The Choice To Embrace By Juliet Glen Ridge

Narrative stories or essays can expand through a wide variety. Although a narrative is telling a story, it could be a person narrative or something they have experienced. This allows others to become creative when telling their stories. Reading “The Sanctuary of School”and “Tell Me Something”, the authors used various ways of writing and publishing a narrative story.

Both “The Right of Love” by Gene Lees and “The Canonization” by John Donne represent a form of forbidden love due to ethnicity and religion where both parties are fighting for the acceptance of their relationship. Donne, although catholic, falls in love with a non-catholic woman which is looked down upon by others. In his poem he states, “we in us find th’ eagle and the dove”,the two birds represent two polar opposite symbols, the eagle represent strength and courage, while a dove represents love and peace. Although a relationship between catholics and non-catholics were forbidden, they found a common ground in their love for each other. Differences can strengthen the love between two individuals, which is also shown in “The Right of Love”,

The poem “for an Inked Daughter by Jane Wheeler” describes in vivid detail how much she dislikes her daughters phase but will always love her. “i carry your heart with me by” E. E. Cummings was Published in 1952 the poem is about the fear he holds of losing his love, but no matter what, he will always carry his beloved’s heart wherever he goes. While both poems are interesting and are about unconditional love, they use different diction, form, and literary devices describing their feelings towards their treasured person.

Love is a concept that was scattered throughout the novel Troy by Adele Geras. It was used to betray, or to bring happiness, during the all famous Trojan War that the book centers around. Either way, love was used to motivate the characters we follow in the story whether it was Xanthe getting away from Boros, or Marpessa betraying her sister for a guy. Love was the way these characters achieve their goals, without the love in the story, plot lines and character development certainly would not have been the same. Which is why the main characters in the city of Troy used their feelings to achieve greater things.

In her essay “On Going Home,” author Joan Didion speaks to new parents about how the experience of “going home” after starting a new family can trigger feelings of disconnection between families, old and new. Written from Didion’s own experience returning to her childhood home for her daughter’s first birthday, the essay describes her nostalgia for her previous home and how she regrets being unable to, as a mother, provide the same familial experiences she had as a child. Using relatable invention, imagery-inducing arrangement, and syntax that inspires more deliberate reading by the audience, Didion effectively convinces her readers of the familial fragmentation that occurs with the creation of a nuclear family.

In “A Sorrowful Woman,” written by Gail Godwin the marriage for the unnamed woman is a torment. The whole time, she suffers from grief and sadness. Meanwhile, the husband is a great man. He shows her compassion, patience, forgiveness, and understanding. He adjusts his life around her episodes to accommodate her needs. She is imprisoned in her mind with this disorder which eventually leads to her suicide. Bipolar Disorder is the psychiatric illness characterized by both manic and depressive episodes or manic ones only. In the short story “A Sorrowful Woman” mom has Bipolar Disorder and has significant difficulty associating with her husband and son. It is disconcerting how a mother cannot connect or deal with her child.

I was in high school the first time I had to write a narrative. I was a freshman. This was Ms. Bradley’s first time teaching at Union Christian Academy. On her first day, she gave us our syllabus and said, “I do not accept late work, especially on writing assignments.” We, literally, sat there stunned. My freshman class had it very easy during eighth grade year. We were not expecting this. As I looked through the syllabus, I saw that our first assignment was due in a week and it was a narrative. At this time, I did not even know what a narrative was. Ms. Bradley explained that a narrative was an account or story of events. It could be either true or false. Our narrative had to be true. It had to be a true account of something that happened to us over the summer. She wanted to gauge how are writing skills were. Our narrative had to be at least two to two and a half pages long. I chose to write my first ever narrative on my trip to Fort Worth, Texas. Once again, I was plagued with writer’s block. I had the story in my head, but everything I

Some Kind of Courage, is written for children between fifth and eighth grade in terms of

The essay I chose for my response page is Mint Snowball by Naomi Shihab Nye, a story of a girl born in the wrong time. It's very interesting that this story is a personal narrative, but it is mostly written about Her great-grandfather. Her mother probably told her this story often enough that it stuck with her and became vivid in detail. She seems like she wished she was there with her great-grandfather. This leads to her disconnect between her and modern day society.

Love can be an amazing thing and it is often said that nothing compares to the bond between a mother and her child, yet before a study called “The nature of love” which is discussed in the book “Forty studies that changed psychology: Explorations into the history psychological research,” our society had a very different understand about what caused this bond (Hock, 2013). In the book the author Roger Hock explores many different influential studies but in the section called “Discovering Love,” he takes a closer look into this study and discusses its importance (Hock, 2013). The influence of this study can be found in many different types of literature such as contemporary articles like “Building your own family,” which was published in Scientific American Mind (2014). This article implicitly provides further understand of the “The nature of love” study results and shows active efforts to continue building on the original theoretical ideas in order to change our views about human development (Jacobson, 2014). Even in modern text books like Psychology: Eighth Edition, can we find traces of the importance of this study. Thus this study not only provided a tremendous contribution to the field of Psychology but also changed society by altering its views on child rearing all together.

Monday Mourning by Kathy Reichs is a crime fiction book, where, a forensic anthropologist, Temperance Brennan tries to unveil the identity of three skeletons that were found in the basement of a pizza parlor in Montreal, Canada. Brennan works with homicide detectives Luc Claudel and his partner, Michel Charbonneau, and Andrew Ryan, who is also her lover. Throughout the book, both Brennan and Claudel doubted each other’s competence to solve the case. According to Brennan institution, she believes that the three skeletons might be recent, however, Claudel speculates it to be century old due to findings of three antique buttons near their bodies. As a result, Claudel puts very little effort in this case, whereas, Brennan is determined to identify the year of death so to validate her inspection and to drew attention of Claudel and her other colleagues to this case. In the process of solving this investigation, she finds herself dragged to other homicides that were affiliated with the three skeleton remains.

The period of the 1950s in Harlem, New York, was an embodiment of despair, poverty, and crime. Such conditions pushed people to live in unsupportable atmosphere of distemper and circulation of drugs. Because of these awful obstacles, people developed bitter sense of abandonment and disappointment. However, despite all these challenges, there is always room for hope. This hope is deeply rooted in the blood ties and such an essential thing as love. Sonny’s Blues by J. Baldwin is a perfect example of it. James Baldwin’s focus of unconditional love is shown through the narrator’s real life experiences of the struggles of growing up with Sonny in Harlem New York in the 1950s.

Bill de Blasio is the mayor of New York City who has a plan to build 80,000 affordable units of housing over a span of 10 years (The New York Times, 2016). His plans could have the potential to change housing patterns in New York, where there are a variety of ethnicities (The New York Times, 2016). In this New York Times story on the mayors struggle with integrating neighborhoods, there is a fight between keeping parts of New York’s housing reputation at an all time high or closing the gap between segregated neighborhoods, which is relevant to issues brought up in this course behind residential segregation. In this story we see the mayor of New York struggling with issues that were brought up in Amy C. Steinbugler’s Beyond Loving and Eduardo

Often, when people think of sex work and sex workers their minds immediately go to human trafficking. Yet, I believe it is essential that one marks the difference between the two, because as social workers we will have clients who come to us who have chosen to be sex workers. As social workers we recognize that every individual has the right to self-determination and we must know how to best serve them. In Janice G. Raymond’s book Not a Choice, Not a Job, she explores the world of sex work and though her views conflict with social work values she presents great information into the world of sex work. I will be presenting the ideas from her book and also be offering other views that are important when working with clients.

The two essays that caught my attention are Frida's personal essay and Eduardo's personal essay. They both talk about how they overcame their way of living to a better life. Although Frida talks more about her mother's struggles it also reflects on her because Frida was in her mother's life. Eduardo talks about how hard it was for him to get fit and live a healthy life. Both of the writers effectivly reponded to the assignment because they talk about how they had a rough start in life but manged to overcome it to become what they want to be in life. They are both happy to the way they are living their life. Some of the efffective choices that both of the writers made are to never give up, to set their mentality in one thing to be able to accomplish