It begins in high school. It begins with music. It begins with songs by Metallica, Slayer, and Black Sabbath. And it begins with a band, original music, writing lyrics. And yes, it begins in high school, but really it begins earlier.
This Friday, October 20, is the NCTE’s National Day on Writing, which celebrates the many reasons why writing is essential. In case you don’t know, which unless you’re an English teacher, you probably don’t, but NCTE is the National Council of Teachers of English. On October 20, NCTE encourages people to share why they write. It’s a perfect time for a blog post.
We all have reasons for writing, obviously. I’ve always had the need to create. I like the idea of seeing something through, especially something artistic. Starting in kindergarten, I attended weekly art classes. I started creating, often in a very serious way, working through lots of mediums each year until I was in high school. My father, so patient and selfless, made the twenty-minute trip every Wednesday for a long time, and now that I am a parent, I truly understand the sacrifice he made. Of course, he had to pay for those art classes, too.
I still enjoy art, sometimes scratching out a drawing or putting some brush strokes on a canvas, but somewhere along the line, I switched to words. That’s what I wanted to do. And although I aspired to write novels, poetry has been the form I find myself in the most, and, in which I also include my song writing.
At one point, I started pasting copies of Wordsworth and Shelley poems on the back of my bedroom door, probably sometime early in college. I had taken a survey of English literature, and I remember my excitement when finding the “Lucy” poems by Wordsworth. Eventually I would take a whole course on Romanticism taught by one of my mentor teachers, Dr. John Ulrich, at Mansfield University. It was an evening class, once a week for three hours, and I remember consuming big chunks of poetry and then heading off to class to regurgitate and chew on them some more.
I made a list of why I write poetry a few years ago, and like many things, I tucked it away for safe-keeping and can’t find it now, but I’ll add it here in the future. It’s true, I also write a lot for my blog, which you’re reading right/write now. The White Whale has been swimming along for several years now, and I’m still excited to write posts, still excited to share my writing. When I first created the blog, I dived in with the idea of compiling some of my thoughts on the literature I was teaching and reading. As an English teacher, what do we do with those “deep thoughts” that come up during discussions, teaching, and rereading again and again? I wanted a place to share them, where students might find something interesting about the literature they read way back in high school or maybe even just yesterday.
With deep thoughts in mind, the mission of my blog has been to dive beneath the surface of texts under study, whether they are quotes from my favorite book, Walden,by Henry David Thoreau, or lyrics from one of my favorite musicians, Jason Isbell. Hence, we come to the name of the blog, The White Whale. We’re hunting the deep—for meaning, for answers, for a chance to discover something new. Oh Ahab, you peg-legged horror! Weren’t you the real monster in that book?
However, l also like to think of “the white whale” as the blank page before a writer. Sometimes it’s scary, to open a new document with nothing written on it. It’s also exciting when we get into that groove, and we keep chasing the white space with our words racing in a flurry from our head to the page. For those who haven’t experienced it, that’s a wonderful feeling. And that’s why I write.
The White Whale 