Central Thing Please Help Me With This Two Resp

Read your group members’ work, and compose one thoughtful response for each group member using the guidelines below. Your written response is simply an informal letter to the author that offers thoughtful observations and questions about the work. Remember, this workshop is NOT about “fixing” the work or making recommendations, so avoid offering suggestions for improvement, etc. Just stick to the guidelines below. There is no length requirement for the response. Write the kind of detailed, thoughtful response that you hope to receive yourself from your group members. Provided you write a detailed and thoughtful response using the prompts below, you don’t have to worry about your score.

1. 1. When you’re responding to each group member’s fiction, write a response that addresses the following:
      1. What aspect of this story really interests you: is it the main character? Another character? The conflict of the story? The plot?
      2. What do you believe the main character wants or needs, and why?
      3. What conflicts or obstacles stand in the main character’s way to getting what the main character wants/needs?
      4. Do you think the main character will ever get what they want/need? If so, how? If not, why?
      5. How do you think the story will end?
   2. When you’re responding to each group member’s poetry, write a response that addresses the following:
      1. What seems to be the central “thing”—the main subject—that all/each of the poems revolve around? Be specific. For example, don’t say all of the poems are about love, say they’re about romantic love, or fraternal love, or about the dangers of falling in love, or the rewards of loving a specific something or someone.
      2. Do the poems spend most of their time expressing emotions or thoughts about abstract concepts (love, hate, friendship, loss, etc.), or do they use a lot of concrete and specific imagery (a cut, a rusty hammer, a vine curled around a rock, an empty room, etc.)? What images stand out to you?
      3. Does the poet seem to be writing about their own experience in order to express something about the poet himself/herself (“self-referential” poetry), or is the poet consciously using their own experience to participate in a larger subject that impacts a larger discourse community? Explain.
      4. What other angles or perspectives do you think the poet might use to explore their main subject? For example, if the current poems explore the joys of romantic love, which is only one perspective on romantic love, do you think the poet’s future poems might explore the dangers of romantic love, or the challenges, the rewards, the humor, the chaos, etc., of romantic love?
   3. Once these responses are complete, you should feel free to talk back and forth, ask each other questions, etc., as you see fit. Keep the conversation going if you’d like; do you need clarification? Do you need more explanation or information from your group member(s)? Go ahead and ask them.