Queen of the Fall

AGENDA:

Finish reading the book.

Post an answer to 3 (three) of the following discussion questions.

• How does each epigraph set the tone for each section?
• What is the difference in tone or content of each of the book’s three sections?
• How are the personalities of the author’s various friends and family revealed through small details?
• How are the complications of family relationships depicted? How do they change over time?
• How are sexual relationships, outside and within marriage, represented?
• How does the author balance her coming-of-age story with the more expansive story of being a woman in modern America?
• Discuss how the writing is imagistic or visual. In what ways is it cinematic?

Work on your memoirs.

End of marking period

AGENDA:

Continue to work on your own memoir.

Sokol/Gannon entries!

Reading:  Queen of the Fall

Queen of the Fall/Memoir

AGENDA:

If you did not post your comments on the previous blog, please do so today!  Please read the comments.  They are very thoughtful!  Good work!

WRITING:  Work on your own memoir
Gannon/Sokol entries

READING: For next Wednesday, please finish reading Part II of Queen of the Fall (pg. 95)

Queen of the Fall

AGENDA:

Readings: "The Rosary Ladies"
                 "Mythology" "Capias"  "The Last American Virgin"

Post a comment on these essays.
What is the role of religion and religious teachings in the adolescent years of a young girl?  What does society expect of young women in terms of their emerging sexuality and the repetitive urging to remain a virgin until marriage?  What is the difference between  a "good girl" and  a "bad girl"?  What are some of the derogatory terms given to so-called "bad girls" who are sexually active?

• How are such issues as virginity, sex, motherhood, and fertility explored by the author both in her life and in the book?
• What is the significance of losing her virginity and becoming a “bad girl”?
• What role does religion play in the author’s life? What examples does the author provide?

https://www.wab.org/rochester-reads-2016-queen-of-the-fall-by-sonja-livingston/rochester-reads-2016-discussion-points-for-queen-of-the-fall/


WRITING: Work on your own "Queen of the Fall" style memoir.


                    Work on Sokol/Gannon entries-poetry, prose, or performance
                    Work on any unfinished work for the second marking period!

Ideas for writing from Discussion Guide from Writers and Books

Related Writing Projects

• Write about your own childhood or coming-of-age experience.
• Take a cultural reference from the book and write about your own relation to it. Examples include Madonna, Nancy Drew, Ally McBeal, Pop Tarts, Land O’Lakes butter, and Land of the Lost.
• When asked in school what she wants to do when she grows up, Livingston comes up with the dream career of “mythologist.” Thinking back, what did you “want to be” when you grew up? How have those goals been met (or not)?
• Write about a woman (famous or not) who has influenced you.
• Write a first-person (creative nonfiction) essay connecting an element of your own history or contemporary life or thought with an issue in a broader social context.

Memoir Writing Prompt by Sonja Livingston

As children and teens, most of us look to others (television or literary characters, popular classmates, artists, athletes, teachers, or rock stars) to help us better understand who we are and to imagine who we might become.

            Queen of the Fall explores the various icons one girl considered on her path to becoming a woman, including Susan B. Anthony, 1980s Madonna, the Virgin Mary, the maiden on the Land O’ Lakes butter box, and many more.

Who did you look to? Who did you admire and why? What did they represent and what does that say about the woman or man you have become? Write a brief creative essay inspired by one of your childhood icons.

For added power, try writing in present tense so that we feel like we’re standing beside you as you describe the summer you plastered your bedroom with posters of Leif Garrett or got a nose ring and a used guitar and tried your best to mimic Ani DiFranco, the season you wanted to be Roberto Clemente or one of the Partridge kids, the time in 4th grade you lost yourself in Nancy Drew mysteries, or the way you spent most of your childhood envying your cousin Gina with the perfect hair.

HMWK: Read to pg. 70 in "Queen of the Fall"

Queen of the Fall

AGENDA:

Discuss readings in Queen of the Fall.  Read Our Lady of the Lakes aloud.


HMWK
:

Read to pg. 51 Queen of the Fall

WRITING: Work on Memoirs.  Work on Skit for Black History assembly.  Work on Sokol/Gannon entries

Prayer for the Dying Essay Test

AGENDA:

HMWK: Read to pg. 31 in Queen of the Fall for Monday

Prayer for the Dying Essay Test

Today, read over the following discussion questions and write a thoughtful response to one of them in essay form.    Develop your response using specific examples from the book.  You may use your book, of course. Length: at least 1 page single spaced using text references cited in MLA format

These questions require thoughtful answers focused on what O'Nan has written (AP English students take note of Question #5!).  How does this novel relate to other works you have read in or outside class this year--? A little critical lens practice, perhaps, in comparison and contrast?)...

Link to blog:

http://thelibrarium.wordpress.com/2006/11/24/discussion-starters-for-a-prayer-for-the-dying/

1)  A Prayer for the Dying uses as its epigraph a quote from Albert Camus: “There is no escape in a time of plague. We must choose to either love or to hate God.”  How does A Prayer for the Dying illustrate this quote?  Do you believe that Camus is correct in presenting the choice we must make in such stark terms?
—– 
2) Richard Eder, in his review of A Prayer for the Dying, writes:

[Jacob Hanson, the protagonist] is, he tells us, the town sheriff. He is the minister. He is the undertaker.
This wacky accumulation expresses his obsession: Out of the destruction of the war, when God seemed to have vanished, Jacob is determined to reinvent Him. He cares for his town as God is supposed to care for the world: He punishes transgressions, provides faith for the living and passage for the dead. “Credo quia absurdum” — the classic religious formula of, roughly, “I believe even to absurdity” — becomes, as horrors multiply, its own horror: I believe right on into madness.

What are your feelings about Jacob’s descent into madness?  When did you first recognize that all was not well with him?  Can religious belief become absurd, and do you see evidence of Eder’s contention above in the book?  And, can religious faith not only descend into absurdity, but even madness? 
—– 
3) Eder also goes on to state, “Clinging to his faith, Jacob disputes it as well. Here is one of his tortured arguments with himself:

” ‘It’s not right,’ you say.
“Who are you angry with?
“Not God
“No? Who else is there? Is this the devil’s work?
“It must be, you think, but uncertainly.”

Eder concludes with, “It is the problem of belief: how to reconcile God with evil. O’Nan carries it further. In Jacob he has the believer, torn. He has God, as well: struggling in despair with the same problem.” 
I know that a book discussion forum is too limiting a place for a full expose on the problem of God and evil, but what does O’Nan say about this problem in A Prayer for the Dying?  
—–
4) Patrick McGrath in his review in the NY Times reminds us of O’Nan’s use of the second person singular and present tense in his writing:  

O’Nan has employed a surprising but ultimately successful narrative technique for Jacob’s story: it is told throughout in the second-person singular and the present tense. Thus Jacob’s references to himself as ”you” have a self-distancing effect; it is as if he doesn’t fully occupy his own being and observes himself from some other place. He is both in his own experience and outside of it. This is a fine perspective for a narrator who will be forced to move from the orderly, predictable contentment of his life in a placid 19th-century farm town to confront the appalling prospect of chaos and destruction as the people around him sicken and die and the brush fires advance ever closer.

Stewart O’Nan once said 

“I mean, I could’ve written, I think, Prayer for the Dying, in first person but it probably wouldn’t work nearly as well. This particular character has this overdeveloped sort of superego and it’s always sort of accusing him. No matter how well he’s doing it’s always sort of saying, “You’re screwing up, you’re screwing up, even though he wants to be this perfect, blameless person, so it fits him perfectly.”

In another interview, O’Nan says:

For A Prayer I needed an intimate narrator capable of fairly hiding things from the reader. So I knew it had to be a first- or second-person, because a third- who’s unreliable is kind of cheating. I tried the first, and it was too close. I was reading Robert O’Connor’s Buffalo Soldiers, written in the second person, and noticed how the voice scourged its owner, tapping him on the shoulder whenever he’s doing wrong, like a conscience or superego. It’s the same use of the second as in Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights Big City, or Charles Johnson’s story “Moving Pictures.” And I thought: what effect would that scourging, nagging, blaming voice have if it were inside a man doing everything he could to prevent a terrible, unavoidable catastrophe? Especially a man who loves his town and feels responsible for everything and everyone. And as I wrote further into the story, I noticed that the voice would veer close to Jacob and then stand apart from him, accusing, and that it worked to highlight that gothic split in him of the strange and troubled private side and the solid and responsible public side. The hidden vs. the seen. And it also works as that ceaseless voice in the head of a mad person, the voice that won’t leave him alone.

Did you find this narrative technique to be successful or off-putting?  Did it take a while for you to settle into the book because of O’Nan’s style here?
—–  
5)  Mark Winegardner, writing for Barnes and Noble, says:

When I finished Stewart O’Nan’s A Prayer for the Dying . . . I called him. I told him how jealous I was that he’d been able to write such a large-vision book in such a svelte (190-page) package. Flannery O’Connor was right: A good man is hard to find, when what’s meant by “good” is moral and not civil, when it refers to something larger than likability. What O’Nan does in this book — create a convincingly good man and put him in the middle of his story — is among the toughest acts a novelist can perform.

Given some of his actions in the story, Is Jacob Hanson a good man?  Is he a moral man?  Does Hanson believe, as one reviewer has stated, ”that the calamity is all his fault.”  Is it even possible to be a good man in a time of madness.
—–
6) In the first chapter we find this bit of dialogue: 

“In Heaven you forget everything,” she says. “In Hell they make you remember.”
No, you think, it’s the other way around. “Maybe so,” you say.

Which do you think it is, if either? 
—–  
7) O’Nan says that the one question underlying all of his work is “When do you give up?” Which, he concedes, “is a horrible question to ask, but it’s a question that a lot of people have to face.” Then, echoing Hamlet’s famous soliloquy on the subject, he adds, “That’s the question.” 
Do you see this question reflected in A Prayer for the Dying?  Is this question “the question?” 
O’Nan also once stated, ”I am primarily a realist and hope to show great empathy for my people without softening the difficult situations they find themselves in-yet my work inevitably veers into the cruel and the sentimental…It is extreme fiction masquerading behind the guise of mainstream realism. I hope it is generous, or, as Cheever said, ‘humane.’” 
Is A Prayer for the Dying a humane book despite its extremes? 
—–  
8) On the last page of the novel Jacob thinks:

“The whole idea of penance is selfish, misguided. You can’t bargain with God, buy Him with pieties. This is what you’ve found out – that even with the best intentions, even with all of your thoughtful sermons and deep feelings and good works, you can’t save anyone, least of all yourself. And yet it’s not defeat. After everything, you may still be saved. Your mother was wrong; it’s not up to you. It’s always been His decision.”

Ultimately, what does this book say about Divine providence?  Do you agree with Hanson’s statements?

A Prayer for the Dying/Queen of the Fall

AGENDA:
NEW BOOK:  Queen of the Fall--Memoir and Essays

https://www.wab.org/rochester-reads-2016-queen-of-the-fall-by-sonja-livingston/
Test on A Prayer for the Dying on Thursday--Essay Response

To prepare for the test, be sure you have read the novel and today write a response to the following questions.  Refer to the text as evidence!

5. Jacob is a veteran of the Civil War. How does his experience there affect the way he behaves in the crisis in Friendship? How did the war change him?
6. How would you describe the relationship between Jacob and Doc? How do their different ideas about the world lead to different strategies for handling the outbreak in Friendship?
7. How does Jacob’s relationship with Marta affect his behavior in the outbreak? How do his priorities as a father and husband conflict with his responsibility to the town?
8. How do you interpret the book’s ending? What is Jacob choosing when he returns to Friendship? What do you imagine happening to him next?
9. Is Jacob sane at the end of the book? How does the author demonstrate the changes in his mind as conditions worsen?
10. “You’ve stopped believing in evil,” the narrator says of Jacob early in the story (p. 6). “Is that a sin?” Is there evil in this story? Does Jacob come to see it by the end?
11. How do the book’s two epigraphs relate to each other? Why do you think the author chose them?
12. Jacob is committed throughout the book to saving Friendship, and willing to sacrifice himself if necessary. Is he naïve? Does his commitment to principle do more harm than good in the end?

CONTEST:  Work on Gannon and Sokol entries, Black History project?