Tag: writing

Writers on Rails

Justin & Ersun Leave a comment

A series of 140 character messages sparked Amtrak to consider a new opportunity for writers. As individual wordsmiths began to collectively tweet about their love of writing on trains, the #AmtrakResidency idea developed. Months later, Amtrak is now offering a two to five day on-board residency program for writers. Moving across the American countryside as they draw ink across pages, these 24 individuals will be sponsored by the company to pursue their creative passions on rails. Amtrak is offering a sleeper car with a desk and amenities to each writer. If you are reading this post on this blog, it is likely that you have an interest in the written word–or at least believe in its ability to be a medium for art–so consider applying to the program here.

Amtrak Residency

Imagine sitting in motion. Your mind is moving while your body is still, with the exception of your hand scribbling words on a page. The train is moving, the country stationary. You are still within the train but are carried with it. No physical effort is required on your part. You are travelling, but there is no destination. The only goal is mental. A blinking cursor that your want to keep moving as words are left in its wake or a series of lines and letters being drawn upon a sheet of paper as your mind dances between the concrete and abstract, trying to form art in the wake of your fingertips. Constant inspiration outside the window above your desk–always moving, not pausing for a moment. Not predetermined, no plot, not rehearsed, no acting, and not fabricated, no screen. An authentic experience that stimulates your mind and forces you into thinking–moving over mental barriers, unobstructed by writer’s block, continuing to push forward, vomit more words, and make progress while moving nowhere. The train deposits you where it picked you up and you have a heap of words in your hands when the rails screech.

There is something about motion that is stimulating. It is romantic, exciting, filled with uncertainty and new experiences. This dynamic and nomadic lifestyle is foreign for many. Most of us live in stable homes with solid roofs and steady incomes and scheduled meals. Living in motion–like on a train–is not a lifestyle for most, but an activity with a beginning and an end. While the Amtrak Residency program is a wonderful opportunity to embrace the beauty of motion and stimulate the mind into creative productivity, it is not a lifestyle. It is a vacation, a dynamic oasis, that can produce desired written works, but it does not hold the bold romanticism of a nomadic lifestyle. To leave behind the stability of a normal life and take up the romanticized lifestyle of motion has many unknown futures. This continued motion and instability may offer even greater inspirations for an unsettled mind.

Hop on a train with no destination.

A Long Journey

Jeannie Marie 1 Comment

My personal journey to University of Michigan has certainly been an interesting one. It creates great table talk, explaining how I’m a transfer student from Houston, Texas, and wow, isn’t it cold? But to me, it’s more than that. This journey here now defines me, and this entire life I have been living has been almost like a dream.

Since I was very little I’ve always been quite a definite person. Yes, I like cheese enchiladas. No, I don’t like the refried beans. My personality has always been quite honest, and even my friends now know when something’s up, even just by the way I text.

So when I started appearing on stage, I knew I was home. Being on stage, playing parts in thick costumes underneath heavy lights that blind me from the world, I let go. I dropped everything at the stage door and pretended to be someone else for a while. I invested in theatre. I breathed theatre, and while I had very little opportunities, I took every crumb I could get. I told myself I was passionate, and that would carry me through.

And then, one day, my mom drove me downtown. We went inside the building, and my legs were shaking. I was wearing leggings, shorts, and a T-Shirt, along with my favorite (and new) jazz shoes. I met so many different people, teens of all ages, shapes, and sizes. I clung to the forms as tight as I could, and I chanted you can do this. You can do this. You can do this.

I introduced myself more times than I could count. Everyone greeted me with a smile that hid the razors I could see in their eyes. This wasn’t a time to make friends; this was battle.

And battle I did. From the very first time I talked to the other kids, I knew I was hopelessly outmatched and outwitted.

I’ve been taking ballet for the past 10 years.

Oh. I mean, I took ballet when I was 6, but I never continued.

I’m in state choir. Really? You made state? I just sing for whoever shows up at our concerts – usually just parents.

But Jeannie isn’t the kind of person to give away her dream that easily.

The dance portion was the best. I could tell I was having fun, even with the sweat starting to form. I did my dance with a smile, and felt the music running through me. But try as hard as I do, and even with the natural disposition I have to music, fun cannot beat training. It took me longer to learn the steps, and even when I performed them from memory, I stumbled. But, like I said, I lacked training, and so I knew after I was finished performing that it was not star quality.

But I had more faith in my singing. While, again, I am untrained, I had more faith that I have a good singing voice, and the song I chose suited me, since it was upbeat, in a soprano range, and had sections dedicated to belting, which my choir told me I could do well with high notes.

So I was going to be okay. I could do it.

That afternoon, I walked into a room with three judges, and I left with four.

My accompaniment was perfect. The setting was right, I had the song and the notes completely memorized, and my nerves were assuaged after the brutal dance portion. But when I walked in, the judges didn’t look up at me. They didn’t acknowledge me, didn’t even know that I was there. And so, in one of the biggest regrets of my life, I started the song, dropped the middle, and ended, leaving the room with a self-esteem that sunk deep into my heart.

And that was the last straw. After that audition, I knew I couldn’t do it. I didn’t even compare to those who had been training their whole lives for their dream. I didn’t sacrifice anything, I didn’t deserve it.

Looking back, I realize it was a stupid mistake, and I shouldn’t blame myself for not having the courage to pursue acting as a profession. I thought that I knew who I was. Like when I was younger, I thought it was yes or no. Yes, I was going to be an actress and be fulfilled in my life, because it was the only thing that could fulfill me. Or no, I wasn’t, and I would lead an unhappy life trapped in a cubicle. My future looked gray.

But instead of coming to University of Michigan to pursue acting, I decided to pursue writing instead. And it seems like everything has fallen into place since then. I found this job, and I found so many friends and faculty whom I love and find happiness in. I’ve found clubs, and friends who share my passion, who look at writing not as a hobby on the side of something else, some other dream, but as their only dream, their only happiness. Through these people I’ve found my courage. I’ve been encouraged in my writing, and I absolutely love the time I get to spend writing these blogs. So no, I’m not pursuing acting. But yes, I am fulfilled. And maybe someday, I’ll get to see my name on the screen. But instead of being an actress, I’ll be credited with the beautiful script I wrote.

And that’s why University of Michigan isn’t just a far off dream school for a girl far from her Texas home. It isn’t just a college, where I study books and get grades and eat food. To me, this school has been where I’ve seen life happen, where I’ve seen bonds formed, and where I’ve seen a new dream that started from a tiny, unwanted seed grow into a beautiful flower that breathed new life into me.

Winter 2014: the semester I read so much my eyes fell out.

Taylor Leave a comment

After entering recluse-mode for many an hour, I have finished my first book of the semester! The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf.

the voyage out 1

*takes breath*

Assigned for my Virginia Woolf class (whodathunkit?), the novel was a quick head on collision to what would be in store for me this semester: a whole lot of reading and a whole lot of feelings. The combination of reading and feelings often leaves me home alone, on my couch without pants, ignoring ambient/electronic beats wafting into the air like my incense, and staring into the massive void that is the winter in Ann Arbor because it never stops snowing.

While it was by no means Woolf’s best work, The Voyage Out is “a beginning” of sorts. Although not her earliest diary nor letters, this first novel stands as a type of fluid production from one of the most brilliant writers of the 20th century. I can see question and figure out what it means to write a novel as she pieces together allusions–from Conrad to Milton to Bronte to Austen to Plato. She tropes Victorian themes (the dying heroine) and twists them into a new modern sensibility as she meditates on deathly illness rather than the sentimental last breath of life. Unlike her other “more modernist” novels, however, there is a clear plot. WOAH. Step back.

Rachel goes to South America, falls in love, and dies. OR A bougie woman travels to a middle class wet dream of what the exotic other-as-land would be and becomes a body with out organs and disintegrates from life. OR Woolf’s creative idea of her dead sister, Stella, comes of age (whatever this means) in a post-Victorian world, and dies. The dying part is pretty consistent, but the other elements of the novel, well, including the death, too, are wildly complex. Meditating on the inability for anyone to really know anyone else, the downfalls of language, the ways humans feel, the ways human name their feelings as emotions, the ways men and women interact, the ways classes interact, what colonialism does to a collective consciousness, how patriarchy fucks over all women (and men), what death and life and love seem to be, etc., etc., . . . *this is a fragment I’m trying to save* . . . the Voyage Out covers a lot of territory that will reappear in the later fiction of Woolf.

the voyage out 2

Not only has Woolf impressed me but she has made me rethink what it means to be a reader in the 21st century.

As an English/Philosophy lover/snob/being, I enjoy a good book. To me, “good” refers to something along the lines of: published out of one’s century (unless your name is Toni Morrison) that either invests too much in the world, consciousness, and humankind or is entirely skeptic of everything including the very page it is written on. Whether Naguib Mahfouz, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, James Joyce, or Audre Lorde, Elizabeth Bishop, or Sylvia Plath, or Michel Foucault, Frank B. Wilderson III, Gilles Deleuze–I have a lot of opinions on what is “good.”

However, as a bibliophile that is moving closer and closer from the hallowed halls of libraries (let’s be real, libraries here means hipster/queer coffee houses) into the real world where the library is anything I can fit on a shelf in my hypothetical apartment in an imaginary Washington D.C. (my future plans), I realize that “good” means more than just “good.”

In reading Virginia Woolf’s first novel I have a newfound respect and curiosity for new authors. This–the ability to read for pleasure and explore new authors–is a epiphany that is oh-too-recent. I have always despised new books because nothing can replace what has already been written. But this despair, I’ve learned, is stupid. Just as I think I have merit and worth in the realm of scholarly writing (HAHAHAHA MY THESIS WHAT), others, too, have merit writing in the scope of fiction. I should honor their creativity.

the voyage out 3

Although new writers can be sloppy, can have an fluctuating style, can be apprehensive, they can also be full of new insights to my queer world–filled with new relations to humans, technologies, and myself, new relations to others, new relations to the environment, and so on. The world is not static, and, I guess what I’m trying to say is, neither should my bookshelf.

Thanks, V.

The Creative Writer

Jeannie Marie Leave a comment

The species that is known as the “creative writer” is one that has baffled me for centuries. Ranging from the hipster elite to that kid buried deep in Lord of the Rings lore, the creative writer takes all shapes and forms.

But really, can I criticize?

The creative writer (aka, me) just encountered her first workshop today. Terrified, she walked into class, prepared for the worst. They hated it, they didn’t understand the point, they wanted to burn the very words off the page. The creative writer had to sit, never explaining her decisions or why the poems were written that specific way, only drinking in the criticisms.

She dismissed the praise. They were lying, they only wanted a good thing to say so the bad things didn’t sound so bad. The things they liked were meaningless.

She rifled through the letters they gave her, reading every word for its double meaning. She wanted an excuse to rip up the pages and never look at them again. She searched, finding the critiques and holding them tight.

This is the life of a creative writer, the life I’ve chosen. Sometimes, I am happy with my choice. I love writing, I love reading, I love words. But most of the time, I am looking for that one glitch that is telling me that I’m not good enough to get published.

But now, I’m sitting in Hatcher. There’s nothing but me and my laptop. And so, to take a break from work, I pulled up Spotify, and decided to listen to one of my favorite albums from last year.

There are two versions of “The North” by Stars from their album of the same name. One is the normal version, the other, a bonus track, eloquently named “Breakglass Version.” This acoustic song has always been something that touched me, so as I sat, I thought of my piece, my classmates, and my future. But then I listened to the original track, and I realized that this version was sung by a different (male) member of the band. There’s always two ways to look at something, and one isn’t necessarily as bad as the other. It sounds (and probably is) very cliché, but just remembering that one simple fact helped me to breathe a little bit easier as I realized not everyone had to love my writing, and not everyone hated it. And that was okay.