Creative Essays?

I'm not going to lie to the readers out there, I have never thought about making an essay creative. When I think of essays, I think of the structured papers that we come across with at school. They are factual, and tend to pose a side of an argument. This is what I have always known, so the introduction of creative essays made me want to run the other way. I told you guys I was not going to lie, so I will not. What a creative essay does is that it incorporates facts about a particular subject and throw a twist on it to make it more creative for the readers. My first exposure to creative essays come out of the essay packet that I had to read for class. At first, I did not see the essay part with the first few sections, but then once I read "Mute Dancers: How to Watch a Hummingbird" by Diane Ackerman, I noticed the combination between creative and factual parts of the essay itself.

To start off talking about the one that I mentioned above first. "Mute Dancers: How to Watch a Hummingbird," is a piece about, well, Hummingbirds. The first paragraph is creatively written, and it drew me in to this particular piece. Afterward, it went into giving history, but it was still creatively written, and the language is beautiful. There are a lot of show aspects of this section as well, but most of it was talking just about the history. I learned things about Hummingbirds that I did not know about, for example how they were depicted as resurrection birds within Indian myths and legends. I know a lot of legend and myths, but I did not know about that. I enjoyed this piece a lot.

Another one that I liked was "Mint Snowball." In this piece, Naomi Shihab Nye talks about the recipe for something that is called a mint snowball, which is ultimately dessert. This dessert sounds so yummy and I want one, let's be honest. But the essay goes into talking about how the great-grandfather sold the recipe outside the family, and that the narrator's family is looking for a way to replicate it. I wonder if maybe the great-grandfather just did not want to pass it on because he is grumpy. All in all, I want to eat some dessert now.