When I started to consider the ways I have evolved as a writer, I was prepared to look back on past work and feel enormous embarrassment. I fully expected to find a lack of personal voice or topics chosen to satiate a professor but which had little or no value to me personally. What I found was the opposite, and that was a pleasant surprise. In my Directed Self Placement essay was an abundance of personal voice; from a creative writing class I found a forgotten sonnet about how irate I was at being forced to write a sonnet (it began: 

 

           “Do you not think this task is shit?

            Pentameter is simply spite

            I would prefer my wrists to slit

            than ten more lines to fouly write”

 

…which I actually did read aloud in class); and in less cheeky moments I manipulated general prompts into very personally meaningful responses. So if all this time I have been unabashedly bold, I started to wonder how I really had changed—where was the precipitous moment when I shifted from elementary amateur to present day proficient? And I had to take one step further back to find the answer.

 

In high school AP English, I received an assignment that was strikingly similar to the Capstone project that I am creating now. My teacher Chris Cronin called it the iSearch (a title which he was immensely proud of, iPhones being relatively new at the time). Cronin urged us, “Think of this not as the paper you have to write; think of it as the paper you need to write.” This was met by a lot of eye rolls from seniors who were desperate to just be done already. But I really took those instructions to heart. A lot of my classmates picked to write about family histories, try their hands at short stories, explore photography, or foray into film making and write about the experience. Starting out, I didn’t expect that this project would be anything momentous; I just wanted to test out my inner David Sedaris with some creative non-fiction where I could give myself an excuse to be as sassy as I pleased. My story was going to be about the desperately pathetic sex “education” program at my Christian elementary school (if you’re familiar with religious based or abstinence only programs and their usual lack of any valuable, useful, or even remotely informative content, you understand my hesitancy to truly call it an educational program). But the more I wrote the more strongly I felt pulled to talk about it. The deeper I delved, the more personal it got—the more I needed to write this essay.

 

In the end, it turned into a twenty-five page story titled “A Sexy, Little Catch-22” where I explained with a touch of comedy the horrific inadequacy of the sex education I—and a lot of other students—received in elementary school, how it utterly failed to prepare me for the double standards on sex and virginity I would face in public high school (and in the rest of the world forever afterwards), and how those double standards and the fear they inflicted made me a very judgmental little girl—until the tables got turned on me. Ultimately it was the story of how I had my heart broken the summer I turned seventeen, lost my virginity to an opportunistic ass during a mess of depression and anxiety, and almost lost my best friend over my enormous fear of her judgment should I tell her what had happened (this, you may have guessed, was not a healthy time in my life). It wasn’t the paper my AP teacher was expecting a seventeen year old to turn in. It was visceral and to this day is probably the most emotionally difficult thing I have ever put to paper (not to mention have graded). It was hard to be honest and face the ugly things in my past. But it was what I needed to write, and the honesty was surprisingly liberating. When my peers read it, they reacted with more feeling than they did to any of the essays on “forays into black and white photography.” There were tears (mostly from young women who faced that same catch-22 in their own way), nods of understanding, and chuckles at just how true they found it. Even if it didn’t resonate personally, my peers deemed it honest. That was the clearest demarcation of what we’ll call my modern writing.

 

                                  After that point, I stopped looking for permission to write from my own perspective—to own the filter that I necessarily introduce as an author because it was that perspective and insertion of personal experience that made my writing stand out. Once I got over the fear of writing what was real and putting it out there for other people to react to and judge, I was never again really timid in my writing (which you may have guessed from the excerpt of my sonnet above) and I lost patience with writing bull I didn’t care about. That’s not to say I didn’t still write plenty of essays that I don’t totally remember and which were lacking in the visceral truth department. For the most part though, I would take the big writing prompts, read them over, and then go to the gym. I’d let the prompt roll around in the back of my mind while I sweat out the stress I was working to control (as opposed to seventeen-year-old me, I now have much better ways to handle anxiety and the like). Usually there would be a moment mid cardio when it would hit me: the tact I could take to answer the prompt in a way I actually, personally knew how to speak to with zero bull. Just like that, another essay was born. The longer I practiced, the easier this process got.

 

The further I moved into my collegiate career, however, the more that process entailed coming to grips with just how much I didn’t know. During the last four years of peer editing, I was confronted by how sincerely I disliked the papers and essays that went on ad nauseam presuming that, “My was of seeing is surely the only way.” I found that the authors who never considered the limitations of their own perspectives produced (at least in me) more retaliation than discussion and often set their readers’ bull-shit-meters pinging. I’m not innocent of this offense, I’m sure. However, the aggravation that kind of writing elicited in me produced a powerful desire to avoid that trap and to come across as unflinchingly honest—about my perspective and the limitations thereof.

 

For example, I took a class my sophomore year of college called Introduction to Literary Studies taught by Professor Alex Beringer (who has since left UM for other opportunities). In his class, we read a novel called The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz, a lot of which deals with the diaspora experienced by Dominican communities living inside the US. I am a white, middle class female who lives (and always has lived) in America. I have never in my life felt the effects of diaspora, and I really didn’t want to spend seven pages writing about how diaspora affects a person when I have no honest, firsthand knowledge of it. I would have felt like a liar, pimping out Junot Díaz’s knowledge for the benefit of my own grade. So I picked a different path: I wrote about it from a gender hegemony point of view. I wrote about the “various ways [in which] the main characters of Junot Díaz’s novel exemplify adherence to, deviation from, and crafty utilizations of hegemonic sexuality” (Wilson, “Hegemony in Oscar Wao: Sexualization as a Means of Control from Within”).

I rejected the idea that even within a relatively narrow prompt I couldn’t find a way to speak from what I know—

and as a woman in this great big world I know a thing or two about gender hegemony. You might even

call me an expert given my twenty-five-page iSearch on the topic. The result was an essay I was

passionate about writing and which I am—even two years later—exceedingly proud of.

 

Ultimately I would use that essay for the re-purposing and re-mediation projects in Writing 220

—the gateway course for the Minor in Writing. There I talked less about the novel and more

about the gender hegemony—this time with a focus not just on the avenues that exist for

hurt and subjugation but the avenues that have been blasted open for rebellion and the

incredible women leading the charge at the front lines (here’s looking at you, Hillary). 

 

Even with the driest assignments, I tried to find a way to twist the prompt so I could

write in terms of something I had experienced. Often that meant days mulling over

a topic, but inevitably there was euphoria in the eureka moment when I had my answer.

The result is that I never have to fain interest, which always works to my advantage

considering how in this day of information overload the average person’s bull shit meter

is quite a finely tuned instrument.

 

Now coming to the end of four years of higher education, my progression as a writer has led me

to own the set of eyes through which I see but also to recognize what my eyes will often fail to see.

Ultimately that facilitated the approach I’ve taken in my Capstone Portfolio—the culminating project that is supposed to strut the way I’ve grown up as a writer. If my iSearch was the Capstone of my high school career where I learned to own my experiences and unabashedly use my voice, then my Writing 420 Portfolio deals with how I’ve learned to take other perspectives into account on top of that—to expand on my own limited viewpoint.

 

In my Capstone project, I’m asking a few basic questions: what happens to you when you adventure;

what do experienced adventurers know that I don’t (yet); and how can I make my goal of

extended, solo travel into a reality? To answer, I essentially crowd sourced. I sent

everybody I know an Adventure Survey; I found a mentor who had already done

a lot of the travel I am hoping to do; and I read a lot of non-fiction books written

by adventurers talking about how hard, scary, lonely, fulfilling, and enlightening

their experiences were. I sought out other voices to help myself figure out what

I didn’t know. Coming to the end, I’m so excited to share all the things I’ve learned

both about adventure and about myself in the process.

 

I firmly believe that life is a team sport: you can’t get through it alone...or rather you

can, but the quality of your experience will be infinitely bettered if you open yourself

up to the helping, guiding hands that are out there just waiting for you to reach. I think

that writing is much the same. As I go about putting this project together into a cohesive

whole, I feel so grateful for the teammates who have helped me to this point whether

knowingly (many thanks to my survey respondents and project mentor) or unwittingly

(as with the authors I read along the way).

 

In my Why-I-Write essay from 220, I said that I write for three reasons: “I write because

I love it. I write because […] it teaches me to work around my incapacities, and because

I simply feel that I can” (Wilson, “Why I Write”). Those are still true, but most poignantly

I write because it teaches me to work around my incapacities—it helps me see how much

I can’t see. It helps me reach out. And its spouse—reading—helps me make sense of the

world I live in. So when I consider how I have evolved as a writer, my answer is that I have

come to reject the idea that personal perspective is something to be banished; I reject

the idea that anybody even can eliminate perspective from their writing. Objectivity is

pure invention: it doesn’t exist. Writers write what they see, and what you see depends

enormously on who you are and where you come from. Identity matters. We should

own it; celebrate it; seek out ones different from our own; and we should cherish

it when we find them. As a writer this is what I believe, and the journey getting there

has made my writing more honest, or so I like to think. When I strive to write with

honesty about my perspective, it becomes easier to do away with pretenses, to see

where there might be other perspectives, to seek them out, and make my writing

more rounded. Owning the filter of my identity has helped me carve my own voice

which is rich with past experiences, and which is different from everybody

else’s—no better and no worse.