Ep 145: My Writing Life Beginnings, Pt 2 - a podcast by Ann Kroeker

Note: This was originally published both at my website and at Tweetspeak Poetry back in 2013.I signed up for an American Literature class. The instructor didn’t ask about my brother, and I understood what I read, like The Mill on the Floss and Their Eyes Were Watching God. I formed opinions—my very own—and wrote response papers that earned A’s and positive remarks from the professor.

My journalism course, however, turned me off. Plus, I couldn’t shake that memory of standing at the doorway to fetch the photo of the boy who had been shot. I didn’t want that life, so I abandoned journalism and switched to social work. The professor discouraged students from becoming social workers unless they were absolutely sure. I wasn’t sure. So I switched majors again when I took a folklore class, because I loved the idea of capturing stories. But someone pointed out the limited career opportunities available to folklore majors, so I started to look for an alternative.English Major
Then I took another English Literature class. Maybe I was reading Kafka’s Metamorphosis or Joyce’s The Dubliners, but I realized I loved literature when I understood the language. Stories, words, ideas, themes. That’s what I wanted to dive into with my remaining time in college. I don’t know what I’ll do with it, I thought, but this is who I am: an English major.Toward the close of a semester, I walked with my boyfriend toward the campus bookstore, wondering aloud about my future.

“What do you really want to be?” he asked.I blurted out, “A writer.”

“A writer? That’s fantastic! How about communications?”“No, it’s too much like journalism and I hated journalism. I want to write creative things for magazines or books. I would love that.”

“Take a creative writing class.”“Creative writing?”

“Sure! You’d write fiction and poetry.”“But I don’t write poetry.” I remembered the sonnets in Dr. Weber’s Shakespeare class. “I don’t understand poetry.”

“It’s okay. If you take creative writing classes, you’ll learn to write.”Creative Writing
So I signed up for Introduction to Creative Writing. I read Writing Down the Bones and learned about free-writing. I filled notebooks with countless words, pen on paper without lifting it for ten minutes, hoping to turn up memories and ideas to work with. We started with fiction and I wrote a story entitled “Fences” that no one liked—not even me.Then we read and discussed poems, mostly contemporary. Some rhymed, but most didn’t. I understood some of them, but not all. Nobody seemed to mind, though I began to second-guess my right to be in the room with other students who grasped the meaning quickly and sounded intellectual.

We began to write our own poems. “Write what you know, ” the instructor advised. “Write from your own memories. Write about your childhood.”So I wrote about dropping hay onto the heads of the cows as they leaned into the manger to eat. I wrote about my brother and his friends warning me that the devil lived in the window well. I wrote about sitting alone in the wooden pew watching the adults take communion at the Methodist church. I wrote about dancing in the barn loft as the afternoon sun streaked through the lone window facing west. And I wrote about my grandmother’s calico cat. None of my poems rhymed.
PoetryEvery semester I signed up for another creative writing class. For one assignment, I wrote a poem inspired by a piece of art. I chose an Andrew Wyeth print my boyfriend’s mom gave me of a little boy sitting in a field. I invented a scene where the boy had run away, and the week I read it aloud, the instructor, who wore long peasant skirts and Birkenstocks, highlighted the last lines, reading them again, slowly. On my way across campus that afternoon, I pulled it out and read the last lines again to myself.

A few weeks later, I read aloud a poem I’d written about potatoes, and that same instructor leaned against the desk and listened.

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