Final Draft of Explanatory Narrative

Smoking Ban Transforms Kalamazoo’s Smoker-Friendly Restaurants

A month after the new smoking ban took action in the state of Michigan, Kalamazoo businesses are breathing in the fresh air. Even establishments that were previously known as havens for smokers have readily embraced the change; for some, it was a switch they would have made earlier if not for the fear of losing customers. Dana Owens, a manager at Fourth Coast, says the café didn’t consciously nourish its identity as a smoker-friendly place; it was simply the last Kalamazoo café to allow smoking. The management has wanted to limit the amount of smoking for a while, but they didn’t want to segregate people.

For weeks now signs on the walls of the café have decreed “NO SMOKIN’,” but Fourth Coast still bears reminders of its past. The stale smell of smoke lingers, and the red and yellow checkerboard tables are covered in small circular pockmarks—cigarette burns. For those customers who don’t want to step outside to light up, a poster on the back of a coffee machine advertises a smokeless, electronic cigarette that acts like a nicotine inhaler and can be used even indoors.

Smokers made up such a large part of Fourth Coast’s clientele that the staff was nervous about the change. The coffeehouse has felt the difference, but not in the way it expected: instead of losing customers, it’s gaining them. “More people come in who wouldn’t before,” Owens says. Owens used to smoke himself but doesn’t any more and he prefers to work in a smoke-free environment. “There are less unsavory people who come in just to light up,” he says. “It feels safer, more comfortable.”

Now that Forth Coast is no longer hangout for smokers, the café can more clearly define its identity as a place where creativity is cultivated. Owens says, “We’ve just got this reputation for being more in tune with the artistic community, and I think that’s what’s going to keep us afloat.” That and the devotion and comradeship of the staff. When the café’s ceiling needed renovation, the employees put in extra hours to get it done. “That love, that’s what’s kept us in business for seventeen years,” says Owens. For long-standing neighborhood business like Fourth Coast, the ban is “just another hurdle.”

Another established Kalamazoo business that welcomed the ban was Olde Peninsula Restaurant and Brewpub. Before the ban took action, Olde Peninsula allowed smoking at the bar that forms an island in the center of the restaurant. Some tables are in close proximity to the bar and smoke would sometimes waft into the dining area despite the restaurant’s ventilating system, says Assistant Manager Natasha Tamminga. “There were a few people who would come in and say, ‘We really wish this was non-smoking,’” she says. “If anything, we had a lot of people come in, and if there’s a longer wait, they want to sit at the bar and have a drink while they’re waiting for a table, but if there are a lot of people smoking then they wouldn’t.”

For Olde Peninsula, the ban seems to have no down side. The bar is crowded and noisy on a Sunday night just before closing as friends and couples chatter over pints and plates of onion rings. “We’ve had nothing but positive feedback,” says Tamminga. “Everyone’s really excited that there’s not really a smoking area.”

Especially the management. “Our owner was thinking about going non-smoking earlier but when the Radisson went non-smoking, we checked their numbers and they lost some money at first,” says Tamminga. Not willing to run the risk of losing customers, the restaurant heard the news that a smoking ban was in the works and decided to wait it out until all businesses had to go smoke free.

Judging from the lively scene at the bar, the smoking ban’s goal of creating healthier restaurants and workplaces has been realized without too many hardships for establishments like Olde Peninsula. According to Tamminga, a couple of the restaurant’s staff members even quit smoking as a result of the ban. She neatly sums up the overall attitude to the shift, saying, “I think clean air makes everyone happy.”

Multimedia Project: Kalamazoo College's Gardening Class

Week 10 Workshop Responses

Marina—

I loved your opening—the names provoke curiosity and give hints to the subject of the article. Like we talked about with your first article, I think you might need something like a definition of feminism early on in the piece. I mean, not like “in the OED, feminism is defined as…” but like some kind of statement linking feminism to this campus. Sorry, I know that’s kind of vague. Maybe one thing that could help: you say, “This play has positively affected the women on our campus…” but that leaves me wondering HOW exactly they are affected. I think specifying things like this, and generally showing in concrete ways that feminism is an important and contested issue on this campus, would make the article’s focus more clear. I was also confused about what this article was trying to do. Are you focusing on the play? On feminism in the arts? On feminism on this campus? On Laura and Rachel? Also, since you’re dealing with a play, showing some scenes with action could be cool.

Andrea—

This article really grabbed my interest, and it touches on so many important social issues, especially with the economic situation today. I loved the little details you included, like the items on her lawn, the PJs, the syringe box, and Martha’s Vineyard. You really know how to make a statement with just an image or a name. I thought that organizationally, this piece could be tweaked to heighten the impact of certain revelations and to tighten the article’s focus. Right now I’m confused as to whether you’re mainly talking about MS, Lisa’s trouble getting a job, or Mira’s doubts about higher education. Obviously you can’t talk about any of those things without talking about the rest of them, but I think if you specify the idea of the story that you want to tell in this article, then you can make everything fit together, and all the facets of the story will point to one main focus. You’ve got really great quotes and Lisa and Mira are well fleshed out as characters, so I think it comes down to making smooth transitions from topic to topic. For example, I got confused after the second paragraph, because you had been talking about Mira’s doubts and then you went to a scene with Lisa and introduce the topic of MS. I didn’t see what that had to do with education at first. So just make sure all the details and the transitions are meshing together and this article will have a really big impact.

Simona—

Really fascinating. I had no idea this was going on at K. The quotes and the scenes are great; it definitely felt immersion-like. For example, the way you observe the students’ reluctance to take notes, and what that says about the paperwork that goes along with this stuff, which in turn says a lot about how under-funded and understaffed the program that students are the ones doing this complicated bureaucratic stuff (it also says a lot about how dedicated the students are). So great noticing throughout this piece. I thought there were some organizational issues – for example, the paragraph “In 2009 the Michigan Civil Rights Commission…” seems out of place because it’s stuck in the middle of a scene. Why not move it to the part where you start talking about the forms and obtaining licenses? Also, while I don’t mind that the piece opens with a scene, I think it would be even more powerful if you had some kind of a tantalizing lede to introduce the fact that students are going out in spite of the danger and doing the government’s job by fighting civil rights violations. Overall, I think this is an important issue that more people need to know about, on campus and off.

Steven—

Well, you’ve got a treasure trove of gorgeous, deftly noticed details; now I think you need to be more selective about which ones you’re using. The description needs to serve a function in your story, and when you start out with so much of it, the reader gets bogged down and doesn’t know what all these images are pointing to. For example, why is it important that Kokkinos has a secretary? Why should we care about what the priest’s hair looks like? I think maybe you need a little something at the beginning to introduce what your doing in this undertaking, your questions as an outsider…basically explain why you’re there. I thought that there were a lot of hilarious moments in this article, and I definitely got a good sense of your outsider-ness. The children and the matriarchs are full of life. I think you’re well on your way to having a lot of intriguing characters that draw us into the story. But I think that in order for YOU to be a full character, we have to know why you’re there and why this whole outsider/insider thing is so important. You kind of get to it in the end when you’re talking to the priest, so I think maybe just starting off with something brief to let us know who you are and what your doing would make things really stick together.

Explanatory Narrative Process

The reporting for this piece was tough for me. When I was a kid Sesame Street taught me not to talk to strangers, but now I have to do a whole lot of that! For my last piece, the interviews were set up ahead of time, so I knew that I had a subject willing to talk to me. In this case, I just had to go out and try to find some smokers. I was pleasantly surprised in that people were eager to talk to me, so that was encouraging...I think it just takes a lot of effort to step outside of my comfort zone, so hopefully I'll get used to that as I continue to do some reporting for this piece.

The actual writing went pretty smoothly compared to the last two assignments. I had a clear idea of what points I wanted to make and what description and quotes I wanted to include. I think the writing was easier because I spent a lot of time thinking about the article before I sat down to write. Plus I was really curious about the issue and I found out some interesting stuff and met some interesting people, and I wanted to write about it all. I put myself in this piece as a character, which is something I haven't really tried too much, but it was fun to include all of the awkwardness and ridiculousness that happened while I was reporting.

Week 9 Workshop Responses

Jess –
I thought this was a really well structured article. You go from Streeter’s role at KAMSC to the national situation to the economy to the students with smooth transitions. For 1000 words, you really covered a lot of ground, and I felt like I got a really good understanding of what’s going on at KAMSC and at universities nation wide. I thought the quotes by Streeter were a hoot—he’s got such a high school counselor voice! All the same, I could have maybe done with fewer or shorter quotes from him if it meant that I got to see him a little clearer. I wanted physical description of him and his office, if that’s where the interview went down. I also wanted to hear from more students, and maybe even a parent or two. Also, what exactly is the KAMSC? At first I thought it was a high school, but then I read that Radhika went to KC. The last quote from Streeter was a little confusing; I would say maybe leave out the second half and just keep it simple. Overall I thought this was a really interesting phenomenon to write about and that you did a great job reporting on this issue.

Joel –
This is something I’ve always wondered about—how do all of these new bands get started, and how do they survive? I loved the way you started with the scene. I wondered exactly who the novice was (you?), but I really liked the way you described Alex’s playing. Also the quotes—these guys really seem like they have a lot of personality. I wanted them to be bigger characters in this piece. I was missing the physical description, and I thought you could have included more scenes. In the last paragraph, you pose the excellent question, what kind of person is crazy enough to try to succeed in the music business? I think in order to answer this question, you need to show The Oaks’s individual members more clearly. We only hear from Alex and Zach—what about the others? Can you show them all in action? Also, I have to be honest: the mechanics in this piece were a little rough. There were a lot of sentences that didn’t flow quite right. I think it’s just a matter of tightening things up for the final draft. I’m really intrigued to know more about this band!

Myles—
Such a cool story. It’s already great, and I think it has the potential to be stunning. I’m getting the impression that you’re not done interviewing, and I think when you’ve got more perspectives about the place, everything will really come together. Already you’ve got amazing quotes and beautiful description, plus this really eerie feeling that runs through the whole piece. Although I loved the description, I wanted it to be interspersed with information about the paper mill’s history. That way I think you would hold the reader’s interest, give little hints about the direction of your story, and make the description really stand out when you do use it (as it is, I feel like it’s all kind of running together). It’s really interesting that the buildings will be bulldozed, but that people will miss them. Are there other people who won’t miss them? Also, what is the town’s economy based on now that the mills are extinct? Were people’s lives drastically altered when the mills first shut down…people that lost their jobs and couldn’t support their families, etc? Another thing to ask yourself is, do you need to be a character in this? I think it works ok as it is, but maybe it’s something to mess around with.

Anna—
Damn that’s a good first paragraph. With the creaky wooden floors, you found the perfect way to introduce this building and the artists it hosts. As I was reading the rest of the piece, I felt like I was being carried very smoothly from one room to the next. The transitions are deft and the voice is clear and engaging. However, I have to say that the article felt a little brochure-y: history, who’s there now, and the outreach to the community. All of this is important, but it seems like there’s something missing. Maybe some scenes capturing the artists in action? Are there any workshops for kids or community groups coming up in the next couple of weeks? That would be awesome. Or maybe if you can watch the artists interact with one another? But already you give a good sense of who these individuals are from the physical descriptions. I especially like the part about Dennis that mentions that he always has wood shavings and dust caught in his hair ☺

Michigan Smoking Ban: All Smoke and No Fire?

It’s May 16, fifteen days after the new smoking ban took action in the state of Michigan. My boyfriend and his friend are going to Waterstreet to get coffee and he agrees to drop me off at Fourth Coast Café on the way. “Fourth Coast? It’s much better since the ban,” says the friend, Kristen. “It used to be, you couldn’t see in there.”

I’ve never been inside before, but I’ve always thought it looked like an interesting place. I was discouraged from going in by reports from friends that the amount of secondhand smoke was enough to singe your nostrils. But for fifteen days now smoking has been prohibited in all public places, so I venture in.

Signs on the door and plaques on the café’s walls say “NO SMOKIN’” with a picture of a cigarette inside of a crossed out circle, but the stale smell of smoke is still easily detectable. I wonder if it will ever go away. I order a juice and sit down at a table. The red and yellow checkerboard surface is covered in small circular pockmarks—cigarette burns? There’s a sign on the back of a coffee machine that reads,

Now Available!
Karma 510 E-Cig Kits
Karma 510 personal vaporizers produce a nicotine-containing vapor.
Tips are available with tobacco or menthol flavoring.
$50

Before the ban, Fourth Coast was one of the only coffee places in Kalamazoo that allowed smoking. It had a reputation as a haven for smokers and gamers. I think some of my curiosity about the café comes from the fact that I’m a little bit fascinated by smokers. Maybe it’s the glamour of a cigarette resting lightly between your index and your middle finger, maybe it’s the self-destructive aspect, maybe it’s the artistic and intellectual connotations.

I’ve never been seriously tempted to join their ranks, but all the same, I wonder how Michigan smokers are dealing with the ban. On the one hand, the Karma 510 E-Cig sign gives me the impression that smokers are miserable and desperate to find loopholes; on the other hand, Michigan is the twenty-fifth state to implement such a ban and there haven’t been any major revolts in other states. And is it really that hard to step outside of a bar when you want to light up?

“This whole going outside to smoke thing is killing me,” complains James Reed as he steps out of Waldo’s Campus Tavern, an unlit cigarette already in his hand. I’ve been standing outside with a couple of friends for about fifteen minutes now, trying to talk to smokers. The three of us are smoking the Camels I bought to give me a reason to stand around outside of bars. So far we’ve only talked to a couple of guys; they weren’t smokers but they were happy to bum cigarettes off of me anyway. Then James steps onto the scene and makes his well-timed announcement like he’s reciting a line for a play.

Waldo’s used to allow smoking on the ground floor, but now smokers have to go out either the front or the back door. We’re out back by the parking lot, and we can look in through a chain-link fence at the revelers on the recently opened patio. Given that they can probably smell our smoke anyway, James doesn’t understand why he’s not allowed to smoke on the patio. We both agree that in this case, the smoking ban isn’t really achieving its goal of creating healthy, smoke-free environments in public places, or Waldo’s just isn’t enforcing it in the right way.

I ask James if he ever thinks about the issue of secondhand smoke, and he laughs and shrugs in an apologetic way and says, “I’m a smoker.” He’s a well-built man in his mid-twenties with closely cropped hair. He’s wearing a plain black t-shirt and a large silver chain with a round pendant. He recently got back from serving in the military only to find out about the smoking ban. “I was pissed,” he says.

But is the ban really going to make very much of a difference? Will people like James eventually get used to the exile? Will bars and restaurants see changes in their business? For some establishments, nothing has really changed. The Strutt, a café/bar and concert venue, has always been non-smoking. The only change that has occurred since the ban is that customers can’t smoke on the patio anymore. On my way into the Strutt I see one of the cooks smoking right next to the patio, which is marked off by a waist-high wooden fence, and when I take my Italian soda outside to the patio I find cigarette butts under my chair and ashes on the table.

I come back later that night for a concert and the doorman who takes my cover fee is smoking on the patio. There are also three people smoking around a table and two others sitting on the curb outside the patio. The doorman, Calvin, admits that the Strutt doesn’t enforce the ban very strictly. One potential problem posed by the smoking ban is that it is enforced by citizens: it’s up to the owners and the staff of bars and restaurants to make sure that patrons comply with the new law. If the Strutt’s relaxed approach to enforcement comes to the attention of a health inspector, they could receive a fine ($100 for a first offense and up to $500 for additional offenses) from the health department. But for the moment it’s May 23 and it’s an unusually hot night. Concertgoers are getting some fresh air and a smoke on the patio, just like they did twenty-two days ago.

Back at Fourth Coast, it’s not business as usual, but that might be a good thing. Barista Dana Owens says Fourth Coast has seen a change in clientele. “More people come in who wouldn’t before,” he says. He used to smoke but doesn’t any more, and he prefers working in a smoke-free environment. “There are less unsavory people who come in just to light up,” he says. “It feels safer, more comfortable.” Fourth Coast didn’t consciously nourish their identity as a smoker-friendly place; they were simply the last café to allow smoking. Dana says that the management has been wanting to limit smoking for a while, but they didn’t want to segregate people.

Smokers made up such a large part of Fourth Coast’s clientele that the staff was nervous about the change. But a couple weeks into the ban, Dana is optimistic. “We’ve just got this reputation for being more in tune with the artistic community, and I think that’s what’s going to keep us afloat.” That and the devotion and comradeship of the staff. When the café’s ceiling needed renovation, the employees put in extra hours to get it done. “That love, that’s what’s kept us in business for seventeen years,” says Dana. For an established neighborhood business like Fourth Coast, the ban is “just another hurdle.”

Final Draft: "Community Gardens at K: Too Much Community, Not Enough Vegetables?"

Kalamazoo College’s campus is bookended by two community gardens. Walk down Academy Street, starting from the top of the hill at the intersection with Monroe and finishing at the railroad tracks at the bottom, and you will pass both of them, although you wouldn’t know it. Both are tucked away, impossible to find unless you have precise directions. Both are attracting more and more attention as the campus ramps up its efforts at sustainability. And both are growing more dreams than their tiny acreage can hold.

At the top of the hill, in the spacious backyard of an empty, college-owned house, is the plot that hosts the gardening class. As you walk up the driveway and around the tool shed, the noise of the campus fades and the neighboring houses and trees create a bubble of near silence. The garden itself is a flat, seventeen by twenty-eight foot plot partially covered by plastic sheets. Part of the rectangular patch of ground is still grassy, waiting to be cleared for planting. Besides the grass, there’s nothing green in sight at the moment.

To get this week’s session started, instructor Seema Jolly tells the class to check up on the progress of the seeds they planted last week. Students fold back the clear plastic sheets and peer down at the soil. At first glance, there’s not much to see, with the exception of one flourishing row of radish seedlings. Looking closer, the students spot a few tiny sprouts that will grow into beets, turnips, and lettuce. “A lot of gardening is just observation,” Jolly reminds the class. “When you just spend a little time and look at where you planted, you’ll start to see things sprout up.”

This garden is still in its infancy. It was created at the start of spring quarter to host a new gardening physical education course. The idea for a campus community garden came from Farms to K, but a lot of other players are involved, including the PE department, Facilities Management, Sodexo, and the Mary Jane Underwood Stryker Institute for Service-Learning. Amelia Katanski and Alison Geist, faculty members involved with Farms to K, pitched the gardening class idea to the PE department and contacted Jolly, a K alum with experience working and teaching in community gardens, to see if she wanted to teach.

Most of the students are seniors and will have graduated before these veggies are ready to come out of the ground, but Jolly says the class isn’t frustrated. “I’ve told [the students] that the PE gardening class is kind of a beginning step to creating a community effort on campus, and so I think framing it in that way makes it a little bit easier for the students to get on board with this, because it’s going to continue after they’re gone. They really are setting the foundation for a much bigger project than just their ten weeks here.”

How big of a project, exactly? And how to create a unified community effort on campus? As word about the new garden started to get around, there was a sudden surge of interest from faculty, staff, and students. Although this widespread enthusiasm looks promising for the garden’s future, there’s a downside: “Everybody’s got their own vision of what they think this garden to be, what it could turn into, and who it would be serving,” Jolly explains. Will the garden continue to be used for a class, or will it evolve into a community garden? Will the food go to the gardening students, to the school cafeteria, or to a food bank? Could the garden eventually generate revenue and become completely self-sustaining? Nothing has been decided.

If this wasn’t complicated enough already, there’s another garden just down the street, with its own tangled roots and its own dreams competing like plants for the sun. Tacked onto the side of the mammoth Markin Racquet Center, the long and narrow seventeen by forty-three foot plot seems smaller than it actually is. The sharp slope of the ground adds to the sensation of compression. While the gardening class’s infant garden is mostly dirt with a few razor-straight rows of seedlings, this garden is thriving, if a bit chaotic-looking. Kale plants line Markin’s brick wall with their raggedy-edged leaves, and strawberries carpet the foreground. The plot is partially surrounded by a rickety-looking picket fence, and next to the entrance a hand-painted sign reads “D.I.R.T. Organic Garden.”

D.I.R.T. (Digging In Renewable Turf) is the campus’s student gardening organization. D.I.R.T. has been around since 2004, and Ben Cooper and Tammy Pheuphong have been leaders since 2007. “We don’t really have a lot of formal meetings,” Pheuphong says, and indeed, a list of suggestions left for her by one of the former leaders includes the tip, “Have a party rather than a meeting whenever possible.”

The D.I.R.T. gardeners are laid back but hard working. Saturday mornings, Cooper and Pheuphong rally as many students as they can and head to the garden, rain or shine, to do tough physical labor. For the two seniors, it’s the combination of devotion and flexibility that has allowed them to hone their gardening skills and double D.I.R.T. membership during their three years as leaders: they are always experimenting with new methods and refining their techniques, whether it’s changing the organization’s promotional tactics or comparing different ways of preventing soil erosion. This spring they’re trying square foot planting: dividing a section of the plot into squares, each square being devoted to a specific plant, in order to see whether the plants will thrive so close to one another. Pheuphong explains that it takes about a year to figure out whether a project like this is going to work, which means that the garden is in a constant state of revision. Sometimes a project results in failure. “Gardening’s not instant gratification,” says Pheuphong.

With all the experimentation going on, it’s hard to measure the long-term impact of the D.I.R.T. garden. Although it is relatively established compared to the gardening class’s garden, it raises many of the same questions. The D.I.R.T. organization still hasn’t quite figured out what to do with the produce from the garden. Currently, the food is up for grabs: anyone on campus can share in the harvest. But a lot of the crops go to waste over the summer when the students are gone. Some ideas include donating the food to a food bank, or selling it at the local farmer’s market.

Plans for the garden’s future are also in a sketchy phase. Much of the decision-making will be left to Trace Redmond, a first-year student who will be taking over D.I.R.T. leadership after Cooper and Pheuphong graduate in June. In Redmond’s ideal vision, the garden would function more like a city community garden in which various groups would each have a plot. For starters, he wants to get the Living-Learning houses involved by giving each house its own plot, but that would mean expanding the garden or starting smaller gardens next to the houses themselves.

For now, though, there are only the two gardens, one at each end of the campus, bracketing something larger than life between their modest plots. There is a charge behind each, a community that wants to see its ideals of sustainability realized in the form of an abundance of fruits and vegetables. If this kind of cornucopia is the goal, then the campus’s gardens are coming up short. The gardening class’s garden hasn’t begun to produce food yet, and the D.I.R.T. garden hasn’t decided what to do with the food it’s producing. So how do we assess their impact? Maybe it’s the human growth, not the vegetable. The networks that are created, the knowledge that is passed along, the passions that are born.

For example, Ben Cooper will participate in a summer internship at Sleeping Bear Dunes, where he will learn about ecosystems and monitor the Piping Plover, an endangered species of bird. Trace Redmond wants to travel to Oregon to study the vascular system of redwood trees. As a K student, Seema Jolly got involved in D.I.R.T., which led her to an internship with Fair Food Matters, and from there to a position as a Garden Manager with a Utah non-profit called The Youth Garden Project. Now she’s back at K, showing students how to pull up weeds and thin radishes.

At the D.I.R.T. workday on Saturday, Ben Cooper hooks up the sprinkler while Trace Redmond hammers away at the leaning picket fence. For now, the other volunteers are trying to stay out of the sprinkler’s range, but they will soon break up the moist soil where the square foot plots have been marked with a grid of twine, ready for planting. Maybe the project will be a bust. But for the moment, the gardeners are soaking up the spring sunshine and pressing their fingers into the dirt to make trenches for the seeds. As Tina, a D.I.R.T. participant, puts it, “To have a project, to have a space where you feel like you’ve carved out a little area of something good and clean, I think it can just be really satisfying.”

Reading Response, Week 8

I struggled a bit with "Access." I think it's one of those pieces that has to be set aside for a bit of time before you can see the way it works. When I read it, I couldn't get a good feel for the piece's structure. There were all kinds of flashbacks cutting in, and the setting changed from country to country without a lot of clear transition. I felt like there wasn't enough explanation in some places (a lot of untranslated words, terms related to the soviet government that I didn't understand, etc.) and too much explanation in others (the beer situation, the train ride). Also, why did he keep talking about the BBC? And what was the ending about?

Things I did like about that piece were the title, which I think really helped me to understand what the article was trying to get at, and the way that Kramer as a character seems very disconnected from all of the people and the happenings around him. He shows the action to us as he perceives it, instead of trying to impose some kind of order to something he himself doesn't completely understand. We really get the sense that he's a traveller going into a confusing situation, and he's bringing us along with him not to preach to us but to have us form our own understandings.

I really got into Joan Didion's "Slouching Towards Bethlehem." In this piece, too, there were a lot of terms that I wasn't familiar with, but you didn't really have to know exactly what such-and-such type of drug is in order to understand the action of the piece. I loved the understated, sometimes potentially mocking or ironic tone (but only if you choose to read it that way). I love the way that she kinds of throws you into the action without really introducing the characters, because you still get a complete sense of who they are just from one quote or one scene that describes them. At times I thought her analysis of the situation was over my head - for example, when she was trying to link the movement to political action, I was a bit lost - but I loved her statement that even though these kids don't believe in words, they are losing themselves because they don't have the right words. I also thought that the ending was a really appropriate and understated way of showing the reverberations that this culture will have on future generations over time.

Reading Response, Week 7

When I read Stanley Nelson's "Developing Character" essay in Telling True Stories, I immediately thought back to Ted Conover's article. Nelson says, "It's important to hint at richer character, but let audience members decide for themselves" (129). Then he went on to talk about the process of character discovery that the audience will go through as the film (article) progresses. I thought that Conover did a wonderful job of facilitating this kind of gradual character discovery in "The Road is Very Unfair." We see little snatches of Obadiah's intelligence and personality in the beginning of the article, but Conover keeps a pretty neutral stance towards him until the end of the article when he reveals details about his compassion (chicken scene), his prudence with money, his health concerns, and his writing. On top of this building sense of discovery, and the attachment that comes with it, Conover piles that horrible revelation: even someone as intelligent, sensible, and well-educated as Obadiah still doesn't see the necessity of protecting himself and others against AIDS.

In "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold," the character of Sinatra seems to be fully-developed from the start. He's mysterious and unpredictable, but he is consistently mysterious and unpredictable. It's not until the end of the article that Talese drops the question: does anyone really know this man? I love this approach. With someone as famous as Sinatra, there's not much about him that's unknown, that can be discovered, until you dig to a deeper level. I thought the section with all of the quotes about him by other people was really effective: all of these definitive statements about who Sinatra is, followed by the truth: "Frank Sinatra was tired of all the talk, the gossip, the theory -- tired of reading quotes about himself, of hearing what people were saying about him all over town." I love the scene in the casino when he is absent. His voice is on the speakers, women are asking about him at the front desk, but he is not there. Similarly, the last scene in which the woman spots him and then he disappears - I thought they both spoke to the slipperiness of celebrity and the desire, perhaps, to just be no one at all.

Article for Class, Week 7

This article is not a profile. As far as I understand it, one of our options for our next assignment is to write a piece that tackles a big issue, in which "a reporter begins with a bit of news, a trend, an idea, an event or a problem that demands closer attention" (syllabus). I thought this article was a good example of this kind of piece, and it's still told in a very personal, narrative kind of way.

In the article I've chosen to share, Population: The Last Taboo, Julia Whitty writes, "The only known solution to ecological overshoot is to decelerate our population growth faster than it's decelerating now and eventually reverse it—at the same time we slow and eventually reverse the rate at which we consume the planet's resources. Success in these twin endeavors will crack our most pressing global issues: climate change, food scarcity, water supplies, immigration, health care, biodiversity loss, even war." This sentence should give you an idea of the scope of this article: it's trying to get to the root of the (literally) huge problem of overpopulation.

I chose this article because it deals with a complicated and controversial issue in an engaging way, using description to draw the reader in. It's a great mix between the general and the specific, as Whitty uses her experiences and observations in India to illustrate the population problems the world is facing now and in the future. It's a sticky issue, and Whitty doesn't shy away from it; instead she investigates the reasons why any mention of overpopulation is such a taboo.

I know this is a long article, but I found that, just when my attention started to wane, I would get pulled in again by a scene from Kolkata or a humorous run-though of the history of birth control. Though the article is statistic-heavy, the figures were easy to understand and gave a clear picture of the issues they described.

Two places I got snagged a little: I didn't buy the transition from Malthus to India (p. 2) and I'm not sure Whitty made the connection between microloans, birthrate, and increased consumerism in developing nations clear enough (p. 3-5). I started to get it, however, when she summed up in the last paragraph: "The paradox embedded in our future is that the fastest way to slow our population growth is to reduce poverty, yet the fastest way to run out of resources is to increase wealth." I loved the way that she ended the piece with the image of the crowds inside and outside watching the sunrise before the fog settles again. Overall, I think this article was expertly woven, meshing history, facts, and statistics with scenes and description to shed light on this tricky issue.

Profile Process

All the while I was doing my reporting, I had no idea how I was going to frame this article or what "angle" I was going to take. The idea for the conflict actually came to me while I was writing, and I'm hoping that for my final draft I can structure the piece to support the overarching idea and make the focus more clear from the start. I want to talk about those people who have crazy big ideas but who are limited by circumstances and can only take tiny steps. I had a fun time writing this piece - rather than working from my imagination, I was describing real people, and I was very invested in making the people come across clearly to the reader because they were people I admired.

It was a challenge to take all the raw information that came out of the reporting process and turn it into an article. I had so many great quotes that I couldn't include because they didn't fit into the structure. At the same time, I wanted to build the structure around some of the quotes that I had, so I feel like the article turned into something kind of patchwork-like. But I learned a lot from the process, and I already have ideas for revision!

Profile Responses—Week 6

Munirah-

This is a great idea for a profile. It looks like you’ve already got a lot of great details on the Dairy Mart—while I was reading I got the impression that you’ve spent a lot of time observing the place. I thought the descriptions were great. I love how you start out with the words on the sign and then move to talk about the kinds of people that frequent the Dairy Mart. As you’re doing more reporting, I think it would be cool to identify more characters like the old man in the second paragraph—for example, the cashiers and other Dairy Mart regulars. Other things I’m curious about: do people try to rob the Dairy Mart often (I heard this was a huge problem at Munchie Mart)? What’s the weirdest thing that’s ever happened there? What’s it like working there? Is there a lot of competition with Munchie Mart? What’s the bestselling item? How do they decide what to stock? What are their goals for expanding/improving? You’re off to a good start, and I’m excited to see how the piece turns out.

Joel-

As always, your wit is sparkling. I liked the use of the word “denizens,” and the woman with the perverse love of burgers. I got a good overall picture of what the Union has to offer, but I felt like there wasn’t much conflict. The piece did make me want a flatbread pizza, though. I think it would be cool to hear from more customers and more waitstaff. Maybe you could even talk to one of the bands after their set? I went on Saturday and I saw a band just hanging around the bar talking to people later in the night, so that might be a possibility. What’s the focus of the piece? The clash between the college students and the old people drinking martinis? The artistic community? The economic downturn? The dating scene (that could be cool, actually—talking to more of the lone sharks at the bar)? I definitely felt like you gave a good view of the clientele, but it could be cool to have more scenes with people doing stuff. Also more description of the décor—how the Union builds that classy yet casual vibe.

Anna-

I really felt like I got to know Victor from your piece. The descriptions were great—the details weren’t just there, they were telling something important about Victor. From your physical description, I got information about his job, his age, and his energetic nature. The quotes were also used well—I really get a sense that he’s a very humble, passionate person from the way he talks about music and his job. There were also some stunning transitions—my favorite was the sexism paragraph to the personal music studio paragraph. That all being said, I didn’t get a lot of conflict from this piece. He just seems so at peace with the way his life turned out. Maybe you have to talk to him again and ask more probing questions? There seemed to be little hints of conflict, like the grad school thing, the allergy thing, the working at his alma matter thing, but nothing really seemed to stand out as the heart of the issue. Also, why did you choose the ending that you did? I thought it was interesting information, but it didn’t seem linked to the rest of the piece. I think there’s so much interesting, vivid stuff here that you should have no problem going back, choosing a focus, and digging deeper.

Marina-

I remember being fascinated by Amy’s story when I took her Shakespeare class in the fall. I love your descriptions of her (especially the crazy pants). One of my questions was, who is your audience? If you’re writing for anyone outside of the college, you should make it clear that she studied film, decided to become a teacher, and started teaching at K College. What I see as the focus of the piece is her transition from being a dancer to being an academic, and how feminism played into that. If that’s what you’re going for, I think you need to go deeper into what feminism means to her, how it plays out in her life and her teaching, and how she feels it “falls short,” as she says in the last quote. How exactly was her decision to quit dancing a product of her growing feminism? It could be cool to include some of what she says during her class to show how she’s teaching feminism. I also thought it would be cool to hear from more students about how the class is changing their ideas about feminism, how it’s making them think more about those issues and the ways they show up in society.

Kalamazoo College's Organic Gardens Want to Harvest Ideals

When I show up to gardening class, a group of about eight students are gathered around a young woman wearing dark sunglasses with her hair held back by a bandana. As Seema Jolly explains some organizational details of the course, her soft voice rings out surprisingly clear; we’re standing in the backyard of an empty house and the space is like a small bubble of quiet, ruptured only by the occasional birdcall. She’s talking about getting a team together for the Farms to K Cook Off, Kalamazoo College’s annual culinary competition where teams prepare dishes using local food. The students are all for it, but Seema reminds them that none of the crops they’ve planted over the past five weeks will be ready in time for the event, so they’ll have to get ingredients elsewhere. “We’ll have plenty of radishes, though,” she amends.

To get things started, Seema tells the class to check up on the progress of the seeds they planted last week. Students fold back the clear plastic sheets that cover certain parts of the plot and peer down at the soil. At first glance, there’s not much to see, with the exception of one flourishing row of radish seedlings. Looking closer, the students spot a few tiny sprouts that will grow into beets, turnips, and lettuce. Seema reminds the class, “A lot of gardening is just observation. It might look like there’s just a lot of dirt on the ground and there’s nothing growing, but when you just spend a little time and look at where you planted, you’ll start to see things sprout up.”

To a newcomer like myself, it looks like slow going. Most of the students are seniors and will have graduated before these veggies are ready to come out of the ground. All the same, they are eager to get their hands dirty, some pulling up the invasive garlic mustard weeds growing on the edge of the plot, some tearing up chunks of sod in their gloved fists to clear more ground, and others using shovels to turn the soil in preparation for the potatoes that will be planted. One student unearths a thick, five-foot-long tree root, and Seema comes over to hack at it with her shovel.

All this hard work for a few radishes and maybe some lettuce, but Seema says the class isn’t frustrated. “When we met for the first class, I told the students that this is a start up garden, so there’s a lot of legwork that has to get put in, because we have to prep the land first,” she explains. “I’ve also told them that the PE gardening class is kind of a beginning step to creating a community effort on campus, and so I think framing it in that way makes it a little bit easier for the students to get on board with this, because it’s going to continue after they’re gone. They really are setting the foundation for a much bigger project than just their ten weeks here.”

Kalamazoo College’s campus is bookended by two gardens. The plot currently hosting the gardening class is at the top of the hill, and there’s another garden at the bottom that’s run by a student organization, D.I.R.T. Both are tucked away, impossible to find unless you have precise directions. Both are attracting more and more attention as the campus ramps up its efforts at sustainability. And both are growing more dreams than their tiny acreage can hold.

For Seema, the dream is self-sufficiency. “I think that now is the perfect opportunity for the college to start producing some of its own food,” she says. The intent of the gardening class was to give extra produce to the college cafeteria. In Seema’s ideal vision, the garden would continue to involve students, faculty, and staff, but it would be expanded to cover more land, with a full-time garden manager who would make the garden productive enough so that it could sell food to the cafeteria. “If this was an income-generating garden and [the food] would be going to our cafeteria, that would be my win-win-win situation: students would be getting better food, the garden would be able to sustain itself financially, and people would be involved in whatever capacity they want,” says Seema.

She has an investment in her vision for a more self-sustainable campus because she went to college here, graduating in 2007. As a freshman looking to get involved in a student organization, she joined D.I.R.T. (Digging In Renewable Turf), a student-run organic gardening club. For Seema, D.I.R.T. sparked the passion that would bring her back to Kalamazoo College seven years later to get her hands dirty once again.

The D.I.R.T. garden is a tiny rectangular plot clinging to the side of the Markin Racquet Center. Ben Cooper, senior K College student and D.I.R.T. co-leader, parks his car in the driveway that cuts off the horizontal strip of a hill where the garden is planted. He gets spades and shovels from a tool shed around the corner of the building, preparing for a garden workday. He’s a Political Science major, but he wants to go into a biology-related field. When I ask him how that plays into his future plans, he says he has a summer internship lined up at Sleeping Bear Dunes where he’ll be monitoring the Piping Plover, an endangered species of bird.

Ben looks like the kind of guy who would monitor an endangered species. He’s tall, lean, and tan, with intense sunglasses and long hair pulled back into a ponytail. He shows off the miniature greenhouse that he and the group constructed out of arcs of PVC pipe anchored by steel rebars and covered by a clear plastic tarp. The design was his mom’s idea; Ben got a lot of his gardening knowledge from helping her as he was growing up.

He weeds the rows of seedlings under the tarp and tells me about some of the challenges D.I.R.T. has come across during his three years as a co-leader: an expensive-to-build fence that keeps falling down, the erosion and nutrient runoff caused by the slope of the ground, having to front the money for projects before being reimbursed by the student government, gardening in the rain, a lack of publicity on campus and a dearth of members.

But during the time that Ben and his co-leader Tammy Pheuphong have been in charge, interest in the organization has grown considerably. The garden’s last workday brought out over twenty students, Ben says, and although I have trouble picturing twenty people working in this narrow, treacherously sloping plot, I’m not surprised. Kalamazoo College’s campus is very environmentally aware: organizations such as the college’s local food movement, Farms to K, and the environmental student organization, Envorg, are very active. The cafeteria went trayless last year, and this year the school had top-five finishes in certain categories of the national Recyclemania Competition for the fourth year in a row. I’m surprised that D.I.R.T. isn’t a bigger deal on campus.

Trace Redmond, a first-year student who will take over the leadership of D.I.R.T. when Ben and Tammy graduate, certainly wants it to be a bigger deal. In his vision, the garden would function more like a city community garden in which various groups would each have a plot, and D.I.R.T. would manage everything in addition to doing their own gardening. He wants to eventually sell produce at the Kalamazoo Farmer’s Market, working with business majors at Kalamazoo College to come up with a viable sales plan. Trace thinks that self-sustainability is an achievable goal for the D.I.R.T. garden, especially since the two biggest costs for a garden, labor and land, aren’t a factor (the college provides land for the garden).

But as it is now, the garden is too small to produce enough food to sell. I asked Trace and Tina, a D.I.R.T. member, how they reconcile their passionate pursuit of ideas with the frustrations of getting a garden off the ground. Both said that for them, the satisfaction comes from knowing that they’re taking action, no matter how insignificant it may seem at first. For Tina, coming to Kalamazoo College and learning about big problems of hunger and environmental destruction made her realize that helping in little ways, such as writing checks or using reusable coffee mugs, wasn’t enough. Gardening is a way for her “to really be on the ground in this do-it-yourself-type way,” she says. “To have a project, to have a space where you feel like you’ve carved out a little area of something good and clean, I think it can just be really satisfying.”

“I think there’s a huge difference between thinking and doing,” says Trace. “In order to completely own an idea, you need to do it. So the idea that ‘I really like organic vegetables’ or ‘I’m behind that idea.’ But until you really go out and do it, you’re going to have a really simplistic concept of it. It’s necessary in order to further goals of eating healthy for people to understand where their food comes from. To really know it on a deeper level.”

On opposite ends of the campus, two groups of passionate individuals are chasing ideals that seem unattainable. But, like the seedlings in Seema’s class garden: the movement has put down roots and sprouted, you just have to look closely to see it.

Week 5 Reading Response

I got a lot out of the essays from Telling True Stories, especially Kelley Benham's essay about dialogue. The examples she used were so perfect. It reminded me of what Marin said last week about only using dialogue if it reveals something essential about the subject. But it also reminded me that readers need dialogue to help them connect with characters (that's one of the things that I thought was a bit lacking in Trillin's Astoria piece - there weren't very many first-hand quotes from the Flavels). As Benham says, "Dialogue is easier for people to read than straight narrative, because that's how we listen to the world and how we communicate" (105). It seems like the trick is choosing when to use it and when to paraphrase.

I really liked Tracy Kidder's "Memory." It was realistic without losing a kind of optimism and wonder at the remarkable individuals that Kidder met. It revolved around a central theme but profiled a few different people in order to get at the issue from different angles. Memory is shown to be really complicated; it's not just a piece about how sad it is when old people lose their memory.

I wasn't so crazy about Trillin's "First Family of Astoria." As Anna said, I wasn't grabbed by the historical layout in the beginning, and it took a while for me to get invested because I kept asking myself, "Why should I care about these people?" Even when I got to know the Flavels better, I still didn't care about them, because Trillin didn't give me much reason to. They didn't really seem like multi-dimensional people; instead they were a source of irritation to the town. And maybe that's the point: maybe this isn't so much a profile of the Flavels as a profile of Astoria and its obsessions. Still, I felt dissatisfied that I didn't get to know them very well except from the outside.

Final draft: The Weight of One Strand of Hair

One Friday afternoon, after a painless one and a half hour drive, I arrived home from college for a weekend with my family. I walked into my bedroom and found an envelope addressed to me waiting on my bedside table. The return address indicated that it was from a small literary magazine. Another rejection letter. They had been rolling in over the past few months, ever since I went on a poem-submitting spree that summer.

I opened the envelope and a check for five hundred dollars fell out.

My first response was, “Holy shit, I won something!”

My second response was, “Holy shit, I’m going to have a lot of explaining to do.”

I was too excited to think. I would figure it out later. I practically floated out to the living room to announce to my parents, “I just won five hundred dollars in a poetry contest! And my poem’s going to be published!”

After the general exclamations of surprise and congratulations, my dad asked, “So what’s the poem?”

What was the poem? The poem was the essence of a secret that had been gnawing at me for over a year, condensed into fourteen lines.

Now the unexpected had happened, and the poem was going to be published, and my secret was out.

***

Losing my faith was simple, the work of a moment. I was in the back seat of a van driving through the Loire Valley with the fall sun streaming in through the window. The excursion was part of a five-month study abroad in France, the longest I had ever been away from home. I was reading The Stranger by Albert Camus. When Meursault says of the priest, “He seemed so cocksure, you see. And yet none of his certainties was worth one strand of a woman’s hair,” I felt a surge of revelation. I wanted to spend the rest of my life appreciating things like hair and sunlight and the chocolate that I bought at the gas station half an hour back.

The certainties of my faith weren’t helping me grow in any way; they told me how to live, and then they made me feel guilty if I failed to live that way. I wanted to find out for myself how to live. I wanted to shake off all the guilt and devote myself to appreciating the world around me, in all of its stunning, miniscule details.

Losing my faith was easy; the hard part was accepting that it was gone. Even if I wanted to figure things out for myself, I couldn’t forget that for twenty years, Catholicism had provided my moral grounding and an important part of my identity. My religious beliefs had also been part of the common glue that had bound me to my family. I may have lost my faith, but I wasn’t sure I was ready to lose any of those things.

When I returned to the U.S. that winter, I struggled to fit my new self back into the shape my old self had left behind. The first Sunday I was back, I went to mass with my family and when I went up to the altar to receive communion, the Eucharist fell out of my hand. I was certain then that I was going to hell.

But what could I do but keep going to church, enacting the empty ritual, pretending I still cared? I couldn’t tell my family. I would do anything rather than hurt them by rejecting the faith they had raised me to believe in. I was afraid they would think less of me, or make repeated attempts to re-convert me.

For over a year, the struggle raged inside me. In the spring I took a poetry workshop. I found that writing was the only way I could force myself to think through the way my faith had shaped me and to consider what I would do now that it was gone. Slowly, secretly, I started to rebuild the foundations of my world.

***

I showed my parents the letter I had just opened. When my Mom saw the title of my poem, “The Good Book,” she asked, “Is it about the Bible?”
“Yup.” How could I tell her that the poem was basically bashing on the Bible? That it described my inability to accept the Bible as truth?
“So,” my mom asked, “do we get to see this poem?”
“Uh, yeah. I’ll show it to you…just not right now.”
My parents looked puzzled, but they didn’t press me for more information.

I decided to explain myself that night at dinner. As the meal got underway, I followed the conversation carefully, inserting comments and laughter when appropriate, nervously waiting for my opening. At every lull of silence I would start to steel myself to jump in, but each time something tugged me back. No, this is too hard. I’m not ready. I need more time to figure this out. But soon the plates were almost clear of food, and I knew it was now or never.

“So, I wanted to say…about this poem…I want to share it with you, but I have to do a little explaining.” I told them how I had been having doubts for a while, and that I wasn’t sure where I stood with the Catholic Church. I explained I had written poems to help me think through the issue, and that this was one of those poems.

Everyone looked at me for a moment longer. Then Dad asked Nora to pass the string beans.

The next day, though, my mom approached me in the kitchen while I was getting a snack. She thanked me for telling her what was going on. She said she was proud of me, and that I was doing exactly what I was supposed to be doing: figuring out my faith for myself. And after she said that, I knew she was right.

Week 4 Reading Response

One interesting parallel between the two profile pieces from Narrative Journalism is the fact that both writers are present in their pieces, but not too present.

Some pieces (for example, the article that John chose) can be told from a distance, but it seems like others really demand the presence of the writer. I think that "Trina and Trina" is definitely one of the second kind. We see LeBlanc's struggle to help Trina through all the twists and turns of her life. On p. 219, we see LeBlanc's confusion about her dual roles of reporter and friend when she says, "There's no open bed for her to start treatment, but Artie's family needs a break. I exceed my role as reporter, convinced I am going the limit as a reporter, and I take her, fully, in." We also see the way LeBlanc compares herself and Trina, which leads her to draw hasty conclusions. We see the messiness of the situation, and it's not just Trina's messiness. It's the system's messiness, and it's also our messiness.

In "The American Man at Age Ten," Susan Orlean gracefully weaves her presence into her portrait of Colin. She's the one getting hit with the sling shot, and she is also sometimes the one being questioned in stead of the one doing the questioning. I really admired her ability to blend seamlessly into Colin's world and to enter his mind frame. It made it a bit easier for me to jump in myself. At the end of the piece, Orlean is literally trapped in Colin's web. I wondered about this ending - why did she choose it? If I had to guess, I would say it was something about the all-powerful imagination of the 10-year-old...? At any rate, I loved it.

Thinking about the profiles we will write, I wonder: Should we show our presence as an observer/as someone who's processing observations? If so, how can we do this without dominating the piece and making it a personal essay?

Profile Pitch

A couple of weeks ago, while I was working in the Writing Center, I met a student named Carline. As I helped her with a job application, it came out that she was from Haiti. Immediately, my mind filled with questions. What was it like for her to see tragedies unfolding in her country from the vantage point of one of the most powerful nations in the world? Who did she turn to for support? What did she think about the campus’s response, both to the earthquakes and their aftermath and to her as a “representative” of her country? What will happen when she returns home?

In the wake of a disaster such as the one that recently hit Haiti, many voices and stories emerge. We have heard many such stories in the past few months, but Carline’s story is unique and comes to us from our own shores and from our own campus. Not only can her story help us to better understand her native country, but it can also shed light on our response as a campus community and our attitudes as Americans.

I have contacted Carline and she got back to me saying that she needed a little time to consider my proposition. She hasn’t talked to very many people about the events taking place in her country because it’s painful for her. I should have her response by today at 5. If she consents to talk with me, I would interview her and shadow her as she goes about her daily life in Kalamazoo. I would also talk to her friends, her professors, and the CIP.

I remember vividly the eerie feeling that I got during my time abroad, when I would turn on the French news and find that every channel was covering the 2008 U.S. election. It was the feeling of watching myself being watched. I can’t begin to imagine the trials that Carline has had to go through during the past few months, but I can remember that feeling, and hopefully that will give me a place to start.

Week 3 Reading Response: Writing For Story

I'll admit: I was threatened by this book. It seemed to efface everything I'd ever learned about writing, both in creative writing classes and from my own experiences. Coming from a background in poetry, I had always been taught that there is no way to plan a piece of writing beforehand; one simply had to let the words come out. The emerging poem would make clear what it wanted to say, and the act of writing the poem would often lead the writer to some unexpected discovery that could never be planned in advance.

In the creative non-fiction course I took last quarter, the pieces were longer and in prose, but the concept was the same: writing is an act of discovery. If you come in with an unshakable plan, you're missing out on the fun. It was not that my instructors didn't stress the importance of finding a focus and developing it over multiple drafts, it was that they explained the writing process as a bloody, painful battle. The writer must strip herself naked, exposing the most vulnerable parts of herself, and wade through the muck of the initial writing until she stumbles upon the true point, the "so what?" of the story. Then she basically has to write the piece over again in order to make everything converge on the main point.

So when this Jon Franklin guy started talking about outlining, I got a little panicky. I rely heavily on outlines in my academic writing, but outlines in creative writing have always seemed to me to paralyze the piece before it even gets off the ground. However, my panic turned to shame when I realized that the amateur writer he's always talking about is actually ME: on p. 112, when Franklin describes "spaghettiing," I recognized the feeling all too well. Like the amateur writer in the book, I have always dealt with this issue by using the "bull-your-way-through" approach that Franklin describes on p. 114. And it sucks...writing that way is more draining than a day at the gym. I've also never thought to start writing a piece anywhere other than at the beginning, which for Franklin is a big no-no (p. 158).

Now, in addition to feeling stripped of the "art" component of writing that I had worked so hard to cultivate over the years, I was feeling utterly belittled and demoralized. But when I got to p. 160 and read Franklin's explanation of "calibrating" the story, I finally found the discovery component I had been missing. Franklin describes that moment during the writing of the rough draft when the writer discovers that "the story is taking over and making course corrections for [him]." He says, "[T]he simple (or not so simple) process of writing the story through, if you've invested yourself in it, has changed YOU. You're no longer the same person who found that story and analyzed it. In a sense you have lived it, and you can see it from the inside now as well as from the outside. As you reconsider the story now you should be able to see it with much more insight and a keener understanding of the forces at play in the character and his story."

After reading this book, I've come to accept the concept that a story can be tightly structured from the start AND contain a process of discovery for the person writing it. And, as Franklin points out, as the rough draft evolves, the writer will often tweak the outline in order to accommodate a change that has come about through the writing process. I'm excited to try Franklin's method; it seems a lot less painful than the blind stumbling I often find myself doing when I sit down to write.

Responses to personal journalism pieces

Anna—

The way you structured this piece really helped me understand what it was about at a deeper level. I love the way you frame the piece with yourself and the role of Eva, and then spend a lot of time in the middle talking about the real Eva and your encounter with her. Arranged this way, the piece makes it obvious that it’s about more than just you: it’s about the way art makes connections and effects transformation. I also loved the simplicity of the scenes—when you describe your meeting with Eva, you include only the most important details to set the scene, and you focus on what she said and did and not on what you were feeling at the time. I think that’s the best way to deal with such an emotional topic without getting sentimental.

I wanted to hear more about why you doubted your ability to take on the role and how the script was challenging for you. This would create more of a conflict, so that when you resolve everything in the final scene the reader will feel strongly the change that you have undergone.

Marina—

I love all of the dialogue in this piece. I really get a sense of her character and your frustration from your exchanges. I think that if you tinker with the organization a little bit, you will be able to bring your main point more into focus. It seems like you’re centering around the idea of being able to communicate in your own way (9th paragraph). I wanted that to be clarified: what did it mean to you to communicate in your own way, and how was your host mom preventing you from doing that? I like the way you started with the description of what you had to sit through every night at dinner; what if you wrote a longer scene that described a typical day in Strasbourg, how you were making progress with the language (vendors) and then you would come home and be crushed by your host mom’s mean comments? But I also like the way you frame the piece with your arrival in France and your departure. I’m just not sure how to make everything fit together. I think that you should choose only one or two scenes and flesh them out a little more instead of giving the reader a summary of you time abroad. The tissue scene has to be the turning point—what a great moment!

Joel—

Hilarious. I like how, after you’ve described everything that happened, you end with arriving in Barcelona and the cycle beginning anew. The piece was all the more comical because you didn’t actually go into what happened the second time around.

I didn’t start to see the piece’s larger significance until the very last sentence. I think you should make it clearer that this isn’t just an entertaining anecdote, and that it’s meant to comment on the way that we (don’t) learn from our mistakes and the way that we see traumatic events through the rose-tinted haze of nostalgia. I would suggest cutting out the part about your first flight from Detroit and finding a way to introduce the Barcelona story that gives the reader hints about what you want him to take from the story. What’s the larger significance to you? How is this a turning point? I got a hint of the significance but I wanted you to make it more explicit.

I think you do a good job of capturing the panic you felt, but I wanted to see a few more details about what you were thinking or doing that manifested your panic. More of the “throwing clothes and toiletries into my bag”-type details.

Munirah—

I think that where this piece ended is maybe where it needs to start. I loved the last sentence, but I was left wondering how college prepared you to live your life. It seemed like you got to the turning point and then stopped. One way you could approach the piece would be to start with college and how it changed you and then reflect back on the way you used to be and your athletics-fueled perfectionism.

I really love the scene that you start with, as well as the scene from your first game. The uniform detail is the perfect way to contrast the other girls on the team with yourself, as someone who was actually concerned about the outcome. I think the question is, how could you work the scenes so that they point more clearly to your perfectionism and your will to achieve? With the second scene, just having more details about what you were thinking after the game, and how it didn’t line up with the ideal game in your head, would say everything you need to without you going through and explaining in overview how perfectionism ruled your athletic and academic career.

My writing process for "The Weight of One Strand of Hair"

...by the way, if anyone has alternate title suggestions, I would be thrilled to hear them :)

I spent the last quarter in Gail Griffin's Creative Non-Fiction class, and I did a lot of writing about myself. It was exhausting and I often felt very naked. So when I got this assignment, I wasn't sure if I had any important stories left to tell. Well, really, I knew that I did have stories, it was just difficult to summon up the energy to write something so personal. It came together in bits and pieces. It seems like I spent more time thinking about the essay than I spent actually writing it. I did a little free writing, then I set it aside and went on with my day, but I found myself thinking about which scenes or events to include and which to leave out, how I wanted to organize the piece, and how I saw my reflections working together to converge upon a central focus. I had a lot of doubts, like "How can I make this subject interesting for a reader?" and "Should I include more scenes and cut out some of the reflection?" But when I sat down to write over the next couple of days, I found that the word limit of under 900 words didn't leave me with a lot of room for doubt. I couldn't do what I usually do, which is just add more and more until I'm satisfied (and my piece is enormous). The word limit was frustrating, but it was kind of a fun challenge to have to cut out all of the unessential details and focus on what really mattered most to the story.

The Weight of One Strand of Hair

The other day in my Victorian Literature class, during a discussion of the widespread crisis of faith that followed the publication of Darwin’s writings on evolution and natural selection, our professor asked us if our generation had any way to understand the extreme shock that hit the Victorians when their creationist world view was ripped out from under them like an ancient, moth-eaten rug. As twenty-first century students at a liberal arts college that is in fact very liberal, evolution was no big news to us, the professor assumed. “So what’s your way in?” she asked. “Can you sympathize with these people, and if so, how?” Hands were going up all over the place. No less than three students said that they had been raised in small, insular communities that had taught them to take the Bible as the literal truth. Then they came to college and took their first biology course where they discovered that according to their professors and their peers, the world was actually much older than 4,000 years and men were descended from monkeys. My own story is somewhat less dramatic. I lost my faith, but it wasn’t violently torn from me; at the same time, I didn’t arrive at college eager to shed the Catholic tradition I had been raised in. But like the Victorians, once faith was gone I had to rebuild my world from the ground up.

I was in the back seat of a van driving through the Loire Valley with the fall sun streaming in through the window, and I was reading L’étranger by Albert Camus. The van ride was part of a weekend excursion to visit the castles of Chambord and Chenonceau, which was part of a study abroad program in France. Already having been steeped in the stunning elegance of the castles and their grounds, haven eaten the most gourmet cafeteria lunch of my life (salade de crudités, veal stew, and chocolate mousse), being in the company of ten fellow students who I had come to adore over the past month, I was overwhelmed with happiness. Camus’s existentialist reasoning was starting to work on me. When Meursault says of the priest, “He seemed so cocksure, you see. And yet none of his certainties was worth one strand of a woman’s hair,” I felt a surge of revelation. Hair is beautiful! The uncountable number of filaments on each person’s head! So many different colors and textures! I wanted to spend the rest of my life appreciating things like hair and sunlight and the chocolate that I bought at the gas station half an hour back. I wanted to shake off all of the religious guilt that was paralyzing me and preventing me from loving the world around me.

My five-month stay in France was the longest I had ever been away from home, and what my parents didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them. The parties, the drinking, the European men throwing themselves at me. I was asserting my independence, but I wasn’t out of control; I felt that as long as I kept myself on track with my own internal moral compass, I didn’t have to continue to follow church doctrine to the letter. I had always doubted some of the Church’s principles, anyway. Like, why is homosexuality a sin? And why can’t women be priests? I wasn’t sure how I felt about birth control and abortion. For the first time, I actively grappled with these issues and tried to understand my own position on them instead of just accepting that I had to believe certain things because the Church told me to. Nothing was automatic; letting go of my faith meant letting go of security and embracing ambiguity. I will never forget the look of bewilderment on one would-be-lover’s face when I told him that I couldn’t spend the night because I had been raised to believe that sex before marriage was a sin and I still wasn’t sure how I felt about it.

But it was when I returned home that the real faith crisis began. The first Sunday I was back, I went to mass with my family and when I went up to the altar to receive communion, the Eucharist fell out of my hand. I was certain then that I was going to hell. I had no idea how to fit the person I had become back into my old life. I didn’t want to tell my family, so I kept going to mass, but I couldn’t accept what the priest was saying. The only way I could work through my questions and doubts was to write poems about religion and spirituality. My secret was out, though, when one of the poems was chosen to be published. My family would have to see it eventually. I explained everything one night at dinner: how I didn’t know what I believed anymore and how I was trying to work it out. My family looked at me for a bit, and then my dad asked my sister to pass the potatoes. But the next day, my mom thanked me for telling her what was going on. She said she was proud of me, and that I was doing exactly what I was supposed to be doing: figuring out my faith for myself.