Second March Post

I’ve started to write this month! It’s been an interesting undertaking because the way I’ve been doing it is by drawing a bunch of different scenes from various funny or thought-provoking or just beautiful things I’ve witnessed at the refugee center. Of course, at this point there is no through-line; the little stories/vignettes have no relation to each other except their subjects, and at least right now I’m hoping to end up with a longish piece (several thousand words, ideally) that flows. (Literally right now I have a few little stories divided from each other by a couple returns and a “—“.) I intend to go as in-depth as I can on one girl in particular, and maybe two if it works out that way, but the way it’s going right now, I could see the final piece being a more general ode to the children I’ve observed and gotten to know at the center and the specialness of the place itself. There are enough lovable idiosyncrasies about the everyday happenings at the after school program that I think it could be an entertaining and valuable “slice of life” type article. I definitely add my own musings along with the observations I describe, mostly because it just makes for a more interesting writing project, but I hope it will end up adding to the overall product in getting the reader to see a strange little world from the perspective of a relative outsider who loves it.

Comments

  1. UnknownApril 12, 2018 at 8:09 AM

    I love the idea of capturing moments as they arise. They are sure to be useful to your writing, and will be great memories in the future. Thanks for your reliable posting this year and best of luck keeping up the pace during the remainder of the semester!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Second April Post

At this point in the project, I’m almost done with the article I’ve been working on all month. It’s an unusual little piece, especially at this stage when it’s mostly written but not necessarily organized yet. To clarify: what I’ve been writing about RISSE has flowed out in bits, little mini ideas that either stand alone or connect to another mini idea through a shared subject. They are technically discrete snapshots (I wouldn’t even say they’re stories, necessarily) but my hope is that they each contribute a verse to the poem I’m trying to compose about this after school center. There’s a certain amount of restraint that is involved in this writing process, too, because I am really dedicated to a couple things with this project: one, acknowledging myself in the context of the center and the things I write about it, and two, painting these kids and this place with as light a brush as possible. I want to convey beauty and love in my piece, but I’m loathe to have any other designs f
Read more

Second January Post

Yesterday I went up to Middlebury College to sit in on a class taught by Sierra, the journalist I met at Emma in November. The class is called “Writing What You Don’t Know: Craft and Ethics in Narrative Journalism.” In it, students write two long form journalistic pieces, read and discuss magazine journalism, and learn about the ethics of journalism while grappling with it in their own projects. In the class I sat in on, the students started off in three-person consultancy groups in which they discussed an ethical problem each student was having regarding the article they were working on. Each person in the group had a certain amount of time to explain the problem, and then the other two members had time to ask questions and discuss a possible solution—inasmuch as a concrete solution to an ethical problem in journalism is realistic! In the group I watched, I was so impressed at how thoughtful and invested every student was in discussing the problems that arose, which included one
Read more

Autobiography

A year and a half ago, I got interested in the Middle East after writing a research paper about the West’s culpability for the comparatively lacking rights for women in many majority Muslim countries. The region’s richness, beauty and complexity, as well as many Americans’ misperceptions of it, all draw me to its history, language, and people. Around the same time, I became interested in investigative journalism after reading two astonishing books: Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo and Show Me a Hero by Lisa Belkin. The former is a story that came out of the author’s visits to a slum in India over the course of several years. The story is beautiful and haunting and reads like a novel. The latter is an investigative report about the de facto racial segregation in Yonkers, NY, and the backlash that threatened to destroy the city when steps were taken in the 1990s to remedy it. My combined interest in the region of the Middle East and investig
Read more