Project 1

Short Story emulated from Betsy Kemper’s “This Is How I Remember It”: I’m seeing mountains all around me and lots of tall trees that don’t look like the ones I have at home and my horse Fire is guiding me along the trail; Justin behind me, then Matthew, then Riley farthest back — I hear all of their horses trotting and I think that I have the best horse because I am in the lead but we are getting to the end of the path (I know because I can see mom and dad but they look like tiny specks in the distance), Justin is telling me I bet I can beat you back there but I ignore him because I know Fire is the fastest, my lungs feel like they can’t get enough of the thin air but the freshness of it reminds me of when I first stepped outside when we got to Colorado, I am still ahead of Justin (although he is trying to catch up) and back at the barn, getting off Fire, the shaky ground under my feet and I instantly miss the feeling of being tall and powerful up on my horse but the mountains and trees still surround me and I smell the fresh air the same way, Justin is saying I let you win and mom and dad are laughing, Riley is now eating a bag of potato chips, Matthew is saying he wants to take a nap, I want to keep riding and prove Justin wrong so I say I want to ride without a saddle because I think that’ll show him because he is older and taller and stronger than me and at this moment I think that I can be all of those things, everyone thinks that I’m kidding but our horse instructor says okay and I can tell that everyone is waiting for me to back out but I won’t, Fire looks even bigger without a saddle and the sunlight dances on her mane, making her look more majestic and powerful . . . I am being hoisted up on Fire before anyone can talk me out of it and I am trying to find my grip but there is none now, I am still trying to balance when Fire starts moving so I hang on but Fire is irritated and not as steady as when I rode her before, the instructor is trying to get Fire to stop but it is too late because Fire’s back legs are off the ground, my nine year old self is in the air and time is going by really slowly, the mountains are prettier and the sun is brighter and I am flying like the birds above me for less than a couple of seconds before my back is hitting the hard, dirt ground and now I can’t breathe at all, my ears are ringing, my eyes won’t open, and my lungs still won’t expand until I hear mom and dad running toward me and calling my name and my body is listening to me again, everyone is expecting me to start crying or say that I’m done riding but the first words out of my mouth are let me try again.

Artist Statement: I chose to emulate “This Is How I Remembered It” by Betsy Kemper because it is very different from my comfortable writing style in that her writing style does not follow the traditional rules of grammar or typical sentence structure, which I found interesting. My first impression of “This Is How I Remembered It” was that it was written similarly to how I would tell a story to someone as a child, which was evidenced in that the entire short story only used a period once. I am a rule follower by nature, so one of the biggest challenges I encountered was just writing without worrying about when a certain punctuation choice was necessary or what word choice would sound the most sophisticated. I knew that this would be difficult for me before I started writing, so I managed this challenge initially by choosing to write about a childhood experience of mine from my point of view as a nine year old. This allowed me to be in a more childlike mindset of how I would describe the series of events and how my childhood self wouldn’t be particularly focused on choosing the perfect diction or punctuation. I will say that every comma splice that I incorporated in my short story made me cringe a little, but I definitely became more comfortable with the style as I got further into my story. Using mimesis as a strategy for creative writing allowed me to experiment with special characters and syntax in a way that I don’t think I would have done on my own, although my short story is definitely not a perfect emulation of Betsy Kemper. My writing style has been fairly consistent throughout my life, so I enjoyed getting to challenge myself in a different way.