The bad and beautiful first draft

After thirty days of writing poetry in April and thirty-one day of writing short stories in May, I find myself feeling thematically hooked on doing a late-night exercise of some sort and posting it to a blog. I don't want to self-promote this writing, particularly, but I do want to do it and I do want to share it. I'm not sure why, beyond the fact that there's something very powerful and self-affirming about putting your writing out into the world.

I learned a few lessons about the writing I did in April and in May, especially in May. To summarize:

1. Nightly check-ins with a set questionnaire are a pain in the neck. I disliked doing them, and dropped that piece of the May project after about two days. I realized that a check-in wasn't helping me write better. Instead, it was making me feel anxious and was taking up a lot of time. That experience tells me something about how self-assessments might feel for the students that I teach. Perhaps a check-in every three or four weeks makes sense. Every night or every week definitely does not.

2. Sticking to a single theme for an entire month also didn't work for me. I started off writing scenes related to my book-in-progress, then began to feel uncomfortable sharing these scenes publicly because they really were not stories in and of themselves but scenes that were meant to fit together in a larger work. I think I wrote some good scenes that will work well in the larger work, but I realized that I couldn't complete them in a single "throw-down-some-words" hour or two with the page.

After I dropped the idea of writing scenes related to my book project, I tried concentrating on themes that I think I would like to generate into books eventually such as the joys and challenges of teaching historical events live from the event itself and the adventures of my husband and myself in backyard gardening. The latter theme particularly resulted in several successful stories, but even that was a theme I couldn't sustain for more than a few days at a time. This experience also was quite instructive in how I teach writing and storytelling to students. Students in one of my classes -- Digital Storytelling -- maintain a story blog for a full semester. They're supposed to decide and then announce to the rest of the class early in the term what the blog is going is to be about. Many of them struggle with the assignment and lose their enthusiasm for blogging after making one or two posts. One thought is that one cannot really know what a blog is going to be about until one gets deep into the process of blogging itself. To that end, I was thrilled to find a different kind of challenge to take on for June. Developed by bloggers at Wordpress, it's called "Post Every Day", and includes a prompt for one to follow if you have no inspiration of your own. Since April 1, I have managed to write a minimum of 750 words each day, and to create a work of writing on 60 of the 61 days in April and May. So I figured that perhaps it might be time to see if I can blog every day, either on this site or on the Moving Your Body site. If it works, I might continue it through July, August, and beyond.

I might invite my Digital Storytelling students to try out the idea, as well.

3. The third insight that I gained from the April and May daily challenges is perhaps the most significant. I would articulate it as learning to trust my voice and giving myself permission to let some writing that is rough around the edges be made available via blog posts and Facebook status updates to a universe greater than me, my notebook, and my laptop. Most of the writing that I did for the challenges was done between 10 p.m. and midnight, at the end of my day. I simply couldn't make the space to do it any earlier in the day. As the weeks advanced, I also found myself realizing that I did not want to do it earlier. I liked the nightly ritual of settling down with a cup of tea or a glass of seltzer water and letting a story pour out. I felt as if the end-of-the-day routine liberated me from demands to polish, check facts, or ground assertions I was making in research. These habits, of course, are good and important habits, and they are ones that I practice diligently as I am working on more polished drafts. But they can stifle and inhibit a writer's voice from coming out, if they are allowed precedence over the quick-and-dirty, no-holds-barred first draft expression of the voice.

I hope to revise many of the writings I created in April and May, and already have submitted some of the poems I created for a possible reading this summer. It may take several years before all of this work is either revised or discarded, but that's the beauty of giving yourself freedom to create really bad first drafts. The drafts often aren't as bad as the writer thinks they are, and undoubtedly, they're also not as good. But it really helps to put them down, share them with a public, and receive feedback.

This is where I will conclude for now. Today's prompt from The Daily Post was to write about something ugly while also finding beauty or hope in one's thoughts. The ugly and the beauty, and, of course, the hope lie in the freedom to write first drafts.

Day 2

Today, I read the second story in the Crossing into America anthology that I referenced yesterday. The story was "Our Papers," by Julia Alvarez (author of How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents) and was  first published in 1988. It documents a young girl's memory of leaving the Dominican Republic for New York.

Strengths/insights of this story:
1. Alvarez develops her theme around a key word, "vacation." In doing so, readers gain a new understanding of what vacation means. The new meaning is insightful for me on a personal level as I consider what a vacation means personally. Is it fair to call time off from work to work on a book a vacation?
2. The detail surrounding a beach house is quite evocative. It takes me back to a time that I lived in India for a year.
3. The story also turns on the memory of the main character leaving for America. The children don't really understand that the departure is for good. This incident reminded me of living in India for a year, and how my parents prepared for the time without really involving us kids.

How I might use this story to develop my own writing:
I haven't written much about the time that we lived in India for a year, beyond an essay that ran in the  Seattle Times in 1992. It strikes me that the theme might be worth returning to, as I consider my own place in America and the world.

I haven't read any other works by this author. I would like to read How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents after reading this piece.

The Short Story Challenge Begins

My last post to this blog described an experiment in self-review that I planned to embark on in the month of May. The plan was to participate in National Short Story Month by reading a short story each day, and by writing a short story of my own. I also planned to analyze the story I read and reflect on my own writing process.

It is now the first of May, so here goes!

The story I read was actually an excerpt from an autobiographical work entitled Diary of an Undocumented Immigrant by Raul "Tianguis" Perez. It was included in an anthology Crossing into America: The New Literature of Immigration that is edited by Luis Mendoza and S. Shankar. I have had the anthology on my shelf for several years, ever since I took a graduate seminar with Shankar, and felt that with my own book manuscript on the South Asian immigrant experience currently undergoing a hefty revision, this would be an opportune time to delve into the anthology.

My assessment of the story:
1. What was the story I read? Title, author, place where it was published, and synopsis.
The story, as noted, was an excerpt from Raul Perez's autobiographical work Diary of an Undocumented Immigrant, published in 1991. The excerpt I read documents Perez's plans to enter the United States illegally as a "wetback," using the parlance of the late 1980s through 1990s, and describes his efforts to locate a coyote and means of getting across the border.

2. What were three strengths and/or insights that I gained about storytelling and writing from this particular story?
a) Perez tells a story that I am familiar with. Yet he does so in a manner that enlightens me to many aspects of the process of crossing the Mexican border into the United States illegally that I had not previously known. I learned specifically that the border crossing was a village practice more so than an urban one, and that people had gained knowledge of this practice largely by word of mouth.
b) Perez's storytelling style is both timeless and dated. He defines terms like coyote and bracero as if they are new to the American reading public. The publication date of 1991 might explain why. What gives the style a timeless strength, however, is the manner in which he loads explanation and historic detail onto the terms. One understands better how both terms developed in historical and political context.
c) I sense from the story that Perez has crossed the border before. He has not done it with the assistance of a coyote so he himself is embarking on a voyage of discovery in what he documents. I enjoy the narrative voice: it is simple, direct, non-judgmental and straightforward.
3. How do the strengths/insights I gained support my own efforts to improve my writing?
I often am asked to define terms like sari or samosa and I often find myself rebelling against doing such things. I gain a new respect from reading Perez's definitions because they help me see the role of Mexican immigration in post-World War II America more clearly. They help me see how words that have entered the American lexicon came into being.
4. Have I read anything else by the story's author?
At this point, I have not.


The story I wrote is posted to My National Short Story Month blog, which is linked to this site. Here is my assessment of it:
1. What was the story I wrote today? Title, word count, and a 1-2 sentence synopsis.
The story was "Not Indian Like Me." It is 100 words long and is based on a prompt from a site called StoryADay.org to write a "drabble," essentially a 100-word story. Not Indian Like Me narrates a conversation between my mother and myself on Hindus and Muslims following the 1992 destruction of the Babri Masjid, a sixteenth century mosque that once stood in Ayodhya, India.
2. Where did the idea for this story originate?
The story is drawn from my book manuscript.
3. How did the story develop?
I followed the guidelines for writing a drabble, which were to choose one or two characters, and let a single moment, action, or choice unfold. The drabble is supposed to hint somehow at how the singular moment is more significant than the characters realize at the moment. Because this story comes out of a book manuscript, writing the drabble was not difficult. I did find myself having to distill it, however, from about 350 words in the manuscript to 100 in order to follow the rules.
4. What might I do to this story later to strengthen it?
I chose this particular story because my husband had suggested last fall that it sums up what my entire book is about. The closing line "You cannot understand. You are not Indian like me." hints at the significance. It comes late in the manuscript, in the second to last chapter. But as I consider it, it reiterates tensions that are apparent throughout the manuscript. Because I am writing a non-fiction narrative, the timing of the scene also is significant. It occurs as I am a young adult, and am beginning to look critically at what it means to be an Indian in the U.S. for the first time. In revising, I might replace the text I distilled with this particular story so that it "pops" out of the narrative quite clearly and then step back to analyze the statements and their implications.

How do I know if I'm getting any better?

       

The past month of challenges -- write 750 words a day, create a poem a day -- has energized my writing and brought into it and my own soul a sense of the daring and reckless. I feel inspired and refreshed. Yet, I also have questions. I know this is raw material and I am passing it off as such. But, should I be posting what is so raw so publicly? What will I need to do best to make my writing get better? How I can self-improve?

As I ponder these questions, I realize that they echo questions that students ask, as they pump me for feedback. What can they do to become better writers? What are they doing right? What are they doing wrong? How can I help steer them in a direction that makes it all right?

The questions plague me like the feeling of "Stage-Fright" that my first contribution to this blog spoke of. To be honest, they scare me because one of the simplest responses is, "How do I know? Who am I to know?" Those responses, I realize, probably don't do much to ease the anxiety of a student who has learned to trust teachers as sources of answers, as authorities, as coaches, as experts, as people who can provide the solutions to the problems that vex us most.

The confrontation of student expectation with instructor stage-fright came to a climax in my mind recently as I encouraged students in my digital-storytelling course to see storytelling as a creative process that relies upon community input. There is no one right way or wrong way to tell a story, I said. Only suggestions and ideas, based on one's own personal idiosyncrasies and insights. Furthermore, the way in which a story is going to be told will vary, depending on the community for whom the story is being put forth.

I had written those words in an online course bulletin board as a way of encouraging and empowering students to take seriously the peer advice they were receiving from one another, advice that, for the most part, was supportive and helpful. There was a layer of guilt added to the words, in that I was late in delivering my own feedback, probably in part due to Stage-Fright. But seriously as I thought of peer review, I really wanted the students to understand themselves to be a part of a community of learners in which authority was not hierarchical despite the indisputable fact that the course did have instructors (who would eventually become grade givers). Furthermore, I had seen the effects of too much instructor input: good ideas that didn't have a chance to develop were stifled; a style that was coming out in a cautious, playful, exploratory way would be prematurely critiqued. These experiences have been helping me understand that the best advice that students could receive would be to listen to themselves and to learners in similar positions as them.

But peer review doesn't create self-review in and of itself. It doesn't help any of us cut to the question of how to make our own writing better. It doesn't really help us understand what to do with those freshly-pressed, very raw and precocious first drafts.

So I have decided to embark on an experiment in teaching myself self-review. I will do my best to document this experiment through two tried and true tools: the practice of writing at 750words.com every day for a month (the month of May), and the practice of what I called self-assessment for students and Julia Cameron refers to in one of her best primers on writing, The Right to Write, as the evening check-in.

Here's how I hope the experiment will work: May is National Short Story Writing Month -- or so I've been told. It is much less structured than the well-known National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) in November and the National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo) in April. Some searching for sources over the past couple of weeks have told me that some organizations consider March to be National Short Story Writing Month, and some mark the heralded month as April. Others consider May to be a worthy month for reading, rather than writing, short stories. And some just want you to write a story and post it somewhere to share.

While I have written short stories in fictional format, non-fiction remains my genre. So the fact that my quest to find a storytelling community to help me through National Short Story Writing Month turned fruitless provoked some anxiety.

What I decided is this: In May, I will read one short story a day. And I will assess it by answering the following four questions:
1. What was the story I read? Title, author, place where it was published, and a 1-2 sentence synopsis should be provided.
2. What were three strengths and/or insights that I gained about storytelling and writing from this particular story?
3. How do the strengths/insights I gained support my own efforts to improve my writing?
4. Have I read anything else by the story's author? How does this particular story fit or not fit with the author's general body of work, as I understand it?

I also will write one story a day. And I will assess that story, with these four questions:
1. What was the story I wrote today? Title, word count, and a 1-2 sentence synopsis will be provided.
2. Where did the idea for this story originate?
3. How did the story develop?
4. What might I do to this story later to strengthen it?
If you're an educator, you might recognize a few traces of Bloom's Taxonomy in these questions. I have been using the levels of learning established in that matrix -- memorizing, understanding, applying, assessing/analyzing, evaluating, and creating -- for the past several years to create learning activities for students, including questions of self-assessment. While I feel that the process is a bit mechanical, I feel that it works in the sense that it allows students and their instructors to create a dialogue on the student's learning that is less hierarchical and more collaborative. I continue to study and work with the method. My hope is that others might join me in this May experiment, and perhaps report to me on their learning.
(On the image: It comes from a blog on online college courses, and offers a more structured and deeper understanding of self-assessment and its value to students than I can offer here. Visit the blog at http://www.onlinecollegecourses.com/2011/11/21/self-assessment-charting-your-own-progress/

What's raw is not all bad

I wasn't sure I would be writing anything at all today because I was scheduled to have my last two wisdom teeth extracted. However, I signed myself on for two April challenges, one of which is to contribute a minimum of 750 words a day for every day in April to a site called 750words.com and the other of which is to write a poem a day in honor of National Poetry Writing Month and to make the poem public, which I'm doing at the blog linked to this site at http://guptacarlsonnapowrimo2013.blogspot.com. I couldn't bear the "agony of defeat" and even considered waking up at 5 a.m. to do the writing in case I didn't make it, post-surgery!

Well, the alarm went off at 5 a.m., and the snooze button was hit. Happily, the surgery went well and by about 7 p.m., I felt well enough to sit up in what my husband describes as my "blanket pod" on the sofa, with my laptop. I have been using 750words.com to work on my book manuscript and two book chapters for other projects that I need to finish revisions on. What I wrote today had more to do with writing practice, however, so I thought I would share it here. There is a small amount of repetition in what I've placed in previous posts, but I think the general idea of "what's raw" is not bad comes through.

I started doing morning pages in October 1998, and read the Artist's Way by Julia Cameron a couple of months later. Initially, Cameron's depiction of morning pages didn't sit well with me, and I stopped doing them or did them at best sporadically for several months. My initial impression of the theory behind the pages was that I could use them to process work-in-progress: things I was reading, ideas I was having to synthesize the readings, thoughts that would emerge from the numerous conferences, lectures, book readings, and my work with tai chi and yoga at the time.

Years and years later, this is how I use morning pages: to process thoughts, ideas, projects, ongoing work. Some days, they are mental dumping -- I need to rant about my lack of money; I need to vent suppressed anger about something; I need to write out about something that is anything but the project breathing down my neck at the moment. I also realize that I think this is what Cameron has in mind with morning pages. I have gone through the Artist's Way several times, and even incorporate parts of it into my teaching. I also have worked through Walking in this World, The Right to Write, and The Sound of Paper. So clearly I find value in Cameron's work, and also appreciate that her approach doesn't sit well with everyone.

One challenge that morning pages does present is the act of longhand writing. I believe in it. Deeply. There's something about the audience of self, page, pen, and Great Creator that is special, intimate, and not requiring edit impulses. A lot gets done because it's free-writing, and it's something I can later transfer to a computer file -- giving it the edit impulses (fix the typo, rephrase the sentence, move the paragraphs around) that word processing makes possible in a way that longhand can't. The challenges are making the time to move it to the computer file, and then trying to determine the next step for the work that lies in the computer file. Three pages of longhand, or the rough equivalent of 750 words, does not usually make a full article, book chapter, or essay so using the process of morning pages to get sustained projects done means dealing with overlap, inconsistency, and sometimes complete ruptures or breaks in thought. In addition, time is one of our most valuable commodities. Many days, I write morning pages successfully, have my breakfast, take my shower, and roll into work and am immediately confronted with demanding tasks beyond my immediate control. By the time I think I have a minute to transfer my morning pages to a computer file I'm too pumped up with distractions, breathlessness, and a sense that I need to hurry, hurry, hurry to engage with the edit impulses in a way that I would like. I end up thinking "it's all bad" when the reality is that "it's all raw". It needs the patience of simmer time to gel together.

I was introduced to 750words.com last summer by a colleague, Michele Forte. She was using the site to begin jump-starting her own thoughts on writings she could initiate as a professor in a position finally to realize long-belated aspirations to scholarship. Like morning pages, I started it in fits and starts, and started immediately hitting the delete button on my e-mail notification from "Buster" saying that he thought I should write 750 words today. I thought about unsubscribing, but I also knew enough about my experiences with morning pages that when the time was write, I would commit.

So April is the month of commitment. I am participating in Napowrimo (the National Poetry Writing Month) and have committed to a poem a day. And I am not a poet by training or passion. I just like doing it once awhile. I plan to participate in National Short Story Writing Month in May, and hope to invent some other "national" genre-writing months (no fantasy or sci fi, though) all the way through the famous November National Novel Writing Month, which I joined three times and failed twice. With these commitments, I also decided that I was going to commit to writing 750 words a day in April. And that if it worked, I would continue into May, June, July, August, and eternity. I thought I would use 750 words as a way to convert my longhand morning pages (because I honestly cannot imagine going without them any longer) to that first electronic file, where editable impulses are allowed.

A lot of my friends laugh at my obsession with challenges. Besides writing challenges, I participate in things like "Complete a Marathon in a Week," "Do an Ironman in a Month," and month-long "Squat-a-thons". I also initiate things like six-week challenges to get more fit, exhorted my friends on Facebook every day in 2011 to move their bodies, and am currently training for an Olympic Distance Triathlon in August and what will hopefully be my tenth marathon in September. I feel a little guilty myself that I lean so heavily on challenges, and feel a little out of it when there is no challenge beckoning me on the horizon.

So why do I them do?

One simple answer is this: Because they're fun. For me, they keep me motivated, and they remind me that with the frantically crazy work hours I keep, 11:59 p.m. and 12:01 a.m., the bookends of a day approach quickly. My hope for the ideal life is write in the morning, work and work out until about 7 p.m., have a good dinner and downtime with my spouse, and write at the end of the day. The challenges force me to remember that end-of-day commitment.

(A note on the photo: I found the image via a Google Images search for "writing raw". The page to which it links is a useful site on writing tips and strategies, one of which is "Free Write Fridays." The image accompanies an interview with Rebecca Tsaros Dickson and has some helpful thoughts on the values of writing in the way that the challenges I describe in this post present. You can access the link at http://kellieelmore.com/2012/11/09/fwf-free-write-friday-writing-raw-with-author-rebecca-tsaros-dickson/.

Art and craft

I had the opportunity today to meet up with a former journalism colleague and friend, Michael Fancher. Fancher was the executive editor of the Seattle Times when I worked there as a staff writer from 1988-96, and continued to serve at The Times before retiring as editor-at-large in 2008. Since his retirement, he has been teaching journalism ethics and considering ways to re-imagine the practice of journalism for the 21st century. He was in Saratoga Springs for a New York Press Association conference, and when I noticed his status update on Facebook attesting to this point, I e-mailed him to see if he might have time for coffee. I was delighted when my cell phone rang a few minutes later.

I was interested in talking with Mike (whom we called Fanch) because I, too, have been interested in how mainstream journalism might evolve away from its often corporate-controlled and rather elitist tradition of disseminating "news" to readers from the top down and more toward a  democratic partnership of sorts in which the defining and creation of news is more of a collaborative act. New communicative media such as blogs, Twitter, Facebook and shared documents via a variety of Google sites have clearly been redefining how people get information and what (and who) might constitute expertise. These are deep issues of a philosophic nature, in my mind. And, at the risk of being accused of "burying my lede" (a journalistic way of saying get to the point, for god's sake), I am going to state now that those issues are not what I'm going to write about in this blog post, though I think they do influence what I am about to say indirectly. What I want to talk about is how my conversation with Mike made me think anew about how one might learn to be a writer.

The simple answer: There is no way to learn how to write. One learns simply by writing, writing a lot of words.

So, a little bit of back story: A few weeks ago, I described how the fact that some people would be praised for having a "god given gift for writing" used to unnerve me, at least partly because no one made that claim about me. To answer the question of why I was writing if I didn't have "the gift," I created two categories of writers: Those who did it as an art, and those who did it as a craft.

Now the difference between writer = artist and writer = craftsperson is loaded, politically and socially. It evokes comparisons between what is often regarded in an elitist sense as "high art" (the stuff you find in places like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art) and what is condescendingly referred to as "low art" (graffiti on a subway train, a mural on a public wall, decorative masks, costumery, embroidered handbags, and pretty much anything one might create to brighten up a day or display a flair for the original). I found it somewhat comforting to be not the "artiste" but the craftsperson. Claiming the latter moniker, I felt, allowed me the right to make mistakes, write some really bad stories that would need extensive editing, and devote some time and energy to working on my craft, honing my skills, trying to become better. I could learn to write, in short, by writing. Not by claiming myself as already perfect, as artiste.

Fanch spoke of a journalists creed that was written by Walter Williams at the well-regarded University of Missouri School of Journalism in the early years of the 20th century. The statement, which can be accessed at http://www.rjionline.org/news/walter-williamss-journalists-creed, briefly describes journalism as an occupation of the public trust. Fanch has dissected and disseminated thoughts on the creed extensively since his retirement from The Seattle Times, in an effort to work toward development of a creed for the 21st century, and shares his thoughts periodically via his own blog at http://mikefancher.wordpress.com. What he had to say about the 20th century creed was this: A fair amount of the creed deals with the skills a journalist might hope to acquire; the remainder is about things that we don't talk a lot about. Those things include an understanding of the society in which one lives; a commitment to engagement in a particular way about that society; and a sense of ethics in terms of how one might engage appropriately.

As Fanch spoke, I started thinking about how I write and how I teach. I started to wonder if perhaps there were different levels of teaching associated with the art of writing. Notice, please, my use of the word "art". It is deliberate. There is the teaching of the skills: crafting a sentence, organizing a story, developing characters, creating dramatic tension and conflict to advance a plot, writing dialogue, constructing scenes, and so on and so forth. Tons of books on how to master writing skills have been published. Most of them ultimately highlight the need for practice. Along these lines, the art of writing ultimately is about craft. You can study stories written by others, masterpieces of the past. But to learn how to write such stories, you must write them yourself. That realization is often frightening for those who think of the art of writing as an art, in the "artiste" sense alluded to earlier. It's much less intimidating if you think of writing as a craft, as something where you're allowed to make mistakes, write really badly, get your work all marked up, and see each new story that you craft as a step toward getting a little better.

But what is the other level associated with the art of writing? Is there more to learn than skill? Fanch's interpretation of the journalists' creed suggests there is, and that other level might be the art of the art, in a more relaxed, more humbling way than the artiste level might indicate. To restate the creed, to write well, one must connect with readers. One does this partly by understanding the society in which one lives. One also does this by making a commitment to engage with that society in ways that are socially appropriate to one's own sense of self and that self's relation to one's place in the world.

To put it more simply, one of the ways that I often engage with the world is by speaking up. But when I'm in a space that feels new or unfamiliar, I am happiest if I can simply skulk in a corner and hang out. This might seem like disengagement, but the reality is that it's not. It's a form of listening and watching -- both of which are information-gathering practices in their own right. These acts of engagement and studies into the society with which one interacts are ultimately journeys of the self into spaces of discomfort that might lead to discoveries and transformation. That, in a way, is what the art of writing is about.

Can you get to the art without the skills? Can you master the skills but never find the art? On the first question, I am fairly convinced that the answer is no. As I write about the art, I feel I am writing about it as an abstraction. It's something that is understood more and more as one's skills develop. Regarding the second question, I find it difficult to believe that focus only on skills will never lead to art. But, to be honest, I am not sure what the answer is. If it were yes, my original belief that you could separate writers into those who did it as an art and those who did it as a craft would be affirmed. But, if it were not, we might need a different understanding of what art is altogether.

To return to journalism, that sense of a need for a different understanding of what defines the journalist and the work of journalism is what seems to intrigue Mike Fancher. It intrigues me, as well, perhaps for different reasons. What would happen if all embarked on a mission to practice and refine our skills while simultaneously entering into a pact to immerse ourselves fully and actively with the worlds in which we live?

(A brief note on the image: I found the image at the top of this post via a Google Images search. In trying to secure an appropriate credit, I discovered that the photo comes from an arts supplies store. It appeared in the Google search after being used on a blog about making money in what is called the Variety Arts. The particular post that it illustrated speaks in some ways to the questions I raise here. Check out the post at http://www.bradweston.com/wordpress/what_is_art/.)

The Power of Story

I saw the film "The Central Park Five" over the weekend, compliments of the Saratoga Film Forum, a grant-supported, volunteer-driven organization in Saratoga Springs, NY, that brings one of more independent new releases, classics, foreign and/or documentary films for an affordable screening to the small town every week. This film was part of a public interest series that the forum has initiated, in which members of the public are treated to a panel discussion by local experts on a particular issue following the screening of a film.

I didn't stay for the panel discussion, but I did find the film to be riveting. Directed by Ken Burns, the film documents how detectives in the New York Police Department more or less coerced a false confession out of five teenaged boys in 1989 of raping the woman who has come to be known as the Central Park jogger. (The five are pictured above in a 2012 photo taken by Michael Nagle for The New York Times. A link to a story about the lingering effects of the case and the film is here:
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/11/19/justice-and-the-central-park-jogger-case)

Watching the film sent a series of flashback memories racing through my head. I was a staff writer for The Seattle Times in 1989, and remember feeling a little queasy about how the press coverage of the New York dailies I had so deeply admired unfolded. The police said the boys were guilty and so the press quoted the police, without further ado. That was standard journalistic practice. I was quite young then, as a journalist, a writer, and a person. So I accepted what the New York daily writers did as standard practice. But it didn't feel quite like the story.

I also was reading the novel Eva Luna by Isabel Allende around that time. The basic story line involves a girl who grows up to become a mystical, magical realist storyteller who, living in a police state, uses magical realism to create stories about the truth that contest the truth being delivered by a heavily censored press. While it was never explicitly stated, the novel's narration implied that most of the public -- without actually admitting it -- knew how to separate fact from fiction. I sort of thought, maybe naively believed, that most American readers could make the same distinctions when they read the decisively certain truths being presented about the alleged Central Park jogger's rapists in the oddly inconsistent reports from the boys, if nothing else.

Other memories conjoined in my head, savoring the benefit of historical hindsight: Spike Lee's film "Do the Right Thing" was released in 1989, and many mainstream movie theatres were afraid to screen it, out of a fear that a fictional story that seemed so potentially jarringly real would generate race riots. An African American liberal was running for mayor of Seattle, as was an African American liberal in New York City. Yet, African Americans were seen popularly as whiners responsible for their own lower socioeconomic status in life, or as fitting the widely circulated Reaganesque prototype of the welfare queen.

Later that year, both Norman Rice and David Dinkins were elected the first African American mayors of their respective cities. And, in Seattle, a white-dominant coalition of parents managed to get a referendum on ballots that kept the inner-city -- well, not racially divided because Seattle is remarkably interracial but racially un-mingled at the basic elementary and secondary educational sense. Just another year later, an amateur videomaker captured footage of Rodney King being beaten by Los Angeles police. A year after that, riots erupted across the country after a white-dominant jury held that the police acted in an acceptable manner. And, one year after that, scores of minority youth cheered O.J. Simpson as he eluded police following his alleged involvement in the death of his estranged wife.

Most of these stories are true, even if they seem to be the stuff of fiction. Allowing them to come into a conversation with each other in my own head reminded me of the value of writing and storytelling. The tales that are not going to be told by the mainstream will not ever be told -- unless we tell them ourselves. 

The boys all spent time in their late teens and twenties in maximum security prisons. In 2001, the "real rapist" confessed. Public pressure mounted, and the convictions were vacated, restoring to the boys who were now men a sense of personal integrity but not the years of life they had lost. A civil suit against the City of New York remains unresolved.

"It could happen here," muttered my husband, as we left the theatre.

Of course, it could. If there's anything, however, that might forestall that possibility, it might be the power of story.