I have been writing for as long as I can remember. The first short story that I was really proud of writing, I wrote in my English class my junior year of high school. It was called “Un Campo Verde” and it detailed a complex, relationship that I—oops, I mean, the narrator—had with a boy a couple of years older than her in another country one summer. It featured a life that resembled my own, and a narrator who was 17 years old. The narrator obsessed over the idea of leaving her life in Queens for a life on the greenest peak, surrounded by warmth, animals, and endless humble landscapes in the middle of somewhere south. She was deeply in love with music and words —exactly like me. The story represented a breakthrough in my writing. I had been writing stories since I was in middle school. Up until my junior year of high school, the stories were, to put it mildly, far from any kind of reality I had personally experienced. They featured children, old women with deep secrets that were shared on special occasions, magical cooking, wizards, worlds I imagined, and sometimes intersex children because I was intrigued by anything my father taught me. In them I wrote about things I heard, smells I remembered, and things people said. I considered my writing entirely separate from my life, and I don’t think I “thought” about my writing in any meta type of way. I just wrote. These days, when I write — a story, an essay, or anything — for better or for worse, I ask myself a lot of questions. “How invested am I in this?, “Why am I writing this?”, “What is this saying or telling about me or what I know?”
I never asked those questions before my senior year of high school. I just wrote. I believed I was a skilled writer in that my prose was compelling, but I don’t think it had much depth. After all, since I didn’t put any of my own emotions into my writing, how could anyone find their own in it? All of that changed in high school. My English teacher, Kenyatta (we called our teachers by their first name) was a rapper and was well known in NYC for working with Nuyorican poets, teaching kids about verses, language, and writing. He was a smart, irreverent young man in his late twenties who was trying to figure out how to share what he knew. He never sugar-coated his critique of my writing. He was direct, but always constructive—something I didn’t get from other teachers. He believed the old adage of “write what you know”—with a caveat. “Write from what you know,” Kenyatta would tell me, “into what you don’t know, sis.” I would respond, ‘All I know is that I know nothing at all.’ and we would laugh. During our first week of class, he had us read an essay whose title and author I will never remember. The essay, from what I remember, was, in effect, a response to the timeless question of the line between fiction and memoir.
What that essay left in me was the idea that fiction writing is in essence writing subconsciously about the self; A fraction of our own unwritten autobiography. My old habit of writing or “detached” made-up stories caught up with me and suddenly I had nothing to write about so I began helping other students with their writing through editing. A year later while working on college applications, I found that I was also good at helping others cut words in their personal statements. Despite my realization about fiction or writing, in Kenyatta’s class the previous year, my personal statement, although personal, lacked emotion. To make up for what I lacked, I turned to read poetry and music as an outlet for my teen angst. ____ In college, I took several arts, art history, Spanish literature, and book arts classes and then classes related to my major/minor that gave me a lot to write about. In my creative writing classes, stories and prose poured out of me. I had missed writing. However, sometimes my professors gave me gentle but unimpressed critiques which pushed me to think back to the essay Kenyatta had me read in high school. When I thought about it and found a way to apply it, I could see that my writing improved significantly. I used compelling characters, raw emotions, descriptive and believable dialogue.
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I felt good about writing again since high school. One day while looking through old work for inspiration I found ‘Un Campo Verde’ and was shocked to find that it was an account with no detail left out or made up of my relationship with a boy in another country one summer and the dreams I had for a simple life. I was both embarrassed and filled with horror. How did I consider this story fiction? Perhaps Kenyatta thought my life was much less unusual and thought I had made up some of the story if not all. So, slowly, with more awareness of what made my story so evocative, I somewhat unconsciously began to write again — to put it generally — about young creative and imaginative people, young people crushing or in love, young people who were figuring themselves out, people who lived in cities—people who, I felt, I might understand. It was different than my first round of realism—mostly because around this time I realized that my real life if recounted faithfully and accurately, was not so interesting either. Rather, I began to find that my best stories came from some amalgamation of the world around me and the world in my imagination. I often lived vicariously through the characters I ‘made up.’ I would begin my conceptualization of a character with an aspect or aspects of a person I knew—and then, almost without my help, they transformed on the page into the characters they were meant to be. I took the trips to the woods, bars, streets, bedrooms I had been to and used them to create intentional settings for my stories.
When I heard phrases people said that stuck with me or a name I loved, I allowed myself to use them in a story—and I tried not to feel too guilty. ___ My senior year of college rolled around and I struggled with trying to come up with my senior thesis proposal, which I knew would have to be non-fiction. I had pondered several ideas for a month after meeting with my advisor and left the decision making for the night before our next meeting. One of the options was a complete cop-out, the second option would have been fun but would require me to travel several times throughout the school year for long and anxiety-filled amounts of time. The third option was about the complexities of language, home, and love as transformation. I had thought about it for years, but it scared me. I kept talking myself out of writing about it before meeting with my advisor, but it had a place on the page anyway.
What I did know in my subconscious, even if I did not want to admit it, is that I needed to write about it. I sat in the booth of my college coffee shop with the only other senior in my department, Sarah, and anxiously waited for Dr. Hall, our advisor. I volunteered Sarah go first and when it was my turn I spoke so fast, Dr. Hall held my hand between her palms and said, “Inti, relax. Say all of that again.” —’ …and my third option, although I am excited about the writing, is about…to conclude it is just ridiculous, Dr. Hall. I don’t have time or energy to write about that. I’m sorry I didn’t come up with a better third option.” Dr. Hall was a wise, kānaka maoli woman with tight wild curls, a fair complexion like mine who took pride when people said we looked alike, though she always felt the need to jokingly add that I had yet to face many demons. She often didn’t say much, even in class, but you more or less knew what she thought. Her face, like mine, had no poker face; exposed and raw in expression. Like her poker face, in many of her classes I left with profound wounds she exposed about the stuff we all know but definitely don’t want to talk about. Therefore, it was no surprise, though I was stunned, that after I explained my thesis proposals she would ask, “Inti, does the third option make you want to throw up?” — yes! Absolutely.
“Then you need to write that. That which makes you want to throw up. Face your demons, Inti.” Since I believed in her and wanted to believe in myself much more, that was what I wrote about. The hardest part of writing since then remains, for me, the idea; the circumstance feels, at times, positively impossible. I still wonder, and wonder often, whether I should continue doing this. I still feel a little bit of angst in me every time I begin to write anything remotely invested in me spending hours with said demons, even when they’re not my demons. I suspect that the struggle I am now engaged in will be a lifelong one. The episode of my thesis writing involved me waking up at 3:30 am, four to five days a week. I opened all of the long window curtains facing the woods and a hill in my house, sat facing it with a blanket and wrote with a large cup of peppermint tea and sometimes whiskey. I trembled, cried, panicked, asked myself multiple times if I should be writing that.
The process was unnerving and affirmative all at the same time. In the end, my favorite part was finishing and presenting it in front of people I loved and people I didn’t know. I thought it was a fitting way to tell the story of its construction and conclusion to my last semesters in college. To this day, I am thankful for Kenyatta, but yet grapple with Dr. Hall’s “we write what we have to,” and “we can’t make ourselves write anything other than what needs to come out.” I graduated, drove back to Queens after a week of too much booze and partying with the college kids I lived with for four years and hid my thesis so well, I want to think I’ll find it again when I need it. I wrote to Dr. Hall a month later, while in my apartment in Brooklyn, thanked her and got an email back saying a lot of deep and beautiful things about me as their student. What stuck with me however was that writing or words are nothing to play with. They are a gift that requires courage, honesty and growth in the person using them; not just in writing, but in all that is language. I write about home, people in their twenties, growing up and living in NYC, escaping family dynamics, loving through doorways, dancing with strangers and sometimes even the guitar I wish I knew how to play sitting in the corner of my room.
