The New New Yorker Chronicles
New to the city + attending The New School = It’s all new

Chapter 1
I’m bad at writing.
It’s an interesting admission for a writer to make, especially if that writer is one month away from beginning a Master’s (play)writing program. It’s an honest admission nonetheless.
Yet, there’s this feeling that I get whenever my fingers begin tapping on a keyboard. It’s a flutter, a moment of thrill that pulses with my heartbeat. Almost like an echo reminding me that I am alive and more alive in these moments than in others. I want to call it what it is — a contradiction, but it seems like an insult to a part of me that I understand so deeply. So I settle for a description, a half-truth: I’m bad at writing.
Despite my self-diagnosed shortcomings, I write when I feel the need to. It’s worked that way for quite some time. However, my instinct senses when a storm is coming. Most wouldn’t call graduate school a storm; an “opportunity” is the most common moniker. I wouldn’t not call it that, but it feels like a word that I’ve placed in the adjective bank because that’s what is expected of me. I call it a storm.
Not because it brings a sense of doom or tragedy, but because it forces change. Storms remove your comfortability in ways that are often at a pace you wouldn’t choose if you had that level of control. Storms bring clarity that is impeded by life’s common clutter. Storms shift spaces, defy minds, and eliminate boundaries. When a storm is approaching, you only have so many ways to prepare, and sometimes even that preparation is not enough. It may sound foreboding, but there’s something magnificent about it.
I see this storm. It has removed my sense of comfortability couched in Southern hospitality and never really running behind. Here, in this megametropolis of a city, I feel my body’s rhythm hum faster because it would be uncomfortable for it not to. I question the choices I make as men from IKEA build the furniture I think I need based on a life I’ve lived in a vastly different climate. I walk down a maze of one-way streets and posit to myself the irony in questioning my safety in the land of possibility when statistics tell me I come from the land of danger. This approaching storm reminds me that I’m bad at writing and that I can no longer afford to write when I feel the need because the need must always be there. My independence and sense of self is different now because it means little without the context that I cannot keep: tell me, how does a life-long Southern black girl explain her ebonics code-switching tongue to people who see her lifestyle and experiences as unintelligent and backwards?
There is an excitement that bubbles in the pit of my stomach each day that I wake up in this city, this possibilityopportunityopolis. But it is not because of what it appears to present to me. I know exactly what I am supposed to see in this place and what I am supposed to get out of this experience. Funny enough, the things that are most expected are the least intriguing to me.
This is more than a journey towards becoming a better writer and more than a three-year stop on life’s expedition. It’s my fun house — the place where images become distorted with time and movement, where you walk endlessly on a rotating wheel until you choose to step off. You can get lost in a maze of mirrors or you can try your hand at the floor that shifts endlessly beneath you. The fun house is where you unleash your creativity, where you can run through time and again and get a different experience according to your own prerogative. The scholarship and federal loans tell you that I’m attending a certain program at a certain school for a certain degree which sets me on an obvious pathway. What they don’t tell you is why.
Is that where the storm and the fun house meet? Within the why? Or do they meet within the who?
I’ve come to think of my life, my artistry, and my perception of it all as the glue that meets me here, standing at a point where inevitable change meets inevitable creativity. The fun house is my shelter within the storm, as unconventional as that might seem. The thing about the conventional is, though, that it requires the thoughts and opinions of others. I refuge in my perspective, even when it pushes me to the fringes of what is right or typical or comfortable. Sometimes, that locks me in the fun house and makes others uneasy enough to stay out of it. You will rarely (if ever) hear me express that as a bad thing.
So here I am. Writing and beginning to write things that I hope people will read. Yet, as I type I realize that I’ve truly said nothing. I’ve fallen into my own personalized trap of writing in spirals. We meet here at an ending and almost forget what we’ve accomplished. At least I have.
Maybe writing is just a circular catharsis, ebbs and waves of releases that can be connected if you will your fingers and jam keys harder and harder on the keyboard. Maybe I just needed a blank space to make less blank. It’s what we writers do: create worlds in blank spaces where nothing but our storms and fun homes and imaginations exist.
This isn’t much different from what I do at “home”. Maybe the only difference is where my canvas sits and what I see when I look beyond it. Do I see the previously Pepto-Bismol pink but now creamy yellow walls that have seen me grow up more than any human on this earth? Or do I see a bare brick wall with no thoughts or memories attached? Does it change the words that bleed onto the canvas?
Let’s find out.
— CA
