finally, meeting # 4 recap

It's taken me forever and a day to get this up, I realize. For that, I apologize. But here, finally, the much awaited and anticipated L.A.D.I.E.S. meeting #4 summary!! (yay!)

The topic of this meeting was "Ask a Question." In it, our goal was to learn more about our own pieces and writing styles through the feedback of our groupmates, coming up with a particular question about our work that we wanted answered. So we spent the first few minutes of our meeting pondering what we wanted our questions to be. We expected this to take less time than it did, but composing the questions was more difficult than we originally anticipated. This was most likely due to the fact that we were all trying to construct a question that was meaningful, that would prompt responses beneficial to our writing process and garner feedback that we genuinely could appreciate. That's a lot of pressure. It's much easier to immediately lean toward more superficial questions, such as "What did you think about this addition here?", "Do my sentences flow?", etc.

In order to ward against that type of judgmental questions, the L.A.D.I.E.S. actually drafted their questions together, bouncing ideas off of one another and asking as they wrote "Do you think this question could prompt a genuine response from you guys?" or "Is the wording too confusing here? Do you get what I'm asking?" Using each other, we immediately felt more comfortable with the situation and all came up with decent questions.

Our next step was, of course, to share our pieces. Sam started us off with a poem she wrote. It was entitled "Letters" and the question she wished us to respond to was whether we thought the fact that she chose to make it rhyme added or took away from its impact. After sharing our initial impressions of the poem (calling back to a previous group meeting by instating the "summary and sayback" feedback technique) we addressed her original question. It ended up being rather difficult to answer. Although the rhyme scheme made it interesting and kept us actively listening, it seemed a bit discordant with the subject and mood of the poem, which was rather darker than the mood the rhyme lent it. This led us to a small tangent discussion on whether anything that rhymes can ever truly take a serious tone, or if we are all biased to immediately assume a consistent rhyme scheme to be juvenile (not in the insulting sense, but rather meaning that it is meant for children to enjoy) and lyric-esque. We ended up concluding that perhaps Sam should keep the rhyme but somewhere in the middle add a change (perhaps one single line to stand on its own) that would break up the consistency of the poem and alter its feel. But then, on the other hand, wouldn't doing this simply give the poem an awkward, unpolished feel to it? (Ugh. All our answers simply lead to more questions. Why is life always like that?)

Moving on from Sam's poem, Elizabeth shared her revised piece with us: the story of a girl who has her very own tree. This is a piece we were already familiar with, so we were eager to see where she had taken it. The question she wished for us to answer was if there was something about the story we would change. If so why, if not why not. After sharing her revision with us, we began with sharing our impressions with her. It was openly agreed upon that the work gave us a very warm and happy feeling. As for changes, at first all we could agree upon were simple grammatical things. But we soon found ourselves in a conversation about where Elizabeth might take the story and how she planned to finish it. It was when we were discussing these things that we were able to bring up potential alterations of a section here or a section there, simply to fit with a certain ending or plot shift. We had many laughs bringing up ridiculous potentials (she and the tree merge to form a ZOMBIE!!11!!1) but in the end, genuinely felt like we helped with her story and really look forward to the next draft.

Lastly we focused on my own piece (which was actually nonexistent that particular day). Since I did not have my revision with me, I called upon my groupmates' memories and asked (much like Sam) their feelings of my choice to continue the story entirely in rhyme, and (concerning the short story part) what age range they felt my writing style was geared to. I had been feeling that the same rhyme style over and over might be getting repetitive, but the group felt it consistent and still enjoyable. As for age range, it was a bit harder to come to consensus. My writing style cannot be said to be geared toward young children simply because I have a young child as the heroine. We wondered over whether I should write an alternate practice version, dumbing it down a bit, using language appropriate to that of young children. But for now, the piece I am working on might be said to be middle-school level. My groupmates shared, upon my request, their own visions of what the appearance of my main characters might be. They helped me narrow down some initial sketches and gave their feedback about potential places I might take the plot.

We finished off (being short a member of the L.A.D.I.E.S that day) by discussing each of our particular readings and going on a tangent about Disney movies and squiggly daggers. (Long story.) Overall, it was a very successful gathering.

2/08/08 Summary and Sayback Discussion

During the last class, we read the summary and sayback and really tried to make sure that we understood the difference between the two concepts. We then read our pieces aloud and after we had read them, we used the concepts of summary and sayback to give the person comments. After each person read their piece, we would summarize it and then ask the author questions which sometimes they could not answer. This would then be helpful to them because it gave them new ideas too think about if they were writing a story, or in Elizabeth's case, something she didn't think about when writing her poem.
Barbara continued with her children's story, Katie continued with her short story, Sam began a short story relating to the book she is reading, and Elizabeth wrote a poem to experiment with rhyming. As a group we did not modify the meeting guidelines since they worked well for us, but a significant moment for us was when we listened to the short story that Sam wrote (which was about the last people on earth) and discussed what we think life would be like if we were the only ones left. In our next meeting we are looking forward to the progress of the short stories. Each time we hear something new it is like a new chapter so it keeps us waiting to hear more. Overall, the L.A.D.I.E.S. had a nice meeting.