activism & Oral History
Where I started:
I began with an origin piece that I wrote in my First Year Writing Requirement class. The topic of the essay was "The Boss' America: Sociopolitical Implications of Born in the USA". I was interested in using this piece for my experiments because I love Springsteen and I finished the paper with some unresolved questions about issues of class, gender, and experience.
Click below to read the origin piece!
Reflection
listen to this:
Then... a short story!
My first experiment was a short story. This experiment helped me creatively discover a more personal and less academic side of “Born in the USA”, but it was also pretty challenging in ways I didn’t expect it to be. My goal with this experiment was to get deeper into the emotional truth (rather than the sociopolitical context) of the fictional protagonist of the title track on Springsteen’s “Born in the USA”.
It was nice to have the guiding imagery of the song (and I ended up listened to the album on repeat while writing), but I also felt weird writing about a topic that I really didn’t have much personal emotional connection to.
I learned a lot from a Jeffrey Eugenides article I read about the process of writing. I think that hearing a famous author (and one of my favorite authors) talk about feeling “stuck” in a story and knowing what to say but not knowing how to say it is very encouraging. I had that kind of experience when I was writing my excerpt–I knew from my storyboard the general content of what I wanted to say, but I wasn’t sure how I wanted to write the story itself.
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One surprise I had was how much I liked writing about someone who I had very little in common with, demographics-wise. In my own writing, I tend to gravitate toward narrators and protagonists with whom I share some demographic or situational markers (age, gender, place, experience, etc), because I often draw from emotional truths (even though the rest is fictional). However, I have no experience with war and I can truly only imagine what it’s like to be a veteran and a soldier. I sometimes wondered if it was unethical to write from this perspective because I really was just creating an experience out of my imagination. Two books that I drew from regarding their treatment of war, pain, and suffering were Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” and Khaled Hosseini’s “The Kite Runner”.
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Check out my sample short story below!
A poem?
Literary journalism!
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For my third experiment, I wanted to move back toward nonfiction. Since a big part of my issue with writing the short story was my lack of knowledge on the topic of Vietnam and protest music, I thought that it would be a good idea to revisit Springsteen from a new perspective.
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I decided on literary journalism because I wanted to do a more informal genre. Music allows for really emotional reactions, and I wanted to write out those emotions (but still be factual and well-researched).
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Since I didn't just want to rewrite my origin piece as literary journalism instead of academic writing, I decided to take on a tangent of my origin piece: the protest song.
I only wrote about protest songs pretty briefly for my origin piece: about Ronald Reagan using "Born in the USA" for his campaign and Springsteen being angry that his song was re-appropriated.
Protest music is such a fascinating topic, and doing research about the subject was awesome and really opened me up to a whole world that I was only sort of aware of. This experiment gave me the idea to ask people what their favorite protest song is during my final project.
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Check out my sample literary journalism essay below!
Although my poem is about really different things than "Shooter", paying attention to the way Beatty talks about violence shaped how I wanted to write my poem.
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I wanted to try writing a prose poem, but I was more comfortable doing stanza-based poems and so I did that instead.
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I tried to use the energy and ideas I had from experiment two, but since I wasn't writing about protest songs, it ended up being hard to apply the ideas I was thinking about.
Check out my poem sample below:
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My last experiment before the final project was a poem. I wanted to channel all the emotion and energy from the music I was listening to for the second experiment, and poetry seemed like an appropriate way to do that. I'm also enrolled in a creative writing class this semester, and I was wondering how the things I was learning in that class could inform or interact with the material I had researched for the first two experiments.
One of my favorite poets, Jan Beatty, writes about topics that are really related to Springsteen's songs. In preparation for writing, I reread Beatty's poem "Shooter", and I was struck by how intense her language is and yet how she manages to infuse a really satisfying lyrical quality into her work.
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...oral history!
After doing a bunch of different projects, I wanted to find a way to kind of combine the most interesting aspects of different genres into one big project. I liked the emotional closeness of the poem and short story experiments, but I also wanted to incorporate the nonfiction aspects of both my origin piece and the literary journalism essay.
I decided that oral history could be a good way to get both stories and facts in one genre, and after doing more research, I settled on doing an oral history of people who had lived through the protests and activism of the 1960s. However, after contacting a few people, I realized that it might be hard to find three or four people who'd be able to speak to me. Instead, I decided to talk to one person who would both be able to speak about the activism in the 1960s and talk about oral history: Dr. Sarah Sharp, my AP US History teacher in high school. Dr. Sharp is one of the smartest people I know, and we ended up having a really interesting conversation about her experiences as an anti-war activist as an undergraduate student at the University of Santa Clara. In order to get a better sense of how people my age approach oral history, I spoke to Julia Moss, who did oral history with the Detroit Historical Society. I also wanted to talk to someone who was more involved in activism, and do my own oral history with her. I'm satisfied with how these people speak to the issues I hoped to address.
