The end of the road

The end of the road

At the end of a journey, it’s always strange to look back on the roads traveled and places visited. It brings with it a sense of nostalgia, a feeling of time passed with the inability, or perhaps unwillingness to go back. I felt like this at the end of the road trip I took this time last year from San Francisco to Alaska. I knew that most likely I’d never again visit those quirky villages in the depths of the Yukon Territory, or stand in the middle of the Alaskan Highway watching a herd of mountain rams cross, miles away from anywhere. And when we reached our destination, the journey seemed far away – separated from the here and now of Whittier, Alaska. And all we had as proof of the 3500 miles traveled were bills for gas and pictures taken along the way.

At the end of my semester in EL170, I am left with a very similar feeling of nostalgia and a strange separation from my journey through writing. I look back at genres visited and works “completed” by our class, and I’m left with a sense of pride at how far we’ve come. And most likely I’ll never again visit where I’ve been, but that doesn’t mean that the memories of where I have visited won’t stay with me for a long time.

Thinking way, way back to the world of Non-Fiction shows me just how unexplored my writing really was. Let’s face it, my non-fiction was pretty bad. I had never really written before or had any “coaching,” so I think my shortcomings were understandable. I found it easy to write because I was drawing from my own experiences, but I found it hard to write well. It felt forced to write about my own experiences. Of all the pieces I wrote, there was one that I liked – my Knowledge Tree. I think that this piece worked better than the othe...

... middle of paper ...

... And it worked. Writing – done. Once I was over the writing hump, I faced the task of creating the digital story. It was difficult, but really fun and it was a great break from the monotony of text book studying which consumed the rest of my life. I feel like my digital story improves as it goes on, simply because I was getting the hang of the idea of the digital story and IMovie. But, in the end I was really proud of what I had made. It was a great experience and I will treasure my digital story forever.

So now I’m at the end of my EL170 journey. This has been the best class that I’ve taken in college with the best group of people – professor and tutors included. We created a community in which I could safely release my first writing failures to the world. Words don’t do justice to this class, so I shall leave it at that, and wait for my next journey to start.