I am a week away from becoming the person I am officially. I have been a writer much of my life, but next week I’m becoming a journalist. I try to be cool about it, but I so excited I can hardly contain myself. So if you see me grinning, its love. The kind of love you experience with self-fulfillment.
Next Tuesday I start school. I have spent the last few weeks reading the required text and enjoying them. I’ve read “The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez” by Jimmy Breslin, “Letters to a Young Journalist” by Sammuel Freedman and I’m almost finished with “Gone to New York:Adventures in the City” by Ian Frazier. The pages of all three are filled with my blue papermate underlines of favorite phrases or items I want to look up. I love Jimmy Breslin’s book because it was so vivid in the telling and heartbreaking. Not the kind of heartbreak where you start to feel that every underdog merits your pity, but deserves acknowlegement none the less. The one thing that I found intriquing about Breslin’s piece is that it does just what Sammuel Freedman suggest on page 102:
A news feature is not merely a snapshot, a slice of life. Ideally, it illuminate some larger issue by means of illustrating and embodying it. It links the micro to the macro, the personal or communal experience to the overarching topic.
While Breslin’s work isn’t a news feature, but a book, I wasn’t expecting to hear the history of
so many of us sprinkled throughout the tale of one undocumented worker. I couldn’t put it down. The book was a great example of how to connect the dots.
I’ll be reading the last two essays in Ian Frazier’s book tonight or sometime before sunrise tomorrow morning. His stories are funny and engaging. In my mind I can see many of the places he writes about because I have lived in New York, in many neighborhoods for over twenty years. I think his story about the crab on the “F” train just about matches the scene a few weeks ago where a guy got on the J train dressed as a horse and rider while dancing to
“La Bamba.”
While these reading suggestions were powerful, I couldn’t help but notice that no women writers were on the list. Perhaps we’ll be getting some women writers when our text are assigned during orientation. Just in case, I’ll be reading “Raising Her Voice:African-American women journalists who changed history” by Rodger Streitmatter. (Lexington, KY : University Press of Kentucky), 1994. It’s on my list.
