To earn both points, choose an event to attend and write me a 250-word letter responding to the event. The purpose of your letter is to both detail and articulate your experience of the event. (What happened?, Who was there?, What did you learn?, How will you put what you learned into practice?, etc.) I’m not looking for a listicle/memo, but rather an honest and personal response to the event you attended.

Visiting Writers Series: Kristin Arnett (#1)

• What: Florida writer Kristin Arnett will be reading from her debut novel Mostly Dead Things. (Read an excerpt here (Links to an external site.).)
• About Mostly Dead Things: One morning, Jessa-Lynn Morton walks into the family taxidermy shop to find that her father has committed suicide, right there on one of the metal tables. Shocked and grieving, Jessa steps up to manage the failing business, while the rest of the Morton family crumbles. Her mother starts sneaking into the shop to make aggressively lewd art with the taxidermied animals. Her brother Milo withdraws, struggling to function. And Brynn, Milo’s wife―and the only person Jessa’s ever been in love with―walks out without a word. As Jessa seeks out less-than-legal ways of generating income, her mother’s art escalates―picture a figure of her dead husband and a stuffed buffalo in an uncomfortably sexual pose―and the Mortons reach a tipping point. For the first time, Jessa has no choice but to learn who these people truly are, and ultimately how she fits alongside them.

Visiting Writers Series: Jaquira Diaz (#2)

• What: USF Alumna and two-time Pushcart Prize winner Jaquira Diaz will be reading from her memoir Ordinary Girls. (Read a short excerpt here (Links to an external site.).)
• About Ordinary Girls: Ordinary Girls is a fierce, beautiful, and unflinching memoir from a wildly talented debut author. While growing up in housing projects in Puerto Rico and Miami Beach, Jaquira Díaz found herself caught between extremes: as her family split apart and her mother battled schizophrenia, she was surrounded by the love of her friends; as she longed for a family and home, she found instead a life upended by violence. From her own struggles with depression and sexual assault to Puerto Rico’s history of colonialism, every page of Ordinary Girls vibrates with music and lyricism. Díaz triumphantly maps a way out of despair toward love and hope to become her version of the girl she always wanted to be.

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You would write 250 words for each event and should answer the questions mentioned above for each. You can just make anything up to answer the questions like as you really attended these two events. Thank you.