I knew in the third grade I wanted to be a writer. It wasn’t a wish or a dream. I knew at age 9 — right after I finished “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” — that I wanted to write stories for the rest of my life. I also thought J.K. Rowling was the greatest writer in the world, and while that has changed, the first part remains true.
As a creative writing student, having the chance to interact and share my work with world-renowned authors through the Morgan Writer-in-Residence Program has truly been an enriching experience. The program, established in 1993 by Allen and Musette Morgan, lost its funding this year and hosted its last Morgan writer, Athol Fugard, last week.
To see the program come to an end is one the saddest experiences I’ve had here at UNC — the exception being that basketball game last night.
Last year, I had the chance to meet and interact with last year’s Morgan writer, the fantastic Amy Hempel. She’s a short story writer with a knack for raw language and a talent for teaching. Listening to her examine a classmate’s story and offer both her praise and criticism helped me look at my writing in a completely different way.
She taught me that sentences needed to be tighter, that words, not scenes, had the power to evoke emotion. As I sat in Carroll Hall and listened to her read from her collection of short stories, she terrified me, because she showed me what I wanted to be and how far I needed to go.
When I came to UNC, I thought storytelling was my thing, that I was one of the best young writers in the world.
When I took my first creative writing class, I realized just how wrong I was. Sitting in a room with 25 other “best young writers” was quite a humbling experience.
Our fiction writing professors always tell us to write about what we know, but to see Amy Hempel put that into practice in works like “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried” really showed us what that concept looked like.
Suddenly, writing became more than something I did in my free time. I stopped thinking about stories as simple plots. The words, structure and sentences suddenly mattered more. It became harder and more frustrating.
