Hello! This is blog post number 6. This week, we are writing more towards our narrative project, which is a memoir. We were assigned to read "Rewinding & Rewriting: The Alternate Universe Inside Our Heads. This article is about thinking the outcome of a situation to be different than what actually happened. This is something I do constantly myself, and I'm sure damn near everyone else does it, too. For this blog post, I'm going to write about if the outcome of my experience for my memoir would've ended up, if I could have changed the situation behind it.
Rewinding & Rewriting: The Alternate Universes in Our Heads (NPR Hidden Brain Episode) I open my fridge to get the chicken and vegetables I was making myself for dinner. It was a Friday evening, and I had off on Fridays at the time. As I get the seasonings out of the cabinet, I got the sudden urge to just throw everything on the floor. The chicken, the veggies, seasonings. And I did. I had a total mental breakdown. I destroyed my entire kitchen as I was making myself dinner. I sat on the floor for a while. I was crying and my head was all over the place. What the hell just happened to me? Why did I just lash out like that? The crazy thing is, that isn't the first time this happened, but it was the time when I totally realized how bad my emotions were effecting my life. I had been prescribed a bottle of pain killers for a neck injury I had at the time, while I also had a bottle of vodka in my freezer. My thought process with these two was, horrible, as you can imagine at this point. I didn't want to live anymore. I didn't want to stress and struggle through life anymore. I was exhausted from my emotions controlling every single thing I did in my life, making it a giant shit show. I was living alone, I was broke, in debt from booking impulsed trips that I couldn't afford nor did I even go on any of them; I didn't care about a fucking thing in this moment. My boyfriend at the time was at work. I called him in the middle of this breakdown I was having. We didn't have a healthy relationship. He was extremely controlling and he didn't understand me at all. But I didn't know what else to do or else to call, because I knew I didn't want to do this, but this dark, disgusting voice in my head was tempting me tremendously. As I talked to him on the phone, this was probably the only time he had actually gotten off on his damn ego throne and helped me through yet another episode I was having. He could tell it was even more so serious this time that it usually was. I sat on the floor for a good solid hour, while I had the pill bottle and vodka bottle next to me, as he talked me out of ending my life. "You do not want to do this, Kellie. Think about what your mom would feel like. Think about how you haven't even experienced anything life has to offer yet. You are more than this illness you have. You cannot let it take you down this way." What if I didn't call him? What if he wasn't able to talk me out of it? What if I just went along and did what I intentionally wanted to do? I most likely wouldn't be here right now. And that's a very scary thought. Although there was a ton of bad times after this moment,there has been so many great moments after it, too. I started college again. I finally moved into a nice apartment and out of the shit holes I was living in.
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Blog post number 5 coming at you! This week we are getting pretty emotional, which is right up my alley. We were advised to read two short stories. One is a piece by one of my favorites, Maya Angelou. I have actually read this story a while ago. The other piece is by Ernest Hemmingway, who is also one of the most famous writers that I have heard about. The strong emotions in these writings and the seriousness of the real situations these people went through very much so relates to a lot of my writing, especially this blog post. We were assigned to share an emotional moment we have had with someone in our lives. Me being the way I am, I had a million scenes that I've had in my life pop into my head.
My Name is Margaret (Maya Angelou) Hills Like White Elephants It was a Saturday night, fairly late. I was around 5 years old. I don't recall ever spending the night at my fathers house before this night. My mother and father had agreed that I should spend more time with him, so they arranged a sleepover. At first I remember being pretty excited about it, since I never saw my dad all that much. But when the day actually came and my Mom was helping me pack a few things, I got this extremely uneasy feeling. My father was coming to pick me up that evening. As the hours were going by, this uneasy feeling became worse. I was so young at the time, so I really didn't understand why I felt like this. I mean, this was my Dad. Someone I should be happy to see and be around. Why was I feeling like this? My father picked me up, and as I hugged my mom goodbye, I didn't even want to let go. I walked out the door and got in my dad's car. He was happy to see me, and on the outside I was too. But on the inside, I wasn't. We got to this apartment. He still lived in the one that him and my mom lived in when I was first born. I put my things in the spare bedroom he had, and we go down to the basement. "What would you like to watch on TV?" He says to me, flipping through the channels. "Oh, it doesn't matter. I guess cartoons if they are on this time of night." I said, taking a sip of the chocolate milk he poured for me. He put something on and he sat on the floor while I laid on the couch. He was making some conversation with me, and I laughed a few times. It was getting late, and I usually would be in bed by now, but for some reason I wasn't tired. "Do you want to go to sleep?" He asks. "Yeah, I am getting pretty tired." I wasn't. But I didn't know what else to say. We walk upstairs. He hugs me goodnight, and I walked into the bedroom. The guest bedroom he had gave me a very cold feeling. I was laying in bed, staring up at this flower picture he had on the wall. I couldn't help but think how badly I wanted to be back home with my mom, but I didn't understand why. At this point, I looked over at the clock. It said 1:34 am. After maybe an hour of laying there in the dark, I got up. I slowly opened his door. He was sleeping. "Dad?" I said, in a very shaky voice. He wakes up right away and turns over towards me. "What's the matter?" He asks, clearly confused as to why I was waking him up in the middle of the night. "I can't sleep" I said. "I really want to go back home and see mom." "What?" He says, shooting up out of bed. "Why?" "I'm not sure, but I just want to go." I say to him. He gets up and walks me with me to the living room. I sat down on the couch and he was standing over me, questioning me about why I felt the way I did. I started getting more and more upset. "I don't know! I just want to go back home!" I cried. "I just want to see mom!" "But Kellie, it's me, your dad!" He starts to panic and yell to me. "Why don't you want to stay here?" I continued to cry, and it was to the point where I was absolutely hysterical. There was tears running down my face and it was extremely hard for me to calm down. "I can't take you home right now, Kellie" He says to me. "It's the middle of the night, I'm sure your everyone at home is sleeping. I will take you home first thing in the morning." After a little while, I decided to go back to the bedroom and try to fall asleep. As I laid in this bed, I looked up at the picture of the flower again. I thought to myself, "if I just keep looking at this flower, hopefully I will eventually fall asleep." This story I shared for this blog post shows the real emotion of how a parents divorce can effect the child. I was so used to being at home with my mom, that my dad almost seemed like a stranger to me. Discourse Community Overview
What is Literacy? (James Paul Gee) A Discourse Community is "a group of people who are trying to achieve specific common goals." There are multiple ways to express a discourse community. One example is Religion. There are many different ways you can look at Religion, but overall there are groups of people who share the same or at least similar beliefs and goals. Another way to look at discourse communities is a sports team. The team initially has the same goal- to win- but individually they may have their own separate parts to play and goals to reach in that game. What is Literacy? "A socially accepted association among ways of using language, of thinking, and of acting that can be used to identify oneself as a member of a socially meaningful group of "social network." In college for example, you are expected to write and read at a certain level. In an interview, you are expected to act, dress, and talk a certain way. When you are born, you are all born into a primary discourse. It's your families discourse, which is more than language. It is identity. We acquire our primary discourse. It is speaking more than words. Then, you have secondary discourses. You are around a certain behavior and you pick up that behavior through men-cognitive teaching. If you're a primary discourse, that you were born into, is close to your secondary discourse, it is easier for you to adapt to this. If your secondary is far away from your primary, you have to make changes to get there. If you were born into an immigrant home, where your main language isn't English, going to college in America will be much more difficult to do than someone who was born and brought up into English. Hola! This is my fourth blog post for this semester. We were assigned a few more readings, but this time the assignment is a little different. We are projecting that the authors of these writings are all having a discussion at a round table. The first reading is by Don Murray, called "Teach Writing As A Process Not A Product" which I completely agreed with his entire focus on that piece. The second article is by Mary Karr, called "Against Vanity: In Praise of Revision." I love the way Mary Karr writes this reading. She comes off aggressive right off the bat and you can tell she's passionate about this specific topic. The last reading is by Anne Lamott, called "Bird by Bird," which we only had to read 6 pages of. I am interested in reading the whole book at some point. Teach Writing as a Process Not a Product (Don Murray) Against Vanity: In Praise of Revision (Mary Karr) Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life | pp. 28 -34 | Short Assignments & Shitty First Drafts (Anne Lamott) On a warm Saturday morning in the spring, I saw an event on Facebook that there was several authors that were going to be at an invention in Philly. I had just started writing in my English class, and it's something I want to get better at. I haven't heard of any of the writers, but I figured they wouldn't mind answering some general questions I had about writing. It was only $20 a ticket, so I thought why not. I decided to jump on the train and head down there. I walk into the Convention Center downtown, and it was packed! For some reason I didn't think it would be this crowded. There were several aspiring authors there, but they had the famous Don Murray, Mary Karr, and Anne Lamott all at one table in the very front. I weasel my way up there through the crowds of people. I was actually nervous to speak to them! Which isn't a feeling I don't have very often. I've been having some trouble with the blog assignments, and I'm hoping they could just give a young writer some good advice. I waited in line for a little while, it went by pretty quick though because most people were just getting some autographs and wanted to say hi. I walked up to Karr, she was the first open author. I smiled at her, and said "hey Mary! My names Kellie. I just went back to college after taking almost 4 years off and I want to get better at writing. Can I ask you a couple of questions? I promise I won't take up too much of your time." She smiles back at me, and says "of course!" I thanked her and say "I feel like I don't pick the right words or use very good explanations when I'm writing for my English class." She nods and says "In the beginning, when there are zero pages, you have to cheer yourself into cranking stuff out, even if it later lands on the cutting room floor." Just that sentence alone made me feel more confident. I laughed and said "Okay, how did you feel when you first began writing? She says "Young, I hated the oldsters and often swallowed them with my nose pinched, as for a stank spoonful of cod-liver oil. They were rich and white and male. So I started off very slowly, reading closest to my time period and feeling my way back." She was cracking me up with her descriptions. Finally, I asked "Will it just click one day?" She giggles and says "Through sheer hardheadedness, even I can grant myself permission to run buck-wild down the page with sentences dumb as stumps and few glimpses of anything pretty. The idea is to get some scenes down. Let your mind roam down some alleys that may land in dead ends—that’s the nature of the process." I thanked her again for her time and for making me feel more comfortable in her own way with writing. I got back in line. Murray opened up next. Feeling better already, I walked up to him and he greeted me with a warm smile. I introduced myself and told him why I decided to come here today. He was a very bubbly, nice man. I proceeded to ask him if it wouldn't be a bother to ask him a couple questions, and he encouraged me to! I look at him and say "What are your thoughts about traditional writing classes?" He leaned in closer to me, and says "The product doesn’t improve, and so, blaming the student—who else?—we pass him along to the next teacher, who is trained, too often, the same way we were. Year after year the student shudders under a barrage of criticism, much of it brilliant, some of it stupid, and all of it irrelevant. No matter how careful our criticisms, they do not help the student since when we teach composition we are not teaching a product, we are teaching a process." I was blown away. I was not expecting that response at all! I told him about how this English class was different than the other ones I've taken throughout my years of high school and college. He was happy to hear that. Then I asked "How would you teach your students in your own class?" He smirks and says "First by shutting up. When you are talking he isn’t writing. And you don’t learn a process by talking about it, but by doing it. Next by placing the opportunity for discovery in your student’s hands. When you give him an assignment you tell him what to say and how to say it, and thereby cheat your student of the opportunity to learn the process of discovery we call writing." I couldn't believe how awesome these authors were. I was feeling better and better after each question I was asking them. I told him how cool I thought he was. I then asked him "Why do you think most English teachers are the way they are" He says "Instead of teaching finished writing, we should teach unfinished writing, and glory in its unfinishedness." I smile and say "It was a pleasure Mr. Murray, thank you." He winks at me, and I for one last time, got back in line. Anne Lamott was the last author for me to speak to. When it was my turn, I take a big step to her and explain who I am and why I was interested in speaking with her. "I've been asking the other authors some questions, hoping you wouldn't mind answering some as well. Her eyes lit up and she says "I'd love to answer some of your questions!" The first thing I asked her was "Was it easy for you to get into writing?" She replies "Very few writers really know what they are doing until they’ve done it. Nor do they go about their business feeling dewy and thrilled." I appreciated her realness and honesty with answering that question. I then ask "How did you deal with your insecurities with writing?" She cleared her throat. "What I’ve learned to do when I sit down to work on a shitty first draft is to quiet the voices in my head. There’s the vinegar-lipped Reader Lady, who says primly, "Well, that’s not very interesting, is it?" I started laughing, and explained that I have someone just like that telling me the same exact thing. "Quieting these voices is at least half the battle I fight daily. But this is better than it used to be. It used to be 87 percent. Left to its own devices, my mind spends much of its time having conversations with people who aren’t there." She goes on about these voices that speak to her and I couldn't believe how much I related to her. As I was leaving, I walked out confident and ready to take this class on. I was extremely glad I went to this convention today. If I had to make my own quotes about my own writing, I'd use "Let all of your different personalities tell your stories." "Don't get discouraged over the overwhelming feeling you get at first, it eventually turns into excitement." Lastly, I'd say "Anything is possible when you sit down and put your mind and positive energy to it." |
Kellie KalbachThis is my blog page. I'm using this page to experience the beautiful yet messy process of writing. Enjoy! Archives
May 2020
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