hi!

My name is Phoebe Wood and I’m from Newton, Massachusetts, about twenty minutes away from Boston. I’ve lived in the same town my whole life, but moved when I was four from one part of it to another. My neighborhood is pretty quiet and there are a lot of little kids and dogs which makes everyone open to conversation. It’s funny, actually; my family got a dog a year ago and we know so many more people because of that. Dog walkers will come up and start talking to my dog and then me, the human holding the leash is an afterthought.
I’m studying English and education. I knew that I wanted to study education and started on the educational studies minor my sophomore year. English as a major happened because I wasn’t sure what to major in and it seemed like a broad enough topic that I wouldn’t be tied down to anything. I like it because I’ve always loved to read but stopped reading as much as I had before around middle school when school work started to pile up. Now I have to read for homework, plus it’s made me a more efficient reader so I usually have an extra book going on the side. Nothing too strenuous; at the moment I’m switching between The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler and Dear John by Nicholas Sparks. As I said, nothing too strenuous. One of my education professors asked us early on why we wanted to be teachers. He said that saying “because I like kids” wasn’t an acceptable answer; we had to think beyond that. As corny as it sounds, I want to be a teacher because it’s thrilling to see a child grasp a concept.
My interests and hobbies include skiing, knitting, soccer, watching movies, reading, spending time with friends, and traveling.
My most memorable workshop experiences come from a techniques of fiction class that I took two years ago, simply because it was the first workshop class I took. I’m very self conscious about my writing and it was scary to have an entire half an hour dedicated to people talking about a story I had written. The first comment, though, was a positive one, a compliment, and after that I was able to take everything in stride. I could have hugged that first person. I now know that people might not always like my writing, I may not always like it, but everyone in these classes giving feedback is doing so with the intention of helping me to improve, and I’m okay with that.
My favorite poem is Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam, specifically section 95. It’s sad but a final acceptance of a friend’s death. I suppose I’d like to be able to write something as affecting as that poem. I’d like to avoid clichéd writing, but I tend to fall into it. I’d like to learn to branch out in my poetry writing, rather than sticking to more of the same, as I feel I do.