I was born and raised in a suburb outside of Minneapolis, Minnesota called Edina. Picture your typical suburbia, with nice pristine lawns, quality public schools, close knit community, etc. it had it all. Along with my supportive community I had the most, and still have, supportive parents. They pushed me to do well in school, but never pressured, they encouraged I participate in sports and out of school activities, but never forced. They provided me with all the resources to excel, and I did. I was a straight A student throughout my middle school and high school years, i was a varsity track runner, and junior varsity tennis player, I had a great social circle, was involved with the church and school. I mean I gotta admit I was the perfect child. If I told you I still were this person I would be lying, but I am more myself than I have ever felt I was in highschool. It’s normal to grow and change as you mature, I know that, but sometimes I look back and think why was I like that?, or even worse, why am I still not like that? I do the very same thing with my writing, and over the course of my writing journey that I am about to take you through I will be showing you, and well as discovering myself, who I used to be as a writer, who I am now as a writer, and ultimately how I got here as a writer.    

 

  
“From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books.”
 

George Orwell, Why I Write

So right of the bat George Orwell knew he was ought to be a writer. Me on the other hand? Nope. I still somedays question if what I want to do is writing. Maybe I’d be better off doing finance, or accounting. But then again we all have to write, even the men and woman on wall street. My writing days started way back in the awkward days of 7th grade. I vividly remember my teach putting a hamburger picture on the screen, she was about to explain the oh-so-well-known 5-paragraph essay with yes, a hamburger. The hamburger model goes like this; the top bun is your intro, the “good stuff” aka the meant, the lettuce, the mustard, the ketchup, etc. are your body paragraphs with topic sentences, and supporting points, and finally the bottom bun is your conclusion to give you a hamburger...or the 5-paragraph essay. That model stuck with me for years. Maybe because I am such a visual learner, or maybe because I am a food addict, but the hamburger model was my absolute go-to.  From then on every single one of my papers would be five paragraphs, thesis in the intro, three body paragraphs with a topic sentence and three supporting points, and a conclusion restating my thesis and three supporting arguments. When my teachers would hand back my papers I more often than not received an A. I clearly had mastered the five-paragraph essay, but that is all I knew when it came to writing, and is what came to my mind when I thought of being “a writer”.

 

It was my first semester freshman year at Wake Forest when I received a huge D on my first year seminar paper. It was a group paper that was in total 20 pages, and was about the role of nature in Western society. I had be cruising along that first semester in all of my intro classes continually writing five-paragraph essays, but this paper called for a lot more than the five paragraph essay, and I was stumped. I have found that all of my significant moments of my writing journey are the moments when I was locked in the library staring at the screen completely unsure as to how to go about the paper. This was one of those moments. It was my first group paper, my first research paper with footnotes, and my first time I felt I was really challenged. We worked all semester on this paper and still to this day I think about how that love hate relationship I had with that paper opened my eyes to a whole new level of writing. One of the first challenges I faced was keeping a consistent voice throughout the paper. Each student I was working with had very different voices, and the first draft of our 20 pages paper was choppy. We sat down with our professor and she told us we needed to “establish a consistent academic voice for the paper”. I had always just thought of writing as my own voice, but I have come to realize voice varies for each discourse community, and there are many different discourse communities I have written for throughout my years at Wake Forest. We all had to work together to create a consistent voice. In the end of the course I had a piece of work that I was actually proud of. We had over 50 sources and footnotes, and it was the first research paper I felt passionate about what I was arguing. It was after that paper I realized that the papers I would be writing in college called for a variety of formats, and depending on the class and professor and genre, I would be writing a lot more than the five paragraph essay.        

 

So now let me take you to the next semester, my second semester of my freshman year. I was in Writing 111 with Erik Ekstrand called “writing for contemplative studies”, a class actually recommended to me by my FYS professor. This is where I realized my love for creative writing. Throughout the semester we were asked to participate in a contemplative practice of our liking. I decided to try out yoga, and I kept a process journal where I recorded my experiences in my yoga classes. We then had to write a paper integrating narrative and observation from our experiences as a contemplative practitioner.  The main goal was to write for all the senses so the reader really felt as if they were there in the class. I had never been asked to write for smell before, or for sound, but to this day it may have been one of my favorite papes to write. I was able to incorporate images, and really take the reader inside my head. My problem with writing papers for school before was that I felt like I was suppressing my own emotions just to receive an A, but for this paper I really just forgot about the grade and put all my emotions into it,which was the assignment. This was meant to be an emotional piece, so emotional that every sense; hearing, seeing, tasting, smelling, feeling, was supposed to be ignited. I remember having to read this paper out loud in class when we were doing peer reviews and I was so nervous, because this was such a vulnerable piece, but from then on out I understood writing on a new level. The writing process is far more in depth than I had ever known and it has become a mirror of my own growth as a person.

 

It was after my writing 111 class that Erik recommended I should take Writing 212 and pursue the writing minor. I honestly was shocked, because I never really thought of myself as a writer, just a student who had to write papers. I had thoroughly enjoyed his class, and it was his own confidence in my writing that I needed to hear. I enrolled in Writing 212 with Anne Boyle, and let me tell you that class challenged everything I thought I knew about writing, and what being a writer meant.

 

The first day of sitting around the table in Writing 212 I counted all the freshman who were in the class. Majority were freshman, meaning they were the ones who tested out of writing 111, which most certainly was not me when I was a freshman. I was intimidated to say the least, and after the first couple of weeks I really considered dropping. The essays we were reading from the book The Art of the Essay were sometimes completely over my head, and after hearing some of the students read their own writing I didn’t think I was cut out to be a writer. But I stuck with it, and I wouldn’t be here writing this right now if I hadn’t.  I just had to work a lot harder than I really ever had on my writing.

 

Anne Boyle is the kindest professor but boy did she not hold back with critiques on my papers, and thank god she didn’t. I wish I still had the paper copies with the comments on my first draft of the first paper. I don’t remember the grade but I know it wasn’t great. The first paper we were asked to do an extended review and analysis of the strategies, styles, and themes used by an essayist from the book The Art of the Essay, or another article we had read in class.  I picked an article published on the Atlantic by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Coates writing is very emotionally charged, and often tackles controversial social or political topics. This article was written during the period excessive police brutality on innocent African Americans. It was titled “Letter To My Son” and was Coates explaining to his son what it I like to grow up in our country as an African American. This subheading of the article says “ “Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage.”” This essay was no cake walk to read, and let me tell you it was no cake walk to analyze as well. As a young white female who has been raised in a fortunate family, and goes to a prestigious school I didn’t feel I had the right to be apart of this discourse community. I never would and never will be able to understand Coates struggles, and yet I was trying to get inside his head when he wrote this article and offer my take on it. In my essay I critiqued Coates on his overall tone. I critically analyzed Coates use of pathos, logos, and ethos and learned how to pull evidence from the piece to argue why I believed Coates article was not an effective approach to the topic of police brutality. I worked on this paper all semester and developed a solid argument by comparing Coates article to another that also talked about the current police brutality on African Americans. By the end of the semester I had successfully written a review of a highly esteemed writer. I learned that writing is a process, and is always a work in progress. I also realized that in order to be confident in your writing and writing for a certain discourse community you have to immerse yourself in that community. I read up on numerous articles about the police brutality, and kept up with all of the news. I talked to others about how they felt about the situation. Writing isn’t just a personal process but it should include others along your journey.

 

Professor Boyle also had us really reflect on who we were as writers at the time. We had to write a paper called “Why I write” and is what inspired me to write this exact reflection here on this site.  I had never sat down and tried to put to words the reason I write, and I was stumped. I met with professor Boyle and she asked me to explain to her what I have written in the past, what I was currently working on and what I want to do in the future.  I told her I actually wanted to be a broadcast journalist and I was currently in a broadcast journalism course. I was writing a 30 minute newscast for that class, but the writing was so simple that I didn’t consider it actually writing, or that being a broadcast journalist meant you were a writer (even with the word journalist in it?). So when I explained to professor Boyle my entire writing journey at Wake I was shocked when she was more interested in my newscast. “That is writing” she had said to me. Obviously I knew it was writing but I had never considered that it was “respectable writing”. I thought she wanted me to talk about all of my academic papers and tell her why I wrote them, but what she really wanted to know was what my fueled my interest in pursuing the writing minor. What sparked it? I remembered my creative paper I wrote for Writing 111, and I realized I loved to write creatively. That’s when I began doing more creative pieces, and taking courses that sparked my own personal interests. I no longer wanted to write for a grade, but to write on topics that I was passionate about. I wrote for the Spoon University food blog, I took a body image course, I interned for an advertising agency and did copywriting work.

 

“When I sit down and just write it seems like everything starts to make sense; the little voice comes out, my voice. I reflect on my time in high school and how I looked at writing as a burden. If students were encouraged to write from time to time without all the pressure and rules from school I truly believe students would grow immensely as writers, and enjoy it too.”

“Why I write”, Regan Wagner  
 

 

This is a passage from my “Why I Write” paper sophomore year from writing 212.  At the time I had realized why I personally want to write, and I had felt that school boxed me in so much to the point that I didn’t enjoy writing. I was a bit anti-academic writing at this time, because I thought it restricted who I was as a writer, and that as long as I was writing academic papers I wouldn’t enjoy it. My junior year I took a communication course that was about Body Image. As a college girl I have always been aware of body image, and I felt personally connected to this course. The first day I walked in with excitement, only to leave feeling a little disappointed. The professor of the course, Dr. Giles, told us we would be writing a textbook for this course and our writing would be published. We each would be assigned a topic (chapter of the book) and do a review of all the current research out there on the topic. I was still in my anti-academic paper phase, and was dreading writing this paper.  I also had never done a literature review before, and had no idea how to go about it. We were given strict organization guidelines, and even a “style guide” so that all the chapters sounded cohesive. Before even writing the paper I felt so restricted so I completely disregarded all the guidelines and wrote how I wanted to write. My essay was about College students and body image and as a college student I felt authorized to add my own personal take on the topic. My essay was fun, and used quirky vocabulary. I engaged the reader by asking questions, and while I did provide research I also made a lot of generalizations that weren’t supported by research. Turns out this was not what Giles wanted, which I had known, but rebelled against. I had to completely rewrite my entire paper and I had to use his guidelines. I reviewed all of the academic, peer-review journals out there on College students and body image (Around 30), and documented common themes, and reported on the methods these studies used. In the end I had an extensive literature review, the first one I had ever written, and guess what? I actually enjoyed writing it. I tried so hard to push back on the guidelines because I thought rubrics, and the academic discourse community was not for me. I realized that it is for me, but that it is important you are passionate about the topic you are writing about. By knowing that my chapter was going to be published for all of the world to see I had a sense of purpose behind my writing, and to be writing about a topic that personally interested me I felt passionate. Purpose and passion is crucial to being a writer, and I finally had understood that.  

Now here I am as a senior. I still love to writing creatively, and I am going into the field of advertising where I can utilize my love for creative writing. Knowing that what I write will be put out there into the world as advertisements is exciting to me, and the creative environment of advertising agencies allows me to write in ways that are purposeful yet allows me to write on a wide range of topics that caters to my curious mentality. I went from a timid freshman who mindlessly wrote in order to receive a grade, to a writer who writes on my passions. The marketing world is always looking to the white space, the space that hasn’t been touched. I seek to push my writing by continuing to be unique, and confident about who I am as a writer. Sometimes the ideas one thinks of as a creative can be shot down,and you must be resilient, and will only push you as a writer. I am excited to see where I will go as a graduate from Wake Forest and I am grateful for the numerous writing processes I have been exposed to here that have helped me find the reasons why I continue to write.