A few days ago I found a patch of tulips growing in our front yard!
And today they looked like this! I'm so excited! I love flowers.
Now, as everyone knows, it's finals week. For our "final" in my Poetry Writing class, we just met during our scheduled examination time as if it were class and discussed submission tips and read aloud some of our poetry before turning in our final portfolios. It was a fabulous experience. As a writer in a writing class, I'm aware of others' writing because we workshop, but I don't really think about them much because I'm concerned with what I'm writing. I never realized how many brilliant poets surrounded me in that class. One girl read a poem all about the letter X: how it only says its own sound above a door in an "exit" sign, how you can see it in the body of a cheerleader, how it replaces a cartoon figure's eyes to signify death, and how it changes a person by putting itself in front of their title (ie, ex-boyfriend), among other examples. I never would have thought to write a poem about a letter! Another girl, K.J., shared a poem about Joseph Smith, Jr.'s First Vision of Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ from the point of view of the tree he knelt next to. It was amazing. I realized that religious themes crop up in my ficion writing--in fact, religion has been a major theme in my two most recent stories--but for whatever reason they never seem to show up in my poetry. Any guesses why? I have no clue.
As far as Fiction Writing goes, our "final" was a major revision of one of the two stories that we wrote this semester, which I started and finished all yesterday afternoon before turning it in early this morning. I got a lot of useful feedback for my second story, "Crisis of Faith" (see that religious theme? it's even in the title!), which was about an LDS girl's attempt to reconcile religion with a dating issue and which I didn't really like once I'd finished writing it, but even though I think better of it now because of a great workshop, I decided to revise my first story. "Unexpected" was about a girl in an American tour of Italy and how God and art history work in her life in one day and it needed a lot of work, which got crammed into one afternoon and evening. Hopefully it turned out all right and I can pull off an acceptable grade in that class.
And tomorrow is my final in Dr. McCuskey's Victorian Literature class (for which I have not studied...!), after the roommate tradition of IHOP during finals week! It really shouldn't be that difficult of a test; he said it was mainly to prove that we'd read Middlemarch and could relate it with the other stuff we read in the first half of the semester. Well, wish me luck!
Oh my goodness--that "X" poem was just fantastic. I'd love a copy of it--thought it was amazing! That was a surprisingly fun and enjoyable day. Good luck with finishing everything, I know you'll be just fine! :)
ReplyDeleteGood luck!
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