#1.
Over the years, I have kept journals and written some poetry, and even a few articles for newsletters. Mainly though, I use writing as a means to process the events in my life, especially the turmoils. Writing helped me through the angst of teenage confusion and hormones. It helped me keep moving during an unsuccessful marriage, and other relationships. I admit, at one point after rereading my journals, I realized I was stuck in a never-ending spiral. I stopped writing except for a garden journal, where I kept track of seeds planted, the weather and the harvest (if I kept it going that long into the season), and I keep a journal when I go on an annual canoe trip with friends.
This course is the first course in my return to school that I actually look forward to. I am a returning student who is fulfilling the requirement to get a degree in ECE , as if my 28 years of experience has no meaning.
#2
You pull out a spiral-bound notebook and you write. You're hormones are raging and you know you love that boy down the street. He doesn't see you, you write of the agony, and sadness of the unrequitted love. Years later you buy another notebook and begin the story of the birth of your first child. You record a few months worth of motherhood and baby mlestones, then you go back to work and time and energy are lost. Your second child doesn't get a baby journal. The children grow, your marriage falls apart. You begin to write again, process your sorrows and questions. Your book shares your loneliness and gets you through the next year, the divorce and the next relationship. You feel insurmountably stuck and you stop writing, you do slowly move forward. You miss writing and you try a new tactic, a new book records only your vacations, an annual canoe trip with friends, you write about the challenges of weather and paddling. You also begin a garden journal to expand upon the little plot plan that you have always used. You write about the seeds planted, the weather, the harvest. It's a circle of events, a cycle. Do you ever move frorward?
#3
She felt lonely and misunderstood. She had noone to share the angst of adolescence. She bought a small spiral notebook and began to write, disjointed poems of love and hurt and pain. Writing became her solace and her friend. She grew older and away from that confusion. She got married, had children. As the children grew and needed her less and less, she discovered an empty place in her being. She bagan to write again to fill that space, to feel complete and whole, and to process the marriage that no longer filled her up. The words helped her move from that life to a new one where she began to feel strong and was able to move forward. When she no longer needed the words she stopped. Life moved on.
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Did you write these in this order in a single sitting? It reads to me as if the momentum built through the second person and peaks there and then you slide into a quieter zone with the third person.
ReplyDeleteThe second person really seems to cook--all those false starts, failures, unfinished things morph into a different way of looking at them: not as failures or incompletes but as waystations along a recurrent cycle. And that's a neat movement within the graf, from one point of view to a different one.
Interestingly, the last graf gives us the same material but nicely restated and tweaked, and with that restatement you offer a different take on the circle/cycle idea: rather than the writing being part of a recurrent cycle you keep coming back to, here you characterize it as mileposts that once you pass them aren't needed anymore.
Well, I'm certainly not criticizing the difference you offer the reader between grafs 2 and 3. On the contrary, I like the flexibility, the willingness to leave things a little indeterminate, and the wealth of details.
Also interesting and unusual: the first person is the 'straight' version, the one where you keep it plain, while the 'you' and 'she' give you permission to cut loose a little. Keep that in mind later in the semester if you feel stuck or bogged down.