Assignment 0

My name is Adam Baitsell and I am a junior majoring in English, with a focus on Creative Non-Fiction. I enjoy writing non-fiction because it allows me to be as honest as possible while tapping into my creativity and my abilities to paint powerful and moving images or scenes with specific words and sentence structure. I live in a suburb of New York City called White Plains; it’s about a forty-five minute drive north of the city. Although it is technically a suburb it is slowly becoming more and more of a metropolis with high-rise buildings and an inexcusable increase in traffic and parking tickets. The town itself has a fairly defined line between the houses and apartments and I happen to live right on the line, I like to think I am the first house outside of “downtown” White Plains even though I know I’m not.
I don’t have many hobbies, but I used to collect postcards and those moist towellettes (sp) when I was younger. Now I enjoy playing rugby and the rush of the full contact sport and its utter brutality is probably what draws me most to the game. As I said early I enjoy Creative Non-Fiction writing, so one of my interests/hobbies has to be reading and writing it. My favorite authors right now are Augusten Burroughs and David Sedaris, and I also really enjoy Ellison and Wright. I have been writing non-fiction since high school and it is something that means a lot to me and I have set a goal to be published by the end of my senior year.
My overall experience within the SLU English department has been great, some have been negative during class sessions but the lessons I learned from the classes have taught me countless lessons for both academia and life. One class in particular sticks out in my mind as the most effective and helpful class and that was my Advanced Creative Non-Fiction with Paul Graham. Before that class I rarely did concrete or cohesive rewrites of my work, maybe a few verb and word changes here and there but never a complete reworking of an essay and from that class and the workshops that gave me my peers feedback I have become an avid rewriter and find that I almost enjoy editing and rewriting more than just writing.
After having read the syllabus I hope to gain a much, much deeper understanding of the African American struggle and be more informed on the historical and social settings of each author and each poem. The first essay assignment seems daunting because I have never taken a poetry class here and I feel like I might be behind in my abilities to close-read and tease out important or necessary information like some of the others in the class but I hope that by May I will be as close to an expert as I can get.
After having read the assignment for Wednesday and trying to give the paper for Monday some thought I think I will write about “When-a Mah blood Runs Chilly an Col.” What I have found interesting about slavery for a long time is the grotesque misuse of religion to pigeon hole and manipulate slaves into “obeying their masters” and being “good servants of God.” And even with this misuse religion becomes a gigantic focal point in the lives of slaves, and heaven becomes their only escape. The ‘Beulah land’ was confusing but after a quick Google search I learned that it is a metaphor for heaven. The poem as a whole conveys an importance of religion and heaven, and the absolute necessity for slaves to go to heaven. Heaven and religion become escapes for slaves while it is a major reason for their oppression. The irony behind it is what really makes my head spin.