On Creative Writing and Virtual Community

Source: https://admission.princeton.edu/blogs/creative-writing-and-virtual-community Parent: https://admission.princeton.edu/blogs/blogger-profile/grady-trexler

January 11, 2021

Grady Trexler '24

Hi, my name is Grady Trexler. I'm from a suburb outside of Richmond, Virginia, and I'm spending the current semester in Chicago, Illinois. I'm interested in studying everything from religion to Italian. "On campus," I've joined the University Press Club as a reporter, and I'm involved with the Office of Religious Life's Religion and Resettlement Project, through which I've done oral history interviews. I'm also a member of First College. Prior to ... Read more

Blog

My Favorite Basement in New Jersey

Blog

There is Always Time to Close the Textbooks

Zoom isolation is real, especially for the other first-year students and I who haven’t yet had the chance to live on campus because of Princeton’s fully virtual instruction during the fall semester. Oftentimes, during classes or clubs I feel as though I’m the odd one out. Everyone who has been on campus has a shared vocabulary of buildings, Princeton traditions, courses, professors and dining halls. It’s been hard for me to feel a connection to Princeton — or with anyone save the people I've been living with, for that matter — when everything has been filtered through a screen. So, the little pockets of community I found throughout my first fall semester became especially meaningful to me, like the introductory poetry workshop I was able to take.

This year, the Program in Creative Writing offered workshops only for first-year students. I knew that I wanted to pursue creative writing at Princeton, so I applied and was accepted, and every Tuesday for the fall semester I met with eight other first years and our professor for two hours to discuss poetry. This was a completely new world for me, and one I was keen to experience. I’ve been writing creatively for most of my life — and writing poetry since high school — but had never before had the chance to devote so much time to it at a high level. At my high school, poetry was taught but rarely written, and I didn’t have a chance to spend more than a sporadic few weeks on it in a class. Being able to spend a whole semester writing, reading and editing poetry was something new and did wonders for my writing.

More often than not, we spent our time discussing things completely unrelated to poetry: how we were doing with midterms, what we were looking forward to doing over the weekend, one of our classmate’s new dogs. It was wonderful to be in such a small class and to all be first-years, all interested in poetry, meeting every week for the whole semester. Though, it wasn’t the same as being in the same classroom, but for a while each week, I was happy to join a Zoom call where I knew everyone and everyone knew my name, the type of poetry I liked to write and where I was living for the semester.

This isn’t to knock larger classes — I took an introductory metaphysics course in the philosophy department which I loved — but a recommendation to try out a smaller class. Especially for your first semester of college, it helps to have a little pocket of the undergraduate community that you can feel at home in, even if it’s only in a Zoom call.