Wednesday, January 28, 2009
A Place Between Stations by Stephanie Allen-Humanities I T/W/F
Using Text-to-Self and Text-to-Text connections, discuss the following: what were your feelings when you read the stories, and how is A Place Between Stations different from other books you have read? (Post one comment using MLA format- no less than 300 words.)
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I have recently read Place between Stations by Stephanie Allen. The stories in the book were very emotional and unique. Each account described situations that were related to the narrator’s personal view on themselves or those around them. However, there is one important similarity between all of the stories –they are about African Americans. When I read the thoughts of Stephanie Allen, I began to understand that she used other characters to represent her point of view on how African Americans go about living their daily lives, and how they are treated by people of other races.
The first story of A Place between Stations was Carved in Vinyl. Miri, the narrator of this story reminds me of myself. Miri is a child who, like me, is always waiting for something to fulfill herself. I can be stubborn like her when I don’t get my way or if someone is driving me insane. Also, I know what it is like to almost give my mother heart attack, like Miri did to her mother. When I read Carved in Vinyl, I couldn’t help but think of the time my mom thought I was lost and she nearly screamed at everyone who tried to stand in her way. At times like these, people are assured that they are loved.
My favorite story was Souvenir. The two main characters, Gail and Cille have a close relationship and have the urge to “get away” for a while. Gail is more of a “play it safe” kind of girl while Cille is very dramatic and feisty. However, when Gail is with Cille, she will find herself doing things daring and carless. This is exactly how I am with my friends. I channel out my inner wild side and act crazy or wacky. I have also read a book that reminds me of the relationship between Gail and Cille –The Bermudez Triangle. This book describes the relationship between three friends who do unexpected things when together and go through many issues relating to their personal life.
Place between Stations is different from any other book I have read because it explains events in the world that happen to African Americans on an everyday scale. The author doesn’t just discuss about racial issues, but things that happen to people everyday. The stories can relate to everyone, even if they are not black.
A Place Between Stations By Stephanie Allen, is a collection of stories about African American characters. I found most of the stories to be pretty confusing. For example, in Close To the Body, I could not figure out what the bumps on Mara were, and how her husband, Ricky, knew what was wrong with her. Also, I didn’t understand Mud Show at all. All these stories are different than other books that I have read because they're about how African American's in Connecticut and New York deal with racism, their living conditions, and their life. Most other stories don’t go that deeply into how the characters feel about these issues. When Gail and Lucille drive down to Florida, and Gail see’s the little figurine she realizes how people down in Florida still view African Americans. She knows that it was wrong for the guy running the Shell station, Weber, to talk to Lucille disrespectfully, and to assume that because they are black, they stole something. The book doesn’t only talk about African American’s however. In Saint Sebastian Street the main character was Puerto Rican, who knew nothing of her native language and her Latina heritage. I can relate to Beatriz, because I hardly know any Greek, unlike the rest of my mother’s family who is practically fluent. However, I have been to Greece and I know my family that lives there. While reading Marisol’s Things, I couldn’t quite understand how the dead squirrel they found changed the relationship between the narrator and Marisol. I was pretty confused with Marisol’s behaviors throughout the years, and how the two sisters could go a couple years without talking. The narrator’s lack of interest in her family stunned me, and I felt pity for her when she spent Christmas alone, sleeping. Overall, the stories were interesting.
A Place Between Stations by Stephanie Allen, writer and Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Maryland in College Park, is a very interesting collections of short stories about African-American experience. The characters were depicted by point of view, detailed and descriptions. An example of that would be from “Mud Shows”, when Cheffal was listening to the circus and Stephanie described him with “His whey-colored cheeks were shaven smooth, and around his head blew straight, coarse, black, hair befitting a horse’s tail”. These were very detailed description of each persons look and personality. This story takes place in both New York and modern day Florida. In “Mud Shows” George Mattie had been hired to guide the H.C. Hutheford’s American Floating circus from New York to Connecticut. Because the manager Cheffal pushed the limits of the performers and animals and demanded George to find a shortcut in the woods to Connecticut that little trip lead to disaster. In “Souvenir” two college girls Gail and Cille take a road trip to Florida and in Florida at a store while the store clerk was giving Cille a hard time Gail notices a “mammy” figurine one the shelf and on it was “pitch-black people, bug-eyed things with head rags and red polka-dotted apron and wet gins wide as the Mississippi”. Seeing that she then stole one! These are two of the short stories consisted in the book. In almost everyone there was an interesting problem or event that happened that kept me reading. You can not get tired or bored when reading this book. My favorite was “Keep Looking” because the woman described her situation as freakish and I thought when I first saw that oh this has got to be interesting. The stories pull you in and are good for any reader of any race.
The story, A Place Between Stations was very interesting to me. I found that I could relate to some of the characters in the book. As I read this story, I could easily visualize what was going on in the story. Although I had many questions about some of the situations that were occurring in the story, I found it very understandable and very concise. In the very beginning of the story I noticed how you made small things have such a big value to them. You talked about how there was no sidewalk in front of the house and how that affected the children’s childhood. As I read this story, I felt as if I were in the book. I could imagine my self standing in the background watching the characters of the book live their life. This book simply reached its hand out, grabbed my interest, and took me to a place and a time that I could never imagine. This book differs a lot from other books that I have read. This book differs from other books that I have read because of its whole demeanor towards its reader. Also the way it is written makes you think more deeply about what the author may want the character to come off as. I like learning the characters personalities because I can relate to them all in a way. As I was reading this book I was wondering why there were some grammatical errors. I was thinking that it may have been the way Stephanie Allen wanted the reader to interpret her setting and emotion of the story. This book makes me want to learn more about Stephanie Allen’s other books. Stephanie Allen inspires me to write about my life and my whole perspective of life as a whole.
The only story I really grasped and enjoyed out of the back and front cover was Carved in Vinyl. It was about a girl named Miriam living with her mother and brother and how some of her childhood went. Her childhood affected her when she became an adult which I could understand. Events that occur when you are younger make up your character. The entire book A Place Between Stations, is different from other books I’ve read because one, it is a book filled with different stories. Most books stick to one set of main characters, relevant settings, and a main story line. Also, this book seemed to have multiple purposely set misspellings and grammar fragments. This book sort of reminds me of any published book of poetry because every one to three pages, a new story evolves. Even though the book made me somewhat confused, it made me think about other books I’ve read such as Chanda’s Secrets, which
The book itself made me confused. It didn’t seem like the stories were structured right. Like I said before, even though the book was somewhat confusing, I enjoyed it. Being a Black girl or in the ethnic term, African American, I understand what goes on in this stories. If I wasn’t in touch with any of African American culture, I wouldn’t understand a word of this. In the stories Close to the Body and Carved in Vinyl, I could make a connection. As adults, both of these women had issues with something that almost seemed like it couldn’t be fixed. It somewhat made me think of my life and how past things have made me who I am. Reading this book, I’m sure you could see frustration on my face, a pen in my hand, defining words and writing notes. To be perfectly honest, I was confused, uninterested, and bored when it came to a story I couldn’t relate to. When it came to the two stories I mentioned a few lines back, I was still somewhat confused, but I was engaged and actively reading. Regardless, this is one of the most transitional books I have ever read.
I have read the book A Place between Stations by Stephanie Allen. All of the stories in this book focus on African American life, and life in urban areas. While reading this book I thought about some of my experiences. I could not directly relate to what the author was writing about, but I can think of some people who could. The first story entitled “Carved in Vinyl” was written as a flash back of an adult woman looking back on her child life. This story sounded like a story that would be told by my grandmother and how she went about having fun “back in the day”. My favorite story was “Keep Looking.” I enjoyed reading this particular story because the author wrote it as though she was narrating the readers own life. This caught my interest because I wanted to know what was going to happen to me next.
This book is not like any other books I have read. Instead of one story, one plot, and one ending; this story had multiple stories, plots, and endings. Though A Place between Stations was composed of many different stories, it reminded me of Haroun and the Sea of Stories. In Haroun and the Sea of Stories the chapters sort of acted as mini stories that all came together in the end. In this way the two books differed because A Place between Stations did not come to a concise ending as Haroun and the Sea of Stories did. This book also uses a different tone and language. The author was being totally honest with what she was writing. She knows how urban people speak and carries themselves; and she was not afraid to write about it in her book. I believe the author “kept it real” with her audience.
A Place Between Stations, by Stephanie Allen was different from the books I have recently read. The structure of the book, the many stories inside of it, was what was most abstract. I enjoyed that part of it because it gives you a variety of story plots, although I still felt like overall the stories were written and narrated from the same general perspective (about African Americans). These stories told the lives of African American people through different points of views. I thought that this approach to writing a book was special and very creative of Stephanie Allen.
The first story, Carved in Vinyl was one of my favorite, it told a very detailed and descriptive of life a young urban city girl. I felt drawn to Miriam’s mother who seemed very caring for her children. As a mother I think that she always wanted the best, but things were not always exactly like that. This was interesting because I could relate to both Miriam and her mother. Miriam was curious and like to explore, to me it seemed that she knew what she should do but not why and did not ever really get it. Miriam is really spontaneous and adventure seeking like I like to be, in result she sometimes doesn’t go well with her mother. At the same time, her mom really loves embracing the city and its wonders, the little things that lots of people pass by without noticing, to me she seems like a very deep analytical person. I liked the depth in this story and the reality of it, comparing and contrasting it to my everyday life, although I was a little disappointed by the ending. The beginning was so great and it seemed to end with such haste and not really connect with the rest of the story, I also didn’t fully get what the meaning of it was.
This book is hard to compare to others because it is different and has lots of different plots happening. Not only with Carved in Vinyl, but with the other stories like Souvenir and Marisol’s Things, I felt like the perspective of “lost” people was repetitive. I found this in the novel Towelhead by Alicia Erian which is about a young Indian girl facing middle school with her strict, traditional dad. He makes her “hide” who she is in order to potentially become what he wants. These plots are similar because they lightly touch on things pertaining to how these people live in the ‘cultural situations’ they have at hand, except there is an interesting spin on it. I enjoyed a lot of the stories and found it not to be what I had expected.
When I was reading A Place Between Stations I felt almost as if I knew the narrator from the informal way the stories were presented. During some of the stories I felt as if I knew exactly what was going to happen next, and sometimes I was sitting on the edge of my seat trying to find out what happens next. For example the story Saint Sebastian Street, when Beatriz was playing hide-and-seek with Grace and she couldn’t find her, at a point I knew she would become scared. From experience I know how terrifying and how many thoughts come to you when you can’t find someone. So in ahead I knew she would be mad a Grace even though it wasn’t meant to be a serious game. But in Keep Looking I was never sure of what the strange man was going to do, so I was always waiting to find out if he would ever talk to the main character. A Place Between Stations is still very different from most books I have read not because there is more than one story in the book, but because the stories don’t seem related. I loved most of the stories, and I understood many of them but some of them didn’t exactly end clear to me. For example Close to the Body made no sense to me at the end. It was eventually recognized that she had a medical problem, but at the end I was still very confused about her condition. Another story that really confused me was Place Between Stations at the end I really wanted to know what happened to the main character’s train pass. Overall I think the book was more of a collection of stories that were favoured instead of a group of stories with a common theme.
A Place Between Stations by Stephanie Allen was different from many of the other books I have read before. There was grammatical errors in the published text, something I have not encountered in the past. Carved in Vinyl, the first short story has a different arangment then most stories. I have only read a few other collections of short stories and they were all much different then A Place Between Stations. I felt as if the story was only viewed by an African American point of view. Even though her over all topic was how African American lived their everyday lives, Stephanie Allen wrote a big variety of stories because they all live different ways. She wanted to show every possible viewpoint.
One of the latest books I have read was The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls. This book connects to some of the stories of A Place Between Stations because the little girl is homeless, and she is forced to move around the country. One of her temporary homes was in the big city of Las Vegas. She and her brother have to grow a custom to the many unique, and new features of an urban life. This is very similar to the first story in A Place Between Stations. Carved in Vinyl is similar to The Glass Castle because “Miri” likes to explore the city. The mothers in the books lost someone who did not impact their lives but felt much pain and sorrow during the loss.
I relate to A Place Between Stations in one way. In the story Souvenir, two girls get lost on there way to Florida in a place that brought an unusual feeling. They were in the town that used the “Jim Crow Beliefs”. In my situation, I was going on a camping trip in West Virginia and we stopped because a flat tire. The small town had an unusual amount of Confederate flags. I do not agree with those beliefs, and I felt out of place. I felt isolated and different, I did not realize that people still thought about those sort of things, and it got me to think about different experiences. A Place Between Stations was a great collection, and I enjoyed reading it.
I just finished a collection of short stories called A Place Between Stations by Stephanie Allen. I enjoyed this book, though there was something about it I didn't like. One of the main reasons I prefer novels to short stories is that I don't feel that I have enough time to connect with the story when it is short. I find it difficult to make text-to-world and text-to-self analysis when the story is short. However, I was able to connect to the character and the story in Carved in Vinyl , which was the first story in the collection. The main character, Miriam, is also known as Miri. The story is told from Miri's point of view as an adult reflecting on her childhood.She starts the story telling of the importance of sidewalks in her childhood. If there was something she loved about her childhood neighborhood, it was the sidewalk. At one point, a new sidewalk was going to be made. Miri waited and waited for the moment when the concrete would be poured, but missed it. After that, the sidewalk felt foreign. She had not witnessed it being poured, and it bothered here. In a way, I can connect with Miri. I have lived all over the world, and my childhood has been very mixed up. Although I wish for my children to experience the things I have, I do not wish for my children to feel like strangers in new lands. Whenever I step off a plane on new soil, I feel out of place. It takes a while for the sidewalk to get dirty and cracked, but then I feel comfortable. One reason why Carved in Vinyl is unlike any short stories I have read, is because I could connect to it. Although it is one of the shortest stories I have ever read, it is very dense. Stephanie Allen succeeded in subtly packing in a lot of symbolism and information into 14 pages, without being overwhelming.
The book A Place Between Stations by the award-winning author Stephanie Allen was a new experience for me. I have never read a book of that kind, where there are many short stories piled together in one book. They have completely unassociated plots, yet are all related.
Firstly, I had various text-to-self connections with the collection; there was one in almost every story. In Close to Body , the main character went to tons of different doctors for help. When I was in seventh grade and about to get braces, my mother and I went to over three different dentists to get opinions and pricing. In Passage , Thelma reminded me of my neighbor, Ms. Bernier. Ms. Bernier is a very old woman, over one hundred years old! They both lived alone, without a husband. My dad and I would go to help Ms. Bernier out, and Alphonse would go to her house to assist her in any way. In Behind the Black Curtain , how children would stare at Antoinette in shock reminded me of Ripley’s “Believe it or Not” books, with weird, unbelievable pictures and people. The story with Tiffany and her friend made me think of the movie El Norte , because there is a certain scene where they are going through an incredibly dark, scary tunnel. They do not know when and where it ends. Also, it reminded me of the countless homeless people in Washington, DC, that I see all the time. In Marisol’s Things , I thought of how I knew specific people that I did not see for a while. When I saw them again, they were completely changed and I almost did not recognize them.
A Place Between Stations was unlike anything I have ever read. It was a collection of short stories, and they are about the “lives of African American characters against the ever-present backdrop of race.” Not once in my life have I read stories of that style, as I am accustomed to action, fast-paced, surreal, adventure books.
My favorite story in the book was Saint Sebastian Street , because it had a hilarious line. I thought of both my past babysitters, because my younger brother used to have problems speaking. We both had Spanish babysitters. I laughed when I read the conversation between the mother and Beatriz. It was hilarious when Ms. Oglethorpe said that she did not want Beatriz to speak to Gracie in Spanish, because Gracie was having trouble with her English. I loved it when I read that Beatriz did not even speak Spanish!
To finish off, A Place Between Stations was a great book. I loved the stories in it, and it brought me into a whole new genre of books to read.
A Place between Stations is a book with different short stories. What is significant about the stories are how the details put on place where it feels like your reliving the stories. The stories I most relate to is Carved in Vinyl, and Marisol’s Things. Carved in Vinyl is about a girl who wonders around the city that worry’s her mother sick. When she grows up she tries to repress that memory and keeps it away from her husband. Well, I don’t know about the husband part, but when I was younger, I wonder off into the crowd at the mall. At the moment I didn’t know what I was doing until I saw my mother’s hurt face. Unlike Miri’s mother, my mother did not just send me off to bed, she had a talk with me but in the end she was just glad I was safe. Marisol’s Things is about a girl who is not close to her sister. Every time she tries to say something to her, no words come out. The story is related to all brothers and sisters especially. My sister and I have are moments but in the end we laugh about it and talk before we go to sleep but not about our day but about what is to come the next day.
Some of the stories in the A Place between Stations relate to book I have read. Keep Looking is similar to a scene is Twilight because Bella is heads over heels about Edward being mad at her. Every time she is staring at him and someone notices he turns around and is curious. Bella will not believe that Edward is looking at her with such curiosity in his eyes. Mud Show is related to nomads because they travel from place to place. The only thing that is different is they travel to perform like a band on tour. Stephanie Allen is an extraordinary and different writer. I have not seen no on that can has as much details that depict back in that time period.
A Place Between Stations by Stephanie Allen was very intriguing, yet it showed a savage of emotions. These stories told the lives of African American people through different points of views. If any one were to ask me would it be worth their time reading the book, No Would be my answer. Not because I did not like the collection of short stories, but because it is not a “must read” type of book.
The first story “Carved in Vinyl”reminds me of the time when I moved from a very urban area to a very rural area, just as Miri and her family did. I remember when we first got there, there was only one sidewalk strip in my whole neighborhood. Automatically I made a connection with the story. It took a long time getting used to but I had the warmth and comfort of my family to enclose the nervous days; just as Miri had. The narrator Miri and I had a slight similarity in our personality. She seems cocky, feisty, and meaningful. There is a descriptive characterization that fits me in its own little way.
This collection of short stories reminds me of Haroun and the Sea of Storiesbecause each chapter has the own story and moral followed behind. I find both of the books motivational and you can tell both authors have a passion for conveying and persuasive writing. They show similarity because the main character in Haroun and the Sea of Stories and the main characters of all of the short stories in A Place Between Stations; all seem to be “lost” or out of place. This book differs from other books I have read because it takes place somewhere it is easy to connect to and the settings are non-fictional.
I author was very in depth when she described things. This helped me visualize what was going on in the text a lot easier. If the book was about one thing, it would be uninteresting, so the idea of short stories kept you determined to know what the other stories were about. I would not recommend this book to anyone, but I still enjoyed it.
"A Place between Stations”
"A Place Between Stations" by Stephanie Allen was a book that I could actually relate to. Because I am a Black I felt as if the stories that were written by Stephanie Allen touched my heart. My favorite short story was "Souvenir". This was my favorite short story in the book because an incident similar to what happened to Gail and Cille actually happened to my mother and her best friend. Although the first story that was in the book wasn’t my favorite I still enjoyed reading it because I could see myself as the main character portrayed in the story, Miriam. I could see myself as Miriam because my neighborhood wasn’t always as nice as it is now. When I was in the fifth grade I would also wait until the construction works would could and fix something that need to be fixed on my block; in order for me to go outside and play.
As a read the book I realized that the most of the character spoke in broken English. Most of the books that have read with African Americans in it speak in improper English. I don’t know why this is but I have noticed it throughout my readings. Stephanie Allen also uses her wording differently; and I enjoyed reading it.
I found some parts of Stephanie Allen's book A Place Between Stations interesting and entertaining. Other parts I found difficult to follow and so boring that it made me want to throw the book out the window. The scene with Gail and Cilli in the chapter Souvenir interested me the most, because I have always been interested in how people treated people of color in the 1900s in the South and how people reacted to the races mixing. I could really relate to this part of the book because not too long ago my friends and I walked into a store and were told to leave because we did not have an adult with us and we were not 18. There were a lot of thefts in that store so the people in the store thought that all people under the age of 18 were the ones stealing from that store. Banning us from the store made us feel very bad since we had been waiting all week to go to that store. The 1st chapter Carved in Vinyl interested me even more than most of the chapters since the entire chapter kept me entertained. When Abbie got hit by the car and Miri wondered why her mother even cared since nobody really knew Abbie, it reminded me of an incident that happened in the 7th grade when a girl from my school was crossing the street and was hit by a police car. I was confused because it was the girl’s first year at our school, she was not well known by my classmates, but everyone became sad. Throughout the entire book I could relate to a lot of the situations the author wrote about in the book, but most of the book could not hold my attention for very long. I had to put the book down and come back and reread sections so I could understand the story.
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