Writing Reflections: Wendy Darling's Grown Up

Well, I wanted to post this on Throwback Thursday, but since I’m a day late, let’s call it Freaky Friday instead because I’m going to take you on a trip—a trip back in time!

Yes, I am starting a new series of Vocal stories. In this one, I’m going to revisit my old Vocal stories and open them up for discussion with you, my readers. Some of them will be more recent, but others will take you back in time…all the way to when I joined in January 2022! Heck, the stories might technically be older than that because I officially wrote them long before I ever joined Vocal.

Is this just a way to get people to read some of my older works? No, of course not…

OK, maybe it is a little. But it’s also about revisiting my older works so that I can see how far I have come as a writer and to also help myself continue to grow. After all, if we never look back on our older works, we will never see what made them good in the first place—and what could be improved in them.

So, on to my first “Writing Reflection”: a three-year-old poem called “Wendy Darling’s Grown Up”. And actually, this is one of the pieces that is older than its Vocal lifespan. I wrote this back when I was an undergraduate student at UC Davis. I was taking ENL 100P, and I wrote this poem as part of my final portfolio. I honestly don’t remember what grade I got on the portfolio or the feedback I got for the poem. I may not have even read the feedback when I got it (I was a bit avoidant back then).

Now, though, I am opening my arms to your analysis: the good, the bad, and the ugly.

I am going to include both a link to the original Vocal post and the poem itself here in this post:

the clock ticks faster and faster in the crocodile

as he devours the girl’s white underwear

she writhes at his bite—

prolonged, rolling, white-burning pain—

twisting in her stained sheets

as Peter Pan cackles at her, fading

before the face of Big Ben

 

the clock ticks within her,

with each cry and story told,

each infant’s laugh and fairy born,

slower, slower, slower

until torn scarlet garments lie

abandoned on the floor

-Stephanie Hoogstad, "Wendy Darling's Grown Up"

I have to admit upfront that I am rather fond of this poem. It is one of my first serious poems—or, at least, my first true attempt at being serious. I really wanted to say something with this poem, and I focused on experimenting with metaphor and imagery within it. Overall, I was—and still am—actually really pleased with the outcome.

Perhaps the couple of criticisms that I could offer regarding this poem—and I do so hesitantly—is that I could have experimented a bit more with punctuation and form. I have always had a problem with needing to stick as close to “proper” English as possible, at least when it comes to punctuation and how the work looks on the page. Honestly, I’m surprised that I got myself to use all lower-cased letters. It was probably one of the “boldest” grammatical/formatting moves I had taken up to that point. It’s something that I still could step out of my comfort zone with, but unless the poem calls for it, I don’t see a need to mess with the formatting and grammar unnecessarily.

Overall, I think that “Wendy Darling’s Grown Up” still holds up today. Its fast pace, dramatic—and possibly controversial—imagery, and theme all align in a way that even most of my poems today do not. It even lines up nicely with another poem I wrote recently, “Time is Beyond Our Control”. Hopefully you all enjoy it as much as I do. Whatever your thoughts on “Wendy Darling’s Grown Up”, please share them in the comments below!

Do you have any works of mine that you’d like to discuss in a “Writing Reflection”? Leave those remarks in the comments as well!