By snoadmin
Colluded amidst raw honesty, subtle candor and coupled with a sincere and genuine empathy, author Emily Rapp delivered an emotive recounting of her memoirs and also gave unfettered advice on the craft of writing and its grueling process at a reading in the University Student Union on Tuesday.
Rapp read and discussed her memoir “Poster Child.” The author spoke of her plight as a disabled person, while citing the struggles and the will to overcome tribulations as elements that make us human and unified people.
Rapp was born with a congenital defect that required her left foot to be amputated at the age of four. What followed were chronic visits to hospitals and surgical operations that eventually led for her entire left leg to be removed. As a kid living in Wyoming, Rapp became the poster child for her hometown chapter of the March of Dimes, an organization aimed at spreading awareness about birth defects.
“Poster Child” is an unabashed recognition of her plight as a disabled person. The book is deprived of overly sappy sentimentalism about her life and struggles. It is a memoir joined together with moments of unflinching honesty, heart-wrenching poignancy, dark humor and straight-forth realism all weaved with a beautiful, almost poetic, prose.
Rapp began the reading at the USU by alluding to the universality she intended her book to convey. The excerpt chosen was from her high school years, as she said it would have been more relatable for the audience made up of predominantly college-age English majors. Her story is not merely a collage of random stories or memories, but rather moments relating to her experience as an amputee, walking with a prosthetic leg and amplified with the struggles of everyday life.
Taken from the chapter titled “Fashion Plate,” she told a story of how she and two girlfriends snuck out to a party. Her self-consciousness about her “wooden leg,” dread of being in adolescent bloom and of imagining herself as undesirable; lead toward her feelings of isolation.
She read, “The wooden leg glistened; it was almost as reflective as the smooth side of a spoon. I tried to pull the black, slinky skirt farther down to hide my legs, but it did between my hands and slithered up far above my knees, leaving the glossy metal hinges of my prosthesis exposed.”
As she spoke, Rapp’s voice became flexible and the range changed to epitomize the characters in the dialogue within the excerpt. The room hung on every word as she retold the story with a fragile quality invoking the voice and mindset of 16-year-old Emily Rapp. She reassured the English students the importance of studying the aesthetic elements and the craft of writing as basis for getting published.
“What I try to say to students is to focus on the craft,” Rapp said. “What you have to do is to learn to tell the story itself. You do that by learning about language, sentence structure, metaphors, descriptions and all the other skills needed for good writing.”
“Writing is hard,” she said. “To be a writer, you have to do it because you want to do it, not because you’re going to be rich and famous.”
She added that getting published is an arduous process of writing, rewriting, submissions and waiting for replies.
“Everyone has a story to tell, but you have to learn how to tell and you have to be patient enough before you get it published,” Rapp said.
