Assignment 0

Greetings all!

I’m Sarah Hathaway. I’m majoring in English with a writing concentration and probably a literature minor. I could go on for ages about why I love my major. Most of my reasons all come back to the fact that I love words. More importantly, I love what we can do with words and language. It is my greatest and most overwhelming desire to be an author. I particularly enjoy the fantasy genre and I am currently working on a fantasy book geared towards sixth grade students. I am ridiculously enthusiastic about writing and almost equally so about reading.

I’m from Cape Vincent, New York. I usually have to use several points of reference when describing the location of my home town to anyone not from the immediate area. For simplicity’s sake, my itty-bitty village is located where the St. Lawrence River meets Lake Ontario. It takes about an hour and a half for me to drive home. I absolutely love my home. Our village is so small that, honest to goodness, there is not one single stop light. Speaking of lights, however, we do have Tibbett’s Point Light House and it is a great source of pride in our little community. I live on what used to be a French nobleman’s farm; built in the late 1850s from limestone quarried from the creak located a half mile down the road. My nearest neighbor is about a mile down the road and I count the freedom of living in such a rural area as one of my greatest blessings. I lived a childhood of immense freedom and splendor that I would not trade for anything in this entire world of pleasures.

The pleasures that I most prize in this life are simple. I love to laugh and I try to fill each of my days with as much laughter as I am granted. I also adore reading. In the words of Jane Austen, “The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.” Personally I could not agree more but I will admit to the fact that I am not vehement in my accordance with this statement. I find long meandering walks with no set destination irresistible. This is probably due to my wandering thoughts; I love to see where I find myself at the end. I take great enjoyment in the serenity of nature, especially under tree canopies and beside bodies of water.

Moving on to feedback about my writing… I went to a very small high school (my graduating class had 87 students) and there are pros and cons to this. On the positive end, most of my English professors incorporated peer review into our classes. The negative end is that as one of the more talented students in my English classes, my peers rarely gave me valuable feedback. I was often placed in groups where the majority of the students were poor writers because my professors could count on me to give valuable help and advice. Though I don’t believe this harmed my writing I do believe that I could have benefited more from more varied feedback. My college experience has been much more useful. I have received a great deal more constructive feedback, both from my peers and my professors. I can honestly say that only one person has ever told me that my writing was, “poop not fit for an outhouse,” and apart from that one experience most people have offered me much more constructive criticism.

This is going to sound either corny or pretentious but in all honesty my greatest influence is God. He has granted me with a gift and a goal and for that He will always be my greatest influence. As far as influence from other writers goes there are so very many. Jane Austen is an extremely influential force. Sometimes I sit and write about the most trivial events of a day, all the while trying to mimic her style. I love her way with words. I also love the way John Keats makes words and images dance across pages to rhythms in ways I can only hope to dream of doing. His way with words is almost like magic, spectacular and almost unbelievable. I also find the work of Emily Dickinson extremely motivating. A book of her poems is sitting just by my elbow right now.

I think one of the most wonderful aspects of poetry is that there are so many forms; no one person could fully explore them all without doing many forms an injustice. Poetry has the capability to be both simple and complex, almost in the same way that life is both simple and complex. Poetry offers both the writer and the reader a great deal of freedom and that freedom is a precious thing. I don’t believe I can actually articulate how truly amazing I find poetry to be. It is truly an art, and one that I wish I were more competent at.

My goal for this class is to grow as a writer. It is a simple goal but it has the potential to be a difficult one for me to achieve. I have a tendency to remain static in one attitude as a writer and it is one of my greatest obstacles. I am hoping to overcome this over the course of the semester as well as the obstacle of my pride. I have a very potent compulsion to believe that I know best as far as my own writing is concerned. It is a cumbersome thing and hopefully this course will help me to jump that hurtle as well.

=)