Not a Writer.

I’ve never considered myself a writer.  I have always relied on outside validation to indicate such.  A professor suggested a creative writing course after I turned in a final paper in which I could not bear to write another literary analysis of some books I hadn’t really read that closely turned out to be a push in a direction I didn’t anticipate.  So, instead of literary analysis I wrote about myself.  Well, not really myself because I don’t really like doing that.  I talk around myself.  I write about the people in my life to make sense of who I am.  What started as a journal entry about a former classmate’s father sent to prison for distributing opioid prescriptions, turned into a final paper about my life growing up next to Heroin Highway, turned into a six week writing program in which I wrote a piece to end all writing about my dead grandmother, turned into a semester course in creative nonfiction, turned into being told to make a go at a career as an author, turned into this.  

Sitting here writing this post, I am once again avoiding a literary analysis paper.  This time it’s my senior thesis and finishing this post would mark a successful afternoon in avoiding all types of research pertaining to YA dystopian fiction.  By the end of the semester I will supposedly have 70 pages of well-researched, artfully-argued prose as to what The Hunger Games and Divergent can tell us about a Western understanding of environmental issues.  

I’m not quite sure where this blog will go, or if it will even take.  Perhaps this is an attempt at declaring myself a writer, perhaps not.  At the very least, I’m increasing my digital footprint.