2nd Creative Writing Event

I very nearly missed the Undergraduate Creative Writing Awards altogether due to being highly distracted by the flagrant housing assignment injustice which had just been perpetrated on my draw group.  (We may end up launching multiple appeals…the possibility has been raised of inciting the righteous ire of a Feminist Studies professor on our behalf…in short, Shit May Very Well Go Down.)  But I digress.  At precisely 6:30, my friend who was planning to accompany me asked, “Wait, Audrey, when is your [creative writing] thing?  …Isn’t it 6:30?”  I jumped up from the table without taking a single bite of the banana I had just lovingly peeled.  Further delay was occasioned by a hotly contested sandwich and the fact that both of our bikes have broken gears, mine being permanently stuck on the very lowest setting and his on the very highest setting.  But at last our energy-inefficient journey to Margaret Jacks culminated in a sheepish entrance into the Terrace Room, where the first reader had just begun. 

            The kid whose turn came right after mine shared a heartbreaking/heartwarming story about the rescue of an abused, malnourished dog, which is normally exactly the kind of thing that would wreak havoc with my emotions.  However, the fact that my own story features a canine narrator apparently brought out the worst in me, because what I mostly kept thinking the whole time was, “My dog would kick your dog’s ass.”  His was sweet and helpless and mine was vicious, so yes, this did make me a terrible person.  

            Probably the most memorable reader for me was the last girl, who spoke eloquently, movingly, and best of all humorously about a traumatic haircutting incident which she suffered as a child.  Through this fairly mundane subject, she provided insight into larger themes like the dynamics between her family, her father’s character, and her experience of being Asian-American.  Having been another little girl who was vain about her hair and fought to defend it from the interference of my mother, and who always feared appearing too “excruciatingly Asian,” I definitely identified with a lot of the things she said.

            There was also a girl who shared an ode to her creative, independent sister, a kid who described some sort of ragtag band of musicians in Spanglish, and some truly phenomenal complimentary strawberries.  All in all, not a bad hour spent—it just happened to be overshadowed by the stress of our infuriating housing situation.

*The experience of actually getting up in front of the room and reading was scarier than I expected it to be, and I was much less charismatic than I had hoped to be, and really, I would rather not talk about it.