For about three years now, I have been writing poetry. It was not until my junior year in high school that I developed an interest, love, and skill for writing poetry. Back in elementary school, I love to write stories. I would write stories on post-it notes and anywhere I could. Yet when I had to write a limerick  for an assignment, I could not wrap my head around poetry. I had a very hard time figuring out how to rhyme words and have the words make sense. I eventually tossed the paper with the attempted limerick in the trash. I did not try my hand at poetry again until several years later. Many years later in my freshman year of high school, my English teacher gave my class a poetry project as an assignment. I still remember my limerick assignment and was afraid of doing the poetry. For the project, we had to analyze a poem and write a response to it. I choose to respond to Robert Frost's poem Fire and Ice. I also wrote my own poem first. I become really excited when writing the poem. Two years later, I started writing poetry, as a hobby and for fun. To learn how good or bad my poems were, I handed them in to some magazines and contests. I won second place in the North Carolina Poetry Society's Sherry Pruitt Award Contest with a poem called The Ocean, and had my two poems published as high merit   poems. I have continued to write poetry, and have even self-published three collections of poetry in both print and e-book formats, which can be found at my store on Lulu. Now, I love writing poetry, but I don't hate writing short stories. I just find it more difficult and not my style of writing, even though I still write short stories occasionally. The author took up writing poetry as a hobby when he   _  .
was in Grade Three in high school worked as a storekeeper was in Grade One in high school was at college