About:
Hi I’m Chloe, a junior in the college studying English & Creative Writing on the pre-medical track. I recently dropped my minor in religion, but reading religious texts is something that fascinates me. My relationship to reading & writing is one of catharsis. I think writing and writing allow me to explore my emotions and experiences in a way that isn’t feasible in a physical or tangible sense. With that, I recently did an internship and publishing and realized that reading/writing/editing are not something I could paid to do. At least, not unless I published a book of poems or a funky piece of fiction. Though, I still hope to have writing and reading as a part of my life–just not as my career. I aspire to be a pediatrician or therapist who writes poems or stories. Thus, writing and reading are something integral to who I am as a person but not necessarily something I always want to be forced to be doing. Stories are everywhere and something I appreciate about this class is how reading doesn’t just mean reading a text. I have been trying to convey how I feel my work in healthcare involves reading real stories, i.e. the stories of real people.
Something I hope I learn:
I hope we address how to talk about identities that we don’t identify with. As a straight, non-queer person I don’t want to appropriate the words or the stories of queer people. However, I would like to learn about how to talk about those stories and even include those stories in my own writing without appropriating them.
Hey Chloe! Thank you for your post! I’d love to discuss religious texts with you sometime! I am from Oklahoma, so a lot of denominations of Christianity were practiced by a lot of different people, and I have an ambivalent-but-improving relationship to all of it. I was always fascinated by my aunt’s ability to quote any part of the Bible for any context, and that inspired me to at least read what so many people are citing. I certainly think there should be more room in literary studies for religious texts, instead of assuming there needs to be some disciplinary divide maintaining them as separate studies, but I digress.
Furthermore, even if being a kind of traditional writer may not be in your career plans, you will certainly find that the critical scrutiny that comes from cultivating reading practices and skills will help in so many aspects of whatever career path you may choose (one of my previous therapists said something to the effect of therapy is basically helping people re-read moments, events, traumas, and other components of their lives in order to gain new perspectives and to make emotional and mental space for the things that trouble us).
I’m also glad you brought up how to speak about identities! We will certainly be discussing discourses and critical/ethical means of talking about different kinds of people.