A decade in review - 2001
Dec. 21st, 2009 10:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seabird782001 was a pretty eventful year.
Here are some of the things that I remember most from that time period.
I got sent to Palm Springs by my academic department to represent at a big writing conference.
I was president of the Fiction Writing Student Board and got to be pretty involved behind the scenes at the Story Week Festival of Writers. The highlight was getting to pick up Dorothy Allison, one of my favorite writers, at the airport and have dinner with her and a member of Columbia's adjunct faculty. And as if that wasn't enough, she agreed to look at a bit of manuscript from me and provide comments, which ended up being very encouraging.
My tutoring work that started in 2000 continued. I got much more confident about my abilities in that area, and even had a few people from the previous year request that I work with them again.
As part of my final project for my senior seminar class, which spilled over into the beginning of 2001 thanks to an academic calendar that was much different than other schools, I put together my very first zine. It was sort of inspired by Bust, focusing on pop culture and women's issues and grrrl power.
I made use of a passport for the first time ever when I visited Dublin, Ireland for the first time.
I enrolled in my final two undergraduate classes during the spring semester: Advanced Prose Forms and The Psychology of Creativity. That prose form class stands out as the class where I probably took the most emotional risks with my writing. I was building upon some strides I'd made in the Fall '99 semester, when I'd taken regular Prose Forms with the same professor and also a class about writers and censorship that helped me overcome some personal censorship issues.
I graduated with a bachelor of liberal arts - with honors!
In the midst of my final semester as an undergraduate, I started writing album reviews for Coolgrrrls.com. Lots of free CDs came my way as a result. This led to my branching out into band Q&As later in the year for the same site, and the opportunity to meet Soul Cracker, a band from VH1's Bands on the Run reality series, in person.
I left my job at the library for a job at a tax law publisher. I thought it would allow me to gain some valuable editorial skills, but the job turned out to be much different than I expected.
In order to transport myself to this new job, which was located way, way out in the burbs, I bought my first car. (Yes, I realize that getting a car for the first time at 22 means I am a late bloomer. It's not the only area where I can claim that status.
I reached my highest point of immersion in the Bust message boards, because I needed some source of sanity when the new job started to get to me. Within about a month and a half of being there, I realized that I had landed in a role that was not a good fit.
Wrestling also continued to offer a much needed escape from reality. Especially the MTV show Tough Enough.
My other really, really important childhood friend, Billy was killed when he was struck by a car. I would not learn this until 2002, however because we fell out of touch after we graduated high school.
Like every other American, I got to experience the day the towers went boom.
I started graduate school.
I published a piece of poetry in a magazine for the first time.
I met Sam Weller, the professor who I owe my entire writing career to.
I was invited to be a featured reader during my school's annual Creative Nonfiction Week event, and I read from an essay about some very personal childhood memories. It was well-received.
I also got to have a one-on-one conference about the above-mentioned piece with the editor of an esteemed literary journal. He gave me some great feedback and made me feel validated as a writer. I kind of needed this because I was struggling with feelings of inadequacy in my first graduate level workshop class.
The novel about the two sisters that I mentioned in my entry about the year 2000 was still taking up most of my creative writing time. The story started to evolve though, and I made the He-Man obsessed character the owner of a pop culture shop and bumped up her age in the hope that it would give me more story possibilities.
I learned, thanks to my long commute to the job that was no longer a source of happiness, that I do not enjoy being in stop-and-go traffic on a daily basis. In fact, I learned that it drives me to the brink of insanity.
Here are some of the things that I remember most from that time period.
I got sent to Palm Springs by my academic department to represent at a big writing conference.
I was president of the Fiction Writing Student Board and got to be pretty involved behind the scenes at the Story Week Festival of Writers. The highlight was getting to pick up Dorothy Allison, one of my favorite writers, at the airport and have dinner with her and a member of Columbia's adjunct faculty. And as if that wasn't enough, she agreed to look at a bit of manuscript from me and provide comments, which ended up being very encouraging.
My tutoring work that started in 2000 continued. I got much more confident about my abilities in that area, and even had a few people from the previous year request that I work with them again.
As part of my final project for my senior seminar class, which spilled over into the beginning of 2001 thanks to an academic calendar that was much different than other schools, I put together my very first zine. It was sort of inspired by Bust, focusing on pop culture and women's issues and grrrl power.
I made use of a passport for the first time ever when I visited Dublin, Ireland for the first time.
I enrolled in my final two undergraduate classes during the spring semester: Advanced Prose Forms and The Psychology of Creativity. That prose form class stands out as the class where I probably took the most emotional risks with my writing. I was building upon some strides I'd made in the Fall '99 semester, when I'd taken regular Prose Forms with the same professor and also a class about writers and censorship that helped me overcome some personal censorship issues.
I graduated with a bachelor of liberal arts - with honors!
In the midst of my final semester as an undergraduate, I started writing album reviews for Coolgrrrls.com. Lots of free CDs came my way as a result. This led to my branching out into band Q&As later in the year for the same site, and the opportunity to meet Soul Cracker, a band from VH1's Bands on the Run reality series, in person.
I left my job at the library for a job at a tax law publisher. I thought it would allow me to gain some valuable editorial skills, but the job turned out to be much different than I expected.
In order to transport myself to this new job, which was located way, way out in the burbs, I bought my first car. (Yes, I realize that getting a car for the first time at 22 means I am a late bloomer. It's not the only area where I can claim that status.
I reached my highest point of immersion in the Bust message boards, because I needed some source of sanity when the new job started to get to me. Within about a month and a half of being there, I realized that I had landed in a role that was not a good fit.
Wrestling also continued to offer a much needed escape from reality. Especially the MTV show Tough Enough.
My other really, really important childhood friend, Billy was killed when he was struck by a car. I would not learn this until 2002, however because we fell out of touch after we graduated high school.
Like every other American, I got to experience the day the towers went boom.
I started graduate school.
I published a piece of poetry in a magazine for the first time.
I met Sam Weller, the professor who I owe my entire writing career to.
I was invited to be a featured reader during my school's annual Creative Nonfiction Week event, and I read from an essay about some very personal childhood memories. It was well-received.
I also got to have a one-on-one conference about the above-mentioned piece with the editor of an esteemed literary journal. He gave me some great feedback and made me feel validated as a writer. I kind of needed this because I was struggling with feelings of inadequacy in my first graduate level workshop class.
The novel about the two sisters that I mentioned in my entry about the year 2000 was still taking up most of my creative writing time. The story started to evolve though, and I made the He-Man obsessed character the owner of a pop culture shop and bumped up her age in the hope that it would give me more story possibilities.
I learned, thanks to my long commute to the job that was no longer a source of happiness, that I do not enjoy being in stop-and-go traffic on a daily basis. In fact, I learned that it drives me to the brink of insanity.
