YES, I get to talk about myself (just kidding...)

Hey, everyone! This is actually my second go at this same blog entry, with these same questions, so this time around I think I'll try to put a new spin on some of them. To start off with, my name is Shaunie -- I know, I know, it isn't exactly one of those names soon-to-be parents go looking for in baby books, but after about fifteen years of absolutely abhorring it, I decided to embrace the strange "S" word. You see, my mother is a very free-spirited, hippie-liberal chick, who enjoys wearing overalls and patchouli perfume every day of her life, which might give you a hint as to why she decided upon my birth to let my older sister, nine at the time, name me. And so, yes, I am called Shaunie -- a title my sibling, Almeda (that one's a kicker too, huh?), chose after a character on the oh so famous television series, "Baywatch." Looking back, I figure it could have been a lot worse. You could all be in class with some weird girl named Pocahontas...Scary, right?

Anyway, I come from a small city called Plattsburgh that's about 2 hours away from Canton. In high-school, I used to complain a lot about my hometown -- that there wasn't enough to do, and that the only people there were to see had the same old faces. After leaving home to go to school, though, I have begun to appreciate it a lot more. I miss my small local shopping mall, bowling alley with a bar next to it, and randomly scattered downtown coffee shops SO much while I am away at college, and of course, some of those "same old faces" I realize are my closest friends, all of whom I wish I could see a lot more of during the year. I guess my new sentiments just prove the old saying true: You don't know what you got til it's gone...And yes, maybe youth is, to an extent, wasted on the young. BUT I like to think I'm not old yet, and so I still have time to make up for a lot of the great things in life I've taken for granted thus far.

Hobbies, you ask? This is always a hard question for me to answer. I'd say I'm a jack of all trades and a master of none, but that's not entirely true, as I'm not even a "jack" at many tasks at all. I do, however, as a writer, highly enjoy reading. Contrary to the stereotype, though, I like getting lost in a great movie story-line just as much as reading a good book (with the exception, only, of the Harry Potter Series) and enjoy almost any activity that helps me escape from some of the mundane and unpleasant realities of the "real-world." If it gives you any clues, over break I watched both the entirety of "The Secret Garden" AND "A Little Princess", and am not ashamed at all! Classics! I also don't like much better than good conversation, long walks in the summertime, trips to the beach, and just spending good old quality time with the people who matter most to me.

As far as writing...well, I've been at it for awhile. I wrote extensively in high-school and exhausted all of the creative writing classes I was offered pretty quickly, and have continued to take advantage of them here, as I declared an English Writing major the Spring Semester of Sophomore year. I'm also a freelance reporter for my local paper, which is a gig I scored from a high-school internship. I couldn't really tell you why I'm studying writing, aside from the fact that I absolutely love it when a sentence, a word, a paragraph, or an entire novel rings true. As I said before, I love delving through worlds that aren't my own, and of course, I love creating them. In specific regards to poetry, some my absolute biggest and favorite influences include Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Walt Whitman, and Allen Ginsberg. All of these writers are people who, in my opinion, have/had a real gift when it came to using "the word" to create solid images, scenes that make you stop and think, "I wish I had come up with that", or, better yet, "I've been there; I've felt that." And, to me, that is precisely what good poetry does.

Writing has always been part of my life, and I have always known, deep down and on the surface, that it is what I would go on to study. That being said, like any writer, I have a lot to work on, and have of course experienced negative criticism, especially regarding my tendency to be overly verbose. All I can say about that, though, is that I'm highly appreciate of it. In the end, it wasn't all the compliments that made me better at what I love to do, it was the critiques that were sometimes hard to accept. So, PLEASE, feel free to pick apart my stuff -- I look forward to it (even if it also makes me grimace sometimes) !


I took Intro to Poetry last semester, and one of the things I am most excited to find out about myself as a writer is that I, too, have the ability to write about more complex, tough, and even uncomfortably painful subjects. My pre-college poetry, though decent, has always been a bit more fluffy, with longer, flowery words that I always felt I needed. I have been please, however, to realize, I don't have to use long, latinate words to get my point across, and can instead write poems with "punch" -- that get right at the heart of the matter. Even so, I'm now where near where I'd like to be in that vein, and my goal for this class largely surrounds continuing on such a journey of power.

Woah, that was a mouth-full (type-full?) I'll see you all in class in about twenty minutes!