Experiences

Hi, I am Sherry Li. I am a senior majoring in Supply Chain Management in the Broad College of Business and I enjoy free writing. I find writing to be very relaxing and it gives me the freedom to live the way I want. During my time in my creative writing class, I learned many different interesting genres of writing styles. One of my favorite experiences was the live events because it made me feel more involved as a writer. Here is one of my memories of an event that I went to during this semester with Rachel Levy.

Before going into the event, my thought was that we were going to listen to someone with a lot of experience talk about their writing style and I expect to discover on how to find my own personal style. The event started with a student named Autumn who shared her experiences on how the class had helped her with eliminating writers block and finding her own personal writing style. She then introduced us to Rachel Levy who was a PhD student and she shared two writing pieces with us. She first read to us a piece that seemed darker and I observed that she talked a lot about Germany making me wonder if she was of German origin. However, she later shared that she was Jewish and she used the German background as a statement of awareness because she feels like that there is a lack of information about her community.

The second piece that she shared is a parody of comedy that she is currently working on. She told us that she was inspired to write a parody of comedy because when she was reading comedy books it was very cringe worthy for her because people had different perspectives on what humor may be. This reminded me of one of my friend who has a dark humor and I thought she should have been here with me. I think it made me feel like it is okay to write in fiction if I wanted too. Rachel read a lot of books in order to craft this piece and to make sure it was in her own writing style because it appeals to her and maybe a group of people who share the same personality. The parody piece seemed like it had a lot of language and diction which I think was to help the audience visualize what the writer was thinking. 

Overall, it was a very descriptive piece and I think she created it to help expand on the subject of humor. Afterwards, we asked questions on how she went on writing her pieces and it was very interesting to hear another person talk about what around them in their influenced them. From this event, I learned that it is okay to take your time when finding your personal style and it is important to understand that everyone has a different perspective when viewing a piece.