Reflecting Upon First Semester Creative Writing

The Memoir:
The inspiration for the memoir was a car-ride through Williamston on a rainy day. I was in the backseat, and was watching the water accumulate and seemingly drown the small town. For the memoir, I expanded on that memory to place myself in that town looking out at the people passing by, and also imagining the people who might live there as well, dealing with this weather. I wanted a consistent idea that would prevail throughout the story, and I wanted that idea to be reflected in the style of the memoir.
In the revision process, I was mostly trying to hone down the voice and tone, and then also expanding upon the girl, following your suggestion. Much of the grammatical editing involved making the sentence structure better, especially by reducing run-on sentences and reducing comma usage. The 2-week-ago revision was my most dramatic, modifying many small parts and also elaborating on certain descriptions, like the girl.

The Poems:
"Untitled Pantoum" was the product of our observation of a stranger. The stranger was someone taking a test outside of the classroom, sitting in a desk that had been pulled into the hall. I decided on the pantoum form for the impacted ending where the lines are repeated. I also tried to use parallelism in my description of him in the lines. It really turned out better than I expected.
"Cope" is a poem inspired from an activity in Poetry Club where we each receive a "type" of person (occupation, personality type, etc) and a location or situation. I received a stock broker in an AA meeting. While many poems of this activity turn out to be humerous, I decided to take a serious turn, and ask what would have led up to this situation. When I finished the first draft of just getting certain ideas and phrases onto paper, I re-read it and found a trend, that I had started and ended a couple stanzas in the same way. So I decided to make each stanza parallel and structered at the beginning, and let that structure degrade as he sank lower, and then return to structure at the end, to give way for a little hope.
"Orange" was the result of having that orange before me in class. When I first wrote the poem it was much more broken and fragmented, which I first was aiming for. Looking back on it later though, I wanted to convey the room and the time period that I saw in my head. I also wanted to expand the description of the orange. I had liked the idea of it being so fragmented, almost as if the situation is portrayed from the orange's point of view, or as events related to this insignificant object, but the orange in my revision seemed to take on a more significant role for the narrator.
"A Holiday Story" was also written at Poetry Club. We each were given an inspiration; mine was Christmas. My first attempt at a poem fell very flat, but was a lot more upbeat than this one. This poem was also party inspired by the Rage Against the Machine lyrics "born of a broken man, but not a broken man."