I wrote about the 2012 election, about the irony of Lahser being a “Michigan Green School” despite incredible waste of printed materials, about the importance of continuing to read in a digital age. My magnum opus was an article criticizing Lahser’s poorly implemented IB Program, questioning why the administration refused to acknowledge students’ complaints about its unclear policies and practices. That article might have gotten me censored, might have placed me at the top of my principle’s shit list, might have forced the newspaper into silence for a few months, but it also created change. Gradually, our school’s IB Program became less bizarre and rigid, more
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"By delivering the Israelites from Egypt, God proves that He is omnipotent and that He will save only those who worship and fear Him."
—This is the thesis of the essay I wrote that received a C+, a piece I now realize isn't really that bad...
"Just as Lulu’s body is unfit for delivering a baby, the Mississippi was unfit for holding the volume of water present in 1927. Lulu and the Mississippi are similar because each is with a burden too great to bear."
—A line about Richard Wright's "Down by the Riverside." Though I actually like this essay, I see in retrospect that the analysis and writing are both fairly simple. There always remains room to grow...
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I signed over my soul and all I got was this t-shirt!
storytelling I had learned from journalism. This, I saw, was what made me excited to write again: the opportunity to create stories about the past that I hoped others would find as interesting as I did.
My desire to make narratives that were as entertaining as they were accurate carried me into the Minor in Writing. I must admit, when I applied to the program, I wasn’t fully committed to embarking on it. From what I could tell, workshopping was an integral part of the curriculum, which frightened me, considering how long it had been since I let anyone other than professors read my work. What if my peers would find my stuff repugnant, convince me once again that I couldn’t write? I waffled throughout the summer before I was slated to take the Gateway course as to whether or not I should just drop the minor. I almost did—until I thought back to that mass meeting I had gone to for the Michigan Daily almost two years previously. Already in college, I had let fear divert me from my dream of writing. I couldn’t let the same thing happen twice.
So I entered the Gateway, and I thrived. Workshopping, for one, was not the horrific endeavor I had imagined it would be, but rather an opportunity to hear about the good and the bad of my writing from a group of remarkably positive and insightful people. Moreover, Gateway was a class that gave me the opportunity to do what I loved—tell stories about the past that might appeal to a wide audience—in ways that were new and unfamiliar. I felt free to experiment throughout the course; though I stuck with the relatively familiar genre of a long-form article for my re-purposing project, I decided to take a risk, and make a podcast for my re-mediation. I believed that a podcast would allow me to engage the public in a new way, to make voices of audience members literally heard on the topic I had soliloquized about in my re-purposing project. Never would I have done that even a year previously, when the prospect of making a podcast that was crap would have been too intimidating for me. Yet, in the Gateway, I never felt threatened or worried; it was always clear to me that whatever failures I had in the course I should regard as learning experiences, rather than something to be ashamed of. As it turned out, the podcast worked—but even if it hadn’t, I know I would have learned a great deal about storytelling and writing in general from the process of making it.
By the time I left Gateway, my passion for writing was as intense as it ever had been. But I was also more guarded than I had been in high school, cautious not to get too invested in something I wasn’t sure would allow me to change the world, or even pay my bills. Life after Michigan loomed ever closer, and I couldn’t help but wonder if writing would play any part in what I would go on to do following graduation. The need to be practical about my writing wasn’t a persistent or even overwhelming thought, but rather one that nagged at me every once in a while, keeping my feet firmly grounded as I occasionally poked my head into the clouds.
More than ever before, I became cognizant of the types of writing that might be useful to me in the future, and took courses that I believed would allow me to practice skills that might come in handy in the real world. Or, rather, I tried to take courses that would develop those skills. I signed up for a professional writing class for one of the minor’s requirements, figuring it would be worthwhile to develop a strong résumé, to improve my email etiquette, to actually try my hand at a cover letter—but then I dropped it the moment I realized I could fulfill the same requirement by taking a fiction writing class. Writing a novel had been something I always wanted to do, even before I became fascinated by journalism, and this seemed the perfect opportunity to get started.
I realize this wasn’t, perhaps, the most practical decision—again, my writing fantasies had gotten out of hand, had trumped making the ostensibly responsible choice. But in no way do I regret taking that fiction class. For one, it was through that course that I realized I would never be a novelist; I was far less adept in creating my own worlds than in describing the one around me, and I became okay with that. But, more importantly, spending the semester writing fiction gave me the confidence to grow as a storyteller. Like the Gateway, this was a course where I gradually moved from the familiar to the unknown; my first long submission was a fairly standard, first person narrative, but the second was extremely unconventional, a series of vignettes describing the dissolution of a relationship. That story challenged me to think about structure, to consider how tension and unease could be built by the order in which scenes were arranged. Though I’m not convinced my piece ended up working, writing it gave me the opportunity to think about subtleties as I never had, to practice the art of speaking implicitly, rather than directly, to readers.
I took the lessons I learned from writing fiction into my other work. No longer did I shirk from using literary techniques in my academic writing; I began my honors thesis with an extended narrative that I modeled on the style of Serial, used sensory details and evoked emotion in an essay about the AIDS epidemic in Thailand. I realized that being unafraid of using literary styling made my goal of giving wide audiences access to academic work all the more attainable; my writing was more compelling than ever, yet just as thoroughly researched as it had been.
With this in mind, I embarked on my Capstone Project. When I came into the semester, I wasn’t entirely sure what I wanted the topic of my project to be. At first, I thought it might be fun to do something light-hearted, like create a strategy guide to Survivor using former winners’ gameplay as research, or begin a book about the strange exploits of my freshman year roommate. But neither of those things felt important enough, or as though they would mean anything to anyone other than me. My experiences in college had taught me that my writing was at its best when I confronted things that I felt mattered, and that I hoped I could convince others were meaningful as well; not creating something in that vein for my final piece felt wrong.
So I landed on an issue that had long bothered me: the way in which Detroit’s rebirth seemed to be more for people visiting the city than those living there. The whole thing reeked of cultural imperialism to me, of wealthy white men from suburbs dictating what was best for a predominantly black city, building stadiums and hotels rather than investing in infrastructure and public schools. But I knew this would be a challenging topic to write about, for unlike most of my work, this was not something esoteric that audiences were unaware of. My mission would not be merely to capture reader’s attention, but rather to change their minds; most people I knew, after all, found the idea of Detroit’s “rebirth” exhilarating. Having my opinion about this matter run contrary to that of my audience forced me to try to be a mediator in my writing, a bridge between two distinct perspectives on the same thing. I needed to suspend some of my own ideas in order to make sense of views that were not mine, and to find common ground that would enable me to persuade my audience to see ongoing changes in Detroit from a new perspective.
It’s appropriate that my Capstone Project is the culmination of my experiences at Michigan. For one, this has certainly been one of the most difficult pieces of writing I have ever completed, and therefore is something I probably could not have embarked on if not for all of my previous work in the Minor in Writing. But perhaps more importantly, my feelings about this project mirror many of my feelings about who I am as a writer at this moment, on the precipice of graduation. I’m as unsure about my ability to convince suburbanites to acknowledge the dark realities of Detroit’s rebirth as I am of my future as a writer. Would I ever be able to make a paycheck from creating pieces like this? Would I have the motivation to continue writing with no external impetuses to push me forward? When commencement has passed and the minor ended, will I still be a writer, or just someone who put a lot of ideas to paper while he was in school?
My view of my future as a writer couldn’t be more different than it was when I left high school. No longer can I assume that my love of writing will carry me to a career at CNN or Time. No longer do I have a stretch of four years ahead of me, where I can explore and network and grow as a writer. That time—some of which I used well, some of which I wasted—has passed. I have no book deal, no position at a magazine, nothing in my immediate future that will keep me connected to and engaged with the writing skills I have developed during college. Increasingly, I wonder if my time as a writer might be coming to a close, if this very essay might be the last significant piece I ever create. This is a dark thought, one that I try to tell myself can’t possibly be true—and yet it remains firmly rooted in my mind, unwilling to relent and be eradicated.
If this is the way things go, so be it—I’ve been there, and have already weathered once what I thought was an end to my writing career. But I’ve also come back from that imagined end, and emerged as a writer better and stronger than I was before. My future, along with the place writing will have in it, remain uncertain; but my hope is that a lot of hard work, and a bit of luck, will allow me to remain connected to my writing. After all this time, writing remains my dream—and if I’ve learned anything from the past four years, it’s that I’m no longer content to let that slip away.
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"You apologize too much.
Sorry. I could tell you weren’t sure whether or not I had my tongue in cheek.
You smiled, apparently deciding that I did.
The thing is, I really did feel bad."
—A passage from my experimental short story, "As You Were, As I Am," which does not distinguish dialogue from thoughts from actions in order to keep readers engaged.
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accommodating to the needs of students. Sure, I looked like a pesky muckraker to the administration, but I had also forced them to recognize the serious issues they had previously chosen to ignore. Following that victory, I felt unstoppable, as though this was only the first of the changes I could inspire through my writing.
But then came college. I should confess I wasn’t particularly thrilled to be at Michigan my freshman year. My heart and mind were elsewhere, specifically the bucolic, New England liberal arts school that I immediately regretted choosing not to attend for financial reasons. In Ann Arbor, I felt restricted. Privileged, self-important, and melodramatic as it might have been, I privately loathed that I ended up where seemingly everyone from my family and graduating class went to school. I realize now that this feeling had little to do with Michigan itself, and more to do with the sense that I had lost my dogged determination to pursue goals no matter the cost. Increasingly, I came to feel that my life had been somehow prophesized from birth, that my path was one I had neither the courage nor the ability to decide for myself.
With incredible speed and astounding apathy, my dreams of being a journalist collapsed. Though I went to a mass meeting for the Michigan Daily, I had decided before even arriving that I didn’t have the stomach for the job—within five minutes, I wanted to be back in my dorm, listening to Lana Del Rey while lying in bed and feeling sorry for myself. Every so often during the semester, I would perk up, like a dog catching the scent of a steak sizzling on the grill, and begin to wonder what my life as a journalist could be like. I would wag my tail and get starry-eyed, maybe slobber once or twice, before realizing that the steak wasn’t for me, and that it would be better to avert my gaze than continue to fixate on something I couldn’t have.
Matters weren’t improved by my indifference to the things I was writing about in my coursework. I wrote essays on fossil discoveries from the Precambrian Era, on Cassandra’s role in the Agamemnon, on making science accessible to non-academic audiences, and I was passionately disinterested in all of it. I began to feel that, somehow, writing had abandoned me. The C+ I received on a paper in my Great Books class affirmed to me that the idea of becoming a successful writer was as laughable as it was misguided. It was with great elation that I left Ann Arbor for winter break that December, able to retreat into a world of Christmas cookies and reality TV and not thinking about my future.
And it was with even greater discontent that I returned to school a few weeks later. I purposely avoided classes that would involve too much writing—I chose the easiest course I could for my Texts and Ideas requirement for the Honors Program, and a Psychology class that would require only a formulaic, scientific essay. I figured that if I purposely chose to write in styles that I didn’t enjoy, I wouldn’t care so much if my work didn’t turn out very well.
But I couldn’t escape entirely from the type of writing I had once prided myself on. Whether because it was the only class that worked in my schedule, or because a part of me hoped I would somehow become reinvigorated by it, I signed up for an English course called “American Environments: History, Thinking, and Representations,” with Professor Susan Scotti Parrish. I had loved English in high school; I enjoyed reading, discussing, and writing about books was as much as my journalistic pursuits, and focusing on environmental literature seemed an interesting new twist on an old passion.
I walked into my first class both excited and hesitant. I was the only freshman there, which was intimidating, but also a bit heartening—if I said something inane, everyone would assume it was because I was a dumb freshman, not because I was a dumb person. But the idea of being the dumb freshman wasn’t particularly exciting itself, so I kept my mouth shut for the first few days. It wasn’t until about the fourth or fifth class, when we were discussing Emerson’s “Nature,” that I felt I might have something meaningful to say. Swelling up all my courage, I commented on how Emerson’s writing style was affected by his belief in the need to be a transparent eyeball that observes rather than interprets the world. I waited. People didn’t laugh. A few even nodded. And Professor Parrish said “That’s a great insight, Michael,” or something to that effect.
And suddenly, my footing was back, as a student, as a writer, as a person. I went to see Professor Parrish at her office hours, and she encouraged me to continue speaking up—she told me that she liked what I said when I had the guts to say it. I didn’t become a chatterbox in class, but I was willing to hazard guesses about what authors meant by particular metaphors, to contest the super smart, English major senior’s argument about the manmade landscape described in My Antonia. In my writing, too, I saw an improvement—I didn’t doubt myself as much as I did earlier in the term, and was willing to choose risky but potentially rich topics for my essays. In one, I focused on literature about the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 treated pregnancy, and it turned out I had a lot to say on the matter. By the end of the semester, I realized that I wasn’t a bad student, or a bad writer—my confidence, though not fully restored, was a bit less tattered than before.
The following year was good to me. As I began to take classes in the History Department, I found that I had a knack for thinking and writing about the past. The more I wrote about the Cambodian Genocide, or the theft of Grecian marbles from the Parthenon, or the effect Uncle Tom’s Cabin had on antebellum politics and society, the more I saw that I was good at sifting through evidence and creating arguments. Historical writing gave me the opportunity to fuse the analysis I had learned from my English classes with the
"You have four seconds to figure out the next forty years."
Losing and Finding The Dream
The lights are white, my chair straight-backed. Vaguely, through the blinding glare, I see moving shapes, forming gradually from blurs to bodies. Squinting, I focus. I make out the faces of aunts and uncles, cousins, parents from the neighborhood, high school acquaintances.
All eyes on me, the interrogation begins.
“So, what comes next?”
“Michael, you’re graduating? What are your plans for the future?”
“History? Oh dear, what are you going to do with that?”
“You should teach.”
“You should get your PhD.”
“Or an MBA.”
“Why not travel?”
“No, that’s silly, where would he get the money?”
“He’s young, he’s unattached, let him have a bit of fun.”
“He needs to be practical.”
“He needs to be happy.”
“Actually,” I say, finally managing to get a word in. “I would maybe want to be a writer.”
Pause.
“Oooooooh, a writer?”
“That’s wonderful.”
“You’re an excellent writer.”
“But what exactly do you mean by ‘a writer’?”
And therein, I realize, lies the problem.
What is a writer? What does that mean? Is it a job? A passion? A hobby? A dream? Four years ago, I graduated high school confident that I had a future as a writer. My thought process went something like this: I like writing, so I’ll make a living off of it. Now, weeks from graduating college and still unsure of what to do with myself when I leave Ann Arbor, I have ideas that are a little more pessimistic and a lot less naïve.
In high school, I thought I had everything figured out. I was going to be a journalist—and not any ordinary journalist, but an Ida Tarbell, Bob Woodward journalist. CEOs and presidents would quiver before my pen—institutions would tumble, dictators fall from power, the world change because of what I wrote. You might say that I was a pompous little prick back then—but equally clear was that I had purpose and direction, that I genuinely believed my work on the high school newspaper was making a difference.
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