Relection on Unit One

I have never obstinately resisted technology, per say, but I have never openly welcomed it either. I have never gone out of my way to adopt new technological practices into my routine, using modern technology only when finally necessary, or inevitable. This being said, our first unit in multimedia and digital work came as somewhat of a challenge to me simply due to the fact that it was unfamiliar, slightly intimidating ground.

In our final project for Unit 1, our multimedia narratives, I thought that I would be limited in how I could tell my story by my general lack of experience in the digital field. While this was true, I also found that the field had very little limitations. I had so many choices: my media, the images I wanted to use, sound, text, how to present it all coherently…this lack of limitations, in the end, was the most overwhelming bit.

The object, as a writer, was still the same: to say what I wanted to say, to relay my message as accurately as possible to the reader, transitioning from my muddled thoughts to a piece of lucid work. Traditionally, writers use language as their tool to convey. Now, we have more tools. And an added difficulty opportunity is the selection of our tools.

One might select an axe when heading into the woods to chop firewood, but a small pocketknife might be more effective for peeling a potato. Even better than that would be a potato-peeler. Our stories are like the firewood and the potato. How best do we carve and shape them, make them into our desired forms? Not only do we need to use our tools well, we need to use the most effective tools.

That is what multimedia has taught me. Know your story and know the tool you wish to shape it with. Because we have more options, we also have a greater responsibility – obligation, almost – to choose the best media, present our story exactly as it should be presented. As writers of the twenty-first century, we should know our alternatives and learn how to use the multitude of media available to us. If we choose to peel a potato with an axe, we should do so not out of ignorance at using the potato-peeler, but out of knowledge that the final effect, as well as the process, is the one we are after.

Multimedia Narrative

http://www.archive.org/details/Shira

(just copy&paste the address; I can’t get it to work as a link)

a brief meeting

I felt a heavy coat being draped about my shoulders and two strong hands turning me around.
“You’re lost,” he said, and in the drafty back-alley by a sliver of moon I made out his confident figure.
The night was open and the stars were close. Closer than home, as a fact, where the flat plains of the Mid-west couldn’t take me up to the elevation of this capital, Lhasa.
I was standing on the roof of the world.
He took me then, and looked at me for awhile. I saw a smile cross his lips just before he turned on his heel and strode cooly down the narrow alley by the way he came.
I took a step forward then, to follow him, but continued only with my gaze. A smile rose to my lips as I silently turned in place and began walking lightly in the opposite direction — the direction I had come, waiting for him to realize and come chasing after me.

reading writing

link to audio recording of my mini-narrative #4:

http://voicethread.com/?#u52065.b61298

5 photo abstractions

 

5 5-min narratives

 1) place
The woods. Early winter. Just when the lakes glaze over with a thin layer of ice. After the first snowfall, maybe. I am sitting on the fallen tree again, the one that makes a bridge from bank to bank over the still flowing river. My legs swing as freely as pendulums, boots brushing the surface of the water. My hands are freezing, I remember. So I get up to go home, but slip on a delicate patch of icy frost and remember the water being cold.

2) person 
I met myself, once. Shira. My alter-ego, my alias, the name I chose for myself when playing those mindless childhood games. Her name was Shira — her real name. My jaw dropped when she said it. I met her in a coffee shop and learned that she’d traveled the world. She’d trekked across countries, roamed entire continents. We exchanged numbers when we parted, but who knows where she is now.

3) a time, alone
I stood on the top of a mountain, as tip-top as I could get. It took me awhile, as I shifted myself about for those last five or so feet, carefully calculating which slightly more elevated patch of land would merit being called the tip. I stood there, hands on hips, looking around. I stood there, quite alone, one girl atop a mountain amidst the mighty Himalayas.

4) understanding the world
When he told me he loved me, I began to reassess my priorities. He gazed confidently into my eyes and I suddenly understood love songs. I suddenly had true empathy for the voices behind all those songs, all those tens of thousands of songs. He broke down a wall and a whole world of undiscovered meaning came pouring in.

5) friends
It was Brittany’s turn, so Louise and I tried to be inconspicuous as we quietly stood watch. The target: a large red bowl of dark chocolate truffles. It was Saturday, so the samples were particularly good today. Ten minutes ago, the bowl looked invitingly full. As I pretended to read the ingredients on a cereal box, I heard, for the fifth time in ten minutes, the small “Aha!” that Brittany let out as if she’d just spotted the chocolates for the very first time, and was presently relishing in her new discovery.

Line Poem Response to Mary Oliver’s Once

On the fence
it hung
dogs nearing
me running
until I finally reached
it
the deer with its hoof caught
on the fence
I pressed
against it, smothering
it got away
and the dogs came nearer
and the trees pressed closer
I saw it again,
later,
well and beautiful.

Letter to the Class

I’ve realized it even more, lately. It’s not that it only recently began, but I’ve only recently began to acknowledge it.

I hide behind my writing.

I noticed it first in a fiction writing class I took at my high school – the first creative writing course I’ve ever taken. In that class, I found solace and release. I poured emotion into the stories that I wrote – emotion that I never showed otherwise, and created characters and situations with what you might call reckless abandon. I had absolute power to create and to manipulate. And every time my story came up in the rotation for in-class discussion, I fed off of other students’ reactions, watched their faces when they hit paragraph five, listened with utmost urgency at their critiques. Perhaps you wonder why I say that I hide, when I’ve openly put my writing out there for my peers to assess. The thing is: it wasn’t open. In fact, this course had a certain aspect that I found very appealing at the time. Everything was conducted in anonymity.

I remember my first journal. I called it a journal then, as I do now, but there was a period in between when I played with the idea of calling it a diary. I was ten, and it was the first journal that came my way. My grandma sent it to me all the way from China, thinking I would like it because it was green, my favorite color, and because it had English text running in the shape of a heart on the front cover. I read the English text and it turned out not to be English at all. The unintelligible words were simply blocks of letters arranged in a way that, I presume, the Chinese must have thought resembled English. The first thing I did was print my name neatly and perfectly on the inside cover. Then I began to write…in pencil, the thought of which now makes me cringe.

I’ve kept a journal for nine years now. And I’ve expressed myself largely through written, but unspoken, words.

It’s hard to be real. But in writing, no one’s watching. If no one reads, no one can judge.

On the other hand, if no one reads, no one will ever know. And by sharing, we can learn so much. I’ve always felt uncomfortably exposed when I volunteer my writing for others to read. I saw it as a sort of violation…into something so personal, so raw, so unready. But I am beginning to understand that exposure is necessary sometimes. We are taught to push limits, stretch boundaries, but we also need to let our own be poked and prodded, uncomfortable as it may be.

That said, I’m holding onto the edge of my seat in a mixture of nervous excitement, fear, and curiosity for what the semester may bring. Hopefully, somewhere along the way, I’ll push myself far enough to finally let go.

Wishing all of you all the best,
Simone