By Brooke Kelly
Growing up, I was always interested in reading and writing. When I was about nine, I watched Poltergeist (1982) for the first time, and—despite the nightmares and ongoing fears about closet doors—I fell in love with the adrenaline rush of a good horror movie. When I was in high school, I spent hours perfecting an essay about Macbeth, only to receive a B on the basis that my thesis did not adequately address the prompt. I wrote my first short story for a creative writing class. I wrote bad poems in my iPhone Notes and hoped no one would ever stumble upon them. I procrastinated reading a few chapters of Crime and Punishment for homework by devouring over half of a Percy Jackson book. I read Jeanette Walls’ The Glass Castle for an English class.
Then I read it again. For fun.
For most of my academic career, I separated my schoolwork from myself. I always preferred English classes to science or math classes, but I still viewed it as the lesser evil. I didn’t appreciate the reading and writing I did when it wasn’t just for me. Throughout the Fall 2025 semester, the first semester of my senior year at KSU, I finally started to face impending graduation, thinking about my future career and my current experiences in academia. By building this portfolio, I learned that my personality—my interests, my hobbies, my opinions, and my skills—were threaded throughout my academic history. There was never a separation between me and my academics.
I want to write. Before this semester, I pictured myself in thirty years, sitting in an artfully decorated home office writing at a well-organized desk, with a shelf full of books I’d written in the background. In this fantasy, I’m confident in the words I’m typing. I don’t worry about a due date. I never second-guess the ending I’ve planned. I don’t get writer’s block and stare at the blank screen. This was my fantasy of a career in writing, of being a writer.
I haven’t given all the way up on my perfect-writer-lifestyle-fantasy yet, but I know now that I don’t need the home office or the publications or immunity to writer’s block to be a writer. In fact, I write lots of things. I’m a writer every day.
Reflecting on my existing repertoire of work to put together this portfolio was a very revealing project for the last four months. It turns out, I have a lot of opinions on movies, and I can turn bad Notes poems into better poems, ones that I want people to read. I can create visual aids and articles that look like real articles! I can design a website that’s easy to use! That feels like me. I used to think of my academic writing as sterile and polished—above my usual self’s way of thinking and speaking. But my thoughts on Nixon’s resignation are part of myself! So much so that I went down a Watergate rabbit-hole, discovering what turned out to be one of my favorite books and films: All the President’s Men. Thinking critically about books, films, and events is just as much a part of me as burning through fantasy books in my free time.
I am thrilled to admit: I love writing! And not just fun, silly stories. I love analyzing articles about the modern world and tearing myself apart in a confessional prose poem and organizing my takeaways from interviewing a screenwriter and reflecting on the wins and losses of the career fair. I have a lot more writing to do and a lot more learning about myself to do. I hope that in thirty years, I am sitting in a (probably disorganized) home office procrastinating my current fiction project by digging through heaps of writing from over the years, each artifact a window into who I am, who I was, and who I am becoming.
