Paul's bio and reflection

I was born and raised in Denver, and I'm very fond of it. It's just the right size. Not so small that it doesn't have an airport or museums, and not so big that you can't feel like it's yours. Denver has a bunch of charming sports teams (the Denver Nuggets are my personal favorite. Really, who names a basketball team the Nuggets?), and, of course, incredible mountains. Best mountains in the world. Way better than the Alps, which are overcrowded, anyway. Mountains are a bit overrated in the sense that skiing isn't as much fun as you think it is BUT driving around up there, checking out the little mountain towns, is way more fun than you'd expect.

My childhood was very secluded and most of my experiences with non-middle-class white people happened through literature. Denver is not as white as you think it is--in fact, according to the latest census, it's majority Latino--but I went to a private high school that wasn't majority Latino, to say the least. So heading out into the wide world was eye-opening for me.

I'm a Computer Science major who would like to become an English double-major. The double major is more contingent on units than anything else. English 90 was a wonderful class for me, as it is for many people. It taught me how to write creatively, which, I know, is a bit of an oxymoron. But I do think writing can be taught. At the very least (and I don't know who once said this, but it came up in English 90 once) I think revising can be taught.

I do think that people are writing new stories all the time. To me, what it means for something to be a "new" story is that it sheds fresh light on a particular aspect of society. And I think that writers have many opportunities to do this because society is constantly changing. The world that we inhabit in 2013 is very dissimilar from the world we inhabited in 1913, or even in 2003. (By "we" I'm referring to the human race, by the way.) So the way that we interact with Earth and with each other is fundamentally different than the way that any previous generation interacted with Earth. Thus, we as writers are confronted with a range of new human experiences and sensations that we can, and should, translate into new stories. I'm not trying to suggest that there aren't similarities between our stories and the stories of the past. Of course there are. It would be strange if there weren't, given the fact that we're all human and most human experiences (love, for example) are universal. But the 21st century presents us with a unique concoction of anxieties and issues that no one has ever encountered. I'm reminded of one of Bernard's lines from Arcadia: "A great poet is always timely. A great philosopher is an urgent need." History reveals how true this is, and it can only be true if there are new stories to write. If every story had been written, then it wouldn't be necessary for us to keep writing. Readers could find everything they needed in the past. But my experience suggests this isn't true. I always feel like I'm looking for a story that will place 2013 into perfect context. That story hasn't been written yet because it can't have been written yet, but when it is written, I can guarantee it will be new.