Margin Notes

What I  Was Reading: 

“The Swim Team” is the second story in Miranda July’s collection of short stories titled No one belongs here more than you. All of the stories in the collection are compelling due to the wildly imaginative inner lives of the usually lonely, bizarre, and socially outcast characters. While reading through the book, I noticed that July commonly excludes quotation marks to denote speech. In “The Swim Team”, this lack of punctuation serves a unique and interesting purpose. This story starts with a paragraph about how it is being written for the narrator’s ex-boyfriend in order to explain a specific time in her past that the ex-boyfriend had wanted to know about, and which may have contributed to their break-up. The story goes on to explain what happened during this secretive time and includes multiple characters speaking to each other without using quotation marks. The lack of quotation marks made me feel like I was not reading exactly what was said, but the narrator’s memory of what was said. Additionally, it made it so that the narrators voice was the only voice I heard while reading. In this way, the story sounded the way a story would if a friend was recounting an event that happened to them. This method of delivering the story made me feel a connection to the narrator, I was standing in for the ex-boyfriend and the narrator was telling her story to me.

What Moves I Notice the Writer Making:

• No quotation marks to denote who is speaking and when
• Lack of separation between dialogue and description
• Writing as if recounting a story to a friend
• Writing as if you are speaking to a fictional reader

Possibilities for Writers:

• Write a story from your past as if you were telling the story to a friend
• Try telling a story with dialogue from one character’s perspective without using quotation marks to separate the speakers
• Write a fictional story from the perspective of a fictional character to another fictional character

Guest writer Julia Mortimer is currently a student teacher at UNB. When she is not busy studying she enjoys staring up at trees in hopes of seeing a bird, talking to her cat, and spending too much time wandering in grocery stores.