Campus Event Journal: FIWD with Steve Coyne

13 11 2014

At the beginning of the semester, I went to the FIWD event where Dr. Coyne read his newest short story, “Taken In.” The event was interesting to me as a writer, since it went to show that all writers go through the same stages of writing, sharing, and revising that I’ve been through with my own work. I also had never heard any of Dr. Coyne’s writing before, so that was an interesting experience as well. I really enjoyed the story.

Looking back on the event, the story kind of reminds me how ignorant people can be about oppression and injustice when it doesn’t directly affect them. In the story, the main character’s female friends are persuaded (or maybe forced) to do the police sexual favors in order to get the main character and the other boys out of trouble. The main character doesn’t even realize what his female friends went through until decades later when someone tells him. Looking back, he realizes that there were hints, but the signs and signals went over his head.

I guess that that whole idea relates pretty well to a lot of the things that we’ve read for this semester. Zitkala-Sa directed her work toward rich white women because she knew that many of them were unaware of (or unwilling to open their eyes to) the injustices that her people had suffered, and she knew that they, in their position of power, could help with the problem. In the same way, the main character, with his relatively affluent background, could have had his parents come down and sort out the whole thing, but he didn’t even see the signs that the girls were being abused.


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