Essay topic 2: Overall description of your learning experience in LITR 3731 Creative Writing and its potential applications to your writing / teaching career.

Kristin Howard

The Experience of Learning

I consider my goals in the English Literature and Education field unique.  When I graduated High School I immediately went to work at a maximum security prison facility for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.  There, I developed my career plan as I worked as a correctional officer inside the Windham School District (the correctional education program).  It was then I decided that I was going to help reintegrate offenders back into our society by teaching them English.  Little did I know the process it would take to be able meet my career goals.  So here I am in your class four years later.  This class placed me head to head with my personal demons in writing.  I didn’t want to write a poem, share my work, or participate in any workshops.  I just wanted to come to class, listen to a lecture, do my work, turn it in, and get my grade.  I never would have thought that those once dreaded tasks would turn into a personal necessity for my future teaching methods as well as a gateway to expressing my actual liking of writing fiction!

The poetry assignment was the first and most difficult chore to overcome.  I put it off until I had to work on it.  Then, surprisingly, once I actually started writing, it became entertaining and engaging.  I hadn’t written a poem since my freshman year in high school but it came to me like I was a poet.  Well, maybe not a poet, but at least someone who wasn’t deathly afraid of trying to create rhymes and rhythm to make an interesting and creative poem.  Then was the next tribulation, the workshop where I had to share my poem with my classmates and receive their feedback.  I was sweating this all week long.  Finally, it was time and instead of stammering through my poem and awaiting criticism I found that the class liked my poem and they actually helped me make my poem even better.  I was sold on writing workshops after this class.  I have noticed in reviewing previous finals of former classes that most of them were anxious or nervous about the writing workshops as well.  JT O’Neal’s first sentence of his Out of the Closet essay was, “I think the biggest challenge for me with this class was to read my work in front of other people.”  I can definitely relate to his statement, “The requirements of the class forced me to come out and say, “I’m a writer. I write. I may be only marginally good at it, but I am always trying to improve myself.”  This quote was very inspirational to me.

The success of the poetry portion of the class helped me be less inhibited by my fears as I approached the fiction section of the class.  I was anticipating my peer reviews and looked forward to their praise and constructive criticisms.  The draft exchanges were not as helpful as the workshops; yet, they were of value when editing my draft.  I suggest a somewhat more formal draft exchange process.  For instance, a set of specific questions to answer or a rubric of sorts to make sure most aspects of format, grammar, creative interest, and readability are acceptable.  Then the worksheet could be attached either online or on paper and the instructor could evaluate the changes the author took into consideration in addition to the analysis. 

The learning experience in general was eye-opening as I have not had any formal creative writing experience.  It was a pleasure to be introduced to a style of writing that allows an author to express themselves and create their own work.  The workshop style class mirrors the flexibility of the genre of creative writing itself.  The Three Genres handouts were the necessary evils of any writing course.  However, they were insightful and interesting such as chapter eleven (From Craft to Art).  This chapter was helpful as I discovered different forms, exploring new themes, reading critically, and revising.

As a future teacher, my personal perspective on the class was that I hope I can create a classroom with as much learning and effective interaction as I encountered in this class.  I am trying to develop a way to have a workshop in an unconventional classroom such as in a prison system.  How can I get convicted felons to engage in constructive ways to learn how to write fiction without causing behavioral problems within the classroom?  I am excited to try to successfully incorporate creative writing in my classroom.

I look forward to writing more creatively both on an academic and personal level.  This class has given me the building block needed to begin writing with higher confidence and skill, enabling me to better develop my poetry and fiction writing.  I only hope that I can pass that skill along to my students in the future.  The most interesting quality about this class was that I could learn not only as a student in the class, but also observe ways to facilitate and organize the class according to the role of the teacher.