Writing Research by Jordan

Writing Research by Jordan - August 2019 Scholarship Essay

When I was younger than I am now, I had a yellow notepad that I would write in. I don’t remember all the things that I wrote in there, but I remember writing fragments of a creative piece about music being like a mother to me. Maybe I was writing about music as my nurturer, but I think that writing has been there too. I am a writer. If I were to take a gap year, I think that my year would have to be fundamentally connected to that piece of me. Since I am going to school as an English major with a Creative Writing emphasis, I would want my experience in my gap year to assist me in that endeavor. To make the most that year’s time, I think that the year would have to be named Writing Research, as one of my past classmates titles her endeavors as a creative writer. I would record and write my experiences in a creative nonfiction, memoir style. I would be sure to journal each day and take special note of the smallest details, from the alligator print on someone’s purse to the way someone’s laugh sounded like a character in The Muppets.
In pursuing the year of writing research, I think that it would be particularly fascinating for me to spend my gap year living in Powell, Ohio, a small town where I moved with my mom and little brother as a girl following my parents’ divorce. Upon moving back to Ohio this time around, I would get a part-time or full-time job in the area and then live out all four seasons in the place where I experienced so much pain and confusion as a girl. I moved to Ohio just before just before starting my fifth-grade year and stayed until part way through my eighth-grade year. Those middle school years are a time of transition and self-consciousness. For me, they were also a time of emotional turmoil that I experienced from the mouth of my mom and from the transitioning in-between parents. I think that it would be a fascinating endeavor to return to this space for me, now a woman in her twenties, and look at this landscape with fresh eyes. It may cause me to revisit painful moments. It may cause me to ache. However, I think that ultimately, it would produce some important realizations and important opportunities for healing. I think that the writing itself would be fruitful and revelatory, thoughtful and raw—a time hidden from so many people’s view revisited.
In order to expand my writing research, I would want to make travel and new experiences a fundamental part of my year, too. Inasmuch as I would be moving through the old, I think that it would be powerful to move through the different as well. Since I would be living in Ohio, it would give me a great opportunity to take little visits to various sites on the East coast. Some of these could include New York, Boston, Washington D.C., or just small towns to stumble upon along the way. I could continue my writing in those places, places for new moments, new discoveries, new snapshots of who I am and who I’m becoming. Paired with the writing from Ohio—a place where I am reliving my adolescence in ways—the two would offer a beautiful contrast and snapshot of life itself. It could show so much, so much about life’s cycles, life’s changes, life’s meaning. It would become an important and exciting part of the year’s writing and discoveries.
I remember writing on a yellow notepad when I was a girl. That girl was living in Ohio with a mother who was reeling from her divorce. That girl wrote about music being a mother to her; she wrote from a painful place. I wrote in Ohio, and maybe it is time to write myself out of it. The hope is that this gap year would produce memoir-styled and raw writing, essays or poems from traveling, and a bit of self-realization. For many people, a year in Ohio would look like a year surrounded by cornstalks. However, for me, a year in Ohio is a year to re-experience the place of a pivotal point of my growing-up. Maybe things would look a little smaller. Maybe they would look a little bigger. Maybe everything would be just the same. However, I think that this trip could be healing in the same way that telling a therapist about childhood can be: it opens us up to what was. Ohio is that for me, and a gap year would be full of that kind of healing and writing.