Comments on: Island of Misfit Manuscripts

By: Jill Morrow

Jill Morrow — Thu, 26 Dec 2024 14:09:11 +0000

In reply to Lauren Potts. This is true, Lauren -- and worth remembering!

By: Lauren Potts

Lauren Potts — Thu, 05 Dec 2024 17:37:36 +0000

Like the old journals – useful to look back if only to see how far we’ve come!

By: Robert DiNapoli

Robert DiNapoli — Sun, 29 Sep 2024 08:11:22 +0000

And THAT’s why serious theology should ALWAYS be performed as stand-up comedy . . .

By: Jill Morrow

Jill Morrow — Sun, 22 Sep 2024 18:58:50 +0000

In reply to Robert DiNapoli. Ooof. Quite an interpretation. I thought maybe Sue just wanted a doll with a different hair color ...

By: Robert DiNapoli

Robert DiNapoli — Sun, 22 Sep 2024 02:44:07 +0000

I HAVE been wondering all these decades! Was it her lack of a nose and eyebrows? Sue? Ah! ‘A scooter for Jimmy, a dolly for Sue’. That IS dark, if her only fault was not to be wanted. Sniff . . . St Augustine, Martin Luther and John Calvin (voiced by Burl Ives on a VERY bad day, of course) would all call that ‘predestination’. That’s the way the cookie crumbles, kid. God’s omniscience knows best . . . and clearly that dolly was one of the reprobate, foredoomed since the dawn of time.

Yup. Definitely dark.

By: Jill Morrow

Jill Morrow — Sat, 21 Sep 2024 12:15:01 +0000

In reply to Robert DiNapoli.

Robert, I feel you. All of us “misfits” want to prove that we can shine.

In case you’ve been wondering all these years, I did a little search into what’s actually wrong with the doll on the Island of Misfit Toys. Because, seriously, she appears to be a perfectly cute doll. It seems nobody really knows. The consensus (backed by one of the show’s producers) is that the doll is psychologically damaged in some way (huh??), possibly due to rejection by Sue, her owner. Rudolph is darker than we thought …

By: Jill Morrow

Jill Morrow — Sat, 21 Sep 2024 12:04:14 +0000

In reply to Kristina Riggle. Kristina, it sounds like this story really wanted to be written! I like when that happens -- it was meant to be.

By: Robert DiNapoli

Robert DiNapoli — Fri, 20 Sep 2024 20:20:28 +0000

I’ve been using ‘the Island of Misfit Toys’ for decades as a metaphor for (I’ll risk a little melodrama here) us unprofessional, institutionally useless academics who the academy told to get lost ages ago, in nicely anaesthetised management-speak. It’s a kind of cheerful image now: who needs all that underpaid non-union elf-labour? But the image of the cast-off, misprised reject who turns out to be the secret sauce everyone needed (‘Rudolf, with your nose so bright . . .’) lies at the heart of nine tenths of the world’s cycles of story and myth. Hope for us all!

By: Kristina Riggle

Kristina Riggle — Fri, 20 Sep 2024 17:40:05 +0000

I always say “no writing is wasted” because it’s all practice. I accidentally rewrote an early manuscript, which had been about two opposite-personality estranged sisters who reluctantly join forces in order to help one of them with a deeply personal, desperate problem…and it became my 2012 novel Keepsake.

I say “accidentally” because it wasn’t until Keepsake was written and I was in preparations for its launch that I realized I’d brought that old story back to life.

By: Joe

Joe — Fri, 20 Sep 2024 15:40:50 +0000

🙂