Personal Reflection

The ISU experience is never one of my favourites, to be honest. It is a hectic and long process that extends over a long period of time, just irking my natural sense of procrastination. The entire project was plagued with "I'll do it tomorrow's" and "I still have till April's", which made it very difficult to maintain the same focus throughout. Aside from the negative, a few good things did come out of the ISU to my unsuspecting surprise.

For one, I became acquainted with an author I've heard much about. I have been known to take some what of a feminist stance in certain situations, just ask Mrs. McConkey or any one of my friends, it's become one of my dominant traits ...jokingly of course. I've heard people tell me that I should pick up an Atwood book because of her female protagonist specialties and her talent for man-bashing, not that I take interest in that. So witnessing for myself, I payed attention to the careful ways in which she blended feminism into her story, and it wasn't the obtrusive man bashing I thought I'd see. It was very discreet, and I learned the ways in which to convey a strong, and sometimes malignant message, in between the lines, it was fun.

My writing style did not change or improve to the best of my knowledge, for the tone was typically informal and I did not exercise any powerful expressions or new vocabulary into my writing, I suppose I should have. I did not really think of this project as a chance to develop my writing, and honestly I can't tell how blind I was to assume that, every English assignment is a chance to develop your writing, you just have to constantly keep the idea in the back of your head as you write, changing words and forming more sophisticated sentences.

The blog was an interesting twist, it indubitably changed my word choice. Knowing that other's were susceptible to view my work had me monitoring my thoughts, and I probably wrote half of my ideas in edited form, writing the way other's would like to hear it, not myself. This is uncharacteristic of me, I usually write from my heart and say what I need to say, the idea that ANY ONE could read my posts was intimidating, I felt contained, a yucky feeling for writers.

In the initial stages of finding an appropriate book, I suppose I should be honest and say that I really didn't see myself finding an excellent read in the genre of Canadian Literature. Maybe this is because I was extremely hoping that Stephenie Meyer was secretly Canadian, but what ever the reason, and I'm sure that was it, I wasn't looking forward to finding a book. I asked parents to find me one, and I eventually decided that I'd give Atwood a try, I was pleasantly surprised. I truly was very happy to realize that when people think of feminism, they think Margaret Atwood, and in turn, they think Canadian Author. It gave me a huge sense of pride, one that I did not expect.

I have come to realize an important learning style I associate with, and I'm still questioning the possibilities of this style being a good thing. I tend to, in the end of a novel or piece of work, get hit by "the big picture." If I do not understand through out the text, I will undoubtedly be hit by a wave of realization some time after I finish, and this will cause me to look back and wonder how I could have missed a certain point, or strayed in an absent minded wrong direction. It's very strange to think of this as something I often do, but with novel's it seems to be the case. I love to revisit certain parts of novels and understand the story more fully after I'm done, it's a backwards method, and certainly not conventional I would assume, but I do it, and I have realized this in the process of this ISU.

I feel as though I have been welcomed into a cult of literature, a secret, intellectual cult where hooded men sit around scholarly tables and discuss philosophical questions that no one could answer in a million years. It's the same group of people that read anything and everything, the kind of people that I'm not brave enough to be, or open minded enough to have patience for. Reading a piece of Canadian literature gives me the feeling that I'm in on the secret, the heritage of our country spread out in front of me, giving way to hoards of mysterious techniques that only the best of the best can use. Oh, the pride is strong in this one. I now know what I have been missing, the experience of a lifetime revealed in the pages of the goddess of feminist critique and poetic descriptions that Shakespeare himself would gladly starve himself to attain.

But seriously, I did enjoy reading one of our own, it's nice to see that Canadians can produce two of the best things in life, amazing literature and beaver tails.
A unique and enthralling experience, thank you for the opportunity to explore something different.