Writing Portfolio
Are You There, Bobs? It’s Me, Emily. | Ms. Magazine | October 2023
375 BCE | Greece
Plato kicks poets out of the first democracy, because we are liars and a threat to civilization. We spread misinformation and corrupt the youth and have no place in the ideal state.
Nevertheless, Plato argues that poetry is “nearer to vital truth than history” and praises poets as people who, “gifted with a god-sent madness,” “utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.” At the time, poets played a significant role in social life and were highly revered—which is one reason Plato loved to hate us.
1964 CE| Somewhere, Florida
The New College of Florida becomes the first institution of higher education in Florida to institute an open admissions policy committing the school not to discriminate based on “race, creed, national origin, or cultural status.”
1978 | Somewhere, Florida; Nowhere, Missouri
Bob Allen graduates from the New College of Florida.
I am born, the first child of two first-generation college students.
1996 | Nowhere, Illinois
Harvard graduate and truck driver Bob Bogue pens an opinion piece for the Quincy Herald Whig, advocating for student artists like me.
I’m 17 and I’ve just won a national poetry award with a $1000 cash prize. I live in a small town known for its state champion basketball team, who regularly rides on fire trucks through downtown. Bob writes: “How about it, Mr. Mayor? Emily just brought us a national title. Can we expect to see her name on a little green sign at the city limits? A proclamation of appreciation? Emily Kruse Day? Quincy businessmen, Emily T-shirts? An Emily burger? A poet’s corner?”
In my honor, the mayor declares June 3 a poetry holiday and all the local Pizza Huts print my poem on special, neon yellow placemats.
Summer
Knee high by the fourth of July
My grandfather always said,
And the golden ears of corn
Would sway in the summer sun.
Wait, child, he would say.
Each day he plucked
An ear from the rustling stalk
And ground the kernels
Between his teeth—
Not yet, child, he would say,
And smile,
Crinkling his creased, brown face,
It is not dry enough.So we would wait,
Wait,
Until the air was filled
With the crackling of parched corn.
The combine would emerge
From the musty barn,
Startling the lazy cats
Basking in thin rays of sunlight.
Slowly the rows of corn would disappear,
And my grandfather
Would return from the fields
In the twilight of the night,
Weary and dusty.And when the corn was gone,
With it went the golden days of summer.
In each ear there lay memories
Of those days
Of freedom and carelessness.
Each glorious month
Was stored in a bin,
To remind us of those happy days
Until we could once again
Fling away all cares
And run wild and free through the corn.
Read more at Ms. Magazine.
Recent Nonfiction
Are You There Bobs.
Are You There Bobs.
Like The Pack, Like The Pack, Like Everybody: Authoring Your Own Guidebook | The American Poetry Review | September 2023
Via the wisdom of science fiction writer, MacArthur genius and visionary Octavia Estelle Butler, this HIIT for the ♥︎ ritual will help you to create a LIFE-AFFIRMING blueprint for your life. It’s for when you’ve lost sight of your true purpose, and there is no blueprint, no guidebook. It’s for writing your own master scheme and finding your own ways to thrive when you get side swiped by life and the question isn’t how to fix things/yourself [you won’t] but how to be well within chaos and/or urgency.
HIIT for the ♥︎ is workshop format I adapted from fitness coaching; HIIT, or high intensity interval training, is a training protocol that alternates short periods of intense or explosive anaerobic exercise with brief recovery periods until the point of exhaustion. Athletes love HIIT because it boosts your metabolism during and after your workout, so you can keep burning calories—for up to 48 hours after you’ve finished exercising. The premise behind my HIIT for the ♥︎ workshops is similar; writing in short, intense, explosive bursts, with brief recovery periods, until the point of exhaustion, leaves the imagination firing long after the workshop. I use HIIT for the ♥︎ to teach creative and “non-creatives,” writers and “non-writers” alike to use writing to process stress and other negative feelings. Think Vitamin B shots for the soul—instant doses of creativity that help us move from reaction to response in difficult situations! HIIT can help us to process anger, grief, frustration, fear, anxiety, etc. in quick bursts. And whether you use your imagination to write poems, advise investors, or diagnose patients, it helps to WORK YOUR EMOTIONS OUT. Because the heart and mind are muscles, too!
Read more at The American Poetry Review.
Author Your Own Blueprint
Author Your Own Blueprint
Imagining Your Way through Pandemic: A Love Letter for Students of Creative Writing in Times of Crisis | The Writer’s Chronicle | June 2020
In the morning, one of you says We no longer know how to live safely in the world.
Outside my office window the trees are throwing their yellow flowers against the startled March sky. Everywhere, it is spring and the Earth is remembering her beauty.
February was tricky and strange. In this open-ended moment—our last?—I am almost fooled into believing March will be different.
That was a Wednesday. By the time I finish teaching Poetry for Prose Writers, campus will be closed, you will be sent home due to a silent, invisible, and unpredictable killer for which we have no cure, and the future as you had once imagined it will suddenly be reduced to ellipsis.
Two weeks later, I invite a poet who knows struggle to join our online session. He says what I—whose struggles are small, having largely been of my own creation—cannot:
You can’t be afraid to think broken because if you don’t think broken you won’t think at all.
What’s your Existential Bucket list? If you don’t have one, get one.
Your fear exists on the threshold of self.
Your fear doesn’t exist in the same shape or form anymore.
Your fear is the cause of someone else’s suffering.
Crisis is a creative opportunity to transform fear.
Rise above for someone who has less than you.
We are born screaming on the inside and die screaming on the outside.
What song unsticks you from Writer’s Block? If you don’t have one, get one.
Visualize the person you want to be on the other side of crisis.
He reminds us that this is an old story. For some, this crisis is the one—in a series of crises that have largely been ignored by the collective—we all happen to care about because the virus does not discriminate as we do.
Together, we write a poem called “Water Believes What We Cannot”:
Buy a plant. Name it after someone who broke your heart.
Don't ask whose imagination you're in.
Everyone should try on a dress at least once.
I believe that spirits visit me. You should be careful which ones you invite.
Don't be a bitch on accident. Be purposeful.
The strongest parts about me are the weaknesses I can admit.
Flatirons are like a crash diet for your hair. Avoid at all costs.
There is no right way to die.
Exercise your lower back. The chip on your shoulder’s not growing any lighter.
Societal expectations have rarely stuck to my slippery skin.
Don't mix prints too often, most don't have the eye for it.
From you, there is no distinction.
I'm going to fly out of a roller coaster seat one day from the drops.
I believe the stock market is just astrology for capitalist men.
Read more at The Writer’s Chronicle.