by Amy Chou

Two years ago, I came back to the University of Chicago after a year-long battle with brain cancer. While my cancer was in remission, my mind was still spinning from what I had gone through. I had no idea how to be a college student again--I felt, physically and mentally, like a 90-year-old--and I wanted a way to process what I had gone through in a concrete way that didn't involve being in a support group with actual 90-year-olds. An older classmate of mine once gave me a piece of advice that has served me well: "If you're ever feeling down at the U of C, take a creative writing class and it will change your life. The teachers in that department are some of the best people you will ever meet." I signed up for one of Dan Raeburn's creative nonfiction workshops and, I have to admit, it really did change my life.

The great thing about Dan is that he doesn't waste your time with BS. In the intermediate class, we were each required to submit 8-15 pages of writing for workshopping twice per quarter, in addition to line editing and critiquing the work of three classmates each week. He gave us grades based on real-world standards and gave us feedback as if we were submitting our pieces to Harper's Bazaar or the New Yorker. This basically meant that if you didn't want to get a low grade, you had to get your butt to work. Dan expected a lot from us, and we respected him for it. I don't think I've ever taken any other class so seriously. Dan's class allowed me the structure to sit down and write about my experience with cancer in a way that I could not have on my own. I was able to turn what I had remembered as a traumatic and terrible experience into a story that I was narrating, in which the character consumed by her cancer was separate from the person I am now.

I will never forget the first time Dan asked us to read an excerpt from Joan Didion's The White Album, in which she writes, "We tell ourselves stories in order to live." Everyone interpreted this line differently, but for me, what it meant was that it was time to stop wallowing in the horrors of my experience and to turn it into a story. I think the best part of writing personal essays is that with each new revision, I discover something new about myself. Getting immediate feedback from classmates, whether good or bad, has forced me to step outside of my experience in a way that I don't think would have been possible in therapy or in some sort of social situation. At some point in each workshop, Dan would spend time helping us discover the universal truths that can be illuminated through our stories. While sometimes I don't see them immediately, I always leave his class feeling a little more thoughtful, a little more aware, and a little more curious. Thanks Dan, for being a great teacher and for helping me find my voice when I thought I had lost it.

Amy Chung-Yu Chou is a third-year English Literature major who will be graduating this Spring. She received the Margaret C. Annan Prize in Nonfiction and is currently working on a thesis entitled "Chemotherapy is Not an Impulse Purchase: or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Survive Brain Cancer."

Click on the Courses link to see course offerings in Creative Writing for Winter 2012. Deadline for submissions is November 10. Email katesoto@uchicago.edu with your submissions and/or your questions. Email the instructors directly to be put on waiting lists for beginning classes.