Interdisciplinary Arts, University of Washington, 2010.
I'm most interested in literary journalism.
It would be wonderful if we were characters in a Shakespearean play and fully-formed ideas tumbled out of our mouths as easily as grocery store lists. But, usually, they don't, and we stare maddeningly at the blinking cursor in front of us and think about the bills we have to pay, the clothes we have to wash, and the emails we've yet to send.
Writing isn't necessarily hard, but we make it hard by demanding that every written thought is total gold. It can't and won't be. We need to allow ourselves the right to doodle and play around with a sentence and get everything out on the page before we go back and, with an educated eye, revise and re-interpret our own thoughts in a very meta way. For those who aren't used to trusting their own judgments, this process can feel cruelly hard, but its rewards are immense and the expansive (but all-too-brief) calm following the final edited sentence has been likened, accurately, to some sort of mysterious writer-drug. It's addictive, but not necessarily in a bad way.
As a writer and a Writing Consultant, I suppose I'm more interested in the things you didn't mean to write: the truthful things you blurt out when you're attempting a carefully manicured paragraph. In order to pay attention to these blurts, you have to have an inclusive definition of what writing is. Essays tailor made for an audience, with all the usual twists and turns, don't usually include these blurts (and so often carry the emotional weight of an infomercial).
My own writing has appeared in the loved / hated Stranger publication, the now-dead-because-of-blogs P-I, and the New York- based Blackbook magazine. I will probably always feel like a fraud because writing is not something I've found conquerable: as soon as I've submitted something, I must face the same maddening, blinking cursor once again. There's something sad about this, but there's something very exciting about it too. I hope, together, we can catch that elusive writerly excitement.