Final Project Proposal

This semester many of the visiting poets and writers have talked about the importance of place. As we have seen in their works, landscape informs language, culture, social dynamics, art, writing, etc… The list goes on. With this in mind, I hope to work my way into a series of poems and stories about my experience living away from home for four years at a boarding school. Using the physical surroundings of the campus as my “way in” to these anecdotes, I will explore how the unique and at times other-worldly culture of this environment is informed and mirrored by its setting, the experience of leaving my home and family for this new place, what it feels like to be an outsider looking in on an unknown world, and the process of reliving and writing about this time from the standpoint of many years later. Building on some of the poems I’ve already written this year and experimenting with other mediums as well, I hope to create a collection of works that speaks to the many different facets of this experience, ranging from the funny to the beautiful to the heartbreaking and (hopefully) to the many other things in between.

Most importantly, in line with something we talked about with Ada Limon and Arcelis Girmay, I will be approaching this project from the standpoint of “giving myself permission” to simply write. As someone who suffers from rather crippling writers block, I often find myself editing and correcting before I even begin to put things on the page – often leading to nothing getting written down. With this in mind, the process by which I put this collection together will be of just as much concern to me as the final product. I welcome any advice or helpful tips on this last matter as well.