Greetings!

I’m Sarah Hathaway. I’m majoring in English with a writing concentration.I could go on for ages about why I love my major. Most of my reasons all come back to the fact that I love words. More importantly, I love what we can do with words and language. It is my greatest and most overwhelming desire to be an author. I particularly enjoy the fantasy genre and I am currently working on a fantasy book geared towards sixth grade students. I am ridiculously enthusiastic about writing and almost equally so about reading.

I’m from Cape Vincent, New York. I usually have to use several points of reference when describing the location of my home town to anyone not from the immediate area. For simplicity’s sake, my itty-bitty village is located where the St. Lawrence River meets Lake Ontario. It takes about an hour and a half for me to drive home. I absolutely love my home. Our village is so small that, honest to goodness, there is not one single stop light. Speaking of lights, however, we do have Tibbett’s Point Light House and it is a great source of pride in our little community. I live on what used to be a French nobleman’s farm; built in the late 1850s from limestone quarried at the creak located a half mile down the road. My nearest neighbor is about a mile down the road and I count the freedom of living in such a rural area as one of my greatest blessings. I lived a childhood of immense freedom and splendor that I would not trade for anything in this entire world of pleasures.

The pleasures that I most prize in this life are simple. I love to laugh and I try to fill each of my days with as much laughter as I am granted. I also adore reading. In the words of Jane Austen, “The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.” Personally I could not agree more but I will admit to the fact that I am not vehement in my accordance with this statement. I find long meandering walks with no set destination irresistible. This is probably due to my wandering thoughts; I love to see where I find myself at the end. I take great enjoyment in the serenity of nature, especially under tree canopies and beside bodies of water.

Moving on to feedback about my writing… in Theo's Techniques of Fiction class last semester I had a wonderful experience with feedback. The first workshop day was a little formal and somewhat awkward but by the end of it our group had figured out how we could best help each other. By the end of the semester I was sad to leave the group behind. I find the kinds of criticism and advice that stem from these workshops to be extremely useful. I have high hopes for this poetry class.

I love the way John Keats makes words and images dance across pages to rhythms in ways I can only hope to dream of doing. His way with words is almost like magic, spectacular and almost unbelievable. I also find the work of Emily Dickinson extremely motivating. I enjoy the poetry of Robert Frost, and Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentile Into That Goodnight" is one of my all-time favorite poems.

I think one of the most wonderful aspects of poetry is that there are so many forms; no one person could fully explore them all without doing most forms an injustice. Poetry has the capability to be both simple and complex, almost in the same way that life is both simple and complex. Poetry offers both the writer and the reader a great deal of freedom and that freedom is a precious thing. It is truly an art, and one that I wish I were more competent at.

My goal for this class is to grow as a writer and a poet. It is a simple goal but it has the potential to be a difficult one for me to achieve. I am not a poet, though I have dabbled in poetry. If I cannot improve, I hope to come to a better understanding and appreciation of poetry by the end of this course.

Cheers!