I am very unreliable narrator

President Obama will be speaking at Vorhees mall on the 16th of July, 2009. My first inklings of a destiny (heartbroken and destitute as it has been) as a writer were supplied to me in that mall. An essential matriculation occurred there, specifically within the pilgrimage route I and many other dormers took to get to class from the Quads area, and Hegeman, the dorm in which I lived a brief, happy life. A year ago Junot Diaz's The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao came out, singing the praises and poetics of living in Demarest. I lived there once too. Hegeman was across the way from it. The place just had that kind of literary charm. Once upon a time I was a rather zealous reporter for the Targum, the student paper. I wrote seven articles before I quit, had interviewed some incredible writers. I was very proud of that. I managed to make a fool of myself to most of them, a few of them I impressed. Thus was my brief, checkered career as a reporter for the school newspaper. There was once a town across the Raritan from Rutgers. It was called Raritan Landing, and I like to imagine that it was a lovely town. Its gone now, underneath the park thats there.

I took several creative writing courses at the English department in New Brunswick. There were a fair amount of very pretty, very young teachers who taught in a program called Writers House, a subdivision of the English department. They make a rather large deal about removing the apostrophe in Writers House. Bravo, for them.
Anyway, I got A's in all of them, and it has only occurred to me just now that maybe that was a clear sign that I should try to creatively write. I never got A's. I always just chalked it up to those teachers wanting to be nice, though. Actually, I still chalk it up to those teachers wanting be nice. Nobody should ever think they're a good writer if they get a good grade in creative writing.
What really made me think about writing was delivering my Uncle's eulogy in mid May. The semester had just ended and he died that Wendesday, so we drove down to North Carolina right after I got back from Rutgers. I wrote it a few hours before the funeral. I was terrified of public speaking, but it was one of those things you know you'll be doing before your mind catches up with itself and asks you how, why.
Anyway, a few weeks later I thought, heck, if I could writer a eulogy and stand in front of a bunch of strangers and deliver it why couldn't I write a story or two that was rolling around in my head? Then I tried, and I did. And that was my beginning as a writer.