Sorry about that last one

My Creative Nonfiction class is a break from... well everything. I've never taken a class like this - one that celebrates writing in its most natural form: about oneself.

Writing is a dangerous pebble on which so many people dream of balancing. Forget about the fact that nearly all of us fall on our asses, a lot of people are "writers." Now I don't put "writers" in quotes because I am an elitest, a successful writer, or an asshole, I'm none of those although the latter could be argued. I put it in quotes because writing is such a broad craft.

I tend to roll my eyes at the prevalence of the student population, especially in High School, which declare with no uncertain terms that they "write poetry" (that time I was being elitest) but that has mostly to do with my distaste for confessional poetry. I don't like Sylvia Plath, she was whiny and had very little to say that wasn't self aggrandizing, she was enamored with suicide, with people who took their lives and essentially spent a majority of her time patting herself on the back for giving it a shot every 10 years. She died with her head in the oven, she thought he husband would come home and find her, save her, but he was held up at work and got home later than usual. She was interested in being a martyr to her own cause. Of course none of that takes away the fact that she was a great poet and had a great deal of influence on the genre.

My point is that in poetry you can write about your ex and how you cried yourself to sleep or tried to cook your head and it'll pass. It may not be good, and people might not like it, but they'll nod and say to themselves "yup, there's some poetry." But the fact that anyone can partake doesn't make it a democratizing medium, poetry is still transient and every new generation finds a new style in the mad dash to distinguish their poetry from every other amateur's. Creative Nonfiction takes what poetry started, blows it apart and the pieces scatter, anyone can pick up a piece of the genre and make it their own. You don't have to have credentials, you don't need a nod from the critics to reach out and connect with people, you don't need to attempt suicide or even cry yourself to sleep although, admittedly, all of these things would make a great narrative.

Whenever I start to write I'm constantly plagued by the fact that I'm a white, middle class, young male. The De Facto history of my people points to the fact that I'm the reason for other people's problems, they should write about me, and I should stay the villain. But this class has taken a crowbar to the notion that tragedy alone breeds good literature. I've noticed that even in the most mundane situations of the pieces I've read there is something to be gained, a knowledge that this author posses which I can't learn any other way. Sure I can experience the same idea, the same emotions, the same day under the same sun, but until I read how the sun felt on their face I retain a bias toward my own existence. It is up to them to tear down how I have experienced life and rebuild it with a piece of their understanding. In the end most succeed and I feel as if each time I am rebuilt I grow steadily upward toward a culminating human experience.