A student hands me a photocopy of a story because she thinks I’ll like it. My own handwriting is in the margins. Underlining. Written in ink in a book then Xeroxed. She says she read it in her literary criticism class with Dr. Farness and even though I took a class 17 years earlier with Dr. Farness, I know we didn’t read “Fat” by Raymond Carver in The History of Western Thought. We read Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women and St. Augustine’s Confessions and Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, some of which were foundational texts for my leftist politics and feminism. Ray Carver is foundational to my fiction writing, but I didn’t make these notes back then. (I’ve since become equally inter- ested in non-Western thought, and the thoughts suppressed by Western history.) I ask her if that’s my handwriting—I know it is, but I’m confused—and she says maybe, he told them another stu- dent had marked up the story but to not let that distract them. She says the story has “an interesting discourse.” The student’s notes are over mine, green and pink through and against my black.
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The Sakura Review Vol. 7, Spring 2016