Reflection is a task that I find to be simultaneously both intensely invigorating, and acutely enervating, and it is a task whose importance I often seem to under-value until having completed it. This is my first attempt at completing this task this year, so please bear with me…

For as long as I can remember, writing has been a medium through which I have felt comfortable expressing myself. In my opinion, there is no single tool more powerful. I find that the opportunity to think through every choice of vocabulary, construct every sentence, and build every paragraph allows a ubiquitous control that is completely unique to writing. J.R.R. Tolkein, Louis Sachar, and Daniel Handler are all among those who have influenced my writing style the most, although I say this with the utmost humility for the superiority of their artistic and literary talent. A few of my own works of which I am most proud include my faithful adaptation of “The Hobbit” into a five-and-a-half-hour play (of which my seventh grade class performed the first hour, or so), and my Alexander Pope-esque mock epic that enraptured all of my waking hours for a period of about five months (I’ll be uploading it as soon as I figure out how to do so).

Perhaps the most easily-identifiably reason for my enthusiasm in Arts One is my love of reading (I’m gonna go out on a limb here, and assume that this is relatively common among people in Arts One). When other children were playing their gameboys, tamagotchi’s, or whatever happened to be the fad at the time, I was begging my mother for the next Hardy Boys’ adventure, the latest novel by Cornelia Funke, or of course, the new Harry Potter book. One of my earliest memories is the moment of profound epiphany that I experienced when I realized that ‘erised’ is simply the word ‘desire’ spelled backwards…

In my short 16 years, I have lived in ‘the Golden State’ of California, the ‘Salmon Capital of the World’, Campbell River, ‘The Harbour City’, Sydney, Australia, and Prince George, BC. Were it not for the Arts One program, I would definitely have accepted the offer of another university and lived elsewhere instead, but I felt like this was an opportunity that I simply could not let slip away, lest I forever regret it. I hope that through the reading and discussion of the texts, I can gain a broader understanding of many different perspectives on the world, while at the same time concretizing opinions and perspectives of my own. I genuinely look forward to doing this with all of you in the coming eight months.

Thank you for bearing with me,

Ryan Miller