When I was a freshman, I decided to try out the creative writing clubs in an attempt to get involved more at my school and with my art. I ended up at a spoken word club meeting in September, with absolutely no idea about what spoken word might be, other than it’s name. I could predict that this would be out loud writing, people standing before a classroom to deliver their work. I couldn’t predict the way words, in the mouths of experienced juniors and seniors, spun this dance of language, or seemed to physicalize in the air, emotions transferred straight to me. In a single hour-and-half after school meeting, I became dedicated to a new art form. Spoken word is unique in the fact that it can, so immediately, reach an audience. There is something in a performer speaking their own words, a person shivering before you and saying this is my truth, that makes people connect deeply to the words of spoken word artists. This immediacy is also deceptively simple, as those audiences, including myself, realize when we turn to making our own spoken word. A terrific performer can’t make up for shoddy words, and incredible language can’t provide for a scared or over ambitious performer. The form is a unique and delicate balance between the two forces. Spoken word exists where words cannot just sit on a page. Spoken word is necessary for when the truth on the page is so internalized in a person they individually have to speak it. Often, in the transition, the ability to be so true through this medium of words, a spoken word piece flourishes with wordplay, and becomes a celebration of language itself. It blends with music, runs off with pun and double meaning. A spoken word artist has to find some way to realize all of the potential of the genre, and still come on stage and deliver what is most true to themselves. They have to use this truth to drive choices about what song, or crazy movement is used. Spoken word is a vibrant tradition, an intellectual tradition, but still a tradition of gut feelings. It is messy. It is invaluable. Recently, I had to struggle with risk taking in the form for a piece I performed at Douglas Anderson’s Coffee House performance. The piece centered around my personal transitions while working on trail crew in the New Hampshire woods this summer. I wanted to convey the feeling of swinging a double jack, this eight-pound metal head on a wood handle, and using it crushing rocks. The piece really centered around this return to loving the physical body. The motion, the way it forces you to appreciate every single muscle, felt too important to leave out. So I spoke, and swung a pretend double jack. I had to take this risk of looking like a teenager with an air guitar, but I did it. Because, the emotions, and currents of ideas in the piece, called for something big. In the end, I think the motion worked. It showed the movement of manual labor. I reconnected me, every time, with those summer days, which helped me bring the piece to the audience. Spoken word is my release, because it asks the question: What are you most angry/joyful/sad/excited/all around passionate about? Write, speak, and move, from there. -Ana Shaw, Junior Editor-in-Chief

I didn’t walk into Creative Nonfiction at the start of sophomore year expecting to hate the class, but I didn’t expect to love it either. My main concern was that my life didn’t offer enough experiences to write about; inspiration for wild fictional stories is endless, but my own life is finite. I didn’t know what I would write after the second or third essay. What I didn’t realize is that while I have limited experiences, there are unlimited ways to tell those experiences. I can write about my parents’ divorce from the perspective of myself when I broke my arm while they were arguing, or I can write about standing in front of the front door with Mom’s suitcases on the night that we left. Even in those specific moments, there is more to tell; with the broken arm, do I write on the realization of the fact that my parents weren’t “alright,” or do I write on the duality of pain I felt in that instant? I have written none of the experiences that I have described so far, but recognizing the possibilities in that I can write on these things is the most important part. Creative nonfiction opened doors for me in respect to both its secular genre, and in respect to all other genres, because what is more applicable to writing than the truth? Creative nonfiction was the first time that I felt it was okay to write the truth in the same ways I had written stories, and it was the first time that I realized that truth is essential to all writing. My current tactic on writing poetry is drawing from my own life, because there is nothing that I can write better than what I have already experienced. My fiction now includes pieces of me, whether a character is dealing with loss or visiting a setting that I am familiar with. In general, I have felt a lot better about all of my writing since I took Creative Nonfiction class, because it has allowed me to know more about my own writing. I can take a situation familiar to me and alter it in the name of fiction without sacrificing the fact that I know enough about the situation itself to write about it in a pseudo-personal manner. Even more integral to my writing is the fact that creative nonfiction has allowed me to look at my own life experiences from a different perspective and gain from the writing process. I can learn from what I have already gone through in a new way, each time I create a new piece, each time I redraft. The beauty in writing what has already passed is that I can continue to learn from the moment long after it is gone, because in writing, it continues to happen, over and over and over again. -Logan Monds, Social Media Editor

I never thought I would be a poet. When I was beginning my full immersion into writing, and dedicating myself to the craft, I had already made up my mind that I was a fiction writer. I adored fiction because I thought it was the best place to create worlds. It had a more massive scope to build, and I just didn’t associate that with poetry. Prior to my entanglement in poetry, I thought it was basically this fancy, condensed, intellectual beast I wouldn’t ever really be able to tap into. It wasn’t until my junior year, and even more so, my current senior year in creative writing at Douglas Anderson, that I really found out I had a poetic voice. What I learned mostly, from my poetry classes, as well as from constantly reading the work of my peers, is that fiction isn’t the only place for a narrative. Poems can be wombs which birth stories whether it be concrete or not, and even if a poem feels confusing, an emotional narrative is always apparent. The concept of an emotional narrative is something that I hold very dear to me. Within my poetry, I at first felt daunted by trying to get across what I desired to say. In fiction you’re able to have more room to build context, to play around, and lead up, but within poetry the collective piece is attempting to get the reader to feels something and pull them in, in a limited space. Poems of course, don’t have to be short, they can be expansive creatures, though typically, they aren’t as long as a novel. To try and tackle the task for formulating an emotional structure to which my poems flow, I normally start off with creating some type of setting or atmosphere. In a lot of my poems, I’m setting the scene to what I’m going to show. I often use color in my pieces too, to visualize what I want myself and others to feel when they read my poem. I like to think of the type of color I want to show with my words, its softness or sharpness, the depth of the color, and how can I construct the words around it to sound fluid or sharp to enhance that color. Thinking about things like colors, then help me build the narrative I want to be contained inside my poem. Along with the rest of what’s going on I construct the words meaningfully, create line breaks to control the pacing of the piece, and I’ve learned to manipulate structure to do my bidding. Poetry is very flexible. I am in love with traditional looking poems, but also the prose poem. Poems have many designs and costumes to wear, as within prose poems it can mimic the reading style one takes on when reading normal prose, but syntax doesn’t have to be confined to conventional methods. One doesn’t have to build an actual story but have a fluid contemplation in that form. It can stabilize a moment. Regardless though, at the end of the day, the work is still poetry, and it’s working on undressing itself and to give the reader permission, to uncloak themselves too, to their own vulnerabilities to expose some type of truth at the end. I may have started out a fiction writer, but I am an equally strong and dedicated poet. Poetry has aided me in exposing the truths I never wanted to confront ever, because in the smaller space you can only run from our minds so much that eventually you have to take the sword to the dragon. -Kiara Ivey, Layout and Design Editor

I love the word “brevity.” It’s quick and sharp but still flows well. It sounds like someone had the guts to let out what they wanted to say. It’s also the word Scholastic’s Art and Writing contest uses to describe flash fiction, and I’d say that’s accurate. Before I got into my fiction “groove,” I struggled with word count. Regardless of the grade level, fiction pieces were supposed to wrap up at around 1,300 words. Usually, I grumbled through the revision process—why do I have to cut so much out? I’m barely exploring my world or my characters. What a waste. I was stuck in description. I didn’t have a complete grasp on descriptive implication, so I just focused on things I considered interesting. For example, several of my freshman pieces mentioned their protagonists’ eyes. Who cares whether they were “seafoam green” or “warm brandy?” Details like that helped visual their physicality more, but interrupted narrative flow. I think I can chalk this up to my hesitance to go deeper. Until very recently, I avoided exploring my inner fears and insecurities in writing. I was scared of opening still-fresh wounds, so I hid behind flowing, unimportant images. Even when I had my first lesson and portfolio in flash fiction, I still fell back on layered-but-shallow imagery. It didn’t work well, at first. The limit was 1,000 words, and my first draft landed at 989. It was below, but it personally wasn’t enough. I wanted—at the very least—to tell something which I felt didn’t suffer under word count. The result was something I was proud of then, sophomore year, and still see the significance of now. To break my trend of unfocused description (and, conversely, protagonists unwillingly distant from the reader), I limited character interactions to just the protagonist and his forbidden boy band love (go ahead, laugh). This was a significant step for me because I usually had the central character of my pieces interact with everyone mentioned. This limitation emphasized the most immediate, important “relationship” in the story. I also cut out all description that wasn’t observed by the protagonist himself, to ensure that every image developed an aspect of the setting, the conflict, and his character. Ironically, his homoerotic conflict intertwined with insecurity about his boring brown eyes, compared to the colors he sees in his band mates’ own. At the very least, I explored aspects of my own insecurities. I applaud myself. Then sophomore year ended. When I started writing fiction again—in junior year—I felt myself regressing. My images didn’t interrupt anything. In fact, they usually contributed to development. However, all my stories were “safe.” Once again, they lacked personal truth. I look back on them now, and they are well-crafted, but when I compare them to my recent works, I’m not as emotionally affected. That’s why I love flash fiction now. The form still expects masterful handling of craft, but in a way that gets down to an intimate immediacy. As a senior, I’ve written strong pieces that all—unconsciously—fall under 1,000 words. It’s this trend that helped me realize just how important flash fiction is to me. It emphasizes a direct approach, but not one that’s blunt. There’s still plenty of room for descriptive implication and explorations of plot, character, and setting. The brevity is there, and lets me be myself in writing fiction. A prompt, to help others grasp the importance of flash fiction: Explore the inner tension of a character as they carry out a single, pivotal action relating to the conflict. -Seth Gozar, Fiction Editor

When I was first introduced to the magical realism genre, I thought it was strange and knew right away that I wouldn’t like it. However, after studying it for a few weeks in my creative writing class, and eventually writing my own story within the genre’s definition, it became one of my favorite things to write about. I love the idea of being able to take a cliché topic and make it original in its own world. At first I only expected the genre to be about magical occurrences and unusual reactions. However, with the first story I read in my class, “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” by Gabriel García Márquez, I knew that this genre wasn’t what I thought it was going to turn out to be. This story does more than just show a moment in which a community is blessed by the presence of an angel, but branches off into many deeper meanings. For instance, the story shows greed and the lust for power that leads a family to treat a dying man (or angel) as though he is an object to be profited off of. After I read that story, I began to research and read more because of how interested I was. I don’t know exactly what it was that changed my mind on how much I enjoy writing this genre, but something clicked my interest and hasn’t let go. When I was assigned my first magical realism story, I racked my brain trying to think of a unique idea that I could make interesting. I ended up writing a short story about a man grieving over the loss of his wife after she dies in a car accident. On his way home from visiting her grave one evening, she appears as a “ghost”, following and speaking to him because she thinks he can’t head her. She talks to him throughout the course of the night until eventually deciding it’s unhealthy for her to stick around and ramble on when he can’t even hear her. Before she has the chance to leave, he pulls her into his arms and embraces her, without questioning how she’s alive they continue to live their life together as if her accident had never happened. After revising this one, I came up with ideas for more stories that I could possibly write in the future. It’s been a while, now, since I’ve sat down to write a magical realism story. However, the ideas and techniques are still heavily present in the other things that I write, whether it be unusual events and warped senses of time, or just that I’ve morphed some of my ideas into other genres too. Someday soon, I hope that I can find the time to sit down and write a new magical realism story, whether it’s an idea I’ve already thought of, a completely new idea, or even just a revision of an older story. -Kinley Dozier, Web Editor

It’s more than a little painful to read my old work, and by old, I mean both the stuff I wrote four years ago and what I wrote four days ago. It’s a constant process of asking, “What in God’s name was I thinking?” and having no response. And while this process does cause me to cringe, it also allows me to see how much I’ve moved forward in my work, how far I’ve come and how much further I can go. The general style of my writing has actually remained the same; I have always stayed simplistic in diction, but gotten caught up in the images of what I describe, almost like I’m writing poetry into my fiction. I think the stagnancy behind this is because that’s just the way that I write. I can alter this style after I bust out a first draft, but, to me, a story always starts out bare, aside from its visual aspects. I will admit that a great shift within my writing is that I have gained the ability to shed excessive images that mean nothing in terms of intention, though I still catch myself slipping up sometimes. Probably the most significant change that I’ve found within my writing is that, in the midst of last year, I decided to start writing weird things. People tell you to write what you know because otherwise you’re stuck with conjecture. From my experience, that advice is total crap. I took familiar subjects and shoved them into strange situations: a girl stranded with her recently introduced half-brother in a desert, a boy stumbling across a body on a golf course, a how-to guide on communication with lost loved ones. One of my major influences in writing all this partial-nonsense comes from the book Stories You Can’t Unread by Chuck Palahniuk, the author of Fight Club. The former is a collection of short stories that are completely submerged in the strange and surreal, and within these weird circumstances, I found that I was entirely interested in what the speakers had to say. I wanted to translate this interest to my own writing, so I started the process of delving into the wild, stuff that I plain hadn’t seen written before. For example, everyone has read a story about a failing marriage, but what about a failing marriage following an accident in which the wife was struck by lightning? Through this type of exploration, I found myself more intrigued and interested in what each story has to offer; once I was hooked in writing the story and had a healthy interest in its direction, the readers also tended to gain more of an interest. I realized that I had to care about what I wrote in order for anyone else to care. So, my ultimate advice for that story that is lurking in a file somewhere, beaten down to the bones, is to make yourself interested in it again. Introduce a sick dog into the mix. Throw some aliens in. Have fun! -Logan Monds, Social Media Editor

Unlike many of my peers in the Creative Writing department, I have only been at Douglas Anderson for two years. Also unlike many of my peers, I didn’t attend Lavilla before applying to DA. However, I did write, and it was something that I held very dear to my heart. I hadn’t seriously written anything creative for years when I started building my audition portfolio. The last time I sat down to write was probably fifth grade, and it was almost certainly a poem about some boy I liked, or something inspired by Edgar Allen Poe - long story short, it was crappy and weird and immature. But there’s value in those pieces, a small tinge of brightness amongst the darkness of the fifth grade psyche, I guess you could say. However, fifth grade wasn’t my earliest writing; instead, it was sort of a middle ground. I grew up living with my grandparents and it wasn’t the greatest of arrangements. I had intense depression and anger issues and so I often found solace in colorful $5 journals that could be bought at Wal-Mart or Target. That was where I let myself go - I wrote hateful, yet situationally appropriate notes to my grandparents, sad little musings about missing my mother, video game cheats, little daily scorecards that I could go back and laugh at later. No matter what I wrote, it helped me get a decent way toward catharsis, and no matter the small steps I had taken, at least I had walked some on those days. From here, I gained an intense interest in reading - fantasies like Harry Potter and Dragon Rider, books about dogs and princesses - basically anything I could get my hands on. And from this love of reading, a love of escaping real life, writing came around. In fifth grade I started reading Poe and writing those angst-ridden fifth grade poems, and then middle school hit, soon enough, and in seventh grade, the trajectory of my writing life changed. Our teacher signed us up to do an essay contest on Korean folktales. I ended up being chosen as one of 10 or so people to be submitted as finalists from our class. And while I didn’t win, I still remember thinking that, hey, maybe this is something I’m good at. Maybe I even like it a little bit. Maybe. While these writings were often superficial, or too blunt to be read by someone else without the solid suggestion of therapy, they all were stepping stones in my road to DA. When I got to the writing program, I was still stuck in that stiff, “make yourself look good” mode of writing, especially in Junior Fiction - I had never really written fiction before, and I was no Christopher Paolini, so I was lost in a world of trying to fake it. But I didn’t make it until I started writing about my family again, writing about things that mattered. This growth happened hugely in Junior Poetry, where I began to be okay, once again, with being blunt and emotional. And so all of my writing since has been for me, which may be selfish, but as Laurie Ann Guerrero said, “I’m working through my [crap].” -Mackenzie Steele, Co-Art Editor

The earliest thing I remember writing and feeling distinctly attached to was a haiku I had written in the third grade about a panda that knits. Our class was learning about Japanese culture and each day of the week was revolving around some different aspect of the culture (food, kanji, etc). This was the first time I thoughtfully created a piece. I mean, I was in the first grade, and the subject matter wasn’t of course complex or earth shattering but I remember feeling good fitting into the syllable count, clapping out the sounds, and digging into my brain for the right words. In elementary school I recall writing a lot about animals. I wrote poems about tigers and even a research paper about them in the second grade. I was compelled nature which makes sense as back then, watching Animal Planet and any documentary on the Discovery Channel was something I’d spent many weekends doing with my granddaddy. This carried into middle school, but I started also writing about things like race, and interpersonal relationships. I find it interesting now, as I’ve noticed that who I am as a writer, revolved a lot around images that pull from nature. Last year, one of the more angry and intense poems I created was a political commentary on the state of the environment. When I write about race, I find myself gravitating towards earthy, strong, rich images as for the African American community, we are connected to the roots of the country, through blood and through innovation. In a recent poem I’ve written about in an effort for self-exploration, I remember I created a scene with a wedding and images of butterflies and the jungle were the things I flushed out. I never thought about it, but it’s interesting that I’ve been using the natural world so long for inspiration. I will say, in nature pandas aren’t exactly keen on knitting, but I think my point is made. I also in my writing, use a lot of colors to imply what I want to say. I notice that I use greens, blue, and yellows a lot. Colors that you immediately think of foliage, water, and light. I think the reason I’ve always been attracted to nature in my writing, is because it always felt so much bigger than me and endless. Watching Meerkat Manor, and penguins migrate across the frozen worlds I know nothing of felt more out of this world to me than fairy tales or whatever. I notice that I subconsciously revert back to these tendencies even if I don’t mean it. Of course, the way I weave in nature inspired metaphors and images are more meaningful and are way less literal than reports on tigers or the poems I created in third grade about the beach. It’s more like in my poems about recalling childhood, the imagery of the sky and the metaphors of mountains always somehow come back to emphasizing a moment, and how small yet significant I felt in them or about the humanity and morality that is present in all of us. -Kiara Ivey, Layout and Design Editor

Just thinking about my earliest writing elicits cringes and pained contortions from secondhand embarrassment. I remember being so proud of my audition portfolio, thought I was the next writer with God-given talent discovered at a young age. Perhaps immediate scoffs when reading my earliest writing isn’t the best reaction because that embarrassment and shame I feel when reading my clumsy prose and cliché poetry lets me know that I have evolved as a writer. Early in my writing career, I believed fiction was completely divorced from the writer and poetry was always angry spoken word or dramatic Edgar Allen Poe rhyme. I didn’t understand that my personal truth could come into play with either of these genres because creative nonfiction itself was a genre and that’s only where I could let the reader know about my life. The result of trying to keep my prose and poetry sterile, free of personal information, was something safe and cliché, showing technical promise but no real depth. It was only after taking a speech/oral interpretation class I realized that one’s personality and experiences can come into play with poetry and by extension, fiction. That class gave me permission to take a published poem and make it my own with stylistic choices and intonation and most of all, relate to it, live inside the piece, let it live inside me for a while. With this revelation and newfound confidence under my belt, my writing began improving. I began writing more consciously about things I was passionate about. My fiction held more clues to my personal life and my poetry became distinguished from usual teen poetry as I learned to become more comfortable in my skin. Oral interpretation broke my shell, and an advanced poetry class during my junior year gave me permission to ooze out. Junior poetry class forced me to be naked in front of my peers in a way normal critique groups didn’t- I now had to write from very personal places without the guise of fiction protecting me. My peers had to read the details about my life I couldn’t even previously utter, and then critique it, tell me what wasn’t working, but also, what was working, what they were interested in. Having this renewed confidence and nakedness oral interpretation class gave me, I’m now learning how to make my fiction as personal as my poetry. I’m writing thematically about things I never would’ve even given the time of day before and my voice as a writer has become infinitely stronger because of this. Diction and syntax that is unique to me has emerged. Fictionalizing my personal truth, my heart beating and bleeding on the page, is a process I’m still learning to create fiction that is still uniquely my own but easier to write about. Once I got a taste of personal truth permission, it was all I could write about, so much so my prose would veer into creative nonfiction, my poetry a diary, so now I’m reeling it back in and being more selective with my personal truth. My earliest writing was good for my age, but now it has improved in strides I’d never believed to be possible, and it’s still improving. -Gabriella Christenson, Poetry Editor

I started writing in first grade because it was fun. I can recall several times where my teacher would push back the beginning of Writers’ Workshop because the class preferred free time. I’d be the only one reminding her that writing time should’ve already started, and whoever was close enough to hear my nagging would groan and spread the news. The earliest pieces I wrote were memoirs because I didn’t know how to do anything else. For most of first grade, I wrote about the trip to the Philippines I had the summer before. In a way that parallels youth, I see these pieces as untainted. Although my first work focused on eating at a Filipino McDonald’s (and enjoying spaghetti and chicken with rice) while a beggar stared from the other side of my family’s window seat, I didn’t know much to poverty. Instead my memoir focused on the uncomfortable experienced of being watched by a filthy man, and my mother’s decision to give him some money. As I write this, I’m actually remembering his appearance again, and how heavy his eyes were. The skin around them swelled—muscle and crust layered with dumi. Spots decorated his wrinkles, and what shocked me most then and now is that his eyes were blue. Beneath the ragged hair and stained, tattered cloths, he was mestizo. Mixed people were especially desirable in the Philippines (not unlike other Asian countries), yet here he was, desperate enough to stare without shame. It’s this type of disconnect and grotesque imagery that I feel carries my fiction today. Both fiction pieces I’ve written so far this year play with distance and disgust. The latest, “Dinuguan,” focuses on a woman with heart cancer, who—in increasing desperation—buys pork blood, spills it, and licks it off the sidewalk. That’s the gist of it. Trust me when I say it’s a lot deeper. In particular, this piece uses heavy description of the pork blood (the main ingredient of the Filipino delicacy the piece is named after) to convey the hopelessness the woman refuses to accept. For example—“Cold slips through her lips—a coagulated mass sinks between teeth and spreads bitter, salty pangs over her tongue. Its grittiness sinks into her throat. She coughs ragged, old and fresh blood foaming together.” I’ve noticed that both my first and most recent piece focus on my heritage, which is interesting. In all honesty, after the memoirs of elementary school, I didn’t revisit my heritage until my ninth grade personal essays. And even then, I didn’t utilize it again until this year. It’s actually my mission to use more personal details in my pieces this year. I’ve got a good grasp on emoting through imagery and diction, and that extra layer of vulnerability will leave a bigger emotional punch from writer to reader. -Seth Gozar, Fiction Editor

When trying to learn about the earliest civilizations, archeologists look to cave paintings as clues to what humans used to be like and how we have evolved. If you think about it, all of the writing in the world creates an entire body of work that represents our society’s evolution of thoughts, feelings, inventions, politics, culture, etc. I think a writer’s work from the time they are a child often does the same. The earliest poem I have a memory of goes like this, “I love whales painting there nails. They look so nice in there long tails. They are so younge they don’t like mails. And they love good sales.” Note the spelling of “there”, younge”, and “mails”. The second memory I have of writing was a narrative story in fourth grade about my dog Keiser that died when I was four. It was a very vivid moment for a young girl and it made its way into my writing a lot. There are obvious advancements in my writing like spelling, phrasing, diction, syntax, and imagery, but aside from that I don’t think the topics of my writing have changed a whole lot. In my fiction, my pieces stem from my own life and personal truths that I need to explore through fiction in order to process and make sense of on my own. I still really enjoy writing things like creative non-fiction, so my piece about my dog Keiser isn’t that far off from something I would write now. It would be a lot more subtly tied to my life and it would of course be more descriptive and have more of an emotional arc and message, but the root would still be that it’s a story about my life that changed me in some way that I needed to express through my love of words. Death is something I often explore in my work. Religion and dealing with death and how those connect are something I struggle with processing and making sense of and writing it out through other characters is sometimes the easiest way to deal with it. I recently wrote a fiction piece loosely tied to my extended family and all the issues we seem to have with each other. When first writing out the piece, I remained angry at that side of my family that was causing all this drama and didn’t feel the need to work to forgive them, but through the course of revising the piece, I grew to understand the characters I created as individual human beings that had made mistakes and were worthy of small acts of forgiveness. I didn’t have to let them in completely, but I could open myself up in slight amounts. My poetry is also almost always rooted in my personal experiences. While I have no encounters with whales that I can truthfully write about, nature is something I often incorporate into my poetry. One of my favorite pieces I’ve written was a coming of age poem centered on how my family and I used to spend our free time going to the beach and hunting for sharks' teeth. If you were to line up all of my work from the time I was a child, you would see an illustration of my life up to this point. You would see my initial love of nature, particularly whales, then my first encounters with death, dealing with family issues, coming of age, and they will continue to follow my life from the big moments, like grieving, to the small moments, like just finding beauty in a creature. As a senior, I am moving towards college and deciding my future. I want to be a pediatric physical therapist and I only hope my writing will be able to follow me and illustrate the next stages of my life. -Madison Dorsey, Community Engagement

The first poem I ever wrote still hangs on my grandmother’s wall. I found it there a few weekends ago, while staying in her guestroom. “Tiger Eye Sun” is the title, printed in a special font on computer paper. I wrote it in a public library workshop when I was six. I remember the adults clapping when I finished reading it out loud. I loved twisting the images of rocks, and playing with personification, to describe something to simple and routine as the sun. I was able to take something I thought was familiar, and show it in a different way. This made me want to be a writer. The poem is, of course, full of the things expected of six year old writers. It doesn’t have images, so much as mentions, and the intent, if I ever had one, is quite clouded. But that doesn’t matter. If writing this piece made me want to stick with the craft, then it means something, in all its kindergarten glory. Writing stayed my favorite subject in school, including many short stories, poems, and a few “novels” comprised of about thirty pages each. Still, I had no way of knowing if what I tried was any good--as good as an elementary school writer can be--until the seventh grade. That Christmas, I entered and won a Christmas story competition for the local newspaper. My piece was printed that holiday for the city to read. I was elated, and decided to keep on writing. Now, I write every day, I’m in classes, learning the mechanics of line breaks and character development. Looking back on my old writing makes me cringe. But, like something really horrific on television, I can’t help but look. What’s interesting isn’t so much the ways I’ve failed at communicating a story, it’s the ways I’ve succeeded without realizing it. Until high school, I didn’t think to make a distinction between summary and scene. They were all parts of a story to me. And still, that Christmas story, has managed to establish a backstory, then lift the character into a scene, then jump back again to transition or give context. I wondered, at first, if there was something intuitive to writing. But now, I don’t think so. If writing could be based purely on intuition, then there would be no need for teaching it. Instead, I was reminded of what my teachers, and the professional writers I’ve seen, have all said: read, read, read. My whole life has been partially consumed by books. My mother and father read to me at night. I checked out audio cassettes of the Harry Potter series and Beverly Clearly. I buzzed through the books at school. I learned how to write the basics of a story because I read. So, if I could learn so much by reading, why is it that studying creative writing is still so important? Studying creative writing is not a “learning how to write”. A person can write without instruction. My teachers, instead, have showed me why choices are made, and what choices. Just reading only shows you the final product. A poetry class calls to attention everything that was put in, and everything that isn’t said. My teachers could take the words, which I might have appreciated on my own, and turn them into a whole working structure. Since high school, I’ve started to learn how to make choices, what counts. I can look at writing not just through my emotional response, but by the subtle pointers driving that emotion. My early writings had no choices. I didn’t think when I wrote, I just saw something in my mind and recorded it. Like a kid who sees the prettiness of a flower. Now, I come across an idea, and I see it for the Fibonacci-driven fractal that it is: infinite, up to me to realize what should be shown, and what should influence the reader from the inside. -Ana Shaw, Junior Editor in Chief #TigerEyeSun #intent #Craft #patterns #hidden #scene #poems #summary