Introduction

As children, we live in a dream of the future. Ambition runs through our veins with adolescent and innocent energy. My childish ambition was always creative. I was writing movie scripts for me and my friends to act out as soon as I knew how to write. I got a little older and found short stories as a way to romanticize preteen angst. In my high school years, I fell in love with poetry as a way for depression and anxiety to take a peculiarly beautiful form.

But, my creative dreams from childhood got skewed in my teenage years. Wanting a creative career was, more often than not, side-eyed and heavily questioned. I continued to write poetry in the back of math notebooks but never shared it. I suppressed the want, the need, to lead a creative and expressive life.

I started college in 2020 because, considering the circumstances, I didn’t know what else to do. I started with little to no plan of the outcome. On the first day of my first semester, I decided to drop one of my courses and replace it with an Intro to Creative Writing course that just happened to have one spot open.

This course, along with an amazingly supportive professor teaching it, altered my life and perspective. I rekindled my want to write, but more importantly, I fell in love with sharing writing and the writing community.

It was a fairy-tale story of chance that led me to my devoted relationship with writing. In December of 2023 we sealed our love with marriage (my creative writing degree) and, also in 2023, we had a child (a published poetry collection titled Aimless). Someone should really make this a rom-com.

But, I have come to the rough realization that things do not just fall into perfect place after graduating college. A job does not fall at your feet, you no longer have professors and fellow students pushing you to consistently write, and writing blocks are no longer combated with prompts from four different English classes. Productivity is not the same type of necessity as it was in school. Like every relationship, you must continue to put in the work after the honeymoon phase.

I met this rock in the road with the idea of finding an internship. That is when I found Quiet Lightning. I was immediately intrigued because I love the city of San Francisco, and I could see the work and passion that was being put into their work. And the way that the name connects to my last name (Shock) is pretty poetic.

Through this internship, I found the column The Storming Bohemian Punks the Muse written by Charles Kruger. I loved this column for the brutally honest, deep and raw way of offering advice on overcoming writer’s block. Especially because this is something that I, and most other writers, go through. Even when passion and creativity are running through our veins, we still hold ourselves back, or simply just feel there is no way to accurately express ourselves when we are in these funks.

This column spans from the years 2011 to 2021. For me, the coolest thing about going through these articles is that I was not in the writing community until the later years of this column’s life. (I mean, did you see that picture of me from 2012?) The odds are, I probably would not have found these (up to) 12-year-old articles without this internship. But here I am, connecting to them years later.

Quiet Lightning, as a whole, is an anthology of creative people, creative ideas, and creative pieces that are at our fingertips even years and years later.

This all got me wondering: how could we resurface these for other writers?

So, welcome to me Re-Punking the Muse in 2024. *insert jazz hands here*

In the very first Punk the Muse article, The Storming Bohemian suggests, “being an artist means staying awake, and not succumbing to the slumber of an unexamined life.”

I am now awake. I will attempt to combat this after college funk/writer’s block stage of life with the original Punk the Muse articles, my own research, and whatever else comes my way. And I’ll be documenting it here. My hope is, by any glimpse of chance, it will find other amazing, passionate, and possibly stuck writers as well.

See you next month? 😉