Hello there!
My name's Taylor May, and I'm from PA, USA. I’m currently in my third year of university, and I’ll be heading into two years of grad school for an M.F.A in creative writing. I’m a writing consultant, avid reader of all things YA, and a bit obsessed with Loki, Harry Potter, Jack Sparrow, and Emma Watson. I also love cats, chai tea, hugs, and conflicted villains battered by circumstance.
This blog is a place where I funnel all my reading/writing thoughts.
Enjoy! Ask away!
My name's Taylor May, and I'm from PA, USA. I’m currently in my third year of university, and I’ll be heading into two years of grad school for an M.F.A in creative writing. I’m a writing consultant, avid reader of all things YA, and a bit obsessed with Loki, Harry Potter, Jack Sparrow, and Emma Watson. I also love cats, chai tea, hugs, and conflicted villains battered by circumstance.
This blog is a place where I funnel all my reading/writing thoughts.
Enjoy! Ask away!
March 10, 2012
February 14, 2012
"Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space."
— Orson Scott Card
January 30, 2012
"Writing is my time machine, takes me to the precise time and place I belong."
— Jeb Dickerson
January 16, 2012
"If you think about it, storytelling is, outside of breathing, eating, and sleeping, the most fundamental and time-consuming human activity there is. We listen to and tell stories all our lives."
— Judith Nadell, John Langan, and Eliza A. Comodromos, The Longman Reader
January 10, 2012
"Easy reading is damn hard writing."
— Nathaniel Hawthorne
January 10, 2012
"A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer."
— Karl Kraus
January 7, 2012
January 7, 2012
"I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions."
— James Michener
January 7, 2012
A Look at the Zombie Obession in Our Culture
Fantasy fiction lovers like me have a hard time understanding our culture’s fascination with zombies. Yet over the last 80 years, interest in the undead has grown to disturbing new proportions.
Last September, the anthology “Zombies vs. Unicorns” accurately portrayed the fight between fantasy and sci-fi, under which the latter category of zombie lit falls. Here are just a few 2011 zombie novels from Amazon: Rusty Fischer’s Zombies Don’t Cry: a Living Dead Love Story, Dr. Robert Curran’s The Zombie Handbook: An Essential Guide to Zombies and, More Importantly, and How to Avoid Them, and Charlie Higson’s The Dead. A guide to surviving a zombie apocalypse? Sure, why not? But zombie romance? I don’t even want to know what that’s all about.
The concept of a zombie arrived as early as the discovery of the classic piece of literature that is read in every high school and college classroom: Tablet VI of The Epic of Gilgamesh reads, “I will knock down the Gates of the Netherworld, I will smash the door posts, and leave the doors flat down, and will let the dead go up to eat the living! And the dead will outnumber the living!”
Edgar Allen Poe’s tales of Gothic Romanticism dwelled on the concept of the awakening of the dead, and H.P. Lovecraft has provided us with perhaps the most horrifying undead-stories of contemporary times.
Literature isn’t the only zombie-infested entertainment ground. According to a November 6th Atlanta Journal Constitution review, “The Walking Dead” TV series is worshipfully watched by over 6.6 million viewers worldwide. The first zombie horror film to hit the big screen was “White Zombi” in 1932. But, arguably, George A. Romero’s 1968 film, “The Night of the Living Dead,” brought the genre into the realm of popularity. “Dawn of the Dead” followed ten years later, in 1978, with Lucio Fulci’s “Zombi II.”
Where do these zombies come from? According to a 2006 article at GreenCine.com, “[These] zombie infestations are always the product of pesticide spraying, nuclear experiments gone awry, slavery, greed, exploitation, Nazi-voodoo conspiracies to take over the world…alien invasions, the military industrial complex, and Michael Jackson’s career.” Despite the political nature of zombies in the U.S. cinema, the concept of the walking dead didn’t originate with us as a means of political commentary. It came from Haitian and African voodoo practices.
In the 16th century, slaves were brought to Haiti from Africa, taking their voodoo religion along with them. Despite actions taken by European and West African totalitarian regimes, voodoo practices just wouldn’t die. Witchdoctors were revered leaders, maintaining social, moral, and religious order in communities by instilling fear with their mysterious practices. And who wouldn’t be scared of a guy who could turn you into a zombie?
Scientist Wade Davis arrived in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti, in 1982 to research the practice of zombification. He detailed his findings in his 1985 book, The Serpent and the Rainbow, off of which the 1989 film was loosely-based.
Davis soon discovered that voodoo witchdoctors were injecting victims with pufferfish poison, called tetrodotoxin, which resulted in paralysis and caused victims to appear dead. However, being one hundred times as deadly as cyanide…it often resulted in real death. The witchdoctors would frequently zombify a victim without telling his or her family members or as punishment for a “crime.”
After collecting the victim’s soul in a bottle, the witchdoctor would declare the victim dead, and he or she would be buried. Shortly after this, the witchdoctor would awaken the victim with a mind-controlling drug called datura stramonium that rendered him or her helplessly obedient to the witchdoctor’s every command.
CNN’s October 2010 article, “Spirit of the Dead Alive and Well in Haiti,” is a shared with VBS.TV and details the journey of Davis’ successor, Hamilton Morris, and his VBS.TV film crew through the backward villages of Haiti. Morris conducted rigorous analyses of the chemicals Davis discovered as well as investigated the lives of people the locals claimed to be actual zombies. The video is available at this link: http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/10/26/vbs.haiti.nzambi/index.html
While the Haitian zombie is the result of chemical processes and witchcraft, most pop-culture and sci-fi defines zombification as the result of highly-contagious viruses created by the government for warfare purposes and unleashed somehow on the unsuspecting public, which then proceeds to tear itself apart – literally – and, boom, apocalypse.
Fascination with zombification is simply not going away. What people’s interest in the undead is all about…I can only guess. In my opinion, it’s a passing fad – although I don’t know if zombies will ever star in a series as popular as Twilight and its vampires. Sure, the best-selling shelves of Barnes and Noble are stocked with tales of zombie invasion and romance, but how long will it really last? Soon, it’ll be minotaurs. Or maybe mermaids.
We fantasy lovers can only bury our noses in the pages of Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games series and Steve Erickson’s The Crippled God – and pray the zombie trend just goes away.
Personally, I will never fall for a zombie the way I’ve fallen for Harry Potter and Frodo Baggins. Potter and Baggins fight against evil at all costs, putting themselves at risk for the sake of their loved ones and worlds. They overcome personal struggles galore and come out on top in the end: they cast the ring in Mount Doom and vaporize the bad guy. (Besides, they both happen to have extremely blue eyes, which is always a plus.)
But…zombies? I can’t seem to get over the fact that they eat brains: I’m in college, so I need to keep all the brains I have – thank you very much. Also, since when has rotting flesh become attractive?
Perhaps our culture’s interest in undead “walkers” is the result of the 2012 Mayan calendar scare. Many people seem to be under the impression that next year will be our last – which would ruin my plans of graduation, so I refuse to believe it.
What sort of apocalypse will destroy our world? The theories get more and more creative, including Native American revenge, robot race takeover, and nuclear threat. The idea that a virus could be released on the public and wipe out humanity isn’t too far-fetched. But the virus resulting in zombification?… I find that hard to believe. Maybe someone could enlighten me.
But, in case I’m wrong and we see an alarming increase in the zombie population over the next few years, I’m heading out to Barnes and Noble now to buy that guide to surviving the zombie apocalypse – after all, a little zombie shooting is a great way to relieve stress now that we’re approaching finals week.
(C) Taylor Patterson
January 7, 2012
Why Homeschooling Is Just Better
I made it halfway through preschool before my parents pulled me out of the traditional classroom – and never once looked back. The teachers complained when I wanted to do worksheets during recess. They said I asked too many questions, and I daydreamed too much.
My parents took an unpopular risk. In 1996, only a few hundred thousand children in the U.S. were homeschooled by parents or paid tutors. When neighbors of our small New Jersey town discovered why I didn’t wait for the bus each weekday morning with all the other little kids, my parents were shunned. Maybe I was autistic, maybe I had ADHD, or maybe my parents were uber-religious.
In 1996, it was rare that a child was homeschooled for any other reason. But, as the quality of our nation’s public education system continues to spiral downward, and many kids are denied the one-on-one attention they require, parents turn to homeschooling as the answer to their children’s individual education needs.
In USA Today’s article “Homeschooling grows,” it is reported that “ranks of America’s home-schooled children have continued a steady climb over the past five years,” and “the percentage of the school-age population that was home-schooled increased from 2.2% in 2003 to 2.9% in 2007.” Likewise, the National Home Education Research Institute estimated in 2010 that over 2 million children were homeschooled in the United States alone.
One misconception is that the majority of homeschooling families are Caucasian. According to a 2010 study conducted by the NHERI, 15% of all homeschooling families were African-American. The 2010 U.S. Census Bureau, however, reported that 12.6% of Americans were African-American. This makes the ratio of homeschooling ethnic groups virtually even across the board.
Homeschooling families come from all types of backgrounds: they are atheists, Christians, Jews, Mormons, libertarians, liberals, conservatives, Caucasians, Asians, African-Americans, and Hispanics. Whatever their religious, political, or ethnic backgrounds, all homeschooling parents have one thing in common: they want better quality educational experiences for their children.
And it’s showing. The same NHERI study revealed that “the home-educated typically score 15 to 30 percentile points above public-school students on standardized academic achievement tests and…are doing well, typically above average, on measures of social, emotional, and psychological development. Research measures include peer interaction, self-concept, leadership skills, family cohesion, participation in community service, and self-esteem.” The benefits of homeschooling don’t just stop at education, however: they continue into all areas of personal development.
Critics of homeschooling frequently ask the question, “What about socialization?” My mother’s favorite response is, “How’s the socialization in public schools?” The Public School Review’s 2010 article, “Gangs, Drugs, and Firearms: the State of Public Schools Today,” reads, “As many as one in four middle and high school students have reported the presence of both drugs and gangs on their campuses… 5.7 million students across the country are also more likely to drink, smoke, and use drugs than students at private and parochial schools.” Homeschooling parents seek to protect their children from this negative peer influence.
April Sessoms, of Lansdowne, PA, has been homeschooling for 20 years. Of her children’s social lives, she says, “They have…obtained a definite sense of individual autonomy and strong family connections… They have never been short of maintaining and keeping great friendships with others their age as well as those older than themselves.” Many parents would agree with April that homeschooling causes children to become confident individuals, capable of making intelligent decisions for themselves without the negative influence of would-be classroom peers.
Did I ever have opportunities to socialize with other kids? Well, let me think back to my homeschooling days… Mom dismissed the five of us from our studies around 3 or 4, then a swarm of neighborhood kids arrived to tear up the pantry, race around with plastic swords, and terrorize the lawn with soccer cleats. On weekends, there were soccer games, ballet recitals, riding lessons, museum trips, birthday parties, s’mores over bonfires, lemonade sales, dollar store trips, Saturday night pizza, and Sunday morning church.
As I am writing this, fifteen children run around my backyard, playing soccer. Four are my still-homeschooled siblings. Another four attend public school, two attend the Catholic school, and the other five are also homeschooled. But one thing is the same for all fifteen of them: they don’t give one hoot about who goes to what school where.
For those neighbors who worried about my educational future back in New Jersey, I am proud to say that I was homeschooled for fourteen years – all the way through to my high school graduation. I earned my diploma as valedictorian with high honors from Buxmont Christian Educational Institute. And, amazingly, I have friends.
(C) Taylor Patterson
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