(no subject)

Feb 13, 2007 19:40

This is the student bio I wrote for workshop. I think it's kind of charming. ALSO, if you do not own the complete series of Firefly yet it is on sale for 19.99 at Borders and goes off sale tomorrow. Go get it! Now! Oh and read my thing.

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hello.

My name is Holly. I am a resident of rural midwestern America, more specifically Illinois. It wasn’t always this way. I was born in Texas, spent some time in Georgia before successfully surviving my adolescence in Sycamore, Illinois; home to corn and not much else. I suffer from the not so rare and thoroughly curable condition of being just barely twenty-two years of age. I was diagnosed with my ailment upon the recognition of symptoms like: hubris, doubt, self-deprecation, and a total inability to balance my checkbook.

It would be a lie to say that I have always dreamed of being a writer; that my first action outside of the womb was to grasp a crayon with my pudgy infant hand and start my literary opus. (When I was a kid I wanted to work with animals and seeing that I work with thirteen year olds, I’d say my dream wasn’t too far off.) I never wrote as a child. What I did was lie. I lied all the time and not your basic self-preservation “I did not break the vase” lie but truly abstract, nebulous, and over the moon lies. As a child I had more than one interaction with Santa Clause, once at a diner in downtown Houston, another in our tree house. The big man and I were close personal friends. I battled villains in rivers, talked with ghosts and held court in castles. I had a blanket of interwoven fibs that followed me wherever I went like a cape fluttering in the wind. I was my own superhero. It’s fair to say that such behavior got me in trouble from time to time and could very well explain my sudden turn to introspection and more importantly to art.

Among my various labels of student, teacher, friend, and daughter, there is also painter. From early adolescence to somewhat recent events I knew that I wanted to be a professional visual artist. I worked in various mediums in accordance to the insatiable changes of eighteen to nineteen and further still to twenty. Most recently I fell for the beauty of oils, more specifically the work of American and French artists studying in Paris before the turn of the previous century. John Singer Sargent is my idol in the art world. He had a way of using sculptural brushstrokes that could paint an entire identity with a few minor flicks of his wrist, earth-shatteringly good. As a way to procure this dream I have studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Academy in San Francisco but neither flourished before my bank account bottomed out. A brief stint with a wonderful professor in community college seemed promising but ended with her death last semester. It’s been a trying road. It’s not fair to say that I am no longer a painter. I am still a painter. The obstacle is in finding a way to profit from it and that is where my plot has twisted so to speak.
I have other loves. As a low paying secondary job to my primary low paying job of Borders bookseller, I direct plays for children. I write adaptations and teach ten to thirteen year olds the Stanislavski method (or at least something resembling the Stanislavski method.) They are grateful and wonderful but this is not a devotion or vocation. Something I have been in search of for a while now.

What has brought me around to writing is another prodigious love, reading. More than painting and more than theater, I love books. I am the kind of girl who reads voraciously through the night, cursing herself when the time comes to leave for work without a wink of sleep. When I was a little girl it was books about magic, followed by science fiction, then love and human truth. I also rearrange my bookshelves every few weeks. It’s a combination of affection and compulsion but I love it all the same.

I suppose the culminating factor in this jabber is that I love to write. It’s the one way I can use my artistic sight, my love of words and dramatic sensibilities in a single avenue. Which brings me here, the endpoint of my biography-short-lived, as am I. This page or so of text may not be enough to know me but it’s enough for now as my biography and life are a work in progress.
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