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Murano
Shoreline
My Mind Set Free
On the Way Down
Setting Ghosts Free
The Sun Shines Brightly
Triolet #1
Love, you
His House
Pandora's Box
To Milk and to Honey #2
The Eyes and the Hungers
Denied
No Excavation
Time Draws
Manipulation
Dreamweaver
Beth

Writing

This essay is a literacy narrative that I wrote for a poetry class in January 2004.

I have been surrounded with words and language since I was a child. My parents tell me that I learned to read at age two. According to my father, one day I was illiterate, and the next day I picked up the newspaper and began reading aloud. I don’t remember this incident, but given my love for reading, writing, and learning, I can only believe that he is telling the truth.

My earliest experiences with writing and literature came from my aunt, a school media specialist, my mother, who enjoyed writing poetry in her younger days, and my grandparents, who were amazing storytellers and told me tales that I will never forget. Throughout my childhood, my aunt gifted me with many, many wonderful children’s books and classic children’s novels. I became an avid reader, requiring that my parents take me to the bookstore or library at least three or four times per month.

I remember trips to the library where my mother and I checked out so many books that the librarian filled them into a cardboard box for us to bring to the car. I often brought a stack of books to the dinner table because I would rather engage myself in a novel than watch television or talk to my parents while eating. I used to hide under the covers at night with a flashlight and a book long after my mother had put me to bed. I collected entire series of Babysitters Club, Sweet Valley, Girl Talk, and other popular books. I recall the first “adult” book that I read, for a class book report, at age eight: A Night to Remember, by Walter Lord. I was the only student in my class who reported on a book that was not found in the children’s or young adult section.
Writing stories and poems came naturally to me, as a child who was constantly reading, often for hours every day. I recall writing many short stories as a child, though I seldom write fiction, these days. I also wrote many poems, often about animals or nature.

I was extremely shy about my poetry, and I didn’t want anyone to read my work. I didn’t think that it was bad, but being the shy bookworm that I was, I felt embarrassed and uncomfortable receiving praise for my writing. This shy feeling increased when I reached middle and high school and began writing more mature poetry about feelings that I was experiencing as I went through the strange and confusing years of middle and early high school.

It wasn’t until I discovered the art of literary websites and an entire community of girls my age who had their own websites, that I ever felt comfortable sharing my poetic thoughts with others. When I was fourteen, I came across the online diary of a girl who called herself Ophelia. She was a few years older than me, and she wrote about her life, her boyfriend, and whatever else she had on her mind. She had a section where she posted personal essays and poetry. I was entranced with this idea, and I began to look for others, not realizing how large the community of young, female online writers there really were.

After seeing many other websites like “Ophelia’s,” I decided to create my own. A few days later, I put my own journal online and began writing entries and posting poetry that I had written. I started chatting with other girls my age who also had websites and posted their writing, and I was surprised and pleased to see that my peers had good things to say about my poetry. I was behind the mask of a computer, and I didn’t know any of these people in real life, so it made it easier for me to accept the praise for my work, and it inspired me to keep writing and practicing and creating a style of my own.

In the next few years after creating the site and posting my writing online, I became very active in the online writing community, at least among my young online friends. I admired the writing of the girls I knew and was so inspired by them to improve and become more original that I often wrote a few poems each day, about anything and everything, but mostly about my feelings. Although I believe that most of my writing at that time was “garbage,” my obsessive poetry writing habit was perhaps the best thing for me, as it allowed me to practice and develop my style over the course of a few years.

My high school years were filled with very typical teenage angst, which fueled my poems and desire to write, as it became a very cathartic experience. Additionally, I was heavily influenced by not only my female friends online, but also by the poets and writers that they enjoyed, such as Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and Pablo Neruda, which I also came to enjoy. Most notably, I loved Neruda’s work due to his passion and attention to detail. I feel that my writing style did not truly develop into what it is today, for the most part, until late in my senior year of high school, after reading Chopin’s The Awakening and a few poems by Adrienne Rich, in my Advanced Placement Literature class. The styles of Chopin and Rich gave me new inspiration, and I wrote many poems that year, some of which I still think are wonderful and still love to reread.

This past year, in addition to my website, I discovered a method of writing and publishing my work, in the form of a personal “zine.” Zines are small, self-published “magazines” in which the writers can include any writings or art that they choose to publish. The zine is photocopied and sold somehow – in my experience, I sold it online. In my first zine, I included old poems, journal entries, and a travelogue of a trip I took to Europe. In my second issue, I included personal essays about experiences I’ve had, tidbits of my life, other thoughts, and a few poems. Making a zine was a wonderfully creative and satisfying experience for me, as it allowed me to express myself, advertise my publication, and get my thoughts and writings out to people who have never seen my website and wouldn’t have read any of my work previously.

Before my recent discovery of the craft of zine-making, I hadn’t written anything creative in a long time, especially poetry. The transition of moving to college from high school wasn’t traumatic for me, but the change in scenery blocked my creativity for a long time. In my first semester of college, I agonized over the feeling that I had nothing to write about. I occasionally wrote a few poems, but nothing I considered spectacular or even special in any way. I took a general creative writing class a few years ago, hoping it would inspire me, but it did not. I can count the times on just a few fingers, in the past three and a half years, that I have written a poem that I even consider to be good. This brings us to the reason that I am taking this course in beginning poetry writing.

I have always been a reader, and for the longest time in my teenage life, I considered myself to be a writer. Some mysterious and unknown force in my life seemed to steal poetry right out from beneath my feet, and I miss it. I am now ready to take it back with as much power as I can muster within myself. The chance to be creative and reintroduce something into my life that has been absent for so long is exciting to me.

As I look back upon my teenage years, I realize that much of the writing I did was based solely on my emotional state. Although my life may be more stressful in other ways now that I am older and preparing to graduate and get married in a few months, I feel that my emotions have not only developed and become more stable, but I have clearly grown up and become mature enough to understand certain feelings and why I feel them. Perhaps, as a teen, I was so used to and so focused on writing about certain thoughts and feelings that once those thoughts and feelings changed, I didn’t know what to do or even where to begin. Understanding this, I am ready to start writing in a different way – less about my emotional state and more about the world and my presence as an entity within it. I hope that this course will be a conduit in which I can jump start the creative, poetic engine that has long lay dormant inside me, and once again return to my roots of writing.