Re:Book Talk…and some Movie Talk

It’s Shira now. I am also a huge fan of Prep, though I haven’t bothered to read her other book. This one, however, sounds fantastic! Definitely an other-side-of-the-spectrum read once I finish Jessica Valenti’s new book He’s a Stud, She’s a Slut and 49 Other Double Standards Every Woman Should Know. So far, SO good! It’s written with the same hard core chatty empowerment as Full Frontal Feminism. Hey, I even got my dad to pick it up…and he’s enjoying it!

Now onto the movie part of this post: I just saw Juno. I know I’m really late in the trend, but in my defense it came out during my Regents cram time. Anyways, it was FANTASTIC! It totally deserves the Screenplay award, which seems relevant as Morgan was one of the leaders of GWN’s recent Screenwriting workshop. Everything in popular culture seems to relate to writing.

Book Talk

Morgan here. So I just found out the theme of Curtis Sittenfeld’s latest book, and wanted to share. Let me preface this with: I loved Prep and count it among my top 10 favorite books. Her second title, The Man of My Dreams, was decent, from what I remember (although the fact that I don’t much remember it speaks volumes, perhaps).

Anyway, her new book imagines the life of Laura Bush, from birth through present day. It’s fictionalized, of course, and the woman has a different name, but all the biographical details are the same, down to the horrific (and wrong) events of the 2000 election. Take a look at what the NYT has to say.

I will totally be reading this.

Our Cinquain Month

Here are the cinquains we read during the annual Winter Pair Reading for Girls Write Now; we enjoyed them so much, we continued writing even after the reading was done. So here are the first ones; more to come later.

Blog for Fair Pay Day!

Shira pointed out an excellent post on Feministing this week about people around the country using today – April 18 – to blog about the Fair Pay Act. So, we are. We seem to be cinquain junkies (hmm, maybe that should have been the name of our blog…), so we each took a stab at a fair pay-themed one:

Shira:
She waits
for the escape.
Legs can move away from
ripped hands, not a penny shown for
their tear.

Morgan:
Ten cents,
or ten grand. Still
a hole we must rise from,
a broken bootstrap we must fix
ourselves.

The New York Times

Girls Write Now was just featured in the NY Times – check it out here. A great read! 

Cinquains

So, we started writing cinquains back in the fall for the Girls Write Now Winter Pair Reading, and had so much fun with them that we’ve continued. We have a fun twist on it, though: whatever the last line of the latest cinquain is, the next writer must use that last line as her first line. So they flow nicely when read aloud, and it’s challenging to have to write such a short, structured poem using someone else’s line. But that’s the fun of it. 

We have many cinquains at this point, so I’m going to post the first few now, and then continue adding over the next few days, so stay tuned. 

 

 

Hello world!

Welcome to Grumpy Words, a blog born out of our weekly meetings at a little place called Cafe Grumpy in Chelsea. Who are we? We’re Morgan and Shira, a mentor/mentee pair and part of Girls Write Now. This blog is a place for us to store some of the writing we work on together, expand on already-existing pieces or create new ones, and just generally talk about writing, books, and whatever else comes our way.