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Restless and Writing

Poet Amanda Gotera '09 regularly feeds her nocturnal creative-writing habit

by Patrick Ritter

More than a decade ago, a kindergartner would print words on a bright pink sticky-note. Many were missing vowels, and few formed complete sentences. She took them home and posted them around her room.

Now, Amanda Gotera '09 sometimes wakes up in the middle of the night and sits in front of a computer screen in her dorm. Her fingers dance across the keyboard. She says she can barely control them as they type enough words to fill a hundred sticky-notes.

"I'm madly in love with it," she said of her nocturnal habit of creative writing.

"Writing is how I become more than what I am," she wrote in a scholarship packet last year. She won, becoming one of five students nationwide to take home?the highest award in the writing section of the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards.

She did an interview on NPR last spring in which she read one of her poems. She was featured in the Des Moines Register andappeared on the Grinnell College website, all before she took her first class in college.

Despite the accolades, Gotera maintains that she writes mostly for herself.

"It's hard to figure out exactly what my motivation is," she said. "Sometimes I'll start writing something because I'm angry ... It then becomes a piece of art."

One such piece is "Circulation," a poem that expresses frustration. Describing her body's reactions to her emotions, the poem has a visceral element common to Gotera's poetry.

In "Mitosis," another poem with a corporeal theme, Gotera draws connections between organic cycles, feminine relationships and conceptions of the self.

"I wanted to comment on our culture's attitude toward the coming-of-age and to the elderly, maybe to sexuality," Gotera said. "There's a sort of mirroring that goes on in nature, and in this poem I wanted to express our own mirroring, our own passing on of tradition and identity."

Gotera's father, a professor at the University of Northern Iowa, has published a book of his poetry. Gotera has dreams of equal success.

"I fantasize about getting a book published with my name on the cover," she said. "But this whole writing thing, while intrinsically tied up in the product ... will go nowhere if I care more for said product than for the process itself."

Gotera said that the process of writing can be intimidating, but she encourages writers to not be so critical of themselves that they "become immobilized."

"You have to be willing to accept that while you don't know everything, you have something relevant to write," she said.

"Mitosis"

When things have bloomed, my mother
teaches me to hunt out the dead
blossoms that are no longer veined
and furled open but coiled dryly
over floret and anther, delicate threads
in withered prayer.

Daughters learn the ritual twist of neck
on stem, how easily a pattern
can be broken. They learn to tear
from the seam, to expose green
and play the trick so each may partake
a little longer in the nectarine pages
of lily, of stamen, of every sweet thing.

You must pluck our papery
skins before we go to seed,
before we repeat ourselves completely.
Partial helix. Idle spindle. We do not
wholly fill our rhythms. Instead
we must don our lip-thin petals again
and again, shed our weathered slips or else
bear that promised tithe.

We come apart and apart
and relive the same season
the same false spring.

-first appeared in Rattle, Winter 2005

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