obligatory letter to the reader. . .

Reader,

Writing for me has become over the years less and less an outlet to write my own narratives and stories whether personal or fictional.  As a child, I spent many hours of my life producing what I now feel are embarrassing works of fiction, short stories, and horribly angsty teenage poetry.  But as I have developed as a reader, and a student of literature, my own writing and my desire to write has become transformed in its nature.  I grew to have a greater desire to write more than I had as a child, but not in the same way. Instead of writing creatively, my creativity moved off the page and more into my theoretical interpretations of texts.  Perhaps socialized by my higher education and the writings I had to produce as a student; or perhaps just finally finding a genre I felt was meaningful to my own personal existence as a individual and as a reader, I have finally found that my writing has become centered around the analytic, and didactic relationship a reader can have with a text through writing.  Developing this didactic relationship of the reader with the text is what I have sought to do through my writer's workshop project: this blog on Gravity's Rainbow.  And although through this course I have not managed to develop this project to its fullest capacity, I have found that this is a project that is important to me and will remain with me when this course is over.  I hope to continue this project for the entirety of this text, and perhaps through other texts as well.  Ultimately, I hope that as a reader this project will push me into further discourse with a subject matter that I love.

~ Gwendolyn

A Note About Purpose:

So my professor has asked that I put a note in about purpose and where I expect to go with this blog for a kind of framework with to work with.  I first became interested in the literary blog as I explained before as way to engage deeply with a text and have enjoyed the previously mentioned Solinquist blog on Coetzee which I will look to as a kind of mentor text.  That said I do not fully expect where this blog will take me or what will come of it.  I hope to keep on with it after this class and I hope it makes an effect on my reading somehow.  As far as this blog concerning writers workshop and education is concerned it will mainly be a content study of literature and it's analysis through writing.  It is important as a teacher to really think of how you can model and how you read a text and in some ways I do hope this blog will help me explicitly think about how I read and how I write perhaps and help me reflect on how I might teach this in some small way or model this thinking to my students.