Hello all,

My name is Jarrod. I’m a SCAD grad, writer, and multimedia artist/harsh noise maker from Georgia.

I participated in the marathon last year. It was a great experience. The no-stop nature of the Marathon ensures that anxiety and procrastination can’t get in the way of writing. It’s go-go-go which means lots of work actually gets done for once. Deadlines, while terrifying, can be a writer’s best friend. Hour deadlines even more so. Self-judgment, wallowing in imposter syndrome, and paper crumbling are hard to do here. In the time it takes you to delete a poem or agonize over a sentence, the next one will be due. More often than not, I found that some of the ones I hated, that I posted to keep up, were ones that some people really liked. Another invaluable lesson here, that I think we’ll all learn or revisit, is that we aren’t the final say in whether what we created has value or not. As much as we’d love to scream-through-sans-serif font at our kind readers here, we can’t. Move on. There will be 13 more to do, and so on.

I’ll see you on the other side, friendos.

-Jarrod