LITERARY EVENT: senior reading

I am sorry to put LITERARY EVENT in capital letters, but I am not taking any chances with this piece being overlooked in the avalanche of last night's blog posts.

So. Last night I went to the senior reading, an annual event to honor seniors in the creative writing department. Putting aside a myriad of questions that I found myself wondering--who organized this? why are only a few seniors performing? why did none of the faculty turn out?--I enjoyed it more than I expected to.

One piece made use of some excellent magical realism. Now I tend to distrust magical realism, on the whole. When I was in high school and reading Garcia Marquez, my Spanish teacher explained it to me like this: "If we were in a world with magic carpets, but no one thought the magic carpets were strange, and if all the people behaved precisely as they do now...that's magical realism." His example of magic carpets illustrates what I dislike about magical realism: the showiness of it. The artificial originality. Instead of really shedding light on the human experience, the writer gives you a magic lamp.

But in this piece, the realism established itself before the magic. The author spoke in a simple first person voice about her life growing up in a rural setting with her mother and grandmother, both of whom could charm birds and squirrels into dancing by just playing their fiddles. I realize, of course, that this is not literally possible, but it just seemed like a romantic embellishment on family lore--no magic yet. Then, after the protagonist moves to the city, this happens: "A raven flies to me and speaks to me in my mother's voice: 'Your grandmother is dying. Come back.'" (I apologize for the mutilated quote, but I didn't write it down at the time and now a whole day has passed, wreaking havoc with my memory. It was better in person.) So now the magic comes to bear in a fully human, climactic moment. The author's mother's remarkable relationship with animals was already alluded to, so this moment doesn't feel like a deus ex machina, and the naturalness of it contrasted with the strangeness in a very perfect way. That was a special and wondrous moment for me. I appreciated it deeply and if the writer of that story happens to read or hear of this post (about a million to one shot) then I congratulate them on having accomplished something special.