Creative Writing Experience

I am a straight-forward, traditional kind of writer. I enjoy stories and novels, and currently I'm finishing up a reflective memoir about my life and my journey as an artist. The creative writing program has challenged that tremendously. It has opened up my writing and made it more imaginative. In past classes our professors had us write. That was it. Just write. Don't think about what you were saying or how it was going to come across. They wanted us to regurgitate onto the paper. At first, I wasn't used to this. But with practice it became increasingly more comfortable. All in all, I'd say the program has helped me grow in a surrealist and expressionistic sense.

In one particular class I took...I believe it was called "Long Poem and Serial Works", we'd break apart very long hybrid poems together in class. Some of these poems were 20 pages long! That was probably the most difficult class. I had to stretch myself just to be able to get through it. I couldn't grasp the themes that the teacher wanted us to pull out of what we were doing. That happens when you try to do something you've never experienced before.

Genre, to me, is a classification of popular and understood themes. Fiction, non-fiction, poetry, etc...everybody is going to think differently, but that is just how I think. My favorite genre is non-fiction, although I do enjoy Mitch Albom and J.M Coatzee's works of fiction. I prefer non-fiction because it is simple to grasp, relate to, and absorb. Maybe that makes me boring. So be it. I don't really care about that. I know a lot of other students read some interesting things, but that is what they prefer to do. We all read and write from our experiences, 100% of the time. Those that claim they don't do as well. There is no such thing as "out of your mind and body." Everything comes from within, whether we want it to or not. We can draw from external influences, but ultimately our subconscious always sneaks in.

I don't have much experience working in transgenre, or writings that blur the border between two genres. Such is why I am in this class. I wanted to expand my pallet, but I also wanted to work on my capstone project and get inspiration from others. I figured we should all work together.