Reflection #1

I selected “Everything is Far from here” because for me it had the richest story. I thought every single word and sentence has such weight to it and that’s what I look for in a story. I thought the imagery that it created was powerful as the story took you on a journey of realizing one of the harder truths about the world we live in. It was the one story of the three that I thought was by far the best in that I was hooked from the beginning. I love how the story is also a doorway to a much bigger issue and that it hones in on a small story that captures the reality of the situation so well. I chose the paragraph that I did because I felt it was the essence of the whole story written in such raw heartbreaking detail. That paragraph is where I feel the tension and the heartbreak comes to the breaking point as the women’s desperation leads her to even further heartbreak. That scene stuck out to more than any others and that why I chose it for my apprentice book. I knew that I could draw the most content from it because of how vivid it was. 

Reflection, Bookmaking

When creating the apprentice book. I knew that going for a purely artistic approach wouldn’t be a good approach for me. I need to start with what I was good at which is writing. So I wrote out the poem using some of my own words and some of the strong sentences from the passage to create the content of the apprentice book. Once I mapped out the words that would go onto each page, capturing the essence of what I thought the book should include. I wanted the pages to harmonize with the words in some way. This is where I got the idea for the hands trying to meet on the cover and back of the book. I then thought it would be a cool concept to have the hands leading to arms and then the two half of the mother and son. The poem describing the pain of not being able to be together. I also decided to make the book about polar opposites in a way with the first half being stormy and the latter half being sunny with flowers. The stormy half representing the mother and her grief and the sunny half representing her child. Trying to symbolize that she is trying to reach her sunshine. I also wrote all the words in red and blue with the white background to symbolize that this is the America that we are living in and that the conflict is due to America.