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Show page 2 leSSOIlS, Spring/Summer 2003 Writing A Life EDITORIAL BY LISA FRASIER I am a writing genius-at least that's what I've always been told. Upon reflection, though, a good deal of that praise may have stemmed from my childhood among gifted siblings, and my resulting overdeveloped need to be good at something. In the second grade, I carried around a little red notebook, and fancied myself some type of journalist, or spy. I kept detailed notes of other students in the class, and would work on them when the classroom lessons failed to hold my attention. In the fourth grade, I was transferred to a school for gifted children, where I not only had the opportunity to write and publish short articles and poems in the school's literary magazine, but I also learned to use desktop publishing software, a skill I brought home with me to help create detailed family newsletters ("...and for dinner tonight, Mom's making..."). In junior high school, I expanded my growing literary repertoire to include longer works of fiction (one about a haunted golden fork that seemingly stalked the owner of a diner was particularly compelling), and also worked on the That's me, in second grade. I'm the curly-haired blonde looking shiftily off to the right, sitting next to the girl in black pigtails. school's newspaper (the Charger Chapter, available to students during lunch hour for one thin dime). I started watching Murphy Brown, and developed a rather skewed desire to become a journalist. The driving force of that hit television series carried me into high school, where I continued working on the school newspaper, eventually winning an award for feature writing from the Utah Press Women. Gathering steam as a burgeoning journalist, I decided to test the limits of free speech as it's defined for public school students, and a stint of bitter columns printed in the Viewmont High School Danegeld gained me a fair amount of fame among fellow popularity underdogs. At the close of my senior year, I somehow managed to be selected to attend the prestigious (and highly coveted among 11th and 12th grade students in Mrs. Bean's creative writing classes) Young Writers@Work Creative Writing Conference. Continuing on my wave of success as a writer, I majored in English at Weber State University, and was invited to enroll in an advanced fiction writing course, where a personal revelation transformed into a short story somehow ended up as a piece selected for presentation in the National Undergraduate Literature Conference. |