“We do not learn from experience...
we learn from reflecting on experience.”
― John Dewey

At the beginning of the project, I identified a list of texts to read and wrote out a tentative schedule on what components I wanted to get done at which points during the eight weeks I would be working. I knew the weeks were going to go by faster than I thought they would, so I wanted to try and get myself as organized as possible as early as I could. My first goal was to create a working definition of "lyric essay" so that I could distinguish it from other essays in the texts that I read (there are very few solely lyric essay collections, and there is no lyric essay sections in libraries or book stores). A lot of my researching time was spent picking through anthologies for lyric essays, or researching essayists known to write lyric essays and searching for their books. After the initial research stretch I began writing. I wrote the syllabus first, and then the essay collection. The syllabus would include my defintions of lyric essays and be the bedrock that the rest of the project would build itself off of, so I felt that it should be written first. I was still reading and researching while writing, dividing my time between these activities. I didn't want to just write because there is the risk of burning myself out, and I wanted to expose myself to as many sources on lyric essays as I could, so this strategy worked well for me. I waited to write the curriculum last so that I would have read as many texts as I could in the time alloted, allowing myself to have the widest scope as possible for resources to choose from.

During the eight weeks I worked as a Summer Scholar, I was pleasantly surprised by just how much I could get done in a day. Since I didn't have to juggle my usual responsibilties of classwork, extracurriculars, and other aspects of student life, I was able to devote more of my time and energy on this project than I would have gotten the chance too if I had done this during the school year. I'm honestly amazed with how much I was able to write and read within the  eight weeks, since I pretty much finished everything I said I was going to do.

The biggest obstacle for me was time managment. At first I had difficulty getting in all of my work hours in a day. This was mostly the fault of a flightly concentration -- there were so many things I needed to do, and it felt like sometimes I had to do them all at once. This lead me to trying to do too much at once and not finishing anything, or wasting time figuring out what to do. To combat this I began making a flexible daily work schedule, detailing what I should be doing at what times. I found this extremely helpful; it gave my work day structure and helped me to focus. 

Another obstacle was the ambiguity of lyric essays themselves. While finding sources discussing lyric essays wasn't too hard, none of the authors of these sources defined clearly and consistently what a lyric essay was. I found them often to be too short and simplified, or too long and convoluted to be particularly helpful. Not to mention that the five types of lyric essays that I mentioned -- prose poem, flash nonfiction, collage, braided, and hermit crab -- are hard to find guidelines for and often share similar traits. There was a lot of nit-picking and condenscing done to compose the defintions I was able to create for all of this. I found the best way to tackle this problem was to look for the similar threads between all of the definitions -- what did everyone seem agree about? -- and compare it to my own knowledge/experience with lyric essays. Eventually I had sorted through enough information to create my working definitions of lyric essays and what the five types of them are, and go on with my project from there.

Working independently on a project like this over the summer has been incredibly different from any other project that I have ever worked on. I have never worked on a project so large in scale before, and never with the amount of control that I had with this. I got to work at my own pace and use whatever time of day or night I felt most comfortable devoting to my work. During the school year, with academic and extracurriculur responsibilites to take into account, I have to work around much stricter schedules and have much less freedom of what material I get to work with. With this project I got to control most of it, allowing me to dedicate more time and energy to my work and reach a level of productiveness than I never knew I could achieve before.

My Faculty Mentor, Professor Katie Marks, had me engage in two reflection activities during my project. The first was an infomal daily journal where I recorded my progress and thoughts, and the second was her asking me questions during our weekly meetings reflecting upon my experience with the project so far. I found both activities to be helpful toward my work progress. The journal allowed me to recount what I had gotten done, helping me keep track of what I still needed to do while also allow me an outlet for my feelings and thoughts on my work. The questions at the weekly meetings helped Katie and I organize my work schedule/rest schedule, decide what materials needed more work than others, see how much progress I had made, and also show how productive I had been. I have never worked on a project like this before, so these exercises for reflection really allowed me to see my project and project's progress from a perspective I wouldn't have had otherwise. For future assignments or work, I think I would like to practice similar exercises to help keep myself in check. 

Due to a writer's conference in Iceland during the first week of my project, Professor Marks and I were unable to meet in person and stayed in communication through email. Once she had returned though we began to hold a weekly meeting every week in her office, and we would exchange edited drafts and updates of my work through email. Professor Marks would also suggest more sources for me to check out (she actually gave me a large portion of my source list and even let me borrow some of her books), was always available for questions, helped to edit my work, and overall helped point me and my research in the right direction. We had a friendly relationship, and I felt comfortable going to her to ask for her advice. As this was a project that required a lot of researching and writing on my own, I felt this level of involvement was suitable and worked really well for us.

Participating in this project has not only confirmed my desire to stay with writing, but also has given me a much needed confidence boost with it as well. Now that I have experienced what it is like to do full-time research/writing, I can now say how I feel about careers or studies that feature a lot of that type of work. I don't know if I want to become a professor, despite what I did for my project, but I did like doing this type of scholarly work and hope to stay on the path that I am on now for my future career.  

While I basically finished everything I said I would this summer, there is still some work with my project that I would like to continue in the future. For one, I would like to continue to expand my lyric essay collection. I really enjoyed working on it, and think it could make an impressive book if it were longer and developed more. With the lyric essay class syllabus and curriculum, I would like to continue to polish them and (hopefully) present it to the Writing Department someday and have them consider adding a lyric essay class to their roster of classes.