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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (March 29, 1985)
Creative drive By CATHY RIELY Staff Writer Writing, for some, is the clarification of life. And life for the entrants of the Texas A&M Spring 1985 Writing Contest is varied — from English to pe troleum engineering. But they all take the risk and they write. The first place winner in the short story contest says she al most didn’t enter. Kimberly Trant had her story in an enve lope, ready to go, but on the last day for entries decided to blow it off. Her husband took the story and entered it any way. She wrote the story, “I Can Still Count,” for a creative writ ing class she took in the sum mer, Trant says. She was preg nant at the time and says she “needed a course that I could miss some but still keep up — a course where they didn't lec ture every' day.” So she tried creative writing. Trant, a senior journalism major, says the story' idea origi nally came from an article written for a journalism class. Her grandmother, who is in a nursing home, had been the subject of a personality profile written as a journalism assign ment. “I already had this frame work and I took that story and fictionalized it a little bit — so it’s all really based on truth — that’s my grandmother in the story,” she says. Trant says that writing acts as a catharsis for her. “There are some things you can’t deal with, so you write about them,” she says. “Instead of sitting down and trying to deal with them —you just write.” Trant’s grandmother had a stroke seven or eight years ago. “Half the time everyone thinks she’s just gone,” Trant says. One day while visiting at the nursing home her grand mother told her “I can still count.” “She kept on telling me that — I can still count,” Trant savs. “I thought there must be some reason for her telling me this — is she totally off her rocker or is she trying to tell me something. And I hated to gives varying results think she was totally off her rocker.” Therese Norris, who wrote the first place poem, also drew' from personal experience for her entry. Norris, a graduate student in physiology of repro duction, lived for four months in Kabul, Afghanistan, which is the subject of her poem, “Ka bul 1974." Her uncle worked in the State Department and was sta tioned there when Norris went to visit him. Her parents had sent her to Kabul as a high school graduation present. Like Trant, Norris wrote her winning entry in a creative writing class. She took the class at Virginia Polytechnic Insti tute where she did her under graduate work. She says VPI is similar to A6=M in many ways. The college has a corps of ca dets and is located in a town much like Bryan. Her poem documents the observations of a 16-year-old American girl in Afghanistan, Norris savs. She hopes her poem will give others insight into what it’s like to live out side this country. A lot of Americans don’t ever , get a chance to go overseas and see the world — to see what it’s really like in another country, she says. Norris says her poem may “get a bunch of Islamic people mad at her” because of the negative view presented of the Muslim religion. She says she believes Islam is a repressive religion towards women. The religion is demanding and puts constraints on its believers, she says. “Men have more freedom, in that they are the master of women — that is what their religion dictates,” she says. “Women are to be their ser vants.” When she lived in Kabul, Norris was stared at a lot. She savs this was because the reli gion didn’t allow the men to look at Muslim women. “It was not considered proper to stare at their own women so they always looked at foreign women,” she says. “I also lived in Turkey and that was true there too — same reli gion.” The Islamic people viewed foreign women as prostitutes because they travel, Norris says. The Muslims’ whole idea of American women came from James Bond movies and Playboy, she says. When she originally wrote the poem, Norris had footnotes explaining the Islamic words. However that proved to be too cumbersome to the reader be cause they had to look up and down. The words are spelled phonetically in the second ver sion. This enables the reader to read the poem smoothly. Nor ris also explains the words in context. Professors from A&=M’s En glish department judged the creative writing contest. They divided the task, three taking the short stories and three tak ing the poetry. They read the entries and selected a list of top contenders. The winning poem and the winning short story were the only entries appearing on all three judges’ lists; the other finalists’ names appeared on two. Kabul, 1974 Therese Norris In every section of the city- in Wazer and Sheri-now, in Car-ta-say and Car-ta-char- the mullah calls the faithful. Five times a day. Face Mecca. In the bazaars: pots, pans, bartering, carcasses of chickens and lambs, hordes of flies. Outside the tea shops the aroma of chars competes with the stench from the jii-e, a roadside sew age ditch. At the arena thousands watch bush-ka-she. Teams of riders and horses fight to place a goat skin in a dirt circle. Down Dar-la-man buses, lorries and taxies rush past houses with ten foot walls. Walls are like a woman’s sha-dra. To discourage curious eyes. Allah made woman to be man’s servant. A man divorces his wife by saying “I divorce thee” three times. A w oman that travels is a w hore. Five times a day the mullah calls for the faithful to submit to Allah.