Check-in 2

This semester is doing its best to crush me, but I won't let it. I was ill last week, leading up to the weekend, and it caused me to get slightly behind on my work. That said, I was a little bit ahead before this, so I suppose things have just evened out. I still need to get caught up in Pragmatics and Love Poetry – those were the two classes I missed last week – and so right now I'm working through our second homework assignment for Pragmatics, which includes some interesting wordplay involving unicorns, and recreating a Sappho poem for my Love Poetry course.

Our assignment for Love Poetry is to take what fragments are left from a Sappho poem of our choosing from the Anne Carson translation I mentioned before, and 'fill in the blanks' as it were, recreating the poem as if it were written in Sappho's time. Currently I am struggling with this as I fight the urge to modernize the poem and as I try to find a voice not my own.

Speaking of poetry, I have recently undertaken a new project. I know, I know, I don't exactly need more things to keep me busy, but I have to have fun sometimes right? This side project can definitely be considered fun. When I was at Bread Loaf early in the summer I had the privilege of attending many panels and talks, as well as individual/small group meetings with various editors and agents. One of the people that I ended up talking to was Chad Post, who was there as a publisher/editor for Open Letter at the University of Rochester. In addition to publishing, Open Letter runs a weblog and international review source called Three Percent. After leaving Bread Loaf, I decided that I would sign up to write occasional reviews for Three Percent, and I received my first book today (October 4th) and so far I love it. It's a book of poetry, but I shan't say more than that here. Once I finish writing the review and it goes through editing I will be sure to post a link to it on this blog.

On the topic of editing, my work in the Student-Scholar Partnership is going well, and I continue to be very happy with this project. To have a paying job, part-time or no, that is in my desired field is an absolute dream for someone my age, and I'm very thankful for the opportunity.

Literary Translation is my dream, as readers of this blog may know, and as readers will also know, my thesis is centered around Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and translations of her poems. At present I have scaled back the active translations as I am focusing a bit more on the content of my secondary source material for the critical introduction, although I of course work on bits and pieces when I have those rare spots of free time. I have an annotated bibliography of sources for my research seminar due next Monday, so I have also been working continuously on that.

Another research project that I am working on this semester is for my Pragmatics course. I'm still not entirely sure what I want to investigate yet; but our initial proposal (topic & research question, methodology idea, list of proposed papers) is due on the eleventh, so I'll have to come up with something soon.

Although I enjoy all of my courses and projects, I am developing a soft spot for my course on Ancient Greek. Learning this new (to me) language is a bit like solving a puzzle and slowly unwrapping a gift, and seeing all the pieces come together and getting a closer look at the prize is very enjoyable to me. When I am stressed out over bibliographies and papers and poems, untangling a sentence is oddly therapeutic.

Getting out all my thoughts on paper (or on screen I suppose) has a similar affect, so in a way I feel indebted to this blog for helping me process my strengths and weaknesses this semester. I hope you enjoyed this little peek into my mind.

Cheers,
Talia

Past Thoughts on Writing

I am currently studying at Middlebury Language Schools. This post (not including this paragraph or the title) is excerpted from a journal entry from  7:17 PM on Wednesday the 8th 2017, just a couple hours after the first ever post on this blog. Spelling and grammatical mistakes included. 

It's not that I'm finding writing particularly difficult these days, it's that the writing I am doing feels difficult for me. I struggle with being  able to grasp certain topics because I am not  entirely sure about how they interact with my own self and how I view the world. My  issue is I think, entirely dependent on the fact that my world view is fractured in ways that  is difficult for even myself to understand. The way that I move in the world has been changed, utterly and that is a really scary thing for me. My opinions, thoughts, points of strength are all things that I have stood by and that are now falling away. I really do wonder  if a past version of myself would recognize  me as who I am now. And I certainly would  not want to be my past self. And I do not think I would wish to be my present self were  it not that the future is so uncertain I  find it hard to contemplate.

Issues with What We Want

In the summer between my Freshman and Sophomore years at Brandeis I took an online Playwriting Course through the Brandeis summer school. I had never even attempted to write a play before, so this was a challenge, but a thing that I enjoyed. We progressed through the course writing scenes and then finally finished with a 10-minute play. Mine was called What We Want and it is about a girl who was (mostly) raised by her mother and step-father, and eventually goes to confront her biological father. I am not going to give the entire plot away, because while I would like to think no one would steal my ideas, this is the internet. Also, if I ever publish this story I would like it to actually sell at some point and that cannot happen if the whole thing is given away for free on the internet. It was a cute little play, at least I think so, and I do hope that I get to share it with the world ― following serious editing of course.

I first got the idea to rewrite the play as a prose story from one of my professors. He suggested this as a creative exercise, and to use as a prompt for the fiction writing in his class. At the time I was hesitant, because I liked the play as a play, and felt overwhelmed at the idea of changing something I loved dearly. This was Spring 2016, and shortly after I got concussed and forgot all about writing for a time. Now that I have remembered however, one thing has become very clear.

this play does not want to be a frickin' story. 

I spent a summer semester working on this play, and a few months post-submission I was still writing it. I'll be honest, once my software expired I let it fall to the wayside. But now when I look at it, the story feels like my baby again, and I don't want to hurt it by forcing it into a new medium. I've made some progress, but with all that has been going on this summer I dropped the ball a bit, and now that I am heading to Middlebury at the end of this week it's a bit too late to work on a project that is being written in English. I'm going to try again once the program is over during my nonexistent free time. For now, I just have to shrug and say hey, I've written worse.

Cheers,
Talia

Forgetting

I forgot how to write an essay. It's always like this, I get my sources, I prepare, and then it comes to the blinking line on a freshly opened word document, and I freeze. How do I write an essay? What are words? How do I form thoughts, oh my goodness seven whole pages I'll die. Shaking in my worn out sneakers, panic. Breathe, I have to breathe and focus because I actually know a fair bit about both Harry Potter and Mythology so what makes me so scared? It isn't the grade, because I was fine with the test last week and I haven't worried about it. I think it's the writing. Every time I sit down to write I remind myself that this is what I want to do, what I am good at, but another part of me screams that everything I put to paper is shit and I will fail out of life.

Okay maybe it is a little bit about the grade.

But that doesn't mean it isn't also more. It's the idea of commitment. Dedicating myself to a topic, weighing myself down. But what is a commitment?

It's much easier to say that you are going to do something than to actually do it. But is a commitment really a commitment if you don't see it through?

Sometimes I wonder.

And I think (I know) that I spend so much time in love with the idea of doing that I lose focus on the present. I am consumed by my future, constantly reaching for that fruit just out of my reach, I am holding up a world that doesn't need holding and with a hush I let go and nothing happens but I don't know, I can't know that everything will be alright. Nothing feels alright, it feels broken, I feel broken and that love I put into the present seeps into the future. My future. Don't give up what you want the most for what you want in the moment, but when is my moment? When will what I want arrive? Will I ever be satisfied?

Creative Nonfiction

It is certainly not the case that I don't like to, or don't want to write. For as long as I can remember, writing has been one of my most favorite things in the world. I think my problem is that I do not fully know what it is I want to write about.

Another problem is that I need time to fully grasp and anchor myself to an idea. Starting in on a writing project, I need to write two or three essays before I can go back and revise even the first one because I need the distance from the piece in order to see what I want from it and what it wants from me. Of course, sometimes that distance grows too far and I can no longer relate to the person I was when I wrote it. The beauty of it all is that these are still my words, and they can be adapted if I simply look at it as something to reflect on - that something being my somewhat flawed past.

What I am talking around is my struggle to write meaningful work in writing workshops. This (Creative Nonfiction) is the fourth writing workshop I have taken, and it is certainly more draining than the workshops I have taken before. I suppose it is because I find difficulty in writing about myself* since my life is a personal one that feels uncomfortable when exposed. That is precisely why I want to stay in this class however, because it pushes me to my limits and past them. If I only do the things that are comfortable in my life I won't grow at all.

Cheers,
Talia

*Trust me, I understand the irony of this being a personal blog post.