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Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye (1970)

reviewed by Jericho Williams

Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye is one of the most difficult books I’ve read and taught.

Morrison thought about her art this way: “Writing is, after all, an act of language, its practice. But first of all it is an effort of the will to discover.” The Bluest Eye attempts to understand how a child’s life can be destroyed, and Morrison offers no easy answers as she interrogates American culture and racism of the early 1940s in Lorain, Ohio.

The basis of The Bluest Eye originated from a childhood conversation in which Morrison recalled one of her friends telling her that she had been praying for blue eyes. Morrison felt “violently repelled by what I imagined she might look like if she had her wish,” and she continued thinking about this comment for many years.

Her experimental and innovative first novel grapples with beauty standards, dominant societal expectations, silencing, and erasure prior to the Civil Rights Movement. Pieced together, the fragmented narrative tells an inflammatory story that is both easy to read and shocking. It is a book about seeing, one that does not look away from what most would rather not witness.

There are many reasons The Bluest Eye remains important and should exist in public libraries, but perhaps the most compelling one for me is the reminder that children are not just of their homes, but rather children of societies. By asking hard questions, The Bluest Eye demands that readers consider their cultural values and the trickle-down societal impacts of oppression, poverty, and racism.

Ruth Behar's Lucky Broken Girl

reviewed by Gwen Retterer

This is a true story about Ruthie Mizrahi and her family who moved from Cuba to Queens, NY in the 1960's. Escaping the constrictive life they had under Fidel Castro, Ruthie's introduction to the United States includes meeting her neighborhood classmates who are also from different countries, playing hop scotch, and learning English at a public school.

Ruthie goes from being an animated and optimistic 10-year-old girl to almost being completely immobile due to an accident. Behar takes the reader into the mind of Ruthie as she journeys through the ups and downs of healing: grappling with hate towards the people that caused the accident, physical dependency on her mom as a caretaker, unexpectedly meeting new mentors, and finding inspirational outlets despite not being able to move.

The recommended audience for this book is 10 and up. While the style of the writing certainly embodies that of a 10 year old, the themes coming from Ruthie and all those around her transcend age. The following quotes will give you a snapshot of the themes, as well as a taste of what this book is all about.

"We're nobody. We're refugees. We just arrived in this country. What if they send us back to Cuba?" - Ruthie's Dad

"Try not to hate so much, mi niña. Maybe you'll get better faster." -Ruthie's Mom

"...Some of us come here as shooting stars, to shine brightly for only the briefest moment, and others of us come and overstay our welcome, living to a ripe old age and forgetting our own names." -Chico, Ruthie's friend

"Why is it that bad things have to happen so you learn there are lots of good people in the world?" -Ruthie

Alumni Spotlight: Jessica Klagmann (née Bryant)

I was introduced to UAF by David Nikki Crouse, who was my first undergraduate writing professor in New Hampshire, and who had graduated from UAF’s creative writing MFA program. I’d never considered going to Alaska, but after losing my father in my last year of college and learning that he’d always wanted to go, it felt like the kind of adventure I needed. I remember David saying to me before I moved to Fairbanks: You’ll live in a dry cabin. You’ll get a truck. You’ll probably get a dog. I did all of these things, much to my delight. They also told me: Alaska is a place that, by nature, forces you to figure something out about yourself. This, I found, was also true.

As a reader, I’ve always leaned toward magical realism, speculative fiction, and environmental nonfiction. Books that shaped me and my work are Gretel Ehrlich’s The Solace of Open Spaces, Kevin Brockmeier’s Brief History of the Dead, and anything by Anne Valente, Nicole Krauss, and Rick Bass. A favorite recent read was Anne de Marcken’s It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over.

As a writer, I’m drawn to the ways people connect to wild landscapes and the natural world, and magical realism has been my way of weaving lightness into dark subjects. But I didn’t always do this well. David Nikki Crouse—who returned to teach at UAF—was an incredible mentor, not just in the craft of writing, but also in becoming a teacher. Filmmaker Len Kamerling encouraged me—as I struggled with pacing and action—to visualize the way scenes unfold and fit together as a whole. Derick Burleson pushed me to find grounding in my fantastical ideas, but then we also went off on tangents about the exquisite beauty of flowers. Everyone I knew in Alaska taught me some simple truth about life that carried into who I became as a writer.

During my time at UAF, I wrote a thesis of three novellas, discovered a love for teaching, learned a thing or two about publishing (I was �ʱ�������ڰ��Dz���’s editor-in-chief for Volume 32), and met my future husband. After we left Alaska for New Mexico, I worked at a college in Española as a writing instructor and the director of their adult education program. I also co-founded the school’s literary journal, Trickster. All the while, I kept writing stories, kept submitting. In 2013, I got my first publication for a nonfiction piece about my worst day in Alaska (and how a day like that can lead directly to the “figuring out” I mentioned). I started writing a novel in 2014, and after many, many submissions to agents—and many, many rejections—I finally signed with one. I felt like I’d made it, not realizing that it was just one step in a longer journey. A whole new round of rejections from publishers ended with that first novel getting set aside, but I’d been writing a second book to keep myself from going crazy, and in 2024, This Impossible Brightness was published.

My second novel, North of the Sunlit River, will be released this September. It’s set in Alaska and is about the ways in which lost loved ones can become greater than human—can become mythical—and how this act of myth-making can heal. Inspired by my time in Fairbanks and by my father, it was a way of finally getting him to Alaska, the place that left so much of its magic imprinted on me.