Wednesday Smiles
Forgive me, but we're on vacation, and I'm posting from the LJ app and can't figure out how to easily pull my usual smiles text from an old post. So, minimal explanation: If anything's made you smile lately, please post a comment listing as many of those things as you like. Be well, friends.
"I was in the process of writing you a very detailed message about how your awesome teaching influenced--and continues to influence me today. It was lost because of my crappy phone.
"I wrote a Genre Analysis piece on Beyonce's "Formation". It was the most radical thing that I've ever written in an academic setting. I remembered when you told my dad that I had a lot of work that I wouldn't let people read. It made me think about how I tend to not let people read my work.
"My professor suggested that I enter the piece into a contest for Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse at DePaul.
"The courage to do that (because every one who writes feels scared at some point) came from my memory of you talking to my dad.
"It's weird. I've always been told that I write well. However, all of that writing has been within very constricted parameters. I took a serious chance with the paper that I spoke of. It was supposed to be a genre analysis. I turned it into an analysis of genre that ventured into power dynamics, race, and mainstream media. My professor was definitely concerned about my choice (it took the assignment to the brink of what my professor actually wanted) but I followed through with it. I frantically waited for the grade. Then, I got an email from the professor stating that it was an excellent paper and analysis and urging me to enter it into the English and Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse competition.
"Talk about validation!
"Writing pieces like that is all that I've wanted to do for so long. I needed the courage (remembering that convo between you and my dad) and the validation that those pieces are effective.
"I'm on top of the world. You should be as well!"
*BEAM*
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