Zohal Faqeeri
Krista Ferguson
ENG 101- 011A
August 28, 2012
It only took about four paragraphs in to be hooked on this story; it only took four paragraphs to start relating it to my life and common experiences. She Had Some Horses: The Education of a Poet was a very powerful story. It was a great example of wanting to stand out and trying to figure out why that was not a common thing in Sherman Alexies’ culture. I believe Sherman Alexie wrote this story to show us all how literature changed his life and his was of thinking. He always did have, from the beginning, curiosities. He was always curious as to why there were no Indian writers in the books he read.
All of his questions led him to finding many answers. His way of thinking made him very different from the others. He noticed things that many others did not. I think he may have been a little bit embarrassed of being an Indian. But through writing and poetry, he began to learn things about himself. He learned that he was in fact an excellent writer and poet.
It seemed like one of his main goals after he started writing must have been to change people’s minds about what their image of an “Indian” is. “It was always about Plains, Indians, or the Navahos (42).” In this part of the story he said that the books they were assigned to read at school about Indians were written by non-Indians and had a sort
Faqeeri 2 of ‘stereotypical’ view of Indians. He didn’t quite like the idea of everyone having a certain image of his people.
That was a great part of the story because I come from a place different from mostly everyone I meet. People always say discriminating remarks to me weather it’s joking or not, it’s upsetting. He got a big boost of confidence from Joy Harjo, an Indian writer and poet. He found her writing very inspiring and it made him believe that he too, can be a writer and a poet. This story was a piece of writing that I could really relate too. When he said he was in college and