Well, my Creative Writing course is coming to a screeching halt and off course the evaluations will certainly start rolling in as well.

My concern here is not whether my teacher was a good teacher or if the course delivered that which it promised to deliver.

My only concern here is whether I as a student accomplished anything worthy to remember and whether I learned something or not.

The obvious answer is that yes, I learned something, I learned discipline, discipline to write.

Do I write well or any better than when before I started this course?

Hard to say, but writing needs encouragement and I encourage myself to write everyday. Regardless of whether I have something to say or not.

Indeed, that most valuable lesson here is how to write something to say and package it neatly for the consumption of the masses.

Another thing that comes to mind regarding this Creative Writing course is the issue of voice.

The question then is, did I get/find a voice?

In retrospect, I believe my voice has been thoroughly misunderstood. Having recently gone through most of Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior it struck me how familiar the tone of the memoir was to me and that was when it struck me: I have a ‘we’ voice as opposed to a western ‘I’ voice. When I address an audience I tend to prefer a ‘we’ collective as opposed to an individual ‘I’ as is most preferred by English speakers. It’s in my culture. I don’t think that too many people at the English institution are aware of this collective ‘I’ that exists within the non-anglo community within the United States. We speak English as fluently as any other folk but we prefer to address a wider collective as opposed an individual.

Hence my voice tends to be militant, rebellious, and accusatory towards a collective that only exists as an ‘I’