There are several perspectives I considered for completing this requirement.
All can be true and most may be accurate. There is the I Wonder What They are Looking For classic school of responsiveness which goes something like this:
All my life I have known that I was destined to be a writer. Not only have I read everything I could get my eyes on, including bottles and boxes of various personal health and hygiene products and cleaning supplies while restrained in bathrooms, but also roadside billboards, subway advertisements and upside-down files on my supervisors’ desks. I won contests during elementary school for Most Books Read During Summer Vacation. Some members of my family referred to my speed and ability of consuming books as ‘eating’ instead of reading. They were right: once read, the words and ideas and experiences entered my bloodstream like a thousand malignant viruses, creating fevers I never recovered from.
And I have written. Pages and Post-it Notes and scrolls and letters and emails and lists of characters and lines of dialogue and news stories and ridiculous nonsensical anecdotes for friends going through chemotherapy. I have written Post Sentencing Investigations for a man sentenced to die in the electric chair at Union State Prison in Florida for killing his mother. He hit her on the head with a shovel and left her body in the travel trailer he made her live in. He lived in the large house next to the trailer with the waitress who came up with the idea of murdering Mother so he would quickly inherit the International House of Pancakes instead of just managing it.
See how the original idea has deteriorated? I can’t write what I believe you might be expecting.
And I can’t write that I think I’m the greatest undiscovered writer since Josephine P. Geeley of 82 West Tetley Avenue, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia.
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(Because I made the name up and there isn’t a roster of eternally anonymous but gifted starving writers whose remains have been tenderly sheltered in cold-water basement apartments. Also, although I didn’t leave my heart in San Francisco I definitely left my ego in Coral Gables. Just outside the plate glass windows of the Anabel Spa where I used to sit inhaling the steam from dried chamomile flowers with a towel over my head. And even though it happened on the Miracle Mile, I’ve exorcised the possibility that anything of a divine nature will pop up to restore my status as a superb accomplished keyboard jockey.)
I won’t write that I know I have so much to give to the World of Letters and only the University of New Orleans Creative Writing Master’s Program faculty can burst the iron fetters that keep my inspired musings earthbound. (Because both of us can spot the undigested corn and peanuts in that type of statement.)
And I probably shouldn’t write that after 65 years of accumulated fits and starts and ragings and ravings, I’m afraid of being remembered not at all. I’m annoyed at very possibly losing the opportunity to save someone a bit of trouble or a few moments of unpleasantness.
It’s the selfish ‘If not now, when?’
I realize that my quilted background (similar to a checkered past except with more stuffing and fewer pawns) may not have the chronological or academic organization and clarity of your usual applicants.
Unfortunately, I can’t change that. I can only explain and provide what scraps I have and hope you see glimmers of a student you think may eventually be a credit to UNO.
Thank you for the time spent reading this and the elements of the included fish stew. My apologies that I am a sprinter and will never be a marathon writer.