Precis

My creative project will take the form of a short story in which a teenaged girl and her younger sibling traverse the parking lot of a fast food restaurant from one parent’s vehicle to another’s. My main character, the angry daughter of divorced, discordant parents, tells the story through her eyes as she laments her upbringing (as angry teenagers tend to do) while she walks. Through her sarcasm and self-pity, however, her complaints of her parents omit one important detail: which parent is her mother, and which is her father. While my story will not reveal the gender of either parent, it will seek to test the ideas readers have about gender roles and parenting.

The creative process I have used to develop this project so far has largely been to draw on my own experiences and mold them around Morrison’s storytelling strategies used in “Recitatif.” While I have successfully developed the main character and her younger sibling to a point where I can begin writing, I still need to consider how problematic the parents should truly be in the lives of their children and which parent will exhibit which of these “poor parenting” traits. I also need to consider how I will go about assigning attributes to each parent. A classmate asked if I would have an idea in my mind of which parent is which gender as I do this, but I’m not sure I will. I think the success of the story hinges on my own lack of knowledge, as well as my readers’.

My goal for this project is to achieve greater insight into the storytelling methods Morrison uses in “Recitatif” through employing a similar technique in a short story of my own. I want to explore how withholding even one important character trait creates enough ambiguity to encourage multiple readings and meanings of a text, especially where readers’ assumptions about society’s perceived gender roles are tried. How could a misguided parent’s behavior denote their gender, and how can I twist those behaviors through writing to challenge my audience’s ideas about the gender roles of parents?