Student Work: Advanced Writing Course

Taylor Swift and the Too-Big Teenaged Girl
Taylor Swift made being an adolescent girl a romantic, beautiful existence, something to be cherished, not run away from.

Variations on the Pleasures of the Temporal Perhaps
Time has a way of vanishing much as desire has a way of changing: almost never in the way expected.

To a Meadowlark
I ask my soul, “Take care of this, right now!” / But it’s silent. / It acts of its own accord: / An echo gasp, / From stupid-little-mundane things / That cry you out.

Poets and Composers
There are poets and there are composers. In a way, it’s simply about their strategies for producing art and relationship to art making. In another way, it’s an inherent, spiritual quality—housed somewhere between the body and the note.

The Metronome
I do not practice with a metronome because I want to become a better drummer. I practice with a metronome to practice focusing. To practice pretending that the world is objective. To meditate.

In Defense of the Non-Place
I seek the sublime enclosed within banality; I seek a hidden form of secular revelation.

Imagining Berlin
I want to imagine Berlin. It yearns to be x-rayed. We must examine its broken bones.

Together at the Movies
My nickname is, in many ways, a stowaway from another life. The simple, happy life that my mom and dad had built in the Rockaways of Queens.

Home Is Where the . . .
Where I come from, there is graffiti everywhere. This place is their museum, an outlet for their frustration, inspirations, and pride.

To Texas and Back
The summer before college, Sarwat moved to Texas. It was a small miracle that she was able to convince them to stay put through the end of high school. Her parents wasted no time packing up after graduation.

Billy Corgan Shiny Pants
Sera wasn’t what you would call a “party person.” Yet here he was, walking in his tight shiny pants, to a party full of obnoxious theater kids.

Squirrel and Tanabe
Just as Tanabe turned a sharp curve, a squirrel ran out of the shrubbery, froze in the middle of the road, and stared straight at him.

A Letter to My Younger Self
The first lesson I want to teach you is that it’s okay to be sensitive. I know mom says that it’s your worst trait, but I think it makes you strong.