With Classes Comes Writing...

Song: The Bloom (ABG 3) x Wale Feat. Stokley Williams

My workshop professor is buds with two of my favorite authors. I found that out while I chatted with them over their cigarette during orientations. Honestly, I think my workshop professor is the coolest professor out there and I've had some pretty great creative writing instructors and they've definitely made the top 5. T is a genius.

T epitomizes why Columbia appealed to me. They want us to hybridize and explore our nonfiction, breaking boundaries on and off the page, because there is no "right" way to write CNF. So we're reading and writing and writing what we're reading, reading what we're writing, and exploring how far we can push, press, and mold this genre into our own. I'm into it. Mainly because whenever I write something short it's this poem-essay hybrid thing and I submit to magazines calling it a "poem-essay hybrid thing" and that doesn't seem the most professional to me, but it's the best I can do at the moment.

I like my essays to have the lyricism and rhythm of poetry, while being formatted as an essay. I'm a long-winded writer and speaker, I can go on for ages bouncing from subject to subject, threading every story together and that's exactly how I write. When drafting, I'm an overwriter, which is better than being an underwriter because for me it's always about where to reduce and which parts to remove and not that much of what's missing and this should be added. I like drafting - does that make me weird? - it's nice to watch this amorphous glob of letters become something after working over it for a really long time.

When I started classes, I was really worried I wouldn't have anything to write about, but for me, being in class really inspires me to write about topics bigger than myself, or about things that aren't focused solely on a single aspect of my life. Since I don't have classes on Tuesdays, I just write because I don't have much else to do (sometimes I do my homework, sometimes I just write), so I have like 4 different essays cooking right now. I have an essay on religion in the works (that probably won't be finished for a year or at least a few months - needs some research), another one on hair, one on recklessness, and one about character portraits. But of course, these are all in the works, so something to be excited about, but not too excited about.

What's wild to me is that there are first year students here who know their thesis or have an idea of what they want to do, and I'm just sitting here, two weeks into classes, lollygagging about trying to write and explore and take my time. Nonfiction is so broad and everyone is interested in so many different things that I've come across a lot of different perspectives and narratives in workshop and it's nice not to be hit with mass amounts of essays on running or why people are writers... Fortunately, I was blessed with a diverse cohort *applause* and faculty.

This school, this city...everyone is just so cool and I've somehow managed to slip my way in without seeming too uncool compared to everyone else. At first it was intimidating, but now I'm starting to feel the cool vibes and it's not so hard to fit in.