Anna Wolff's Intro

Part 1) Hello, everyone! Like Mary, I am an instructor at Whatcom Community College, and some of you are in my section of English 100. I’m new to WCC, and pretty excited to be here and about this blogging experiment! (I am so excited that I’ll probably overuse the exclamation point all the way through this post!) Since I can’t compare with Mary’s story of tiny hellions, I thought I would just tell you a little bit about where I come from. I was born in London, England, and both of my parents are British. If you’ve met me in person, you are probably wondering where the accent went. Well, we moved to the States when I was still a toddler, and lived here ever since (we still go back to visit. This Winter—Sunderland, England! You should google map it). I grew up in the Dallas/Fort Worth area of Texas— a drastic change for my parents! My mum once told me that she almost fainted in the August heat when she stepped out of the airport for the first time. We also spent some time in New Mexico, and eventually moved to Washington State when I was a teenager (a much more comfortable environment for my folks). With all this moving around, I really only have two constants in my life: my family, and reading. Cheesy, I know. But I’m a big word nerd from a family of readers, and proud of it. It’s no surprise I ended up teaching writing. I’ve been teaching college composition for a few years now, and the longer I do the more interesting (and fun!) it gets. I am excited to see what all of the English 100 students on this blog have to say and learn!
Part 2) So, on my good days I am a poet. Or, I try to be a poet most days, and it’s a really good day when I actually sit down and write something. A great day when I sit down and write something I actually like. Poetry comes to me two ways: out of the blue, and through deliberate sustained effort. Sometimes I will just notice something inspiring—a bright umbrella on a cloudy day, the buzz of the crowd at a concert, the way a friend always rests her head in her hand just so—and words start spilling into my head. I grab a pen and something to write on, and I scribble down what I’m thinking, try to find the words that sound best (whatever that means…). This is the way I thought poetry should happen when I was younger. Now, I find my best poems come out of images or ideas that come back to me again and again—and when I sit down and deliberately write and write and write wherever the writing takes me. Most of it is bad, and later discarded. Even what is good, I will later ruthlessly work to make better. From pages of writing, I often get a poem less than fifteen typed lines long. I write poetry because I am obsessed with short moments, with images, with surprising words, and with what you can do in poetry with what you don’t put on the page. I love the precision of poetry—how each word carries the weight of the whole poem on its back. Of all of the incredible art I view and great books I read and fantastic movies I watch, a powerful poem is where I’m most likely to lose my breath.