​​​​Sarah Clayton​

The Writer and the Chef

 

I saw him from across the mixer, lights down low, Pitbull yelling to give him everything tonight cause we might not get tomorrow. Everyone was dancing except for K.J. He was in the corner writing something. I was instantly drawn to him and we got really close over that 10-day pre-medical camp in Chicago. When he went back home to Colorado and I came back home to Michigan, we talked every day. I learned that he had a passion for writing, but I also knew he would be going to medical school because that’s how we met - at med camp. So when I was visiting him in Colorado over Winter break of my freshman year in college and he said to me, “I think I’m going to be an English major,” I totally freaked out. He was supposed to be going to medical school, not becoming a “writer.” Harshly, I asked, “What are you gonna do? Write books every couple of years and hope they do well? You can’t make a living off that.” Two weeks later once I’d gotten back to Michigan, he called me and I’ll never forget the words he said. “I think it’s time to wrap this up. You know, whatever this is, just wrap it up.” We never talked again. If you’re reading this, I am sincerely sorry and I hope you pursued your dreams. 

 

I used to believe that a writer was someone like J.K. Rowling who produced novels or other types of books and I knew that it was hard to make a real living out of just writing books. So to me, when K.J. told me he wanted to pursue his writing, I assumed that meant he wanted to write books and my naïve perceptions caused me to push him away. The irony of the situation is that I am and always have been a writer, I just didn’t know it. Even when I applied to and was accepted into the Minor in Writing through Sweetland I didn’t consider myself a writer, just someone who enjoyed expressing myself through words. I had very black and white views of the world. My experiences throughout this Minor have completely shifted my assumptions about who writers are and taught me that writing is so much more than just words in a book.

 

My own passion for writing began in seventh grade with poetry, though I never thought of making it more than a hobby and I never considered myself a writer. To me, it was something I did to relax and sort out my thoughts on the side of my actual work. So I came to college, kept my interest in writing, but declared Cellular and Molecular Biology as my concentration right on track to go to medical school. The same semester, I got an email about applying to the Minor in Writing and remembered that freshman year my Writing 100 instructor had recommended it to me. With my application, I submitted a ten page research paper from a biophysics class on the DNA microarray technique. This piece was dry and science-y and because I considered a “writer” to be someone who creates pieces of non-fiction and/or fiction, I thought Sweetland would think I wasn’t the right fit for the Minor. I was so self-conscious about it that I even wrote a note on my application saying that although this might be the most boring essay they’ll read, my biophysics professor loved it just so the people at Sweetland would have a feel for how it compared in the science world. When I was accepted to the Minor, I was thrilled because I thought I could finally take time in my college career to return to my poetry roots. Thankfully, my preconceived notions of what I would get out the Minor were way off. Being in this minor did help me return to poetry, but I also experienced that a piece of writing encompasses everything from essays to poetry and even visual storytelling through images and video. 

 

When I first started my journey in the Minor, we were asked to write a piece mirroring George Orwell’s “Why I Write.” The point was to explain what writing is to us as individuals. When I got to thinking about why I actually love writing, I found that I loved it because it allowed me to express myself without fear. My favorite topic for writing poetry became the changing seasons and how poetry allowed me an avenue for comparing them to emotions. The freedom writing gave me to express my inner emotions without having to say them out loud is why I write. So I decided to peel back layers of my own onion and write the How I Write essay as a metaphor that explains how I feel emotionally during my writing process.

 

Stylistically, I wrote it in a poetic way with the metaphor of how writing brings me clarity in my otherwise messy life. When I write, nothing else really matters. I can just shut out the rest of the world and clear my head. The entire piece plays out like a nightmare with a character named Fear trying to kill me until a break of light that was there the whole time shows through, destroying Fear. That light represents writing and as it overcomes Fear, I can breathe again just like when I start to write and my head clears of all the chaos in my life. This piece was the perfect start to the Minor because it allowed me to focus in on why I was here as a pre-medical student in a writing minor when I thought writing was for novelists. Through the process of truly examining how I feel when I write, I found that writing could be more than just a hobby, but something to communicate to those around me. I still didn’t fully understand that what I was doing considered me a writer and I still confined my definition of a real piece of writing to books, but I was starting to see that what I was creating could be useful beyond my own release. 

 

I knew I loved to write and I knew why I loved to write. However, I still saw writing as just words on a page, not as anything that defined a person and created identity. I knew I was going to learn from my experiences in the Minor, but I thought that meant learning how to write better grammatically or more convincingly or creatively. That I may grow to change the way I perceive what writing is was never a thought I could have had because I didn’t consider another definition existed outside of my own narrow idea. But I had my starting place and I was excited to continue in the Minor and discover more about myself.

 

At the end of the gateway course, we were faced with doing a remediation project. I had never heard that term before and I was pretty confused about what was even within the realm of possibilities because I was still convinced that in my writing minor I would be asked to write essays or stories. Some ideas people threw out there were magazine articles, podcasts, videos, and storybooks. I landed on making a video, because I thought it might be a cool way to present the issue I was focused on throughout that semester. I had done a previous repurposing project on a Women’s Studies paper about body image and sexuality and I had seen other short videos using interviews to tell the narrative of feminism in America. My video was about six minutes long and included clips from interviews, music videos, and slides with text. I had never created anything like this before. Looking back, this was a multimodal writing piece, yet at the time I didn’t have a good understanding of that term. To me, this was just a weird project that helped me explore some different ways of expressing the one idea. As unbelievable as it sounds, I honestly didn’t think of this project as a writing assignment and didn’t consider that I had finished a piece of writing at the end. You’d think I’d have been able to figure that out with it being a writing class, but I was stuck in my own box of what it meant to write and a video did not fit within those walls. I was loving the freedom that the Minor gave me to explore new avenues like creating video projects even though I couldn’t see how this was considered writing or how these projects were contributing to my identity as a writer.

 

It wasn’t until I enrolled in my first real English class since freshman year that I started to expand what I thought of as a piece of writing. I was a little nervous because I imagined I’d be back to writing long essays like I did in English 125 and I was just getting to love the freedom I picked up from the Minor Gateway course. On day one of English 225, I knew I wasn’t going to have to worry about that. We were going to be creating op-eds, doing film analyses, and writing open letters as well as looking at examples of these genres to get a good feel for how arguments are shaped based on the genre of the piece. For the open letter section, I chose to get out my frustrations that had been building about the way science classes are taught and assessed at this and many other prestigious universities. I wrote a letter to one of my MCDB professors about how the way he lectured and wrote his exams was very unfair and pitted the students against each other. I started by pulling evidence from my personal life experiences in science classes and it felt different to have my own thoughts being used as evidence toward a claim. I finally found writing that showed me poetry wasn’t the only way to express myself without simply stating my emotions. This piece was the first thing to really widen my horizons on what could be considered a piece of writing. I started to realize that the Minor wasn’t just teaching me basic writing skills, but was bringing me an expanded definition of what constitutes writing. It all started to click: writing isn’t cookie-cutter and a writer isn’t just a baker, it’s a chef. 

 

It’s hard to pin-point an exact moment when I realized that the open letter was forcing my closed mind open. But after I had completed English 225, I looked back at the pieces I had created that semester and I was surprised because I was thinking of each of them as evidence toward my identity as a writer instead of simply essays I turned in for credit. In the process of writing the open letter, I only considered how nice it was to finally be able to write something without having to cite every sentence and that sometimes my own thoughts were sufficient for an argument. It wasn’t until after it was said and done that I connected my enjoyment for writing that letter to a complete piece of writing that supported the idea that a real writer had created it. Unfortunately, I still hadn’t fully accepted that I, Sarah Clayton, was a writer who’s final products were contributing to an identity more than they were contributing to a grade in a class. I’m sure if someone was doing a documentary on my life at college, the audience would be really frustrated at my ability to ignore what’s right in front of me over and over again.  

 

In the Minor, we were required to enroll in one course that was inside your major and also fulfilled an Upper-Level Writing Requirement (ULWR.) There is exactly one ULWR inside the Cellular and Molecular Biology major and there is exactly one restriction to who can take it - students must also be working in a research lab. On top of that, the first time it was ever offered was the Fall semester of my senior year. Apparently the MCDB directors don’t think science majors need to know how to write beyond scientific research papers. At the time I had to choose the course I was going to take to fulfill this requirement, I was not working in a research lab so I had to find a round-a-bout way of convincing the Minor in Writing board members that some other class would be related enough to count as “inside my major.” I scanned the course guide for hours and days until I kept coming back to one ULWR course on environmental journalism. It had a public health component, so I made the argument that while it may not technically be an MCDB course, it related directly to my future aspirations as a physician which is what really mattered. They bought it (thankfully) and I was excited because I’d never done anything remotely like journalism before. Turns out I hate it, but that’s not the point. The Minor pushed me, albeit unknowingly, into something I never would have tried on my own and it was in this second to last semester at college that it all came together for me. I was a writer, everything I create to communicate with an audience is a piece of writing, and I had made a fool of myself for not seeing this earlier. Maybe it was because the course was taught by two real life journalists, but this was the turning point that made me realize a career as a writer was infinitely more than just novelists.

 

We had two major writing assignments in this journalism course. One was a News Feature and the other was an option between covering a governmental meeting or profiling an interesting person in the public health or environment field. Of course, politics make me more confused than a chameleon in a bag of skittles, so I chose the profile and found an awesome physician who was the head of her department at the UM Hospital. After talking with my instructors, they helped me see that you can take a story idea and pull it apart to find the hidden news within that event. So while it was very interesting that this physician was being awarded membership to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies, that had already been told by some other reporter. It was a real challenge for me to learn this new genre of writing, but I am thankful I put myself through the agony that is journalism because that course really did change the way I think about writers. My instructors and some of the other people we met on field trips were writers and that was something that rocked my world view on what that means. As one of the last classes I would take in the Minor, it really brought me full circle to realizing how broad writing is. I finally realized how tangible writing is and how you don’t have to create a novel to be considered a writer. I have become the person I used to discourage and mock. I have become the chef instead of the baker and I’m making my own recipes. 

 

The journey is closing now as I’m in the final course I’ll take as an undergraduate Minor in Writing student. This capstone course is really forcing me to reflect on where I came from and how much I’ve grown as a writer - which is quite a bit considering I didn’t think I was a writer a year and a half ago. As I think about the pieces I want to include in my final portfolio, I’m being challenged by all of the other writers in my class and by our instructor to think carefully about what each demonstrates in terms of my identity as a writer. Each piece I’ve created during my time in the minor uniquely represents a new skill and a new or expanded way of thinking about writing I hadn’t had before. The final capstone project is also culminating everything I’ve experienced in my time as a Minor in Writing student. I’m creating a website complete with essays, letters, a video, and I’m even taking it one step further and creating an interactive map. Like most things in life, I’m realizing that writing is one of those things you’ll probably never master. There is always room for growth and for a new perspective. 

 

P.S. - If it’s any consolation, K.J., I understand now. I truly am sorry. I hope one day I find myself listening to the radio, jamming to a song you wrote.