#fiction literature thenovel littlefireseverywhere creativeproject celesteng KState ENGL698

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Dan’s creative project: Mia Warren’s reincarnated bears

Okay, before I explain, please bear with me (pun intended). Here’s the before:

And here’s the after:

In homage to Mia Warren, the secretive photographer in Celeste Ng’s novel Little Fires Everywhere, I purchased this bear at the Manhattan, Kansas, Goodwill (for $1.70), split one of its seams, pulled it inside out, and sewed it back together. Mia (see the passage below) is much more meticulous with her deconstruction. I didn’t take the bear totally apart or get rid of the visible fringy seams (please consider this my ode to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein), and, well, I lost the bear’s ears completely.

This project, however, got me thinking about the metaphorical value of how Mia might pull things (especially people) into new shapes as she photographs them. We won’t discuss Little Fires Everywhere until April 3, so I won’t say anymore yet, but the project helped me think about Mia and her art and her life in new ways.

Okay, sure, my bear is not perkier, but it certainly looks reincarnated, ready for some new and other life.

In English 698, each member of class will have to do some kind of similar creative project. That doesn’t necessarily mean a craft project. Rather the requirement is to take something that happens in one of our novels and recreate it somehow in real life, then write about the experiment in this blog. This assignment is another of our attempts to see these books in new ways and to use our books to understand our lives and our lives to understand our books.

Here’s the bear in its previous habitat before I freed it from the realm of no-longer-wanted Hello Kitties. Mia and I and Celeste Ng—but mainly Mia and Celeste—allowed it to live some new, richer life.