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