The Thrill
Toney, Darius

DARIUS: I've never had a thrill for writing - that was until I met my twelfth grade literacy teacher Mrs. Mingus. She worked wonders on my life for writing. I can remember reading "The Hotter Darkness" and any people in the literacy era know it's not a good book to analyze but I can remember writing essay after essay analyzing sentence after sentence but when I was done with the book, my mind was pushed above the norm. I could just catalyze anything whether it's a movie, real day situations, anything. I also remember at the end of the year we had to write a research paper to pass a class. I chose my topic and it was suicide and I don't know why, I felt like suicide when I was doing it. It turned out that my research paper was approximately seventeen pages long without work cited and that paper drove me nuts. It took me three months to complete but when I was done I felt so much confidence in my writing. So over the summer I was like, "Man, I don't want to write anything anymore ever." But the moment I got here at UALR I encountered Greg Graham and he let me fall in love with writing again. It was just such an enticing experience. I loved every moment of it, writing stories and novels and all the stuff that we wanted to do. Now that I'm here, this is my second semester here, I'm taking Dr. Fisher and he's really cool. I like the versatility of the writing; we write memos and things of that nature, it's not just persuasive research papers and stuff but so far it's just an amazing experience for me and I can see my life going somewhere with writing.