Impressive Literary Criticism

Reading the commentary John Scalzi provides for "The Friends Went to Camp" (by Athena Scalzi) gave me flashbacks to classmates in college literature classes pulling symbolism from every minor detail of a story.

Absolutely hysterical.

This also made me think of the first story I remember writing, in first grade. We were actually given an assignment -- pretend to be a flower or a bird and write a story about it. I thought the idea of being a flower was pretty stupid when the other option was a bird. Birds can fly! I was baffled by my classmates who passed up the opportunity to fly and would rather be planted in the ground.

Anyway, I think my story was about two sentences and mostly talked about how great it was to fly. The teacher typed up all the stories into a packet and sent them home so that the parents could get a good laugh, too. I think my parents still have that packet somewhere...I should track that down one of these days and see how accurate my memory is. And maybe provide some literary commentary as well!