The body of work I’ve produced during my time at UM is anything but homogenous.  In the past three years I have written countless analytical, thesis-driven papers, a few pieces of short fiction, several personal essays, a handful satirical articles, and even a few recipes.  Through working in a plethora of genres, I cultivated a few writing personae, each of whom best serves a particular sort of prompt or occasion.  Some examples include the academic, who writes about literature with the confidence of a more accomplished scholar without using contractions and absolutely never curses; the creative essayist, who strives to reflect openly and honestly about her past experiences in order to make plain their significance to a larger audience; and the satirist, who unapologetically pokes fun at the world around her with colorful, scathing diction.

 

     I don’t view these or any of the other voices I’ve created as entirely distinct from one another; each one is less an isolated individual and more a component of my writerly identity.  However, when I consider the quality and purpose of the various masks I employ on the page, I do see two distinct categories emerge within the work I’ve produced thus far: the academic/professional and the creative.  The academic/professional category constitutes analytical essays, applications for both various programs within UM and extracurricular jobs, and any other work that requires the use of “critical distance,” and/or a more “professional” tone.  My creative work is, quite simply, everything else: fiction, personal essays, satire, etc.  

However, I do not love these two designations, and it’s worth noting that I struggled to find the proper terms to use to describe these two categories.  My choice for settling on academic/professional and creative is, in part, a reflection of how these two have come to be used in discussions about writing, though I don’t agree with the manner in which they’ve come to be seen as markedly distinct from one another.  Viewing these two as opposites, or mutually exclusive concepts, wrongly suggests that academic writing is, by default “un-creative,” and fails to acknowledge academia’s inherent need for creativity -- i.e. exposing individuals to new, inventive ideas, and then providing the necessary tools to process them -- in order to foster and facilitate intellectual growth.  Additionally, this divide also suggests that this supposed “creative” work does not have a place in an academic, or scholarly context, when there are numerous programs that prove this to be ostensibly false.

 

     And while I produced effective, successful work in both of these categories, I found that creative writing felt better; the mask I wore fit comfortably than those of the academic/professional category.  Through examining the various writerly personae I’ve employed during my college years, I have come to realize that academic prose hinders my writing by limiting the breadth of expression, while creative work, unencumbered by the same oppressive conventions, fosters better, more productive writing in me.

 

     Like all college applications, my transfer essay to UM required a fair amount of written work.  And like most college applicants, I utterly detested these portions of the application.  This was not because I didn’t like writing or doubted my writing abilities, but because the applications called for a very strange style of writing centered on humble-bragging, by asking for pieces that “Discussed how I might contribute to the diversity at UM” or “Explain my motives for transfer.”  I remember pouring over my essays for hours, straining to sound intelligent enough to prove my worth to UM.  

Moment to discuss the intellectual requirements of the task

I e-mailed my father every time I revised my work, hoping his careful eye would catch any and all grammatical errors, but never asked him for feedback on the content of my ideas.  Oddly enough, now that I’m at UM and doing well, I can’t help but laugh at my past self and the silly, ill-fitting persona she chose to adopt to write these.  One particularly amusing example reads as follows:

 

On October 15, 2011, I embarked on a trip to Honduras to volunteer charitable services through Friends of Honduran Children, an organization that works to better the lives of impoverished children of Honduras. A few days before I left, a friend asked me, “Do you think you’ll see things that you [sic] wouldn’t want to see?” I felt taken aback; I had not even considered such an issue. And while I had a lovely experience, I always think about that question every time my trip crosses my mind. I have found that the images most vivid in my memory are not only of the people casually toting semi-automatic weapons, or the beggars wandering through intersections, but also the countless displays of love and perseverance by the Honduran people. Despite the poverty and violence surrounding them, the people I met were not disheartened, but rather strong and incredibly generous. I learned then that one’s burdens do not dictate one’s fate, but rather how he or she chooses to carry them.

 

I can’t help but chuckle at the diction in such places as, “I embarked on a trip to Honduras to volunteer charitable services”, and “I felt taken aback; I had not even considered such an issue.”, and smirk at this particular persona’s forced, cheesy writing.  That said, I understand why I made the choices that I did.  In this paragraph, I see myself putting in an honest effort to try and explain a profound experience, but finding that the required discourse falls short.  The worldly, professional, academic persona I cultivated to write this piece could not write honestly about the situation and in a way that would better my chances of getting in to UM.  Rather than write a more honest response, e.g. “In October of 2011, I spent two weeks volunteering in Honduran orphanages,” or “My response?  A short pause followed by a confused-sounding “No…” I couldn’t believe any one would ever approach a volunteer with such a grossly self-centered question,” my academic opted to sanitize the material in order to present it in a humble, aesthetically pleasing manner.

 

     My struggles with the sanitized prose of academia continue to this day.  On more than one occasion, I have found myself struggling to articulate my ideas for a particular assignment in the appropriate form.  I feel that as an English major, there is very real, substantial pressure not only to present a clever, compelling argument, but to do so in in a way that “sounds smart.” Explain this  This pressure does not do much to motivate me; it typically exacerbates any of my pre-existing anxieties and inspires me to procrastinate.  

 

     I felt this pressure particularly strongly when I wrote my first “Critical Analysis Essay” for English 298, the gateway course to the English Major.  This was my first major writing assignment at UM, and I felt it was important to start strong in order to prove myself worthy of the English Major.  As I revisit the paper now, I don’t think that it’s a bad paper per say, but it feels incredibly stiff and safe. The essay, “Finding Love Where Life Cannot Breathe,” is repetitive, both in its diction and argument, and the sentences are riddled with the passive voice, e.g. “The living world is devoid of love,” “Their shared apathy is what defines and maintains…their relationship,” and “Rick is born not out of love, but out of lust.”  I attribute these shortcomings to the length of time I spent struggling with academic prose.  For example, when I first sat down to write this paper, even after free-writing, drafting an outline, etc., I found myself paralyzed.  I stared at a blank word-processing document, my mind abuzz with ideas, somehow unable to find the means of typing my thoughts into a clear, intelligent-sounding argument. What does that mean?

Thankfully, I eventually found a solution: I started writing out what it was I wanted to say in the paper in my “normal,” “everyday” voice, and then “translated” it into academic prose.  For example, my thesis initially read, “There’s love in the dead world but not in the living world,” and was later “translated” into, “The interaction and separation of the living and the dead in “The Drowned Girl” indicates that in addition to being marked by the presence or absence of life, the realms of living and the dead are similarly divided by the presence or absence of love, with that of the deceased assuming the former and that of the living the latter.” In doing this, I began to develop a relationship with academic writing as an actor does a mask; it became a disguise I put on to make my performance better, and more believable for my intended audience.  

 

     Furthermore, this essay marks the beginning of my arsenal of “academic verbs,” which are verbs that work particularly well in an academic/professional context.  Some examples include illustrate, highlight, suggest, underscore, constitute, indicate, and seem.  At present, I use these verbs somewhat arbitrarily, and now have a view of academic essays akin to an intellectual madlib.  Consequently, I don’t hold this sort of prose in high regard.  It now feels constricting, and discourages experimentation.

 

     Fortunately for me, I’ve been able to write in other genres than the academic/professional.  In my junior year, I composed three different pieces of short fiction for class: “Advice,” “The Man Who Ate Me For Dinner,” and “Red Wine on Ice.”  Each of these pieces was free not only from the shackles academic conventions, but the very laws and rules of reality.  But even though I had the freedom to write about anything, I chose to write stories deeply rooted in my own personal experiences.  I think that this is because I felt most comfortable writing about familiar experiences, and I was excited to re-visit strange or interesting situations in the fabulous world of fiction.

 

     In writing these pieces, I found that I could write in a more honest manner than I ever had before.  I felt protected behind the guise of fiction, that the mask I’d given to each author/narrator was, at least on the surface, developed enough to appear separate from my “normal,” day-to-day self.  I could write freely about how I felt a particular girl from my elementary school was a “classless piece of shit” (6) when I wrote her into a character named Sharon B in “Advice,” because, as I explained to my classmates, the narrator isn’t me, though we do have a few shared traits.  In writing “The Man Who Ate Me For Dinner,” I figured out why I really broke up with my past two boyfriends when I combined them into a character named Eric, who didn’t respect the narrator enough to be honest with her, “I wanted him to admit that he hated the food, to help me admit it myself.  I wanted to act like this had never happened, to throw the would-be curry in the trash and have him whip up something new and delicious, but he wouldn’t let me.” (4).  In the case of “Red Wine on Ice,” a one-act play, I worked through my complicated feelings about a creepy, though seemingly well-intentioned co-worker, by giving him a chance to encourage a troubled young woman to break up with her deadbeat boyfriend, “3.85 from Oberlin, a scandal-free Internet persona, you’re one of the good ones.  Why waste your time on this schmuck?” (6).  Oddly enough, crafting a fictional persona for both myself and the people in my life, embellishing certain qualities and cutting others, I found myself getting closer to the “truth” of these issues.  It seems that in order to tell the truth, I needed to lie, but only a little.

 

     I found myself doing similar work in the personal essays I composed for both English 325, The Art of the Essay, and English 425, advanced essay writing.  While these pieces fell under the category of “creative non-fiction,” and thus required me to write about real experiences from my past in a factual manner, I found that the form did allow for some creative embellishment.  This was particularly true of my second essay for English 325, “The Hulk, My Family Tree, and Me.”  In the essay, I opted to use a very specific, sharp tone of voice, “In order to make my point, we have to first establish that my grandfathers were not good men.”(2), “Granted, I wasn’t there, but I still can see my father, a little boy with dark hair like my brother’s in footie pajamas, knocking on his parents’ door over and over again, and no one coming to answer it.  That shit breaks my heart.” (4), and “And because my grandfather was neither capable of resisting the urge to screw my grandmother nor getting a vasectomy, he went and knocked up his wife any way.” (5).  In truth, I do sometimes feel angry with my ancestors; they were, as I say, not particularly good people, but I don’t feel allowed to say that sort of thing in conversation.  The veil of personal essay allowed me to explore this anger, though, in a creatively productive and gratifying manner.  I took the anger I felt and allowed it to be its own entire character on the page, which made this latent anger, which I often dismiss, to run free.  Furthermore, because this was a persona I crafted of my own free will, I was free to use any words I liked, and follow (or not follow) any rules I chose.  This freedom allowed for greater possibilities, which inevitably produced better, richer writing.

 

     When I consider my reasons for favoring creative work over the academic/professional, I believe it all boils down to the idea of space.  There is, inevitably, always space between a writer and the folks on the pages they produce, no matter what the occasion.  I don’t believe that there’s more or less space in one setting than there is another, but I do believe that in academia, the “critical distance” required indicates a pre-set, exhausted role with its own set conventions and vocabulary.  In creative writing, however, I set and measure that distance on my own through crafting my own new persona.  Consequently, it’s no surprise to me that I’ve produced my best work in more creative contexts.  Despite their distance, they’re closest to me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My annotated bibliography, which includes detailed desciption of my sources) for this piece can be found as a PDF here.