My Writing Within the Minor

 

Writing, for me, is many things. Over the course of this semester, why and how I write have changed considerably. Over 3 months, I have grown into my voice and have grown in my abilities to convey information, portray feeling, and connect with my audience.

 

Writing feels more natural than it did just a few months ago. In whatever situation, be it academic, personal, or something in between (there’s been a lot of in between this semester, and I have thoroughly enjoyed it), I am more comfortable just sitting and writing. As simple as it sounds, it is easy to overcomplicate the process. What I create is now more thoughtful of my intended audience; it is more thoughtful of its purpose and more thoughtful of circumstantial exigence. My repurposing is a perfect example of this; I took a piece that was neutral and “objective” (robotic...), and injected opinion, analysis, and perspective. I made it more provocative and argumentative, but I also kept it within the boundaries of the medium I was concerned with.

 

The boundaries of my writing have been furthered as well. I have written in the last few months knowing I will be held accountable to my personal opinion and my personal voice to those who are not academics. Writing with a sense of certainty of who will be reading and what they are looking for allowed me to more easily manufacture my words, and that just cannot fulfill me as a writer and as a thinker. It is in publishing and sharing my writing that I have felt inspired by my own work and guided by my voice. My repurposing and remediation projects both speak to this: it will be consumed by the residents of the neighborhood I am writing about, the people who will be the most naturally critical of it. For this reason, I have found the pressure, good pressure, to be even more critical than them, to beat them to the punch.  I want to do the best job researching and understanding what I write about, or else I do not want to write about it at all. And I think I’ve pushed myself to create my strongest work yet.

 

In the past, I have been afraid to write or stubborn to dedicate myself to topics that I held little stake in. Something happened this semester, however, in which a working person from the real world reached out to me. What they said really impacted me in a way I did not expect to happen so soon. To come in contact with someone in the field of work I hope to one day be involved in —political, social advocacy—really opened my eyes to the possibilities of being comfortable with my voice, and not changing that voice as it translated to the page.

 

 

Into The Real

 

On November 7th of this year (2015, if you’re reading this in the future), I sent an email to the president of the New York Civil Rights Coalition. The president, a guy by the name of Michael Meyers, is a neighbor of mine, and someone who talks and writes for a living. He talks for hours, he writes endlessly, and he occasionally appears on TV shows to debate people who dislike him. He likes to talk and he’s brutally honest, so his response would be genuine, but maybe not endearing. I emailed him my repurposing draft, a New York Times style investigative piece about income and commercial inequalities in a microcosm of my hometown in New York City, and waited anxiously for a response. He responded on November 9th:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I read this and smiled, as it all just kind’ve clicked in my mind; I read this and I had figured out why I write.

 

“In short, you might have written the piece from the perspective of a young man who actually lives in the neighborhood, who interned at a pol's office, interacted with all kinds of people, and saw and experienced first-hand the enormous mix and changes underway, and felt the frustration or witnessed the confrontation and/or the hope that the residents feel, plus the challenges…”

 

It’s my neighborhood and I should write about my perspective within it, because it matters. I should write because I am passionate about and connected to it, but I should write because my words may be helpful, and that in itself is good enough.

 

His correspondence had come as reassurance that no, I would not be crowding the discourse, and no, I may not be undereducated on these topics. I have so much left to learn, and I know that as well as Michael Meyers does. But, as I read the criticism, I felt secure in my research and my conscious decisions to put information in or to leave information out.

 

In terms of this email, I did a bad job of explaining to him the scope of my essay - writing on just one block in Chelsea, Manhattan, not the whole of it, and writing as a journalistic piece, not an op-ed. He had quite a bit to say about my piece, and quite a bit of substance that he felt was missing from it, but I had discussed all of these themes in my mind as I wrote the piece and I was fully aware of why I didn’t add them. I had not done a bad job in my research, as he let me know, however inadvertently.

 

In doing the research, forming the argument, and publicizing my work, I created something that was meaningful for me because it would be meaningful for members of my community. This was fulfilling and it felt like progress. I want to work in the arena of what I care about: my communities, their issues, and what members of my community can do to solve them.

 

My communities are my passion. My writing is my outlet.

 

I am another citizen, another person in the neighborhood I call home. I have opinions and a need to develop and share them. When I walk the streets, spend time with friends and family who are born and raised New Yorkers, I feel the community as an extension of me, and what I love as an extension of my community. For some reason, I have developed a sense of duty to my community, to keep it equal and its members secure in their homes. It's hard to explain why other than to explain what I see and what I want to see.

 

In doing so, I can write with my brand, and my personal take on the research. It’s a ‘me’ thing; through my passion and through my belonging, I will always write as myself, and with that, I will be satisfied. But, it’s also a lot bigger than that, and my goal is to one day use my writing to actually create change in New York. That’s why I write.