Introspection 202: How Different Forms Informed Me
There are two ways I can frame this post.
1) Nothing exists sans context.
2) I am a successive summation of everything that has happened and will happen.
Last week, I was in the throes of revisiting several years of slam poetry which of course got me thinking about not only how poetry informed my writing, but how… I started writing at all. Because that’s not a story I think I ever recounted in full before. Which is wild because I usually repeat myself repeatedly. It’s kind of a recurring theme with… everything. So come with me down this road as trace our steps.
Cheers to you, Antigone
The first time I was ever encouraged to do more with reading and writing was in middle school. Specifically, the seventh grade. At this point in time, my family had relocated to a new state in a fluctuating school district thanks to a new school and so in the seventh grade, while the year was in, they finally found time to assess me for those oh memorable Gifted & Talented courses.
But before that could be fully realized because public education is inherently slow, my first seventh grade English teacher upon reading my essay on whatever book we were reading at the time informed that I was almost certainly going to get pushed up to the higher tier of classes and that I should get a jump start on Antigone and that I should consider joining the writing club after school. And so I did. I started doing fiction for the fun of writing fiction, and that was really the start of all of this. This gentle push into expression.
I don’t remember the contents of Antigone at all. I have a vague recollection of my teacher’s name. I do remember the lesson though. That writing is fun. That there was a joy in creation. I somehow managed to keep a binder of my work.
It’s A Shame NaNoWriMo Sold Out to AI In the Mid-2020s
Come high school, I had managed to produce a steady output of creative writing. The biggest shift in how I approached writing was during sophomore when my English teacher Ms. Curry told me about National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo for short). A challenge in November. Write a “novel” (really a novella) in a month. Fifty thousand words in thirty days. And I did it.
My first ever NaNoWriMo was not particularly good. But it was never meant to be good. It was meant to be an exercise of practice and repetition. To achieve the milestone, I had to write an average of one thousands, six hundred, sixty seven words a day. And I did it. And I did it with the confidence of a middle schooler thinking this was the coolest thing ever when it was in fact the fever dream of a middle schooler.
But NaNoWriMo taught me consistency. Taught me not to erase. Taught me to be okay with a first draft when writing a first draft. Taught me endurance and taught me that I was in fact capable of producing that much.
It’s a shame that NaNoWriMo would go on to embrace Generative AI models as a valid way to generate words when the entire point of the exercise as I learned it was to see what happens when you are trying to produce words with a vague recollection of a plot and a dream. A machine can’t do that. Or at the very least, it’s not nearly as fun.
Other things in high school influenced my writing. Mark Rosewater’s Tropical Blend #1 (which may have been late middle school, but who knows when I actually read it) was very informative about the blending of topics that I have continually utilized. Watchmen by Alan Moore. American Gods by Neil Gaiman, which I will cite as one of the most seminal texts in the corpus of me as a person and writer even if Gaiman has been revealed to be a terrible person. But unfortunately as I have learned, being a good person is not a prerequisite for making good art.
Everything About Modern Mikkel Is At Least Partially Derived From Collegiate Mikkel Doing Slam Poetry
Now I did not intend to do slam poetry in undergrad. That just sort of happened after failing to get involved with any of the plays in the Theater department or any of the a capella groups, so naturally I ended up discovering performance poetry by sheer chance. As it turns out, it was a significantly better fit for me as a writer, even with two years of barbershop groups, three years of musical theater, and four years of choir.
Now, if you a fuller experience of this, I’m going to direct you to a slidedeck I made to cover some of this or you can go straight to 2013 Mikkel’s commentary with this link (I don’t think I’d ever make a good librarian or archivist, but I do make a very good lorekeeper).
Poetry taught me that language itself was fun and how much I rely on parentheticals. Slam poetry taught me that vocalizing language is a game within itself. Slam poetry with WU-SLam taught me that creating in community is one of the fastest ways to get better at writing. And also a great way to make a lot of different communities from the Twin Cities to California to the DMV to North Carolina.
This time also coexists with a fiction writing class I took at the night school because I needed to write. Exposition with Schuman and Argumentation with Seeley. Intro to Screenwriting with Professor Chapman after attempting to take the class seven semesters in a row. Graph poetry, a phrase I will not elaborate more because I fear I will hit some sort of word count and I have two more eras to get through. Dungeon mastering and roleplaying. Oh god. It’s all connected.
In Lieu of a Poetry Community, We Try Everything Else
I live in Madison, Wisconsin for exactly a year, at which point I do make some friends with the Madison poetry scene, but the most friendship I make during that time was becoming friends with the future founder of Intelligame. This would not matter until years later, but Josh would give me my first chance at games journalism.
I come back to St. Louis and start work as a technical writer, which means I somehow lucked into a very specific niche where I continue to thrive in for several years to the point where they even paid for my Masters of Science of Education, which means I am certifiably decent at making instructional content when prompted.
I did some work with FreezeRay Poetry as an editor for a few years. It mostly taught meme that editing is not for me.
I have a brief flirtation with trying to write comics, only to discover that I do not think in panels and I am far, far too verbose to ever do comics without a dedicated editor or an ample time to edit (can you tell?). I work with a writing coach for a while who helps me through this whole process who teaches the single most important lesson of all of this: “the reward of being good at writing is getting to do more writing.”
Zining becomes the closest thing to comics, as several years of readership of a softer world inform an appreciation of reuse, juxtaposition, and constraint that you know became paraluman.
I end up writing more fanfiction than I ever expected thanks to the Destiny franchise (more on that in July).
I inherit a container’s worth of my mom’s writing and realize I owe even more of my love of language to her and that there were signs of creativity much earlier than middle school.
My brief stint with games journalism gets translated to a regular gig with Black Nerd Problems (something I remain continually grateful for), which ends up acts as a prologue to the penultimate era.
The World Didn’t End, But It Certainly Did Change
I ended up applying to VONA in 2020. I got accepted into VONA, but not VONA proper, but the Covid-Era, virtual conference of VONA, which in fairness is still VONA. I did a week long workshop with Valerie Boyd on creative nonfiction with several other fellows.
This would eventually lead to my first (and currently, still only) non-pop culture byline ever, and is still probably my “best piece” I’ve written so far. I am endeavoring for this not to be the case.
It is during this time I also end up reconnecting with WU-SLam alum and current WU-SLam in the form of Monday writing workshops recreating the rituals of old.
I mess around with one page TTRPGs after seeing Cassi Mothwin talk about games at SLICE while I was volunteering, which led to becoming a committee member the next SLICE, which led to being a board member for this year’s SLICE, which was forced an entirely different set of communication skills.
I start doing in character fanfic for my tabletop campaigns.
Oh, I get introduced to crosswording, which adds an entirely different dimension to how I view the abstraction of language and meaning and the intersection of form and meaning.
And then at some point through all of that, I also decided to start this newsletter because apparently I have excess energy to burn.
But of course, as we persist in this era, one of the more defining parts of my writing is influenced by the continual existence of large language models, which have made me determined to become an even better and more prolific writer out of sheer spite.
…And that concludes today’s lengthy introspection, which is probably missing some important things, but at the very least is a little more complete than any other retelling I’ve done. And that’s something.