Letter to an Ex/To Me
Ragusa, Daniela

>>DANIELA: Hi, my name is Daniela Ragusa and I am a compositionist which means that I teach first year students in college how to get into academic writing. What I've found over the years is that I really prefer writing that is memoir and writing that calls on people to talk about their personal experiences, their life stories. Recently, I'm sitting here at a booth at the four C's, recently just before coming on this trip to San Francisco I was going through some old emails that I've kept and I came across this old love letter/break up letter that I had written to my ex-boyfriend two years ago. I hadn't looked at it in a really long time and I just decided I wanted to reread it because it had been a while. In the letter I talk about my relationship with him of course and our break up and memories and this and that. I look back on it and think it was really well written. I thought that I kind of captured my experience and explained it to him in such a way that kind of did give me closure and I'm proud of it. I look back on it now and I probably won't look at it again for a really long time but I will keep it and it is some of the writing that I think I am most proud of, even more so than my academic work because to me it was kind of capturing a real life experience and sharing it with someone. Even though he and I are no longer in contact I kind of feel like I'm pretty sure he kept it and maybe he rereads it once in a while too. I don't know, maybe I'm flattering myself, maybe he doesn't and he threw it away but I kind of felt like it was a good thing for the both of us. By writing about my experience I understood it better and made myself really clear to him in my thoughts and feelings. So I thought this might be going a little too far but I kind of think of it as a feminist act because I found my voice and I used it to speak up and I communicated with him in a way that I don't think that I would have been able to do verbally. So that's one of the pieces of writing that I am most proud of. Thank you.