Portfolio- Selena Armendariz

SELENA ARMENDARIZ December 8th, 2021

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Table of Contents: Letter from the Editor Have You Ever Smelled Creosote Before?

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Move Adapt or Die

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Speedway House

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Semester Reflection

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About the Author

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Letter from the Editor: Dear Readers, I welcome you to my Creative Non-Fiction portfolio.

These collected works are stories whose bits and pieces have lived in the voice memos sent rapid fire to the group chat, the ramblings in my notes app, and the long long Instagram captions of my finsta account.

I don’t know if any of these stories are relatable but I hope that they inspire some sort of self-reflection. At the very least I hope that they are entertaining.

In this portfolio are the essays titled, Have You Ever Smelled Creosote Before?, Move, Adapt or Die, and Speedway House. Weirdly enough (or not) all of these stories all go together conceptually in one way or another, something I didn’t realize until I finished writing them all.

I used Google Slides to put this portfolio together because I am not artistically inclined but I’m pretty satisfied with how the final product came out.

Reader, I appreciate you for taking the time to read some of my silly little writings.

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Wrap Essay #1: Prewriting

Q: Describe a Smell A: The smell of creosote is one that has followed me in strange ways my whole life.

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Draft:

The smell of the American southwest is distinct and pervasive. The scent is carried for miles through the mountains by the hot dry wind. How can a geographical location be defined by scent? For me it can be.

The border towns of Texas are a cultivation of hundreds of years of experiences and community.

Growing up in what many would describe a desolate intense landscape, I am well tempered to the radiating heat of the dry El Paso sun. The strong saguaro cacti, the creosote bushes and the Franklin Mountains were the backdrop to my early childhood. Specifically, I ascribe the smell of creosote to my childhood, the smell that the plant gives off permeates the air and drenches it in a warm smokey scent that is easily identifiable.

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When I was 5 I remember being conscious and aware of the smell for the first time. It was one of the rare occasions when it was raining outside and the air felt cool and stagnant, breaking up the monotony of the usually dry and bright climate. My grandpa took me outside to the back porch to watch the rain. In sitting with him I remember breathing in and out and feeling how different the air felt. The oils of the creosote tinting the air with their musky fragrance that had been released by the moisture the rain brought.Once the rain had cleared and the desert sun came back out to evaporate the water, he showed me the bush in our backyard.

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Inhaling the strong scent of the bush I couldn’t get enough so I remember rubbing the small leaves between my fingers, effectively coating my hands in the smell and rubbing it on my clothes and in my hair. From that point, my brain had associated the smell with positive emotionally fulfilling experiences with my grandpa.

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Have You Ever Smelled Creosote Before?

The sight of rain always makes me think fondly of the smell of creosote. In Austin it’s not something I ever smell really but my brain tricks me into thinking I do. The rain in Austin makes the soil soft and muddy and settles in the air for days making it hot and humid. For me, without the smell of creosote, it feels like something is…missing.

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The border towns of Texas are held together through hundreds of years of shared experiences and community both on the American side and the Mexican side of the border. Growing up in what many would describe a desolate intense landscape, I am well tempered to the radiating heat of the dry El Paso sun. The strong saguaro cacti, the creosote bushes and the Franklin Mountains were the backdrop to my early childhood and shaped how I perceived the world around me.Specifically, I ascribe the smell of creosote to my childhood, the smell that the plant gives off permeates the air and drenches it in a warm smokey scent that is either loved or hated.

One of my first memories of it was when I was 5. During the summer’s rainy season, the pattern of intense radiating heat was interrupted by the cool rain.

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The feeling is similar to getting into a perfectly cool pool on an unbearably hot day. My grandpa who I spent most of my childhood living with, took me outside to the back porch to watch the rain.

In sitting with him I remember breathing in and out and feeling how different the air felt. The oils of the creosote tinting the air with their musky fragrance that had been released by the moisture the rain brought. Like always, once the rain stopped, the sun came back out to evaporate the water. He showed me the bush in our backyard. Inhaling the strong scent of the bush I couldn’t get enough so I remember rubbing the small leaves between my fingers, effectively coating my hands in the smell and rubbing it on my clothes and in my hair.I would pick the small leaves off and put them in my pocket or collect little piles of them in my room where they would eventually dry and shrivel up but their smell was still strong and pungent.

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Coming to Austin, there were so many times where I deeply missed the smell of rain, the rain smell I grew up with. When I tried describing this to people, they either didn’t know what I was talking about or they only knew about it secondhand. It wasn’t any sort of core memory for them.

It’s a very small thing, but not being able to find this common ground with my peers really affected me and made me feel like if there are people who can’t relate to me on this small, seemingly insignificant level, then how could they ever really See Me as a person.

My sophomore year of college, I meet this boy for the first time named Andrew. He is hard to read at first but as we start to become friends, he gives me his phone number. I immediately recognized the area code, 915 El Paso, Texas.

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However, I keep this to myself. When we eventually agree to hang out as an official “date” for the first time, He takes note of the tattoos I have on my arm. I explain how they’re kind of basic and ask if he has any. He pulls his sleeves back to show me a beautiful black and white rendition of a creosote branch. Before I have a chance to react or comment he asks me, “Do you know what creosote is?” I nod my head and immediately start explaining how this entire time that I’ve been in Austin, I’ve been actively trying to find people know what I am talking about when I start trying to describe the smell of rain, or the smokiness of the plant that will never be well encapsulated by the English language. The fact that he not only knows what it is, he has the same story that I do about my grandpa. The similarities between us in this strangely specific way feel almost divinely orchestrated.

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As things between us got more serious, instead of flowers, he would go to El Paso to get me a dried creosote branch as a symbol of affection. All of them I still have and cherish deeply.

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Reflection: This essay was one where I think the concept and idea was the most unique. I like that it’s the first essay I present in this portfolio, it sets the tone and scene for the rest of the essays I think. I got a lot of helpful feedback about how I could create a more cohesive narrative. When I was first writing I think I made the assumption that my readers would know what creosote was/is so I had to explain it a little bit. I included a picture at the end because I think that really helps solidify and illustrate what creosote looks like and gives the reader a different perspective than one that they might have been imagining.

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Wrap Essay #2: Prewriting

Q: Describe the character as you saw them when you were a child.

A: For me, this character in my life was my mom. She used to scare me growing up

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Draft:

When I was a kid, I saw my mom as this one dimensional authority figure who only went to work and came home and was mean and made me clean all of the time. She was definitely "safe" person to me but not anyone I would ever go to whenever I needed emotional support, to younger me, my mom wasn't someone who was capable of feeling emotional about anything.

Of course now that I'm an adult I can understand why I saw my mom that way. For one, I lived with my grandparents because my mom was always working and she was also in school and now that I'm in school and working I can't even imagine how hard it must've been for my mom to take on all of that responsibility and have 2 kids before she was my age.

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I love and appreciate my mom for who she is, and I hope that if there is ever a time when I am a mother, I think of my mom and how all that she did for me and my sister was to ensure our survival against what she perceived to be threats or potential danger. Our physical safety was always her number one concern.

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Move, Adapt or Die I don’t think it’s a secret that within Mexican households eldest daughters shoulder so much responsibility both within the day to day tasks within the household. There is immense pressure to be so many things and hold so many roles: mediator, financial advisor, nanny, chef. This of course has serious consequences emotionally and mentally. My mom grew up with the burden of playing all of these roles. She had to take on the burden of raising her siblings at a very young age when my grandparents got into a serious car accident that left them unable to maintain a household without a lot of help.

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There is a concept that biologists and people who study evolution use called Move, Adapt, or Die, it’s usually shortened to the acronym MAD. This concept is used to describe a species, community or ecosystem that, when faced with challenges, has three choices. They can either move to a different environment that is better suited to facilitate their survival but would take up resources or time to do, time that they did not always have. They can adapt to the circumstances of their situation which comes at the cost of their safety and comfort or, the last option, they can die if neither aforementioned option is viable.

Admittedly, growing up with a mother who had to take on these enormous burdens that no child should have to take on and being an eldest daughter myself, was not easy.

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My mother lived in survival mode. She had mastered the art of adapting to your surroundings and trying to make the best of an unfortunate situation. From a young age, I remember absorbing her anxieties and fears making them my own. Since my mom had me just after she graduated high school and the man who signed my birth certificate was never in the picture, it is suffice to say that we were not wealthy, far from it actually, to this day some of my favorite cereals and cheeses are the ones my mom would pick from the WIC center. For many years before I began living with my grandparents (after my relationship with my mom became too strained) my mom and I lived in a small one bedroom apartment in El Paso. We never went without, in fact, I have very fond memories of sitting on the floor of our living room eating Oreos.

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My mom’s general demeanor for all of my childhood was strict bordering on hostile and at times, outright verbally abusive. Once my sister was born and her dad began living with us, things changed. Even though I was still in elementary school, more and more responsibilities were placed on me. Of course when you’re a child you have no way to really compare your lived experiences with your peers, so to me, it was normal that I was tasked with watching my sister or making sure that she wasn’t hungry and if she was, making her food or else I’d be in trouble. Of course this list goes on and on and becomes increasingly more worrisome as I got older and into highschool. To my mom, life was a series of tasks that “just had to get done” . I rarely ever saw her indulge in any hobbies or watch tv or have friends. Her life was focused on working, 21

not because she loved it but because it was “her responsibility to keep us alive” and she was very good at keeping us alive actually! Our physical bodies were always taken care of and to her, that was her only priority. Our mental and emotional health suffered greatly as a consequence of this mindset. My mother was never ever someone who I’d seek out for comfort, she’d tell me to get over whatever was hurting me or say “well if you’re not bleeding and nothing’s broken you’re fine also these floors need to be mopped again they’re filthy.”

It would hurt when I’d go to school and hear my friends talking about their moms and how nice and stereotypically motherly they were and wishing that my mom could be like that.

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There were times that I resented her for not being someone who could even just pretend to care about how I felt without dismissing me. When I moved to Austin for college, I was shocked when people would tell me that I came off as judgemental or dismissive when those were traits i so deeply disliked in my own mother.It took me years to unlearn the unconscious ways that my mother’s coldness impacted me. Now at 22, the same age my mom was when she already had two kids, I can really sympathize and feel for her. I can’t even begin to imagine how difficult it must have been to not have a very consistent income, two kids, and still barely be in your 20s.

With both my sister and I in different cities, my mom has had a chance to turn off the part of her that prioritizes survival. She has hobbies now and disposable income and space to be herself, something that she did not get to have when she was 18.

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Reflection: I was nervous to write about this topic because it’s not something I have ever really written or talked about before, even to myself. My peers were supportive though and encouraged me to write this story. When I was writing this story, I actually didn’t realize how it kind of mentioned or referenced themes that I talked about in my first essay about creosote. I’m not in love with this revision only because I feel that there is some context missing but wasn’t sure how to incorporate it without turning it into a different story entirely.

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Wrap Essay #3: Prewriting

Q: What is Your Unpopular Opinion A: My unpopular opinion was that I like summer more than winter or fall.

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Draft:

As the year approaches its close, fall begins to transition to autumn, and the days get shorter, I am reminded that people like me were not built for cold weather. The first autumnal day that drops below 80 degrees in Texas is a sad reminder that the year is actually coming to a close.Having lived in Texas my whole life, I have experienced the full spectrum of heat that the landscape has to offer. I have felt the dry dusty heat of far west texas and I have also felt the swampy sweltering heat of deep south texas. I have never craved the cold windy days that are few and far between here in this region of Texas.

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As the year, just like every other year, treads on, the latter few months are a shocking reminder of the way that time passes so quickly before we are ever really aware of it. The way this coincides with time and weather changes is always a precursor to the inevitable dread and weirdness that comes with 6pm sunsets and freezing mornings. I think my circadian rhythm is permanently aligned with the mid summer months. The warm mornings and clear skies remind me of times where I have significantly less obligations and have space to just be me. My only real obligation in the summer is my job which is luckily pretty easy but tiring. I don’t get paid much so I have to work full time just to make rent.

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Speedway House The summer months of June and July are times that I look forward to every year. They are times of relaxation, excitement, and social fulfillment.In the summer my only responsibility is going to work. The job that I have to work in the summer, which is open 24 hours a day 7 days a week, schedules me around the clock. This means that there are days that I am working alone in the middle of the night until the very early morning hours or I could be working from the afternoons into the night. The monotonous task of getting up everyday and putting on my little uniform and clocking in for 8 hours is something that always reminds me of summer.

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Where I work is very close to the local skatepark so there are people that I am friends with who spend their entire summers at the skatepark and always come in throughout my shift to say hi to me, no matter what time it was. It would always be the same interaction.”Hey Selena, when you get off?” and I’d respond, to which they’d invite me to hang out the “trap”whenever my shift ended (just as a disclaimer, it wasn’t really a trap house, just a 4 bedroom college house that housed anywhere from 8 to 10 people at a time) Conveniently the “trap” was less than a block away from my apartment in East Austin. Most days I would work until the middle of the night but when I would make my way over there, the excitement was only just beginning.

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The house had been turned into a makeshift skatepark of sorts with homemade ramps where the living room would be and huge loud speakers that were always blasting early 2010s indie garage rock music(see also: Wavves or the Yeah Yeah Yeahs). SInce the permanent residents of the house were early 20 something year old guys, the air within the house was always a little bit heavy with smoke and the grime that has accumulated from never sweeping or cleaning the house. They didn't “believe in air conditioning” so the interior temperature always lingered around 90 degrees especially with all of us squished into the limited number of square feet that made up what was supposed to be the living room.

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It was during times like this that I was glad that my hair was extremely short to help facilitate some sort of ventilation. My favorite memories ever are getting off of work where I had spent the last 8 hours being berated by customers or being forced to work with my extremely inappropriate manager to taking a walk from my apartment down the block to my friends’ house where my designated seat on the couch was always waiting. I didn’t have any academic obligations to worry about or any high stakes internship tasks to work on. I just had to worry about making rent for my one bedroom apartment, my snacks, and the occasional trip to the nail salon.

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We’d spend the entire nights until 4,5,6 in the morning just talking, laughing, watching youtube videos on someone’s computer or making playlists. Until most of us would get really tired and someone would offer to walk me home since it was late and we lived in an area of questionable activity. This was my routine throughout the entire summer and I grew to really love it. I love my friends and the times I’ve spent at the “trap”. As summer transitions into fall and classes start again, I am pulled out of the reality and sense of comfort I have created into a reality that I don’t have as much control over. One where my daily schedule is dictated by assignments, family obligations, my job (that I am only able to work part-time) and internships.

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Especially now, as the year draws to a close and the days are extremely short and the weather is cold, I find myself longing for the summertime and the hot, sunny summer days that I spent with my friends. The feeling of contentment and warmth I feel hanging out with my friends is mirrored by the warmth of the summer nights. The cool weather months do not inspire or encourage people to seek out or build a sense of community with others outside of their family. Of course I still see my friends, but the times we spend together in the summer are irreplaceable and something I will always cherish.

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Reflection: This essay was the most enjoyable to write. I find myself thinking about these ideas and feelings a lot and it was nice to solidify them in writing. In my draft, I got comments saying that people were sure if I was initially talking about fall as an idea or a literal demarcation on the calendar. So I decided to write to write more about what kinds of things summer is for me and how that relationship I have with summer is personal and means something very specific to me. It was difficult for me to write about an “unpopular opinion” I had because I genuinely could not think of one when we met as a group. There were many directions that this essay could have taken but I’m content that I got to tell this story.

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Semester Reflection In choosing to take this class, I knew that I would have to expand the creative part of my brain and really dig into what kinds of memories and events in my life could translate well into a written text. Over the semester what I enjoyed most was hearing what other people were writing about because it helped inspire me and reassess some of my own writings. From the beginning of the semester until now at the very end, I know that I have changed a lot as a person and as a writer and I think that this shows in what I have written for this class.I have gone through a lot of personal events this semester that have impacted how I view myself and my relationship with the world around me. What I struggled with the most this semester was the frustration that came with feeling like the things I am writing about weren’t good or interesting.

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This feeling came from how I was delivering the narrative and not so much the subject matter itself. So, I felt like nothing I was writing came out “right” or had an impact on the reader. I also struggled with trying to make my content “relatable” or like feeling a lot of pressure to write a story that was “relatable” I really enjoyed our readings this semester, we were exposed to a variety of different writing styles and narrative techniques that helped us refine our own writing style and voice. All of the readings were impactful but the one that stuck with me the most was The Friend. I think it stood out to me because it felt very stream-of-conscious at times which I really enjoyed because it helped us really connect with the character of the husband who is losing his wife, and himself to cancer.

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The feedback I got from my peers, and other people I showed my writings to really helped me establish what I was trying to say as well as what was or was not working. It’s always really scary for people to read your work especially when you really do not feel confident about it. I am not sure that creative writing will ever come easily or naturally to me but I know that I do have ideas and stories that are meaningful and that I want to share. Usually, I share these stories with my best friends or I repeat them to myself over and over trying to see if I missed some hidden message or something

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About the Author Selena is a writer living in Austin with her pet rat Money Machine. She moved to Austin to attend St.Edward’s University as a Professional Writing major. Her body of work comprises mostly of technical and academic writing as well as some grant writing (creative writing is very much not her forte). Unofficially, tweeting makes up a significant portion of her writing, if it were possible she’d be a professional twitter.

A lot of her writing is influenced by and integrates her critiques of Western society and culture and how it fails to account for marginalized perspectives.

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