Non-Fiction

Simple by Kerrie Kemperman

http://www.creativenonfiction.org/brevity/pastissuestwo/brev38/Kemperman38.html

I first clicked on this poem because of it's title and as I read along I truly enjoyed this short story of non-fiction. I love the daughter-father relationship discussed in this story because you don't get to read much about them, at least I haven't. Most stories are rather about the bonding between a father and son.

The daughter-father relationship kind of reminds me of the relationship I share with my father. My father's also a very simple guy who doesn't like to show off.  He also has a tendency of showing/telling me things about his childhood and the life he's seen thus far like the father in the story does. Sometimes, like the author, I only half listen to what he says but if I were to question myself and ask what's one of the things I admire about my Dad, then his simplicity - simple talks, simple belongings, simple clothes, simple lifestyle - would definitely be on the list. 

This story is meaningful because a father-daughter's relationship is actually hard to understand. I don't understand my relationship with my Father half the time but I know it's special. For example, I don't communicate with my Dad as much as I do with my Mom but when it comes down to a funny family argument my Dad and I are definitely backing each other up!

Raymond Carver

Little Things

To be blunt, I hated this story. While reading the first paragraph, I was able to foreshadow that the story wasn't going to be a happy one because of the way Raymond Carver describes the unpleasant change in weather. When he uses parallelism to compare the darkness that is setting both outside and inside of the house you sense something intense/dramatic is going to occur. 

I was fine with the story until the baby was mentioned. There was a couple arguing and being hopeful, I figured that maybe at the end things will be solved. But when Carver mentions the baby, there's an entirely different twist to the story and you don't know where it's going to go. I didn't like the story because of how the baby was being treated with lack of care by the parents because of their argument. No matter how mad they were at one another, I feel there was a better and mature way to handle the matter. Carver uses ambiguity at the end to let us think of what happened to the child. Although it's not said, you get the assumption that the baby was injured and this gave me a feeling of disgust. Carver definitely knows how to impact his audience emotionally.