I'll Find Out, In Due Time

A personal essay by Marcus Cain

An eternal promise to a mortal being; a torment light can’t unveil.

My relationship with God has always been distant.

When I was younger, I felt close to Father in the sense that I knew He was there; like a child being supervised. However, the older I got, the more I treated Him like any teenager would - off handed communications and years of detachment. Confiding in a man of great spirituality, I hoped to mend my impartiality towards Father. As the man spoke, his voice sounded familiar, though I had not heard it before… it wasn’t his voice, but His. Reassuring. Calming, even.

Unsettling.

Cameron's Personal Essay Draft

“Moonrocks, Nevada. A place where any urbane would dread, but for he who loved riding dirt bikes, it became a heaven on earth. A place that unites family in wholesome recreation, but at times can border the line of life and death.”

There was a time when I didn’t believe in a God. Nevertheless, I wasn’t what you might consider a problem child nor a rebellious teenager. I just didn’t think about the possibility that there might be something out there greater than myself, my family, or my friends. If you were to ask me what I believed in, I’d tell you that if I do good deeds in this life, I’d end up where I want to go in heaven. For my 19-year-old brain, heaven consisted of a motocross track, jumps, and all the dirt bikes I could ever want.

Ana's Essay Plan

REFLECT: Two of the exercises that have been beneficial for my prewriting has been the character sketches and the quotes. After doing the character sketches, I thought a lot about what I wanted to write about, and my original idea got discarded as I was exploring.

SELECT: I was really passionate about my original idea, but, after doing the character sketches, I want to focus on the children I watched full-time over the summer, as I have a wider range details, seeing them from an outside perspective. It’s also more recent than my original idea, so the details are still fresh in my head.

COMMENT: I liked how Hoiland used imagery—both literally and in a literary sense—in her writing. I don’t know if I’ll end up using it, but I do want to play around with imagery (in an art sense) as I write the essay. She also wasn’t afraid to talk about sensitive topics, which is another thing I want to play around with in my essay.

PLAN: I want to talk about my personal experience of watching someone else’s children day after day, and how it has impacted me, and the affects it had on the children, from what I saw. I want to portray the differences between the kids and how that affected me, focusing specifically on one of them. I have several ideas I want to incorporate into my essay.   

Incorporation of Quotations

Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far they can go.” – T.S. Eliot

I stood there, looking at the beginning of what would be a long climb. Rock paths lined the base of what was to be a 10-hour journey up and back. It was dark, ice covered the black asphalt of the parking lot. The dirt was hard and crunched underfoot as I lumbered along the path of needle ice to the trailhead. With each inhalation of breath, my lungs stung, then the cool visage of condensation appeared with each exhale. How does one even start to climb a mountain I wondered? I looked up to see that the snow on the trail ahead had illuminated the surrounding areas in the moonlight. I had been dressed in thick boots, thermals, pants, a sweatshirt, a Canadian jacket with a hood, a beanie, scarf, and gloves. Were we really doing this so late in the season? I looked up at Mount Timpanogos: it hung luminously overhead. From where I was, I couldn’t even see the tip it was so high.

            As I gazed up at the giant that lay before me, I was reminded of the old Chinese proverb that comes to mind, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” Looking back on the experience I scoffed, well do they have proverb that tells you what do you do when your legs are burning, your depleted of food, you feel as though you can’t take another step for fear of sliding off the slippery edge, what then? As I began that hike, I reflected on my schooling and the mountains I’ve had to climb throughout the admissions process to law school. Under all that clothing, the burning doubt of whether I’d actually make it dangled unanswered in the air.

Ana's Martine Leavitt / Hoiland Response

As I was reading My Book of Life by Angel, I thought it was interesting that throughout the book she would bring up Milton’s Paradise Lost, as well as some biblical imagery. Before the interview, I thought that had contributed to the form (as Paradise Lost is an epic poem, and Angel seemed to enjoy him a lot); however, she brought up that the form provided a distance between the story and he readers (as she’s broken, and writing to herself, it gives her voice). As I was reading, I found myself cringing in certain parts because of the struggles, and feeling sad for Angel. She didn’t make it graphic as she could’ve, so I wasn’t focused with the specifics, but, instead, Angel’s perception and feelings were present for me. I also liked, going back to the interview, that through poetry, she was able to tell the truth in the way she presented her story.  

In One Hundred Birds Taught Me to Fly, on pg. 70, her mission companion tells her “we are not here to save them, we are only here to minister to them.” Throughout the first 1/3 of the book she contemplates saving and what it means to be “lost.” As she does so, she is vulnerable, as she talks about her own family and some of the people she met throughout her life (for example, marriage, divorce, and death). That vulnerability helps shape her character and the story.

Marcus's Leavitt/Hoiland Post

1.    The author mentioned different methods of her writing, like using poetry forms to provide a different style of reading. If I remember correctly, she created the story in this form for a couple of reasons: 1. Because that’s just how the story ended up as she started writing it. 2. Poetry allowed her to write about difficult moments without being too graphic or specific. 3. The form created an interesting connection between the reader and the story – it was a truer form to tell the story. It made it more real. As for morals and LDS angles of her writing, she demonstrated the reliance of miracles. The author mentioned that many of these young girls turn to Christ because they have literally nowhere else to turn. She used this fact to increase the addition of miracles to the story. However, the author leaves it open ended, because she didn’t want the ending to be too glorious – many of the times, these young women only live up to 5 years once immersed in drugs and prostitution.

2.    “…A pretty useless word, really, but the fact that someone took the time to teach it to us, to say. it over several times until we got it and the Remy held the snail up to his eyes and said snigel means I will cherish that word as a passed-on treasure until I am old and forget all my words.” (Pg. 10)

I really liked how this part stood out among others even though she is very descriptive in her details throughout the book. She used a simple word and phrase to create an entirely new meaning which produced a deep reflecting moment. It is details like this that I would like to remember and put into my own writing. As I had mentioned before, writing boldly helped me remember details I had forgotten, but by replicating this style and approach, I think details will come back to me and I’ll be able to write them in a unique way. There are simple things in life that can have a great impact, and it is important to show that in my writing. At times I want to focus on this big moments, but the little ones pack a big punch as well.

Katy's Bold Writing

My bold writing wasn't the most literary of things. It started out as an outpouring of question after question. These were things that had been on my mind since my mission. Little idiosyncratic elements of our faith and testimonies. These ideas and seeing them on paper led me to keep writing, trying to find resolution, honest resolution to these questions. This is a difficult thing to do, I discovered. It is so simple to say, well, maybe I just don't get to have the answers during this life. But I don't know that I believe that. Joseph Smith got answers when he asked, so why can't I? Is part of the reason for the church's seeming slow-down in doctrinal revelation the focus on orthodox Mormonism?

These are a few of the ideas that I tried to explore in my writing, and truly, it felt really good to write about these things. I feel like I understand better now where I am in relation to my testimony. There are a lot of questions I still have, and I think I need to continue writing about those questions to find answers.

Ana's Bold Essaying Response

As I wrote about my topic I chose for my private writing, I noticed I kept thinking about concerns and questions I had with my topic. I was able to dig deep into a topic that isn’t talked about frequently. I realized that sometimes it takes writing about concerns in order to crack what my thoughts really are. It helped me develop concrete opinions and questions about what I was writing about. At first, I had to reflect on what I actually thought on the topic, then, once I started writing, more and more thoughts appeared; it was definitely a challenge at the beginning, then became easier. There were times when I thought about a question I had, or an idea I wanted to explore, and then the direction I had originally anticipated went an entirely different route. When I dealt on my newly-found ideas, my writing seemed to flow a lot more naturally. It goes to show that sometimes I don’t recognize how much of an opinion I actually have about a topic.

Ana's Sketch Reflecting Belief

As soon as Mary walks through our front door, the only comment she can make is, “Your family has a lot of musical instruments! Do you all play?”

“Kind of. Everyone in my family can play the piano at least, but then we each have our other instruments we lean towards.” The stack of instruments in the corner of our living room, full of strings and woodwinds, gave away the fact that our family was musically inclined. We were that family who was always asked to give all of the musical numbers in sacrament meeting during church when they wanted one, but didn’t know who else to call. We knew there were other people, but they never came forward and admitted it in public. If someone didn’t play at least the piano or sing in the choir, they felt like an outcast. My mom had this rule in our family: you had to take piano lessons for at least five years growing up, then you were allowed to quit, or move on to another instrument. My brother quit, while I started learning the violin.   

The moment we moved to a new place, it was always the same situation—as soon as the word was out that we could play and sing, the following Sunday we were doing a musical number in church.