AboutSamantha Prust Expertise I have a BA in English and an MFA in creative writing. I have worked in various publishing companies and for various literary magazines. I work as an editorial and production assistant for a book publishing company. I also have my own publishing consulting business.
Experience I grew up on the Sisseton/Wahpeton Sioux Tribe Indian Reservation in Sisseton, South Dakota. After high school I attended college at Minnesota State University in Fargo/Moorhead. After receiving my B.A. in English, I stayed in Fargo/Moorhead for two years, working as a proofreader, a librarian assistant, a cocktail waitress, and in customer service. I then moved to Colorado to attend Colorado State University, where I worked as Associate Editor for The Colorado Review while pursuing my Master's degree. After I graduated, I was able to stay in Colorado when I got a job as an editor and writer for Cottonwood Press, a small publisher specializing in supplemental books for teachers of English and language arts.
Question QUESTION: I got your point. Seeing the lack of tension, I put in a new paragraph and deleted the old. Hopefully, some sense of urgency was created. When you find time, please tell me what you think. Thanks again.
The Products
My older juvenile delinquent brother had taken this shop class with a teacher I didn’t know, and kept getting bad grades. One day, he brought home what was supposed to be a brown, varnished wooden cat, but it was a shapeless piece of crap coated with black paint and showing paint bubbles. I remembered my father yelling at my brother about the awful work. The products and the yelling got worse and when my brother failed the class, I thought he was going to be killed. Now I was in that class and would soon bring home my projects.
Shop class was a world of various races and ethnic backgrounds, a class of lively or quiet, clownish or serious, fourteen year old boys. The classroom was split into two sections. One part of the classroom was the sweat, made up of the jigsaws, drills and buffers we worked with, and the other part of the class was the brains, the rows of chairs where we took tests or listened to a lecture. There was the thinking part and the part where we put our thinking into action and made
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something. But to produce something, we’d need to use both parts of the classroom.
This week, we would have a change. Our regular teacher, Mr. Cohnagan would take a look at what we had produced under the environment of his teaching, and then we would have a substitute teacher after he left for a while.
John T. Cohnagan, was a stable, white-haired Irishman in that aqua shirt he loved to wear, Mr. Cohnagan taught his enduring way. With all of us gathered around him at lecture, Mr. Cohnagan once told us the story about a diligent boy who had worked hard and produced a silver tray. Carrying it home, a man saw it, liked it, and bought it. In this class there was Bobby, Virgil and myself who were serious about producing something. Bobby worked metal, in Virgil in hard plastic, and I worked in wood.
Mr. Cohnagan worked instructed us his way, concentrating on getting us to do our best, and then the day came for him to look at what we had done so far. Bobby’s solid metal work was there, with two silver anchor designs embedded in it, My wooden nail box with little compartments in it for different types of nails, was almost finished, and coming along fine. What Mr. Cohnagan
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taught us was in the nail box, and what I put in was in that nail box.
Afterwards, we had the substitute teacher. I can’t recall what that instructor told us about shop, or even if he knew anything about shop. All I remember about him was that he was a younger white guy and the joke he told us. The joke was about a black man who was one of three people who were told by St. Peter that they had to bring ping pong balls to get into Heaven. The joke ended with the black man staggering to St. Peter torn up and bruised and telling him, “You said I was to bring ping pong balls? I thought you said King Kong’s balls!” The boys followed his lead, and the class time was spent with the boys telling dirty jokes.
When I listened to Mr. Cohnagan, I wanted to be like that boy who worked carefully and produced something that he sold, and when I listened to the teacher who told dirty jokes, I wanted school to be only fun.
After the new instructor left the room, all of a sudden, one boy started yelling, “We want puss-sey, we want puss-sey!” On hearing him, a few other boys yelled the same thing and, afterwards, most of the boys were chanting, “We want puss-sey,
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we want puss-sey!” As the chanting continued, the new instructor returned, and with a smile on his face, told the boys that they could be heard down the hall. When he left, the boys started back up again. Then a female teacher stood in the doorway looking over the class, and the boys became silent. The chanting stopped.
Then, in a different spirit, the boys rapidly finished their products. But when I walked home, I heard one of them in a group ridiculing me for taking so long in working on my nail box.
Over the weekend, a great downpour struck the city. In some areas of the school, including the shop class, rain leaked heavily from the ceiling. Under a leak where it fiercely rained, were the boy’s soft wooden projects and some sturdier ones.
The end of class marked the time that we looked at what we had been working on, or was supposed to be working on, under the substitute teacher. I ran to school, anxious to see the outcome of our products.
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Running to shop class, I fell and slipped into a puddle. I came up from the puddle with my pants soaked with mud and water, but I got to shop class and looked at the work of the class.
It was as if acid ran over a body. The color, the life, and the luster had been washed out of the wood. Ugly, faded and bruised, the wood stood in rain water and unless it was taken away and repaired, it would only further deteriorate.
Then I walked over to what I had done. With a frozen sad face, I saw that, like the work of the other boys, my wooden nail box had been soaked. Under where it had mercilessly rained, the wood was warped and I didn’t know if it could be saved or not.
ANSWER: Your voice in the first paragraph is MUCH better than before...it's natural and I am interested in the person behind the voice. However, one thing in the 1st paragraph that really got my interest yet was dropped immediately was the father. I think the tension between father and son is much more interesting than the teacher stuff you have going on. I say put more of the father/son relationship in it. I love the idea of the father judging the things the son makes and never being good enough. That is tension, in my book! Keep working on it and I think it will take shape.
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QUESTION: Thanks for the reply. But, hoo boy! I made the mistake of sending it off as is to a few markets. Should have waited to see what you had to say about it first. What should I do now?
Write a completely different story about the father/son relationship where the father gets on the boy everytime he brings home a crappy piece of work? How does it end? With the suggestion that the father is also a crappy piece of work his mother brought home from the hospital one day?
ANSWER: Hi Demetrius,
I don't think you should hang everything you do on my every word. You are the writer. You need to make the judgment call before sending things off. I'm not the God of Writing. What should you do now? There's really nothing you can do, but don't worry about it. Let me be frank: Being a writer is a tough racket and most great writers take a lifetime to develop. However, I really do think that you have raw talent. You need to tap into those "natural" voices. Read some contemporary short stories of literary merit--that will help you tap into voice.
When you write a first draft, it should be like you're not even there and your fingers are just typing and typing, like a stream-of-consciousness. Don't edit yourself on the 1st go around. After you get the raw material on paper, then it's time to revise, revise, revise. A lot. Revise and keep revising. Put it aside and wait a couple of months. Go back and read it again. You will find things to revise further. This is how I work, but, of course, I'm not a published fiction writer nor am I an "expert" as this site conveys. I'm just a person with a creative writing degree. Too many cooks spoil the broth, you know. Trust your gut more. Go with the flow of your voice. A compelling and true voice is the key to great writing. Don't worry so much about what's going to happen in your story or how it will end. Just write. Your imagination will take you to the place that works for the story. This is what I believe.
Say, if you have a copy of the first story you sent me for an opinion, I'd love to read it again. I remember really liking it.
Samantha
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QUESTION: Yes, I have a second story, but I don't recall sending it to you. I thought I only sent one.
True what you wrote, but I don't usually have a reader, and, still any comment will give me something to consider whether I make the change or not.
Answer Oh, sorry. I could have sworn someone named Demetrius sent me a story (sci-fi) a while ago for critique. I thought it was you.
I am happy to give you a free critique on this site for a short piece, but I do normally charge for manuscript critiques...just for future reference. In other words, I am not available for unlimited free critiques. I don't mean to be rude...just wanted to be upfront.
