literature

Sandra Cisneros seems to have a way of creeping up on me… of finding me over and over again. Her short stories popped up when I attended Bryn Mawr’s Writing for College program, and when I tutored students in English over the summer. The week before we looked at selections from A House on Mango Street in this class, I went to my education field placement and observed a seventh grade class who was reading the same book. She always finds her way into my life, and she always inspires me to keep writing when she does. For years, I have struggled to find my voice both as a writer, and as a woman in today’s society. I admire Cisneros because she writes about what she knows – her family, living in poverty, being a woman

Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison’s book An Unquiet Mindprovided many examples of biological concepts that we discussed throughout thecourse in the context of an individual’s life.  Due to the intricacies of her condition and her acuteawareness of death, her story embodies, perhaps to an extreme, the complexitiesof what it is to be fully human and not just a creature of chemical processesmoving through life.