From Chaos to Creativity: One Teacher’s Path to a Writing Degree

Former high school teacher 和 lifelong writer 艾莉莫兰 finds her perfect fit in the Professional Creative Nonfiction Writing program at University College.

艾莉莫兰 will never forget the day she decided to go to graduate school.

那是2021年的秋天, 和 she was in her classroom at Denver’s East High School, 她在那里教英语. 突然, 学校被封锁了, 和 Ellie was stuck with her rowdiest class of seniors, 等了两个小时，一打警察, a SWAT team 和 bomb-sniffing dogs went through the building.

“And I said to myself, that’s it, I’ve got to go to grad school. 那就是我下定决心的那一刻. 那天我回到家，就申请了正规赌博十大平台排行。.

埃莉一直在东方学校教书, 她的母校, for five years—an experience she calls both “delightful” 和 “tumultuous.“她爱她的学生, 她的同事和教育领域, but the pressures of being a teacher were too much—和 not just because of lockdowns.

“我才上五年级, 我觉得自己快淹死了, like I didn’t have the brain space or capacity to learn or be creative,她说。. The curriculum she taught had started to feel monotonous, 和 she wanted to spend more time writing.

作为一名本科生, she double majored in creative writing 和 secondary education at the University of Colorado Boulder. 她在东方工作了几年, she decided to get a master’s degree in curriculum 和 instruction but, 就在她准备开始这个项目之前, 她恍然大悟.

“我正走向一家咖啡店，然后, 我不知道为什么, 但我只是问自己, “你为什么要去读研究生??我唯一的答案就是赚更多的钱. 我说，‘什么?’ I can’t do something I’m not passionate about,” Ellie says. 那天下午, 她说, she deferred her enrollment 和 removed herself from the pool completely about a week later.

“我每天都得写作。”

她意识到写作是她想做的事情. “对我来说，这就像是生存. I don’t know how to navigate the world without it,” Ellie says. “我每天都要写作. I observe so many things in a day, there’s so many things in [my head], that I have to expel them.”

在2022年秋天，埃莉加入了 University College’s Professional Creative Nonfiction Writing program, which 她说 is a perfect fit for the memoir style of writing she enjoys most. “我的记忆力和大象差不多. I remember everything 和 enjoy writing about the things I remember,” she explains. “I don’t necessarily enjoy writing about things that haven’t happened.”

创造力来了, 她说, by embedding her nonfiction with poetry 和 figurative language or adding images 和 “kind of just visually playing around” on the page.

“It feels like weaving, weaving creativity into the truth. It’s essentially making your personal story universal, taking the stories I see in my everyday life 和 pulling out the universal truths,她说。.

Now working as an enrichment coordinator for a Montessori academy in Denver, Ellie says her long-term goal is to get into publishing. 大学学院课程, 她说, was an easy choice because of its flexible schedule 和 virtual option.

“There are times where I’ve been wildly overwhelmed—because it’s grad school—but for the most part, 它真的很容易理解, 我很感激你,她说。.

That accessibility has allowed her to zero in on her writing. “我知道如何写作，但我想做得更好. I wanted professors to look at my work 和 say, ‘That’s terrible’ or ‘That makes no sense.’ I wanted to learn how to structure my writing better, to work on the process.”  

One of her main writing outlets is a SubStack she started last year called 管理信息系统(s)的教育. She writes narrative nonfiction essays on the state of education, including topics like school shootings (including one at East High School in 2023), teacher burnout 和 the “epidemic of ego” in educational leadership.

She plans to continue combining her love of writing 和 her love of education when she moves to New York City in the fall. She has applied to several publishing houses but is also applying to some schools 和 community colleges for non-classroom positions in areas like student engagement 和 community event planning.

“The biggest thing that I've learned is that you can’t change a system while you're in it. Teachers are too tired to write about their experiences. 我想有时间, 代表他们, 和他们交谈, 相信他们的话, 把它们写下来，然后付诸行动.”