Predeparture Shenanigans

Hello all and welcome to my blog!

I hope it becomes more successful than many of my other blogging attempts have been (read: wrote a weeks worth of entries and was then distracted by life). However, since the point of this blog is to record everything that I'm doing and seeing, perhaps it will become more concretely routine.

I suppose I should explain a few things in case anyone not related to or immediately connected to me should stumble upon this and find it interesting (shockingly doubtful, but you never know!). My name is Anna Krueger and I'm about to be a senior at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. I'm an English major, a Psychology minor, and am also part of the Undergraduate Creative Writing Track for poetry.

Writing has been becoming increasingly more important within my life since my junior year of high school and has seemingly led me here: about to embark on Iowa's 2011 Summer Irish Creative Writing Program taking place in Dublin! It's fairly exciting (and slightly terrifying) for me for numerous reasons, the first of which being that I've never traveled outside of the North American continent.

I'll be going here! Pretty, right? Very not-North America, which is key.

I've been fortunate enough to have a family that embarks on many traveling adventures across America, from Yellowstone to the Grand Canyon to the Gulf of Mexico. I feel pretty well versed in the long car rides through South Dakota grasslands (very beautiful, like a rippling green sea), midwestern corn/wheat/cow fields, and roads lined by precarious looking rocky precipices. However, while I've been to many of the 50 states, a good chunk of Canada, and Mexico for approximately 10 minutes, I've never made it overseas. So I'll be experiencing passport inspection and daunting airport security for the first time, which will probably lead to me obsessively looking over my required papers about half a billion times just to make sure they haven't disentegrated or blown away in the wind. I'll also be experiencing a place that is completely NEW, which is fantastic and scary in itself. I expect to get lost (more than I do at home, if that's possible) and to feel pretty googley-eyed a lot of the time. That's okay though, perhaps I can pull off the "charmingly confused American" look....and hopefully it won't come off as "stupid American fool." At least they speak English, right? But seriously, I'm so thankful to be going to such a beautiful place and I can't wait to watch that beauty unfold before me (super cheesey, but go with it).

Omnomnom, schmaltz-ey!

Okay so this started off as a list of reasons I'm excited/nervous right? Paragraph flow, connecting points, all that jazz. Second big reason is the fact that this is a writing program, specifically prose. From what I understand (syllabus outlining is still fairly murky at this point in the game) we have an Irish literature/drama/culture class where we'll be, you know, reading and discussing books and history and then a writing workshop class where we turn in original pieces and everyone gets to read them and judge how hungover you were when you came up with them. Just kidding. Sorta. The workshop thing certainly isn't new to me, but the prose thing kinda is. I've primarily been a poet for most of what I consider my "serious" writing years. I've written some prose (mostly for class assignments) and even some pieces that I can read without cringing, but it pretty much ends there.

Writing poems instead of short stories is an entirely different animal and requires the training/flexing of very different....mental muscles, if you will. It's probably going to be a bit tricky for me to suddenly start pumping out 5 page stories when I'm used to writing 20-30 lines of poem. Couple that with the fact that the writing workload for the program is anything but light, and I'm looking at some looooong nights spent feverishly bashing my head against the computer screen and willing my fingers to magically type something coherent. But in the same breath, I'm excited! I'll be forced to confront something I'm not totally comfortable with and hopefully it'll help me become a fabulous prose writer! Okay...maybe not so much, but it will at least help me learn more about myself as a writer overall, and give me some new tools to work with, even if I only write poetry for the rest of my life.

I'm realizing that this is getting super long, and I'm also realizing that the rest of the blog will probably have less to do with my hopes and dreams and more about "I went to a castle today! Irish pub beer is great! I got lost today, but here's a picture of a cool sign I found!" Pictures are definitely something I want to do on here and that goal will serve as an incentive to remember to use my camera. I always intend to come back from trips with massive amounts of beautiful photos capturing each moment...and then the camera stays nestled safely in the corner of my suitcase the entire time. Look! I visited...my socks. Ah, the memories.

This appears to be a lunchbox rather than a legit suitcase...but it does have socks with owls on them! 

Anyway, tata for now! I'm sure a post wherein I panic about packing is soon to follow. Hopefully the bulk of my posting won't end up being before I actually leave...but you never know :]