Tell My Story

What makes someone's story interesting enough to put to paper? Can any of us make that judgment? Yes. We all have backgrounds, true. We all don't have stories, also true, in my opinion. Not everyone possesses the skills necessary to put you in their shoes so that you can live their story. So that you can understand it.
Which is where writers come in. We have (or we should have) the ability to take the spoken word and craft it into something written, something tangible, something to make you look at that person and say 'Wow...so THAT's why..." or 'Wow...I couldn't have done that, but I understand why you did..."
This is biography. That is how you do it. You don't tell the positive side, you don't tell the negative side. You tell the story.

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& Scene!

Chairs sprawled across the room that serves not only as a classroom, but as a computer lab, cafeteria, counseling center, apartment and at the moment, a church in Virginia from years ago, through the mind of a young Tamara Jeffries. My classmates and I sat in amazement as she took us back in time to visit with her the inside of her mother's purse.

"How did you do that?" We all whispered with our eyes, too awestruck to ask the question. Ms. Jeffries is as close to as a writing god as we have close enough in our reach. "I'm not that different from you. I'm nothing special," she said, trying to convince us that yes, we too, could write like her.

Trith is, she really isn't anything special. She just knows how to create a scene.

We write to be witty. We write to tell what we think is a story, but we're honestly nowhere near telling a story. We all were instructed to describe a church scene. We described the church pews, the color of the choir robes, the way we felt walking into the church tardy, but not really setting a scene.

Ms. Jeffries took us throughout her mother's purse. She described the crumpled napkins and the peppermint wrapping and the dirt and lint at the bottom. She left us at the bottom of it and took us to the pew, where she sat with her patent-leather Mary Janes dangling from the pew. She took us there. We were her. She became us. She gave us a scene.

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Thick in The Words

My Creative Nonfiction teacher, Ms. Tamara Jeffries, one of the most brilliant teachers and people I know, has these sayings that she likes to use, and most of them I forget, but one stuck with me. She told us that she wants our writing to be "thick on the page". We need to FEEL our writing. It needs to be beyond surface level analysis.

Sounds easy, huh?

I know, I know...I'm being sarcastic.

But her advice is what I strive for in all my writing, whether I knew it or not. I want my writing to jump out at you on the page. I attempted that as I prepared to write my first memoir ever. I don't believe it turned out so well, and a part of the problem is that I tried too hard. Yes your writing should always be intentional, but I slapped on so many things about myself that it turned into a healing piece for me. I forgot about the reader. I tried to be thick but ended up being thin. So instead of going to the store and buying everything I see to make my refrigerator full, I'm going to essentially buy the things that will make me healthier, so I can live a richer life. So that my story will have a purpose, existence, instead of doing nothing but being my prayer to God. Who wants to read that?

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For Writers Who Have Considered Rewriting When Gender is Enuf

http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2010/09/for_colored_girls_trailer.html

http://clutchmagonline.com/newsgossipinfo/tyler-perrys-for-colored-girls-gets-november-release/

For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When The Rainbow is Enuf

I was 16, maybe 17, when I was first introduced to this choreoplay by Ntozake Shange. When the rainbow is enuf...how powerful those words were to a 16-year-old girl struggling to find acceptance within herself can't even be described. One of the resident writers that I was fortunate enough to have as a teacher in one of my classes at Young Chicago Authors first introduced me to the book, and later gave it to me as a present. I was touched. I was moved by it. The way that the play is written is just simply amazing.

So when I heard that a movie was going to be made from an adaptation of the book, of course I was excited. When I heard that the director was Tyler Perry, my happiness decreased. Not because of his past work...that is a whole different blog post. I was upset because yet again, a man was chosen over a woman to direct a movie that is about women. Whether it was done deliberately or not, this has happened more times than it should.

THen that made me think--is it wrong for Perry to direct this story just because he is a man? Would a woman be more qualified to direct it solely based on her gender alone? Although For Colored Girls isn't a creative nonfiction piece, the same decisions about whose story is it to tell, and WHO should tell it still remain across mediums.

The story will of course be different since Perry is a man.

Or will it be? Gender isn't a degree in a sense that it doesn't reward one a higher level of intelligence. I don't think that it is in my place to come to the conclusion that Perry's version of the story would be different and, I'll admit, inferior to Shange's simply because he's a man. I think that their own personal experiences will determine how the story is interpreted, but Perry may relate to Shange's characters better than she can if he has experienced it firsthand and she didn't--he'll not only understand it, he'll feel it.

Storytelling is an art form, one that I think anyone can possess. Great storytelling does take time to develop, and I am very interested to see the result of Perry's development.

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That Old Thing Back

An interview that I have yet to see wasn't what caught my attention. I, like many other people in my generation and the one before me, treat The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill as a Bible of some sorts put to beat sung by an angelic voice- that which belongs to Lauryn Hill. Although that album was released in 1998 (12 years ago) and Hill has yet to have an album to reach its success, her name still starts a flurry of conversation, partially because of the privacy that she has set aside for herself.

The music journalist Toure' recently did an interview with her for Fuse Tv,and although I have not seen the interview, I first heard about it via Twitter. Hiill's words weren't what caught my attention, as I stated earlier. It was what was said by someone else that really got me.

In my Creative Nonfiction class on Tuesday, we discussed why people may hide things or not share them when writing. As writers, do we even have the right to do that (pun intended)? You have a responsibility, I believe, to tell your story, to share things about yourself (we were discussing our upcoming memoirs that we have to write as our first major assignment, so this is why I feel that leaving out things is not right).

The comments that really made me stop and think were said by Vernon Mitchell, Jr. (@negrointellect), a doctoral candidate in history at Cornell University. He wrote:

"I think we want "that old thing back" so bad that no matter what she did, it likely wouldn't measure up. I could be wrong...maybe I am. We won't ever "hear" Lauryn Hill again, until we let go of what she did in the past..."

I'm not the only one who worships The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, her debut album. Hill is held to a very high standard in hip-hop, neo-soul, R&B, etc. In fact, her album was listed by Rolling Stone as one of the 500 greatest albums of all time. Songs like "The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill", where she sang,

"My world it moves so fast today, the past it seems so far away & life squeezes so tight that I can't breathe...And every time I try to be, what someone else thought of me, so caught up I wasn't able to achieve..."

really helped me grow into a confident person. But that's beside the point. Mitchell's tweets are one of the reasons, I assume, that Hill retreated behind the spotlight, why she shied away from people like me, who live by her lyrics- we expect too much from her. When we relinquish the Lauryn from 12 years ago, we can get to know the Lauryn from today.

So in this situation, is her hiding parts of her story acceptable? When I say hiding her story, I'm referring to releasing new music. If and when she does decide to release new music, does she even have to be as personal as she once was? When you are in a different place in your life, do you have to write the same as you did previously? Do you owe that to your audience?

I guess that in Hill's case, she should just take her own advice. Make up her own mind to define her own destiny.

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Becoming Butterfly

As I am writing this blog post, a butterfly lands quietly on the window of my car. At first I didn't notice it, but it became harder to ignore as it flapped its wings ever so gracefully, oblivious to the fact that I am watching it. I became excited because I absolutely love butterflies and what they represent. I love how they are originally caterpillars and then transform into butterflies. My favorite saying is "Just when the ccaterpillar thought the world was over, it became a butterfly."

In my Creative Nonfiction class, we have been assigned the task of writing different forms of creative nonfiction--memoirs, essays and more. In "Keeping it Real", Lee Gutkind, the godfather of creative nonfiction, writes about the different ways to make creative nonfiction beautiful. You can use facts, the backdoor approach, reserch--whatever necessary to tell the truth, to tell a story.

This butterfly landing on my car has a story, and as a writer of creative nonfiction, I have the assignment and responsibility of telling stories like it. I know that the butterfly cannot literally speak to me, but in other ways, it is indeed telling me a story, creating its own memoir in these moments that it shared the same space with me. And it is my job to listen, to take heed to it, to write, to observe, to feel. I get it now. Creative nonfiction isn't a made-up story genre for journalists who are tired of the inverted pyramid. Its for writers who find something that they are interested in, learn it, essentially become it, and tell the story of it.

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because of all of this

i have been bored out of my mind since June 30th, when i came back from my whirlwind of travels. i am not the type of person to sit idly by and watch life pass me by. i get bored very easily, & i like to take advantage of pretty much every opportunity that life throws at me.

being stuck at home w/ no car & no money has pretty much sucked & made me forget about all of the amazing things that i've done in just two months. it made me forget that from June 2009-June 2010, I have not stopped. Last summer was the internship w/ the Chicago Defender. Last school year, I took on a whole list of new responsibilities that I hadn't before. I was an RA. Editor-In-Chief. Student. Girlfriend. Sister. Friend. Daughter. In May, I was in St. Petersburg, FL at the Poynter Institute for a journalism fellowship. In June, I was in Atlanta at Emory University for the UNCF/Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship. On the 26th of this month, I'll be heading to San Diego for the NABJ Conference as a participant in the Student Multimedia Project.

I'm not saying all this to brag, because it takes a lot of work to do all that. Many don't see the sleepless nights that I had [& when I say sleepless, I mean not going to sleep for over 24 hours because I HAD to get something done]. Many don't see the tears that I shed because of a combination of stress, lack of sufficient rest, some days I barely ate because I was so busy to notice the headaches I had every day. For a year, I was constantly running, constantly ticking off things in my head that I needed to do. When I did rest, I felt guilty. When I was here, I knew I should be there. I learned that there's no reason to be that way. To live that way.

& as bored as I've been, my body has been thanking me. I feel 10 pounds lighter. my days consist of...i honestly don't even know what they consist of, & that's fine.

i believe that God knew that on my own, i would have never taken this time off. so He forced me to be still. normally i would be ripping & running & trying to see the whole city of Chicago, but not this break. not out of spite or lack of love, but out of love & respect for myself & my health. i was physically & mentally drained. i could barely keep up w/ the days, wouldn't remember if i had eaten that day, wouldn't really care, either. guilt constantly plagued every activity that i did. i always felt like there was something more that i should have been doing, someone else who i could have been seeing, some paper that i needed to write, something else that needed to be added to the website.

& for the first time in a year, i'm finally saying what everyone else has already been telling me: slow down. B R E A T H E. take it all in. what good would i be for everyone else if i was somewhere passed out because of exhuastion? my heart bursts at the seams with all the love that i have for the people in my life, even for those who i don't even know. i know & trust that the people who love me, know all that.

so, i'm taking off the cape (for now). i'm just enjoying my time w/ myself. listening to music. writing. oh how good it feels to finally be able to write for myself. during school, it's almost impossible. my brain is switched to academic mode & i can't concentrate on anything else but my assingment. but in this moment, in this space in time, i know that i have at least a week more to write the things that makes my spirit sing, not just stuff that will be good in this issue or that will get me an A.

& when it's time for the cape to come back on, i'll be a better person because of all of this. i'll be refeshed. rejuvenated. smiling more, & meaning it.

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