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.