For me, writing this year was like going back and listening to your favorite album and finally listening to that one song you always skipped and actually enjoying it.
To put this in perspective, throughout the course of high school I’ve always dreaded writing and everything about it. I never found it interesting and I never deemed myself good at it. However things slowly began to change once Mrs.Yuan became my teacher junior year. The passion that she honed for writing slowly began to trickle on to me. Senior year came around and I knew this would be my last chance to fully discover my new found passion, so I decided to take creative writing. This class was a breath of fresh air for me. In my previous English classes, all of our writing prompts were predetermined and had to be analytical. This was the first time I could fully express myself and write about what interested me. One of our first assignments was to read Elizabeth Acevedo’s Rat Ode poem.
Long story short her poem was a clapback at an old college professor who said rats aren’t seen as noble creatures. Mrs. Yuan wanted us to emulate her style, but also make it our own. For this assignment I didn’t write about an animal, this type of creature lingered in my writing throughout the course of the year. Social injustice.
The name of this poem was called Ode to Bre. However it didn’t necessarily talk about Bre and the tragedy that occurred, it spoke more along the lines of being uneducated in topics of this matter and understanding the real concrete facts.
After a workshop, my work received a lot of praise from my peers, however I needed to work on my line breaks and incorporate commas throughout the entire piece instead of just in random parts. I took the feedback and worked on my poem some more and made it into a masterpiece.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pSmR54-D3HEkYPiZXqeeiFpj5kyt6VzKzIY2wCk3gbc/edit
This poem was only the beginning of me finding the potential I had as a writer. Throughout the course of the semester I began to write a lot of little lines of poetry, some in the notes of my phone and others scattered throughout my journal.
Writing slowly became another outlet for me to express myself. A good example of this, came when one night I was in my feels and I just decided to write in my notes. This cleared my head and allowed me to release built up emotions that I never had the chance to release before.
As I stated earlier a constant theme that appeared in my writing was the current social injustice that was occurring in our nation. This kindled another poem I wrote called two faces. This poem was about having two personalities in different settings of your life. One that you display for 24 hours and the other that you display for 8 hours. This poem was geared more towards African American and other minorities.This poem was geared more towards African American and other minorities. I got the name of the poem from an infamous character Two-face from batman. Two-face got stuck in an explosion and ended up having half of his face blown off hence the name Two-face.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dh3uerRnAooh88z26eTN2IB4FsbplifwQwJYNs3Xa7U/edit
I doodles a-couple of times in my journal throughout the course of the year. My biggest doodle was a drawing of my next tattoo.
3 food experiences. This assignment raised some eyebrows in my household, because at the dinner table I had a piece of paper and a pencil right next to my plate of food. If I wanted to get the best experience I had to go all out and I did just that. Mrs. Yuan wanted us to take notes about what sensory details we noticed when eating food. She Had us write about it and later put it in a story. This assignment was inspired by one of the food essays in our beloved reader. In the story she wanted us to give the food a role and to have a deeper meaning than just eating it. In my story the food played a pivotal role in exemplifying the inner battle that I was having with myself.
Draft 1:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VhgkHfESoeQjpBcEWCIv9Y1it_a1b_WPrIlmtEK44_8/edit
Draft 1 was very raw; it had a ton of mistakes, which at some points took away from the story not allowing the reader to fully grasp what I was trying to show. However I fixed and made it a complete story.
Final Draft
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lld3pbXcDS9CjVgVMgE7o2-4ierJFo2s-blR8bJHfCs/edit
Although the journal was quite annoying it grew on you but not in a good almost like a tumor. Just kidding all jokes aside, my journal was my most loyal companion; it held my thoughts and in a way was my own therapist. Even though I rarely went to its session, it was good knowing I had something to debrief to.
Until next time.
“C.j. Out”
P.S.
Have fun in seattle just know you’ll never meet another C.j. And you were by far my most favorite teacher. :)