1. Coming Home After Your First Day as a College Commuter

2. Self Portrait With a Volcano and a Backpack Full of Books

3. Flying an Airplane over the Kenai Peninsula

4. First Mission in the First World War

5. The Golden Revenge of Hector Bull

     Coming into this semester, I did not take writing poetry very seriously. I had only used it as a way to release confined emotions or to clear my mind at the end of a day. I didn't care about abstractions or clichés, and I certainly hadn't considered writing poetry to share an experience with others. The poetry unit showed me that poetry can be more than an outlet; that it can be a powerful tool to communicate an experience, truth, or the Gospel. More specifically, I learned how to spot abstractions and cliches and replace them with more concrete descriptions that one could easily picture in their mind’s eye and and with comparisons or images I didn’t remember having heard before. The writers’ series events introduced me to how people can use poetry to convey experiences to others who come from another culture, and I was amazed at how Abdurraqib and Childress were able to use the same tools to convey completely different experiences as humans. That experience showed me how poetry can be used to generate cross-cultural communication that may produce empathy and understanding between people who are opposing ends of social spectra.

Through the revision process, I learned that when I go into a work, what I think it’s going to be about and what the piece actually ends up being about can be very different. For example, when I wrote my poem about flying, I originally wanted to try and capture my experience of doing something I really enjoy on the same day that I learned of a family tragedy. I wanted to express conflicting imagery and emotions, but the ways I went about it didn’t really work, trivializing the tragic and making it seem trite rather than traumatic. The poem ultimately landed on just depicting what it’s like to fly a single-engine aircraft over a small part of Alaska.

From the fiction writing portion of the class, I learned a little of how to write characters with whom I have nothing in common. In most of my work, I can relate on some level with the narrator or one of the main characters. In The Golden Revenge of Hector Bull, however, I ventured far from my own suburban existence and drew on my rural relatives lifestyles and learned that as long as I had some kind of understanding, I could use it in my writing. I also learned to develop a story by asking questions. Actually, that’s the entire reason The Golden Revenge of Hector Bull came into existence. One of the reading responses required me to write a grammatically correct sentence of eighty words without relying on semi-colons. In this sentence, I made a simile comparing heavy rainfall to corn cascading out of holes in the side of a silo. Then I began asking questions. Why were there holes in the silo? Who put them there? As I saw the scene in my mind’s eye, I realized a farmer had put the holes there because he was drunk and ran into the silo with a combine. Why was he drunk? He was grieving for his favorite cow that his wife sold. Why did his wife sell the cow? Well, he was paying more attention to his cow than his kids, so his wife got mad. The story unfolded as I asked more questions and wrote, answering those questions and crafting their story.

The poetry in this portfolio draws on some of my experiences - both real and imagined. Self Portrait With a Volcano and a Backpack Full of Books actually did come from a dream I had a couple of days before it was my turn to workshop a poem in class. The day before the workshop, I need a poem, and in order to write one, I needed a subject or a story to tell - one that would be interesting enough to keep the attention of my classmates for fifteen minutes. The volcano dream was perfect; it pokes fun at and critiques a fatal flaw of bibliophiles (whose less academic classmates love to tease), it presented plentiful opportunities for practicing my similes, and it’s not every day one gets to read a poem featuring a volcano. Initially, I had intended the poem to be hyperbolic in a somewhat humorous way, but the tone of the poem didn’t lend itself to that, so I stuck with building up to the tragic and ironic end. Flying an Airplane over the Kenai Peninsula depicts exactly what the title states and comes from an actual experience I had while on a family vacation in Alaska. Coming Home After Your First Day as a College Commuter reads like one really inconvenient day. Initially, I tried using each of these images to illustrate the feeling of frustration that comes with losing someone and the grief that comes with it, but it was heavy without being profound and worked better as—pardon the cliché—a comedy of errors.

I have already introduced half of the fiction by explaining the formation of The Golden Revenge of Hector Bull. The other fiction scene, First Mission in the First World War is actually fanfiction for a point-and-click adventure computer game I played a little too much in high school. In the game, the player is Agent Kara, an intelligence worker for the Allies tasked with tracking down a German scientist that disappeared in the middle of his groundbreaking research. The player/agent tracks the scientist and his work from his house in Bavaria, through Germany and France all the way to Lisbon, Portugal. On the way, she discovers how the nature of his research could affect the outcome of the war with its advanced technology and surmounts various obstacles (including escaping capture and infiltrating an enemy blockade) to prevent German forces from exploiting the scientist’s research any further. The game gives Agent Kara no backstory, so the first version of my opening scene for this story read like a scene from an action novel, neglecting the main character as a person. The final revision takes Kara and adds dimension to her, giving her ambitions, anxieties, and a bit of paranoia that may be characteristic of a young agent wanting to prove herself. These stories were exercises in writing characters and situations outside the realm of my experience. I hope you enjoy reading them as I enjoyed writing them. Thank you.

    You burst through the front door and your

golden retriever ignores you. The carton

of your favorite ice cream has only half

a bite left. You pour a bowl of cereal, only

to remember that you’re fresh out of milk.

As you shower, the bottle of shampoo

slips through your fingers, landing like an

Olympic gymnast onto your pinky toe. You

put on your favorite t-shirt only to get stuck

halfway through it. It must have shrunk

in the wash. As you hang up fresh laundry,  

wire hangers refuse to untangle. Reaching

the bottom of the stairs, your stomach flips

as your face hits the floor - you missed one.

Filling up your gas tank, you glance across

the street and discover they have it cheaper.

You reach for your keys only to spy them

fallen on the driver's seat: locked in your car.