I'm a one-hit fanfiction wonder, two-time experimenter of fixed-form poetry, and a hoarder of stories spun from the cat's cradle of my imagination. Some days I long to join the circus, or consider building a Lego castle to live in -- until someone points out how painful that will be. Most of the time, I watch James Blunt's Bonfire Heart and envision myself, biker-chic and rugged, riding through small-town America -- one of Kerouac's mad ones. errbody wanna be your best friend after this paragraph

In short, I'm crazy; obsessed with making something of the imagination, but it has never been easy in reality. When I started air pistol shooting, my laughter was the first thing I had to stifle in the range, and even art class demanded a deep melancholy, and unfortunately, goofy illustrations of a grinning banana sporting a mullet didn't cut it. LAUGHING WITH YA And it would have stayed that way, if I hadn't begun to write -- to carve out a space for self-actualization. In my experience, there are two types of writers: the deadpan, classy-but-melancholic conformists, and the more free-spirited, unapologetic thieves of the plums that were delicious, so sweet, and so cold. I am unabashedly the latter, and if 'poetry is you' as Becquer declares, then my poems are my Japanese woes as I rub sandpaper next to the lilts of fluency omg the imagery kills, CBS procedurals, and always for the laughs. I'm part of a class that's more free-spirited than conventional aesthetics. We write to deliver justice for the moth shredded by the ceiling fan, and find a commentary about power and metaphysical determinism in bathroom habits. If Joyce brought his comic vision to life in Finnegans Wake, then likewise I write to create something that's undeniably my own.

In 8th grade, my English teacher stopped me in the hallway and said, "Jiawen, I've read your portfolio. It's good, but you never write about anything that's real." I laughed, but her comment stuck with me. What is real? Am I being disingenuous if I write about places I haven't seen or experiences I haven't had? I've used Hurricane Irene to confront disappointment, dancing in the Sierra Nevada for the freedom I tasted when glacier trekking in Nepal, and pork chops for the aching sense of home, with neither geographical nor gastronomical authority. Metaphors were my creative license to combine seemingly disparate ideas to express emotions, idealism, and controversy. I constructed my own frames of understanding, and so within the words I could be truthful, even if just on my own terms.

Writing dared me to unlock the gates of my imagination and unleash it, unrestrained and unrepressed. I remember the sheer adrenaline of reading a poem of mine for the first time to an audience of published poets and confident preteens. I bore my soul to criticism, but also to the connections, the laughs when I say, "that is about seducing fruits", and the peers who have left ideas in my head and over my notebooks. In putting myself up for discussion, my suspicions were confirmed: alas, I was no precocious Jane Austen. Reality was harsh, but I would always ask for a candid, second opinion from others, whose perspectives save me from cringe-worthy puns (examples include "heroin" and "heroine") and pseudo-profundity. I grow from there.

With this conviction, I continue writing, through the glory and self-loathing, to invest my stark, raving mad self into the words, ruthlessly edit, and patiently untangle ideas. From there, I've built myself a collection of wit, second-hand embarrassment, and stories so eccentric they leave me in fits of giggles years later -- a time machine of grit and growth; a lifetime of crazy.