Semester Project: Tribal

So, I originally planned to write about the tribulations faced by a particular young woman living in a dichotomy of strict patriarchism and unstinted expressionism, but my story began to take a turn when I was about a page into it. Tribal: I'd call it creative non-fiction because I found myself writing about something totally different, although not entirely different, then how I first intended to write it. Instead of letting the readers analyze the narrator through their actions, I ended up writing about the narrator's reminiscence and inner-dialogue concerning their cousin and of the impact his character has on their life. The world is explained through their point of view and their point of view only, so it's a pretty involved outlook on life and on the issues they face. I hadn't sacrificed the hyperrealism, or relation to art, women, and society, but I think it'll take readers a while to figure out the connotations embedded throughout the story. We leave the story asking a couple questions, but the essence of the story's plot linearity is contingent on the reader and how they interpret things as they unfold. Questions of trust arise, of love, of loss, and of some mysticism. 

I'll include a brief a passage below: 

"He stayed with us for about a year. He was still the Chris he’d always been—he was just hooked on the needle, too. Sometimes I’d hear him crying up in his apartment. I don’t know what he’d cry about, but, whatever it was, I was able to feel his pain sear straight through the floor and fill my room like a gas, unavoidable and omnipresent in every gasp. I’d sit there on my bed, my tears forcing their way through eyes squeezed shut. I’d stay at home in my mind, and I’d shut everything else out. I just wanted to help him, but I knew he wouldn’t let me anyway; or more like he couldn’t let me. I don’t know if I was crying because he was in this pain or if it was because he never cared how I felt about it. I’d try to like talk about it with him, but he’d always bottle whatever had just been spilling and what was already spilled as soon as someone noticed his feeling. So it became, after a while, a bother for me. His stoicism made me uneasy like it wasn’t really Chris behind that door, so when I’d come home in the afternoons, I’d walk hastily past his attic apartment to avoid having to see him like that again. It was really hard at first, dealing with that kind of shit day in and day out, but I moved on with my life, however best I could. I knew he was fucked up on something, but, heroin, Chris?"

So I've posted a small passage like this one on my new blog, realgiancarlopiccininithings, on Tumblr, so I can not only keep a track record of my work but also, hopefully, gain some type of a following for it. I don't know, who knows what'll happen; we shall surely see, right?