You Can Write
Hello, lovely blog readers!
My name is Alicia Schubert, and I’m one of the poetry co-editors for Opus. I can’t pinpoint exactly when my love for poetry began, but I can remember the first poem that impacted me. In elementary school, I memorized a poem a week for English class, and one of those poems was Christina Rossetti’s “Hurt No Living Thing.” Rossetti’s call to protect insects must have touched my soul, because even now I can still recite it word for word. If you don’t believe me, come to the next Opus meeting and I’ll prove it to you. J
However, despite my affinity for Christina Rossetti, I didn’t take a poetry class at Hope until this semester. When I pondered what kept me from taking a poetry class sooner, I realized that I put it off because I was afraid—I was afraid that I didn’t have enough life-changing experiences to write about, and I was afraid that I didn’t have the talent my peers possessed. All of that seems silly now, though, because through this class I’m realizing again how much I love poetry. I love the way it trickles off my tongue when I read it aloud. I love late nights in front of a computer screen playing with images and line breaks. I love receiving feedback from my classmates and my professor and returning to my poems weeks later to rework them. I’m learning that I don’t have write like my friends—I can write like me. And so far, I haven’t run out of writing material yet.
So here’s the moral of my story, friends: you can be poets, whether or not you’ve skydived or traveled the world or lived through a broken heart. You can write sonnets and short stories and essays, and they can be beautiful, because each of your stories is beautiful. Don’t sell yourselves short. Don’t quit before you try. And definitely don’t wait until senior year to take your first creative writing class. Carpe diem! I promise you’ll be glad you did.
Love,
Alicia
P.S. Over break Hope played Bridget McCarthy’s gender-swapped production of Hamlet! It’s brilliant, and it was showing Friday and Saturday night at 7:30 p.m. in the DeWitt Studio Theatre. Tickets were only $2 at the door. Here’s a comic to get you in the Shakespeare mood:
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