As a female writer, I highly empathize with some of the questions, that are too frequently asked. Number 9 was something I was too frequently asked in Creative Writing my high school senior year.
If you have not read the article above, the 9th question was, "Why are your poems so angry?"
I love Aricka Foreman's answer, "Because you asked me that dumbass question." After Aricka's answer, she drew a heart. Hilarious. Gotta love it.
I hated listening to my Creative Writing teacher and classmates in high school constantly asking me the 9th question.
In more primitive times, people expected women to always write the stereotypical cutesy, girly, shiny, happy people holding hands, and to be all daisies and dun barrels with gumdrops and unicorns being farted from the sky.
Reality Check: It's not all daisies and dun barrels and everything surely isn't always going to be gumdrops and unicorns.
Sir Thomas More's Utopia is a Communist philosophical fantasy; It NEVER existed. Welcome to the real world where our freedom can be compromised, if not destroyed at any given time.
Sometimes there is no silver lining to everything. Sometimes you are just screwed over by people, who you once loved and trusted in your life.
Later, you ask yourself, "Why did this have to happen to me of all people?!"
It has been a decade, since I last wrote any poems. Writing poetry was my personal catharsis. By the time I was a Creative Writing Minor, my Creative Writing professors "dug my shit."
My professors could actually feel my anger and every painful emotion I poured onto paper, which was something they could not say about most of my Creative Writing classmates.
Most only took Creative Writing because they assumed it was an easy "A" elective. They didn't expect the amount of work and creativity their writing would require.
I don't know what was and still is the most annoying, students believing they can bullshit themselves into easy "A's" in Creative Writing? Or students, who already KNEW they were required to workshop their writing?
Granted, when I started taking Creative Writing the last semester of my high school senior year, I RARELY shared my work.
I was already notorious for lusting for a pretty boy guitarist outside of my race. He then became my Valentine's Day Secret Admirer. The truth was not revealed to me, until a few days before Graduation Day.
What can I say? I have always had a thing for musicians dating back to my childhood, during the 1980's. Feel free to blame '80s Metal bands played on MTV, if you want.
During the late '90s and early 21st Century, interracial couples and being attracted to someone of the opposite race were somewhat still taboo. Then again, I was always an outcast and still am 3 decades later.
Because it was taboo for a kook like moi to lust for a pretty boy guitarist (imagine Jordan Catalano's doppelganger except younger and more intelligent), I endured more than public humiliation for 7 hours daily.
The mind games he and our student body generally played made it difficult for me to share all of my work. He and I shared the exact same Creative Writing Class, while he played mind games by flirting with another girl in front of me. Outside of her having a big ass, she could've used the so-called "Bitch Bag;" She was fugly.
Adding insult to injury, that same girl always felt the need to single me out by always volunteering me to share all my Creative Writing with our class. 95% of the time, I did not.
There was also a time, when we were assigned to do Collage Poetry. I created a Collage Poem about ANOTHER boy from my past.
Everyone, including Jordan Catalano's doppelganger automatically assumed it was about himself. That day I wanted to hang myself outside our classroom window with a noose.
The situation was THAT much of a humiliating misunderstanding, too. Luckily by the time I was a college student, I was not forced to endure the amount of paranoia, anxiety, and public humiliation I already endured throughout high school.
In college, there is usually a broad age range of adult students ranging from high school graduates to senior citizens. That may sound like a sarcastic joke, but I'm serious.
As I digress, when it comes to any Art or Creative Writing course, students are required to share their work in class.
Workshopping is about handling constructive criticism. If people cannot handle constructive criticism, they do not belong in any Art or Creative Writing course. Sure, there are some rude, immature, and ignorant classmates in these types of classes, but it's inevitable. You'll love this.
My college junior year, we had to create an Instructional Poem for Creative Writing. A classmate wrote an Instructional Poem about how to apply make-up.
Her poem never went any deeper; There was nothing in the writing about hiding flaws behind a mask or anything of the sort. Some friends and classmates felt that their intelligence were highly insulted.
The next semester, I wrote my short story titled, "The Bill Collector." "The Bill Collector" is already bound in It's Not All Bunnies And Sunshine (chapbook).
In my short story, the so-called bill collector stalks my protagonist, Alice. Everyone in my Creative Writing night class couldn't stop talking about "The Bill Collector."
My short story triggered LOTS of discussion the night I workshopped it for Creative Writing.
That same shallow twat from my previous semester of Creative Writing had the audacity to call "The Bill Collector" "a bunch of fluff." Everyone in class looked at her like she was stupid because she WAS a total dumb ass.
BTW: That same dumb ass was getting her BA in Secondary Education!
I pity her students because she's like a blind, superficial, space cadet leading the blind.
The next session, she returned with her tail between her legs, ate some crow, and decided to kiss my ass in the process. Not that I was expecting her to do so, but I found it highly laughable.
I do NOT write "a bunch of fluff." If anything, I have always been highly controversial.
Whenever I finish writing "All Of Chastity's Men," I already know some will automatically label me as being a "man-hater."
If it is not women highly lacking in self-respect, it will typically be butt-hurt womanizers with crushed toes calling me a "man-hater."
Little do those people know that my audience has ALWAYS been male-dominated. SURPRISE! So, let the demonization begin!
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment