Senior Writing Portfolio Students
Millikin University

Deirdre Fields

biography

Deirdre Fields was born in Morristown, New Jersey on October 7th, 1984. She has spent her life since then trying to escape New Jersey, which has left her with nothing more than a desire to return. In the winter she gets fat, in the summer she tries to keep the weight off. These two facts more than anything have shaped her life to this date. She has a large collection of costume jewelry that she never wears, but keeps it because she enjoys shiny things. No one ever says her name properly on the first try, which has given her a full lifetime of vexations in only twenty-two years.

Her short stories and poems are unpublished and unknown to the world at large, which is a comforting thought to her in desperate times. When alone, she enjoys a fine video game. She is known to the public chiefly as “–that- girl, you know –that- one” and has little qualms about this designation. One day, she will be fully famous, or completely obscure and unknown.

poetics

Not many people ask me why I write, mostly I think because no one really knows that I do write. People know me as an “English Major” which to many people simply means that I can construct a somewhat suitable sentence and not fall asleep reading books. I don’t tell people that I write because invariably that leads to one conclusion, they want to read something of mine. Not necessarily because they think it will be good, or that they think it will be bad, but they want to place me somewhere in a hierarchy of talent. I’ve never been fond of hierarchies.

Now being that not many people know that I write, and the few people who do know have barely read any of my work, it’s hard to say why exactly it is that I do write. There are many complex answers to this simple question that could be offered up from any number of sources, but it usually boils down to a variant of this answer; most writers I’ve known want to effect a change, or some sort of impression on the world.

It would be a bold-faced lie to say that I didn’t also have such aspirations, but the likelihood of them occurring is remote. I will never be great, I will never be a part of a Norton Anthology, and no college student many years removed into the future will dread having a course completely dedicated to the study of my works. These are plain and simple facts, and every writer must confront them at one point or another. The troublesome part comes after one has confronted them. Are you accepting obscurity and failure, and if not just what are you accepting? These are hard questions that I have not answered myself…I think few people my age have or will ever answer them.

I can only say this about my writing, and hope it makes some sense to you as it does to me. I write to see. All my life, I have felt as though I have been reaching, grasping frantically for things above and yet tantalizingly lingering just within my periphery. The great writers I have learned to love and admire (far too many to name and so silly an exercise anyway) have grasped these things, they have grasped them full with their hands and wrestled them in understanding. I have decided that if I keep trying vainly with whatever faculties I have managed to scrounge up, perhaps one day I too will see these things that so few have known. To know and to feel and to see these things, and to let them flow through me like glass, this is the ignorant wish of my writing.

That is why I clumsily throw sentences onto paper and hope. You see, it is wish and frustrating argument all rolled into one.

writing sample

Introduction to “On the Celebration of My Twenty-First Year”

When I wrote this poem, I had just turned twenty-one, and I had supposed it would be a milestone, but it didn’t necessarily turn out that way. When I looked back at all that had happened on twenty-one years on this earth, it seemed something like an unchangeable cycle and this latest measurement had little to do with that cycle at all. It seems a sort of obvious secret. What had my life meant, what would it mean? These are hard questions for anyone, and the only real comfort I could take was in the very natural cycle that frightened me so much. I wrote this poem in an attempt to settle my debts in a sense, and try to progress, no matter how hard that seemed to be.

To All Who Join on the Celebration of my Twenty-First Year

Upon these heights, these crags, bluffs of existence
To these we weather our years against,
Absolute, abundant, alone.

Light of the unkempt dawn our cradle,
Heights of trailing clouds our governess,
Dappled shade guardian into unknown years.

We give them thanks with ours, our verdant body.

Corseted in silver bark, held fast in growth
Blinking back, refined and alluring, weathered and won.
We settle our claim and progress into this afternoon.

On this, my twenty-first year, I give as much thanks as
Afternoon sinks on, a dull hammer before night.
And we who stand on the wind whipped cliff know this,
looking back, on the deep places of the world.

D. Fields