I wrote something they liked

[morrigirl]

It was my turn to read in front of the class again today. This weeks assignment was to write about "a place where something happened." Naturally, I wrote about the brownstone where Kirk killed himself. I was really lazy about the whole thing. I had three weeks to write two pages on a tough topic and I didn't even write the first paragraph until this past Monday. And when I got started on it, it wasn't as easy as I'd imagined it being. I knew exactly what I wanted to write and how I wanted it to come off, but suicide is a subject we don't have the right words to describe and I found it difficult to do anything deeper than a straight relation of the facts. I had wanted to focus on visiting the house a year after his death, but it was easier to write about going there with Clark so that became the crux of the piece. I cooked it up last night, spellchecked it this morning and went to class hoping I'd make it through on the sheer horror of the subject matter cause I knew the writing itself wasn't very admirable.

And once again, to my surprise, my piece was well received. The professor said I handled the subject matter very delicately, that there was a lot going on and the details made the piece. That shocked the hell out of me cause one of the things I was really worried about was its lack of deatil. When I read it over before class it sounded so sketchy and general to me. Maybe I wasn't reading my writing as closely as my prof was. Wouldn't be the first time. One classmate said she liked the tension of "the narrator" being physically unable to enter the apartment or attend the funeral. Another said she liked the ending where "the narrator" realizes that though this man was a love of her life he won't be the only one.

I have to say I was very pleased with all the praise. I was even blushing while they heaped it on me. It made me feel as though I really DO belong in there with all the students who applied and were accepted into the program, that I'm not an interloper.