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senior year:
During my senior year of college, I took four honors courses and eleven upper-level courses. Here's a little bit of information on few of them and the kind of coursework they required.
creative writing poetry /
small press publishing
Taking these two classes in the same semester was possibly one of the coolest things in my educational career. As a very intermediate writer, I had never experienced the joy of learning poetry writing techniques or reading well-loved poets and responding to their words with my own. I was able to find my niche in this class by keeping a pocket-sized journal to record my thoughts that would later become poetry. In conjunction with this class I took Small Press Publishing, where we learned the importance of supporting small presses and submitting our own writing for publication. My eyes were opened to the beauty of chapbooks, zines, and self-publication. These two classes were quite possibly the most influential that I've taken at Drury. From these two classes, I self-published my first collection of poetry in a zine titled Grandma Couch Poems. It consisted of spending hours cutting and gluing magazine clippings and scanning pages over and over again. It was time consuming, but one of the most rewarding things I've ever created. I have plans to create a second zine with the poems I wrote this semester. To buy a copy, just contact me.
Shakespeare and ethics
A combination of the famous playwright and ethics, this class served as a great introduction into both subjects for me. I read a few Shakespeare plays in high school, but wasn't completely aware of all of his comedies, tragedies, etc. In this class we read 10+ Shakespeare plays and compared them to the theories of Immanuel Kant and Stuart Mill. Our final project was centered on a play of our choice and was a close reading of the play in addition to looking at different productions of the play in film. I chose to focus on Twelfth Night and compared an early adaptation to one of my favorite movies: She's the Man. To the left, you'll find my final paper for the class, which not only looked at this comparison, but also delved into the history of the play itself and the ways it has been adapted in different countries.
studies in contemporary literature / supervised undergraduate teaching
Contemporary Literature helped me to pull another type of literature closer to my heart: graphic novels. In this class, we read works from Michael Cunningham, Toni Morrison, and Jhumpa Lahiri, while also focusing on graphic novelists/sequential artists like Art Spiegelman, Satrapi Marjane, and Alan Moore. While I enjoyed reading the more classic works of literature, I loved diving into the graphic novels--which are literature, I might add. The inspiration I gained from this class was what led me to participate in supervised undergraduate teaching for an honors reading seminar on graphic novels. In this seminar, the students in the class chose to read graphic novels that interested them and I loved getting to see them view this style as literature. To the right, you'll find my term paper for Contemporary LIterature; it was centered on my favorite book and graphic novel Everyone's a Aliebn When Ur a Aliebn Too by Jomny Sun.
single author:
brothers grimm
This class was one of the most unique I've taken. In it, we read theoriginal Grimm's fairy tales and looked at other scholars in the subject like Marina Warner, Jack Zipes, and Angela Carter. Throughout the semester, we dissected several stories and looked at the things that made them magic. What are the rules for writing magical realism/fairy tales? What patterns or themes are apparent in all areas of the subject? We answered these questions and looked at works we read in comparison to modern themes: childhood, motherhood, feminism, film (Tim Burton), and fantasy (Tolkien), etc. To the left, you'll find my comparison of J.R.R. Toklkien's definition for fantasy and Kelly Link's Catskin.
advanced writing workshop
This class was my last time experimenting with creative writing, and I had so much fun with it. Over the course of the semester, we read from collections of flash fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction. From these, we free wrote when we found one that struck a cord in our hearts. Most of the time mine was with poetry, but I was also able to write a creative non-fiction piece I really liked and experimented a bit more with fiction. This class was unique because we were all able to create/do what we love and share that with our classmates. There's nothing cooler than seeing someone passionate about creating and getting to workship alongside them. To the right, you'll see my final portfolio for this class and the things I was able to work on this last semester of college.
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