Sophia Gregoire
I’m Not Writing a Book
I’m Sophia Gregoire and my whole life, I’ve adored writing and storytelling. I loved creating worlds and characters along with them. I could find a story in anything I interacted with. I would stay up all night playing out scenarios with my stuffed animals. I made paintings and drawings of characters to tell my parents all about them. I even tried to get into timeouts on purpose to tell little stories to myself, with my fingers as the characters. I was always begging people to read me picture books or tell me their own stories. And all this love of storytelling and reading in my youth brought me to where I am today.
I’ve wanted to be an author/writer since I learned how to write, and my whole life I’ve been seeking out opportunities that allow me to expand on my writing and writing skills. From elementary school on I’ve been jotting down book ideas, writing little poems in the margins of my notebooks, and creating little sketches of characters for stories I intend to write.
In high school, my passion and enthusiasm for writing has only grown, and with that, so have my opportunities. In 9th grade, at the first chance I had, I took on an honors project that involved me writing a number of short stories. In the summer of 10th grade, I took my first extracurricular writing course, where I studied creative writing with best-selling authors at The School of the New York Times. In 11th grade, I created the school’s Creative Writers Circle x-block, took Ashley’s course in creative writing, and completed another honors project where I wrote more short stories and did paintings and illustrations corresponding with each one. This summer I took two advanced creative writing courses at Columbia and Oxford, and worked with a variety of professors, poets, authors, and writers. It was the best time of my life. During first trimester of this year, my classmate Tatsuya and I began creating a graphic novel, where I took on the majority of the writing and the art, though it was all incredibly collaborative. we are continuing the project into the second trimester.
Building off of this, another form of storytelling I’m passionate about is art. Paint, charcoal, watercolor, graphite: all are further media for me to explore my love of creating a story, building a character, or sending a message. Unlike writing, art is not something I want to pursue as a career, but still something I want to continue exploring throughout my life. A professor of mine from Columbia works at The Center for Book Arts, and I visited her at her workplace recently which was really cool and incredibly inspiring. At the Center they write, print, and press zines and books, and stories, combining both art and writing in a way that fascinates me.
Ever since I learned about Senior Project, I knew that mine would have something to do with writing. It wasn’t a question of if I was going to write, more what I was going to write. For my project, I’ve found a way of combining all the things I love about writing while being able to incorporate my artistic passion and abilities as well. For my project, I will be making books. I will not be writing a book, but instead writing short pieces, learning how to make zines and bind books, and then binding my writing into zines and handbound books. A zine is a small book that usually contains, art, images, or some form of short-form writing or all three put together. A zine is fairly easy to make, while book binding is a more complicated and time-consuming process. My project time will be divided into writing time and book time. I don’t have very strict guidelines for my writing, but I will be writing: flash fiction, poems, short stories, or whatever else I’m inspired to write. In order to ensure I’m not abusing these loose guidelines and slacking off, I have given myself a required word count of at least 20,000 words a week. These words don’t need to all be perfectly edited, or ever printed in a zine or a book, but will at least provide work that I can use to build off of. And as another measure to make sure I’m getting all this work done, I will be meeting with Anna Gonzales once each week to check in on my progress and go over my writing, in addition to sending the pieces to her for review and editing. I’m expecting to experience writer’s block at times, so I’ve already constructed a large collection of prompts and other sources of inspiration that I can employ as needed. This writing time will take up half of my week; every other day so I can give myself a break from writing and bind the stories I’ve already written.
I want to fully commit to the bookbinding and zine-making process because I want to utilize the art resources the school provides. Most of my writing will be made into zines, as I’m not planning on writing 100-page stories, so I could fit a short story or a series of poems into a zine easily. I want to incorporate the full process of bookbinding in my project near the end because I want to have a final collection of writing that I’m proud of, and then bind all those pieces into a book. For the zines and books, I want to get really into the process and take the opportunity to practice some things that I haven’t been able to before. For example, I want to make my own paper for my zines and use block printing to make cover art for the zines. And I also want to work with James French and Susan Now to help with both the art and actual binding processes, as I know they are pretty experienced and knowledgeable on the subjects. And when I’m learning how to make books, I’m going to practice with pieces of writing that I’ve already completed.
The writing days and the making days may not end up being every other day, if I get really into a story or really into a zine or piece of art I’m making, they may bleed over into the next day, but I intend for the time I spend on each aspect of the project to be approximately even by the end of the project. The community service part of my project will mainly take the form of cleaning up New York City parks, as a part of Sam Beacher’s senior project. I’m really excited for this project, and looking at the list of prompts and ideas I already have I know I’m gonna have a lot of fun during this project and learn a lot as well.