Name of Assignment: Nā Leo Poems
Subject: Creative Writing Facilitator/Teacher: Paul Wood Nā Leo is a literary publication run by UH students. Mr Wood told us that we could get extra credit if we submitted some of the pieces we wrote for his class to Nā Leo, and that we could even earn a cash prize. I decided to submit two of my poems, "Moon" and "The Girl And The Crows". This assignment addresses Communication skills in two ways. First, poetry is a form of communication, but it is one that we aren't usually very used to using. Second, I had to reach out to the editors of Nā Leo via email to submit my poems, and it took a while to figure out how I should phrase it and how formal I needed to be. Honestly, I'm most proud of the fact that I did this assignment. Since it was an extra credit assignment, I didn't need to do it, but I knew it would be a good experience to have sent my work to a publication for the first time. I improved my Communication skills during this assignment both through writing the poems, which requires communicating specific emotions through abstract language and metaphors, and sending my poems in, which meant figuring out what to say and how. The hardest part of this assignment was picking which poems to send in. I had other pieces I was more proud of, but they were in prose and I wanted to send poems, so I had to only pick from my poetry assignments. If I started this assignment over, I would just do it sooner. Nā Leo takes a very long time to get around to reviewing submissions, much less deciding to publish them, so it will likely be a while before I know if they will publish my work, and I would have liked to know sooner. I have done assignments where I have to write something as if I was going to publish it, but this was the first assignment where I actually had to send it in for review. In the future, now that I know what it's like to try to get my work published, I can do the same with anything I write in college if there's a similar student-run magazine or publication. |