I never thought that entering high school and learning how to write would make me forget how to be a writer. I never considered that uncovering the workings of language, would make me forget that words ever held magic. Most of all, I never believed that growing older and more mature would make me forget how to see the glitter of inspiration in the air, because I was too attuned to the stark world of reality.
When I was younger I plucked stories out of the air because for me they were easy to see. They glimmered like specks of dust in certain light, and liked to bounce off one another and land in my friends’ hair, collecting on each individual strand so that even the follicles shone bright.
But as I grew older, I stopped seeing stories in the air as sparks of light. Poems were no longer an exotic type of sweetness on my tongue. The music of words didn’t swell in my body.
In the midst of all the chaos of junior year I neglected to make time for myself just to sit down and write. Whenever I wrote it was for a class, for a grade, not for myself. This led me done an unpleasant path of being disconnected from most of my works. I thought that I would never be inspired to write again.
But recently I read a poem called “Parsley” by: Rita Dove for my author project. On the first read I didn’t understand what was going on at all, but by the end of the fifth read I was devouring the words. Some of them tasted too cliché. Some of them were too intense. However, most of them, to my surprise, tasted like chocolate, soft and rich, deep and smooth. They had filled an appetite that I forgot I ever had.
-- Stephanie Thompson, Public Relations & Marketing Editor