Mae
Is this a day in-the-life story, a story about bar as a center of a community, a profile of the bar, of you and the clientele, or what? I feel that this lacks a focus and that makes some of the details of the story, although interesting, go nowhere. I think that the most interesting part of the story is the two women, Wheezy and Brenda, as workers who are managing two central places in the middle of a specific neighborhood with specific clientele. It even seems like they might have a relationship with one another given their comments. I bet they have a lot of stories to tell that speak to the area. The last paragraph Brenda’s personality starts coming through and it’s the most lively and interesting part of the piece.
Austin
Your unexpected/unexplained performance might be the key here. I know in class you said you wanted to talk about people who are glbt and some other minority and how they balance, think about, defend, use their identity. Your own experience with this, especially in a setting that moved you to stand up and join in community and connection with other people is perhaps evidence for the success and/or the need of Pulse and/or spaces like the Fire Gallery --or even how roles or the feeling of membership to a certain group or identity is shown to be both positive, a way to make connection, and ludicrous and unfair as is obvious through the way strangers in this space can communicate and connect because they are in boxes and not despite of it. I don’t know how the actual experience was so forgive me if I’m making assumptions. I do think that you should trust your own instincts and experiences here though, especially with how well you can communicate a mood and the reasons people do what they do in social settings.
Toni
This is well written, as are most of your rough drafts of your pieces. Your ability to incorporate quotes and give vivid details is wonderful but I was frustrated sometimes with this piece because I wasn’t sure where you were going or more accurately I suppose, why this topic matters. It is only interesting because you write well but I need convincing of why this is something that we should pay attention to given all the other things you could write about.
Martin
I think that your piece is too individualized, if that makes sense and is a word. The topic could appeal to a wide audience but the way you incorporate yourself somehow closes it off. I think if you spend more time on the dunes or on other characters it might help but try approaching this problem from a different angle. See how far you can get with using yourself and even if you can’t write the whole piece without “I” then at least you will see more clearly where it will actually help strengthen the piece, not just fill and tell. The conflict of someone being an environmentalist and not changing his or her lifestyle completely is pretty widespread, but I think your piece could be more provocative than that.
Regis
Bummer that it didn’t work out for this guy. It must have been hard trying to figure out what angle to take. I think the teamwork thing is interesting but I don’t know if it’s enough. I also think that the entrepreneur kid angle can be interesting but you don’t quite give enough to convince me that that is the whole story either. Bottom line is that I think you can do both and make it intriguing but you need way more detailed attention to character and tighter scenes. There is plenty going on and plenty of people around but no scene or person is very vivid. Keep going with it, I think it can turn into something great.
Elizabeth
It appears that you have several stories running through this rough draft and you haven’t been able to focus or get excited about any of them. The story about race and staff is a totally separate story than one about how students treat security in general. And the ridiculous things parents call about or that security has to deal with every day could be something else as well. Also, the strange close-minded quote from the freshman threw me for an even bigger loop. I think that you should go with what most interests you, what most gets your fingers moving across the keys. Take another angle, do another interview but stick with what is interesting and what you want to write about.
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Monday, June 1, 2009
Draft, too long, still has notes in, more interviews coming will shape it more. Would love feedback!
Imagine being a graduate of a 4-year private liberal arts college. Last weekend you stepped across a stage heavily draped in white cloth, shook the president’s hand, and received your laminated and leather-bound diploma in front of family and friends.
Flash forward a few weeks. The horns playing your Alma matter still echo in your ears and the inspiring words of the $2,000/hour commencement speaker (“Go forth with this knowledge bestowed upon you and change the world…”) still mock you. Unemployed and uninsured, you sit down at your mom’s kitchen table and stare at the envelope in front of you. Your first loan repayment is due in 4 weeks.
The bright-eyes of college graduates are looking unusually dim and as the media consistently reports, for exceptionally good reason. Students don’t need someone reporting the really bad and even worse, as the Wall Street Journal did with its recent “The Curse of the Class of 2009.” Graduates are well aware that their money, their time, their education is being called, usually with little finesse, useless.
With the current economic hoo-hah, college, especially of the liberal arts variety, is quickly being discovered to have little to do with getting a job and making a living. Current liberal arts college students, the recently unemployed, and especially recent graduates and are rightly questioning the organization of our education system that led or is leading them down a road to NO JOB.
Evidence of this is in Kalamazoo, a city of about 250,000 in the great depressed state of Michigan. Kalamazoo has been in the news in the last few years for its luck in formally housing an exceptionally rich person interested in education. This anonymous person gave not only students but the entire city an enormous boost, and the Kalamazoo Promise has been heralded as remarkable and innovative by many.
Outwardly, it is not completely apparent that the city is feeling the strain; it’s not the picture of depression as is Detroit , two hours northeast . The roads are often in disrepair but a new skate park, tennis court, and basketball hoop sits next to the public pool. A new multi-million dollar condo complex and award-winning public library sits next to the abandoned Pfizer headquarter buildings. (the company still hasn’t taken down banners proclaiming “the science of being a good neighbor” and "we love where we live.” )
One of the most obviously surviving locals, appearance-wise, is Kalamazoo College, a 4-year private liberal arts college gaining notoriety among elite institutions for its first-year experience, study abroad, and service-learning curriculum. It is one of three main institutions of higher learning: a community college, a private liberal arts college, and a state university.
On the high hill that Kalamazoo College sits on, spacious emerald green lawns kiss red brick streets, flowers bloom, birds sing, young and optimistic intellectuals move on sidewalks sans a single weed in the cracks.
The panic comes from within. The college’s endowment has dropped over 30% and stress over the potential of lost income due to dropping enrollment numbers had the college’s administration putting admissions workers on attack.
Downtown, Kalamazoo Valley Community College is feeling good. They have had record numbers apply and enroll this year. INTERVIEW COMING
ENROLLMENT NUMBERS
What is going on here?
In an economy where getting and having a job is becoming more difficult than ever, critics of the humanities usefulness in preparing students for practical, useful work are getting our attention. It is easy to imagine that college education, both undergraduate and graduate is becoming, as Colombia professor BLANK wrote in the New York Times, is becoming “the Detroit of higher learning,” in the eyes of potential students, their parents, and even those already involved in academia.
Perhaps KVCC, which has majors like BLANK, offers an education that offers certainty that appeals to many in this uncertain time. A narrowly focused, carefully applied education seems to provide a solid anchor and security when things go sour. Perhaps it’s just that it’s cheaper. Maybe the unemployed are going back to school. Most likely it is all of the above.
Should those colleges on the green grassy hills be worried? Should education adapt to market forces? Is it right not to prepare students for obtaining an actual paying job?
Regardless, the liberal arts army is on the defense.
It’s bad though, quite a jungle out there. When graduates, professors, and even current students are questioning their choice of education not because of the lack of quality but because of a lack of practicality, a rumble’s a-coming. An argument for survival will beat an argument for lofty thought everytime. And right now it appears that it is about survival. If college education can’t translate into a better shot at a higher living, SOMETHING HAS TO CHANGE>
It’s a struggle of class and prestige. It’s almost impossible to defend liberal arts philosophy in this economy and this point IN EXISTANCE without sounding like ELITE/ catchy phrase.
It sounds as if those highly educated are freaked out that the educational hierarchy order is being disrupted.
Silently, they are asking questions that have everything to do with class hierarchies: Am I really less valuable/going to have less to show in this economy then people who can repair AC’s or cut hair? As a society we tend to associate prestige with wealth, while simultaneously skewing our definitions of worth away from manual labor.
Joellen Silberman, Vice President of Enrollment at the private liberal arts based Kalamazoo College, is nervous about anyone recommending that liberal arts colleges start “behaving” like community colleges and narrowing the focus of study.
“If you think first about the fact that the definition of liberal arts is, from way back when, what are the skills that a free person, at a time when there were free and non free people, need to live in the world? And then there was a set of manual skills that individuals who were not free needed to learn…so that is where the term first came from, what are those skills?”
This doesn’t help defend liberal arts as entirely mind-opening and open-minded.
From the nation's founding through at least the nineteenth century the liberal arts were reserved for the few who had the resources and leisure to pursue them. A liberal arts education groomed upper-class men to assume what were seen as their natural positions in society—almost all others were excluded by dint of sex, race, and class.
The system is failing. Our upper classes, our upper echelon of students, are being called “cursed.” The stack of rejection letters is growing as they lose their health insurance and write their first loan payment check. Even if their parents are writing the check, there is a lot of head-rubbing going on. (“Didn’t I put my kid on the right path? 1400 SAT score! Math and English honors all the way though high school?! They volunteered at the homeless shelter for God’s sake!”)
Economists now say they have told us for years that it was a fact that the bubble economy was unsustainable and the current young generation would be the first in history to not surpass the standard of living of their parents.
This told-you-so attitude and the very mention of an “economist” is enough by now to makes any college-aged person want to beat their head against a wall. The job market has reached mythical status for recent college graduates. It is a fairy tale, a imaginary place the old folks reminisce about, like drive-ins or the old south.
Flash forward a few weeks. The horns playing your Alma matter still echo in your ears and the inspiring words of the $2,000/hour commencement speaker (“Go forth with this knowledge bestowed upon you and change the world…”) still mock you. Unemployed and uninsured, you sit down at your mom’s kitchen table and stare at the envelope in front of you. Your first loan repayment is due in 4 weeks.
The bright-eyes of college graduates are looking unusually dim and as the media consistently reports, for exceptionally good reason. Students don’t need someone reporting the really bad and even worse, as the Wall Street Journal did with its recent “The Curse of the Class of 2009.” Graduates are well aware that their money, their time, their education is being called, usually with little finesse, useless.
With the current economic hoo-hah, college, especially of the liberal arts variety, is quickly being discovered to have little to do with getting a job and making a living. Current liberal arts college students, the recently unemployed, and especially recent graduates and are rightly questioning the organization of our education system that led or is leading them down a road to NO JOB.
Evidence of this is in Kalamazoo, a city of about 250,000 in the great depressed state of Michigan. Kalamazoo has been in the news in the last few years for its luck in formally housing an exceptionally rich person interested in education. This anonymous person gave not only students but the entire city an enormous boost, and the Kalamazoo Promise has been heralded as remarkable and innovative by many.
Outwardly, it is not completely apparent that the city is feeling the strain; it’s not the picture of depression as is Detroit , two hours northeast . The roads are often in disrepair but a new skate park, tennis court, and basketball hoop sits next to the public pool. A new multi-million dollar condo complex and award-winning public library sits next to the abandoned Pfizer headquarter buildings. (the company still hasn’t taken down banners proclaiming “the science of being a good neighbor” and "we love where we live.” )
One of the most obviously surviving locals, appearance-wise, is Kalamazoo College, a 4-year private liberal arts college gaining notoriety among elite institutions for its first-year experience, study abroad, and service-learning curriculum. It is one of three main institutions of higher learning: a community college, a private liberal arts college, and a state university.
On the high hill that Kalamazoo College sits on, spacious emerald green lawns kiss red brick streets, flowers bloom, birds sing, young and optimistic intellectuals move on sidewalks sans a single weed in the cracks.
The panic comes from within. The college’s endowment has dropped over 30% and stress over the potential of lost income due to dropping enrollment numbers had the college’s administration putting admissions workers on attack.
Downtown, Kalamazoo Valley Community College is feeling good. They have had record numbers apply and enroll this year. INTERVIEW COMING
ENROLLMENT NUMBERS
What is going on here?
In an economy where getting and having a job is becoming more difficult than ever, critics of the humanities usefulness in preparing students for practical, useful work are getting our attention. It is easy to imagine that college education, both undergraduate and graduate is becoming, as Colombia professor BLANK wrote in the New York Times, is becoming “the Detroit of higher learning,” in the eyes of potential students, their parents, and even those already involved in academia.
Perhaps KVCC, which has majors like BLANK, offers an education that offers certainty that appeals to many in this uncertain time. A narrowly focused, carefully applied education seems to provide a solid anchor and security when things go sour. Perhaps it’s just that it’s cheaper. Maybe the unemployed are going back to school. Most likely it is all of the above.
Should those colleges on the green grassy hills be worried? Should education adapt to market forces? Is it right not to prepare students for obtaining an actual paying job?
Regardless, the liberal arts army is on the defense.
It’s bad though, quite a jungle out there. When graduates, professors, and even current students are questioning their choice of education not because of the lack of quality but because of a lack of practicality, a rumble’s a-coming. An argument for survival will beat an argument for lofty thought everytime. And right now it appears that it is about survival. If college education can’t translate into a better shot at a higher living, SOMETHING HAS TO CHANGE>
It’s a struggle of class and prestige. It’s almost impossible to defend liberal arts philosophy in this economy and this point IN EXISTANCE without sounding like ELITE/ catchy phrase.
It sounds as if those highly educated are freaked out that the educational hierarchy order is being disrupted.
Silently, they are asking questions that have everything to do with class hierarchies: Am I really less valuable/going to have less to show in this economy then people who can repair AC’s or cut hair? As a society we tend to associate prestige with wealth, while simultaneously skewing our definitions of worth away from manual labor.
Joellen Silberman, Vice President of Enrollment at the private liberal arts based Kalamazoo College, is nervous about anyone recommending that liberal arts colleges start “behaving” like community colleges and narrowing the focus of study.
“If you think first about the fact that the definition of liberal arts is, from way back when, what are the skills that a free person, at a time when there were free and non free people, need to live in the world? And then there was a set of manual skills that individuals who were not free needed to learn…so that is where the term first came from, what are those skills?”
This doesn’t help defend liberal arts as entirely mind-opening and open-minded.
From the nation's founding through at least the nineteenth century the liberal arts were reserved for the few who had the resources and leisure to pursue them. A liberal arts education groomed upper-class men to assume what were seen as their natural positions in society—almost all others were excluded by dint of sex, race, and class.
The system is failing. Our upper classes, our upper echelon of students, are being called “cursed.” The stack of rejection letters is growing as they lose their health insurance and write their first loan payment check. Even if their parents are writing the check, there is a lot of head-rubbing going on. (“Didn’t I put my kid on the right path? 1400 SAT score! Math and English honors all the way though high school?! They volunteered at the homeless shelter for God’s sake!”)
Economists now say they have told us for years that it was a fact that the bubble economy was unsustainable and the current young generation would be the first in history to not surpass the standard of living of their parents.
This told-you-so attitude and the very mention of an “economist” is enough by now to makes any college-aged person want to beat their head against a wall. The job market has reached mythical status for recent college graduates. It is a fairy tale, a imaginary place the old folks reminisce about, like drive-ins or the old south.
Friday, May 22, 2009
Staying Alive
By Jackie Rogers
“We are here to celebrate you. We celebrate us. We celebrate our community by sustaining ourselves through arts and hip-hop culture,” booms a man, one of many people wearing a bright green t-shirt with LIFEISLIVING.ORG across the front, at the microphone.
“We are all part of the environment. We celebrate sustaining the earth and recognize what sustains us,” he finishes and passes the microphone onto the next performer on stage. He starts rapping and beat-boxing. I sit on the warm pavement and wrap my arms around my folded knees.
Little kids run around me and mimic various parts of the diverse and active crowd; the most popular the some white, mostly black and West Harlem Dominican teenagers jumping and spinning on the concrete, practicing and parading their moves in the middle of a break dancing circle. I stand out as a loner under a tree and move over to get a better view and to integrate myself into the lively, sweating scene. The pavement is warm and the crowd swells in unison around the stage, hugging and dancing.
Here in New York and in urban areas across the country, the LIFE IS LIVING campaign is incorporating individuals and communities, mostly youth who are poor and/or of color, who are excluded from the popular green movement, dismissed as inaccessible or irrelevant.
It is catching on. The tremendous energy lifting this movement off the ground is motivating people to assert themselves and their communities as capable and conscious. The individuals and communities represented at the upper upper-west side park in Manhattan are mostly of color. We are in West Harlem, a mostly Dominican community but not far from 125th, where Malcolm X walked and the heart of strongly connected black community works and lives.
The first step of this masterfully philosophical and well-organized campaign is to be an opposite response to all the years of energy put into excluding. It is a disturbing but powerful message that brought these people together.
The people assembled, in New York and elsewhere, are organizing to prove they are alive, conscious. They have a voice, a brain, a community that is and will continue to contribute to the world.
Between swells of people, a woman catches my eye. She is at eye level, behind one of several tables, the majority providing information about local efforts for sustainability. One has a bike made of bamboo, another hundreds of small planters with tiny green shoots to take and grow in your part of the concrete jungle. She smiles at me but turns away, towards the stage. Her bright blue sarong moves as she sways to the booming beats of the performers. All but one of her long dreads are coiled under a yellow head wrap underneath a wide brimmed straw hat. A tribal mask the size of her hand hangs from her neck and she through the hours she often strokes or holds it with her wrinkled fingers as she watches, listens, and moves with the performers. A green coat covers all but one word on her t-shirt, “ACTION.”
Encouraged, I move over until I am sitting on a ledge right beside her table, swinging my feet in her direction.
“I am a queen,” a man roars into the microphone on stage thirty feet in front of her, starting the next phase of the day’s performances, slam poetry from a local group of teens and twenty-somethings. She shouts with laughter and I finally open my mouth and shout over the crowd, asking for her name.
“Janie Franklin,” she says, barely turning her head towards me, “I know that man.” She is still grinning and points to the stage. He finishes and she stops swaying to lean against the table and readjust the flyers advertising a Family Arts Festival into neat piles. They are being held down with one of the planters.
She turns to face me and her eyes hit my face and then move down to the pen I’ve been fiddling with, scribbling notes on a piece of paper I’d found blowing past, and the Frisbee I’d brought and was now using as a clipboard. She reintroduces herself as an employee of the Riverside Park Theatre and hands me one of her flyers.
“AESOP FAMILY FABLES: Reclaiming Our Cultural Memory, One Fable at a Time,” the flyers said in yellow and green bold font, “A jazzed, popped, hip-hopped, beat-boxed version of Aesop’s Fables!”
“Fifty down,” Franklin smiles and sighs, “five hundred more to go.” She is rewriting all of the popular fables, turning “prose into plays” as she puts it. Families will perform their interpretations in a competition.
I ask her what the whole day is about and she pauses for a minute and looks at my pen.
“We are here because people don’t listen, they don’t think we know…we know that we have to come together to make this world a better place…” she answers but trails off as some cheering starts behind us on the only grassy splotch of land. She touches my hand softly and I turn around to look with her encouragement.
On the grass, graffiti artists have set up huge canvasses. We watch as they splatter themselves and those around them with brilliant oranges, greens, blues, and pinks, furiously spraying aerosol cans. Judges walk around and smile and debate the art with the families and groups of friends standing or sprawled out on blankets in the grass. A little boy is break dancing in front of one and a crowd gathers around him cheering, the art acting as a backdrop for his impromptu performance. Each one of the dazzlingly bright pieces incorporates a single word, “ALIVE.”
“I am the power,” whispers the performer at the microphone, “without me there is no fight.”
“We are here to celebrate you. We celebrate us. We celebrate our community by sustaining ourselves through arts and hip-hop culture,” booms a man, one of many people wearing a bright green t-shirt with LIFEISLIVING.ORG across the front, at the microphone.
“We are all part of the environment. We celebrate sustaining the earth and recognize what sustains us,” he finishes and passes the microphone onto the next performer on stage. He starts rapping and beat-boxing. I sit on the warm pavement and wrap my arms around my folded knees.
Little kids run around me and mimic various parts of the diverse and active crowd; the most popular the some white, mostly black and West Harlem Dominican teenagers jumping and spinning on the concrete, practicing and parading their moves in the middle of a break dancing circle. I stand out as a loner under a tree and move over to get a better view and to integrate myself into the lively, sweating scene. The pavement is warm and the crowd swells in unison around the stage, hugging and dancing.
Here in New York and in urban areas across the country, the LIFE IS LIVING campaign is incorporating individuals and communities, mostly youth who are poor and/or of color, who are excluded from the popular green movement, dismissed as inaccessible or irrelevant.
It is catching on. The tremendous energy lifting this movement off the ground is motivating people to assert themselves and their communities as capable and conscious. The individuals and communities represented at the upper upper-west side park in Manhattan are mostly of color. We are in West Harlem, a mostly Dominican community but not far from 125th, where Malcolm X walked and the heart of strongly connected black community works and lives.
The first step of this masterfully philosophical and well-organized campaign is to be an opposite response to all the years of energy put into excluding. It is a disturbing but powerful message that brought these people together.
The people assembled, in New York and elsewhere, are organizing to prove they are alive, conscious. They have a voice, a brain, a community that is and will continue to contribute to the world.
Between swells of people, a woman catches my eye. She is at eye level, behind one of several tables, the majority providing information about local efforts for sustainability. One has a bike made of bamboo, another hundreds of small planters with tiny green shoots to take and grow in your part of the concrete jungle. She smiles at me but turns away, towards the stage. Her bright blue sarong moves as she sways to the booming beats of the performers. All but one of her long dreads are coiled under a yellow head wrap underneath a wide brimmed straw hat. A tribal mask the size of her hand hangs from her neck and she through the hours she often strokes or holds it with her wrinkled fingers as she watches, listens, and moves with the performers. A green coat covers all but one word on her t-shirt, “ACTION.”
Encouraged, I move over until I am sitting on a ledge right beside her table, swinging my feet in her direction.
“I am a queen,” a man roars into the microphone on stage thirty feet in front of her, starting the next phase of the day’s performances, slam poetry from a local group of teens and twenty-somethings. She shouts with laughter and I finally open my mouth and shout over the crowd, asking for her name.
“Janie Franklin,” she says, barely turning her head towards me, “I know that man.” She is still grinning and points to the stage. He finishes and she stops swaying to lean against the table and readjust the flyers advertising a Family Arts Festival into neat piles. They are being held down with one of the planters.
She turns to face me and her eyes hit my face and then move down to the pen I’ve been fiddling with, scribbling notes on a piece of paper I’d found blowing past, and the Frisbee I’d brought and was now using as a clipboard. She reintroduces herself as an employee of the Riverside Park Theatre and hands me one of her flyers.
“AESOP FAMILY FABLES: Reclaiming Our Cultural Memory, One Fable at a Time,” the flyers said in yellow and green bold font, “A jazzed, popped, hip-hopped, beat-boxed version of Aesop’s Fables!”
“Fifty down,” Franklin smiles and sighs, “five hundred more to go.” She is rewriting all of the popular fables, turning “prose into plays” as she puts it. Families will perform their interpretations in a competition.
I ask her what the whole day is about and she pauses for a minute and looks at my pen.
“We are here because people don’t listen, they don’t think we know…we know that we have to come together to make this world a better place…” she answers but trails off as some cheering starts behind us on the only grassy splotch of land. She touches my hand softly and I turn around to look with her encouragement.
On the grass, graffiti artists have set up huge canvasses. We watch as they splatter themselves and those around them with brilliant oranges, greens, blues, and pinks, furiously spraying aerosol cans. Judges walk around and smile and debate the art with the families and groups of friends standing or sprawled out on blankets in the grass. A little boy is break dancing in front of one and a crowd gathers around him cheering, the art acting as a backdrop for his impromptu performance. Each one of the dazzlingly bright pieces incorporates a single word, “ALIVE.”
“I am the power,” whispers the performer at the microphone, “without me there is no fight.”
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Profile Pitch
Profile Pitch Idea:
http://www.mlive.com/news/kalamazoo/index.ssf/2009/05/kvcc_expects_large_enrollment.html
The above story highlights huge enrollment numbers for KVCC. We know that K College is fighting to keep their enrollment levels steady. One obvious explanation is the economy. Are there any others? Is this a negative development? What does community college offer students that a “liberal arts” private college doesn’t? Is it more practical and is it paying off?
I would love to talk to both K people and KVCC people (staff and students) about this development and look to connect it to both the economy and how our education system could and should change, not in depth but in practicality.
Here is a link to a recent NY Times Op-Ed that has made me think a lot about education reform.
It is called ‘End the University as We Know It”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/opinion/27taylor.html?_r=1&emc=eta1
http://www.mlive.com/news/kalamazoo/index.ssf/2009/05/kvcc_expects_large_enrollment.html
The above story highlights huge enrollment numbers for KVCC. We know that K College is fighting to keep their enrollment levels steady. One obvious explanation is the economy. Are there any others? Is this a negative development? What does community college offer students that a “liberal arts” private college doesn’t? Is it more practical and is it paying off?
I would love to talk to both K people and KVCC people (staff and students) about this development and look to connect it to both the economy and how our education system could and should change, not in depth but in practicality.
Here is a link to a recent NY Times Op-Ed that has made me think a lot about education reform.
It is called ‘End the University as We Know It”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/opinion/27taylor.html?_r=1&emc=eta1
Reading Response
Conover's "The Road is Very Unfair" was exactly the type of writing I would love to do someday. It takes little to no funding, requires travel, hanging out, and observation, and has a political, social edge. I am starting to really appreciate the telling of story as a way of informing, making a political statement, without using explicit critical commentary. Marin told me last week that I need to get away from feeling like everything I write has to make a statement, be important, and write to tell the story in a way that speaks for itself. I think what she meant was not that what I write shouldn't be important (in terms of subject) but that I, myself, should not have to be important in everything I write.
This is a good lesson to learn and one that parallels with some of the stuff in the Ethics reading from Telling True Stories. I think by being focused on making some sort of statement, I often "change the story" and manipulate what is really happening to what I either want to be happening or what I can be critical of, both pretty unethical if I am still claiming to be writing a representation of some one or some place.
To continue about Ted Conover, his style, at least in "The Road is Very Unfair," appears to tell the story of what it really is to be a truck driver, driving across parts of Africa in the midst of an AIDS epidemic, while also including "I" but not making the story about him and his political position. The result is a piece that informs and doesn't alienate any readers, it draws them into the piece to share and experience what he shared and experienced. It lets the characters, the main people in the piece, be fully developed and individuals in their own right.
I love Conover's use of quotes through-out the piece, I wonder if he recorded or wrote down furiously, or just knew these people so well by the end that he could recall those conversations easily (I imagine this is the case). He also did a great job of letting the readers know he was legit- small duffel bag was all he carried, etc- but also reminded us that we could trust him and relate to his experience because he still was a newcomer, a Westerner, someone who was learning as he went as well (relationship with girlfriend in US, condom cost comparison, etc.) He shows us how he navigates, answers the questions before we ask them.
This is a good lesson to learn and one that parallels with some of the stuff in the Ethics reading from Telling True Stories. I think by being focused on making some sort of statement, I often "change the story" and manipulate what is really happening to what I either want to be happening or what I can be critical of, both pretty unethical if I am still claiming to be writing a representation of some one or some place.
To continue about Ted Conover, his style, at least in "The Road is Very Unfair," appears to tell the story of what it really is to be a truck driver, driving across parts of Africa in the midst of an AIDS epidemic, while also including "I" but not making the story about him and his political position. The result is a piece that informs and doesn't alienate any readers, it draws them into the piece to share and experience what he shared and experienced. It lets the characters, the main people in the piece, be fully developed and individuals in their own right.
I love Conover's use of quotes through-out the piece, I wonder if he recorded or wrote down furiously, or just knew these people so well by the end that he could recall those conversations easily (I imagine this is the case). He also did a great job of letting the readers know he was legit- small duffel bag was all he carried, etc- but also reminded us that we could trust him and relate to his experience because he still was a newcomer, a Westerner, someone who was learning as he went as well (relationship with girlfriend in US, condom cost comparison, etc.) He shows us how he navigates, answers the questions before we ask them.
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Responses to Group
Mae-
I think this has potential but I want to know where you think the story is. Is it more about the bar or the patrons or your relationship with the bar and the patrons? It has to be more clear where you are going from the beginning—what exactly are you profiling? I think I way you can do that is by really showing rather then telling. I bet the bar would be really fun and interesting to describe—although it might be a challenge to see it the way someone who had never been in there would since you grew up there. Maybe start by sitting in there and really describing what stands out to you the most- a particular patron, the mood of the setting, or maybe your dad, the owner??? It seems by the end you are about to start profiling him.
Austin-
Are you profiling the place or the hours you and other people might eat? We might have a similar problem in our first drafts, nothing excited us, nothing really stood out, we took the wrong angle, and we need to move on or find something more specific and/or more interesting to write about. Of course your descriptions are well written and thorough but they can’t save a profile that has no clear purpose as of yet. Keep working, I’ll go back with you for more research si quieries.
Regis-
I think you should try writing a version of this without you in it. Although I can tell you personally skateboard and have particular feelings about skateboarding and how its viewed by non-skateboarders, I think your piece would be more powerful without the “I”—or at least is worth a shot. Give me more description too, the history of skateboarding is good but you need a lot of SHOWING of the actual skate zoo and the people in it to balance it. Also, before you start writing again, figure out your focus. Is it on a particular skater—Gerald? The skate zoo as a space that represents a misinterpreted sport? Good start, way to get through the length and way to pick an interesting place.
Elizabeth-
I’m glad you were brave and wrote about the “lining up process.” Your descriptions throughout the whole piece were good and I think you should keep most of them. I do think you could inject more humor into the piece, like you did when you told the story outloud. We know that the humor is there because we were all rolling with laughter- it was YOUR voice that told the story that made us laugh…so I know you can do it. Also, your lead has the right idea but I think it needs some reshaping and rewording. Overall really wonderful story and you included a lot of information that was all interesting.
Toni-
Reading your stories, even your drafts, is effortless. You have a wonderful fluid and detailed style. For most of this piece that is true but the ending (last 3 paragraphs) I have a lot of questions about the purpose of some details and where you wanted to go. What is most interesting to me is the journey to Kalamazoo and the restaurant—the history of working in so many places in the fields, and why kalamazoo proved to be the place to stay and succeed.
Martin-
There is a some interesting stuff in here and a lot of you filling in with observations about how you feel, think, relate to the place. That can be good, and parts where your voice comes in is really fun, funny, interesting, but make sure you are doing it in the right places for the right reasons. I know I used my voice as filler in my non-exciting uninteresting piece-without-a-point, and I don’t think you need to do that because you have some interesting leads. I don’t know if you feel comfortable, but the AA thing would be great to go into—smoking is social and Fourth Coast is almost more of a smokehouse than a coffee one. That was more interesting to me and I think you started to flesh that out in your last paragraph.
I think this has potential but I want to know where you think the story is. Is it more about the bar or the patrons or your relationship with the bar and the patrons? It has to be more clear where you are going from the beginning—what exactly are you profiling? I think I way you can do that is by really showing rather then telling. I bet the bar would be really fun and interesting to describe—although it might be a challenge to see it the way someone who had never been in there would since you grew up there. Maybe start by sitting in there and really describing what stands out to you the most- a particular patron, the mood of the setting, or maybe your dad, the owner??? It seems by the end you are about to start profiling him.
Austin-
Are you profiling the place or the hours you and other people might eat? We might have a similar problem in our first drafts, nothing excited us, nothing really stood out, we took the wrong angle, and we need to move on or find something more specific and/or more interesting to write about. Of course your descriptions are well written and thorough but they can’t save a profile that has no clear purpose as of yet. Keep working, I’ll go back with you for more research si quieries.
Regis-
I think you should try writing a version of this without you in it. Although I can tell you personally skateboard and have particular feelings about skateboarding and how its viewed by non-skateboarders, I think your piece would be more powerful without the “I”—or at least is worth a shot. Give me more description too, the history of skateboarding is good but you need a lot of SHOWING of the actual skate zoo and the people in it to balance it. Also, before you start writing again, figure out your focus. Is it on a particular skater—Gerald? The skate zoo as a space that represents a misinterpreted sport? Good start, way to get through the length and way to pick an interesting place.
Elizabeth-
I’m glad you were brave and wrote about the “lining up process.” Your descriptions throughout the whole piece were good and I think you should keep most of them. I do think you could inject more humor into the piece, like you did when you told the story outloud. We know that the humor is there because we were all rolling with laughter- it was YOUR voice that told the story that made us laugh…so I know you can do it. Also, your lead has the right idea but I think it needs some reshaping and rewording. Overall really wonderful story and you included a lot of information that was all interesting.
Toni-
Reading your stories, even your drafts, is effortless. You have a wonderful fluid and detailed style. For most of this piece that is true but the ending (last 3 paragraphs) I have a lot of questions about the purpose of some details and where you wanted to go. What is most interesting to me is the journey to Kalamazoo and the restaurant—the history of working in so many places in the fields, and why kalamazoo proved to be the place to stay and succeed.
Martin-
There is a some interesting stuff in here and a lot of you filling in with observations about how you feel, think, relate to the place. That can be good, and parts where your voice comes in is really fun, funny, interesting, but make sure you are doing it in the right places for the right reasons. I know I used my voice as filler in my non-exciting uninteresting piece-without-a-point, and I don’t think you need to do that because you have some interesting leads. I don’t know if you feel comfortable, but the AA thing would be great to go into—smoking is social and Fourth Coast is almost more of a smokehouse than a coffee one. That was more interesting to me and I think you started to flesh that out in your last paragraph.
Sorry group
SOOO... there is nothing from my interview worth writing about. I might go with the same base idea but go find a totally new person and place. Sorry for the poor poor read.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)