Senior Writing Portfolio Students
Millikin University

Stephanie Williams

biography

Stephanie Williams started writing because she found she was awkward when attempting other modes of communication. She grew up in a Chicago suburb called Batavia with her two beautiful sisters, Alaina and Susanne.

Stephanie loves to dance, and she loves to write poems that she never shows anyone. (Except for the one below. That is it.) While at Millikin, Stephanie has been a writer and Features/Arts & Entertainment editor for The Decaturian and Editor-in-Chief/Design editor of Collage.

Stephanie is graduating in December 2006, and, hopefully, by the time you read this she will be exploring some new, far off place.

Writing Theory

To Share & Be Understood

Whenever I sit down to write, I conjure this incredibly clear memory of pushing open my bedroom door, hurrying across cold linoleum and jumping into my mother’s lap. Instead of sending me back to bed, she let me stay there between herself and her typewriter. I watched the thing, (which now as I sit at my computer seems archaic and fragile) clap away at the paper leaving my mother’s words in its wake.

I write because growing up, I knew my mother had to be the most amazing woman to ever walk the earth and all I wanted was to be just like her. So, as soon as I could spell I started writing stories and poems and family newsletters and plays for my sister, Alaina and I to put on in living room. It was like a habit I had formed. And that was who I was. A writer.

Since it was instilled in me so early on in my life, writing has always felt like the best way for me to communicate to others. I think this is why I chose to pursue writing in college. It was great to me that this thing I just did automatically could be something I could study and eventually make a career out of. It wasn’t so much a question of whether or not I would write- I always had. It was a question of what type of writing I would pursue. I chose journalism.

The importance of journalism is that it works to give a voice to something or someone that can’t speak for themselves. However, I have also always been a creative writer, so I hope to write for a magazine where I can utilize a more creative voice in my reporting. I became a writer because it was an outlet for communication. In a magazine environment, I will be able to speak for those who can’t, but do it in a way that embraces my personal voice as well. I didn’t become a writer for the sake of reporting. I feel that writing is what I do to express myself. I send four page letters to my friends, and my notebooks are lined with half written poems- someone who writes when they feel they have something to say, that is a writer. Reporting to me is simply a skill I’ve developed as a writer. It is just another way that I have learned to construct words.

Ever since I was small, I felt the need to share. I think the most important part of our human experience is to connect to other people. That is what all art works to do. I write because the written word is the tool I have chosen to do that with. Whether I write creatively or journalistically, my purpose for writing is to share something with my reader. Just like everyone else, I want to be heard and understood. Writing down words has always been the most natural and rewarding way for me to do that.

Writing Sample

While reading Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, I became intrigued by her creation of a fictional sister of Shakespeare, named Judith. Woolf believed that if Judith had been a real person, she would have killed herself from frustration with the stifling of her creative voice by patriarchal society. The reason this struck me was because Woolf seemed to nearly prophesized her own suicide, which she committed by filling her pockets with heavy stones and walking into a river.

There are two references in this poem to works done by Woolf. The line “You are loveliness incarnate” comes from the novel Orlando, which has a main character who changes genders in the middle of the story. The novel has been said to be one long love letter to Vita, Woolf’s first female partner. The title “But I beneath a rougher sea,” comes from her novel To the Lighthouse. The line is a way of describing the pain of loss within the story and it is one of my favorites of her lines. It felt like being immersed in a calm reverence amidst chaos, which is what I wanted to describe with this poem- as unfortunate as her death was, Woolf left a legacy of humanism through defiant and striking literature.

But I beneath a rougher sea

i

Counting stones, she thought of
the weight of men, of
so many years wrought
in dense quiet,
and a calm that would not
find her.

Forward to the folding water,
gone there to meet that peace
and the soft rush of depth-
warm like slow breath,
heavy with salt.

ii

Immersed
she may have conjured
Ophelia, as if she was
of Judith’s ink, and of
a history written in her own.

No sinking stones, no
hanging pockets. No tangled
throats without sound.

No hiding words, no Ellis Bell.

No flowers floating in knots of
golden hair.

iii

Willing herself to her Vita, she hums
                        “You are loveliness incarnate.”
Then sand, then dark.

iv

That water ever pulls
at the stones
of a trembling shore.