Organizing Principles

(This post also appears on my blog, Hip-Hop America, accessible at http://hip-hopamerica.blogspot.com)


I'm attending the Rensselaerville Writers Festival as I write this post, and during a morning workshop, a reference to walking came up. Workshop facilitator Peter Trachtenberg was leading us through an exercise of discovering affiliations and passions, and points and places in life where those affiliations and passions converge. He suggested -- in a delightful way in which he hinted that the idea had just come to him -- that this is the point where one should begin to write.

I loved the suggestion because I realized that one affiliation and one passion on my list converged with a point and a place in life that would help me wrap up my writing on my soon-to-be completed book manuscript, and that a second affiliation and passion converged with the same place but a different point in a way that might provide the perfect entry point for my second book project. What's relevant to this essay is that the place of convergence in both instances was Seattle, which brings me to walking.

Writing workshops usually include a certain amount of sharing among participants, either of writing generated in prompts during the workshop or of work prepared beforehand to be brought in for discussion. The only writing we did in this workshop was the lists of affiliations, passions, points, and places so that's what we shared. Time was short so we were only allowed to share one.

When a participant shared walking as a passion, I realized that walking also was a passion for me even though I hadn't put it on my list (opting for running and bicycling and swimming more generally). I also realized that it underscored the passion I did share out loud -- making things myself, creating something out of nothing -- that I shared, and that walking was tied up intrinsically in the affiliation I shared, of writer. Walking also took me to Seattle, which was the place where I realized that many years earlier I had begun walking first as a matter of course, then as a vehicle for discovery, which evolved into curiosity and inquiry, and ultimately into an organizing principle for life. Trachtenberg suggested that when something becomes an organizing principle in life, it can serve also as a guiding force for writing, moving the pen and the narrative through rain, snow, sunshine, clouds, sleet, and wind toward destinations that might be unknown at the moment but become clearer as the principle's organizing logic unfolds.

I think I can trace the start of my walking to an impulse that has kick-started many other endeavors in life: a desire to be less wasteful and to save money. I used to work at The Seattle Times and paid $20 a month (yes, seriously, in 1989, that is how much I paid) to park my car in a lot three blocks from the newsroom. At some point, the parking fee went up, and I decided that since I actually lived less than a mile from the newsroom, I could give up my parking spot and walk to work. I did need my car on days that I had interviews or other out-of-the-office commitments, but for years I was able to manage to find street parking anywhere from one to eight blocks from the newsroom.

At first, my walks were fairly straightforward treks down the hill from my apartment to the newsroom, but over time evolved into longer and wider breadths that took me across unfamiliar streets and into new neighborhoods. The walks sometimes helped me discover new styles of landscaping, new activities or new projects and translated from there into stories for the newspaper.

The practice stretched away from Seattle and into new cities that I would visit, both inside and outside the U.S. My boyfriend and I at the time often organized our weekend jaunts around walking treks and labeled ourselves urban walkers.

In graduate school in Honolulu, walking became a way to ease stress, to understand urban life in the islands, and often to get exercise. I remember one time period in 2000 when a series of life-changing events occurred, throwing me into a crisis of self-doubt. Walking through the crisis introduced me to people who began walking with me and sharing their stories of personal strife, of asking me to talk to them about Marxism and colonialism (after they found out I was a graduate student). Walking through the crisis also helped me save my own life. Walking in 2000 led to running, and to my first marathon.

When I moved back to Seattle in 2006 with my husband, we did so without a car. The 1988 Honda Civic that I had bought new when I had moved from Kansas City to Seattle died with 217,000 miles on its odometer and went to the Honolulu office of the National Kidney Foundation as a donation. A couple of other clunkers we owned briefly also went to the donate-able scrap heap. We figured we could get around Seattle with buses, bicycles, and our feet -- and until I began teaching in the outer suburbs of the city, we did. And even after we got a car -- a 1990 Volvo for $500 -- we continued to walk as much as we could.

The post-2006 walks got me through two more marathons, and numerous part-time and contract jobs. They opened my eyes constantly to changing conditions in the Seattle and to the shocking state of the devolution of daily life in our post-industrial era. They also exposed me to expressions of hope: plum trees growing in the inner-city, wild blackberries, public art of both the legal and illegal kind, impromptu music and dance, and ultimately hip-hop. Hip-hop artists showed me how, in a changing society, one could sustain a good life, reinvent one's self, and continue to create something new. In my head, I often felt like a parenting voice questioning the artists' motives: Shouldn't you be getting a "real job" with all that talent? Where is your passion for dance or for music going to lead? If I voiced the questions out loud, the artists would laugh and mutter something about eventually "teaching or leading workshops or doing something like that" when they had figured it all out. Truth was, they had sort of figured a lot of things out, and they were teaching me that I, the middle-aged professional struggling to pay a mortgage, that I could figure it out, too.

Three weeks ago, I went back to Seattle to reconnect with the city, some of the artists I had interviewed, and the manifestations of hip-hop I had discovered. My goal in going back was to begin pulling together ideas and materials for a book that would somehow weave together hip-hop, b-girls, race politics, Seattle, and my experience of being a part of the city. I knew even before I began planning the trip that I would walk. I would walk everywhere.  I would eschew rides from friends and rental cars. I would even avoid taking the bus as much as possible. I wasn't sure why I would be walking.

Today, I realized I walked then and I walk now because it is an organizing principle in life.

Processes and Projects

I write this blog post one week before an agreed-upon deadline to complete revisions to a major writing project -- a book manuscript on which I've been working a decade. The manuscript began its life as a dissertation project and technically did not evolve into the book it is now until 2012. However, I began my academic career a couple of decades after I had begun my writing career so when I embarked on the writing of the dissertation, I did so with the full intention of turning it eventually into a book. The fact that the idea was radical -- "most dissertations don't deserve to be books" is the verdict of one "from dissertation-to-book" manual I read -- didn't occur to me, then or even now.

That I have a manuscript and a probable publisher makes me feel blessed.

Furthermore, the process of working on revisions to an already complete manuscript that are in response to reviewers' comments is much more enjoyable than the agony I endured last summer when I was trying to rewrite what had been a reasonably strong dissertation with a notable narrative voice into a manuscript that I thought would appeal to the academic press that had expressed interest in it without quite knowing what the publisher's acquisitions editor and its editorial collective would want. I found myself wondering more than once what had ever made me want to be a writer, as I floundered and blundered and cried and swore my way through four months of melodrama over writing processes, research practices, and questions of personal and professional ethics as I wondered how much I was obligated to share my work with those who had allowed me to interview them nearly a decade earlier. When I finally hit the send button for the electronic version, and put the final copy of the paper version into postal mail in early November, many thought I should celebrate. I mainly felt a deep sense of relief that the book and its subject matter would be two things that I would not have to think about for at least another two months. Academic publishers (as well as non-academic ones) have a standard practice of submitting manuscripts to external reviewers for critique on the text's scholarship and potential marketability, and I had been informed that the reviewers usually require about two months to complete their reading and commentary.

The two months passed, and I received the external reviews. I felt they were overwhelmingly positive, and supportive. The reviewers praised the manuscript's overall writing quality as well as the argument and manner in which I had framed my main points. They suggested several additions that I felt would strengthen the overall text and broaden both the quality of its scholarship as well as its readership appeal. Their suggestions helped me hone in on a question that had dogged me both through the writing of my dissertation and the production of the book manuscript: What was I actually trying to say?

That question still dogs me, as I write my way to the final steps of this stage. I try not to pay too much attention to it because I know uncertainty can paralyze me. At the same time, I wonder if the very uncertainty of what that closing note is going to be is the issue that prevents major projects from coming to completion.

In journalism, one learns that one needs a captivating opening paragraph (a "lede"), a statement of what your story is about (a "nut graf") and a provocative closing sentence or word ("kicker") that leaves the reader waiting to buy the paper the next day to search for your byline, eager to read more. Academic writing is somewhat similar in organization. One needs an introduction, a thesis statement, and a conclusion.

The difference between the two formats is that journalism relies primarily on the factual material about the story to hold it together while scholarship relies on the argument that the writer is putting forth. The quality of the writing is judged not only on the basis of its readability but more significantly on the level of new knowledge that the body of work produces. One can understand the stakes involved in academic writing in both positive and negative ways. Negatively, the assertion of a need for new knowledge can be seen as inferring that if you don't have anything fresh to contribute, you shouldn't be writing the work. More positively, one can see all writing -- and the process of writing -- as creating new knowledge because one person (or a pair or group of persons) is writing about the topic of interest from their unique perspective. As one of my dissertation advisors put it so well, you can't raise your second child exactly as you raised your first one because the very experience of having already raised one child will condition  the choices you make in raising the second.

Similarly, one of things I have learned about writing a dissertation and then writing a book is that the processes are significantly different. For a dissertation, the goal often is simply to finish -- "a good dissertation is a done dissertation" -- and to establish yourself as a credible scholar worthy of being awarded a doctorate. For a book manuscript, the goal is to communicate your thoughts and ideas to as broad an audience as possible and to advance new knowledge in the area in which you are writing while doing so.  The key distinction seems to rest on the same question: "What are you trying to say?"

The ability to form an argument is essential: "What is your perspective on this topic and why?" is  often a question I ask students in offering feedback on the first drafts of their work. The idea of an argument used to daunt me until I began to understand it as stemming from a personal relationship with the material you're writing about. When there's a personal stake, argumentation is easy. But closure then presents another issue. How do you disentangle yourself from the process of digging deep into your personal psyche to explore your relationship with your material so you can pack up your project and send it off to the publisher?

Many writers advocate writing your ending first. I cannot do that, because for me writing is about figuring out how you want things to end. What happens, however, when you get to the end and you still haven't figured it out? Is that the time to throw in the towel? My sense is that's the moment when you go back to where you began.

This morning, I met with my friend Michele. I was telling her that I felt that three stories in my book that dealt with differing religions captured the sentiment that I wanted to end with, that each were offering a way to understand citizenship, belonging, and democratic activism in an alternative, more intimate way.

       "Is that like having respect for difference?" she asked.

       "Yes, but it goes beyond respect. It's actually participating, engaging, mixing it up," I said. "That's what triggers a backlash, when people transgress."

       As I spoke, I realized that that was the question that first inspired me to explore the topic that lurks at the core of my book, long before I knew I was going to write a book -- or even an essay, let alone a dissertation -- about it. "People would tell me," I said to her, "that if Hindus and Muslims could just be left alone to do their own thing their own way, separately from each other, everything would work out. There wouldn't be any violence; everything would be just fine. My response was always, 'No. That's not right. That's not getting to know each other. That's separation, not integration."

       "Say that," she responded. "That's what it is."

Writer's Block

A guest speaker in one of my Feminist Methods graduate seminars once described writer's block as a productive and fruitful time for the mind. Blocks, she explained, occurred when the brain was trying to wrestle out an important thought or issue. She always appreciated them because she knew when she was past the block, she would have written something great.

One question I have is this: When do you know that you're suffering writer's block? Might it just be that the piece you're trying to write just is not ready to write itself?

I began working on an essay Doing Hip-Hop in the Classroom in late August. By early January, a good three or four months after the desired due date, I had a first draft. I received comments on the first draft in February with a request to submit revisions in March. By late April, I knew I was struggling. I had a brief talk with the editors who were preparing the book for which the essay was aimed, and felt that I could work out the essay over the next couple of days.

A couple of days stretched into a couple of weeks, and then a couple of months. I tried again in early June, then mid-June, and late June, and for a couple of days in July. I thought I had nailed down at least a passable second draft, until two days ago when I looked at it again. Ugh. This afternoon, I wrestled with it for four and a half hours, and finally e-mailed the editors, suggesting that once again we talk.

In all fairness, I have to say that the essay is competing for my attention with a couple of other major projects, one of which is huge. Because it doesn't rank at the top of my priority list, I have considered apologizing to the editors and withdrawing from the project. I haven't done so because there's a piece of me that really wants to write this essay, to figure out what I am trying to make sense of in terms of what it means to learn through hip-hop and how to teach about hip-hop to others. I have started and stalled on this essay at least two dozen times. Something in there tells me that I have something I want to say. I just don't quite know how to say it yet.

I experienced a similar block last summer when I had set aside six weeks to revise my dissertation into a book manuscript. I felt as if I had everything going for me: support from my dean to write; an encouraging response from an acquisitions editor of a reputable press; and a schedule that I had cleared of all teaching, mentoring, service, and other writing commitments in order to write.

It was the most nightmarish six weeks of my life. The manuscript had seven chapters, plus an introduction and conclusion. I already had revised the introduction and first two chapters, so I figured that with six weeks, I could revise one chapter a week, and use the remaining week to proofread and give the full text a close review. After three weeks, I had revised one chapter. The process tore my heart out, and felt like a continual struggle. I cursed the wish I had made as a teenager to become a writer when I grew up, and walked around with a stressed-out panic look in my eyes the whole time. The second chapter took equally as long, and elicited just as much internal drama and external tears. By the end of the six weeks, I was pleading for more time. Clumsily, I managed to finish the manuscript and submit it to the publisher for consideration by the end of October.

This summer, the cycle repeats. The publisher sent the manuscript out for an external review, and the comments came back as positive. A contract and request for revisions arrived in the mail. The revisions have been painful and slow, but better than in the past. I can see as I re-read the manuscript and recall areas where I struggled that I was undergoing writer's block. I had some intricate, important points to make, and too much emotional baggage blocking me to see how best to articulate those points. The baggage is gone, and the edits -- so far -- are flowing.

Perhaps the same thing will happen with Doing Hip-Hop in the Classroom. I will look at it in a year, and see the light. Only I think I need that light to come in a day.

(Note on the image: It came from a fairly interesting writing site. The article itself that accompanied the image was about overcoming writer's block. Here is the link: http://litreactor.com/columns/7-strategies-to-outsmart-writers-block

The writing regimen

"You need to take charge of your writing career, because no one else will."

I don't remember the exact words that longtime freelance writer and writing instructor Wendy Call used, so my quotes are perhaps misplaced. But the gist of the advice is on target. It came back to me today, as I listened to two friends talk about how their jobs were wearing them down, robbing them of their creativity, running them ragged, and making them feel too frazzled and too distracted to write. I felt a little guilty as I heard them talk because I am coming off of an unprecedented four-week block of time where I have used several of my accumulated vacation days as well as a work trip to avoid the persistent pile of tasks at the office in order to indulge in three passions: writing, planting, and working out.

I did an amazing amount of indulging in all three over the past month.

And I feel great.

Let me describe the regimen I followed. It's fairly basic: Morning, rise and have coffee. Write for two to three hours and/or read work directly related to a writing project. Follow this with a two-hour workout, and then two to four hours in the garden. Drink a lot of water and eat a lot of fresh fruit while working outdoors, and don't forget the sunscreen. Afterwards, eat dinner, and write for one to two additional hours before going to bed.

During the work trip, which was an 8 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. work day (with an hour off for lunch, 12:15-1:15 p.m., on the dot), I woke up at 5 a.m. to write and read for writing each day, and did two workouts -- usually a run during the lunch break and a swim or bike ride between 5:30 and 7 p.m. After dinner, I worked in a night stint of writing, usually after calling my husband to check in on things at home.

It was not a difficult regimen. At home and away from home, I slept eight hours most nights and managed to have three healthy meals. Four weeks later, my skin is healthily tanned, and my body feels fit and trim. My attitude about my work is running high, and that's because the writing regimen was do-able, consistent, and somewhat forgiving.

In short, it worked.

I share the regimen because I know all too well the feeling of office overwork. One of the consequences of our post-industrial, twenty-first society's 24/7 pace is the fact that workers -- particularly those in the office, educational, and other high-tech sectors -- are essentially on the job all the time. (Yes, I, too, am guilty of waking up from a sound sleep to check the e-mail coming in on my smart phone at 3 a.m., and actually responding to a query despite the fact that the response could have waited till morning.) In the olden days -- before cell phones and e-mail, back in the 1980s -- I used to maintain a rigid separation between work and home. I did my best not to take work home with me. I did my best not to go into the office on my days off. Technology and a corresponding expectation of 24/7 availability has eroded my ability to maintain that separation. I'm not complaining, however, because the trade-off has been more flexibility in my schedule and more freedom to create what's often defined as work-life balance.

"I want to have a balanced life."

I remember saying that to Evelyne Raposo, a superbly supportive life coach type therapist who guided me through six years of doctoral work, emotional loneliness, flighty romances, and ultimately the lasting and highly loving relationship I have with the man who became my husband.

Evelyne's eyes lit up as I listed that statement as one of my goals for her work with me. For years, she worked with me to define what balance meant and how I could try and effect it on a day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month and year-to-year basis in a world where flux is the norm. What I learned from her was that imbalance creates stress. Stress produces a hormone called cortisol that can be hazardous to one's health, producing obesity, draining energy, and resulting in such ailments as hypertension.

Even though I was aware of the effects of imbalance, I felt incapable of creating a balance because it always seemed as if there was not enough. Not enough time. Not enough money. Not enough focus. Not enough clarity to get what I needed to get.

I finished my work with Evelyne as a success. I completed my doctorate, and I found the man of my dreams. We got married.

But imbalance took its tool. I will be on blood pressure and cholesterol medications probably for the rest of my life because stress eroded the strength of my heart, leaving me with hypertension. I was obese, and, at one point, at risk of developing diabetes.

These warning bells gave the words that Wendy Call uttered a new dimension: "You need to take care of your writing life because no one else will."

Today, at age fifty, I am no longer overweight. I write two times a day, and I exercise usually five or six days a week. I remain on blood pressure and cholesterol medications, but I am healthy, both physically and emotionally. My husband is on the same path to health as I am. We work together to build a life around gardening, exercise, and our creative pursuits -- writing for me, photography for him. At some point I realized that the pile-up of work at the office never really shrinks. One thing gets done; two other things move into its place. Needs and deadlines constantly haunt me, via e-mail, text messaging, and sometimes snail mail and phone calls.

Yet, I have found a way to walk away from the pile, knowing (or at least hoping) that "one more day" won't translate into the end of the world. I try to be as efficient as I can. But ultimately I walk away.

What allows me to walk away is the writing regimen I have adopted. It is balanced with a healthful blend of rest and activity, coupled with balance between home life and work life that is vital to one's existence.

So, I concur with Wendy. If you want to write, you must take control of your writing life. If you don't take care of your writing life, no one else will.

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.