In the Fall term of my freshman year at the University of Michigan, I took a class called “ENGLISH 360: Rise of the Novel.” We began with Austen and ended with Hurston, but in between the works we read, I finally finished reading Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë for the first time. It’s been my favorite novel ever since.

For one of my papers in that class, I chose to write about bird motifs that appear throughout the book, and it’s still one of my favorite essays I’ve written. Once I was in WRITING 220, the gateway course for the Minor in Writing, I selected this essay as my origin piece since I knew my affection for Jane Eyre could help guide me as I experimented with writing blackout poetry and a braided essay (which you can read here on this website). Now that I’m on the other side of this gateway course, completing these experiments and my fully-realized project has provided me with a new understanding and connection to Brontë’s work in a way that’s deepened my appreciation for it. Furthermore, my work in this course has allowed me to practice my storytelling skills and allowed me to bring my own narratives to light in a personally meaningful way.

I struggled for a while with deciding what I could do for my first experiment until I considered the words on the pages of Jane Eyre. Part of my affection for the book comes from my love of its prose, and I figured I could rework Charlotte Brontë’s own words to tell a new story and landed on the idea of blackout poetry, a genre I had worked with a couple times prior to this experiment. With the three pieces I created, I explored how I could express the themes of Jane Eyre in new ways using excerpts from the novel itself and from A History of British Birds by Thomas Bewick, a book that appears in Jane Eyre. I enjoyed getting to be creative — or recreative, rather — as I balanced representing the original themes in the novel while also expressing my own narrative and taste in these adaptations.

My second experiment strayed a little further from the motifs of Jane Eyre and more into my own personal experience. I knew I wanted to write a braided essay that tied together Jane Eyre, birds, and a personal narrative, but for a while I found it difficult to determine how I could connect my favorite book to a story from my own life. I started thinking about the first time I read Jane Eyre on a roadtrip to visit my grandparents, and then I began to remember my grandmother and the life stories she’s told me. At that point I had landed on the most important strand of my braided essay. So, as I experimented with creative nonfiction, I discussed both my love of and critiques for Jane Eyre as well as my relationship to my grandmother and how these two seemingly unconnected ideas come together. 

Completing this experiment for my fully-realized project later on pushed me outside of my comfort zone, as I’m a bit uncomfortable with more creative forms of writing. Even so, my previous experimentation with more creative forms like poetry and creative nonfiction gave me the confidence to take on the task of incorporating more personal elements and intertwining them with well-loved literature. I greatly enjoyed the process of researching and writing as I crafted this essay, but most of all, I found it incredibly fulfilling on a personal level to piece the whole story into its final form.

Take a look around this website as you please; you’ll find my experiment, project, bibliography, family pictures, and all sorts of other fun little things. I’m proud of the work I’ve put into all these pieces, and I hope you’ll enjoy reading them!