Writing is...

Writing is a lot of things. In its broadest sense, it is the communication of ideas through words transmitted in text. But it is also so much more than that. One of my favorite quotes from Allen Ginsberg, which comes from his poem Improvisation in Beijing, says “I write poetry because the English word Inspiration comes from Latin Spiritus, breath, I want to breathe freely.” For some, writing is essential as a means to convey ideas and express themselves- almost as much so as breathing. As someone who writes creatively, I can agree with this- writing is another way for me to “breathe freely,” to make sense of my feelings and express them.

Writing is how we preserve our past and how we shape our future. It is also how we make sense of our present. Writing is one of the most important elements of our culture, helping us to communicate pretty much every idea from faith to finance to one another for centuries.

This post is a definition, but also an introduction. With that said, hi! I’m Katie and I hail from a small town in New Jersey. I love seafood (one reason I wanted to go to school in New England), and  I watch a lot of TV, listen to The Magnetic Fields and love to read poetry- particularly Ginsberg and Lorca. I also love to write poetry and prose, and am currently attempting to write an epic of love, loss and lies set against the post-apocalyptic wasteland of America after a very different ending to the Cold War. It grapples with such questions as religion, sexuality and politics, and the plot is sort of sprawling and needs to be tamed into a cohesive narrative.

As far as academics go, I am definitely a humanities person. My favorite subject in high school was history, and I’m also passionate about film and politics, as well as creative writing and social justice issues. A big part of why I wanted to take this course is because I feel like high school literature courses don’t discuss gender or sexuality nearly enough. Nearly every opportunity to do so is ignored or downplayed. In my junior English class we discussed the racial aspect of Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston and what effect race had on Janie, the novel’s heroine, but not the effect of gender, which is just as pronounced, if not more so. These are topics that I, as feminist and advocate for the LGBTQ community, believe are incredibly important and should not be ignored, and I look forward to discussing them in this class. I also look forward to perhaps gaining a deeper understanding of myself in terms of these themes, as they are often not discussed. I want to know what being a woman and a sexual human being means for me.