In 2011, a clever entitled song, Honey and the Bee, was released by Owl City AKA Adam Young. One line from it sums up my latest novel in both contempt and theme. Young sings, “There’s something about you that makes me feel alive.” I get chills even reading this to myself. How did he know this will be the emotions I would portray to my two main characters in Ambience as they juggle life, choices, and the discover that life is worth living till it’s fullest when you find that love is real?
Though Ambience was something first imagined back in August 2009, through many revisions and death threats from me to end the project, I saw it through. Along the way, I grew up and can honestly admit after much thought, I found that I learned more from writing three novels about writing then I ever did receiving my four year degree, in English Literature nonetheless. I read and wrote, read and ignored. Yes, lots of ignoring. Lots of, ‘I just want to give up because who will ever want to read this’.
But then I thought, Wait!? I want to read this. I discovered that the most important reader a writer will ever have is themselves. Writers write what they would like to read, if not what are you doing trying to write a book not even you will read? Its true and the moment you figure that out, your doubts start to drift away. Though they’ll always linger around, look those Christmas tree pine needles that show up months after the holidays has past and no matter what you do they stick around. So I say embrace them, maybe even have a good cry with them.
Writing and life are a journey, a lone adventure only you can see through to the end. It’s hard when you see others doing what you know have the right to be doing as well, but don’t give up. If you really want this life, see it through. Explore the world, discover your fears and relish in the impossible. Be fearless and weak. You’re only human and one that knows that zeal takes years to mature, that growing up must happen in order to be the person you daydream about.
A cardboard cutout of Henry M. Flagler drew long lines of people Saturday who waited in the dining hall of Flagler College for a chance to get a picture of themselves with the oil tycoon.
“That is so neat,” said Theresa Lee, of Virginia, as she held pictures of herself, wearing a lace shawl and holding a white parasol, standing next to the black-and-white cutout.
Just 125 years earlier, the real Henry Flagler opened the same building as the Hotel Ponce de Leon, a luxury hotel and winter resort visited by the wealthiest of the wealthy, famous personalities and U.S. presidents.
On Saturday the college, the city and about 4,000 people turned out to celebrate Flagler, the hotel and the tourism boom he launched. After a ceremony saluting the 125th anniversary of the hotel’s opening, people walked through the entrance of now-Flagler College to tour the former hotel, learn about the man and pose for pictures with his cutout.
Perks
Inside, tour guides told tales of what life was like in the grand old hotel.
Finished in May 1887, the hotel featured electricity, more than 70 of Louis Comfort Tiffany’s stained glass windows and other priceless pieces of art.
Off the rotunda was the ladies’ parlor, where the women would spend their time listening to music and mingling as the men checked in, said guide Kalei Fowkes, a senior at Flagler.
“Ladies were actually not allowed at the check-in desk. It was forbidden,” she said.
The parlor is the most expensive room at the hotel and boasts Tiffany chandeliers and a clock made of the “largest piece of intact white onyx in the western hemisphere.”
By DARON DEAN, daron.dean@staugustine.com
A crowd gathers outside of Flagler College during a celebration of the 125th anniversary of the Hotel Ponce de Leon on Saturday morning.
Men who stayed at the hotel and needed a shave could head down to the barbershop, where Flagler and other notables such as John D. Rockefeller probably went for a trim and got the best-of-the-best kind of treatment, said Scott Jackson, another tour guide and Flagler student.
“This was the hotel for the elite — you were rich, you were powerful, so you had to be very well taken care of,” Jackson said. “You were given the best business, the best service you possibly could.”
The barbershop is now an office, but the original mirrors and woodwork remain.
A billiard room reserved for the ladies was another interesting feature of the hotel, said Thomas Graham, professor emeritus of history at Flagler College, during a telephone interview.
“Billiards was regarded as not proper by some people in those days,” he said.
“This billiard room today is (Flagler College) President (William) Abare’s office.”
Daily life at the hotel was “pretty leisurely,” Graham said.
“A lot of people came down just to spend time sitting in the sun.” That time was spent in the courtyard. For entertainment, people took carriage rides, listened to concerts in the courtyard and the rotunda and played cards in the solarium.
Pomp
Saturday’s anniversary ceremony started in grand fashion as a Florida East Coast Railway train brought notable figures including Henry Flagler, played by John Stavely, and Mayor Joe Boles, St, Augustine Alligator Farm owner David Drysdale and Abare to the stop near Palmer and West King streets. The four men made the rest of the trip in a horse-drawn carriage that delivered them to the crowd waiting outside the entrance of Flagler College.
Boles spoke to the crowd on the sunny and unseasonably warm day.
“As I squint out at you in the midst of this bright sun, let us be reminded why 125 years ago on Jan. 12, this opened because of that sun,” he said.
Boles read a proclamation from the City of St. Augustine and spoke about the “profound” influence Flagler had on the city and the state.
“If not for Mr. Henry Morrison Flagler 125 years ago, people would not be flocking to the state of Florida, the most visited state in the union.”
Flagler, the cofounder of Standard Oil Company, is considered the father of Florida’s tourism industry. He developed St. Augustine and much of the east coast of Florida, building resort hotels and the Florida East Coast Railway.
Stavely, who portrayed Flagler, dressed much like the statue of Flagler that stands outside of the entrance of the college. His speech, delivered in what he called the “bombastic” style of the day, used quotes from Flagler and stayed close to what the tycoon might have said if he had given a speech that day 125 years ago.
“ … I do wish to welcome you to the opening of this grand hotel in the year 18 and 88,” he said.
“My friends, I’m often asked, ‘Why St. Augustine? Why did you leave the board rooms of Standard Oil and leave the comforts of New York City to come to the Ancient City for a new venture?’ And I reply the same way. I say: Well, it just sort of happened. I happened to be in St. Augustine, and I happened to have some spare money to spend.”
Stavely, in character, talked about the challenges and expenses of building a hotel that the modern 19th century guest would enjoy while staying true to the town, and he gave credit for the final product to his architects, Thomas Hastings and John Carrere.
“I think they did a nice job, what do you say?” he asked, gesturing toward the building with his top hat.
“We are now going to open the doors and allow you inside this grand hotel,” Stavely said. “Thank you for coming, one and all.”
Past
When Henry Flagler came to St. Augustine and stayed at the San Marco Hotel in 1885, he could see things were changing and he saw opportunity, Graham said. A railroad from Jacksonville to St. Augustine had been built in addition to the San Marco hotel.
“... he could see the guests coming to St. Augustine were no longer sick Yankees but were now becoming rich Yankees.
“He had accelerated a trend that had already started before him.”
The opening of the Hotel Ponce de Leon was much like Saturday’s ceremony, even down to the numbers. The Jacksonville News Herald reported at the time that 3,000 people attended the opening on Jan. 12, 1888.
“As the hotel was being built, local people kept saying, ‘We want to go inside and see what it looks like on the inside,’” Graham said.
Builders had been resistant to that, but eventually officials agreed to let the public in for a few hours on opening day. The local newspapers announced that there would be a general reception.
On that day, people from all sections of town and level in society got to see the hotel.
“Everybody came in,” Graham said. “It was the general populous from St. Augustine … Minorcans, and black people and poor people.” Flagler did not give a speech, but he was there with his wife, and there were bands that “struck up a tune” as the gates opened and people went inside.
“They did what people did today,” Graham said. “They wandered around and looked at the art and said, ‘Oh my, isn’t that wonderful.’”
Questioning that English Degree or High School/College class that others are saying is a waste of time, enjoy the below fellow lovers of the written word.
He's now Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In grad school? He studied literature -- W. B. Yeats, to be exact.
Editor’s note: Michael Bérubé is the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor and director of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at Pennsylvania State University, and the 2012 president of the Modern Language Association.
(CNN) - Almost every college student who considers majoring in English - or French, or philosophy, or art history - inevitably hears the question: "What in the world are you going to do with that?" The question can come from worried parents, perplexed relatives, or derisive, incredulous peers, but it always implies that degrees in the humanities are “boutique” degrees, nice ornaments that serve no practical purpose in the real world. After all, who needs another 50-page honors project on the poetry of Charles Baudelaire?
Well, strange as it may sound, if you’re an employer who needs smart, creative workers, a 50-page honors project on a 19th century French poet might be just the thing you want to see from one of your job applicants. Not because you’re going to ask him or her to interpret any poetry on the job, but because you may be asking him or her, at some point, to deal with complex material that requires intense concentration - and to write a persuasive account of what it all means. And you may find that the humanities major with extensive college experience in dealing with complex material handles the challenge better - more comprehensively, more imaginatively - than the business or finance major who assumed that her degree was all she needed to earn a place in your company.
We have plenty of anecdotal evidence for the value of the humanities. Over 25 years of teaching, I’ve had many students tell me - sometimes five, 10, 20 years after they graduated - that their English major gave them the intellectual skills they needed in their careers, while introducing them to some of the most challenging and delightful works ever written in our language. At the Modern Language Association, any one of our almost 30,000 members can say something similar. That’s why we’re such passionate advocates of study in the humanities.
And as Richard Brodhead, president of Duke University, has pointed out, we can point to success stories like Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or Harold Varmus, director of the National Cancer Institute, Nobel laureate and former director of the National Institutes of Health. Each of them earned a Master’s degree in English. Dempsey studied Joseph Conrad and William Butler Yeats; Varmus concentrated on Anglo-Saxon literature. In other words, they immersed themselves in dealing with complex material that requires intense concentration, and they honed their intellectual skills in so doing. It turns out that those skills are useful - and transferable - anywhere there is thinking to be done.
But for the first time, we also have statistical evidence for the value of the humanities. In 2011, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa published “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses.” What most people took away from that book (no doubt partly because of the title) was that college students are goofing off: They spend far more time on social activities than on homework. The results show up on a test called the Collegiate Learning Assessment, which basically asks students to deal with complex material and write a persuasive account of it. “At least 45% of students in our sample,” Arum and Roksa write, “did not demonstrate any statistically significant improvement in CLA performance during the first two years of college.”
That’s not a happy result by any measure - and it makes college sound like a waste of time and money. But when you break down the numbers, a funny thing happens: Students showed improvement in “critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills” largely to the degree that their courses required them to read at least 40 pages a week and write at least 20 pages in a semester.
The more reading and writing they did - serious reading, analytical writing - the more they learned. A remarkable finding!
All right, it’s not really a remarkable finding. It’s precisely what you would expect - except that it’s precisely what everyone manages to forget every time they ask a humanities major, "What in the world are you going to do with that?" In Arum’s and Roksa’s findings, humanities majors scored quite well; business majors did not.
Too many students (and their parents) think of college as the place that will grant them the degree they need to work at X job. The problem is, X job might not exist 10 or 20 years from now. Or X job might be transformed into something else, something that requires critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills.
When that happens, and it happens all the time, humanities majors find that their degrees were good investments after all - and that they are employable anywhere in the economy where there is thinking to be done.
The opinions expressed are solely those of Michael Bérubé.
It is my belief that children
shouldn't go to school in fear of never coming home. Though I am not a parent
et, my heart was broken this past Friday for those in Connecticut who will
never see middle school, go to prom, and cry when there folks drop them off on their
first day in college.
Twenty little innocent souls are in
heaven tonight, no longer in pain or fear. Six adults who saved countless
children, putting their lives on the line to save a parent’s whole world. No
words can comfort anyone of those parents ever again for we are human and were
made to never forget. And may we never forget of the events that took place on
12/14/12, for all those lost that tragic Friday will forever be alive in every
soul they've ever encountered and the millions that have heard of their lives
and deaths.
You will always be alive, Charlotte Bacon, 6, Daniel Barden, 7, Rachel Davino, 29, Olivia Rose Engel, 6, Josephine Gay, 7, Ana Grace Marquez-Greene, 6, Dylan Hockley, 6, Dawn Hocksprung, 47, Madeleine F Hsu, 6, Catherine V Hubbard, 6, Chase Kowalski, 7, Jesse Lewis, 6, James Mattioli, 6, Grace McDonnell, 7, Anne Marie Murphy, 52, Emilie Parker, 6, Jack Pinto, 6, Noah Pozner, 6, Caroline Previdi, 6, Jessica Rekos, 6, Avielle Richman, 6, Lauren Rousseau, 30, Mary Sherlach, 56, Victoria Soto, 27, Benjamin Wheeler, 6, Allison N Wyatt, 6, bubbly smiles and pink cheeks, colorful works of arts and handcrafted birthday cards, in our memories.
Third-grade students at Bayard Taylor Elementary in Philadelphia. Educators say children need more familiar images.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~***~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This week I’m going to take a breather from “The
Writer” series on my blog and focus instead on a article I recently read on the NY
Times website that concerns me greatly. The caption read, For Young Latino Readers, an
Image Is Missing. You can guess from my last name that I’m Hispanic.
Personally I don’t call myself a Latino as my family has roots in both Spain
and Central America.
My mother was raised and brought over as a child from Cuba to Florida.
My father came to the states in his early teens from Costa Rica.
Growing up in South Florida in the late 90’s and early 00’s, I was
exposed to the vast culture of both Miami and Fort Lauderdale and its growing Spanish
speaking residences. Sure they got the food industry covered to the max, but I always
noted the lack of Spanish writers, primarily the lack of Spanish characters in today’s
YA market. Yes there are the side characters that pop up every once in a while,
but no one I could relate to. I mean, how could I relate to Belle Swan from
Twilight? Sure we could both act like idiots and fall in love for the bad guy
all our friends are warning us about, but how about the struggles Latinos face
in a world that only pictures them as the maid or a burger joint employee?
Most of the novels I’ve written and the ones that are in the processing
of being written do have Spanish characters leading the way. Ambience has two
main characters, one a ghostly male Spanish solider from the 16th
century, the other a Cuban American female starting college. It’s important
that in writing Spanish characters into ones novel, we paint them in a positive
light. Everyone’s read the story of the tough tattooed Mexican who’s only goal
in life is to break as many hearts as possible. Please be more creative. I am
so much more than a stereotype. Yes I can be loud, just like a Cuban, but
I’m also that shy girl who sat in back of the classroom in her college class
dreaming of the day where I could be seen as more than just that odd mixed
Spanish girl, instead that oddly shy Spanish girl who wrote those awesome
killer novels.
So too all the writers and non-writers out there, what in this article speaks the most to you? Is it Mario Cortez-Pacheco notices that, “many of the other books he encounters in his classroom…most of the main characters are white. “I see a lot of people that don’t have a lot of color,” he said.” Even at the tender age of eight, this kid sees the gap. A gap that needs to be filled so the future isn’t as closed minded as our past still seems to be.
In closing, this article should speak to the heart of every small or grown child out there, no matter the age. Writers, we need to mix the YA pool up and include more characters that everyone can relate to, just not the typical overly done stereotypes.
PHILADELPHIA — Like many of his third-grade classmates, Mario Cortez-Pacheco likes reading the “Magic Tree House” series, about a brother and a sister who take adventurous trips back in time. He also loves the popular “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” graphic novels.
Jessica Kourkounis for The New York Times
At Bayard Taylor Elementary in Philadelphia, three-quarters of the students are Hispanic.
But Mario, 8, has noticed something about these and many of the other books he encounters in his classroom at Bayard Taylor Elementary here: most of the main characters are white. “I see a lot of people that don’t have a lot of color,” he said.
Hispanic students now make up nearly a quarter of the nation’s public school enrollment, according to an analysis of census data by the Pew Hispanic Center, and are the fastest-growing segment of the school population. Yet nonwhite Latino children seldom see themselves in books written for young readers. (Dora the Explorer, who began as a cartoon character, is an outlier.)
Education experts and teachers who work with large Latino populations say that the lack of familiar images could be an obstacle as young readers work to build stamina and deepen their understanding of story elements like character motivation.
While there are exceptions, including books by Julia Alvarez, Pam Muñoz Ryan, Alma Flor Ada and Gary Soto, what is available is “not finding its way into classrooms,” said Patricia Enciso, an associate professor at Ohio State University. Books commonly read by elementary school children — those with human characters rather than talking animals or wizards — include the Junie B. Jones, Cam Jansen, Judy Moody, Stink and Big Nate series, all of which feature a white protagonist. An occasional African-American, Asian or Hispanic character may pop up in a supporting role, but these books depict a predominantly white, suburban milieu.
“Kids do have a different kind of connection when they see a character that looks like them or they experience a plot or a theme that relates to something they’ve experienced in their lives,” said Jane Fleming, an assistant professor at the Erikson Institute, a graduate school in early childhood development in Chicago.
She and Sandy Ruvalcaba Carrillo, an elementary school teacher in Chicago who works with students who speak languages other than English at home, reviewed 250 book series aimed at second to fourth graders and found just two that featured a Latino main character.
The Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education, which compiles statistics about the race of authors and characters in children’s books published each year, found that in 2011, just over 3 percent of the 3,400 books reviewed were written by or about Latinos, a proportion that has not changed much in a decade.
As schools across the country implement the Common Core — national standards for what students should learn in English and math — many teachers are questioning whether nonwhite students are seeing themselves reflected in their reading.
For the early elementary grades, lists of suggested books contain some written by African-American authors about black characters, but few by Latino writers or featuring Hispanic characters. Now, in response to concerns registered by the Southern Poverty Law Center and others, the architects of the Common Core are developing a more diverse supplemental list. “We have really taken a careful look, and really think there is a problem,” said Susan Pimentel, one of the lead writers of the standards for English language and literacy. “We are determined to make this right.”
Black, Asian and American Indian children similarly must dig deep into bookshelves to find characters who look like them. Latino children who speak Spanish at home and arrive at school with little exposure to books in English face particular challenges. A new study being released next week by pediatricians and sociologists at the University of California shows that Latino children start school seven months behind their white peers, on average, in oral language and preliteracy skills.
“Their oral language use is going to be quite different from what they encounter in their books,” said Catherine E. Snow, a professor at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education. “So what might seem like simple and accessible text for a standard English speaker might be puzzling for such kids.”
Hispanic children have historically underperformed non-Hispanic whites in American schools. According to 2011 data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a set of exams administered by the Department of Education, 18 percent of Hispanic fourth graders were proficient in reading, compared with 44 percent of white fourth graders.
Research on a direct link between cultural relevance in books and reading achievement at young ages is so far scant. And few academics or classroom teachers would argue that Latino children should read books only about Hispanic characters or families. But their relative absence troubles some education advocates.
“If all they read is Judy Blume or characters in the “Magic Treehouse” series who are white and go on adventures,” said Mariana Souto-Manning, an associate professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College, “they start thinking of their language or practices or familiar places and values as not belonging in school.”
At Bayard Taylor Elementary in Philadelphia, a school where three-quarters of the students are Latino, Kimberly Blake, a third-grade bilingual teacher, said she struggles to find books about Latino children that are “about normal, everyday people.” The few that are available tend to focus on stereotypes of migrant workers or on special holidays. “Our students look the way they look every single day of the year,” Ms. Blake said, “not just on Cinco de Mayo or Puerto Rican Day.”
On a recent morning, Ms. Blake read from “Amelia’s Road” by Linda Jacobs Altman, about a daughter of migrant workers. Of all the children sitting cross-legged on the rug, only Mario said that his mother had worked on farms.
Publishers say they want to find more works by Hispanic authors, and in some cases they insert Latino characters in new titles. When Simon & Schuster commissioned writers to develop a new series, “The Cupcake Diaries,” it cast one character, Mia, as a Latino girl. “We were conscious of making one of the characters Hispanic,” said Valerie Garfield, a vice president in the children’s division, “and doing it in a way that girls could identify with, but not in a way that calls it out.”
In some respects, textbook publishers like Pearson and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt are ahead of trade publishers. Houghton Mifflin, which publishes reading textbooks, allocates exactly 18.6 percent of its content to works featuring Latino characters. The company says that percentage reflects student demographics.
Students should be able “to see themselves in a high-quality text,” said Jeff Byrd, senior product manager for reading at Houghton Mifflin.
But Latino education advocates and authors say they do not want schools to resort to tokenism. “My skin crawls a little when this literature is introduced because people are being righteous,” said Ms. Alvarez, the author of the “Tia Lola” series, as well as “Return to Sender.” “It should be as natural reading about these characters as white characters,” she said.
At Bayard Taylor, another third-grade teacher, Kate Cornell, said that she would love to explore more options featuring Hispanic characters. “It would be more helpful as a teacher,” she said, “to have these go-to books where I can say ‘I think you are going to like this book. This book reminds me of you.’ ”
Hi my name is Christina and I’m an insecure writer.
There I said it and I’m proud of it.
A lot of people live life with two faces, the one they use in
the public world and the one they face daily in the mirror. I’m not talking here
about facial dislikes people, but more of what’s churning up instead us.
What the outside world doesn’t understand is the fact that writers
spill themselves into their novels. Heck, we even put ourselves in it through our
main or secondary characters. I’ve done it and probably will always do so. And that’s
fine, perfectly normal really. I mean what else would you write your novel
about if it wasn’t filled with some of your own hopes, dreams and wishes? We take
our insecurities and let them form into cleverly crafted words and that’s awesome.
Being a writer isn’t easy. We deal with a lot of rejection,
not only from readers and agents, but also from people not involved in this
complex writing word.
“You wrote a novel?” Questions your big bucks of a lawyer
family member, this past holiday season.
“Yes, it’s…” The writer in question starts to respond, eager
to spill about their work.
“You’ve published it?”
“No, not yet.”
“Well, you better get yourself a ‘real’ job then, can’t pay
the bills writing sentences.”
Thanks for the wise words, see you next year.
Sometimes even teachers and professors can push you forward
even if there words don’t.
I was told by a high school teacher in my senior year that I
shouldn’t attend college, that I wouldn’t be successful if I choose that route.
This coming Sunday, 12/9/2012, I will be celebrating my one
year anniversary of receiving my English degree.
I was told by my college professor that a degree in neither
English nor writing would ever be good to peruse for my skills weren’t great
nor there.
Dido the golden words above.
When someone has ever
told me I couldn’t do something, I proved them wrong. I fought my insecurities
and won. Though I still have to deal daily with the ones my mind creates to
stunt my growth as a writer, I push forward.
Life is crazy.
Last year at this
time I was wrapping up my last college finals and buying my navy cap and gown, now
I’m living three hundred miles away from my childhood home and letting my
dreams take me where I’m supposed to go. I’m following my dreams and letting my
insecurities be my guide into the great unknown because who’s ever said, ‘I
dreamed small and I got to where I am today because of it.’ Writers, only dream
big dreams, it sure make the journey of life that more adventurous.
This post is part of the Insecure Writer's Support Group hosted by Alex J. Cavanaugh. We post the first Wednesday of every month.
Check the link for some of the other blogs participating in this event!
Back in 2007, I could never imagine that journeys I would take
and places I would visit or the person I would become. Coming from a sheltered
upbringing, where church life was a 24/7 lifestyle, I started college wanting a
new identity. Much to others pointed looks and cold words I took off in a new
direction. To this day, I’m glad that I have. Without a doubt, I knew my life
would have been bipolar opposite. Leaving behind the part of myself that I disliked
so much, I found myself in this world for the first time with real eyes. I found
the person I was denied of becoming. My love for reading and knowledge grew the
more distance I placed between myself and the past.
Then in February 2009, I found my future. I discovered one
novel that would forever change the direction my life was heading towards, and honestly
that was nowhere. I was a sophomore at my local college, taking literature and
music classes, trying to figure out what to do next. Had just left my job at a
bookstore to work in a shoe store *cringe*. Than Beth Fantaskey’s YA novel,
Jessica’s Guide to Dating on the Dark Side, was released. I read it in less than
a day. That day I knew without a doubt that I wanted to spend the rest of my
life crafting novels like the one she had written.
Four year later, three novels written, two laptops and one
degree received, I finally found the type of writer/person I had longed to be
back in 2007 and 2009. I found the Christina who smiles at the silly tourist
who invades her new town every day of the year that don’t know it’s history
correctly and found a place in the business world she never thought she could
co-exist with.
So my advice to both writers, readers and everyday people, is
to be free. As the end of the year comes to a close, look forward to the
future. Embrace the parts of yourself that others say you can’t be. Be that
butterfly and find the YOU that you always daydream about. With a new year, let
the years past be taken away with wind. You’ll be glad you did. :)
Recently, I read a post on yahighway.com, that I couldn't
help but correlate with what my high school years were like.
You see, I wasn't the girl with tons of friends for my head
was always somewhere else, speeding what seemed like a thousand miles an hour
in every direction. Though I didn’t know back then that I wanted to be a novelist,
more like a songwriter that wrote killer radio hits and got paid the big bucks,
I knew without a doubt that I loved to read. Reading helped me believe in being
that type of dreamer who knew that if I dreamt big, I could do anything I
wanted to do and still do to this day.
There was one novelist who inspired that spark of nerdy
dreaming in my early high school years and still does till this day. Caroline
B. Cooney was my world changer. The four novels from hers that I’ve read more
than a dozen times by now were the Time Travelers Quartet, still my guilty pleasure till this
day. I cherished those books and anything else she has ever written because somehow
just reading one of her novels made my high school, family life and troubled
thoughts a little more bearable than having a false group of friends who really
didn’t care about me most of the time. You see, I knew I was different than the
rest of the 5,500+ students at my high school. Yes that’s correct, during the 2007-2008 school year Cypress
Bay High School had reached an enrollment of more than 5,500 students and got named
the most overcrowded high school in the United States. The school even got a
show on MTV in 2008 called, The Paper.
Sometimes in a school that larger, I felt like I would never
fit in anywhere. I was that girl whose style of clothing, friends and music
changed every year because I didn’t know where I was wanted. I went from
freshman hip hop to sophomore rocker to junior prep. When senior year rolled
around, it was more of a preppy rock attitude I tried to pull off because by
then I was thinking of college and high school was just becoming a bittersweet
aftertaste that I was quickly trying to get rid of.
Till this day and more so back in those four years, I was seen
as that nerd that wasn’t necessarily school smart, but sure knew how to dream
of a world outside of myself. I was the friend who others asked for help in writing
their papers and poems. They knew me as the girl that liked to write flowery
words in black and white composition notebooks, now a day’s one is more likely
to see my jolt down ideas on my iPhone.
Even though in my life today I have to hide the part of
myself that wants to soak in the world of my novels, I still have my personality
speared around my cubical at work. O’Hara’s Having a Coke with You Poem is
tacked in the wall in my direct view, a Saint Augustine historical timeline
tacked in another wall to remind me why I took the job in the first place so I could
live in Saint Augustine, while a plastic pumpkin sits nearby to display that my
love of Halloween doesn’t only get seen in October. These small objects keep me
sane more then I let on sometimes.
When I have to get so consume in a world I have to grin and bear
to live in, remembering that part of myself that dreams crazy ideas, makes me
believe in a future where I can and will be a world changer. Where my art will
become my whole life, where the nerd will finally be able to breathe easily and
laugh a little more. So to all those out there that have been laughed at and
spitted upon, take it from the girl who spent most of high school eating lunch
alone on the back steps of portables. When you want something so badly it’s
hard imagining what the loss would feel like, keeping pushing forward because nothing
will burn worse than giving up on your daydreams and seeing others doing what
you know you should be doing as well.
I was That Kid. The one who was colored pictures of unicorns when she was
supposed to be solving equations. The one who kept a book hidden under the desk
while her teacher lectured. I was the kid who imagined myself a warrior
princess, a witch, a wise woman, until grownups told me I was too old to believe
such things.
I'm willing to bet most of you were That Kid too. If you are a reader, or a
writer, or a dreamer, you were probably scolded. Probably teased. You were
probably called a ditz, or a nerd, or a geek.
It's ok. Most of us were.
As we grew up, we were taught how to hide it. How to pay attention when the
teacher was talking. How to be smart and professional. How to live in the real
world.
It's ok. We all did it. We all learned how to be normal.
But the older I get, the more I resent the "normal" mask, and the more I
think it's not ok to wear it.
In recent years, we've learned so much about multiple intelligences, and
all the ways that people learn. We've learned how to encourage children who
learn by pictures and pretend games and storybooks. But we have not yet learned
how valuable it is to be a dreamer.
Have you seen Once Upon a Time? I just started watching the series. It's
one of those TV shows that everyone I know seems to love; and I think I know
why. It speaks to something deep and instinctive in us - something that begs to
be part of a different story.
Dreamers, artists, writers -
those are the Henrys of
the world. They are the ones who see princesses where others see housekeepers
and teachers and college students. They are the ones who see a cursed land in
need of healing, when others just see a boring little town. They are
important.
You are important.
Your art is important.
You may think of yourself as just someone trying to write a book; just a
reader; just a dreamer. But your dreams and your art and your books are vital.
They mean something. They add to the world. And maybe we aren't real-life
princesses or witches or warriors; but something about art and beauty makes us
feel that we can be.
So embrace the fact that you are That Kid. Be a ditz, or a geek, or a nerd.
Be a world changer. Make us see the goodness and light behind the cursed land.
When I remember middle school I recall September 11th
2001.
That Tuesday morning I was in my first period
history class. We were about to watch a school safely video that was being
broadcasted to everyone at our school. The time was either a little before or
after nine in the morning and the channel we were supposed to be watching was
blank. So my teacher switched the channel to the news to see what was going on
in the world. That was when I saw it, sitting in a desk in sunny Weston,
Florida, hundreds of miles away from New York.
Even till this day, eleven years later, I can still
see those smoky streets of New York and the scared reporters when I close my
eyes. It felt as if time stood still as we all just gawked at the TV till my
teacher ran out of our classroom as if she was on fire, leaving us twelve year
olds alone and staring confusingly at the events taking place
What I was able to comprehend was that something really
bad was happening. A plane had hit a building in New York. Wait, now another
one got hit as well? What was going on? It wasn’t till a few minutes later when
my teacher returned and explained to us that it seems we were under attack,
before racing to the phone to try to call her dad that worked in downtown Manhattan.
Till this day, I don’t know if that school safely
video ever did come on. The rest of the class was spent focused on the news, trying
to learn as much as we could about what was going on and failing to make sense
of the tragic events happening in NYC. It wasn’t till December 2005 when I
myself visited New York on a family vacation for the first time. My dad, who
had spent his teenage years as a New Yorker, had made it very clear that he
didn’t want to go the memorial site, didn’t want to pass a place he remembered
from his youth that was no longer there. But on a day trip to the Statue of
Liberty, we happened to stumble across the site. It was strange, seeing the
look on my dad’s face of pain and regret, as he peered through the metal fence
at the spot that once housed the city’s tallest buildings. I believe that being
back after the attacks helped him heal, like it had for others who had seen the
towers before they were taken away from this world forever.
Tragic moments like these define a person. At twelve
years old, I was suddenly faced with a world that was on high alert, even at
the mall a place I thought I was once safe to wander about. But I guess it’s
like discovering that fairy tales aren’t as truthful as you would like to
believe when you’re a kid. 9/11 made me more aware of the world, fast. Innocence
was taken away from all eighteen and younger in 2001. The world lost that hint
of spark to us all, ones are parents tried to replace with hugs and kisses.
I was too young to remember Columbine, but 9/11 will
be forever written into my Middle School years as do tragic events that have
happened every day since. It helps me sometimes, when I doubt what path in life
I should have taken or where I should go next, to remember that scared twelve year
old who awoke on that Tuesday morning innocent to the worlds evils and came
home forever changed.
Everything moves forward, I’ve come to realize
through the years as personal tragedies and accidents have befallen me. But
that past I’ve come to learn can’t be forgotten about. The past makes us who we
are today. It’s in our blood and views. Our values and loves. One’s past is a
luggage we all must carry, but don’t over stuff that bag or the burden might
just take over your present and future. Writers Beware.
Sometimes when life gets a little to difficult to handle, most turn towards an outlet, a way out of life’s craziness. Maybe a short trip to paradise in some far away island in the Caribbean?
Well, I myself turn to writing, sometimes jolting ideas down on paper, my iPhone, iPad, or laptop, the last three all beautiful technology thanks to the 21st century I would never take for granted. But if any of those weren’t around, could I just sit back and chew on it for a bit? Figure out what I really wanted to bring across to my future readers by choosing my next words like one would answer a question on the SAT’s?
Sometimes.
But then again, sometimes things just need to be written down, fear of it disappearing and never coming back to me a constant battle and itch millions upon millions of people in a creative driven life deal with all too constantly. I’ve had those moments when I just need to write it down, capture that thought in a voice recording while my baby sister gave me a weird glare or seek a single scrap of paper at work to jolt down a quick note.
So to fill my most undying itch of all, for a book idea that was on the back burner since the summer of 2009, I decided that in order to fully grasp the location of where I wanted this book to take setting in, I decided to move there. Itch crazy times ten. Three hundred miles away from my family, I suddenly found myself in the sea side town my characters resided in. At first I was thrilled. I was here. The 25% of the book that had yet to be written would just come screaming out of me to be written and so would everything else that followed, right?
Nope, because life got in the way as did my insecurities of my once pretty awesome book idea.
What if I fail?
What if no one wanted to read it?
What if I ruin all the good this town was doing in prep for the upcoming 450th anniversary of the cities founding with this book?
The closer I got to being finish with it, the more I seemed to ignore it, hated it like it was cursed. For weeks I wouldn’t read a single word. But then something changed one day as I was sitting typing away in my full time desk job. I was overcome was a sense to read it like I’d never read it before. And you know what? I discovered again why I thought this idea was great before I let doubt sink in. Felt that someone out there, just one person alone, would fall in love with these characters one day, just like I had when I first envisioned them in 2009, though through many revisions they have drastically changed forms for the better. I had found a happy median somehow for myself in this fast paced world where my daily life was always constantly evolving into complex agendas of just putting one foot in front of the other. I knew that the only way to be happy with what I had written was to finish the darn thing once and for all. To be gleeful when I thought of it instead of making me cringe at the idea of mustering up the courage to just read one more word.
Writers, in every vein of the worlds vastly developing genres, are unique. We are each our own aged wine and we all need time to mature, though sometimes we think that delaying the process will help the end result, when in fact a writer never stops dreaming of what’s to come. A writer never stops living life for their lives are a book in and of themselves. Though one can’t predict what will happen next like one does a books plot twist that will just wow the audience, writers need to find and listen to that little voice inside of themselves telling them that it will get better and happier time will soon find their way to us in due time.
Because when you do listen for it, hidden behind all your self-doubts and misguided thoughts, just a still small voice in the vast darkness of one’s sometimes irrational lives, can a writer produce a masterpiece, the ones that are so often a part of our daydreams.
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