My Division III project is a collection of short fiction focusing on aspects of childhood that I have come across during my Divison II work in childhood development (through course work and internship/volunteer work). I set out to create a cohesive collection that would accurately portray children at various stages of growing up. I wanted to shape characters with child-like voices and points of view while also maintaining an interesting and worthwhile piece of fiction. The collection will end up being ten stories ranging from very short fiction to longer pieces. I will write from both adult and child perspectives; the adult voice reflecting on his or her own or someone else’s childhood, or experiencing something in adulthood that brings them back to a point in their childhood.
After being able to start writing the kind of stories I enjoyed to write last spring, I noticed some themes that would run from one story to the next. (I’ve always been a very dark writer in nature. My stories are rarely happy and often end in ambiguity.) As a child I enjoyed being scared. I liked horror stories and monsters, witches, vicious animals. When I started writing, a lot of what scared me as a child came through in my writing. I incorporated the supernatural to express an idea of fear or anxiety in a child. Another theme that came through was that of how people experience grief, trauma, and change of environment.
The main theme that connects directly to my childhood studies concentration is that of when a childhood ends. I don’t think it ends when a person turns eighteen and I don’t think it is the same for everyone. In one story I talk about how a childhood can end with the death or absence of a parent, when no one is there to take care of you anymore, at least not in the same way. A childhood can also end with a traumatic event; something that fundamentally changes the way a child views the world.
When I spoke to people about my project, about writing about children, one of the first things they would ask was, “Through writing have you been thinking a lot about your childhood?” And I would say yes, but that I wasn’t writing about my own experiences but of fictional childhoods that I found engaging because they were different. Then they might have said nonchalantly, “Childhood, how I wish I could go back – so carefree and fun.” But I’ve found that a lot of adults glorify their childhoods; make them seem happier than they were. Children experience uncertainty all the time. My life was anxious and I worried a lot because grown-ups wouldn’t explain a lot of things and there were plenty of things I was too scared to ask about for fear of sounding silly or unimportant. I don’t think my childhood was vastly different from the childhoods of my friends or family.
The books I have read to complement my division III are as following: Lolita by Vladamir Nabokov, Bad Behaviour and Don’t Cry by Mary Gaitskill, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer, Never Let Me Go by Kashuo Ishiguro, Lullabies for Little Criminals by Heather O’Neill, The Worst Years of Your Life Edited by Mark Jude Poirier, The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, Looking for Alaska by John Green, It’s Kind of a Funny Story by Ned Vizzini, My Mother Never Dies by Claire Castillon, Rethinking Childhood edited by Peter B. Pufall and Richard P. Unsworth, The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and Other Stories by Tim Burton, Room by Emma Donoghue, Peter Pan by J.M Barrie, Refresh Refresh by Benjamin Percy, Creamy Bullets by Kevin Sampsell, A Wolf at the Table by Augusten Burroughs, and Dahlia Season by Myriam Gurba. And a childhood development textbook.
