Creative Writing – Skyline Writing Center

Nebula

Sean Weathers (’23) shares a poem and describes his unique creative process. “…I learned a lot about myself and how I express creativity as someone with ADHD and how I work with it, instead of against it.”

When You Open the mind

A nebula of information greets you

One perspective only shows so much

Take a second, look around

The inviting sea of colors

Some you have never even seen

The nebula is always changing

Take a look, every second changes something

More perspectives show infinitely more

The colors only get more beautiful

Just open your mind

Allow the other perspectives to flow in

leading you down your path to understanding

There’s never enough time on this earth

Why not explore the endless colors while you can

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Creativity has always interested me, the different ways people express themselves. Over my years here with Skyline I’ve tried to be as creative as possible by taking multiple classes that allow freedom of expression. In doing this, I learned a lot about myself and how I express creativity as someone with ADHD and how I work with it, instead of against it..

I’m always expressing my creativity. More often than not I have several projects going at the same time, which is super helpful for me personally because I’m able to break things down. For example, say I lose inspiration for one project and instead of feeling like I’m getting nothing done, I move to my next project and get some things done regarding that project. This helps my brain understand that I’m still doing something productive. This gets my mind thinking of more ways that the project can go, which in turn gives me other ideas for that other project I have going on. Then all of the sudden I have inspiration again and I’m able to continue my projects.

Creativity can never be confined to one box, everyone expresses their creative side differently. I think that being in the writing center has given me an opportunity to see what other people love doing, what they do with their creativity. Just listening to someone else talk about what they’re doing creatively, can be a really eye opening experience because you can see a little bit into how their mind runs. Everyone works just a little differently and I think it’s important to understand this because it can help you become someone who can easily understand others.

The more perspectives you have and learn, the more you fill in the unknown.

Write It Out

Dylan Schueler (’23) writes about the ways that writing and self-expression can support our mental health.

As I assume most people may already know, writing can be used for many different things. It’s something we use in our everyday lives whether we realize it or not. From school assignments, to note taking, to texting friends, to careers, etc. we are constantly writing. However, how often do we write to express ourselves personally? Some people may have diaries, and others may have text strings between their friends that they use to express their feelings, but something that I don’t think is used often enough is mental health journaling. The definition of mental health is “a person’s condition with regard to their psychological and emotional well-being”. While mental health sometimes seems to have a negative connotation with it, it’s something that every person obtains. It’s also something that is personable and should be expressed rather than kept in. One very beneficial way of expressing thoughts or feelings is through writing or journaling.

Studies have shown that journaling is very closely affiliated with improving mental health. According to URMC- Rochester University, it can help to manage anxiety, reduce stress, cope with depression, control symptoms, improve your mood, prioritize problems, fears, and concerns, while also allowing for positive self-talk and identifying negative thoughts. Last year, I decided to devote my badge project in the writing center to creating a safe space for people to express themselves through writing in a practice called “Time To Write It Out”. My main goal was to spread mental health awareness while creating a safe space for people to write about their feelings. I wanted to bring positive attention to peoples’ emotions through writing. Writing is a judgment free space that allows for people to express their emotions to themselves and to those they choose to. It can help people to realize how they actually feel. I wanted to express these benefits through an open writing space during both hours of lunch for multiple sessions. I didn’t want to pressure students to write so there was also a choice of drawing responses to the prompts. Some writing prompt ideas that I had found and used were from Port St. Lucie Hospital. The examples are listed below:

Talk about your day

Try to relate events in your day to how they made you feel. It can help you identify trends in your behaviors and how those impact your mental health.

Identify things you’re grateful for

Finding things you can be grateful for may be difficult when you have a mental illness, but by recognizing reasons to be grateful, you can start to create a more positive outlook on life.

Describe a goal

What are you working towards? Write it out and explain how you’re going to reach that goal. “Dreams don’t chase you back,” so don’t be afraid to go after what you want. Keep only positive goals to help you stay motivated.

Write a list of your coping mechanisms

Evaluate which mechanisms are working for you. Rate each coping mechanism on a scale of 0-5 to see which one helps to calm you down the most. This will show you what coping mechanisms can stay, and which ones should maybe be retired.

Write about how different you were 5 years ago

Everyone is constantly changing. It can be easy to forget when you’re dealing with mental health or stress. Try to recognize the ways that you’ve grown over the years. Give yourself credit for being better and wiser than you were.

Write a letter to your body

Mental illness often changes the way you perceive yourself and your body. Whether you want to write a love letter, some complaints, or a letter of apology, it’s important to address your body image. If you can recognize issues in your relationship with your body, then you can work toward fixing them.

List and describe your emotions

What did you feel like today? List out every emotion that you went through and describe how it felt in that moment. This tool will help you identify the causes of your emotions and how you’re responding to them.

Write about how you’d describe yourself to a stranger

If you were going to explain who you are to a stranger, how would that go? What are your likes, dislikes, your strengths, or your weaknesses? Writing this prompt can go a long way in helping you identify how you think of yourself.

Describe the best compliment you’ve ever gotten or the best one you’ve ever given

What was the nicest thing anyone has ever said to you? Or what was the nicest thing you have ever said to someone? How did it make you/ them feel, and how did that moment play out?

Write a message for yourself on bad days

Bad mental health days happen, and there isn’t much you can do to prevent them. However, you can prepare for them by writing a message to yourself. The message can look however you want; remind yourself of happier times, point out good things in your life, and do whatever you think will mean the most to you when you’re in a bad place.

After hosting some sessions of writing spaces, I thought that it was really beneficial. Though it was a very small turnout, I felt as though I learned a lot about what it means to benefit from writing. It’s a tool that I wanted to share with others and spread awareness around. If you ever find yourself struggling to express how you feel, or if you’re stuck between a decision, or you just have free time, try writing out your thoughts and feelings! You never know how much something can impact you until you try it!

Backyard Ice Rink

Caroline Vance (’23) shares memories from her backyard ice rink. “In each corner of the rink, tall wooden poles connect strings of soft glowing lights, which extend around the perimeter of the rink, and there is one center pole that holds a spotlight as bright as a full moon, so that during the long winter nights, we can still skate under a frosty glow. “

Our backyard ice rink that my dad puts up every winter is 80’ by 60’ and takes about thirty man (dad) hours to build, fifty hours to flood, and a total of 35,000 gallons of water. It is made of long plywood boards, decorated on the outside with colorful costumed penguins that my sister and I painted over the years. In each corner of the rink, tall wooden poles connect strings of soft glowing lights, which extend around the perimeter of the rink, and there is one center pole that holds a spotlight as bright as a full moon, so that during the long winter nights, we can still skate under a frosty glow.

I remember one winter when my sister and I were both in middle school, we had a massive blizzard that even the snow trucks couldn’t get through to plow the roads. That night, as soon as we heard news of the snow day we rushed out to shovel the snow off the ice and played hockey until the early hours of the morning. We were so hot from playing so much that we ended up in our t-shirts, in sub-zero weather.

Another winter, during the Covid-19 pandemic, we invited our neighborhood friends to come skate since it was outdoors and socially distanced. This made the lonely virtual school days go by much quicker.

Whether it’s due to global warming or just a strangely warm Michigan winter, this season we’ve had, for most days, a tragic, massive puddle sitting in our backyard instead of a skateable ice rink. Looking out on fifty degree days and seeing this giant pool of water has inspired mixed emotions in me; on the one hand, it’s warm enough to run safely and comfortably in Michigan February (!), but on the other hand, we miss the magical moonlight skating until 2 in the morning with only the snow-covered backyard trees as our witness. I hope this winter was only a fluke and not a foreshadowing of climate change to come.

Wishful Thinking

Spoons Stovall (’24) questions the adage that time heals all wounds. “..your trauma is not all you are, but if it becomes all you can be, then recognizing your in need of help is the first step to reconstituting yourself.”

I believe in wishful thinking. I believe the fabric of the universe can coddle and nourish the will of a person in order to shape or reshape their heart and desires for their greater good. I believe we can use the tools we are given to get a job done while still knowing our limits and trusting our bodies. Morals, as some might call them. These are things that we learn and shape our lives and minds. Experience and word of mouth guilds us through the most difficult of situations with more data being added to it on the other side. For example, I was told from a young age to let time run its fingers over old wounds, to let the light shine in even when you think it might singe your skin from the strength of its warm hug, and that crying is ok and should be encouraged. It will be uncomfortable and you can’t expect it to be easy despite how much it may hurt. The world isn’t a calm or delicate place for a frayed mind on the edge of unraveling completely, and you will have to give parts of yourself away in order to pay the price of living. And this is where the morals are formed, their rigidity striking against the inside of our skulls as we pick ourselves up and continue on. Next time will be different, next time I’ll be prepared, next time will be better.

But what about the nails left behind? You can pry them out of the wood, sure, but then you’re just left with holes, and no structure is sound with holes in its support. You run the risk of crumbling when put under the same pressure, or god forbid more. This is often where the saying “time heals all wounds” comes into use. You just need to let those holes sit with you for long enough that they heal over, like a scraped knee or a bullet in a tree. And it works, at least it does often enough we assume it can be applied over any wound and we’ll get the same result. It’s a fix I can just carry around in my pocket for future use, lathering it over new cuts and scrapes as they are added to the old ones that decorate my hands and legs. I could count them for fun if I got bored. But what about the ones that get infected? What do I do about the ones that continue to reopen despite the layers upon layers of ointment I put over it. Your wishful thinking isn’t as strong as the reality of your pain, and all of a sudden you’re strangled by the fear of not knowing what to do. How do I fix something I wasn’t prepared for? Time is no longer the salve for my pain, it’s the one picking my scabs off.

Time isn’t your remedy, and it’s certainly not your friend. No amount of waiting will peel the hurt away from your heart and disgarde it. It will likely only numb you to the pain, and that isn’t healing, it’s just leaving the jar lid on. The truth won’t go away even if I stretch it out of shape. I believe your trauma is not all you are, but if it becomes all you can be, then recognizing your in need of help is the first step to reconstituting yourself. Then letting yourself be helped is the next bridge you’ll have to cross in order to fix the damage. It won’t be comfortable, and it certainly won’t be easy, but it will be the right thing to do for yourselves. And then one day I’ll be able to step into the sun’s light again and let her rays slip into the crevices of my scars without feeling them burn. That’s all I want.

ChatGPT as Simulcrum

Liam McGlohon (’23) reflects on what the mainstream conversations around ChatGPT are missing. “Mastery grading’s inability to adapt to technological developments has put educators in a position where technology is developed against teaching, not with it. This is a disservice to both educators and students, for it prohibits experimentation by students and distorts the conversation among educators to reactionary dogma rather than any real ethical conflict. “

ChatGPT has created an uproar in traditionalist teaching spaces – barely a week after ChatGPT went online hundreds of articles by teacher and writing organizations foretold the doom of English courses if it wasn’t outlawed, that AI plagiarism would run rampant, and new security measures must be installed to prevent its propagation. The paranoia around plagiarism has only grown worse as teachers have scrambled to respond – all the while without a full understanding of the technology’s real impacts and dangers.

This fear of seemingly positive technological advancement reveals a serious failure in the current order. Since the invention of the chalkboard, the projector, and even the calculator, the first response from the education system has been fear. While that fear is understandable it prevents real conversation. Mastery grading’s inability to adapt to technological developments has put educators in a position where technology is developed against teaching, not with it. This is a disservice to both educators and students, for it prohibits experimentation by students and distorts the conversation among educators to reactionary dogma rather than any real ethical conflict.

The initial concerns surrounding AI essays haven’t necessarily been wrong – but rather the focus has been misplaced. These tools are by no means perfect plagiarism machines, even calling tools like ChatGPT “AI” oversells their abilities, but by no means are they thinking machines but rather hyper-complex chatbots who’ve been fed an absurd amount of information without an understanding of how it relates to reality.

And there is a real danger to writing that seeks to reflect reality without any basis in it. The philosopher Jean Baudrillard wrote extensively on these concepts, and in Simulacra and Simulation he argues that society has replaced all reality and meaning with signs and symbols; they are not reflections on reality nor even false mediations of reality. They do not contain hidden reality – simply that the way we perceive our lives has been completely disjointed from reality.

He defines four phases of an image, which are created in any pursuit that seeks to reflect reality.

“It is a reflection of profound reality;”

“it masks and denatures a profound reality;”

“it masks the absence of a profound reality;”

“it has no relation to any reality whatsoever; it is its own pure simulacrum.” (pg 6)

AI writing, by using all internet writing, both that which is a faithful reflection (stage 1) and a perversion (stage 2) – with an absence of any understanding of profound reality beyond simulation it is a reflection of a reflection. It has no profound meaning and rather “masks the absence of profound reality” the sign pretends to be a faithful representation while not actually reflecting reality (stage 3). If these tools were to draw on their own writing for material it would be nothing but pure simulation (stage 4). Thus to create even a deceptive reflection it must take from more faithful creations of humanity.

To satisfy those material needs – they cannibalize other’s writing, remixing “new ideas” from their fractured corpses. It is fundamentally parasitic, it cannot exist without new ideas – new human writers and writing being created. Rather than fear ChatGPT for its plagiarism, the concern must be how online writing has been used to fuel these systems without their authors consent.