by Jesse Curran
For twenty years I’ve circled “huge” in student essays. In the margin, I’ve scribbled, maybe another word? With twenty years under my belt, it’s surely been thousands of papers and hundreds of huges. A huge amount of huge. You know what I’m talking about. Claims crafted by undergrads like grief is huge in Hamlet and Epicureanism has a huge effect on Horace and racial identity is a huge issue in Toni Morrison’s fiction. Sometimes I’ll suggest another choice. Why not significant or formative or determining? Sometimes I’ll scribble, avoid colloquial diction in formal prose. Though this semester, my first fall since the big dawn of the big chat gpt, I’m suddenly delighted by the euphemism. Let me tell you, what a relief it is to see a huge. Yes, marriage IS a huge deal in Midsummer Night’s Dream. Indeed, you lovely undergrad, I can tell you wrote this paper and not some silly chatbot. I’m hugely relieved that you’re writing with your own voice. I’m hugely grateful for the often-strange syntax of your sentences and the weird way you decided to arrange your punctuation around your MLA parenthetical. Now, when I see huge, I think of starring it with my purple pen. I breathe a sigh of relief. I smile. I gather it with the other words I used to critique in student writing and bask in the bouquet of cliché choices. I now seek the plethora of plethoras—and unique no longer feels banal. Now, I celebrate the fact that a student is writing. I praise the act of taking time, having voice, placing words together, and not surrendering the existential necessity that is a first draft. At this moment when the academy fears it will become even more irrelevant, I hold strong that it’s a pretty big deal for a human to scribble words from the void with her pen. Actually, it’s huge.
Jesse Curran is a poet, essayist, and teacher who lives in Northport, NY. Her essays and poems have appeared in dozens of literary journals including About Place, After the Art, Allium, Blueline, and Ruminate. She teaches in the Department of English at SUNY Old Westbury.
www.jesseleecurran.com
Emerge Literary Journal 