitan author.” Jane comes to realize that it’s not 
simply a matter of renouncing authority to “free” the audience, but of channeling one’s power as an 
author in a way that encourages the audience to draw their own conclusions. Jane’s revelation at the 
end of the novel is likely reflective of Ozeki’s own views of authorial responsibility in media; as 
such, Ozeki, too, is driven to encourage the audience to make their own interpretations of the 
information and themes presented in her works. When she incorporates details from her own life, 
Ozeki prompts in her readers an interest in the truthfulness of these details. The reader may search 
for information about Ozeki outside of the text. As Rocio Davis puts it in her article “Fictional 
Transits and Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being”, “The writers’ self-awareness and need for 
readership generates the readers’ participation in the textual validation and construction, a 
metanarrative gesture that limns the possibilities for narrative experimentation” (Davis). Ozeki’s 
autobiographical details inspire her readers to participate in making meaning of her works, fulfilling 
her own desire to be a responsible and ethical author. Additionally, because the fictive elements of 
her autobiographical characters can be seen as a reflection or result of the instability of her identity, 
the reader is drawn into Ozeki’s own difficulty in establishing the “truth” about her life story. 
 Additionally, Ozeki points out that once she enters a book as a semi-fictional character, she is 
able to disrupt readers’ expectations about the novel’s reality (Ozeki). In A Tale for the Time Being, 
there are several sequences in which the “real” diary that Ruth finds washed-up on the beach 
inexplicably loses or gains pages. Toward the end of the novel, and as Ruth nears the end of Nao’s 
diary, Nao sees her father about to commit suicide, and decides to do the same. The remaining 
journal pages are blank. Distraught, Ruth goes to sleep and has a “dream” in which she meets Nao’s 
father and convinces him to live, to stay alive and be with Nao. When Ruth awakens, she finds that 
the diary has more entries – despite the fact that it was written years ago, and is of course an ordinary 
book. Understandably taken aback, Ruth questions whether she, too, is perhaps a fictional character 
in someone else’s story. With reactions paralleling Ruth’s, the reader is left surprised by this 
unexpected introduction of magic in what appeared to be a nearly-nonfictional book, satisfied that 
Nao’s story did not end on such a hopeless note, and perhaps wondering to what degree they, as a 
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reader, can affect “Ruth’s”  story, and if they, too, are part of a fictional story. By further blurring the 
line between fiction and nonfiction, Ozeki encourages her reader to engage more deeply in 
questioning what makes a person or story “real.” 
 Ozeki believes that everyone is making political choices each day, in choosing what they 
consume both nutritionally and in media, but does not write her books with the intention to spread an 
agenda of any sort (Wong), in keeping with her convictions about ethical authorship. Rather, she is 
undertaking a personal journey to explore questions that bother her. However, she is pleased when 
her readers are moved to make changes because of her books, because she believes books ought to 
change the way both readers and writers see the world. Readers of Ozeki’s novels are quickly drawn 
in to her dilemmas about truth and fiction about postcolonial identity, in a way that can be more 
effective that simply reading about the theory, since they experience her own difficulty with 
discerning truthfulness as they read. This idea of “embodiment,” that an intangible idea can be 
personally experienced, is a concept borrowed from Buddhism, and one that inspires Ozeki in her 
work. In personally experiencing the difficulty in establishing identity, readers are allowed to come 
to their own conclusions and invited into the conversation surrounding the topic. Ozeki believes 
fiction is a wonderful, if nontraditional, means of practicing embodiment of ideas, and her works are 
testament to the validity of her belief. 
 In conclusion, Ozeki’s autobiographical fictions are not only a means of understanding 
complex aspects of her own life, but a powerful method of engaging her reader in discussions of 
postcolonial identity. As she says in a 2016 interview with Melody Nixon, “Literature is a kind of 
mirror. We read it to find out about the world, but we also read to find out about ourselves” (Nixon). 
Ozeki writes to find out about herself and about the world; her readers read to find out about the 
world and themselves. In Ozeki’s works, both writer and reader are engaged in a quest toward better 
understanding, and her metanarrative references are an effective means of pursuing that goal. 
 
 
  
 
Works Cited 
 
Anderson, Linda. Autobiography. London, Routledge, 2001. 
Davis, Rocío G.  “Fictional Transits and Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being.” Biography, vol. 
38 no. 1, 2015, pp. 87-103. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/bio.2015.0007 
Ker Conway, Jill. When Memory Speaks: Reflections on Autobiography. New York, Alfred A. 
Knopf, 1998. 
Milne, Leah. “’Hybrid Vigor’: The Pillow Book and collaborative authorship in Ruth Ozeki's my 
year of meats.” College Literature, vol. 42, no. 3, 2015, p. 464+. Academic OneFile, 
http://link.galegroup.com.cod.idm.oclc.org/apps/doc/A428095069/AONE?u=cod_lrc&sid=A
ONE&xid=a10fa7ff. Accessed 14 July 2018. 
Nixon, Melody J.  ““Literature is a Kind of Mirror”: An Interview with Ruth Ozeki.” Electric Lit, 3 
May 2016, electricliterature.com/literature-is-a-kind-of-mirror-an-interview-with-ruth-ozeki-
f340e73b7e22. Accessed 23 July 2018. 
Ozeki, Ruth. All Over Creation. New York, Penguin Group, 2003. 
---. My Year of Meats. New York, Penguin Group, 1998. 
---. A Tale for the Time Being. New York, Penguin Group, 2013. 
 
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“Ruth Ozeki on Catastrophe, Thought Experiments and Writing as Performed Philosophy.” YouTube, 
uploaded by WheelerCentre, 13 Sept. 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0--yah7K7U. 
Accessed 30 July 2018. 
Wong, Kayi. “Ruth Ozeki: On Writing for Answers and Money.” Room, 
roommagazine.com/interview/ruth-ozeki-writing-answers-and-money. Accessed 28 July 
2018. 
 
 
 
 
 
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Fictions and Fragments: Autobiographical Inclusions in Ruth Ozeki\u27s Work

Weslo, Joey

ESSAI
Volume 16 Article 30
Spring 2018
It Don't Mean a Thing, If It Ain't Got That Swing
Joey Weslo
College of DuPage
Follow this and additional works at: https://dc.cod.edu/essai
This Selection is brought to you for free and open access by the College Publications at DigitalCommons@COD. It has been accepted for inclusion in
ESSAI by an authorized editor of DigitalCommons@COD. For more information, please contact orenick@cod.edu.
Recommended Citation
Weslo, Joey (2018) "It Don't Mean a Thing, If It Ain't Got That Swing," ESSAI: Vol. 16 , Article 30.
Available at: https://dc.cod.edu/essai/vol16/iss1/30
82 
It Don’t Mean a Thing, If It Ain’t Got That Swing 
 
by Joey Weslo 
 
(English 2224) 
 
 
 
hoebe is an English student who consults her older brother Richard Roma (character from 
David Mamet’s play, ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’, portrayed in the film adaptation by Al Pacino), 
in a deserted dive-bar, for help understanding post-Civil War American literature. 
 
As more and more liquor enters his bloodstream, Richard delves into the worlds of American 
Romanticism, Transcendentalism, Realism, Naturalism, and Modernism. While discussing the 
literary themes of each movement, he directly or indirectly references: 
 
Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”, Henry James’ ‘Daisy Miller’, Charles Chesnutt’s “The 
Wife of His Youth”, Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, Edgar Lee Masters, T.S. Eliot’s “The Love 
Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2)’, Ezra Pound, 
Wallace Stevens, Pablo Picasso, Willa Cather, Claude McKay’s “The Harlem Dancer”, Zora Neale 
Hurston, William Faulkner’s ‘As I Lay Dying’, Ernest Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”, 
Tennessee Williams’ ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’, and David Mamet’s ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’. 
 
Phoebe gets more than she bargained for, listening attentively in stupefied silence to her brother’s 
unhinged, yet erudite philosophical rhetoric.) 
 
Richard Roma: All right Phoebe. Tell me something right now that isn’t instantly forgettable. 
 You must compete against the silence. Every image, every word must battle the blank space 
dominating the paper. Can you hear it? An emptiness pervasive through your every thought. 
Insidiously creeping into your sentences, drowning your words, asphyxiating your every breath. Who 
are you? And why should I give a damn what you have to say? “Oh, do not ask ‘What is it?’” (Eliot, 
“Prufrock”). You may guess; but it is bullshit. It is bullshit unless you give it a voice. What voice, 
whose voice? Is it my voice? It’s certainly not your voice. Time is precariously precious; who 
decides what I give my time to? You must grasp a moment; you must take time and collapse it upon 
its own gravity. You must dare to “disturb the universe.” (Eliot). 
 You are the embodiment of a narrative, and you have the teeming voices resounding in your 
consciousness. What is your story? Fragments of a star-laden consciousness strewn out across a 
night-sky. Each star burning, consuming itself with magnificent passion. Listen to all the singing 
voices. All these perspectives, smoldering to a cinder within your curious head. Take these voices 
and give them life. If you define their perspectives, you define their reality. If you define their reality, 
you define your own reality. All wisps of smoke within your gifted hands. 
 All right Phoebe. Take this American literature class and hold it up to the light. Shatter the 
metaphysics, examining piece by piece; American literature is nothing but perspective. We are not 
Europeans; we are not the indentured servants to a parochial tradition. We manifest our own destiny, 
and we must define our own reality. American literature is a celebration of this pioneering 
perspective. “I celebrate myself. And what I assume you shall assume. For every atom belonging to 
me as good belongs to you.” (Whitman, “Song of Myself”). Whitman Is The Godfather! Every 
verdant adventure, every leaf of grass in American literature history, rising to tell his or her story, 
emanates from his poetic breath. Take a dash of European romanticism, and take a flourish of 
P 
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83 
pantheist philosophy from Baruch Spinoza. Listen to America’s barbaric yawp resounding across the 
countryside. Pick up any book, from any subsequent time, and you can still hear Whitman’s primal 
echo dancing across the pages. 
 What is this life? Is it mine for the taking? Am I promised the glories of heaven and all its 
fire? Or is my destiny nothing more than to decompose in matter and supply food for the worms? 
Food for thought. Their shit feeding the grass. The American Dream. Everywhere you walk reeks of 
their shit. Ashes upon hollowed out ashes. “Do I contradict myself? Very well then... I contradict 
myself; I am large... I contain multitudes.” (Whitman). Don’t draw your breath upon a lie. The 
American dream was always shattered. Fragments of glass and shards of light. Every shard reflecting 
a different perspective. You are not one fragment, and I am not another solitary fragment. The 
metaphysics are quite arbitrary. We consist of different fragments at different times. Our individual 
make-up perpetually evolving, forever changing with the mercurial gales of our imagination. The 
dream is not without, it is within. There’s a tempest howling in your subconscious. Crack open your 
skull and I’ll follow you through, “certain half-deserted streets, the muttering retreats” of your 
bellowing mind (Eliot). 
 The study of the mind becomes the narrative. Ever-changing in the ascertation of the truth. 
Do not trust your narrators, always take your malaria pills, and never place your story in the hands of 
a man named Winterbourne (James, Daisy Miller). Can you feel the miasma wafting in the air? It 
never left us, and it never will. The undying stench of rotting ambiguity. Take your subconscious and 
hold it as a prism to the light. Marvel at the refracted colours. American writers do not inscribe in 
black and white. We write with the full spectrum of life. You must capture the spectrum of 
perspectives. Tease them, flirt with them, berate them, sing them, make them grow out of the very 
graves the world tries to isolate them in. Desolation is artificial. Everything is psycho-analytical. Do 
not look without, look within. What questions have been dropped on your plate? Where is the doubt, 
the insecurities, the psychotic nervous twitch? So you take a powerful, independent woman 
representing modernity, and you debase her. You trivialize her existence. You allow Byron’s 
parochial fangs to sink into her flesh. We are all sucking the corpse dry. The blood has long run cold. 
You must give it new life. 
 Find the blood’s racial impurities and make them shine. Rebel against the coagulation of our 
plantation past. Do not kill to preserve. Do not archive. Miscegenate your gaze. Dialects and 
colloquialism are not an attempt to capture realism; they are an attempt to give a voice to the 
voiceless. Do not be ashamed of our past, nor turn your back to its shadows. You do not stand in 
front of the sun, with your aching presence casting shadows behind your frame. The sacred light 
emanates from every direction, luminous all at once. You are the shadow. You are your own ball and 
chain. You are the wife of your own youth. Do not embellish. Do not romanticize. I see the 
pretentious mirage. “Their history presented enough romantic circumstances to rob their servile 
origin of its grosser aspects” (Chesnutt, “The Wife of His Youth”). Embrace the grosser aspects, 
beauty marks, dimples, warts and all. This is realism, this is life. We are subjugated by our past and 
confined within our minds. We hear emancipation knocking, but we refuse to answer the door. There 
is no escaping this celebration, this is our song. 
 Blades of grass, each crooning out their sentimental dirges. I ponder our lamentation. “The 
wrongs and sufferings of this past generation, and all of them still felt, in their darker moments, the 
shadow hanging over them.” (Chesnutt). A solemn silence echoes in the mind. It stirs up a mournful 
resonance. But progress thunders on in a cry of ambitious momentum. We are on the way up; but 
who do we absorb? Who do we leave behind? Who do we cast astray to the destitute abandons of a 
cannibalistic society? 
 Social evolution combusts its inevitable linearity. We must follow the path of progression. 
Modernity, lead the righteous path forwards. Bolt after bolt, mechanize our society. Churn those 
factories. It all makes perfect sense. It’s all a shimmering epiphany. It all works magnificently, until 
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84 
suddenly it doesn’t. We all see the light, until suddenly that light turns a noxious gaseous green. The 
echoes from the small towns, the footsteps from the graves of rural Ohio, all the efforts to humanize 
the forgotten, become forgotten. All become asphyxiated by modernity’s sulfur. Lost on the 
battlefield. Complete destruction. Reinvent, redefine, nothing is worth saving. Where is your 
progression? Where is your modernist utopia? Your saviour has been slow to save you because he 
limps with trench-foot. Take off his helmet and boots. Strip him of his gun and uniform, and push his 
nude body down the staircase (Duchamp). Did you see it? Did you capture the motion? Kinetic 
epiphanies rupturing and bursting simultaneously. New perspectives blooming from the ashes. The 
past is a burning effigy and we dance in its light. 
 If you try to materialize the abstract, you facilitate its destruction. Forget the dream, “the 
dream was gone” (Fitzgerald, ‘Winter Dreams’). If it is not new, it is not worth doing. Shatter a 
blackbird against the rising wall (Stevens). Place an eye here, a lip there, and an ear wherever it will 
fit. It is not the same object if you look at it in a different way. It is not the same story if you tell it 
from a different perspective. You think life has only one perspective? You think if I ask the question, 
only one voice will answer in return? The subliminal question slips into the fabric of our collective 
conscious. We live life traversing one image to the next. Our lives are broken down into symbols. 
Living by associated metaphor. “The apparition of these faces in the crowd. Petals on a wet, black 
bough” (Pound, ‘Station of Metro’). It is more powerful to create one lasting image in the mind, than 
to create a bogged down narrative full of numerous descriptive details. The psyche of the reader 
becomes a partner to the writer. Working in tandem, symbiotically catalyzing scenes into motion. 
Temporarily freezing the chaotic mind. A snapshot of our subconscious. 
 We open the inner-eye, focusing on the outward gaze. This most important lesson I can teach 
you is this gaze is malleable. Its omnipresence dictates everything that follows. It drips all over the 
map. You take all of history and dump it on an islander’s lap. He will take your solidified notions and 
caustically and methodically corrode them. Modernity must delegitimize the colonizer’s gaze. 
Oppression has an inherent feebleness as fickle as who controls the pen. You can only stare through 
the peephole for so long before the object balanced in the light stares back at you (Willa Cather). 
“The wine-flushed, bold-eyed boys, and even the girls, devoured her shape with eager, passionate 
gaze. But looking at her falsely-smiling face, I knew her self was not in that strange place” (McKay, 
“Harlem Dancer”). You must recognize the offensive gaze, the pretentious perspective, and 
dismantle its insidious intent. Take all the dynamism of perspective, lay it supine, and let the 
momentum carry it horizontal rather than upwards. Stretch your arms outwards towards the 
tantalizing unknown. 
 Resist the temptations to study the fringes of society in an attempt to better understand 
yourself. Don’t look without, look within. Inside the labyrinthine confines of your mind lay seething 
perspectives bounding with disparate desires and resounding voices. Take the traditional narrative as 
you took the blackbird, and shatter it against the wall. Give impetus and importance to every 
fragment, every voice. The story is a composite of their severed unity. What unites them, what 
divides them? What dream lays torn asunder, demanding you reassemble it? What vengeful deity has 
been dictating their every action (Faulkner, As I Lay Dying)? What crucible has been imposing a 
maleficent shadow? A tree is not a tree, and a chicken is not a chicken. They are symbolic allusions 
mirroring the turmoil of our inner angst. You must tie the symbols together to form an existential 
narrative. You must balance the story somewhere between universal and colloquial. If it is not 
balanced, you risk losing the omniscience of perspective. 
 The rocking gyrations of the balance, stir the blood. You have vibrant cultures colliding and 
atrophic institutions emaciating to death. The laws of entropy bought a ticket on a roaring streetcar. 
Can you hear it thundering past, shattering traditions, with new life basking in its blue glow 
(Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire)? This district is where affluence goes to hang itself. New life 
blooms from the oppressed manacles of our dysfunctional society. Perspective maintains the power 
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85 
to destroy these manacles. Take perspective, and again hold it up to the light. The refraction burning 
on the wall is identity. Identity becomes a question. Play with race, play with identity. Who gets to 
define race? Who gets to define identity? It is a tool of perspective to craft an identity from the ashes 
of turmoil. We become our transgressions, we become our mistakes, and we become our desires. 
“Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them 
well” (Hemingway, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”). 
 Identity and perspective are not entrenched in solidification; they are an exploration of 
discovery. Perspective manifests itself where our deepest questions lie. Search for the confusion, 
search for the questions. Find the “it” and swallow it whole. Engulf a stick of dynamite and watch 
your imagination explode. “Your head is a living forest full of songbirds.” (e. e. cummings) No, 
rather, I’d like to contradict myself. It is a roaring wildfire scorching the rural hillside leaving 
nothing but shadows of ash in its wake. 
 
(Phoebe Roma takes a moment to capture her breath. Mystified by her brother’s inebriated sway, she 
watches him fall silent and lean exhaustively back into an empty booth. Her head spinning as well, 
and not from the drink, she turns to leave the dive-bar with more questions than she began with.) 
 
 
  
 
Works Cited 
 
Baym, Nina. Ed. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Vols. C, D, and E. 11th ed.  New 
York: W. W. Norton & Co. 
 
 
 
4
ESSAI, Vol. 16 [2018], Art. 30
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It Don\u27t Mean a Thing, If It Ain\u27t Got That Swing

Durbin, Dick

Address by Illinois Senator Dick Durbin

Gnadt, Cherylyn

The Prairie Light Review
Volume 41 | Number 1 Article 17
Fall 12-1-2018
Unkept
Cherylyn Gnadt
College of DuPage
Follow this and additional works at: https://dc.cod.edu/plr
This Selection is brought to you for free and open access by the College Publications at DigitalCommons@COD. It has been accepted for inclusion in
The Prairie Light Review by an authorized editor of DigitalCommons@COD. For more information, please contact orenick@cod.edu.
Recommended Citation
Gnadt, Cherylyn (2018) "Unkept," The Prairie Light Review: Vol. 41 : No. 1 , Article 17.
Available at: https://dc.cod.edu/plr/vol41/iss1/17
Unkept
the path
of course, at first glance
looked perfectly acceptable, comfortable even
mirrored reflection revealed grey, unworthy, unwanted
the petals fell and birds wept
fragile steps rubbed at the surface
the shimmering paved path
began to fade and crumble under foot
unveiling the true nature
blanketed in darkness and lies
through the thicket of overgrown brush and stones
a glimmer – shallow, faint – within reach
tender arms stretched forth
unable to retreat nor fast forward
frozen, set out for thaw
time, keeper of infinite wisdom turned slowly
pulling at roots, aware of thorns
a gently point tears – often a gash
no matter, showing care
the pricks lost their bite
the dense entrapment started to thin
revealing the marks and bruises
thrust forward onto a ledge, untethered
wide open showing the faded scars
that never disappear
filling cracks with moonlight and fresh greenery
a new path, not as glittering as before
more of a glow, but rubbing the surface
it remained true
unkept
Cherylyn Gnadt
Fall 2018 Journal .indd   15 1/3/19   4:35 PM
Unkept
the path
of course, at first glance
looked perfectly acceptable, comfortable even
mirrored reflection revealed grey, unworthy, unwanted
the petals fell and birds wept
fragile steps rubbed at the surface
the shimmering paved path
began to fade and crumble under foot
unveiling the true nature
blanketed in darkness and lies
through the thicket of overgrown brush and stones
a glimmer – shallow, faint – within reach
tender arms stretched forth
unable to retreat nor fast forward
frozen, set out for thaw
time, keeper of infinite wisdom turned slowly
pulling at roots, aware of thorns
a gently point tears – often a gash
no matter, showing care
the pricks lost their bite
the dense entrapment started to thin
revealing the marks and bruises
thrust forward onto a ledge, untethered
wide open showing the faded scars
that never disappear
filling cracks with moonlight and fresh greenery
a new path, not as glittering as before
more of a glow, but rubbing the surface
it remained true
unkept
Cherylyn Gnadt
Fall 2018 Journal .indd   15 1/3/19   4:35 PM
1
Gnadt: Unkept
Published by DigitalCommons@COD, 2018


Unkept

Kurz, Jennifer

The Prairie Light Review
Volume 41 | Number 1 Article 35
Fall 12-1-2018
Pensive under our Oak
Jennifer Kurz
College of DuPage
Follow this and additional works at: https://dc.cod.edu/plr
This Artwork is brought to you for free and open access by the College Publications at DigitalCommons@COD. It has been accepted for inclusion in
The Prairie Light Review by an authorized editor of DigitalCommons@COD. For more information, please contact orenick@cod.edu.
Recommended Citation
Kurz, Jennifer (2018) "Pensive under our Oak," The Prairie Light Review: Vol. 41 : No. 1 , Article 35.
Available at: https://dc.cod.edu/plr/vol41/iss1/35
Pensive under our Oak
Jennifer Kurz
Fall 2018 Journal .indd   36 1/3/19   4:35 PM
1
Kurz: Pensive under our Oak
Published by DigitalCommons@COD, 2018


Pensive under our Oak

Marr, William

The Prairie Light Review
Volume 41 | Number 1 Article 57
Fall 12-1-2018
March for our Lives, 2018.3.24
William Marr
College of DuPage
Follow this and additional works at: https://dc.cod.edu/plr
This Selection is brought to you for free and open access by the College Publications at DigitalCommons@COD. It has been accepted for inclusion in
The Prairie Light Review by an authorized editor of DigitalCommons@COD. For more information, please contact orenick@cod.edu.
Recommended Citation
Marr, William (2018) "March for our Lives, 2018.3.24," The Prairie Light Review: Vol. 41 : No. 1 , Article 57.
Available at: https://dc.cod.edu/plr/vol41/iss1/57
March for our Lives, 2018.3.24
the sky is still cloudy
yet I see sunshine
trying to break through
to shine on your young faces
yes
sooner or later this world belongs to you
but I understand
you want to hold this world in your hands now
before it breaks into pieces
William Marr
Fall 2018 Journal .indd   26 1/3/19   4:36 PM
1
Marr: March for our Lives, 2018.3.24
Published by DigitalCommons@COD, 2018


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