"A Work in Progress" by Hiram McDaniels

“No book can ever be finished. While working on it we learn just

enough to find it immature the moment we turn away from it.”

― Karl Popper

I have a history of being a particularly mobile writer. In my earliest days as a self-proclaimed “novelist to-be,” I remember lying in the bathtub, holding a notepad over the water and scratching away at my latest idea; I remember writing at the kitchen table, shuffling my journal away when it was time for dinner; writing in bed after everyone else had gone to sleep, writing sprawled on the floor, writing on the bumpy bus ride to school, writing in the margins of my homework, writing on my arms when I had no other option and a writing mood struck. I never figured out how to write in the shower, but I was well on my way to a solution when I made the transition to the more stationary process of typing out my plans instead of scrawling them on every available surface. Despite this change, one thing that has remained constant is that I never

"Bacon and Writing" by Victoria Lemmings

“i never think at all when i write

nobody can do two things at the same time

and do them both well”

-Don Marquis, Archy’s Life of Mehitabel, 1993

            Before taking Advanced Composition in my sophomore year I primarily looked at writing through an academic lens. I was very focused on organization, paragraphing, analysis, and all the other necessary elements of formal writing. The extent of my creative writing was slim to nonexistent. If I ever did creative writing, it was always for a school assignment that I considered dumb at the time. Writing was fun for me because I succeeded at it, but I never wrote out of class sorely for my own pleasure. When I started Advanced Comp and I saw all the non-academic pieces we would have to compose, I remember groaning inside. I hardly considered myself creative, so the task of having to create four personal pieces a quarter plus short fiction, poems, and newspaper articles seemed daunting and chore-like. Back then, my writing process was formulaic, precise, and quite frankly boring. I would always have trouble writing enough because I would overthink what I wanted to say before I had even written it out. The sentences I wrote were always perfected before they even arrived on my paper. I overthought about nearly everything I wrote. I would still edit a lot out at the end, but that was more taking out ideas and chunks than actually changing the structure and bones of my writing.

            However, the more and more we wrote creatively in Advanced Comp, the more fun I had and the less structured I was while writing. Slowly, I gained confidence creatively as I realized that writing personal pieces was like telling a story in my head and just writing it down on paper play by play. As Marquis said, “i never think at all when i write/ nobody can do two things at the same time/ and do them both well.” I really began to relate to this quote after we wrote our first personal pieces, in particular my piece using imagery to describe my favorite place, the pool. In class we had talked about the madman, the architect, the carpenter, and judge. I unleashed my inner madman for the first time during my pool piece. I didn’t think when I wrote, I just poured everything out. Like never before, I had no filter with what I wrote. I felt the pool; I was basking in the sun and I was feeling the cold rush of the water on my burnt skin. My words just came onto my page like word vomit. I felt like a sink faucet that couldn’t be turned off, my ideas spitting out like flowing water. Now I find that my best ideas are the ones my brain just dumps out without my thinking, like Marquis says. If I tried to slow myself down and compose these craftily beautiful sentences, my ideas wouldn’t be as

"Thanksgiving: Bricktown" by Kate Gillen

For my grandpa.

My grandfather held court
around the smoky kitchen table
after dinner, telling us stories of the time
he released snakes into the ladies’ restroom
in the deli where he worked when he was fifteen
(he got fired that day),
or the time he accidentally
fumigated the entire apartment building
in Curries Woods one afternoon,

"To My Husband After Twenty Years" by Janice Jewell

Context:  This was an assignment in which students brainstormed lunch foods, flowers or plants, animals and appliances.  They then had to write a poem using at least five words from each category.  This is mine.

A long life together is 90% washer/dryer and 10% tesla coil.

Chores:

Unload the dishwasher;

Do the laundry;

Clean out the fridge.

On a Friday night: steak to end the week.

"The Price of Too Much Time" by Tom Bombadil

This week's pieces of the week feature our senior tutors, some of whom represent our very first HWC tutors. We wish them the best of luck in all that they do, and especially in their writing!

     Mrs. Ferguson always walked her cat down the street at 8:00 in the morning.  This was a commonly known fact that was not debated by the residents of Ponsly Square.  The little silver bell around her tabby’s neck would softly ring as the lady and her cat ambled down the street.  Often Mrs. Ferguson would stop to admire the different flowers that grew around her neighbor’s house’s white picket fences while her black cat would pull on the leash that connected the two.  Any neighbors that happened to be outside would stop and say hi, though wishing the strange old lady would continue walking.  None of the neighbors knew where Mrs. Ferguson walked to or why her cat needed to be taken outside every day.  Though all were curious, not one person asked the lady.  And so, each day, Mrs. Ferguson and her black tabby wandered from their creaky house at the end of the block, past all the cookie cutter suburban houses, into the vast forest behind the neighborhood.  

"Too Late to Change " by Gatsby

This week's pieces of the week feature our senior tutors, some of whom represent our very first HWC tutors. We wish them the best of luck in all that they do, and especially in their writing!


The dark, heavy night air consumes John,

No lights illuminate his path, yet he continues to walk, lost in thought.

How could she be dead? How could she be gone?

He now understands that love is worth more when it’s not bought.

"A Story" by James Archer

This week's pieces of the week feature our senior tutors, some of whom represent our very first HWC tutors. We wish them the best of luck in all that they do, and especially in their writing!

                The murderer’s knife, metallic and sinister in the full moon, dripped with a crimson shade of blood. She crouched to the ground, budging the weapon from the victim’s body. Police sirens echoed through the cold, silent night. Rain, pouring, washed the blood from the knife and the victim’s body. The murderer carried the body, thrusting it down an opened, then closed, manhole.