Forwarding: Hooks and Torgovnick

After reading Memories of My Girlhood and Remembered Rapture: Dancing with Words by bell hooks in combination with Marianna Torgovnick's Experimental Critical Writing, I am further inspired as a writer and as a college student to write outside-of-the-box of structured writing.

In Remembered Rapture: Dancing with Words, hooks discusses her passion for writing and pushes the reader to consider using more creativity in writing; that we, as writers, must not be afraid to move against set guidelines. In the second paragraph of hook's explanation, I noticed the poetic cushion to her writing. It caught my eye and intrigued me enough to deeply read her material as opposed to rushing through it, something the majority of students do once they encounter a tedious article. She writes, "Standing in our living room, during dark southern nights when the earth was shaken by fierce thunderstorms and all electrical power was down, I performed...During those strange and unpredictable nights I practiced the art of making words matter." If this sort of writing is what reels readers in and keeps them hanging on the line, the real question is why people of power, such as politicians and other government officials, do not use powerful descriptions when attempting to capture the citizens of America. One of the current issues in America is the fact that many people are losing interest in government and political problems, leaving politicians dumbfounded as to how to achieve the attention of Americans. Perhaps if these people of power took a more creative approach in their speeches they would reach more Americans. It might also be that individuals with this task of writing to appeal to the public need to be paid more efficiently.

In addition to this point, I thought that her statement, "Critical writing counts for very little when critics speak about ending domination, eradicating racism, sexism.." was raw and rebellious of her to write, and I love the fact that I see its validity. Critical writing has not been proven to change struggle, but rather creativity and being outside-of-the-box has because it captures attention which ultimately is the catalyst for change.

Memories of My Girlhood by hooks is a perfect representation of what hooks asks of her readers regarding the importance of creativity and ignoring normal structure. The narrative is focused around the rough social struggle of racism, yet the topic is presented innocently and easy to understand. The culture between black and white is simply exemplified in Barbie and Baby. As free citizens, we are entitled the ability to stray away from the structure of critical writing and include some of our most serious emotions, creating more impact on a reader than average critical writing would. People want to read words that relate to them and evoke emotions, not bore them. The culture in which I grew up in represented by a basketball; college education is costly, especially for a child born into a working class family of four. My dear father accepted early the reality of not being able to afford his first-born child's education out of pocket, leading him to find the alternative of me becoming a college athlete. Unfortunately, an over-excessive amount of money is poured into American athletics each year instead of being used to house the homeless or educate the poor.

To summarize hook's two pieces, I wanted to include Torgovnick's piece Experimental Critical Writing. She compares her voice to that of La, a female character from Tarzan. "For me, writing like La became a metaphor for getting to a place where I was not afraid to write in a voice that had passion as well as information -- a voice that wanted to be heard." As a student writer, education has kept me in a state of mind in which I forget that I have the ability to enhance informational writing with personal emotion. Creative, free writing in the major of psychology is considered to be a "waste of time" because such a thing will not secure a spot in a well-respected graduate school. However, I am a creative and free student writer majoring in psychology with generous expectancies of attending graduate school, even if it means editing the norm of informational writing to get there.