by Sara Suleri
This week I had to write four imitations of writers we’re studying in my MFA lit class. I did the first three pretty quickly (by now I dream in Baldwin’s prose, Hoagland was fun, and Natalia Ginzburg’s “He and I” was a gimme), then was stumped. Orwell? Too hard to mimic. Woolf? After several attempts, I gave up. Five authors later I turned back to Sara Suleri’s essay, “Meatless Days,” featured in a collection by that name. An hour later I had my last imitation, and the best part was not my forgettable bit of homework but the hour I spent digging into Suleri’s unforgettable style, a wonderful blend of domestic detail, humor, heartbreak, and the complicated connective tissue that is family.
Posted on this day, other years:
- Getting that full Lenten experience - 2008
- Button of the Year Idea - 2005
- Gorman, On Reflection - 2005
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Copying Minor White
This reminds me of my photography class at Rice. I took a photo of pile of dirty sand under a freeway, and when I printed it, it looked just like a Minor White. My prof, Peter Brown, saw it the same way. He told the class we should copy as much as we w…