Brittany Coppinger - Post 3

I love the way Aimee Bender writes. I think that it is creative and whimsical but still deals with powerful topics. She can write about really disturbing depressing topics but still keep her reader. In class we talked about how Bender writes fables. I love this about her writing, because she requires the reader to think a little to understand the lessons she puts into her stories. If one just reads at surface level, her stories come of very weird and a little out there, but if you take a closer look you can see the lesson or moral that she is trying to get at. At first, in End of Lines, it may have seemed like a big man buying a little man was really weird. But I think that Bender made it weird to draw our attention to it. She wanted us to think about how some people own others, and what that means about how we can treat them. She wanted to show us that bigger does not mean better, and belonging is what is most important to us all. In Fruit and Words, one may think that the woman in the store is crazy. They might think its weird that she makes words out of things, but open closer inspection it makes perfect sense. What are words anyway? Nothing. The only have the meaning we assign to them. You could say a word and it would have no meaning if the person you were talking to didn't know the thing you were talking about. It makes more sense to build the word out of the the thing is represents because then the word really is the thing. Words are just words until you make them more then that. I think that that idea is pretty heavy, but she brings it up in a light whimsical way. And that is what makes her a great writer.