Journal Two, Kaylee McCormick

Hello guys, I'm a little late coming on to the blog. I'm sorry about that. However, hi, I'm Kaylee. I'm from Mansfield, Ohio, but traveled around Ohio a lot when I was younger. My mom was unstable and on drugs so we never stayed in a town for too long. I went to Liberty or River Valley from about first grade to 4th or 5th. I also don't remember a lot of my childhood, I guess a mental block or something, but I'm dealing with it. Up until the first to weeks of 2018, I was super depressed and really couldn't find hope or love in anything. I talked to my mom for the first time in six years and realized I didn't want to go down her path and realized that I wasn't going to give a damn and be myself. I work at a waiver home for MRDD (Mental Retardation Developmental Disabilities) men. There's four of them and it can be a pain, but I enjoy it a lot. Fun fact, I have 2 hedgehogs and would 10/10 recommend. Also, this past weekend my cousin, whose more like my brother, was taken to the ER and transported to Columbus. They found that he needed dialysis treatments so put a dialysis tube in his neck. The doctor said he'll need a kidney transplant in a month or 2 so if you don't see me in class or I'm late, it's because I'm getting tests done to see if I am a match to donate my kidney to him and I'll be helping his mother with his appointments, seeing as he'll need to go to Cbus 3 times a week for dialysis treatments once he's released. I've been keeping good and happy vibes for him and in live in general so. Alright, peace out. 

My youngest, Juliette

My cousin, Chandler and I at my graduation

Penelope, my oldest.

Short Short Story for February 22nd Class by Nikki Wehner

I'm not feeling up to class again which is ironic because this is my favorite class this semester. Anyway, here is my short short story for today since I can't be there during the in-class discussions.

Nikki Wehner

Short – Short Story

The room smells of antiseptic and it makes me want to scream.

            I am so very tired of this smell. My nostrils become drenched with it at least a couple times a month now. They’re trying to figure out what’s wrong with me – and that means being poked and prodded and questioned countless times.

            The rooms merge together. The fake smile has a permanent residency. You’re too polite not to keep faking it. Although every time you still ask yourself how you’re going to manage that fake-ass smile for even another second… but you do.

Every. Single. Time.

            Life is changing around me. This is an incorrect statement. I’m simply opening up to all the bullshit that was masked by my innocence. All of that is now gone in my world. I’m an adult. I’m dying. I’m weak. Yet – strong and focused better than ever. Why? I know what really matters around me because my life timer was brought better to my attention. Life’s really too short for bullshit and aging really puts that into perspective as an adult.

There’s no denying mortality anymore. I am reminded every single time I smell that awful antiseptic that is my hospital room again. My fake smile is up again. My fiancé there with me being more supportive that I could have ever hoped for. I would be bored to death already. I am more bored than ever. I’m so tired of being here being poked and prodded and questioned again.

But here I am doing it again.

            There’s of course the exciting side to it. I love and fully appreciate science. I will, of course, continue to go through the visits to the hospital and those gross antiseptic-smelling rooms because I believe in the science coming through or improving with time.

But I’m not going to lie and say it’s not fucking awful because it really is exhausting. I’m dying. Dying is exhausting.

            Chronic pain is the worst. You’re alive but it hurts to even breathe deeply some days. No one believes there’s something wrong because it’s not always visible. The doubt is the most annoying. The pain is gnawing, throbbing, stabbing, and stinging… sometimes a mix.

            It’s amazing how the human body works at all considering how many complicated parts go into the body functioning but here we are. Walking, incredible, humans.  Here, the scientists are trying to play magician trying to scientifically find a starting point to comprehending the processes when they malfunction is magnificent. That’s why I don’t blame science for not knowing the cure to what I have yet. As much as I was going to the hospital, you’d assume that I would be getting some form of a treatment – wrong. The professionals don’t even know what’s wrong with me. That’s right – they don’t even have part A down to begin trying to treat me.

            So here I walk down the hall, smelling that antiseptic again, with what hope I have left.

Sierra Hedges Triggering Town Response

Sierra Hedges (Trout)
Triggering Town Response
2/16/18

The eighth chapter in The Triggering Town was very vivid as far as imagery goes. Multiple times, Hugo paints a vibrant mental image about Italy. "I came to one Italy in 1944 and another in 1963. Then 1963 Italy was filled with sparkling fountains, shiny little cars that honked and darted through the well-kept streets, energetic young men and beautiful, well-dressed young women, huge neon signs that said CIT and CAMPARI and CINZANO in bright blue or red or green." (Huge pg. 76. paragraph 2) These last two chapters are rich with mental paintings and song-like phrasing.


I was curious as to what the italicized words meant, being that I do not speak Italian, therefore, I looked up the meaning to a few. Campari is a fairly popular drink of choice. Cit means the city. Cinzano is also a popular drink but more importantly, the name of a smaller quiet town in Italy. Just a little bit of info on this.

To me, these last chapters were very much the general theme of this book. Hugo talks about how everyone needs a trigger to write, whether it be direct or indirect, a town or item, a person or group, etc. He wrote about his triggers which were always towns and specifically Italian towns that held a special place in his heart. While, I may not be capable of using a town to trigger my writing, this has taught me that your writing does not really have to have a deep dark meaning. It can literally be just be composition of your observations. I think sometimes, I try to hard to find a deeper meaning for something to write about, which can be heavy and strenuous to put into comprehensive words. I will strive for writing that floats on a whim rather than boils from within. While, as we learned, its great to risk a little sediment, I think it is also important to keep things approachable and light at times.

Sorry that I posted so late. Work gets in the way of life sometimes. Thank you everyone for your patience.

Triggering Town reflection - Bethany Swan journal 3

In the last two chapters, you are able to tell the book was coming to an end with the memoirs. The book contains a series of specific insights. Richard Hugo gives us a method on how to write poetry. By seeing how Hugo arrives at his conclusions, this method can be applied to numerous other instances. By reading how Richard Hugo determines what to write, the method he gives us can be used and applied to our own poetry.

‘Ci Vediamo’ is a memoir, written on returning to Italy, after fighting there in World War Two. Hugo tell the story on all of his memories and what he learned about himself there. He also walks us through his thought process, while writing poems based on specific events. He says, "Problems of how memory and the imagination modify and transform experience, problems of stances you might have to take or to drop to order language into a poem." He tells us at the beginning of the chapter, he would show us this throughout his stories.

In the final chapter, ‘How Poets Make a Living’ Hugo tells us about working in a factory. This chapter is mainly based on the story of the squatter and how that became the subject of one of his poems. He starts off by mentioning a question on the differences between business and university. "In some ways the university is a far more real world than business. So there are differences but I'm not sure they affect the writing of poems..." The last lines in the book are a great ending and is a great last point to his overall lesson.

One of the most impactful chapters in this book to me was chapter three: 'Assumptions'. In the first paragraph he states, "Often the weirder the better. Words love the ridiculous areas of our minds. But silly or solid, assumptions are necessary elements in a successful base of writing operations." Assumptions are the back-story to your poem. Its useful write down original thoughts, but you shouldn’t question them while you are writing. Get your thoughts down then decided if they need tweaked. In another important lesson, Hugo uses ‘The Triggering Town’ as a metaphor for personal obsessions and the subjects that cause you to write. I learned it is useful to know what they are so you can have ideas for subjects of poems.

Journal 3- The Triggering Town reflection- Bobbi Swan

Part One:
I found it very interesting that Hugo worked for thirteen years doing other things before he started teaching and working in academia. To me it seems as Hugo did a lot of different things in his 58 years. The last two chapters for sure were some of my favorites. Chapter 8 talked a lot about Italy, and I found it interesting how when Hugo describes visiting Italy again, he is slightly upset to see it is no longer, "brown and gray and lifeless." Hugo says on page 76, "I hate to admit it, but that was the Italy I wanted to find. I fell in love with a sad land, and I wanted it sad one more time." Also through chapter 8 I felt I really gained better insight on Hugo as a person, which I really enjoyed. Chapter 9 was also one of my favorites because it really brought the book to a great conclusion. The ending was powerful and left a meaningful message that will stick with me as I sure it will with many other readers. 


Part Two:
One of the biggest lessons I took away from The Triggering Town would be when writing a poem, "the initiating subject should trigger the imagination as well as the poem" as stated by Hugo on page 5. Hugo says how things that should have a poem written about them, are not the best things to write about because they have a bad habit of "wanting lots of things at the same time. And you provide those things at the expense of your imagination." This advice was helpful for me when writing some of my poems for class. By writing poems about things that do not have "moral or social obligations to feel or claim you feel certain ways" opens up your imagination and helps to not block creativity and imagination while writing.
Another lesson I took away from this book is talked about on page 17 when Hugo says, "If you write often, perhaps every day, you will stay in shape and will better be able to receive those good poems, which are finally a matter of luck, and get them down." This made a lot of sense to me when I read it. I thought of this as like you have to do if you play a sport. You practice, maybe everyday, in order to better your skills and grow as an athlete, or in this case a writer. How can one expect to get better at writing if they don't practice? Just from writing the five poems we did in class I can see the growth and improvement I have made as a writer being that my last poem is way better written than my first one.

Journal Three - Triggering Town - Tricia

In the last two chapters of The Triggering Town, I enjoyed the glimpse into Hugo's experiences and how this context offers more insight into his writing method. The experience he recounts that resonates the most with me is the period of time he spent in that field outside of Spinazzola in his "moment of surrender" during which he felt he would "sit [t]here forever and watch the grass bend in the wind and the war would end without me and I would not go home, ever"(84). In this passage, it becomes obvious how stressful his experience in Italy had been; his brain could no longer handle the pressure and more or less shut down. It's striking that even though it was a stress reaction, he regards the feeling as beautiful and believes that his poetic attempts to describe it come no where near doing it justice. Knowing the historical context of the experience--that Spinnazola had been on the Roman Road--puts another lens over the experience. Imagining how long people had been lying in the field or other fields in the area, watching others go by, and wondering if anyone else had had similar moments of surrender grants another sense to Hugo's experience that I don't have the words to describe. Of course, all of Hugo's experiences in Italy provide a greater understanding of his writing and deeply impacted him.

The first of my two biggest takeaways from the book is that "if you are not risking sentimentality, you  are not close to your inner self" (7). I think that this summarizes many other points throughout the book. The final two chapters and parts of several others are about Hugo's experiences, and he mentions repeatedly that it is his feelings about these things that inform his poetry. It is necessary for a poet to draw from their own experiences and use their feelings in writing. Though this may seem obvious, he recounts a young writing professor who thought writers didn't use their own experiences. Using personal feelings and experiences make writing real and relatable. The second of my takeaways is the tool of setting up arbitrary rules and assumptions for yourself. He mentions a rule he set up when he was young that if he liked a particular sound he wrote, he would "make a similar sound three to eight syllables later" (10). He also dedicates a chapter to assumptions as, he claims, they underlie the work of all writers. I think that actively developing assumptions could be a way to increase creativity and to ensure that there is never a  shortage of things to write about. After all, Hugo creates an entire chapter of just assumptions this way. It's important to not doubt these as "you have to be silly to write poems at all" (10).

Journal 3- James

Part 1- the last two chapters put me in the mindset of a book I read in high school about WW2 in the South Pacific called Goodbye, Darkness by William Manchester. That book chronicles the life of a man at war and his return back to the hill he spent most of his time fighting upon. Many similar emotions were evoked by both. In Manchester's book the question of what our purpose is is brought up quite often to the end and I feel like Hugo almost gives us that. Our purpose is to share as much as we can and hope that "we have been honest enough to scream back at the fates."

Part 2- I feel like this is one of my first introductions to setting poetry to a specific place or time to turn the work into more of a story. Do I know if this will work with my style of writing? No, but it's worth the try to find out (or at least I think so). It's also kind of helped my attitude towards literature itself and the importance of new works. No one can write the poem I could and I couldn't write the poem someone else could. Each of our efforts are unique and genuine and no one can ever take that from someone.