Rulfo, Juan. Pedro Páramo. Translated by Margaret Sayers Peden, Grove Press, 1994.
Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo is a ghost novel of magical realism, centered on generational trauma during and after the Mexican Revolution. The story follows Juan Preciado, who travels to the town of Comala after his mother’s death in search of his father, Pedro Páramo. What he expects to find is the beautiful town his mother once described to him: “a beautiful view of a green plain, with a bit of yellow from the ripening corn” (13). Instead, he arrives in a decaying landscape, almost entirely occupied by ghosts.
The guide who first leads Juan into Comala describes the town as “the very mouth of Hell” where the dead return to reclaim their blankets (15). From the beginning, death is normalized within the setting itself. The living and the dead exist together, conversations blur between memory and hallucination, and time moves in fragments rather than straight lines. Juan eventually becomes consumed by the voices and ghosts surrounding him, dying from fear and exhaustion before continuing the story as one of the dead himself.
One of the most striking aspects of this novel is its nonlinear structure and fragmented narration. The story shifts between timelines, memories, conversations, ghosts, and interior thoughts without warning. At times, this can feel disorienting, but it also reflects the emotional collapse of Comala itself. The town is haunted not only by literal ghosts, but by the lingering violence of exploitation, corruption, revolution, and abandonment.
Setting as a Protagonist
What interested me most in this novel was the way Comala itself functions almost like a protagonist. The town is not merely a backdrop to the story; it actively shapes the emotional atmosphere of every scene. Comala represents exploitation, ruined revolution, abandoned women, inherited suffering, and the decay left behind by powerful men like Pedro Páramo.
Throughout the novel, the setting constantly shifts between memory and reality. Damiana Cisneros recalls hearing celebrations and parties in the streets: “There was a time when I could hear the commotion of a party that kept going night after night…” only to discover “Nothing” when she investigates (50). Ghosts roam through the town as though death itself has become part of the landscape: “If only you could see the horde of shadows roam the streets” (60). Yet memories of the past briefly illuminate the darkness through Juan’s recollections of his mother describing carts filled with corn and life moving through the streets (55).
The novel repeatedly contrasts beauty with decay. One moment, the sky is described as bright and full of light, and the next, the physical world becomes suffocating and grotesque:
“The bed was made of otate reeds and covered with burlap sacks that smelled of urine…” (64).
The environment mirrors the emotional and moral collapse of the town itself. Rain, heat, rot, dust, and darkness all become extensions of grief, violence, and abandonment. Later, after Susana San Juan recounts traumatic memories connected to her father, the narration shifts outward:
“Outside it continued to rain. The Indians had left. It was Monday, and the valley surrounding Comala was still drowning in rain” (100).
The environment reflects the narrative’s emotional state. The endless rain feels less like weather and more like accumulated grief soaking into the town itself. In Pedro Páramo, nature and atmosphere become emotional language.
Pedro Páramo and the Corruption of Power
Pedro Páramo’s influence poisons every layer of Comala. Wealth protects him from accountability while everyone beneath him becomes disposable. When a woman comes demanding justice because Pedro’s son murdered her husband, Pedro’s administrator attempts to pay her off with corn rather than acknowledge responsibility:
“I offered her fifty hectoliters of corn if she’d forget the whole thing…” (74).
When Pedro asks who the grieving people were, and his manager responds that he does not know them, Pedro simply replies that they therefore “do not exist.” This moment captures the emotional core of the novel: people without power become invisible. Comala is haunted because suffering was ignored rather than healed.
Susana San Juan becomes one of the most emotionally powerful figures in the story. Her mental instability, trauma, sensuality, and longing are written with poetic intensity. Before her death, she speaks of swimming naked in the ocean and surrendering herself to the sea (105). Water becomes symbolic of purification, release, and returning to something natural beyond suffering.
When Susana dies, the town erupts into celebration:
“They buried Susana San Juan and few in Comala noticed. They were celebrating” (126).
The celebration is not because of Susana’s death itself, but because the town is distracted by festivities while Pedro loses the only person he ever truly loved. Her death marks the emotional collapse of his power. Just as Pedro spent his life taking from others, loss is finally returned to him. After Susana’s death, Comala fully descends into ruin.
What I Take Into My Own Writing
This novel taught me how setting can function as an emotional force within a narrative rather than simply a location. Through memory, atmosphere, ghosts, weather, and fragmented storytelling, Rulfo transforms Comala into a living embodiment of generational trauma.
For my own work in Discordia, I want to explore a similar setting by showing Zetheus before and after societal collapse, using memory, hallucination, storytelling, and environmental shifts to reflect emotional change within the world itself. Pedro Páramo also reminded me to pay close attention to diction, pacing, and the emotional rhythm of sentences. Even in confusion and darkness, the language remains poetic and intentional.
Beneath its ghosts and fractured timelines, the novel ultimately becomes a story about how violence and exploitation echo through generations long after death itself.
Butler, Octavia E. Parable of the Sower. Grand Central Publishing, 2019.
Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler is a dystopian science fiction novel set in a near-future California, where climate disaster, addiction, violence, poverty, and political corruption are collapsing the state. Told through the diary entries of Lauren Olamina, the story follows a young woman trying not only to survive societal collapse, but to create a new moral philosophy within it. Through Lauren’s belief system, Earthseed, Butler explores religion, adaptability, community, and the human need to create meaning during times of chaos.
The story begins in a gated Los Angeles neighborhood, where Lauren lives with her family. Her father, a Baptist minister and professor, attempts to preserve structure and faith within a rapidly deteriorating world. After his death, the fragile safety of the neighborhood collapses completely. Drug addicts obsessed with fire burn the community to the ground, forcing Lauren to flee northward on foot, disguised as a man. Along the way, she gathers companions, slowly building a community of survivors connected not through blood or traditional religion, but through shared ethics and collective care.
Eventually, Lauren meets Bankole, a doctor who owns land in Northern California. The group travels there hoping to create Earthseed, a sustainable and intentional community built around Lauren’s philosophy that “God is Change.” However, even upon reaching their destination, violence and destruction continue to follow them. The property has already been devastated, and corrupt systems remain close behind. Still, Lauren refuses to abandon her vision.
Religion as Adaptation
One of the strongest themes in the novel is not simply survival, but transformation. Butler presents religion not as rigid doctrine, but as something living and adaptive. Lauren does not inherit her father’s Christianity directly. Instead, she develops her own spiritual philosophy through observation of the natural world, human behavior, and change itself. Earthseed becomes both a religion and a survival strategy.
The world Lauren inhabits is already accustomed to suffering: “Seven of the homeless people sleeping inside on that last night burned with it” (2). Violence has become normalized to the point where people emotionally detach from it. Lauren’s response to this chaos is not despair, but the creation of a moral structure centered around intentional ethics, adaptability, labor, and community responsibility.
What stood out to me most is how Earthseed represents the refusal to blindly follow inherited systems that no longer serve humanity. Lauren creates a belief system aligned with her own understanding of justice and survival rather than simply repeating tradition. The novel asks an important question: how do we build morality in a world where institutions have already failed?
Humboldt County and Returning to the Land
As someone living in Humboldt County, the ending of this novel resonated deeply with me. Butler’s depiction of people migrating north toward the land felt eerily familiar to the history of Humboldt itself. Many people came to these mountains searching for freedom, sustainability, self-governance, and a closer relationship with nature.
I especially connected this to the Green Rush and the migration of cannabis growers into Humboldt County. People originally came to the mountains seeking alternative ways of living outside traditional systems, but over time, corruption, cartel involvement, outside investment, overregulation, and corporate expansion transformed the culture entirely. The same systems people hoped to escape eventually followed them into the mountains.
That connection made Butler’s novel feel less like distant science fiction and more like a warning already unfolding around us. Parable of the Sower suggests that societal collapse is not simply caused by violence or environmental disaster, but by the breakdown of shared ethics and collective care. Lauren’s answer to that collapse is not perfection, but a community rooted in intentional values and cooperation with the earth itself.
What I take from this novel for my own writing is the importance of creating belief systems within stories that shape every layer of the worldbuilding, character decisions, and themes. Butler does not simply tell the reader what Earthseed is—she builds the entire narrative around its philosophy. The story becomes a reflection on how people survive not only physically but also spiritually and ethically during times of collapse.
Jones, Stephen Graham. Mongrels: A Novel. HarperCollins/William Morrow, 2016.
Mongrels by Stephen Graham Jones is a coming-of-age horror novel told through the perspective of an unnamed boy growing up in a nomadic family of werewolves. Living alongside his Aunt Libby and Uncle Darren, the nephew struggles to understand who he is as he waits to discover whether he will eventually transform himself. Throughout the novel, Jones uses the werewolf figure not simply as a monster but as a metaphor for poverty, marginalization, generational trauma, displacement, and survival.
The nephew is rarely named directly. Instead, he is often referred to through shifting identities such as “the nephew,” “the vampire,” “the mechanic,” or “the prisoner.” This creates a feeling of instability surrounding identity itself, reflecting the uncertainty of adolescence and self-discovery. Although his experiences are supernatural, the emotional core of the story feels deeply human: the desire to belong somewhere while fearing what you may become.
As the family is forced from town to town, instability becomes their normal way of life. Darren works dangerous and degrading jobs, while Libby repeatedly pulls the family back together whenever things fall apart. Eventually, Darren disappears after falling in love with a woman outside the family, leaving the nephew once again abandoned by a male role model. Shortly before the nephew’s own transformation, Libby promises she will remain beside him:
“I’ll still be here,” the aunt says, reaching her hand across, taking his. “Just like Darren,” the nephew says. “Werewolf promises aren’t any good, don’t you know that one by now?” (296).
That line captures one of the novel’s strongest emotional themes: the fear of abandonment inherited across generations.
Werewolves as Social Outsiders
One of the most powerful aspects of Mongrels is the way Jones compares werewolves to the poor, the criminalized, and the socially unwanted. The nephew grows up believing imprisonment and suffering are inevitable for people like him: “Everybody goes to jail at some point. Werewolves especially” (53). The family survives through scavenging, temporary work, theft, and constant movement. Childhood friendships are temporary because they never last long enough to take root.
The werewolf mythology becomes a framework for exploring inherited trauma. The nephew’s mother became pregnant after an act of violence and died during childbirth. Throughout the novel, there are fragmented stories surrounding her death, some softened or disguised by family storytelling. The grandfather often “humanizes” horrific events through strange, indirect narratives instead of telling the truth directly. One disturbing example involves him describing killing a rabid dog:
“Once I hit her that first time, little pup, I like to have never got that next lick in…” (17).
The story feels awkward, violent, and emotionally detached, especially through the child’s eyes. Later, however, the novel reveals a much darker parallel beneath the story: the brutal death of the nephew’s mother during childbirth while infected with the werewolf condition. The grandfather seems more comfortable transforming trauma into folklore than confronting the real violence directly. In Mongrels, the “humanized” stories often become the fantasy, while the true human experiences underneath remain unbearable to speak aloud.
Memory Through Cars
One literary element that deeply stood out to me was the way cars function throughout the novel. The vehicles are disposable, stolen, temporary, patched together, and constantly changing, much like the family itself. Yet at the same time, the make and model of each car becomes a way of tracking memory, emotion, and periods of life. The cars become emotional landmarks.
Jones repeatedly introduces vehicles with careful specificity:
“Nearly two weeks later, he finally drifted in again. What he drove… was a pretty pristine old Mercury Monterey” (71).
And later:
“The Sabre wasn’t close to street legal anymore…” (71).
The naming of the cars grounds the timeline emotionally. Instead of remembering life through stable homes or permanent places, the family remembers periods of survival through whatever means carried them at the time. The cars become connected to memory, identity, grief, movement, and family history. Each one marks a chapter in the nephew’s life. Because the family is constantly uprooted, the vehicles become one of the only consistent ways to orient time and memory.
This detail resonated with me deeply because it reflects how people living unstable or nomadic lives often attach memory to objects in motion rather than permanent locations. In Mongrels, cars become temporary homes, escape routes, symbols of survival, and emotional timestamps all at once.
Monstrosity and Emotional Truth
What I take from this novel for my own writing is the permission to lean into dramatized or monstrous figures to express emotional truth. By filtering lived experiences through imaginative characters like werewolves, the novel creates a bridge between realism and metaphor, allowing readers to emotionally inhabit difficult truths. The supernatural elements never feel disconnected from humanity. Instead, they intensify it.
Libby’s warning to the nephew echoes throughout the novel:
“Not all kids born to a werewolf are a werewolf” (21).
Beneath the horror and mythology, Mongrels becomes a story about inheritance—what we fear inheriting, what we cannot escape, and the possibility of becoming something different despite where we come from.
Grace by Natashia Deón is a historical horror novel that follows the life and death of a young Black woman named Naomi. Told through a nonlinear narrative, the novel follows Naomi as a ghost after her death, watching over her daughter Josephine while reflecting on the trauma, violence, love, and resilience that shaped her life. The story blends ghost story, historical fiction, and lyrical prose into something emotionally devastating and deeply human.
Gender roles and the brutality of slavery play a major role throughout the novel. Naomi begins as a hidden child, concealed by her mother from Massa, the slave owner who controls their lives. After witnessing abuse and violence against her family, Naomi kills Massa in order to protect herself and avenge her mother. She is then forced into survival alone, wandering through a world where Black women are constantly vulnerable to exploitation and violence.
Throughout the novel, men repeatedly fail the women around them through manipulation, abandonment, rape, cheating, and abuse. Yet alongside this darkness is an equally powerful theme of motherhood and feminine endurance. Naomi’s mother survives by complying outwardly while secretly protecting her children. Hazel, Naomi’s sister, becomes an example of survival and sacrifice. Even when Naomi herself is betrayed by Jeremy—the first man she truly loves—she eventually refuses to remain trapped in abuse. Jeremy attempts to pimp her out, abandons her during pregnancy, and later returns only to shame her. Naomi ultimately walks away, choosing both herself and her child over submission.
Motherhood Beyond Death
Shortly after Josephine’s birth, Naomi is killed by slave catchers. However, death does not end her connection to her daughter. As a ghost, Naomi remains tethered to Josephine, unable to fully let go. Some of the most haunting moments in the novel are not the supernatural ones, but the emotional truths surrounding motherhood, attachment, and grief. Annie tells Naomi’s spirit:
“One day you will leave her, by your choice. It’s what you’re supposed to do. At some point, every mother has to let her child go” (185).
That line stayed with me long after reading the book. It transforms the ghost story into something much larger about the pain of motherhood itself: loving someone enough to eventually release them into the world.
Lyrical Prose and Emotional Rhythm
One of the strongest literary elements in Grace is Deón’s lyrical prose. She slows down intimate moments and emotional observations until they almost feel suspended in time. Her writing often moves with a poetic rhythm that makes even painful scenes feel beautiful and deeply sensory.
“I wish he would smell sweet to me like a man looking for love or seemed soft like a man who could love me silly and forgive me for the thangs he didn’t know about me” (38).
The prose lingers inside physical sensation, emotion, memory, and desire. Rather than rushing through events, Deón allows moments to fully breathe. Her storytelling carries humor, sexuality, tenderness, and humanity even within the horror of slavery and violence.
What I take from this novel for my own writing is the importance of slowing down and honoring the details of life itself. Grace reminded me that storytelling is not only about plot progression but about fully inhabiting emotional moments, relationships, and sensory experience. The novel feels like a ghost story not simply because of Naomi’s spirit, but because it honors the cycle of life, motherhood, trauma, love, and memory itself. It suggests that even after death, the emotional imprint we leave on one another persists.
Amrith, Sunil. The Burning Earth: A History. W. W. Norton & Company, 2024.
The Burning Earth by Sunil Amrith is a historical examination of climate change, empire, war, and humanity’s relationship with the natural world. The book explores how rising populations, industrialization, greed, and global conflict directly reshape the environment, while environmental collapse simultaneously reshapes the human condition. Throughout the text, Amrith presents history as deeply interconnected with nature rather than separate from it.
One of the most compelling ideas within the book is the danger of believing that technology alone can solve climate collapse. Amrith discusses the concept of the technosphere, humanity’s attempt to “engineer the climate itself” (331), while warning of the consequences that follow: “species loss, the depletion of fresh water, assaults on the forests and the oceans—and reducing the incentive for the wealthy and the powerful to change their behavior in any way” (332). The book repeatedly returns to the idea that those in power often exploit both land and people while avoiding responsibility for the damage left behind.
War Against Nature
A major theme throughout this book is Man vs. Nature, but also the illusion that humanity exists separately from nature. Amrith argues that environmental destruction and human suffering are directly intertwined. Civilization expands, consumes, wages war, and extracts resources while ecosystems collapse alongside it. He writes, quoting Hannah Arendt, that “earthly nature, for all we know, may be unique in the universe in providing human beings with a habitat in which they can move and breathe without effort and without artifice” (252).
This quote deeply resonated with me because it reinforces how fragile and rare our planet truly is. The Earth is not simply a backdrop to human history but the condition that makes human life possible at all. Throughout history, conflict between rulers and the ruled, empires and indigenous peoples, industrialization and sustainability, has repeatedly led to environmental collapse alongside human suffering.
Amrith traces these patterns through multiple eras of history. In 1426, Portuguese colonizers burned the forests of Madeira for sugar plantations, destroying ecosystems alongside local culture and community. During periods of empire and expansion, gold, oil, and resources fueled war while forests, oceans, animals, and entire ways of life were erased in the process. The industrialization of warfare only accelerated this destruction. “War machines were thirsty for oil” (171), Amrith explains, connecting environmental extraction directly to global violence and political ambition.
Discordia and Environmental Tyranny
This book strongly reinforced the central themes within my own novel, Discordia. My thesis asks: How does tyranny affect our environment? And beneath that: When and how do we rise against tyranny?
What The Burning Earth helped crystallize for me is that war, environmental collapse, and the human condition cannot truly be separated from one another. As long as we treat issues like sustainability, politics, war, and social inequality as isolated problems, the destruction continues to spread outward into every part of life.
One of the most haunting passages in the book describes wounded soldiers during World War II, comparing modern warfare to mythological monsters and apocalyptic visions. A Punjabi Rajput soldier wrote, “This is not a war… this is the end of the whole world” (172). That line captures something deeply relevant to our present moment. Environmental destruction is not disconnected from political violence or greed; they are reflections of the same imbalance.
This book ultimately reminded me that humanity behaves as though it stands above nature, when in reality, we are part of a singular living organism. To harm the planet is to harm ourselves. Healing the environment also requires healing the systems of violence, exploitation, and tyranny that continue to consume it.
McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. Vintage International, 2007.
The Road by Cormac McCarthy is a dystopian horror novel set in an apocalyptic America where cannibalism has become normalized, and survival itself feels unnatural. The story follows a father and son, referred to only as “the man” and “the boy,” as they travel west toward the coast searching for warmer weather and some remaining fragment of hope. Along the road, they encounter starvation, violence, death, and the constant fear of other survivors.
When they finally reach the coast, however, they discover the same emptiness and danger they faced throughout the journey. At one point, they discover an abandoned ship and recover supplies, including a gun. After the boy accidentally leaves the gun behind, the father injures himself retrieving it, further weakening his already dying body. Eventually, the father dies on the road, leaving the young boy alone in a brutal world. By the end of the novel, another man approaches the child, claiming to have a family, and the two continue down the road together.
Repetition as Atmosphere
One of the most noticeable literary devices in this novel is repetition. Much of the story moves back and forth between short conversations between the father and son. The dialogue often revolves around death, survival, fear, or reassurance. The boy constantly seeks affirmation from his father, asking whether his father is telling the truth or whether things will be okay. McCarthy writes:
“The man was trying to kill us. Wasn’t he. Yes he was. Did you kill him? No. Is that the truth? Yes. Okay. Is that all right? Yes” (270).
The repetition creates a bleak emotional rhythm throughout the novel. The dialogue is stripped down, sparse, and often emotionally restrained. Even moments of tenderness feel muted by exhaustion and by the need to survive.
Another repeated element is the physical movement across the landscape: “They slept… They hiked… they followed” (88–89). The repetition of actions and imagery reinforces the emptiness of the world around them. Town after town, road after road, ash after ash, the setting rarely changes. This creates a suffocating atmosphere where time and geography almost blur together.
Emotional Flatness and Monotony
While I understand that McCarthy intentionally uses repetition to create emotional desolation, I personally struggled to fully enjoy the novel because the dialogue and prose became overly repetitive. Conversations often felt dry or emotionally flat:
“Is it okay? Yeah. It’s okay. Does it hurt? Yes. It hurts” (266).
The characters themselves sometimes felt similarly muted. Most people they encounter blend together under the same grayness of survival, fear, and hopelessness. I also noticed repeated imagery throughout the novel that made the world feel emotionally stagnant: “In the morning they stood in the road, and he and the boy argued about what to give the old man” (173). The landscape, conversations, and interactions often carried the same tone, with little variation.
For my own writing, this book helped me think about balance. Repetition can absolutely be powerful when used intentionally to create mood, rhythm, or emotional weight. However, I also realized how important it is for me, personally, to vary dialogue, imagery, pacing, and character voice to maintain emotional engagement with the reader. Even in bleak or desolate worlds, I am more drawn to stories where moments of tonal variation, personality, or vivid emotional shifts break through the darkness.
Gomez, Jewelle. The Gilda Stories. Beacon Press, 2023.
The Gilda Stories by Jewelle Gomez is a vampire novel that explores racism, queer love, slavery, chosen family, and survival across generations. More than simply a vampire story, the novel examines what it means to belong to one another in a world built on violence and displacement. The story begins with a frightened young woman escaping slavery and finding refuge in Gilda’s brothel, where she is introduced to compassion, education, and community in a way she has never experienced before.
“The gambling, musical divertissements, and the private rooms were all well attended. Gilda employed eight girls, none yet twenty…” (14). From the beginning, Gomez creates a setting that feels alive with intimacy and emotional texture. The young woman remains fearful of white men and the possibility of being dragged back into slavery: “Any of these men could capture her and take her back to the plantation” (29). Yet within Gilda and Bird’s household, she witnesses something entirely different from the cruelty she has known. The women are intelligent, capable, compassionate, and empowered: “They all had manners of ladies, could read, write, and shoot” (24).
Eventually, the young woman learns that Gilda and Bird are vampires, though Gomez reimagines vampirism as something rooted in connection rather than violence. “It is through our connection with life, not death, that we live” (43). The vampires in this world do not exist purely as predators. Instead, they exchange energy, dreams, and emotional understanding with humanity. Gomez writes, “We draw life into ourselves, yet we give life as well… It’s a fair exchange in a world full of cheaters” (43).
Chosen Family and Queer Love
One of the strongest elements in this novel is its exploration of chosen family. The emotional architecture of the relationships feels deeply intentional, especially the connection between Gilda and Bird. Their love is romantic, nurturing, and spiritual all at once. When Gilda prepares to die, she asks the young woman to remain with Bird, believing she belongs among them. Eventually, the young woman takes on the name Gilda herself, continuing the family’s lineage and identity she has entered.
Throughout the novel, Gomez repeatedly returns to the idea that family is not solely determined by blood, but by loyalty, protection, understanding, and mutual care. Eleanor later says, “…to choose someone for your family is a great responsibility. It must be done not simply out of your own need or desire but rather because of a mutual need” (63). That line felt especially powerful to me because it defines family as a responsibility rather than ownership.
The language surrounding community and belonging throughout the novel is often breathtakingly beautiful: “Those of us who can withstand that uneasy pulling of the sea’s waters swirling about the bay feel firmly rooted here and protective of each other” (71). Gomez creates an emotional atmosphere where intimacy and survival become deeply intertwined.
Resistance Against Exploitation
The antagonist, Fox, represents exploitation, cruelty, and domination. Unlike Gilda’s compassionate philosophy, Fox treats working women as disposable and slave-like. Because Gilda herself escaped plantation slavery, her conflict with Fox becomes deeply personal and symbolic. As the story unfolds over time, Gilda also becomes involved in activist movements such as Greenpeace and the Black Panther Party, continuing the novel’s larger themes of justice, resistance, and collective care.
One thing I struggled with personally was pacing. I found myself wishing Fox had been introduced earlier within the story, possibly within the first sixty pages, to create a stronger central tension sooner. I also wanted the novel to slow down more often and remain longer inside the emotional and sensual details of each scene. The relationships, touches, environments, and emotional moments were among the novel’s strongest parts, and I often found myself wanting more time to fully inhabit them before the story moved forward. By the end, the pacing felt rushed to me compared to the emotional depth established earlier in the novel.
Still, what stayed with me most was the novel’s belief in companionship and healing across time. Even after centuries, distance, grief, and transformation, the characters continue searching for connection with one another. The story ultimately suggests that survival alone is not enough; people also need intimacy, community, and love in order to remain whole.
Saunders, George. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life. Random House, 2021.
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders is a craft book that examines four Russian authors and how storytelling can reflect morality, culture, human nature, and community. Saunders breaks down the mechanics of storytelling sentence by sentence, showing how every detail matters and how intentional writing creates emotional resonance.
One story that stood out to me was The Singers. The story slowly introduces an entire tavern full of people before the singing contest even truly begins. Saunders writes, “It was an unbearably hot July day when, scarcely able to drag one foot after the other, I walked slowly, accompanied by my dog, up the Kolotovka ravine in the direction of the Cozy Corner” (67). Immediately, we are placed into the exhaustion, the heat, and the atmosphere of the setting.
At first, the pacing almost feels too slow. The first eleven pages are mostly descriptions of people sitting in a bar. But that slowness becomes the point. Instead of simply saying the tavern was crowded, the story allows us to feel the room through observation, gossip, body language, and internal dialogue. The tavern becomes alive.
Community as Character
One of the most interesting craft choices in this story is how the community itself becomes a character. Every person in the tavern seems connected through shared history and quiet observation. The narrator notices Yashka the Turk standing in the center of the room: “a lean, slender man of twenty-three, wearing a long-skirted blue nankeen coat” (69). Small details like clothing, posture, and mannerisms layer the scene until the reader can almost smell the tavern and hear the crowd shifting around the room.
The emotional tension builds between the two singers. The contractor performs perfectly, technically polished and controlled. Yashka, however, sings with emotion and vulnerability. His voice is imperfect, but it resonates far deeper with the people listening.
Authenticity Resonates More Than Perfection
This story reminded me that authenticity will almost always move people more than perfection. A technically flawless performance may impress an audience, but emotional honesty is what creates connection. Yashka’s flaws are what make him human, and because of that, his singing reaches the community in a way the contractor’s performance cannot.
Saunders also discusses how long the buildup is before the actual “heart” of the story occurs. The exposition takes patience, but without it, the emotional payoff would not land the same way. The reader must first understand the people, the environment, and the culture before the climax can truly matter.
The Child Within the Adult
At the end of the story, after the celebration and drinking have ended, the narrator walks home and overhears a boy shouting to his brother, “Dad wants to give you a good hiding!” (82). It is such a small and almost humorous ending, but it carries something universal within it. No matter how old we become, there is still a child somewhere inside us. Across cultures, generations, and countries, people continue echoing the same emotions and relationships.
This book deeply influenced the way I think about storytelling. Sometimes spending extra time in setting, atmosphere, and internal observation can create a much more immersive emotional experience. It also reminded me that flawed characters are often the most lovable because they feel real. Most importantly, it reinforced the idea that, despite our cultural differences, there are deeply human experiences that connect us all.
Mean is a creative autobiography and true-crime narrative that follows Myriam Gurba from childhood to adulthood as she confronts rape, racism, cultural identity, and personal transformation. Haunted—literally and figuratively—by the ghost of Sophia, a raped and murdered woman, Myriam is compelled to visit the place where Sophia died. Through this haunting, she faces her own trauma and survivor’s guilt. Gurba’s voice is sharp, defiant, and self-aware, blending humor and horror in equal measure as she examines cruelty, injustice, and the survival mechanisms women develop to exist within them.
The title Mean becomes a lens through which Gurba explores power and pain. The book opens with Sophia’s death:
“Wrecking her makes him feel like she belongs to him” (2).
By beginning with this act of violence, Gurba forces readers to confront the brutality often silenced in stories of women—especially women of color. The murder of Sophia, a Spanish woman killed by a Hispanic man, mirrors Gurba’s own experience with sexual assault and raises questions of ownership, violence, and cultural complicity. Through this, Gurba links her trauma to a collective experience, a bridge between the living and the dead—between victimhood and survival.
When Gurba talks about being “mean,” she often invokes the cattiness of girlhood, but her real subject is cruelty in all its forms—social, racial, and systemic. The word “mean” becomes elastic, stretching from playground gossip to the most profound violations of humanity. She illustrates this concept through humor and absurdity, such as her discussion of the “Michael Jackson donut,” which sparks a debate about whether the pastry—half chocolate, half powdered sugar—is racist. Gurba observes:
“What I found most interesting was that everybody dominating this debate was white” (163).
Her point lands sharply: conversations about racism are often dominated by white voices, leaving people of color excluded from their own narratives. Gurba writes that the opinions of the two “mud people” in the room were never solicited—a darkly humorous yet devastating critique of white-centered discourse on race.
Another central motif in the book is the phrase “white girl,” which Gurba uses as both political and literary shorthand. It exposes the subtle hierarchies that shape American culture and classrooms:
“White girls from the English-only classes refused to socialize with girls from the bilingual classes” (19).
The term becomes layered—a symbol of privilege, separation, and the ways in which whiteness is normalized. Gurba’s repetition of “white girl” challenges readers to recognize how language itself can uphold systems of exclusion. She recalls moments of alienation and microaggression, from classmates to family acquaintances:
“‘What is this?’ in that supremely bitchy California-girl accent some white girls reserved for interrogating my mother’s hospitality” (19).
Through these moments, Gurba transforms “mean” from insult to insight—a way of naming the everyday cruelties that shape a person’s world.
As I read this novel, I found myself turning the question of “mean” inward. What does it mean to be “mean” as a woman, a survivor, a writer? Is meanness cruelty, or is it the courage to hold boundaries in a world that demands your silence? Gurba redefines the word as an act of reclamation: to be mean is to speak, to refuse apology, to survive.
In my own writing, I hope to evoke this same self-examination—to make readers question the norms we excuse, the systems we uphold, and the voices we choose to hear. Mean reminds me that storytelling is not just about empathy; it’s about confrontation. It’s about being brave enough to look directly at the discomfort—and to speak from it anyway.
A blend of satire and queer fiction, People Collide by Isle McElroy takes readers by surprise with its sharp humor and emotional depth. The novel follows Eli and Elizabeth, a married couple who seem perfect together on the surface—Eli is sweet, funny, and attentive, while Elizabeth is ambitious, successful, and confident. Yet beneath their charm lies mutual dissatisfaction. Eli resents Elizabeth’s constant criticism and sexual demands, while Elizabeth grows tired of his lack of ambition and emotional availability. When an unexplained event causes them to switch bodies, they are forced to confront the very parts of each other they have avoided—and, in doing so, the unspoken distance between them.
At its core, the novel explores recognition and empathy within relationships: the desperate need to be seen, understood, and appreciated. Both Eli and Elizabeth fail to listen to one another, and their transformation becomes a metaphor for what happens when communication collapses. The reader is reminded that true connection comes only when we are comfortable within ourselves—and capable of hearing others.
Eli, insecure and self-critical, longs to be noticed by Elizabeth, the woman he adores but feels overshadowed by. His self-sabotaging behavior manifests through an eating disorder—
“Eli would throw up after meals while she was always at her desk writing” (75)— and through infidelity, as if seeking pain in exchange for attention. Once trapped in Elizabeth’s body, Eli experiences an entirely new vulnerability. The physical form he once idealized now becomes a source of fear and insecurity. As the narrative deepens, McElroy cleverly shifts perspective, giving Eli’s internal voice more space than Elizabeth’s, symbolizing the emotional distance that defines their marriage.
From Eli’s point of view, readers gain an honest reflection of gendered experience and self-awareness:
“I always walked faster than everyone else like I didn’t care. It didn’t bother me until I was in her body” (112).
Now living as Elizabeth, Eli also encounters the world’s perception of himself:
“Is that what you think of him?” I asked. “That Eli was negligent?” (188).
Through this inversion, Eli gains insight into how others view his failures—a painful but transformative realization.
Elizabeth, in contrast, is ambitious and driven, yet emotionally distant. She perceives Eli as dependent and unmotivated. Her professional success and self-assuredness lead her to view Eli as an obstacle rather than a partner. After the body swap, however, Elizabeth experiences a new kind of freedom in living as Eli—a freedom that feels less confined by social expectations. Instead of nurturing Eli’s insecurities, she begins to relish autonomy and sexual exploration:
“This place is loaded with dicks,” she said. “There’s no better place to talk about dicks” (198).
McElroy uses humor and discomfort to illustrate gendered liberation and the ways in which societal conditioning shapes our desires.
Ultimately, the two remain trapped in a cycle of unmet needs—the woman seeking companionship, the man craving freedom. Even in their new bodies, their minds remain unchanged, unable to bridge the emotional gap between them. Eli reflects on this repeating pattern:
“There are things you won’t be able to plan for… You can plan for the towels and the flashlights and the recycling and the aunts, but at some point you’ll have to trust me, because all I can do is aspire to the version of you I find the most accurate, which is the version of you that I love, the kind and brilliant and generous person—someone who would, I truly believe, let her partner sleep through the night” (218).
This reflection captures the tragic irony of their relationship: love filtered through self-interest, intimacy blurred by projection.
By diving into dark psychology and relational imperfection, McElroy forces readers to confront the parts of love that society often avoids—jealousy, resentment, and incomplete listening. For me as a writer, this novel underscores the power of storytelling to reveal the truths we hide from ourselves. It reminds me to bring awareness to my own characters—to let them stumble, misunderstand, and grow. Through such honest portrayals, fiction becomes not just reflection, but revelation—of culture, of identity, and of the fragile art of being human.
Little Lost Forest 