Sometimes you write about nothing when your uninspired.

So here’s an attempt to get myself writing. I figure, if I can muster up the words for a blog entry, I can muster up some words to write a poem for my creative writing class.

The poem is supposed to start with a picture: a sketch of our bedroom when we were twelve years old. I start with the general layout like an architect. There’s a window there, a doorway on the opposite side of the room. My room isn’t an exact rectangle, there’s a little bit that recedes where my closet is. Then, I draw and label my furniture as I remember it when I was twelve. Yet I don’t remember the exact placement of my furniture. Is it so bad that I moved things in my room around… a lot? The next step, my teacher tells us, is to label other things that might have been in your room. She gives the example of posters that we might have had up on the wall. I never had any posters. I had two framed prints on my wall: one was a Monet and the other an O’Keefe. The walls behind them were pastel pink, reminiscent of a baby girl’s nursery. I kept two journals on my nightstand and my Harry Potter books close by. I had a wide armoire and a tall dresser, which I used to hold old paint brushes I’d borrowed from my dad and a pad of watercolor paper. My clothes got shoved into the armoire. I label these things and consider their general irrelevance to my life now. She moves on to the next step, which is to draw other places or things outside of your bedroom that remind you of that time in your life. I draw a tree and label it ‘the park’ and a building with a small bell tower, which I label ‘the clubhouse.’ I can’t think of anything else to draw, and instead start bullet points beneath ‘the clubhouse’: youth group, piano lessons, the bell everyone wanted to pull, and the benches that we made in girl scouts. We’re sent home with this “memory map” that is supposed to inspire us into writing a poem about it. But for the life of me, I am uninspired by this “map” of my memories. Instead, I find a bitter edge in my thoughts. Nothing is good enough; nothing is inspiring enough. Who was I when I was twelve years old? I don’t know.

I consider that I may have had too high of expectations for this creative writing class. I thought it would reel me back into writing, that I would be inspired on the drop of a dime. And instead I find myself at the opposite end of the spectrum. I’m confused because I don’t know what environment is going to be right for me to be creative in. I thought it would be this one. I’ve considered myself a writer for most of my life, and yet here I am unable to construct a simple poem. I even wonder if this is what I should be doing. I think that I need to go pray.