Teaching Notes for Waiting for the Miracle
Use in the classroom to discuss: the death drive; the weight of witness; writing about writing; naming conventions; dynamics of absence/presence; suicide; survival amid extinction events; apocalypses; destructive actions; grief narratives; segmented narratives; colony collapse; crackling; church remnants; memory; remembrances; (im)permanence of cultural touchstones; family dynamics; being wo/man; body parts; bodies of water; rabbits; rot.
Pairs well with Dante’s Cartography, Excellent Evidence of Human Activity, Daddy Issues
Waiting for the Miracle by Jason DeYoung
54 pages.
Perfect bound.
And even in the unwritten end—when the collapses that come one by one amount to naught, when nothing at all arrives—what is there to do but to keep on living? In Jason DeYoung’s Waiting for the Miracle, an unnamed man sequesters himself at the end of the world within a found family of four: himself, the hardened Daisy, the mutable Roberta, and The Little Man. They listen to the crackling—loudest at the church. They listen to the last anthems. They eat the dead dogs and don quarantine haircuts and laugh last laughs at negation games and reenacted sitcoms and live—onward, onward, onward—into the unwritten end. Join them. There is room, too, for you.