Blog Post 9: 3/19/15

This week has been very filled with insomnia and sleep. The yin and yang of life sometimes. I find that when I go many days without sleep, my writing becomes a haze of nonsense that I can only begin to decode after the crash happens. I write and write and write no matter what, just to keep myself flowing through life, and then make sense of it all later when I am more coherent. I have found that it's interesting to write in all different states of consciousness; when tired, when awake, drunk, mad, sad, happy. I produce such drastically different pieces of writing in each different emotional state. Playing with that helps me figure out what kind of writing style I have so I can easily transfer thoughts from each state into different pieces of writing. I guess it's a perspective thing. This week was the bathhouse event. Unfortunately I couldn't go because I had to work and I really wish that I could have. Instead of going, I looked through both of the featured poet's writings and explored them a little bit. Today I am going to talk about each of the poets.

CA Conrad is a very intersting fellow, with even more interesting pieces of work. He has completely lived off his writing, which I find really amazing. Most writers must get a second job because writing can't ALWAYS pay the bills, but CA Conrad has done just that. He has forcefully immersed himself into the world of writing and creating, and I think he has been rather successful about it. One of the most interesting things I have come across with him, is his use of SOMAtic writing exercises. These exercises intertwine the body and the mind and ask for a lot of strange actions. The idea is to connect the mind with the body and for you to use the experience of doing the exercise as a creative outlet. He also gains creativity from writing the exercise. It's like a complete process from start to finish. I read an interview about these exercises, and a lot of what he had to say was really amazing. He finds inspiration in everything, and his creativity is a form of his own protest. A quote that he said that I really liked was: "Creativity is our only true revenge. Being creative is the revenge against all the bastards trying to break the spirit of our fellow humans." This is so true to me. Being creative is also being comfortable. Allowing yourself to give in and caring less about the judgement you may or may not receive. Creativity should have no judgement.

Dawn Lundy Martin was the other poet speaking at the bathhouse event. I also really liked her poetry when we read some in class. Her style is one that I really like. Intentional breaks and lots of spacing. In the one of the poems called 'The Morning Hour", she uses brackets in between some of the lines. I like this because it is sort of an intentional thought space. It shows how she developed her poems and what kind of thoughts took place. I also think it goes nicely with the poem because it is about the morning, when our thoughts are often jumbled and out of focus. This whole poem really reminds me of the morning. Even when she is talking about things that don't relate to the morning. There are two sets of lines that I particularly enjoyed. One was on page 32; "What is familiar is the warm spice of a girl oiled in lavender". This line has so much imagery and I can almost taste the spice of the lavender on the tip of my tongue. It reminds me of my grandma, who always smells of lavender, and of the balm she would rub onto our cuts and bruises when we were little. I love imagery of scents, because they seem to stick in your mind better than any thought. It's like tasting something you haven't had in a long time, it takes you back to the last time, and you can remember like it was yesterday. The other set of lines I really liked was on page 33; "The footsteps are wet. Desire is wet. Is going step by step- the ash trail is wicked. The thicker wept." I love the way it flows when you say it out loud. It really flows, and the rhyming gives it really good dynamics. I also like the sentence 'Desire is wet'. It's the truth to me. Desire is something that makes you salivate. You want, you crave. Desire is there to hold you and not let you go. It is what you don't have and will make you sweat until you do have it.

This week was a challenge for me, but none the less challenge makes you a stronger person. Therefore, my writing is strongest in the toughest times. I want to develop my writing a lot more. It all feels really incomplete, so hopefully I can grow and be able to let my pieces grow with me.

Blog Post 8: 3/12/15

This week we read two new short stories, and worked some more on creating our own.  We were given some postcards of different places and told to write about them, and then create a story from that.  I wasn't here during the day we were given the postcards, so I chose some off the internet that I liked.  The one I chose to write my story about was from Wichita, Kansas.  I'm going to talk about the short stories that we read, and one of the stories I created.  

The first short story we read was from Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo.  The story follows a little girl who likes to play the fiddle in her own way.  She refuses to get lessons because she likes the way it sounds when she plays random sounds in her own way.  Her mother is not fond of this and doesn't allow her to play in the house unless she has proper lessons.  This doesn't stop little Indigo and she keeps on teaching herself how she wants.  She ends up finding success in this, and plays at a local business her own tunes.  When she plays songs written by other people, she never gets the same reaction that she gets when she plays her own made up songs.  She is also African American at a very bleak time period.  She realizes through her experience with the public that it's tough to grow up when you are African American.  This makes her want to get rid of her dolls so they don't have to grow up and experience what she deals with.  The story really shows her character and what kind of person she is with very few details.  We know from how she refuses to learn the fiddle properly that she is stubborn and stuck in her ways.  We also know that she has a very strong personality, based on how she interacts with other children her age.  Her mother can see this, and I think in the story it is sort of implied that the mother is the same way.  She is harsh and set in her ways about her daughter getting the lessons she needs.  I like this aspect of the story because it feels very much like real life.  We learn and mirror our parents, so it makes sense that she would be this way.  This story really gives good character details as a whole, without actually describing.  I'm starting to get used to this when I write my own stories.  It's just so much more effective if you want a captivating story.  

The other short story we read was called Night Women.  It is about what we assume is a prostitute mother who works at night in her home while her son sleeps.  The house is described as small and damaged, and we can tell she is dependent on her work for survival.  Her son is also assumed young based on many of the details in the story.  There are a lot of sexual references, even on things that wouldn't necessarily be seen as sexual.  There are a lot of things you can tell about her character in this story.  She talks about love in a very abstract way, so I can tell that she doesn't have a traditional view on love and marriage.  Also, you can tell by the way she describes her life that she doesn't like what she has to do, but also feels kind of ok about it because she knows she is doing it for the right reasons, as in having a son.  There are lots of poetic "magical" images as well, which to me show that she is kind of in a dream state with her life.  She wishes for better and can imagine better, but it doesn't seem to ever be there unless she is with her son or telling him about life.  It's almost as if she believes what she is telling him.  I liked this story a lot, because the stark details were very beautiful.  Even if something wasn't particularly 'good', the way it was described was vivid and imaginative.  I was particularly captivated by a line on page 86 "My fingers coil themselves into visions of birds on his nose.  I want him to forget that we live in a place where nothing lasts".  To me this describes the story's meaning as a complete whole.  

I wrote a story about a girl who has a damaged mother who moved to Wichita, Kansas to get away from all of her problems, including the girl.  She is left with all the blowout that her mother left her.  Her father left long ago and she doesn't know where he is.  I haven't gotten too far on the story yet, but I want it to be her journey to her father.  I added lots of little details about the mother without saying too much.  I described her lifestyle, and how it affected the main character.  There's so much I can do with this story, so I'm hoping in our small groups I can get some more ideas.  I choose to write about hard situations because i have a lot of experience in my life dealing with hard times, so it feels good to be able to write out on paper how it feels.  It's very different on paper than in your head.  I feel like you can't really effectively write about something you haven't you yourself experienced.  You might be able to capture a little bit of certain elements, but it won't feel real.  There are certain little details that you see and feel when it is actually happening to you.  I can't wait to get through this story and try and take it somewhere.  

This week was very powerful for my writing.  I didn't get very far, but the ideas are really flowing and I can finally see how to develop a character without listing out details.  I think by the end of this class I will just be getting started as a great writer.  To me that's a very good thing.  I want to feel very improved by then.  

Blog Post 7: 3/5/15

This week we were asked to write and share our own stories, and to read a new one called "The Girl With The Blackened Eye".  As we are moving forward with fiction and all of the elements to a good short story, I am really starting to see how best to put my ideas to use.  I never really thought about how to write a short story, I always just went with my gut.  This can be good sometimes, but I am really liking knowing some different techniques.  When we were asked to write a story, we used a fiction exercise to get our ideas flowing.  I am also getting really good ideas from the various short stories that we have been reading.  They have shown me that a story has many different definitions and ways it can go.  The Girl With the Blackened Eye was very different from what I am used to reading, but I really enjoyed it.  It's really weird to me that something painful sounding and terrible could be so good to read.  I'm going to talk about the short stories I have been working on and "The Girl With the Blackened Eye".

The fiction exercise that we did in class asked us to describe a place, emotion, and thing without saying what it is.  This was way harder for me than I thought.  I liked it though, because it gets the brain in the habit of using show instead of tell to describe things.  It also really got a lot of ideas in my head about what kind of story I was going to write.  When I did the exercise, I sort of wrote each thing in some form of prose instead of doing it 'high and dry'.  I love poetry, and feel like I can't write a story without at least a little bit of it.  I'm hoping it will help me be able to extend what I wrote, because of the two stories I have, they are both extremely short.  The first little buds of a story will hopefully be translated into something more developed.  I chose to describe anxiety as one of my emotions because I suffer from it.  It's so hard to describe, but because I feel it everyday, it is a bit easier.  This emotion really gave me good ideas for character development as well, because I could use the emotion of anxiety to describe the person.  Not saying 'anxiety' also really makes for good development.  I'm really interested to see where I will go with these two stories.  I feel like they are in the middle of a story instead of having a clear beginning, middle and end, so hopefully I can work on this.

The Girl With the Blackened Eye was a really powerful story.  It had a lot of terrible images, but perhaps that's why I was so enthralled in it.  I couldn't look away the whole time I was reading it.  I had to know what was going to happen, even though I knew the main character was going to survive.  The imagery played into this a lot.  When an author is good at describing stuff, it doesn't really matter what the story is about, as long as it is done effectively.  Everything we have read has played into this, which further reinforces me to write like this in my own stories.  There was a line in the story that really stuck out to me on page 207: "When you give up struggle, there's a kind of love." For some reason when I read this I knew exactly what she was talking about.  Giving up struggle is relieving in some ways.  Even if it means the end is near, that struggle is no longer there to bother you.  I've dealt with this a lot in my short life so far.  It's difficult to describe.  It's like an idea that you feel really strongly about or something you are constantly fighting yourself about that finally comes to you just letting it go.  Realizing that you have no control.  Then you are satisfied, even if the end result is not getting what you want.  It's strange to feel satisfaction in failure, but I think that's exactly what the person in the story is trying to get at.  It's not love, it's a wave of relief because you don't have to defend yourself in some way.  It's acceptance in your situation.  She talks about how she didn't really know how long she was gone, she just lived.  Night and day didn't exist to her, it could have been 80 days for all she knew.  That is the most raw form of living life to the fullest.  She did even thought it wasn't for good.  Her life existed as a mono day and night.  Survival was a blessing, the next minute she was alive was a relief.  I can't imagine any of those feelings.  I feel like we as humans live our lives for the next day.  We think about what we need to do for the next day instead of the day we are presently in.  It's so frustrating to just want the days to pass instead of being able to enjoy every moment and be grateful that the next one came.  

This week was really intense for me as a writer.  My stories are starting to come alive the more we read and do fiction exercises.  I really can't get enough of them because I truly want to create something great.  I know it takes time, but I want the effort to show.

Blog Post 6: 2/19/15

This week in class we focused a lot on fiction writing, and what makes a good short story.  We read another packet of short stories and a couple passages from writers about short stories.  So far I really like everything we have read.  I particularly liked the Lamont piece that began with Polaroids.  The short fiction stories that we read were from around the world, which was really interesting.  I really like the concept of looking at story telling in a global way.  Every culture has a different view on what makes a good story, yet they all hold the same basic elements.  I will talk about my favorite short story, and the Lamont piece today.

My favorite story by far in the second fiction packet was called 'The Falling Girl' by Dino Buzzati.  This story is from Italy, and is about a girl named Marta who falls from a large building in the city.  In class, we were asked to write about one story from this packet about how character is emphasized or expressed using show, not tell.  The details of the story are what develops Marta's character.  The author doesn't tell us about her life or why she jumps off the building, it us up to us as readers to infer from little things that the author would like us to know about Marta.  There are lots of hints from the author about her wardrobe that suggests she is poor, as well as self conscious about her appearance.  She talks about looking at other girls with better dresses and the price of hers being on sale.  Her comparison of others really shows this to me.  Self consciousness also suggest a history of depression and anxiety.  The shivering and heart throbbing that is described also illustrates this.  Also the fact that she jumps from a building is a pretty good indication that she suffers from some form of mental illness.  Her being so young, but also at the age when you start to gain your own independence could also suggest that she is going through a rough time coming of age, like so many adolescents go through.  Maybe I saw this story as an outward display of anxiety and depression because I also suffer from both, and my experiences shine through allowing me to see it in others.  Or maybe this is truly what it is about.  I like how the story is really up to your own interpretation, because maybe she really isn't falling to her death literally, maybe it's all in her head, as anxiety often is.  I looked at this story from both points of view, and it worked either way.

The Lamont piece captured my attention really well.  It began with a chapter called Polaroids.  I really liked this because it talked about how a final piece of writing does not happen the first time you write something.  It develops like a Polaroid.  There are things you notice and realize need to be added as you go.  I like this way of looking at a piece of writing.  I think it really illustrates this point.  Practice makes perfect. and adding detail takes practice and careful examination. The section on character was also especially interesting and made a lot of sense to me.  It talks about how character development is something you show, not tell to be effective about it.  You drop in hints about their life in subtle ways that show specific characteristics that tell more about a person than one detail you could tell.  This also gives the reader a little more flexibility to take the story where they want.  To me, it allows the reader's own experiences to shape their idea of the character, it humanizes them.  This is important if you want to write a good story.  You don't want to hear "he was tall, arrogant, and knew how to tie a good knot".  These details only give us specific details that we don't need to use our imagination to decide how he is as a person.  The author of this passage also talks about how you can use your own experiences and ideas about what you like in a person to develop a character.  You can also use yourself and the qualities that you possess.  This is really effective because you are using real evidence and the person in the story will really appear real and believable.  This passage really gave me some good ideas about how to really effectively create characters for my stories.  I am going to start by listing off traits, and then from those traits, showing them without saying them.  I think this will really help me come up with some good story ideas.

This week really got me motivated to start writing some short stories.  I feel like I have the right tools at my disposal to create something beautiful and full of real life.  I want my stories to feel like you just experienced what the character did.  I want you to taste the ice cream they just ate, or feel tired from the lack of sleep they experienced.  After reading about how to do this effectively, I'm pretty sure something good will come out of it all.    

Blog Post 5: 2/12/15

This week we finished talking about Tocqueville and peer editing our poetry.  We then read some more of Goldberg's book Writing Down the Bones and have begun to read a packet of short fiction stories.  I really like Goldberg's book and have since started to use some of her techniques when it comes to my own writing.  I also really really enjoyed reading the packet of short fiction stories.  I was not expecting to enjoy them as much as I did in fact.  

In Writing Down The Bones, a section in particular that I liked was called "Don't Tell, but show" on page 75.  It talks a lot about how when we have emotions, we don't talk about them as much as we express them.  Expressing emotions is like describing how you feel without ever saying what the emotion is.  Just like how you can sometimes tell someone is upset based on their body language.  I love this concept.  It helps writing because it teaches you to color your words and really dive deep into making detailed observations, and therefore detailed writing.  Details in writing is what gives it its color.  I used this technique to try and word how I felt one day without actually saying emotional words.  For example "Her brow clenched into the jaw as tears rolled down her hot cheeks."  To me this means there is anger and sadness being expressed without ever having to say 'anger' or 'sadness'.  Another section I really liked is called "Big Concentration".  It talks a lot about how thought is fluid, and so is the universe.  We are always moving forward in time, and our thoughts are always digressing to the bigger picture.  When you write, it can sometimes become easy to be single-minded and not acknowledge your surroundings.  She suggests that in our writing we should add little details about the surroundings to remind the reader that the universe is fluid.  It also speaks to a more colorful piece of writing.  Her suggestion of bringing up the color of the sky in your piece really resonated with me.  I love that image, but I love even more the idea of adding it into a piece about something completely different.  I like tiny detail in writing, it catches me and keeps me reading.  

The short stories packet is so amazing.  I wasn't that excited to read it to be quite honest, but when I read the first story my jaw nearly dropped.  I never really thought about the fact that stories can be that short and that captivating at the same time.  I always think of short stories as a lot longer than a paragraph.  The fact that a small paragraph can be a full story gave me hope!  I really liked the first story.  It instantly captured my attention because of the images that it evoked.  It was really poetic and romantic.  I could picture everything it talked about.  I truthfully liked every single story in this packet.  The other story in particular that extra caught my attention is called "Morning News".  This was about a man who got bad news from his doctor about how long he had left to live, and his reflection about what he was going to do when he got home to his wife.  I thought it was really sad but had a really humorous end that really illustrated the way life goes sometimes.  I got so many feelings from this story.  The last story that I want to talk about is called "the letter from home" and is kind of a bunch of tasks listed out in a very descriptive manner.  The author lists out literally everything that happens.  I thought this was a really cool abstract way to write a story and thought about adopting something similar for my own writing.  These stories over all are one of my favorite pieces we have read so far in class.  I can't wait to read them over and over and really gather some more thoughts.  I don't feel like I have fully digested them yet.  Next week I am sure I will have another opinion. 

Blog Post 4: 2/5/15

This week we spent a lot of time talking about Tocqueville and some of our own poetry. So far I have been really enjoying Tocqueville and what it has to offer. It covers a lot of sensitive subjects, which I found a little hard to talk about in discussion. There are also a lot of things that I want to go in depth with and really try and decode some of what the narrator has to say. In class we talked about a few of these things, and in our small groups we talked a lot about many of the reoccurring themes that are present throughout. We also had to write two "imitation" poems from the book. This was one of the hardest to write poems that I have ever experienced in all honesty. It was so hard because I had to try and figure out what the poem meant to me at first, and then write something that portrayed what I read. I am going to discuss Tocqueville, and also the imitation poems that I chose to write. 


The largest, most fragmented poem called Tocqueville was the poem that we spent most of our focus on in class this week. This poem is very long and really hard to decode. There are lots of fragments and seemingly many narrators. When we discussed this aspect in class, another student mentioned how the fragments and different narrators may be showing how the media and what you hear on the news about big events is often also a set of fragments. You don't always hear the entire story, and you don't often get a completely unbiased approach to the the story either. I think this is a really good way of looking at this poem, especially with all the themes that are present in regards to terrorism, 9/11, and people from the Middle East. The media is also often used as a point of entrance for a conflict of interest. It is there to persuade you to think a certain way based on how something is being portrayed. I think this point can really be illustrated in a particular section on the top of page 28 of Tocqueville. It begins with "It just doesn't look like racism. What do you call it then?" and goes on into another longer section that talks about how fear rationalizes violence. I won't quote it here because it's quite a large section. This section shows that whatever conflict that arises, you can use fear of the "other" group to instill violence. This really connects in to the events that happened at 9/11. There are many reports of gaps in the things that the media told us about exactly what went on at that time, so it leads me to believe that no one has the full story of those events. This idea of using fear to instill violence is how I see the US using the events of 9/11 to push fighting deeper into war and giving in to a loss of privacy. Is it a coincidence perhaps that the Patriot Act was passed right around the same time the events of 9/11 unfolded? Many things are fishy, and I can tell that the narrator can see this as plain as day. The whole of this poem to me is a discussion of the narrator's disgust with our politics and ideals of society. He pokes fun at racism too, stating in another section on page 34: "You talk about them as if they are a different species. It's not that they're different. It's not even their need to normalize their difference. It's that they are trying to paint the world the color they want to see. They're actively doing that, trying to bring on the second coming. It's a long history of projection. Think of Kinsey." The part about 'trying to paint the world the color they want to see' really illustrates his thoughts about race and racism. Even today, as progressive as we think our society is, racism is still very VERY at large. I think this passage in the poem is trying to say that the type of racism that exists today is a want for sameness and a lack of different cultural practices. Our society wants us to be one way and reject the rest. All of this is so difficult to discuss because there are so many issues with race that we see on a daily basis. Race is something we have constructed, it is an act of nurture and how we have decided to treat one another. To me, people are people, and there are bad people of every kind. Evil has many faces, and power has a funny way of bringing out the evil in people. Mattawa's poetry, and Tocqueville as a whole really shows how race has caused such a dent in how we treat other people and place judgement just based on looks. 


I also would like to talk a little bit about one of the imitation poems I wrote out of Tocqueville's book. The poem I chose to imitate is called "Trees" on page 48. I don't know exactly why I chose this poem, especially because it was a little harder for me to decide what exactly it was about. I liked a lot of the imagery it used, as well as some of the things that I found meaning from it. In whole, I gathered from this poem that trees are everywhere. Literally everywhere. They hold more than just leaves and branches. They are eyes and ears of the passing years and can see through the biases that we place on everything. That's kinda what I got out of this poem, and how I chose to shape my imitation. I talked a lot about how trees shape your life. They are essential to your survival yet placed under such little importance. We destroy them like they can be thrown away. I talk a lot about these themes throughout my poem. I also hinted at our lack of racial equality a little bit in the last couple lines of the poem: "I can call them the names they want to be called. I don’t want to group them by their texture or color or scent. They have stories like the rest of us." I feel really strongly about these lines. To me they sum the poem up nicely and it was really useful using trees in comparison to people on that scope.

This week was really powerful for me.  I liked talking about all of these sensitive subjects and letting others see my poetry.  That is something I often times have a hard time doing, because accepting criticism is something that isn't easy.  I find also that it's hard to get criticism for something you may have meant to bring meaning to that can't be seen by your peers.  A lot of my poems have intentional breaks or an uneven pace, and so I think it confuses people sometimes.  I do this sometimes to capture the uneven thought process of the human brain.  We don't think in full sentences all the time, and a lot of my poems are simply thought processes.  The beauty of poetry is that it's in the eye of the beholder.  If you don't understand my poetry, it's okay, because I do.  To put a summary on all of this, we are making good progress decoding and deciphering Tocqueville and I am refining and improving my poetry and writing skills every day.      

Blog Post 3: 1/29/15

So far in the semester we have covered a lot of enjoyable material that has really got my writing creativity moving. I now carry with me a little journal instead of using my cell phone to write down little notes or fragments of thoughts. I much prefer this to my phone, because there's something deeply organic about writing in a notebook; pages can be felt, pen motions heard. It feels so much better to me. I don't write just poetry either. I have begun to really expand what I write and not care about if the next thing I write is going to be a masterpiece at all. This is better for me because I am an inherent perfectionist always trying to get out of that shell so that I can stop the vicious cycle of anxiety that almost always follows. I really like where this class is taking me, so I hope I can only improve from here on out.


This week in class we focused on the Harlem poet Langston Hughes, who happens to be one of my favorite poets. His poem Harlem is one of my all time favorite poems. I remember reading it in high school and really loving all the images it gave off in my head. I remember thinking that it really applies to me, because I almost always feel like I am deferring my dreams. I also really like his poem titled Children's Rhymes. This poem really gets to the heart of some of the racial issues that he had to deal with growing up. The passage that I believe really illustrates this is "What don't bug them white kids sure bugs me: We knows everybody ain't free!" 
This speaks to the fact that the white race has gone about their daily lives without really thinking about the inequalities and lack of opportunity that people of color on all fronts of the world have to deal with. To me, he's saying that white people feel comfort in society because they are the dominant race with the most opportunity and freedom, so nothing really bugs them like it does for marginalized people. Langston Hughes' poetry is really simple and speaks to a wider population because of its simplicity. He writes with a lot of thought fragments and pays little worry to developing a "masterpiece". This is what makes his poetry so great; it really shows that anyone can write and be great at it. Simplicity is just as great as complexity. The simplicity in his words also brings about a bigger more complex meaning. I love the dichotomy of the two brought together. 


We also began reading Tocqueville by Khaled Mattawa. His poetry speaks to the Islam and the Islamic people as a whole. There are lots of conflicting themes and symbols throughout the entire book. I really like it so far. I chose to write about one of the poems in the book that gave me a little more trouble when it comes to finding his meaning. "Bread & Butter" on page 6 is a beautiful poem. I am honestly not 100% sure what kind of meaning I find in it. I like the language that he uses, and the types of emotions that he evokes. His imagery in this poem, as well as most of them in the book are really strong and evocative. One symbol in particular that caught my attention was in the line: "There is no escaping the white rose". I see the white rose as his spirituality. Even though he may want to escape some of the deeper hallmarks of his spirituality, you often cannot escape what is already there. The rest of the paragraph really speaks to this. We often question our reality, but at the same time, some of us don't question it. I believe this is what he is getting at in this part of the passage. The next part of the passage talks about how the baker is deprived of all things besides bread. It brings me to think about what is the baker a symbol of to him? Who is this baker that must save us when we are drowning? Why does he wish the baker would save him? These are some of the questions I asked myself reading this poem. Because the poem is kind of centered around a deeper spiritual meaning, maybe the baker is a higher being of some kind. Maybe he is also an ideal higher being. It is so hard to decipher this poem. I have looked at it every day in hopes of coming to some kind of conclusion. Maybe our discussions in class will really bring me some clarity I hope. 


In conclusion, I am really excited to dive deep into Tocqueville and really find some meaning in what he writes about. I am excited to write some more poetry also. I feel like I have a lot of inspiration right now with all the poetry we have been looking at.