I received my critiqued second writing packet back from my mentor today.
Its is always so interesting what someone has to say about your writing. Especially a person who knows a lot about the craft and who’s opinion you trust and admire.
I wrote an essay about what it is like to have an A.D.D. brain, yet be a student- the struggle between making sure I take the notes I need on the lessons I am being taught, and writing down everything else floating around in my psyche. The basis of the story can be summed up in these few sentences:
- Burn my notebooks when I die.
- I spend about 40% of my time in class making lists of chores I need to do or errands I need to run or tattoos I would like to one day get.
- “Need to make the decision before you start writing: Am I willing to bare myself? If the answer is no, then pack up your shit and go home.â€
That last bullet is an actual quotation from my writing notebook during this past residency. The best part of that essay are the excerpts I included from my notebook. Problem is that I’m not quite sure how to structure the piece and where to include these awesome statements.
Lary suggested I read the following poem, as the topic is somewhat similar, and like most good poems, the word choice is precise. I liked it so much I thought I would share it with you all.
Marginalia” – Billy Collins
Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O’Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.Other comments are more offhand, dismissive –
“Nonsense.†“Please!†“HA!!†–
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
why wrote “Don’t be a ninnyâ€
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls “Metaphor†next to a stanza of Eliot’s.
Another notes the presence of “Ironyâ€
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
“Absolutely,†they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
“Yes.†“Bull’s-eye.†“My man!â€
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written “Man vs. Natureâ€
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird signing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake’s furious scribbling.Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents’ living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one pageA few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
“Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.â€