Dear Reviewer:

To some, the exploration of the depths of a normal nine-year-old mind would mean a misadventure filled with rudimentary fantasies of the Power Rangers and Barbie, but to others, like a crazy old coot (who just happened to be my favorite teacher - at the time), the strange world of a nine-year-old was one-tenth fraught only with deviant thoughts and beliefs while the other nine-tenths was oddly filled with pointless questions or nothingness.

"He needs help!" was the exclamation of my fourth grade teacher, Ms. Rainer, directly referring to me. Help? In what possible way did I need help? I was able to captivate my audience in ways the others could only imagine with thrilling tales of deceit, supernaturalistic occurrences, gruesome deaths, and I had uncanny wit to boot. I certainly did not need psychological help - I was the sanest person I knew (I was a Cardinals fan)! So what if I was obsessed with pigs' possessing machine guns and the idea that they could go on killer rampages and leave a trail of utter catastrophe? I never actually wrote seriouslsy about it. I just drew pictures of my inner thoughts. I was expressing myself in the only way I knew! Later, through meditative thoughts deep within my cerebellic realms, I would learn how to convey those pictures into words.

These dishustingly violent stories were what the people wanted! I was just complying and going with the flow, aiding and abetting the unquenchable thirst my peers had for my multi-talented writing. Who actually cared (besides all adults) if I were a bit too graphic in my depictions of the characters surmises and demises? I was able to breathe life into my characters' (as well as a fourth grader can) and then suck it right back out with surprisingly fluid imagination!

This was my style, my essence. To be nasty and crude was the kernel of the truly great and was the message I wanted to sell. I would continue to write with that certain flair and thrill all English teachers until the day that my high school freshman English teacher, so exasperated by my utter and refulgent repugnancy, screamed for me to discontinue at my current projected place (nowhere) in writing history.

In the middle of a little something I had entitled "When I First Met William Loera II," I had just finished describing the physical and mental atrocities of Loera and was beginning to develop a headache from the non-stop laughing I had endured for the last five minutes (the mark of a truly astounding writer is when he can find hilarity in his/her own writing). Ms. Thornton, however, decided to stop the splendor of the story in full swing. "STOP READING!" she screamed at me finally. Ms. Thornton would proceed to lecture about how I had talent and how she wanted me so desperately to use it. What she was really saying was: This sucks! If you ever actually have the audacity to turn in a piece of crap like this again, I will fail you!

That soul-awakening experience would begin an odyssey not fully realized until this year, when I saw a light at the end of the writing tunnel - a stunning and magnificent light! My writing style had undergone a sagacious and significant change, a change destined to alter all English teachers' opinions of me! Instead of belittling my fictional stories, they now praised them and said I had an amazing talent! I, now, was able to create an atmosphere so alive with creativity that I could draw the reader into my world, show the reader what I wanted to show, be in control!

Still, even though I had a particular style, a defining trait, I couldn't quite manage to piece together a portfolio symbolic of the way I thought. Typically, I would fill all required writing portfolios with stories of fantasies of blowing up my classmates (I was real popular) with grenade launchers and stabbing them in the fashion of Caesar with celery sticks and maybe a book report just to make the teacher believe I was sane some of the time.

I wrote such hated classics as "The Dumb Fools," a wacky and psychotic look into the lives of two cops tracking ten female serial killers, and "The Masterpiece," a satirical portrayal of two cops following Don TooTall and his sardonic bunch of bounty hunters. Obviously, not much intelligence and creativity was required for stories of that stature and while the finished product was something I like to consider smooth, it didn't satisfy me. I was looking for something that would quench my unquenchable thirst and not the thirst of others.

Fulfillment would not arrive until my senior year in high school. Up until this point, a portfolio belonging to me consisted of no more than several personal narratives (a la Fallacious Reasoning) and an understandably tedious research paper where I was no doubt assigned a topic to discuss.

My first project for my portfolio was an in depth and personal account of a school I had encountered in tenth grade. "Fallacious Reasoning" was a story I had originally written in my sophomore year and at the time, I thought I could do no better. Faced with the dilemma of having to write a personal narrative for my portfolio, however, drove me to at least give it another chance and try to bring my story up to senior standards. What I saw amazed me. I was able to change nearly the whole story and improve upon nearly every facet of the non-fictional facts.

The poem was also a challenge, but I never thought it would be easy. I had never successfully been able to write a poem before with my being happy wioth it, and it took until the last minute to compose the poem "Preferable Remembrance." Writing a poem, a poem that was revered by others, was my ultimate goal and I achieved it. After I composed the poem, it did a lot for my self-confidence it terms of writing because a series of figurative shots in the arm showed me that I was more than a one-dimensional writer. It was an illustration of colossal magnitude for I first began to believe that I could write seriously as well and not joke my way through a paper. Truthfully, I felt the poem was a bit crass, but when others complimented the poem, all was well. One has to consider, however, that I do not write seriously for myself, but rather for others.

Perhaps one of the harder challenges for me that I had first believed to be easy was my analytical anecdote, "An Unparalleled Countenance of He." I imagined just writing it plainly and doing nothing special with it, but I quickly realized that wasn't the way when I got it back with no comments attached. The utter realization that my story sucked and was tacky was a bit too much for me to handle and I didn't feel like experiencing that humiliation again. Thinking hard and long about any possibilities feasible, I quickly found my problem to be that I had to put myself in the passenger seat in this story, whereas I was used to and able to better operate when I was driving the story. It didn't take much imagination to stir my way past that little obstacle and better suit it for myself. I centered the anecdote around the other person but still kept it in the format of a personal narrative. Writing the analysis taught me that there is always a loophole and that it's always possible to simplify writing or change it to your style. Conforming is a serious part of writing.

I do consider that I have grown as a writer during my senior year of high school. I have taken on a wider variety of topics and have successfully completed nearly all of those tasks, which I believe to be quite impressive.

                                             Sincerely,

                                           Jerry The Great