11/11 Reading

Letter’s to Wendy was intensely enjoyable. I knew it was going to fly off the page and hit me the moment I read, “I'd like to spank Wendy's-white ass and fuck her hard.” This was an interesting piece – a confessional is no longer the wooden box in the church but rather a personal letter to a fast food chain. Wenderoth, when speaking of his mother and his incessant problem with anal bleeding is incredibly in-your-face. I was interested to read that Wenderoth lives in Mt. Horeb, WI. I’ve spent a lot of times in Mt. Horeb and didn’t even know there was a Wendy’s there!


Baratier, in In What’s In It, also uses the letter format as a springboard to write. I didn’t enjoy it as much as Wenderoth’s but it was still very interesting to see how he started with a single idea and let the words blossom into something very pleasing at times.

In Estrella’s Prophesies, Baratier uses a different method of writing. He is writing as if he were the “Gypsy” in a carnival fortune telling machine. It’s interesting but get’s quite odd at times. It is really more, I think, an autobiographical work. Again, an interesting way to start writing.

Stanley Crawford writes in, “To My Wife,” uses a “chicken-soup-for-the-soul” type of format to describe, I think, how much of a rut the marriage is in. It’s as if he is sitting at his desk and seeing how items like walls, floors, roofs, electricity all relate to marriage. He lays out everything that he deals with daily in a way that it reflects the state of the marriage. I liked it and found the format to be entertaining. Marriage isn’t a set of rules or lists. It is a day by day event by even situation – exactly as single life is. The difference is you have a partner so there is some coordination of schedules and expectation involved. I think he knows this and is being a little facetious with this piece.