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"Perhaps the ultimate blank is the space between reader and writerー or, more accurately, the space between the story we create and send out to the world and the story each reader perceives.”
"Perhaps the ultimate blank is the space between reader and writerー or, more accurately, the space between the story we create and send out to the world and the story each reader perceives.”
Through our study of narrative, we analyzed how others tell stories and how our perspective of another can be limited to our own experiences. With the idea of "sonder," it can be difficult to have a complete understanding of another's perspective; however, exploring lives outside our own is the first step to understand it.
Through our study of narrative, we analyzed how others tell stories and how our perspective of another can be limited to our own experiences. With the idea of "sonder," it can be difficult to have a complete understanding of another's perspective; however, exploring lives outside our own is the first step to understand it.
untitled ; my initial poem from IJ03: All my Places
Before exploring other's stories, I started to think about the way I tell story. Growing up, I latched onto any poetry book I could find. I loved how poets could describe universal and honestly quite moving sentiments with poetic language. Many times, I read poems that were only a few sentences-- sometimes only a few words-- and was blown away by how I felt that poem. Somehow they created this incredible balance between the words they choose to express and what they left out. I believe that the space between these two things lies truth of both the message they were trying to express and truth behind the reader.
I never tried poetry on my own until when my junior year of high school my language arts teacher encouraged me to give it a shot. I have been writing poetry ever since-- typically only to be seen by myself.
I decided to edit this poem because I wanted to really analyze how I tell story and how if the "spaces" I left were too open--that is not making sense/ at least expressing my own truth. Revising this, I wanted to give better descriptions of the space and how I was feeling at that moment.
Context for the poem: when I was in New Zealand, I went swimming out in the ocean after spending a night out with my coworkers. It was pretty rowdy in Paihia that night, so I decided to swim out to this doc that was about 100m off the coast. I'll admit, this is probably a pretty weird thing to do at midnight, but I was really happy I did. It was interesting to listen to how quiet the ocean really is. Most experiences I've had at the beach have been during the daytime when there are a lot of people. But when no one was around, it was the quietest thing I've ever heard without sounding like silence. That night also had a full moon that was as bright as a spotlight hanging over the town. As I explained in my Story section, I was processing my place and direction a lot during my year off. This was a moment where I felt like I was getting to the root of who I was by observing that I was, at the depth of me, existing.
Grounded ; my revised poem
Two stories, one place
When I was in France, the first farm I worked at was located on a peninsula in Plouezoc'h. The area was one of the most beautiful places I had ever seen. On the days I had off, I would spend the entire day traversing the rocks on the beach. During low tide, pockets of water were hidden between the rocks and contained forms of life I had never encountered before. I remember pausing while walking around and noticing my mouth hurt from smiling so much. For this assignment. I tried exploring a perspective of someone else walking through this same area but with a different context. Based on our experience, we interact and view a same place completely different. I wanted to juxtapose my interpretation of place with that of Marie, where we were looking at the same scene but had different emotions tied to the same components.
Creating a fictional character can be challenging, but understanding the drive and thoughts of another is challenging. Many times, we assume other people's experiences based on our own. In this poem, I tried to put myself in the position of a construction worker that was relaxing in the grass during their lunch break.
We always look at other people through the lenses of our own experiences. This, unfortunately, may be through stereotypes or previous experiences. I tried to put all of my thoughts aside from what I thought a construction worker would be thinking about and wrote a poem about what the man lying in the grass was thinking about.
IJ09: The Lenses Through Which I See and am Seen
Education in the US_Hidden Truths (1).pdfOther America ; Manifesto Assignment
(turn screen brightness all the way up and click underlined words; also zooming into pdf can help)
My mother was born in Arvada and comes from the middle class and I'm a first-generation American from my father's side who was born in Russia. I had grown up with their perspectives-- that receiving a good education here is readily accessible and available to all Americans.
It wasn't until I read the book "There are no Children Here" my freshman year of high school that my perspective began to change. This book followed the lives of two boys battling the inescapable cycle of poverty in the Chicago Projects.
Wanting to someday be a teacher in an underprivileged area, I am now on the other side of this. In this piece, I wanted to bring light to the "Other America" where many students from struggling families are left unseen and forced into the continuous cycle of poverty.
I purposely wanted to make the darker text almost impossible to read to show how these perspectives are invisible to many policymakers.
But our perspective of another is limited to the perspective of our own.
Though we have limitations in our interpretation of another's perspective, we have the ability to work with other people to create a collective of various experiences. Challenging yourself with and giving thought to perspectives outside my own helped me begin to tackle the idea of design. These different perspectives started to have me consider design's interaction and impact.
Click the Design tab to learn about how I learned about what factors into the design process.
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