Author: Patrina Ayamba (Page 9 of 10)

What Mike Bunn means by “You are already an author” is that all the things that I write, it could be essays for my class, short stories or poems of even just a paragraph I am an author in my own way. My work doesn’t have to be published or be a New York Times bestseller for me to be considered an author.  Some of the things I write already are short fictional stories which I really loved doing when I was younger , but as I grew older I have become more interested in poems and often try to come up with my own poems during my free time and I like to get inspiration from other poets. One of my favorite poems of all time is “I, Too” by Langston Hughes. This existing expertise will help me in my college reading and writing career because I will already have some knowledge or background on how to read and write at a college level. Due to my experience mostly from high school where I would be assigned 20 pages of work to read or a 10 page research paper, I have knowledge and background information of what is expected of me in college reading and writing. The way Bunn wrote his article was very interesting, he started his article talking about his job where he would often sit in the corner of the theater trying to read on a tiny flashlight and then having the realization that the way he reads “one word at a time” was the exact way the author had written the text “word by word”. I would like to try what Bunn did here in my own writing, I would like to give the reader some background as to how this article, book or piece of literature came to be.

For this post I won’t be talking about my first name “Patrina” I will be talking about my middle name “Wintima”. The reason why I will be talking about my middle name and not my first name is because I’ve always liked my first name and I never felt embarrassed of my first name, but my middle name has always been a different story. My middle name is my cultural name it is a common name in the upper east region of Ghana, Bawku where I am originally from. For as long as I can remember I have been embarrassed of my middle name, out of all my siblings I was the only one my parents would call using my middle name and not my first name. All my family members except for my two older sisters call me by my middle name. My middle name means “God’s Gift” or “God’s Gift to me” in my native language Kusal. The reason I hated my middle name and would often correct my parents when they called me wintima in public saying ” That’s my middle name not my actual name why do you always call me Wintima?” is because it was a name that made others constantly say ” Ive never heard a name like that before” or “how do you pronounce it” or  ” wow that is a very ethic name” and worse of all I hated how much they would often struggle to pronounce it with the right tone and right flow of the words “WINTIMA”. I had often found myself trying to pronounce my name in a more “Europeanized way”  instead of the “African Way”, the way it should be pronounced. But over the years I have learned that , my middle name is a part of me that will always be there it reminds me of my culture and my home.