Tuesday, May 31, 2011

A Very Good Place to Start


I guess I should start from the beginning. This blog idea came to me via my boyfriend as way to continue my passion for literary discourse in that awkward time between undergrad and grad school that drives nerds like me crazy.

I have to thank Lois Lowry, author of The Giver, for my passion for literature. I read her young adult novel in the sixth grade and haven’t looked back since. I remember standing in the hallway and telling Mrs. Hasara that an analogy for Jonah’s world was going to a Dairy Queen where they only served vanilla – no choices, no differences. I started devouring the novels we read in class, putting pieces together and making my first real connections with literature. I wasn’t doing homework anymore; I was experiencing the text. And what’s most of all, I was experiencing literature in a way that fueled my creative fires, allowing me to create and develop some of my most in-depth characters and plot lines that I’ve carried through my teenaged writing into my adult fiction.

My love of reading inspired my academic career as well because I learned to appreciate and develop a talent for study and research.  In my undergrad, I studied elementary education and communications around the first set of people who saw me for me – a girl who loves learning and literature. And they so graciously enabled my scholarly addiction until reality came calling for me to sell my soul for nine-to-five security.

So, let’s meander back the to the point of this blog . . . I’ve lived life as an adult for a little over a year now; It hasn’t been the easiest, but I’m the happiest I’ve ever been as my boyfriend and I plan for our future. And as part of my future, I’m nowhere near close to being done writing, learning about, reading and discussing literature. So, I find myself writing “the nerdy word girl” blog to both cultivate my passion post-undergrad as I apply for graduate schools. It’s where I’ll discuss and share my world and the literature that finds its way onto my shelves, the big screen, and into my heart because my favorite literature professor once told me that art and literature are what makes the universal personal and the personal universal.

For those of you who choose follow these developments, comments are always welcome.

Up Next: My initial thoughts on Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, the first two chapters.

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