Academic Portfolio

I wrote this piece mid-way through my ASU program. The class was Methods/Issues of Teaching Composition. This was a required class and even though I never planned on teaching, taking the class gave me an understanding of what it is like to draw up lesson plans and teach, further cementing the knowledge that I would never do it. My first assignment was to write about my writing history and I found that to be so interesting. It gave me time to reflect on things I never had really thought of and to look back, see the trajectory of my writing, and see that it was always a part of me.

Gina Ruiz

Professor Shawn Towner

ENG 507

29 August 2022

Writing is my History

Writing is something I have been doing since I could hold a pencil. My father likes to tell stories about how he caught me scribbling all over his newspaper and when he demanded to know what I thought I was doing marking up his paper, he says that I said, “writing better stories than these.” He swears that after that he would buy two papers, one for him to read and one for me to scribble on. My mother hated the newsprint on my hands, but my father was sure I would be a reporter. Once I could read and write, I graduated from newsprint to actual notebooks and decided I would not be a journalist, but instead tell stories. I ended up somewhere in between.

However, it wasn’t until 2012, when I became a PEN Emerging Voices Fellowship finalist that I finally believed I was truly a writer. PEN America has been around for a hundred years and is an organization that champions the freedom to write. The Emerging Voices Fellowship, at that time, provided a one-year immersive writing mentorship program (it is now virtual and five months long due to the pandemic). The mentorship program includes introductions to editors, agents, and other publishing industry players; with the panelists being experienced, published writers that can provide valuable feedback and mentoring.  Hearing the feedback from the panelists and knowing how far I had gotten in the process really helped me to believe in my writing far more than some of my published articles did. Even though I didn’t win, that was a pivotal year for me, and I published stories in a few anthologies shortly thereafter that I wouldn’t have had the courage to submit before that. PEN gave me the courage to submit more and move out of my comfort zone.

Sometimes I write short stories, mostly I write profiles about chefs, I write about food and food history, and how food writing in literature matters. Since I started this program, I haven’t written much of anything for my freelance career because a full-time job and a Master of Arts program do not leave me much time. Whenever I get a break, however, I am back at my computer hammering out words or filling my Scrivener files with research materials and notes for the next non-graduate program project.

I live in a large loft in what used to be a barn when this part of Los Angeles was all farmland and orange groves. I have the whole top floor. It used to be the hayloft. The area I live in, the border of Mt. Washington and Highland Park in Northeastern Los Angeles, has a rich and diverse history. During Prohibition, this was the place the rich kids came to drink, carouse, party, and visit a red-light district. Around the corner from me is the Charles Lummis House, one of the sites of those 1920s raves. Mt. Washington and Highland Park are both known for their creative artist communities, though gentrification has sent most of the artists scurrying for the desert and cheaper rent. Since my place is so large, I have a huge writing room/office that overlooks a busy street at what used to be part of the last leg of Route 66. While this may sound great, my apartment has no air conditioning, and my office faces west onto Figueroa Street. It can be terribly hot up here in the summer, freezing in the winter. It can be noisy because Figueroa is a large and busy street and during the summer, the constant churn of my portable A/C keeps me company while I write. Still, I am lucky to have the large space, which I’ve turned into a huge library, research room, and office. It seems I am constantly shoving something over or taking art off the walls to make room for more file cabinets and bookshelves. There are three desks in my office. One holds my desktop computer, and the other is an old 1950s oak desk that I use for mapping out large projects for work, spreading out research, and studying. The last desk is a tiny rolltop writing desk and it is there that I do my letter writing and journal writing. Why three desks? The huge oak desk was my granddad’s so I can’t give it up. It’s made for a tall man – my grandfather Cecil was a whopping six foot eight inches tall. I can’t use it for a computer since I’m only 5’3. The little antique writing desk belonged to my grandmother and has no room for a computer. The desks all serve a purpose. Admittedly, I could chuck them all and get one U-shaped modern desk to serve all my writing purposes, but the historian in me won’t allow it. I also have a collection of vintage typewriters here. I know this is a writing history, not the history of my furniture, but this is my writing room and it contains the history of my family, of writing, and of my own evolution as a writer.

In my file cabinets and drawers, I keep all my writing history. There are drawers full of old journals and writing notebooks, printouts in binders of old articles and essays, and even some of the old stories I wrote in grade school. My writing room is full of books. I collect books on writing. My food studies library is extensive, and I have a magpie-like obsession with books. If I am researching a topic, suddenly I need everything ever written about that topic. If I am writing fiction and my character has a hobby or profession, that becomes my next obsession. Hence, I currently am working on an herbarium and on my walks, collect specimens for it because that’s what my character would do. My research file cabinets are crammed with journal articles on everything from Cicero’s garden to neurogastronomy, old recipes, and stacks of notepads filled with ideas. I have every essay and the accompanying research that I’ve ever written-both for college and my freelance career.

As I look around my writing room, I see that my writing over the years has become its own history-a history I can read up on and research to resurrect old ideas or thoughts; or remember something I wrote on a subject that just may have some relevance to something new I am working on now. It is a living history that is constantly evolving. My writing is in a constant state of evolution and growth. The more classes I take on writing or the more things I learn in my personal, work, and student lives, the more I find that my writing experiences change. It gets better, stronger, and sometimes, it suffers from having too much thrown at it, and I must pare it back.

Like any writer, I am always seeking inspiration. These days it sometimes comes in the form of Midjourney, an AI program that takes words and processes them into art. I am new to Midjourney, but I like it. I started out fiddling to see if I could get a character portrait and give some of my characters faces for a novel I am working on. Some of my first attempts didn’t come out right but they gave me other ideas for other stories and characters, and now, I have a Midjourney folder full of ideas, along with a notebook where I brainstorm those ideas.

My writing history also is the past. In my family, it is me who documents all the history, information, and genealogy and pulls it all together into books for family reunions. I am also the family obit and eulogy writer, though not by choice. My sisters are not writers, nor do they care as much as I do about family history. My cousin Alicia and I are the ones that are passionate about it and while she is a fine archivist, she is not a writer so that task falls to me. There is something to be said for being the family history documentarian. The magpie in me loves finding old photos and records, receipts for my grandmother’s flowers for her wedding bouquet, old love letters, and other ephemera. I spend a lot of time with Alicia going through audio tapes, family papers, and letters. In reading through a lot of my family’s history and documenting it, I find I am writing some of California’s history as well, and as an amateur historian, that makes me incredibly happy. My mother’s side of the family arrived here during the Mexican Revolution and lived on a ranch in Piru, California called Rancho Camulos, the site of Helen Hunt Jackson’s novel, Ramona, first published in 1884 and still in print today. The family lived in unimaginable conditions on the ranch, with my great-uncles and great-aunts all moving away and leading successful lives as adults. They lived through a revolution, a depression, Spanish Influenza, two World Wars, and huge change here in California as farmland became urbanized. Through their letters and photos, my cousin and I have documented quite a bit of the history of California and we intend to donate some of our family archives to Rancho Camulos.

During this pandemic, my writing history has helped me in drafting COVID policies at work and I’ve assisted the attorneys I work with start writing case law for Workers’ Compensation for employees that contract COVID-19 at work. That too is historical, and it is so fascinating to be part of the process of seeing how this pandemic is changing the way we do business, and the way we attend court (most California courts are still using Lifesize, a secure court version of something like Zoom or Teams), and how we protect people in the workplace that contract the virus. While this type of technical writing is not my favorite and can often be dry, it is important, and I can use tools from creative narrative nonfiction to help make those policies and procedures not so boring for the people we employ.

I am a letter writer as well. I do so much of my writing work on the computer, though I still take notes in longhand because it helps my creative process. At the beginning of the pandemic, when my office all moved to remote work and people were feeling isolated, I started handwriting cards and notes to cheer up friends, co-workers, and family. It ended up turning into letter writing as some of my older aunts and my father really liked receiving long letters in the mail. I find that letter writing is helping my creative process as well, much in the way journaling does. Letter writing to my family and friends also helps me memorialize seemingly ordinary days during a historical time.

My biggest writing challenge is time. I sometimes miss the days when I had tons of free time after work to write but being in this M.A. program is giving me more inspiration, and education, and while I’m not working on my novel as much as I should be, I am still writing essays and discussion posts. The feedback I get from peer review is invaluable and when I do get back to working on my novel, the things I learn here at ASU will make that novel better and become part of my ever-evolving writing history.