My fascination with language began a long time ago. It started with wondering who I was—in any way, at all.

Click, clack. Who's there?

I started this play on a heavy Royal typewriter once: a family of Spanish immigrants clung to their stories of pure-blood and royal lineage, and to superstitions that protected them against the sickness of poverty.

The typewriter made words into rocks; and, I had to rewrite the page if my finger slipped.

The curtain rises. The curtain rises. The curtain rises.

I wrote A Pride of Novelty Lions in an unfinished basement filled with the trash of thrift stores; I loved old things: a radio that played static, a Magnavox record player, a few empty leather briefcases, stacks of the classics. I hung a gold picture frame around a window with a crack in the sealant.

It let water stain the concrete wall in long brown and red strokes to the floor, swelling the feet of my dresser. On the wall, I wrote “Superstition is the Poetry of Life—Goethe,” in black permanent marker. I locked myself in and waited among the relics; writing was magic.

I was accepted to Denver School of the Arts to study Creative Writing. Ms. Dubrava was the director: white hair, glasses, plain clothes. She gave us lines from poetry books, and we wrote off the page.

We wrote on white iMacs with stubborn keyboards, and we talked, and we made quips. The year passed. I was nauseated by the romantic daydreams and the vocative nature writing and the damn wordplay. I was done with the names we recited: Frost, Eliot, Dickinson.

I took an advanced language course with a man named Mr. Thornton. Posters of chairs, cubist paintings, taxonomies of teeth, surrounded us as punk records played, and he read from the devotional to begin class.

We read refreshingly concrete and thoughtful essays with more than five paragraphs, like “On Dumpster Diving” by Lars Eighner and “On Keeping a Notebook” by Joan Didion. He introduced us to the rhetorical occasion and argument. He helped us present an argument with an appropriate design.

I read the style guide he suggested like a novel: The Elements of Style. I packed my typewriter into its black box.

So, I wrote “Rule #17” on white trash bags and filled them with the antecedents of magical thinking. I took the gilded frame down, and realized writing was not magic. It was not a performance or a certain kind of life, it was thought.

I began again with empty space, on a processor that allowed me to erase my words. “A hundred visions and revisions,” I liked the white space and I liked writing in CAPS LOCK. I liked everything being STANDARD, being the SAME, having no decoration and no (dis)coloration.

But, I wasn’t canonical or standard. I was stuck. I couldn’t live in a gilded frame or scrub the stains from my wall; the rain kept leaking through.

By then, I could no longer ignore my position: a teenager who dreamt in an unfinished basement whose mother brought down a plate of 1-Minute rice, Kroger green beans, and on-sale chicken breast.

After, I reread the play, put away in a copy paper box. Not much was left.

I remembered the defective radio that punctuated my scenes with advertisements for toothpastes, soaps, shoe whiteners and ionized yeast tablets; the daughter who sets her hair on fire reading by an oil lamp and dreaming of a different life; the purist mother who recites, “When they still respected good blood, we were the ones with straight teeth.”

The family was struggling with nostalgia and romantics, assimilation and whitening, surrounded by the trash of the American dream.

My struggle with writing was there—is here again.

I stopped writing and started reading: The Philosophy of Andy Warhol. Andy Warhol was famous for making non-art. He turned low-culture (commodities) into high-culture (art) by putting prints of the Campbell’s soup cans, Coca-Cola bottles, and Brillo boxes, into the white spaces of galleries.

He sold art back to the people and forward to the Factory. Andy put the ordinary in a new space using new technology, and it transformed; it became available for examination. Reality (became) television.

Commodities, logos, advertisements—the everyday classics—have become my real life’s literature. Advertisements produce meaning where there is only trash. This redeemed trash is rich with accessible arguments and visceral poetry produced with the technology of symbols, sounds, and prose.

In the future, can I pretend I’m always watching television to transform mundane into meaning? Can I just change everything around with an edit here and a revision there?

I'm Devn Ratz, and I certainly hope so.

Perhaps it's a fantasy—that I think we can be just what we say before we became this thing that who knows what we said we were and have always claimed to be.