My response to an application question: What kind of writer am I?

When I was 13 years old, my mother, who, according to my teenage self, had already made many near-unpardonable mistakes, committed an act that was so egregious that it is still a bone of contention between us today. She was aggressively scouring the attic during a typical spring-cleaning rampage when, in her enthusiasm, she accidentally dropped one of my precious diaries into a crack that reached far into the bowels of our house. As an avid diary writer and poet, I was devastated. Gone were the early years of my writing—my expressions of childhood angst, my musings concerning the mysteries of the Universe, my detailed account of my first kiss with Scotty McDonald—all lost in a time capsule made of dry wall—waiting.

The incident aptly serves as a metaphor for my writing. I feel like the real writer in me, the one who desires to write about things of real personal worth, has been temporarily trapped by years of academic dry wall. Granted, this did not happen as quickly as my diary’s descent into the house; I did win a poetry contest in middle school for a poem that expressed my deep concerns about the effects of the Vietnam War. (What writer wasn’t a little strange as a kid?) No—it was a much more gradual descent as I fell into the trap of almost solely writing for someone else—an all-too common result of the formal education process. By the time I finished graduate school, I had almost completely unlearned how to write for my own enjoyment and self-expression.

By no means am I suggesting that academic writing, or writing of any kind, for that matter, does not have its place. As a former copywriter and editor, and as a current educator, I recognize the importance of learning how to write for different audiences and purposes. I am grateful for the skills that I have acquired in those areas, and do feel that they have greatly improved certain aspects of my writing. Still, I wonder if such a heavy focus on academic writing in recent years has permanently wounded my writing in other ways. Lately I have attempted to recover that former creativity, and I have been frustrated by a serious case of writer’s block, self-doubt, and general atrophy of the poetic lobe. It has become my quest to free my inner poet from her dry wall tomb.

As an educator, this quest has become much more urgent as I have tried to teach my students the importance of writing as a means of self-expression, catharsis, and communication. With the ever-increasing push toward standardized testing and curriculum, I am concerned that students will be so focused on writing for other people, that their personal writing will, in a sense, be lost in the cracks. Though there are aspects of this predicament that I cannot control, it is my hope that if I personally am able to find greater balance and satisfaction as a writer—then perhaps I will be able to help my students do the same.