Essay Draft: Spider-Web Ties and Double Stuf Oreos

   Foot on the brake, hand on the key, with a twist of my wrist, I was on my way. With one 
hand on the wheel turning it left, I saw the shadow of an unknown creature with eight legs on my windshield. His presence was as calm as mine. This arachnid and I weren’t as different as it seemed at the time. Like that spider, I stand calm in the presence of fear. Pulling to the side of the street, I prepared myself for his execution. Looking around my car for the best method of lethal impalement, I remembered the ring doused in the space of the cup holder beside me. It was a large, silver and solid ring scratched by the woes of life of another. I picked it up between my thumb and two first fingers and brought all my focus to the victim in front of me. Not wanting to fracture my windshield, the first blow was light and slow only to get the animal where I wanted him. In that moment, the intensity in the vehicle increased dramatically. Panic was in the air and pumping through my veins in fear of loosing my prey. When he reached the target area and after two attempts to kill him, the spider took its last steps in his earthy life and was squished between two hard matters. Rest in peace web slinging soul.  

  Standing larger and taller than that innocent being that day, I felt a power that I do not feel today. Today I feel as if the spider and I have swapped bodies. That instead of me, myself claiming victory over death, I have been shattered by the unprecedented pressures of life. The pressures of self doubt, expectation, misconception, mistakes, heartache, trauma, fear, anger, anguish and panic are a few feelings that the spider and I share in common. The day I squished that spider, I did not empathize with it as I do now.

One sleeve of Oreos eaten.

“You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.” 

Ernest Hemingway

Milk is poured and drank in one gulp.

   Everything that you do not expect to happen will happen. Someone will call you and manipulate you into giving them thousands of dollars over the phone. You will do it. You will do it in spite of that feeling you have in the pit of your gut that it might be fraudulent. With a chilling fear down your spine, you continue blindly until it is too late. 

Insufficient funds and second sleeve of Oreos eaten.

  You will have a hard time returning to that bank. With the artifacts from that incident stuffed under your bed, they will haunt you like a ghost in your dreams. For days after, you will jump when people unexpectedly, but harmlessly come too close to you. 

Empty box of Oreos.

  You will date a guy and he will kiss you on the first date. He will heal your heart that was stolen from, but you will fall harder than you ever had before. He will tell you he isn’t good enough for you, but you will still go out with him. One day, you will realize he was right. You will stop talking to him and try to go after what you deserve, but you will still miss him.

New box of Oreos. One sleeve of Oreos gone.

   The boy that broke your heart six months ago will come back. You will fall for him again. And guess what? He won’t just come back, but he will break your heart again. Did you see that coming? I didn’t. 

Another sleeves of Oreos eaten.

   One day you will find someone who is worth pursuing but he won’t have much time for you. You will get bored and lonely. Seeking company, evil will find you. Yes, another boy.

Trampled. 

Crunch. Another box of Oreos gone. 

Ana's Essay Draft: Finding Love for Another's Children

“What you do to children matters. And they might never forget.”

—Toni Morrison

I never knew watching three children during summer would have such an impact on me, but it did. They became children I learned to love, despite their difficult times. I especially came to love the three-year-old, as I spent the most time with him. (He only had to go to preschool once a week.)

Maxwell, the three-year-old, and I instantly had a connection. He had enough energy to run five miles without taking a break. I wouldn’t be surprised if in one hour, he ran five miles inside the house.

He would reach up to grab my hand whenever he wanted to go somewhere. “Ana, come.” He would say. Even though he always went places alone in the house, as long as I was there, he needed me to go with him.

After a while of watching him, he started asking, “Mom, can you play –.” As my time with Maxwell was coming to a close, he started calling me mom, and his older brother had to correct him. Maxwell would respond, “She’s my second mom.” All I could do was smile, even though I knew the truth. It was hard to correct him—after all, he was only three.

In August, Arizona was in the middle of monsoon season. It would rain in the middle of the day, even though the day started out with few clouds in the sky. Maxwell loved the rain. Even more, he loved to play in the muddy puddles.

Nothing can compare to the smell of rain after an Arizona rainstorm. Many people don’t think rain has a smell, but rain does have a smell in Arizona. Sometimes I miss the smell of a yard after it’s been mowed, but, after monsoon season, I desire the smell of rain once more.

Because of the uneven levels of dirt in Maxwell’s backyard, his huge mud puddles were waiting for us. He had a tiny Step 2 water table that was always filled with water. That was one of the reasons he loved the rain so much.

On an afternoon, after the rainstorm had stopped, he pulled my hand in the direction of the back door, to signal it was time to play outside. He told me to gather rocks (his attempt was to gather all the boulders I could carry, but I thought it was safer to look for pebbles instead). After gathering close to ten, Maxwell would throw them into his water table, turning the rainwater into a dark-colored mess. He would place his hands in the water, until they touched the bottom, and would ask me, “Can you see my hands?” I would tell him no most of the time. After a while, I began to tell him yes. Frustrated, he would shake his head and bang one of his hands on his forehead. Then he would move his hands around in the water to see if there was another position that would make his hands “disappear.”

When he was sick of the muddy water, he would ask me to fill it up again with the hose. To his request, I told him to play in the water he already had at his disposal. When I didn’t do what he wanted, he decided to play in the muddy puddles in different areas of the yard. “As long as you only get your hands wet,” I would tell him. However, being the three-year-old that he was, he decided to go big or go home. The next thing I knew, I had to change him out of his now-mucky clothes. Even though I tried to keep the house as clean as possible, he left a trail of footprints on the hardwood floor before I had time to come back with a clean outfit.

My time with the children was coming to a close. Maxwell had a keen sense of sound. During one particular evening, when Maxwell’s dad was returning from work, and as Maxwell heard the front door beginning to unlock, he placed his paw patrol figurines down, next to his giant PJ Masks house (which he referred to as “PJ Maxwell”) he would frequently play with. As soon as the toys were out of his lap, he bolted to the door to throw himself onto his dad.

His dad would tell the kids to say goodbye to me before I would leave. On one occasion, Maxwell cried, “Ana, don’t go! We still have to play!” To spend more time with me, he asked his dad if they could get “the packages,” which he was obsessed with; In other words, the mail. Their mailbox was on the way to my house—I would walk home, if the weather was bright and sunny, as I only lived a block away. With a smile on his face, Maxwell not only got to spend a little more time with me, but also peek into the mailbox. He hoped he could walk farther, so he could come home with me, but his dad had to redirection him.

After I left to attend school at BYU, I received a text from Maxwell’s dad, telling me how much Maxwell missed me. At the moment, all I could think about was how much I missed him to. I couldn’t believe a three-year-old still remembered his playmate.

Cassie's Writing Plan

REFLECT

I have loved writing in the past and it had been so long before this class since I had written anything besides an instagram caption or a letter to my grandma. Just getting pen to paper has been really therapeutic and exciting. I was really excited about some of the topics I had brainstormed at the beginning of class. I am still excited about them. In some ways, the writings we've done have been related to those topics, but they have related in different ways than I had expected. 

SELECT

This is so difficult. I am very stumped about what to choose. I think if I were going to start writing right now I would write about going to my friend's bridal shower. She was my mission companion and then roomed with my friends from high school. So it was this weird crossover of people I hadn't seen in a while that represented different times of my life, and being there made me feel very foreign. But to be honest, I'm struggling to commit.

COMMENT

Someone already said this, but it is what I want to do too. Holland had a great ability to have the essence of her heartache understood without delving into it. I think I am sometimes too inclined to write about pain, and I loved how she wrote about hope more than sadness. And she did it without being didactic. So I guess that's a really big concept that I want to try and imitate from her. I want my writing to be more hopeful. I grew up loving Sylvia Plath so I think there's part of me (however much I fundamentally disagree with this) that believes there is beauty in pain. And while I think there is a very important place for that writing, I think I've done enough of it. And I want to write something hopeful, even if it has the essence of heartache. 

PLAN

I am having a hard time committing to anything!!!! I want to write in a more prose-like way like Hoiland did. I've taken poetry writing classes so I want to make my writing seem more artistic than storylike, if that makes sense. I want to be as honest as possible, while still maintaining beauty in my writing. I liked that about Leavitt's writing as well. I want to make sure I am still reminded of life's beauty no matter how much I feel like I am personally struggling with whatever topic I choose or story I tell. I want that reflected in my form.

Kendal's Personal Essay Ideas

REFLECT: I wrote a lot about some excepts of my book about my mission, a spider, things from my journal and other concepts that I have been grappling with. Writing about these things and writing them in different forms have allowed me to see things in other perspectives. With these perspectives, I can see clearer and allow myself to progress and move on from things.

SELECT: I think I will write about how my character of the spider relates to how I feel about myself in present time. This will be abstract but also fun in that I will be portrayed as the spider in attempt to understand and put my life to metaphor.

COMMENT: I want to imitate this form here: “I want to tell her… I want to assure her...I want to impart to her...But…” (46) I think it would work well with what I am planning on.

PLAN: I would like to attempt to write in prose for my personal essay. Not sure how that would would exactly, but I play to attempt it maybe. Start out with the spider and take myself out of the equation and then bring the reader to how I relate to the spider.

Cameron's Personal Essay Ideas

Reflect: I think that writing the experiences I’ve had over the course of this class in segments has taught me that I can take a very short moment in time and expand it into a large and descriptive paragraph. This tactic draws the reader into the scene, but must be careful not to include too much information/info dump. I’ve learned that I must not be didactic but that some of the best learning comes when a reader can make assumptions for themselves, therefore, writing to a general audience usually works better to reach more people. I want to convey meaning in this personal essay, yet not be too symbolic in what I want specific things to mean.

Select: I plan on writing about my experiences as a boy with a loving, but contentious father, who always desired the best for his children, but somehow couldn’t quite convey it in the right way. I’m not sure if I want to model the fictitious, yet realistic example that Martine Leavitte uses in My Book of Life by Angel or the strikingly realistic stories of Hoiland.

Comment: Hoiland talked about getting to know her sister when she was a young girl but said, “I’m embarrassed now to think that I ever questioned the happiness of another because it did not match perfectly my own but my young heart was not ready to understand that the threadd between my sister and me would not ever waver, let alone break, in the years to follow, even when our lives looked different” (Hoiland 41-42). I love this sentence, because there are layers of meaning, not only with the content, but also style and form. It is very telling of her experience, yet does not make any didactic statements about what one must now believe. It simply relays her experience.

Plan: I want to tell of experiences of a young man, what discipline has looked like for him, what belief systems looked like in that household, the motives behind the “why” they did things and the reasons he was given. I want to show the good intentions of this young man’s father, the feelings of the love he experienced, and contrast those with moments and conversations of fear and doubt with his mother and brother. Then flash forward to the perspective of an older, wiser man, seeing his parents as flawed, how they too grow, learn, and change, ending with a similar connection to that of Hoiland’s as mentioned above.

Dorothy's Essay Plan

1. Reflect: The character and different scene settings helped me to explore a different type of descriptive writing. This was beneficial in also setting to the tone of the essay and foreshadowing what is about to happen through scene setting. I want to incorporate this in my essay so that the reader can envision themselves in the same situation and place. I enjoyed the idea of jumping right into the story at first and later explaining the context as the essay builds.

2. Select: I have decided to write about my experience returning to the mission field after I came home when I got sick. Rather than dwell on the disheartening experience of returning home early, I want to celebrate the decision that I made to complete my mission after months of doctor's appointments and an internal wrestle with the decision. Being an extremely indecisive person myself, I think that by exploring how this decision was made in an LDS content will be beneficial to me as a writer and as a Latter-day Saint.

3. Comment: I loved how Hoiland retained a reverence throughout her pieces, but was also able to make light of some of difficult situations. For example, she shares how difficult and lonely it was to be in Sweden with two small children but never lingered on the hardship, rather what she did to make the best of the situation. I also like how she has sections of things like what she can believe better, what she longer believes and etc. She just lists things in these passages and it creates a powerful impact. This could make a strong concluding paragraph, without being too didactic.

4. Plan: I want to structure my essay similar to how Hoiland structured many of hers. While she reflects on a certain situation, these situations she chooses are often smaller moments that have impacted her. I want to incorporate the same thing in my essay, without being too didactic, which Hoiland did a good job at.

Marcus's Essay Plan

My topic is the effects of timelines in our lives. Within the church, and even outside the church, there seems to be a large stigma surrounding timelines. Well, mine isn’t ordinary. There are a lot of pressures on graduating college as a certain time, getting married at a certain time, going on a mission at a certain time. However, my timeline isn’t your timeline, nor God’s timeline.

As for a form to imitate in my essay, I would like to make it more personal with the use of letters, like Martine Leavitt. I think the use of letters (in this case, to myself) would add an interesting effect and cut up the traditional essay format. The manner in which we format our text allows us to read it differently – I’d like to experiment with that.

The format of my essay will mimic that of a traditional essay but will also include choppier and shorter paragraphs with the occasional letter to myself. These short letters will include motivation saying or advice to myself during difficult times. The content will include moments I feel I let myself down by falling behind: Gymnastics, Learning the Gospel, Late advancements in the Mission field, Getting into College, Joining a BYU Athletic Team, etc. I will include each of these in a timeline, but the timeline may have some hiccups.