Prompts: How did you fall in love with writing? What are your earliest memories of writing? Why do you want to pursue creative writing? What are your creative goals for the future?
You have two first grade graduations. The first one occurs in Baltimore, Maryland, the other in Natal, Brazil. The last few months you lived in Baltimore were taken up by countless hours practicing cursive calligraphy and Portuguese. Your mom wasn’t the parent who could make you cry while teaching you something, but you also had other things to cry about. Moving to a different country, for one, or spending countless hours learning to write differently than you had already been taught. Portuguese was the language you had least experience in. You had Spanish and English under wraps now, but mom and dad didn’t ever speak Portuguese at home. You only ever spoke to Vovó in Portuguese, and you didn’t enjoy speaking in Portuguese because you were bad at it.
You skip second grade, which you don’t understand why in the moment but makes sense as you get older, and third grade sucks. At your schools in Natal, you are forced to write everything down in cursive calligraphy. It’s hard for you, and you often miss out on part of recess, games, and social time because you are still copying your agenda from the board, never mind the three chalkboards worth of history notes you need to put in your notebook. One day after school, your mom offers to buy you a book at the outlet near your apartment. You hate writing, and you hate reading, but you find a book named Dear Dumb Diary that has lots of drawings and a brunette on the cover. It’s yours, and you finish it quicker than you thought possible. You laugh out loud, you feel sadness, you feel company. You obsess, more or less, until you save enough allowance to buy the next book. For some reason, your parents don’t believe in owning books, so it fuels your desire to keep buying them even more. You buy Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, mistaking it to be the sixth book, and you read that too. Your parents encourage you because you already watched the first five movies, so it should be okay, right?
It is okay. Up until you move back to Baltimore, and are stuck in the middle of fourth grade, again. You had just finished fourth grade in Natal. Now, you relearn the right cursive, the right maths, the completely different history chalkboards. You find Dear Dumb Diary by Jim Benson at the Scholastic book fair, and you re-read them all in English. You read the Harry Potter series in English, as well. You still laugh, you still feel sadness, you still feel accompanied by the characters. You start writing about a girl who doesn’t move around, or speak multiple languages. She’s blonde and has lots of friends, unlike you, and she has a love interest that may or may not look like your crush.
Writing a story is like learning cursive calligraphy in a different language. It’s not easy, it’s only fun if you get it right, and sometimes people don’t understand what you write. But you are determined to feel understood, feel accompanied, feel sad, and feel happy. Your stories can do that. If other’s stories can do that for you, can’t you find a way to do that for them?
You write a novel in 2019. It takes you a year and a month. Prior to that, you wrote fanfiction across genres and fandoms until you built enough confidence to keep pursuing your own stories. In 2021, the pandemic and your immigration struggles blow over your flaming ambitions like the devil over your shoulder that tells you that you aren’t good enough. If during your BA in English at TMU, you’d been able to take seven courses a semester, work twenty hours a week, and finish a novel, why can’t you write anymore? Where was the space you used to hold dear for writing stories? Had you lost it?
You enroll at OCAD University for a Creative Writing BFA. If you can’t reclaim autonomy of the passion you feel for writing stories and connecting with others, then you will reclaim your confidence through learning. Cursive needs practice to maintain, just like writing.
Comments