Skip to main content

Short Story: Allertonia

Hey everyone, here's my short story! Basically it's about Allerton Park. There's a sort of futuristic frame narrative that anchors the main story about a contemporary woman living on the grounds. She uncovers a bunch of confusing things connecting the park's history, art, and nature. I stole the title from a horticultural journal about plants on the Allerton family land in Hawa'ii.

Here's a link to a public google doc with the story:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mEeaY6byKs-n-gdn7m0Maqm6_g1TDJkQcAFI46NEgBc/edit?usp=sharing



Comments

  1. Ethan AshbrookMay 15, 2020 at 10:00 AM

    This was really interesting to read! I never thought about using a combination of the future and present time to try and interpret the past, but this story does a really good job of doing just that. I'm not sure how to interpret the more magical aspects of the story, but it all fits together really well to give a sort of mysterious vibe to the past and nature as a whole. I'm not sure how, but it really encapsulates those moments that you spend in the woods just taking in the surroundings and absorbing the essence of nature. It's a very refreshing feeling, and good job imbuing that spirit into this story!

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousMay 15, 2020 at 10:06 AM

    Nice job! I was looking forward to read it again after the peer edit. The first time through the bear was my favorite part and this time through it was fun to learn about morris the garden man, and read the end of the frame narrative with Dr. Min. Way to go

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Two kinds of poets

Being thirteen is pretty rough, but that's especially true for Jason Taylor. His low social standing and embarrassing stammer make him incredibly self-conscious and uncomfortable in any interactions with other kids. But Jason also has a secret: he's a poet. Poetry is an outlet for all of Jason's inner thoughts that he can't communicate with others. Jason's stammer makes it difficult for him to say what he means in front of other people because he's constantly scanning his sentences for trouble words and rewriting his speech to seem normal. Poetry is the only place where Jason can confidently say the things he can't in everyday life. It's interesting to compare Jason with Stephen Dedalus from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. They're both young men struggling to find their place in the world, and they're both talented poets, but their attitudes toward the rest of the world are completely different. Stephen thinks that his artistic tal...
6 comments
Read more

Butler's postmodernism

Octavia Butler's Kindred might not appear as startlingly postmodernist as other novels we've read ( Mumbo Jumbo, for example) but her writing presents a powerful challenge to the kind of unilateral, hegemonic narrative that postmodern texts sought to deconstruct.  The story unfolds on a Maryland plantation decades before emancipation, grounding Dana's experience in a time when slavery would have felt virtually inescapeable. Dana realizes that the rift between her time and Rufus' time is more than temporal or spatial, but the two environments she's pulled between demonstrate completely different assumptions about humanity. She and Kevin first seek to understand their new environment through their history books from back home, which provide essential information about past laws and regulations. However, the knowledge found in history books can't capture the real experience of living as a slave on Weylin's plantation. Recounting facts about such a brutal era...
6 comments
Read more

it's-almost-summer apathy strikes again

Reading a book about summer while we’re all stuck in school is almost cruel. Here we are, staggering through the last weeks of an insane year, and Benji is off in Sag with tons of time on his hands. This post was supposed to be about Benji’s summer goals, but I’m just going to write about the it’s-almost-summer apathy that comes around this time of year because that’s on my mind. The last weeks of school are both terrible and wonderful. Everyone is burnt out and exhausted from long months of the educational grind, so all our motivation has been replaced by apathy. Each day it’s more difficult to find the will to go to class or finish assignments, but the constant threat of finals keeps us halfway stuck on the academic hamster wheel. Instead of dutifully keeping up with our responsibilities, Uni students use May for a variety of spontaneous activities. Personally, I’ve discovered the wonderful sense of freedom that comes from skipping physics.   I’ve also been spending mor...
12 comments
Read more