All posts by bacaya

i beat a dead horse and also give you homework im sorry

October 15, 2026 bacaya

Alyssa try not to bring up Edi Giunta or memoir in your blog challenge: failed.

I promise this week’s blog will be shorter, if only because I have some supplemental reading I am providing you all with. I apologize in advance.

The idea of this reading—that writing can be a tool for healing for the body and the soul—is something I am intimately familiar with. Writing has always been an outlet for me. I think you can pick any writer off the street, and nine times out of ten, they would tell you that the writing process is healing for them, too. I love seeing all the way healing comes out of writing, and I love reading Pennebaker and Chung’s explanations as to why it works.

In line with last week’s theme of looking back at our old work and admiring our fluidity, inspired by this week’s theme of writing as healing, I decided to look back at my process essay that I wrote after finishing my memoir for class. Instead of reinventing the wheel, I thought I would share a revised excerpt with you all here:

I did not know where writing this memoir would lead me. I started with a vague idea of what I wanted to write, but I did not know how I would do it. I did not know why I would write it. However, after these four months, I found a common thread between my pieces: these are all moments I know happened. I could tell you what happened, give you a timeline, describe the events on their surface level. I could not tell you what effects these moments had on me, until now.

I write to process. I create, erase, and reshape words until I am once again familiar with the face of my youth. I trace the outline of myself, guided by the writers before me. Louise DeSalvo. Margaux Fragoso. Melida Rodas. Emily Bernard. They hold my hand as I look into the mirror.

If I push too hard, the glass will shatter. I cannot be my younger self again; I cannot fix her problems. I cannot tell her it will be okay. All I can do is look at her through the mirror of memoir, and answer her questions for myself. Who are you? I hope she is fine.

In writing “A Rosary Held So Tight It Leaves Marks”, I see myself through the hundreds of eyes in the mirror. I see myself from the Ikea bookshelf in my childhood room. I see myself from the St. Clare’s bathroom mirror. I see myself in glass, in mugs and phone screens. Memoir surrounds me; I have become comfortable with it.

I would also like to leave you all with another piece of writing that has stuck with me for a long time—the book Writing as a Way of Healing by Louise DeSalvo. DeSalvo, mentioned in my process essay, was a fellow writer of memoir, and recognized the power of writing. I’ve thought a lot about her recently during our class discussions, but I haven’t figured out how to bring her up until now. Quite literally the perfect book for this week! I find that the part of her work that is most relevant to our class discussions so far is her section on the writing process, where she argues that writing must be done in different stages to be effective for healing. She writes, “I’ve come to understand that the most healing way of approaching the writing process is to focus upon the potential and possibilities for growth rather than upon its problems and pitfalls. Knowing what each stage of the process affords us and making explicit our intention for using the process as a healing experience assure us that we will pass through each stage in the most enriching way possible” (DeSalvo, 1999). I am attaching to this blog post a PDF of this chapter for your enjoyment.

Writing as a Way of Healing_Louise Desalvo_Stages of the Writing Process Download

Very short blog post this week, but I just thought that sharing is caring—so, enjoy! (Also, no annotations because I was not printing out 40 pages. Sorry!)

Student Blogs

i fear there should be an ideal text

October 8, 2026 bacaya

Picture the following: I finish reading Brannon and Knoblauch’s “On Students’ Rights to Their Own Texts: A Model of Teacher Response”. I am, to be quite honest, confused. Not on the content of the reading—in fact, I find myself agreeing with many of the points made within the article. I just felt that the article held unnecessary tension between the idea of the “Ideal Text” and what students had to say. Then, I flipped back to the front of the article to see that it was published in 1982, and everything made sense.

the energy i came into these readings with

I think that I have been lucky so far in that most of the environments I have written in and worked with writers in encouraged the idea of focusing on higher-order concerns. I began my tutoring career with the idea that most of my job would be proofreading and helping writers edit their work line by line. In fact, I was worried. I knew my way around the page, but if you asked me to explain what a comma splice was, I probably would not be able to (I am proud to admit that I can do that now, I think—please don’t quiz me). Even until recently, I would make sure to review Purdue OWL if I saw I had a student coming in for APA. I quickly learned, though, that “fixing” the student’s writing was not the point of tutoring. I was taught to look past the grammar and that which we called a lower order concern. Instead, I was trained to look at the paper as a whole. This made sense. I could sort out what a student meant even if they misplaced a period or used a sentence fragment, but if I could not understand what their point was after looking through the entire piece, something had gone wrong.

Many of my most fruitful tutoring sessions involved me, at some point, asking that student, “So what?”. I found that students have a habit of just giving one third of the full story. Whether that was the evidence, the conclusion, or the idea that linked the two. I’d love to give an example. So: think of a cow. Then think of milk. Lactose-intolerance. Allergies. Trees. Hamster balls. How did I get there? My close friend is, unfortunately, allergic to dairy and most types of nature, amongst a few dozen other things. We often joke that if we ever wanted to have a picnic, we’d have to roll her around in a protective barrier—much like a hamster. If I just gave you a cow and a hamster ball, though, you’d be confused as to how we got from one point to another. That middle part was what many of my students seemed to forget: that their ideas came from something, and that we, as readers, don’t get an all-inclusive tour to their brain. I love it when it clicks for students that we actually want to see their thought process, and that they’re not just spitting out what we want to hear.

Another thing I tend to do with students is to ask them what they want to say—then tell them to say it in the least academic way possible. I find so many of my students trying to put on a voice that isn’t theirs. They think there is only one way to write, and if they can’t figure out how to do it that way, they’re stuck. Something changes, though, when they say it in their words. It comes out fluently. Easily. All there’s left to do is tell them, “And that’s exactly what you write.”

It makes sense, then, that our job when working with students is to take what they want to say and help them say it. That is our “Ideal Text”. Reading Brannon and Knoblauch’s work, though, it feels as if they are pushing an inherent tension between a student’s work and their ideal text. It seemed like they had this idea of all teachers aiming for their students’ work to look like The Great Classics. This made sense, of course, when you put it into perspective that this article was written in the 80’s—as we’ve learned, many of these ideas that we implement in classrooms today were just popping up at the time. I’m sure there are still classrooms that focus on this antiquated type of writing, and I’m sure many of us lived through some of them, but I’m glad to see that now, there is less focus on just “avoiding errors” and more on teaching students to write what they need to.

If I were to take this article and reframe it for today’s standards, I would say that there absolutely should be an Ideal Text: the one in which the students’ work is not only in their voice, but in the best version of it. That might mean foregoing typical conventions. It might mean the opposite: doing a deep dive into the norms for a certain type of writing. It almost definitely means at least some rounds of drafting and revision.

I just think I’m lucky that I’ve been able to experience this way of learning to write.

Student Blogs

queer theory and the memoir

October 1, 2026 bacaya

Queer theory posits that identity, much like the act of writing, is fluid. Ever-changing. It requires grappling with boundaries and definitions that might have never been under consideration before. If I had any takeaways from this article (with which I struggled—it just felt so heady at times), it was this. I initially started writing this blog post as some way to connect this lesson with the other realizations I’ve had over the course of our class, but I found myself continuously led back to one idea: writing memoir.

I know I’ve made it a habit of including anecdotes with my blog posts. To be honest: I struggled with this one. It reminded me a bit of our first reading from Lauer—a lot of ideas that I agreed with, but did not know what to do with. I did not want to just write about being queer and being a writer, because that did not feel in line with the spirit of the article. I ended up reflecting on part of the memoir I had written in a class taught by Edi Giunta. While the content was about me being bisexual, I ended up realizing that the act of writing it was in itself pedagogically queer.

no annotations bc i did not get time to print this week </3, so here’s the first line of said memoir

If identity is fluid, memoir is the act of capturing your identity at one point in time. Past that, you must decide which identity you are writing from. You may be writing about your seven year old self, but whose voice are you using? The child version of you, or the version of you now, who has experienced more and knows more? How do those identities live in the same piece? What do you do with the inherent tension between them?

Memoir is also an act of grappling with your perceived identity. When you write memoir, it is your perception of who you are and what you have experienced. However, we cannot discount the fact that you have also been perceived and experienced. It is a constant negotiation of truth, and is just one of the many distinct layers of identity and experience we have. If you remember an experience one way and someone else remembers it differently, you have every right to write it as you remember. However, you must always be prepared to have it seen another way. My parents do not know I am queer. To them, I am as straight and cis as one can be. It does not help that my partner is, in fact, a straight cis man. That is the identity I have chosen to take up around them. While writing this memoir—and subsequently having it published online—I had to reconcile with the fact that there were two different spaces for me and my identities, and that there was a very real possibility that they might cross over. Still, I decided it was worth it.

As a genre, memoir is also well-equipped to discover what is possible in and out of its boundaries. “Queer Theory in the Writing Classroom” pulls from Ki Namaste and their argument that heterosexuality must exist for us to be able to understand queer theory. The boundaries of one form the definition of the other. That means we can, as writers, use queer theory and memoir as a space to play and explore. My favorite memoir, Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House, is a beautiful example of this. Not only does Machado use its subject matter (confronting the lack of domestic abuse narratives in lesbian stories, even though it is a grim reality) to question what is normal, but she also uses form as a way to push against norm. In the Dream House’s chapters are each based on different styles, genres, and tropes (ie., “Dream House as Horror”, “Dream House as Choose Your Own Adventure”, or “Dream House as Famous Last Words”). By acknowledging what is the norm, writers are given the tools to push against boundaries.

My attempt to write about my queer memoir, in the end, was not just an attempt at inclusivity, thank god. There are also so many ideas that we’ve discussed in class that I see reflected in this article: writing as social commentary, the power of discovery, how shame robs writers. It feels good to be able to have a throughline in places I didn’t expect.

Student Blogs

the one in which i forget (and rediscover) common sense

September 23, 2026 bacaya

I must admit: when initially looking at the titles of our readings this week, I was under the impression that their content would not mesh. It was not like the pairing was an issue to me; I had faith that there was a reason we were reading them now. It was just a small act of noticing. Perhaps I had this idea that the teaching of craft would stay focused on just that—craft—and that the idea of liberation and social justice in the classroom were separate issues. I cannot tell you why I thought that. In hindsight, I was wrong.

First, though, I would like to examine Murray’s idea of the writing process as “discovery through language”. For most of my life, I was under the impression that we should only write what we know. It was advice I had heard both online and in creative writing classrooms—how could you write about what you don’t know? Oddly enough, the time I learned to do the opposite lines up with the time I really began to learn how to write. In a class with my mentor, Edi Giunta (there will be no shortage of her appearances in my blog posts, I apologize in advance), I was told to write what I don’t know. It was an idea I struggled with at first. It feels shameful to have to admit you don’t know something. For a while, I resisted this advice, and came into class with the idea that I knew what I wanted to write about, and that I would not stray from it. I told myself that I had been wanting to tell that story for so long, and I would tell it, memoir best practices be damned. In reality, that piece of writing had already been turned over in my head over and over again. The narrative was set in stone, so to say. I now know I had to dip into the unknown to be able to come back and tell the story as faithfully as I could.

Even in non-academic writing, the process of discovery is irreplaceable. While reading, I was reminded that the course titles for English 101 and 102 at NJCU were not just titled something along the lines of “English Composition”, but rather “Critical Reading and Writing”—emphasis on the critical. I look back on those classrooms now and see Murray’s implications of teaching process all throughout them. I think about the ways I’ve encouraged my students to just write—to not worry about the assignment, to just get their thoughts on paper. The way I’ve been taught to let them grapple with not knowing. To not jump in and try to guide them a certain way. To, as Murray so eloquently puts it, just shut up. It is beautiful when it works.

However, I am cognizant that this ideal practice might not be realistic—at least, not yet, and maybe not for a long time. While reading bell hooks, I thought about the kinds of students and classmates I had. On one end, I think about my high school classmates. Many of my classmates, including myself, were the top achievers during our middle and elementary school years. Many of them came from families who could afford to put money into education and extracurriculars. If we committed ourselves to education, we were all but guaranteed placements in Ivy Leagues and prestigious internships. School was a chance at power. This, however, meant a suffocating school environment. Advanced placement was expected, not exceptional. If you were not staying after school for extra classes or resume-ready extracurriculars, you were falling behind. You did not, could not, think of school as a place where it was safe to discover.

On the other end of the spectrum are the peers I had in undergraduate. I think it is safe to say that college was also their chance at power, albeit of a different kind. If my high school classmates had the privilege of time to dedicate to their studies, in college, time was a resource often stretched too thin. I am cognizant of the fact that NJCU was seen as a “safety school” to many. Most of our students attended because it was cheap, or the school was nearby. Our demographic is very different from the kinds of people I knew in high school. I had many students who believed they had to conform to the traditional path: go to college, get a degree, get a high paying job. However, many of these students also faced additional outside pressures. They were the breadwinners of their family. They had siblings or parents to tend to. They were the first to attend college. Because of this, school was just something they had to do. Their focus was the degree at the end of it all. I had many conversations with students who wished they could take the time to sit down and do the kind of learning that would help them, but more often than not, schoolwork—and discovery through writing—was last on their list of priorities.

In class, we talked about new writing technologies—generative artificial intelligence. Generative AI allows learners to skip the process, the most liberating part of education, in favor of the product. What is so disappointing is that I can see students from both ends of the spectrum falling victim to this. When you have been told your entire life that you must go to school to better your social standing rather than to learn, it is easy to justify cutting out the parts of the journey that don’t seem to support that goal. The unfamiliar is scary. Why should I risk being vulnerable when I can just plug in a prompt into AI and go? It gives me my time back. It ensures I turn something in rather than nothing. It is safe.

In an ideal world, everyone has experienced the joy that I’ve been able to experience in the classroom. Everyone has the resources to go to school for the love of learning, rather than out of necessity. Everyone is free of pressure, free of fear of vulnerability. At the beginning of my reflection, I wrote about my initial confusion about the two articles. I now assume I must have known somewhere in my subconscious how they were connected: through the idea that the ability to deeply pursue the craft of writing is intrinsically tied to the state of the human being.

Student Blogs

like a kid in a candy store, except everything is free and made of big words

September 17, 2026 bacaya

In reading Janice Lauer’s “Rhetoric and Composition”, I find myself thinking about my experience with the act of writing throughout my years in school. It feels odd to be able to put a name to all the work I’ve done before, both as a student and during my experience as a tutor. The margins of my print-out copy of the reading recall my experiences in the classroom: “i always talk about how students consider themselves ‘bad writers’” and “dr. walters is that you” in response to the idea of revision.

In particular, I found myself reflecting on what Lauer calls the current-traditional paradigm, and how for most of my life, writing was taught to be a challenge with subjective parameters. There was an idea of what good writing was, who did it, and where it could be found. Rhetoric was a two-day unit (vocabulary test included), and feedback from teachers focused on punctuation and sentence counts. This experience with writing often extended past me. When I talk about how people learn to write, I tend to refer back to a student of mine who considered herself a “bad writer”. In reality, her issue was a weak grasp on things like comma placement, something that we were able to fix in just a few tutoring sessions. Her voice, however, was something that seemed to come naturally. She was adamant that she wasn’t good at writing, and for the first half of the semester, was hesitant to engage with our class. I think years of being told writing could only be done a certain way taught her to feel shame in her work. To coax her out of her shell took delicate care and, unconsciously for me, many of the ideologies Lauer covers.

Only in college did I realize what studying English could entail. For the first time, I was able to see English as not just Shakespeare and five-sentence paragraphs. I fell in love with writing as a craft and being able to help others understand it. I know now that this is because of the nature of rhetoric and composition, being a “human science”, as described by Louise Wetherbee Phelps. I found it funny that as I read, I was able to connect ideas with experience: the theories of invention I had come across while generating writing across classes or the factors that influenced my feedback to students I tutored. What a surprise, I thought, that although I was not aware of the science, there exists a reason for the things I learned to do. More than that, while reading about the growth of the field of rhetoric, I was fascinated by the idea that composition had been, “considered only a teaching practice”. To me, it only made sense that the field grew. I was reminded of the saying: “how you do something is how you do everything”. The way we compose—the way we put together our words—is the basis of almost everything we do. It is how we express ourselves, why we write to-do lists, where we get the information to write a report. Of course it is natural that we study it.

*“it is ALL connected” – me, re: writing being interdisciplinary*

I am excited to finally “put a name to the face”, or so to speak, with all I have learned about writing so far. During our check-ins last week, I spoke about how, for me, returning to school meant practicing being more deliberate. The information in this reading is similar. It forces me to look back on my learning experience with a new lens and pick it apart. When was I taught this idea? How? Which of these ideas do I subscribe to, and what experience taught me to think otherwise? Even the philosophical aspects, which I sometimes struggle to wrap my brain around, excite me. It feels like I am about to open a whole new set of toys with which to write with.

Student Blogs

like a kid in a candy store, except everything is free and made of big words

September 17, 2026 bacaya

Student Blogs

introooooo !!

September 7, 2026 bacaya

hi, everyone below, you can find my official (but quite boring) bio, why i’m in the m.a. program, and then some more extras that didn’t quite make the cut to either! vvv excited to meet you all.

skip to specific sections here:

the (boring) bio:

Alyssa Lian Bacay is a Filipino-American poet and memoirist from Jersey City, New Jersey. She works at Kean Jersey City, formerly New Jersey City University and her alma mater, at the Writing Center, where she has organized and hosted community writing events, including monthly Open Mics and an annual Book Fair. Her work has been featured in the Jersey City Poetry Festival, the Jersey City Museum of History, One Mic Stand with SJ, redrosethorns journal, and The Gothic Times. You can find her at @alyssalianb on Instagram.

the why:

hi, everyone! one of my favorite professors tends to start each semester by posing the same prompt to his students—i am here right now because. i find it fitting to start this semester, and this introduction, by answering with this:

i am here right now because of my love for reading, writing, and the community i’ve built around it. because of my mom’s obsession with harry potter (j.k. rowling’s political views aside), i was raised from a young age to love words. i remember growing up on percy jackson, piles of journals and stationary, and scholastic book fairs. and despite the rough patch i had with it in high school, in college, i found myself returning to literature and writing.

i started my undergraduate years majoring in computer science. my parents are both in the field, and i wanted to follow their footsteps; at the time, a degree in computer science promised a stable job career and more than enough money to provide for my family. in the end, though, i was convinced to pick up a minor in creative writing after one (1) class. to be fair: i was not very strong-willed.

from there, i found myself making opportunities to be around writing more. i worked at the writing center. i became an embedded tutor. i started a creative writing club. i hosted open mics, planned an annual book fair, attended events and workshops across campus. i was reminded of how much joy reading and writing brought to my life. by the time i graduated in 2024, the computer science degree i had started with did not quite fit the person i had become.

after two years working full-time at njcu’s writing center, i decided i could not let myself sit around any longer. i spoke with one of my favorite people on this earth, my mentor, edi giunta, and she suggested i apply to kean’s writing studies program. it was a very last minute decision—but i’m glad i did it.

back to the prompt: i am here right now because i cannot imagine a life without writing, and in taking up the m.a. in writing studies, i am become the writer i want to be.

the extra:

if you couldn’t tell, i love talking about myself (blame the aquarius sun and leo rising), and i wanted to include some other things that didn’t quite fit in my bio or writerly backstory!

i am avid collector of hobbies, including but not limited to: reading (duh), writing (double duh), journaling, coloring, playing music, gaming (board games and video games but also specifically magic the gathering and d&d), crochet, knitting, jewelrymaking, puzzles, and more
my favorite books are This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, Babel by R.F. Kuang, and If Cats Disappeared from the World by Genki Kawamura
i am a fiend for korean barbecue, salmon nigiri, and a sweet treat
i have a dog whom i love dearly and call my son (picture attached below)