The following is a reflection of my experience in Jesse Miller’s Creative Writing course:
I took Creative Writing with little prior experience in the craft. I struggled initially. How was I to write an entire short story? I stopped trying to write like Raymond Carver or other masters and started writing for myself. I stopped trying to dream of elaborate plots once I understood the meaning of literary fiction. Writers write what they know, so I did too. That’s how I ended up with a short story about a girl mentally lost in Boston. The territory was familiar to me after just spending a semester in the city. I enjoyed the transition to poetry and liked how the semester was divided the way it was. My first poem, Ars Poetica, took me probably 10 minutes to write, and I thought it was really good. Later poems took me hours to write, and I wanted to hate them. My perspective of a “good poem” changed, and I took the prompts more seriously. I’m thankful the workshop sessions were part of the course. I learned a lot about my own writing through the input of others.
View some of my poems below!
