how i became a writer

I spent the last hour searching through a black three-inch binder packed full of papers and essays I wrote during my four years of college education. I couldn't find the one I wanted; maybe I thought, years ago, that throwing it away would make me forget it happened. It doesn't matter, I haven't forgotten--in fact, I can still see the penned words, cursive and hard to decipher, scrawled across the heading of the first page.

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After two semesters of manual drafting and art classes with Del Parson's brother (how unfortunate a life for those with a famous sibling), I quickly realized that I lacked the physical dexterity and attention to detail to excel in the exclusive 3-year Interior Design program at Ricks College. I changed my major to English Education--English because I loved to read, and Education because what else could I do with an English degree? Writing was part of that institutional package, and so by default, I spent the next three years of my life writing every single day.

One of my first classes was Brother Samuelson's English 314 Advanced Literary Research and Analysis. As the title suggests, we learned how to research and analyze literature, and as it turns out, there are different and specific ways to analyze literature--which we call criticisms. It was all very new to me; I had never even heard of these criticisms: deconstructionism, reader-response, and formalism, to name a few. My first assignment was to write a formalist critique on Phillip Levine's "The Poem of Chalk." I did some research on Phillip Levine and researched the background of some words, and then wrote everything I could think of in order to turn in a ten-page paper.

To be honest, I'm experiencing some confusion today (I need to find that paper!), because in a formalist critique, you separate the writing from the author and from past experiences in order to analyze the writing by itself--which is exactly what I'm pretty sure I did NOT do! But I think the assignment was supposed to be a formalist criticism, and I was very, very confused.

A few class periods later, my paper was returned displaying an 82% and this hard to read comment: "Your theories are forced, your logic weak."

Imagine a pin pricking a balloon. Whoosh.

Was I in the wrong major? I was just getting started and this meant (to me) that I was a horrible writer! I had no idea what I was supposed to do!

So in my spare time (by the way, I was taking 21 credits, 15 of those credits in English classes, and working 20 hours a week as a reading tutor), I began reading literary criticisms for "fun." I visited Brother Samuelson's office frequently to ask him questions and to allow him to not-so-formally criticize the rough drafts I had written. I wrote and rewrote and then started all over again.

I wonder now: was it the grade that was bothering me? Maybe. I was a straight-A student and I had a scholarship to maintain. I wanted to excel, yes, but I also wanted to grow as a person and as a writer.

Today, as I flip through the black binder that contains hundreds of the papers I have written, I skim through several of them, remembering the literature I read, the feelings I felt while writing. Some of the essays, with their short, choppy sentences, make me grimace. Some show great potential and growth. Just a few, those written near the end of my four-year progression, are actually pretty decent, showing real thought-process and reasoning.

The last paper I wrote for Brother Samuelson's English 314 class was a psychoanalytic criticism on Willa Cather's "Paul's Case." I kept that one; it is the very first one I see as I open the binder. It is also the one that was presented and published in the 2002 National Undergraduate Literature Conference.