All posts by Dawn

Hi! I am the Academic and Learning Resource Center Assistant at the Ivy Tech Warsaw campus. I also love books and stories of all kinds and am a writer myself.
Book Review

Book Review: Frankissstein: A love story by Jeanette Winterson

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In Frankissstein: A Love Story, Jeanette Winterson, author of mind-expanding, gender-bending, time-shifting fiction, brings to life a new creature cobbled together and electrified by language. 

Picture the scene: Nineteen-year-old Mary Shelley is vacationing at Villa Diodati in the company of her stepsister Clair Clairmont Romantic bad boy poets Percy Shelley and Lord Byron, and Byron’s physician William Polidori. The summer is dark and damp; nothing stays dry and even her underclothes are molding. Then one evening Byron challenges his guests to write ghost stories, leading Mary to have a monstrous dream that sparks her most famous work—Frankenstein, a novel that has endured for over 200 years. 

Winterson weaves this story through Frankissstein. Mary has already lost so much—her mother, her firstborn—and considers these losses as she experiences the pains and promises of love (“How would I love you, my lovely boy, if you had no body?” she muses to Percy, and then, “I cannot divide you.”) 

But Winterson does not leave readers in 1816. Instead, she time hops to the present (the future?), and fills this space, too, with love, loss, and philosophical speculation. She populates Frankissstein with a transgender doctor (Ry Shelley), an AI-obsessed professor (Victor Stein), a sex doll inventor and marketer (Ron Lord), and an evangelist converted to view sex dolls as an opportunity for doing God’s work (Claire). 

In her 2019 article, “Why Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is More Relevant Now Than Ever”, Winterson asks: “What happens when our newly created life forms can copy themselves, are immortal, can update their own software and make their own decisions? Will they feel remorse? Will humanity really be worth keeping?”  

Frankissstein: A Love Story examines these questions unburdened by a need for answers.

Events

National Poetry Month

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“The poet is the priest of the invisible.” — Wallace Stevens

In 1996, the Academy of American Poets designated April as National Poetry Month “to remind the public that poets have an integral role to play in our culture and that poetry matters.” Twenty-four years later, during this uncertain shelter-in-place April, we turn once more to poetry. 

Poet Mary Catherine Harper, who gave a reading on the Warsaw campus in March, shares that during this time especially, “Poetry reading is a vital part of my daily routine. Poetry sustains me.” Adjunct English professor Shari Benyousky, who thinks of poems as conversations, says that writing poetry, “is really helpful therapy these days of being cut off from so many people.”

This year both the Warsaw and Fort Wayne campuses are actively celebrating National Poetry Month. Ivy Tech Warsaw is posting a poem a day to its Facebook page drawing from a range of poets, styles, and themes, including Lynn Ungar’s timely poem “Pandemic.”

Meanwhile, the Ivy Tech Fort Wayne Library is encouraging students, faculty, and staff to write and contribute poems to Ink Cloud, the annual poetry publication which showcases campus poetic and artistic talents. With an extended deadline of April 19th, time remains to submit!

Interested in exploring poetry and making it a sustaining part of your life? Here are some resources to start with.

This April and every month, be well and read more poetry!

Book Review

Book Review: Earth as it is by Jan Maher

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“This was the burden Charlie Bader was unable to lay down: his need for softness.” In one quiet sentence, Jan Maher captures the heart of Earth As It Is, a richly layered novel about one person’s journey across time, place, and gender to find softness, community, and love.

In the hands of a lesser writer, a novel about a cross-dressing man living as a woman could become shallow and sensationalist, but not in Maher’s. Maher’s understanding and empathy for the honest complexity of individuals is a gift both to her characters and her readers.

Maher constructs her novel in such a way so that when Charlie Bader moves to Heaven, Indiana, as Charlene, readers know Charlie’s history but Heaven’s residents do not. To them, Charlene is just Charlene, the hairdresser who shampoos, cuts, and perms the hair of Heaven’s women even as she hears and holds in confidence their stories and secrets. Charlene is a woman to be trusted, and so they do, to the benefit of the whole community.

Earth As It Is reminds readers that Earth truly is as it is, woven through with heartache, longing, secrets, love, sacred trust, softness, and a desire to be in every moment one’s best and truest self.