I feel the need to write a preface to my blog—though I have no idea if that’s the kind of thing everyone does, being as unfamiliar as I am with the blogging experience—mostly because as I’m about to make my first big post grad move, I am doing the first real bit of writing I’ve done in a while; and the writer in me feels a preface is the best way to begin. Writer Me also feels honesty is the best policy, so, full disclosure, I’m not the most technologically inclined person, and beyond email, Pandora, Google, Facebook I don’t spend a ton of time exploring the vast interwebs. I haven’t read a lot of blogs other than movie reviews, bitchy celebrity gossip or links sent by friends or “Stumbled” upon, so my default blog format is actually putting my college degree to good use.
Now maybe for the few of you (of the few of you) reading, it’s odd that I haven’t written anything, knowing I focused my English studies in creative writing. For me, it’s odd because the first time I have felt inspired in awhile, I’m going the non-fiction route. In school I always made fiction my first choice, I think primarily because I always loved stories. I probably read more as a kid than I do now. My mom has a collection of all our childhood keepsakes from school, and among the finger-painting and art class crafts, my pile has short stories, some from like the fourth or fifth grade. Creating my own characters and plot, writing dialogue, playing out scenes in my head—it was fun because I loved actually participating in my deep interest in books and movies. But for as much as I always loved making up stories, my first Article and Essay workshop was, in hindsight, a turning point in how I approached fiction. After a few semesters of fiction centered writing, I come back in January and suddenly have the coolest dude (Cooper!) teaching me creative non-fiction. Two assignments: an expose and a memoir, specific to one time/event in our lives so we didn’t drive him to suicide with our autobiographies. Attempting my memoir, almost as if I had to get it off my chest, I succinctly chronicled my family through my dad’s first deployment it the effect it had on us left at home, and the subsequent political/religious disconnect between my father and I as the years went on—again, for a few of you, you know, and may have even witnessed first-hand a good Harper father/daughter ideological word brawl, complete with F-bombs. I just rolled with what was coming out even though, at some points I thought, Holy shit, I’m about to submit a witty diary entry for a PhD candidate and 20 classmates—almost all girls, who almost all wrote about their boyfriend issues—what the hell am I doing? Do I think I’m Carrie Bradshaw or something, being honest about religion and sex and complicated familial relationships? Suffice to say, I was sweating balls right before workshop, but my teacher actually liked it. I distinctly remember he said, he thought it was going to be a sappy cliché military family saga, but was pleasantly surprised, and also, that my writing sounded like I was 30, which I wasn’t really sure was good or bad.
I continued to switch between fiction and non-fiction every semester until I concluded my undergrad with Bob Butler’s fiction workshop. Now, I won’t say anything disparaging about him, because he’s brilliant and he has a fucking Pulitzer Prize, but that class was the first time fiction was not fun. A lot of students love him and I get why, but I was so sick of digging into my white hot center in the most human way I could and putting it all into 500 words or less just to be told there was no real yearning and, therefore, I should put it in a proverbial drawer and never look at it again. All that being conscious of my subconscious never felt as natural as when I just sat and wrote something I wanted to just because.
Then recently, when I decided to start blogging (for the record, I hate that verb, the same way I hate ‘tweeting’) about my upcoming experience teaching in Mexico, the writer in me drifted back to the last time I’d written something I felt really proud of and that was by far, my most well-received piece in any workshop. A flash fiction exercise for the awesome Elizabeth Stuckey-French, we had to imitate Jayne Anne Phillips’ Wedding Picture, in which she depicts a deeper story from a photo taken at her parents’ 1940s wedding. My parents’ wedding picture has been on the same shelf of my house as long as I can remember, my young mother and father in all their 80s glory, so I know it well, just as I know the struggles they’ve endured over the years. The day we work shopped my story, one guy actually said he thought it was better than the Phillips’ example—the writer in my was jumping up and down but trying not to seem so eager for validation. And now I’ve come back to my keyboard after fiction left a bitter taste in my mouth right before graduating, leaving me wondering if what I’d just spent years doing was even what I wanted to do. To tell the truth, I’m still not sure what the hell I actually want to do with my life—after all, I am spending 4 months teaching elementary English to Mexican kids after months of being unemployed—so I’m taking it one day at a time for now. But when I thought about this Wedding Picture exercise, I realized my favorite and, I suppose, best story, was actually a true one.
So since I feel like something worth writing about is finally happening, I will blog, killing two birds with one stone kind of thing if you will. Though I guess it’s obvious I do, and will, often break off into more personal tangents as I experience Tehuacan and my first real job (cue anxiety), and I, not being a seasoned blogger, warn that I could very well slip into some sad, foreigner in a foreign land, homesick kind of mood at some point, I thought it best to write a preface (but I swear I’ll try to avoid that.) In any case, I’m excited for what’s to come in the next few weeks and glad to be writing about something I care about again. Really, it’s cathartic, and if there’s one thing I need after months of living at home, missing friends and sinking further and further into this quarter-life crisis, post grad depression hole, it’s to get all this shit out of my head. I’ve considered how people unload all their anxieties and neuroses to therapists probably because they just need someone to listen, get it all out to. And while the jury is still out as to whether I might actually benefit from therapy, this writing thing I majored in, well, it’s free. And turns out, pretty fun.
