Shelley Jackson... What a Character

Stitch Bitch was definitely not my favorite piece of literature that I read in this class. I was at a complete loss from the start. Trying to figure out the first couple of paragraphs and what the writer was trying to say seemed like an impossible task. Used to written work that is composed in an ordered, chronological way, Stitch Bitch seemed like an alienated puzzle to me. At first the concept of disorganized work seemed overwhelming, but as I kept reading, it started to make a little more sense. I was able to understand that Shelley Jackson was portraying the actual thinking methods every writer goes through.

A written piece of work is rarely ever made from beginning to end, right from scratch. The composer, author, or artist works on pieces here and there. At the end, everything is molded together and presented as one fluid, and unique piece. Shelley Jackson also expresses the idea that you may have a particular thought to end with while writing, but in reality, you have no clue. “You won't get where you think you're going,” and you end up somewhere else, explaining something you never even imagined writing about in the first place. She also presents the idea that you can be whoever you want to be by writing. You don’t have to actually live out west to use a southern accent in your writing, nor would you have had to live during Shakespeare’s time to write in his language. So through all her confusing statements, Shelley Jackson does make an extremely useful point; that writers can be whoever they want to be and write however they want to write.

When finishing Shelley Jackson’s piece of literature, I still was unable to grasp all the concepts she had addressed because they were extremely metaphoric and I just couldn’t understand all her analogies and structure of literature. And in reading the last paragraph, I found a quote that I could argue against. “But I’m not sure closure is what we should be working toward, any more than a life well lived is one that hurtles without interruption toward a resounding death.” Although I do agree that life is full of setbacks and conflicts, I strongly believe that our impactful deaths should allow us to die with closure, allowing ourselves and others to know that we had lived a good life. Thus, our life story ends, in a strong ending, and someone else can either repeat our life story with the same concluding ending, or start where our lives ended. Having closure is a way to justify our good lives. And that is how the ending to a piece of writing should be; justifying the great depths in which the story ventured through in order to come out with a strong, impactful ending.