Creative piece:

Being alone and feeling lonely are two different things.

Even though you’re alone, are you lonely?

Loneliness is a feeling almost everyone has felt.

Human interaction is a cure.

You can feel lonely when loved ones are away.

Being lonely feels like a knife in your chest.

You find yourself wanting to share your memories.

With each pickup line and laugh, I wish that I was a part of it.

I am one person in this huge school.

It makes me feel like a nobody.

Earth is the only planet we know of that contains life.

If there are others, wouldn’t they have contacted us?

Are we alone?

Listen, we are alone.

I am a small spec in the universe.

The earth is one little layer of the kingdom.

Being here, I can’t think of anything else besides communicating.

Do we need each other to grow?

Or are we just enjoying alone time?

I don’t need anyone to lean on.

I love this part of me.

There is victory in being alone.

But we all get bored of it.

This is how life is.

I sit here alone, until something sprouts up again in my life.

I have so many amazing people around me.

It’s better to be alive than dead.

Human interaction was the cure.

Victory.

Inspiration images:

My chosen photo for loneliness was the planet Earth.

My partner’s photo to represent the word loneliness was a woman sitting alone at a bar.

My second partner’s photo she chose to represent loneliness was a single tree in the middle of a desert.

Five photographs of your process (brainstorms, drafts, drawings, moments) with explanatory captions:

This is an image of the specific words my partners and I chose to replace or insert into our lines for the combined poem.

These three images are the process of the re-arranging of lines and adding in the words from the poems. Each photo is a different stage of the process, the first one is still incomplete and has yet to have the rest of the sentences and words added. To the last one, which is a very raw compilation of all our sentences.

This is a photo of the software our group chose to work on the poem. We chose to work on google documents so we were able to all edit.

Reflection:

My group’s topic was loneliness. We all chose very different images to represent this theme. One was an image of a woman sitting at a bar, alone. Another photo had a single tree, in the middle of a desert. I chose an image of the planet Earth by itself. It was interesting to see how some images were easier to write about than others. My photo, of Earth, was very easy to write about because I am fascinated by the galaxy, and if we were the only Planet out there that contained life. I wrote about Earth, as being lonely, us the human population being alone. As for writing about the woman at the bar was easy as well. I was able to write from personal experience as a woman, and how it feels to be single. Writing about a single tree in the desert was the most difficult. Since I could not connect to the picture in some way, I wrote about the need to live off of other life forms or not. The style of writing I chose to represent the three images was a stream of questions. Which played a positive role later when combining with my partners’ style of writing.

After each of us wrote a paragraph on each other’s photos, we selected three lines from each of our responses. We cut them all up and put all 27 lines in front of our group. Quickly we skimmed all lines, and arranged them from beginning to end. This is where I realized my style of writing worked well with the mix of lines. Since I chose to write in questions, and the girls in statements, it seemed as if their sentences were answering my questions. This combination of question and answer, made the compilation process proceed very efficiently. After we roughly arranged all lines, we then had to read each other’s chosen poems about loneliness and chose two words from each poem. We had to include each of the 18 words in the 27 lines, by either replacing other words or inserting them in. It was interesting, that even without looking at the words they picked, two of us ended up with the same words. We both chose victory and cure, so we had to improvise and figure out a way to repeatedly use them, but still make the poem seem diverse.

At the beginning, we scrambled all lines together to make some sense. But after we added all the other modifications, the piece was confusing again. This is where we started the serious editing and re-arranging. We wrote up all the lines as it was on paper, on a google document. Then collaboratively, we read through it and made many changes. One change was changing the person perspective to be the same, it went from us, you, she, I to first person. Another change was that I used specific terms like tree, girl, and planet which made it difficult to combine with the other general lines, so we changed all the content of the lines to be general. A line that used to be “Does the tree need to live off of other live forms?” changed into “Do we need to live off of other live forms?” which then change to “Do we need each other to grow?”. The last change was when we cleaned up all the lines but then needed to go back in and take out all the unnecessary words, to make it short and concise. A large content-wise change we decided to make, was to separate the stanzas into a theme. Each stanza has a topic, either the person is proud to be alone, or needing others. This decision made sense because we tried to cut out unnecessary words to make it clean, and dividing the themes would benefit this effect.

I am happy with the final product. The collaboration was very fun and unique, which made the process very smooth. We achieved in portraying the theme of loneliness in this poem, because we successfully stayed on topic. Also, due to combining all of our ideas, we now have creative and multiple perspectives on the feeling of loneliness. What surprised me the most was the styles of writing between the three of us, and how it worked out so well. I wrote questions, they wrote statements, which ended up being the answers to my questions.