KRISTEN BOUDREAU
Writing Portfolio
EXPERIMENTS
In Writing 220: Gateway to the Minor in Writing, we were tasked with choosing a topic that we wanted to pursue in the course. We then had to choose three genres to explore as potential avenues for this topic with regards to our final project.
For my experiment, I chose narrative poetry as my genre because I feel like it is the perfect genre for my experiment. My two main goals for my final project are to immerse my reader in my experiences, and to make the reader feel emotions that I felt. These goals I have for my project fit the purposes of narrative poetry.
For this project, I decided to go with the personal essay for my genre. I have always cringed at the word “essay” because the constraints for an essay are usually quite tight, but this is not necessarily true for the personal essay. This genre allows for a lot more creativity, and no one personal essay is alike.
Even though the op-ed is not necessarily a radical genre choice compared to, say, a documentary, it is fairly radical for my thought process and fairly different from my origin piece. I started out this class with the mindset that I wanted to talk about my experiences and only my experiences. With this genre I was able to stray from this mindset and be more open with how other people’s voices or other people’s experiences could contribute to a larger conversation, with my voice still being central.
A narrative poem about my best friend telling me she might have an eating disorder, which triggers memories about my own.