Year 2

This story was my first non-academic midterm after returning from the pandemic. I was terrified, burnt-out, and ready to leave school by this point. So, when my professor, Dr. Gilbert, told us to write a short story using at least one character from each book that we had read so far, I felt relief. That is not to say that I anticipated this paper to be easier - my creative writing skills were not as developed as my academic writing skills - but that this was a new change of pace. To create this paper, I had to reread major moments in each of my selected characters lives. To pick this moments, I had to consider the theme of the class, which was the intersection between the law and literature. However, as we had seen throughout each of these stories, I also had to consider when the literature indicated the injustices of the law.

I also wanted to create an organic way to tell the story while also providing meaningful analysis. So, I set the story in a tavern in the afterlife, allowing each character to reminisce about the living world. This gave me an opportunity to introduce characters as they would naturally enter a conversation. This also allowed me to put the most lawful characters at the beginning of the story, allowing for a natural dismantlement of their legal ideologies. I also borrowed from my experience in theatre, which gave me the skills to take a character from the page and breathe new life into them, allowing them to interact and live in new ways.

This creative approach also provided a new lens on literature. I had always read stories as if they were scripture. Ergo, the law and just of a text indicated some meaning that I needed to understand but was still above me. This excersize humanized the characters and their creators, which made the texts more accessible and, as a result, more useful. Afterall, the law and its injustices are written by people. Therefore, understanding these people and their stories does not provide a doctrine, but a new and valuable perspective to build community with.

Also, I just learned that creative writing is fun and a good way to manage emotions you do not know how to understand yet!

By the end of the semester, we applied our understandings of legal institutions and the theory of the law to real institutions and how they interact with living examples of justice. As a future English teacher, I was also taking linguistic courses, which introduced me to the descriptivism vs. prescriptivism debate. Descriptivism argues that language should be understood scientifically, meaning that language should be allowed to exist and evolve naturally, concluding that their is no correct or incorrect grammar. Prescriptivism argues that there is a correct use of grammar that should be universally taught.

Prescriptivism is the most common lens in high school ELA curricula, favoring the rules of standard academic English (SAE), which in turn favors the patterns of certain dialects of English most commonly spoken by a select demographic of white people. However, as demonstrated by the diversity of people who speak English in the U.S. alone, this approach creates a monolith in our language that does not honor the breadth of our language. So, I argue that ELA programs need to reconsider how we teach English, favoring a descriptivist approach that honors all students. More specifically, I argue that we need to honor the sister language of English, African-American Vernacular Expression (AAVE).

This class, and especially this project, encouraged me to take the time to understand how practices that I deem as trivial, such as the demand for "proper grammar," have impacts that are far deeper than my intentions.

I wrote this short-story during the first semester back from the pandemic. I had just recently committed to becoming an English major, so I was taking my first creative writing class. Terrified of the world around me and dreading the reality that somebody actually have to read this, I started by describing how I felt: It was the beginning of the pandemic, so we were allowed no guests in our rooms. We had to wear masks and follow strict protocols. Although I knew every policy was intended to keep us safe, I still felt like we had been imprisoned. So, I started off with that notion, which slowly evolved into a sense of isolation, which then quickly turned into a sci-fi horror story about deprivation.

This story went through several drafts and rounds of criticism before I felt comfortable with it. However, I did not quite feel comfortable with submitting it. After all, this was a piece that I had written during a low-point in my life. Was I willing to share it with an active audience? I had to answer that by asking myself if I was willing to keep the story to myself, which made me realize that I would rather face the anxiety of having other people read my story than let it collect dust. So, I sent it to the editor.

Fortunately, they liked it enough to publish it, which gave me the courage to send another story the following year.