6A — Wednesday, October 2, 2019
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

My 2019 New Year’s resolution was to only 
purchase books written by women. Given the 
beyond-scary statistics of male authors being 
published around eight and a half times more 
frequently than their female counterparts, I 
recognized the only way to beat the statistic 
is to support female authors and share their 
books. Ironically, I’d read Peg Alford Pursell’s 
debut collection “Show Her A Flower, A Bird, 
A Shadow” in 2017, prior to realizing she was 
joining us at Literati to celebrate her newest 
collection of fables and stories, titled “A Girl 
Goes into The Forest.” 
Pursell is known for her lyrical prose and 
imaginative world building. Although she’s an 
advanced, published writer, she did not think of 
becoming a writer as a young person. 
“I grew up in a small town in the Allegheny 
Mountains where there was no bookstore, not 
even in the two closest cities, and I’d never met 
a writer and was unaware of anyone who wrote 
— practical occupations were encouraged. Yet, I 
always wrote,” Pursell said in an interview with 
The Daily. Pursell’s prose writing is extremely 
visceral and poetic — it builds worlds around 
you as you read. As a young person, she won 
awards for her poetry, and in her adult writing 
career, she’s honed her poetic expertise in her 
prose. 
Despite her recent success, Pursell wasn’t 
always confident in herself as a writer. Even 
after her MFA graduation from the Warren 
Wilson College program for writers, she claims 
she suffered a “crisis of confidence.” Her first 
book was featured by Poets & Writers magazine 
and was also named the INDIES “Book of the 
Year for Literary Fiction.” Though she had a 
few slow moments in her early career, she has 
since thrived in the literary world. Her most 
recent collection was published in July of 2019, 
and she just finished putting the final touches 
on the manuscript for a novel. Despite the non-
traditional trajectory of her career and not-
straightforward, she hit a stride within the vein 
of story collections and magical, mysterious 
world building. 
She specifically hones this craft in “A Girl 
Goes into the Forest,” which features 78 
imaginative stories broken down into nine 
sections. The sections each introduce a line 
from “The Snow Queen,” a fairy tale by Hans 
Christian Andersen, a favorite of hers. 
“His fairy tale is significant to me because it’s 
one of the few in which the girl has agency — 
Gerta rescues the boy, little Kaye, whose been 
corrupted and who everyone else has given up 
on. The stories in “A Girl Goes” were written 
over a number of years and collected for their 
shared thematic investigations into the mythos 
of the American girl, nature of consciousness 
and human connections to wildernesses without 
and within,” Pursell said. The book grapples 
with the complexity of female agency and 
feminine protagonists. 
“It’s essential that female and female-
identifying writers tell our stories and share 
our perspectives, for though most readers are 
female, the largest number of authors continue 

to be male. This continues to make no sense, 
though it does reflect the reality of patriarchal 
capitalism, a system that hurts everyone, 
regardless of gender,” Pursell said. As a woman 
writing female characters into mainstream 
published literature, Pursell is aware of her 
place as a female writer and uses her status to 
tell stories about this narrative and experience. 
“The book endeavors to offer readers new ways 
for seeing the familiar American metaphoric 
landscape, in ways that I hope speak to each 
reader, in their own unique way,” Pursell said. 
It is not an easy feat to accomplish — rewriting 
and rediscovering the American landscape in a 
metaphoric and inventive way. However, Purcell 
takes on and executes this feat with a descriptive 
prose voice and stunning imagery. 
As a young woman aspiring to go into a similar 
field as Pursell and hoping to meet similar 
success, I asked her what her advice would be to 
her 20-year-old self regarding her career path. 
Her advice was poignant, and something I will 
personally remember as I begin to understand 
my desire to be a writer. 
“The most important thing I’d want any young 
self to know is there’s no one pathway, especially 
when it comes to writing and publication 
readership. It’s a twisting and turning route, 
with surprises and luck and disappointments 
to navigate. That it’s important to protect the 
writing self, especially from the publishing 
author self (two very different selves, oftentimes 
at odds), and to cultivate that solitude from 
which one writes and creates,” Pursell said.

Peg Alford Pursell chats
about her process & prose

ELI RALLO
Daily Arts Writer

COMMUNITY CULTURE REVIEW

As a woman writing 
female characters 
into mainstream 
published literature, 
Pursell is aware of 
her place as a female 
writer and uses her 
status to tell stories 
about this narrative 
and experience

The lawyers of “Bluff City Law” want to change 
the world. Unfortunately, their show writers are 
not as keen on making this courtroom drama pilot 
any different from its peers. 
NBC’s new fall procedural “Bluff City Law” 
follows former corporate shark Sydney Strait 
(Caitlin McGee, “Grey’s Anatomy”) as she moves 
back to her hometown of Memphis following 
the untimely death of her mother. With much 
reluctance, she accepts her father’s invitation to 
rejoin his law firm — a cozy office full of smiling and 
polite Southern stock characters — and handle civil 
cases instead of continuing to work on “the dark 
side” of large corporations. 
Sydney’s father, Elijah Strait (Jimmy Smits, 
“NYPD Blue”), in between moments of mourning 
his wife and accepting praise for being a legendary 
civil-suit lawyer, seeks to win back his daughter’s 
affections after a lifetime of cheating on her mother. 
Upon Sydney’s return to her father’s firm, she 
happily greets her supporting characters and learns 
of her next case: A high school custodian, Edgar 
Soriano, and his family claim his terminal cancer 
is the direct result of exposure to popular fertilizer 
produced by a conveniently evil conglomerate, 
Americorp.
Through some calculated grandstanding and 
some dramatic violations of courtroom and social 
etiquette, the Straits win the case, secure over 
$45 million in damages for the Soriano family and 
establish precedence for a pending class action suit 
against Americorp. Sydney and her father start to 
get along better, one of the firm’s partners has begun 
an appeal for a wrongfully convicted prisoner and 
some romantic tension is brewing between Sydney 
and her ex-husband, the chief of detectives.
On paper, “Bluff City Law” has all the components 
of a good courtroom drama. It has snappy dialogue, 
a fresh case every week, some moral introspection 
about good and evil in the American justice system. 
But in practice, the show falls flat. It’s major issue 
is its focus. The sympathetic clients exist only 
to be defended and pitied. The lawyers drive the 
emotion of the show and are the only ones shown 
suffering from corporate greed. Suffering by being 

in proximity to actual victims, of course. 
The storylines of horrific injustice simply serve 
as a backdrop to play up the rather uninteresting 
personal issues of the Straits and their partners at 
the firm. The warped focus results in a shocking 
lack of heart or emotional stakes for the audience. 
Rather than demonstrating the hard work involved 
in these cases ripped from the headlines, characters 
just talk about their already sterling reputations and 
inexplicable talents ad nauseum. Any emotional 
conflict is expressed by how tragic it would be for 
the lawyers to fail by co-opting the actual hardship 
of their clients.
Yes, the system is broken. Yes, victims of the 
system deserve justice. But focusing on beautiful 
attorneys winning sanitized, simplistic cases gives 
the wrong people attention they don’t necessarily 
deserve. For every Erin Brockovich securing a 
guilty verdict and getting a movie made about 
her, there are hundreds of people and towns that 
continue to suffer without media coverage or a 
team of Sydney Straits to break the rules and save 
the day.
The lawyers of “Bluff City Law” are good 
people. Great people, if you ask them. In fact, every 
scene of the show’s pilot episode revolves around 
the moral superiority of its main characters and 
how wonderful they are for being humanitarian 
lawyers. Yet, despite their lofty rhetoric and good 
intentions, the show’s premiere relies on tired 
courtroom drama tropes and petty personal feuds 
while failing to come through on its promise to 
“change the world.”

‘Bluff City Law’ gets off to
a very disappointing start

ANYA SOLLER
For the Daily

TV REVIEW

NBC

Humans are entitled creatures. Our superiority complexes 
prevent us from acknowledging our relationship with the natural 
world to be one of mutualism, not parasitism. Though a cynical 
thought, it seems ingrained in our psyche to take as much as 
possible with minimal reciprocation. A prime example of this 
greed is found in our treatment of bees, one of the most central 
species to sustaining our environment.
Bees embody balance, buzzing behind the scenes to maintain 
the agricultural life-cycle through pollination. Despite their 
centrality to the flow of our daily lives, society rarely witnesses 
the magic of bees, and thus fails to respect it. The sole female 
beehunter in Europe, Hatidze Muratova’s world revolves around 
bees, a dynamic that is jeopardized when a new family disturbs 
the peace in Honeyland, seeking to learn the craft of beekeeping 
under the incentive of pure profit. Though the plot revolves 
around beekeeping, at the core of the film, “Honeyland” is a much 
deeper message about greed, solitude and human connection, a 
message that pushes us all to reflect on our interactions with the 
world around us and the ways we treat one another.
A concept the film reiterates again and again is harmony. Before 
the arrival of the Sam family, Hatidze’s circle was relatively small, 
consisting of her sick mother, a few animal companions and, of 

course, her bees. Whenever she makes the long journey up to 
the beehive, it is so clear from the way that she gently lifts away 
the rockface and coaxes the bees off of the honeycomb, that her 
attitude toward the insects is one of honor and understanding. 
Among the swarms of bees, Hatidze appears at peace, unbothered 
by buzzing and fearless of stings.
With the arrival of the Sams, the atmosphere of peace and 
symmetry is instantaneously interrupted. The family is loud, 
unruly and eager to learn the ways of beekeeping, which Hatidze 
willingly teaches them. Though she enjoys the companionship that 
the Sam family brings, her tone soon changes when she realizes 
that the patriarch, Hussein Sam, has no intention of cultivating 
a give-and-take relationship with the bees. The evolution of the 
relationship between Hatidze and the family from neighborly to 
hostile is exemplified through the change in behavior of the bees. 
Under Hatidze’s care, the bees are calm and behaved, whereas 
under Hussein, they are feisty, stinging Hussein and his children 
left and right. This juxtaposition hints at the film’s larger theme 
of the bonds people form with their environments. While Hatidze 
regards the bees as companions and business partners for selling 
honey, Hussein only perceives them as temporary resources, 
meant to be used and then discarded.
Through the differing attitudes of these two characters, 
directors Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov prompt 
audiences to consider their own ties to the world around them. Do 
we treat the planet with respect, with an approach of reciprocation, 
or do we simply view the world as an asset, destined to be used up?

‘Honeyland’ shows a give-and-take

SAMANTHA NELSON
Daily Arts Writer

FILM REVIEW

Honeyland

The State Theatre

Contact Films

Bluff City Law

Pilot

NBC

Mondays @ 10 p.m.

By Jeffrey Wechsler
©2019 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
10/02/19

Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle

Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis

10/02/19

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:

Release Date: Wednesday, October 2, 2019

ACROSS
1 Barely enough
6 Like a pooch’s 
smooch
9 “Happy Days” 
actress Erin
14 Software writer
15 Texter’s “As I 
see it”
16 Defunct defense 
gp.
17 Pear variety
18 Opening setting 
of “Madagascar”
19 Be carried by the 
current
20 Fort Worth sch.
21 RR stop
23 Giuseppe’s god
25 “S” on an 
invitation
26 NFL’s Gronk and 
others
27 Roller coaster 
experiences
29 Previously, to a 
poet
30 1999 Ron 
Howard satire
32 Easy-to-spot 
jigsaw pieces
33 Ado
34 Turn back to zero
36 Hundred Acre 
Wood joey
37 Egyptian 
Christians
38 Word from 
Robin preceding 
headache, 
homework, and 
hamstrings, 
among others
40 “Beetle Bailey” 
dog
42 __ monster
43 Song and dance
45 Ramp, and 
what’s found 
in each set of 
circles
50 Con
51 Floor models
52 Putting game
54 Iconic lemon
56 “Live With Kelly 
and Ryan” 
network
57 Big name in 
whisky
58 Small songbird
59 Reevaluated 
favorably

62 Corp. tech boss
63 Action film gun
64 Privately
65 Journalist Curry
66 Brief time
67 Taste
68 Charles of R&B
69 Macaw, for some

DOWN
1 Disperse
2 Admit having lost
3 Fiddles with
4 Fresh start?
5 Estate manager’s 
suggestion
6 Potter’s specialty
7 Angsty rock 
genre
8 “Ta-ta!”
9 Early PC 
platform
10 Above, to a bard
11 Elevate
12 Initially
13 Qualifier for a 
minimum price
22 With 48-Down, 
Time Lord played 
by various 
performers
24 They, in Calais
28 “Need __ on?”
31 Jam ingredient?

33 Cinematographer’s 
compilation
35 Temporary 
usage fee
37 PC key
39 __-back: relaxed
41 Solemn bugle 
solo
42 Early Christian
44 Kilimanjaro 
topper
45 Treat, as table 
salt

46 At hand
47 Put in prison
48 See 22-Down
49 TV pal of Jerry 
and George
50 Womb occupant
53 Weather map 
feature
55 Unbridled desire
57 June 6, 1944
60 Water filter 
brand
61 That, in Tijuana

