My Story
Gifford, Chad

>>CHAD: Hi, I'm Chad Gifford, I'm with Northern Planes Writing Project in Minot, North Dakota. My story is when I was in eighth grade we had to do a poetry unit and I was never really a big poetry writer, in fact I'm still not really a big poetry writer. We had an assignment to put together a whole packet of poems. We'd read a series of different styles so we had to write all these different styles. So we had our limericks, our haikus, and all these things and really I wasn't putting any thought into it, I was just punching them in, "oh it's long enough, it rhymes, perfect," and then move on. For some reason when I got to this ballad, we'd read one ballad and it was fairly long and it was very musical, it had all this rhyme and rhythm all the way through and something in that connected to me. So I started to write my own and I really just felt the rhythm and the rhyme and a story came to me and so I told this story and it really kind of flowed out and it came pretty easily actually. I think the idea of the telling of a story in this form, something about it really worked for me. But I didn't think anything of it; the night before it was due I'm quickly typing all of these things up and trying to make sure I didn't spell anything wrong. So I get it all ready, put it all together and I don't think anything of it until a couple of days later when the teacher calls me up and asks me if this is my packet, and yes, and she thumbs through all of the poems and she looks at the ballad and she says, "How did you come up with this?" I said of course, "I don't know." That was my thoughtful response. She started asking me a series of questions about it, how I thought of it, how I worked it out, and then finally she says, "Where did you copy this from?" I said, "What?" "Well this is way better than anything else in here, you must have copied it from somewhere." And I'm like, "No, I just wrote it." I was so shocked at the time and she said, "Well, ok, I guess I'll believe you." She had never heard of this poem before; at the time I was just like, "Huh, that was weird, I wonder why she thought I copied it" And it wasn't until finally weeks later that it hit me that I'd apparently written something so good that she didn't believe I could because all of the rest of the stuff I'd written was terrible. [Laughing] But this one thing that really connected with me was so good that she didn't think I was capable of it. That was kind of the beginning of it for me when I realized, "Huh, you know, I can write stuff that people think is actually so good that they think I copied it." That's probably the best compliment I ever got with my writing.