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I entered the first class unsure of what I would find. I knew it was a genre course, but I didn't really now what that meant. I thought of genre as a way of categorizing books, but I wasn't even entirely sure that was what we would be looking at. Would be just read “genre” fiction, like science-fiction? I was almost more trepidations than curious. At the back of my mind, I knew that it was still shopping period. I could drop the course, but I was too intrigued to do so.

I didn't talk that much, for the first several classes. I didn't feel comfortable. I was worried that I had nothing interesting to contribute. I had never studied the digital humanities, and I was sure that I would reveal my ignorance. Sometimes, I would find myself feeling passionate about something (for example, when we read “Mad at School” I definitely wanted to give my thoughts, as someone with depression and OCD). At the same time, I worried about being judged – especially when I revealed personal things that I never talk about, like my mental illness. Sometimes, I would hold myself back. Other times, I found myself sharing things I never talk about; most of my friends here at Bryn Mawr don't know that I have depression and OCD, for example, but I wanted to share them, even when I didn't feel comfortable.

My first paper was about the blogging website LiveJournal, and looking specifically at the blogger Cleolinda Jones. Jones began on LiveJournal, but has since been published in print, though she still blogs, too. I was thinking about websites as something academic, for the first time, and about “breaks,” a concept I had never really thought about. Jones broke the idea of a wall between the digital and non-digital publishing worlds. I also wrote about the genre of LiveJournal (a crazy thought, at the time!).

My next paper was about gutters. It was also my favorite paper, to be honest. I looked at gutters, a content and form convention in graphic novels. I studied different ways a specific novel, A Visit from the Good Squad, by Jennifer Egan, uses prolepsis and breaks and other literary elements that are, truly, gutters. This paper was exciting. I felt as if I was doing something new, at least for me. Two weeks earlier, even, I would never have thought to look at novels though a visual element of graphic novels. And yet, it made perfect sense, but the time I wrote that paper.

My third paper synthesized Slaughterhouse-Five and The War of the Worlds, looking at how Vonnegut and Wells used aliens to make points about. Both of these books were classics that I'd never read, and when I did read them, they didn’t seem very alike. Writing this paper, I found similarities in that they were dissimilar. Both writers made social and political points, with their fiction – just different points.

Over the course of... well, this course, I grew more comfortable. Part of it is that I got to know all the wonderful people in the class, and to feel at-home with them. Talking with friends is fun. Part of it is that I felt at-ease in science-fiction, a genre I know and love. Part of it, I think, was evolution. I just grew more confident, less frightened that I would annoy or bore people. None of us quite knew what we were doing, I realized.

Now that the class is ending, I'm sad. I really enjoyed our discussions, and I feel that my whole way of looking at things has shifted. This has never happened to me before. It's exciting, and a bit confusing. Things that I never would have considered, before this class, seem normal. The edges of my mind have expanded – I'm looking at genre as content and form, as something that can be applied not just to put library books on the right shelves, but as something I can think of in non-literary contexts. The classroom has a genre, of all things. Weirdest of all, I don't even think that's crazy.