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Malee Moua, arts and entertainment editor.

I’ve never met Dorian Gray. Didn’t hang out with any of the “Little Women.” In the 11th grade, I was assigned to read Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms” and Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five.”

I SparkNotes-ed both.

The gasps from my literature professors and peers when I’ve admitted this haunt me in my sleep. No, not really, but it’s embarrassing when my more scholarly writing peers wax poetic on Proust’s use of involuntary memory, while I chew the fat on how unabashedly “Michael Cera-y,” Michael Cera came across in last August’s issue of “Rolling Stone.”

I haven’t read the classics, nor am I an avid reader. I once overheard a fellow writing student talk about books the way I would talk about clothes. He said he could never leave the bookstore without purchasing two or three books. I began to worry that my nonexistent love of literature meant I was in the wrong major.

I don’t have an insatiable thirst for the written word, and I don’t plow through books. To give you an idea of my reading style, I’ve been trying to finish Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Never Let Me Go” for over a year now.

I’m a short form kind of gal. If we go all the way back to why I’m majoring in writing, it’s because I love reading and writing poetry. I always have. I could tell you that my favorite E. E. Cummings poem begins with “being to timelessness as it’s to time.” I could tell you about the one stanza in Jeffrey McDaniel’s “The Benjamin Franklin of Monogamy” that always brings me to tears. And I could tell you how Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech nurtured my love for anaphora and metaphor.

I have tried. After I graduated high school, I felt so bad about my skimpy English career that I set out to complete “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “Catcher in the Rye.” The former is now one of my favorite novels. As for the latter, I didn’t really understand all of the fuss.

Some may see this as a backwards way to create art, because how can I produce good work when I haven’t read the books deemed “classic”? It’s not because I feel that they wouldn’t be of any value to me. It’s because, well, novels are really long. I know that makes me sound, dare I say, unintelligent and lazy, but I’m simply not interested. I truly wish I was, but I’m not. I hope that doesn’t make me a bad writer.

I came to school here because of my love for the free-spirited poetic form, but I quickly learned that SCAD was not the school for fiction writing. I was initially disheartened by this, but strangely enough, this uncommon curriculum led me to my love of creative nonfiction. Without even knowing or planning it, my nearly blasphemous writing background has found the perfect home to flourish.