I thought I'd play along...

1. Introduce yourself briefly. Where are you from? Where have you gone to school? What educational plans brought you to the University of Maryland, and what fields of learning or potential majors interest you at this stage in your academic career?

My name is Natalie Corbin, and I grew up in Kalamazoo, Michigan. I attended Kalamazoo Public Schools for kindergarten through high school, graduating from Loy Norrix High School...awhile ago. I attended Albion College, a small liberal arts school in Albion, MI, for undergrad, and had a double major in English and German (although, I did start out as a Biology major--o! how things can change!). While an undergrad, I also studied abroad at Universitaet Heidelberg, in Heidelberg, Germany. Upon graduating from Albion College, I received a Fulbright fellowship to return to Germany for a year to study at the University of Potsdam and teach English at the Friedrich-Wilhelm-von-Steuben Gesamtschule, where I taught 7th through 13th grade English. Upon returning to the U.S.A, I decided I wanted to pursue a masters degree. Now, I'm currently in my 2nd year of the Masters of Fine Arts program at UMD, with a focus in poetry. Next up, I plan to get my PhD...I'm going to basically be a student forever. My specific academic interests at this point are the American Sideshow and post-colonial/20th century literature, as well as Cold War era lit/everything. The further you go along in academia, the more specific (and generally trivial, though I prefer the word nuanced) your interests seem to become.

2. What kinds of writing have you done in high school? At UMD? At another college? Outside of a school setting?
Wow...ok. Lets go back in time here. High school is when I first became interested in poetry, and I wrote a lot of terrible emo poems back then. At Albion, I had a concentration in Creative Writing, and my undergraduate thesis was a collection of poems centered around the circus and themes of "otherness" (sounds fancy, right?). Additionally at Albion, I wrote many a research and term paper. My favorite writing project was a transcription of a 16th century religious tract, where I transcribed the poem into standard, modern English. Since the tract hadn't been transcribed before, I was able to publish my work and research my senior year, which...felt pretty good and important at the time. I'm still pretty proud of that work.

3. What steps do you usually follow when you write a paper? Do you outline? Revise? Compose on a word processor? What part of the writing process do you find easiest? What part do you find hardest?
I always start with a hand-written outline. Then, I flesh out the ideas in my outline on the computer, just typing as much as I can. Then, I look over what I've written and cut somethings, move other things around, etc. I do a lot of revision. Sometimes, just getting my ideas typed is the hardest part--in fact, I hate writing introductions. I think they're really difficult to do--especially if you aren't sure how your whole paper will look yet. I almost always write the introduction last for this reason.
4. What kind of writing has given you the most satisfaction?
Clearly, poetry. And blogging, too. I like just babbling on in cyberspace.
5. What is the longest or most challenging paper you have ever had to write? How did you go about preparing and writing it? What did you learn about writing from that experience?
Well, my undergraduate thesis was 30 pages--but 20 of those pages were poems. I've written a handful of 20 page papers at this point in my academic career. I feel like to keep going on those long papers, I need a really solid outline. Also, my trick is to type my papers single spaced, and then double space them when I run out of things to write--it usually surprises me how much I've written without realizing it.

6. What do you remember learning about writing from other courses or other writing experiences that you found useful?
My senior year as an undergraduate, I took a Literary Theory course with a very, very tough professor. I stayed up all night working on a paper, and then emailed it to her without my name on it, or properly formatting my works cited. She failed me on that paper. So...I learned (the very hard way) to always proofread and properly format my papers, no matter how tired I was. If you want to be taken seriously in the writing world, good editing and presentation is everything.

7. Assess your strengths and weaknesses as a writer. What are you good at? What aspects of your writing are you dissatisfied with?
I'd like to think I'm a decent poet. I was never really great at writing research papers when I was younger, but with practice, I've become at least comfortable with it. I'm absolutely terrible at writing formal letters/applications/etc. Writing the essays for my college applications, both for undergrad and grad school, was incredibly difficult for me. I always feel terribly cheesy and unoriginal when I have to write a cover letter or application.

8. What part of the writing process do you think you will need the most support with?
Since I'm the support, I'm going to skip this question...

9. If you had your choice of subjects for a research project, what issues or topics would you like to write about?
This semester, I'm planning on doing a project on the web comic "Achewood" for my seminar in Folklore. I'm also doing a lot of WW2-based research for my Graduate thesis, which centers around my Grandfather's experience as a prisoner of war in Germany.

10. What do you associate with the term argument? How do you feel about taking a course that focuses on argumentation?

You all are going to hear my talk about argument enough in class.