THE JOURNEY

The Themes

For as long as I can remember, sports have always been a dominant theme in my life as a whole. I grew up playing soccer, lacrosse, and basketball (although I quickly realized that lacrosse and basketball were not my fortes), and much of my free time was spent watching live sports or sport-related TV. More often than not, my dad was sitting on the couch next to me. And almost always, from kindergarten to senior year of high school, he was leaning against the fence of the soccer field I was playing on and watching my game. So, I decided to write about father-daughter relationships through the lens of sport, with an inherent emphasis on my own personal experiences. 

The Medium

I’ll be the first to say it: I’m not a poet. I’ve only really read poetry for class assignments (although I’ve been trying to expand my horizons and read more poetry for fun), and I’ve only ever written poetry for class assignments (that one’s definitive). My experiment sequence originated from a Michigan Daily article that I wrote for Father’s Day about my dad and our connection through sports, and I decided to challenge myself to write a poem for our first experiment. I ended up really enjoying the process and the initial outcome, setting a foundation to be built upon for the fully realized project. Of course, the single poem experiment was fleshed out much further and added to, with the addition of photos, illustrations, and a zine format. I do have lots of zine-adjacent experience, given my roles as a newspaper/newsmagazine layout designer and occasional collage journalist (another hobby that I’ve been attempting to do more of recently). 

The Process & FRP Introduction

Starting at the very beginning of the experiment sequence, my aforementioned origin piece was a Michigan Daily article that I wrote for Father’s Day. It was a collaboration between the sports section and our Statement section (which is a long-form magazine that intertwines the genres of news, opinion and creative nonfiction). I wrote about my dad and my relationship with him, using sports as the springboard and the overarching angle of the story. I used a specific moment (a hug between my dad and me after my high school soccer team won our league championship) to frame my writing. There was no requirement to write this piece; I wrote it because I wanted to and it made a ton of sense — my dad and I have always been close and we’ve always shared a passion for sports (especially University of Michigan sports). This piece kind of spans a few different genres in my mind — it certainly falls under journalism, but it's not objective reporting. It also can be looked at as creative nonfiction/somewhat of a personal narrative.

For my first experiment, I transformed my origin piece into a poem about my dad and our relationship (as well as overarching father-daughter relationships). For my second experiment, I worked on a photo essay featuring photos of my dad and me throughout my life. I decided to expand on my first experiment poem for my fully realized project, building it out into a collection of poems and a zine. I started by nailing down my ideas and working through some questions as I began my fully realized project journey. A lot of those questions stemmed from the structure of the poems (as I said earlier, I’m not a poet). Once I came to conclusions, I planned out what images and illustrations I could use on each page of my zine (that was one of my favorite parts). After the planning process culminated, I worked through each of my poems to flesh them out and finalize them before moving on to the physical zine creation.