Creative Writing
Prehistory and Juvenilia:
This is where all the pre-university scraps can be found, like crude pottery fragments crushed under the sediment of subsequent civilizations’ excretory accomplishments. (Actually, for the most part, my high school writing was very kindly encouraged by my friends and teachers, and if you like Monty Python’s absurdity without any of the sophisticated political subversiveness or Oxbridge-educated intertextuality, this stuff’s okay. It probably helps if you like me personally, though, before you try it.
Wilted Laurels:
For a few brief years in my undergrad, and especially during my creative writing electives with John Kooistra, I was really buzzing. At the time of this writing, I think my best work was produced in this period. Enough, actually, such that as I lost momentum during my B.Ed. and M.A., my inability to leap back into writing with the same satisfaction at my wordplay and vocabulary, or to finish projects like the Smock Cycle and my epic fairytale, became an albatross fatal to my ambition going forward.
Now:
Everything since my M.A. thesis has felt like a return to those soiled pottery shards discussed earlier, and my work in special education has encouraged clarity and simplicity in my prose at the expense of wordplay and risky conceits. Or so I tell myself. Maybe I’m permanently broken, but I’m still giving it a go. Watch this space (if you like seeing the odd sapling growing out of the carnage of a train wreck, I guess).
