“How I Wrote ‘The Brass Girl Brouhaha,'” by Adrian Blevins (Poetry ’02)

Poetry graduate Adrian Blevins recently had a craft essay featured in Waxwing. Read an excerpt below:

How I Wrote The Brass Girl Brouhaha

I wrote The Brass Girl Brouhaha by tattooing the word WRONG across my heart to help me muster the strength I’d need to argue with a world that wanted me to say “hey, y’all!” in a hill-country accent sipping tea under a dogwood in a pink smock smattered with etchings of ivy.

It was wrong of me to stop writing poetry as a second-year college student and to start writing fiction instead. It was wrong of me not to notice that the fiction I was writing was so bad it was blather disguised as essays disguised as fiction.

It was wrong of me to have a baby two years later as a senior in college totally on purpose.

It was not wrong of me to become a waitress in a Greek restaurant to make money to help feed my baby or to work nights and weekends serving middle-aged men vodka martinis with a fat slab of cow. It wasn’t wrong of me to live near my mom and sister so they could help with the baby, and it isn’t wrong of me now to tell you that one night a man in the restaurant offered to fly me to Florida for a weekend getaway. I’ve got a baby, I told him. Bring the baby, he said. I’ve got a husband, I said. Leave the husband at home, the man said.

It was not wrong of me to apply to graduate school after this little incident showed me the extent to which I was wasting my life, though it probably was wrong of me to apply to just to one program because it was near my house. It was wrong of me to try to use writing as a form of escape. It may have been wrong of me to get pregnant with Baby No. 2 before I could accept the program’s offer, and it could have been wrong of me to keep on writing all that bad fiction I was telling you about earlier rather than the poems I really wanted to write…

Find the rest of this essay here: http://waxwingmag.org/items/issue21/64_Blevins-How-I-Wrote-The-Brass-Girl-Brouhaha.php