This past Friday, a new tradition was born. It was kind of a bittersweet day, with many of us feeling not only the dull relief of finishing our final finals, but also the pain of the impending loss of our amazing and irreplacable seniors. When we walked into the CW room and were greeted by the sight of a podium at the front of the classroom, we weren’t sure what to expect. Was there another guest speaker? Were we going to have to make impromptu speeches for the seniors? Wrong and wrong. Some twenty minutes later, after Isaiah Dufort made a dramatic, smartly dressed entrance, we learned that that the CW room was now the site of the first annual Excellence in Eccentricity Awards, curated by Heather, Maia, and Isaiah. Everyone in the department recieved an official paper signed by Maia, Heather, and Isaiah certifying their unique affinity for something or other and an accompanying gift from the dollar store. I was awarded Most Likely To Institute a Hug-a-thon to Raise Money for CW (Allegedly). The award came with an adorable pink stapler since according to Isaiah, I’m always trying to steal Heather’s. I have no idea what he’s talking about.

The ceremony continued with more spot-on, strangely specific awards and gifts. After it was all over, we drifted to the carpet for a compliment circle to appreciate our lovely seniors. Fond memories were shared. Tears were shed. An entire box of tissues was used. We’re all going to miss the seniors. It’s going to be weird starting the new school year without them. Friday’s class was a mixed bag of emotions, but having our awards ceremony was an excellent way to acknowledge the awesomeness and uniqueness of every single person in the department. I, for one, am in love with this new tradition. Long live the EE Awards!

Giorgia and I are writing poems for our own graduation ceremony—which is a mere few days away (!?!). Our mission, as I have interpreted it, anyway, is to be creating something that will be both meaningful to and easily understood by everyone in the auditorium. Something that both preserves our authenticity, and conveys our classmates’. Something not overly cynical. Plus, I found out that I would be writing this poem with only a week or two to spare. I only turn out four or five poems per year that I’m completely proud of, and most of those take me at least a month to finish. In other words, this might be the craziest assignment I’ve ever been given.
I’m reminded of the process of writing a college essay. This is more fun, of course, but some of the elements are the same. The guidelines are, if not strict, at least clear; you’re writing to a very specific group of people; you’re writing to them for a prescribed reason. That doesn’t mean you have no freedom, or that whatever you write will be contrived. But every so often, I catch myself becoming dangerously skeptical about the purpose of writing this poem. Does graduation have any intrinsic meaning, or is this all just pomp and circumstance?

Since this kind of thought tends to occur right after I’ve been writing irritably for half an hour with no results, it’s pretty easy to put down to momentary crankiness. Yes, graduation is meaningful. And not just graduation as a moment in time—graduation as the event that the school puts on and that we’re all obligated to go to in slightly silly-looking hats. One of the reasons it will be meaningful is that the seniors get a final chance to show off our art: to write poems for the occasion, and play music, and dance, and do all the stuff that has been of ultimate importance to us for the last four years.

For my final blog post of my CW career, I’m supposed to be writing a testimonial to bring all you crazy blog-readers who are not already convinced of the value of CW over from the dark side. Obviously, there’s not enough space in one post to give a full brief, so I’m going to have to choose just one aspect of CW to talk about: Heather.

Today, I went into Heather’s office to consult with her about a poem (the one I’m writing for graduation) for the last time. This felt more final than any of the other events of the day—more so than attending my last high school English class or bringing my cap and gown home or even being part of the “senior appreciation circle.” I have the impulse to frame my enthusiastically-scribbled-on poem and hang it on my dorm room wall.

Working with Heather has been a defining part of every senior’s time in CW. “Working with Heather” may have included any of the following and more: sleeping on her couch; calling her at all hours of the night; eating her food; being showered with ego-boosting compliments; sometimes, grading her papers. Perhaps most importantly, hearing her explain something about your poem—some clever syntactical choice or meaningful image—that you hadn’t even consciously considered. Any CW knows how pissed off I get at apathetic teachers. Heather is the opposite of apathetic, and her complete generosity with her time, energy, and love is unearthly. She wins the Nobel prize for life-changing teaching.

Prospective parents reading this? If you think your kid can find a teacher like this at any school, you are wrong. Prospective CWs? If you have ever felt like you didn’t fit in, or like nobody understood you, the chances are that Heather will be able to fix that. Along with teaching us to write, it’s what she does.

Well, it took us a couple minutes to learn to love it. When the always adventurous Maia told us that today we would be working alongside another department, most of us were a little reluctant. It’s not that we don’t thoroughly appreciate the talents of the Instrumental Music department or the merits of working together, but I (and I’m sure many other CWers can attest to this) experienced a sudden onset of social anxiety. It meant we would have to SPLIT UP and it’s so HOT OUT WHY would they make us MOVE out of the CW room and what if they DIDN’T LIKE US and what if they JUDGED our poetry?? But, with the urging of the always wise seniors and Maia, all fourteen of us trudged on over to Orchestra room. We were then split up into groups (one or two CWers alongside three to five musicians), and assigned decades from which to compose a musical piece and a written piece to accompany it. My group, assigned the 1920s, wrote a short piece that begins: “Speakeasy, hold my secrets….” So you know there’s going to be some pretty good flapper drama going on in ours. Anyway, as I looked around to all the other CWers and musicians, working side by side to create their own beautiful, original pieces of art, I realized something: collaboration is scary, but its rewards enormously outweigh those few seconds of social anxiety. Interdisciplinary collaboration is so valuable and important in instituting a real feeling of community in the school and an appreciation for other art forms outside of your department, and I really hope that this day sets us on a path for collaboration between all departments in the future.

Below are pictures of our collaboration day:

Recently we visited the school farm. Part of this adventure was visiting the chickens they keep on the farm, something I, personally, was very excited about. See, I like to think of animals as my friends, and I wrongly assumed that these chickens would feel a similar love for me. 

Maybe I should have stayed out of the chicken coup. When you go into a dangerous zone like that, you have to understand the risks. Of course, I was just excited to pet their soft, feathery heads and did not consider the possibility that they were not as eager to be petted. 

Maybe I should have just patted one or two on the back, watched them run in circles for a while, and gone home unharmed. That’s not the kind of person I am though, and after seeing Olivia Weaver pick up a chicken and give it a big hug I decided that there was nothing stopping me from doing the same. 

When I grabbed the hen, she seemed at least partially content, and I was so exhilarated by the knowledge that I was holding the chicken and had therefore made a friend that I did not notice that I was being crapped on until it was too late. Fortunately, chicken feces are mostly grass and don’t smell too bad, but the whole experience was tarnished by that one traitorous chicken.

At this time of year most schools have a Winter Formal. School Of The Arts has a Drag Ball. I learned about this when a Drag Queen in flamboyant colors and excessive makeup stormed our classroom, arbitrarily picking me up in the process. Dances aren’t large events at SOTA, and the student government is looking to change that. After what I am sure was a long and arduous process, they decided to stay close to our core values, and start what I predict will become a tradition.

The image, in its absurdity, seems symbolic of SOTA and San Francisco. In Sochi, Russia gay propaganda is illegal, despite it hosting the Olympics: a symbol of worldwide unity. I wonder what they would think of the Drag Queen there.

    We began the first day of Sarah Fontaine’s mini-unit with a prompt to write about how we, as both humans and writers, connect to other people. This got me to thinking about my most recent favorite poem, “In Blackwater Woods” by Mary Oliver. I don’t usually read poems and then proclaim them my “favorite,” but for some reason this poem really appealed to me. I think it’s because I made a strong connection with the message (that I interpreted) of the poem and the circumstances of my life right now. What I love about the poem is that, although I identified strongly with it, I don’t think that Mary Oliver wrote the poem for anybody but herself. I think that she, like I hope to someday do with my writing, wrote the poem to express a feeling and a message that she wanted to understand for herself (not for any potential reader or critic), which also happened to convey a message that many readers, like myself, could relate to. I don’t think that the sole purpose of writing is to connect the writer to other people—at least for me, writing is a very introverted and personal activity— but I do think that, like I recently experienced with Oliver’s poem, if the writer choses to put their ideas out into the world, their personal thoughts and feelings and struggles could deeply connect with and impact somebody else.

This past Monday, Creative Writing welcomed a very special guest, photography writer Pete Brook. In Brook’s own words: “I am not a photographer. I stick to looking and commenting. I work as a freelance writer.” Brook, an avid blogger and curator of photographic images, came to speak about his work with images taken in and of the prison system. Originally from Lancashire, England, and now living in Portland, Oregon, Brook works for Wired Magazine on their ‘Raw File’ photography blog as well as actively maintaining his own blog, prisonphotography.org. He showed Creative Writing an inspiring slide show of photos taken within prison walls, and shared with us his thoughts on why prisons, prisoners, and images thereof can be an important and uniquely revealing look into this group of American citizens. 

 Brook first became interested in the prison system back in 2004, when he was, in his words, looking for an excuse to stay in California. At the time, he was finishing up a master’s course in museum studies at the University of Manchester in England. He wanted to stay and do research in California, but what would be his subject? Brook discovered that the San Quentin Prison had a prison museum, which became the center-point of his thesis. The 2.3 million people in the prison system fascinated him as well as the human rights abuses they suffered. Brook started prisonphotography.org six years ago, after moving to Seattle. He did it to show people a different side of prison photography. As he states in an interview with the New York Times in 2011, “When you deal with prisons, you’re dealing with closed systems. These are effectively disciplined spaces. And that discipline attends to the imagery that is released.” 

One of the first slides in Brook’s presentation was a compilation of prison clip art, the kind of stereotypical pictures a simple Google search produces. I thought this laid a good foundation because he started with the most basic, simple, unrealistic pictures of prison and then delved into emotional photography, which depicted prisons from all kinds of angles, even the outside. For me, the clip art symbolized the media’s portrayal of prisons. This got me to thinking that I never question prisons or what goes on inside of them. I always assumed that the people handling criminals weren’t criminals themselves. This is one reason I appreciated Brook’s presentation, because it offered a fresh perspective on a topic I am not familiar with and have not thought a lot about. As writers, we always need new experiences and new ideas to inspire our writing. 

Brook showed us many different photographers that have either spent time volunteering in prisons and taking pictures, or have fixated their photography on prisons. Two that interested me the most were Stephen Tourlentes and Cheryl Hanna-Truscott. Tourlentes photographs the outsides of prisons. One of his pictures was of a large penitentiary at night, all lit up. Brook told us a story of how Tourlentes was driving along the road at night in the middle of nowhere and saw these bright lights, as if there were a city in the far distance. When he went to investigate, Tourlentes found that it was in fact a bright prison, and he took a picture. I thought about the architecture of prisons and how so simple they are yet in a sense they are their own cities: A complex jungle of cell blocks and lights.

Cheryl Hanna-Truscott took pictures of incarcerated mothers with their newborn babies. Brook talked about how if the mother is stable, charged with a non-violent crime and has good behavior then some prisons let them stay with their babies up until they are seven years old. The picture Brook showed us was of a prison mid-wife holding a newborn baby in a prison cell. Brook shared with us that he thought more prisons should have programs where mothers are allowed to stay with their babies.  I found myself conflicted on this topic, which made it so intriguing. Is it fair to keep babies in a cell for the first years of their life? How will that affect them emotionally? How will that change their upbringing? On the other hand, Brook said that research has shown that it is crucial for a baby’s development to be with her/his mother in those early stages. These questions, and the profound photograph, inspired me to write. This got me thinking that inspiration for a Creative Writer’s writing does not only come from a prompt, but the ability to go beyond the prompt and look at it from every view point. Brook’s presentation has me thinking still, and I continue to analyze my own thoughts on the prison system through my writing. 

Although he describes himself as not an activist, Brook has inspired me to use my writing, and my camera, as a tool for activism and reform. He said that during the Vietnam War, newscasters and politicians were telling the people their version of what was happening in Vietnam. Photographers who went there and took pictures of what was really going on were showing the people something completely different. I want to use my writing to show the world something new. I want to be truthful in my writing and show all perspectives. I want my writing to inspire reform. I attribute these recent revelations to Pete Brook and his insightful presentation. 

For more information, visit Pete Brook’s blog: http://prisonphotography.org/pete-brook/ and check out his twitter account, @Brookpete (All Pete’s tweets are written, very proudly, by him) Also, check out Wired Magazine’s ‘Raw File’ blog: http://www.wired.com/rawfile/  And, lastly, Pete’s interview with the New York Times (which can be found on his blog): http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/19/focusing-on-prison-photography/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=1