Ellington

After multi-dozens of radio and TV interviews, magazines stories (ones I've written and ones I've been featured in), I am feeling so disconnected from my trip to Africa. A book publisher contacted me, wanting me to write an essay for a book alongside Barbara Kingsolver and Michael Chabon -- writers I am really pretty gaga over -- and of course I want to do it. But I feel so stuck.

Do you ever feel that -- you write about something so much and then it loses its power? That's how i feel right now, like I can't give weight to things that have happened even though they do hold power.

I have been very skeptical of becoming too much of the point in all of this -- the character rather than the observer. I want to make truths real for people, but how can I do that continuously (I am seeking advice here)? How do you personally stay affected and then also communicate that for others?

Previous Comments

ID

108573

Comment

Casey, I am learning so much through the stories as you're telling them through your eyes. It doesn't lose its power—not for the readers. Write the essay. Put your heart and soul into it. "Show" your readers what you learned; don't just tell them. They need you in the story, they need to experience this through you.

Author

DonnaLadd

Date

2006-11-27T15:52:57-06:00

ID

108574

Comment

I’m really not sure myself C to the P I guess I would start with an experience that happened to you while you were over there in africa that you haven't talked about yet. start off with that and see were it takes you.

Author

William Patrick Butler

Date

2006-11-27T23:42:25-06:00

ID

108575

Comment

Casey, you're doing great!! I'm really moved by your words. I think keeping being compassionate is the way you stay connected and also communicate for others.

Author

yueli

Date

2006-11-28T01:57:18-06:00

ID

108576

Comment

thanks everyone. i think that i need to get back and read the journals i kept just for myself, concentrate on feeling rather than writing. thanks for the advice -- definitely helps.

Author

casey

Date

2006-11-28T13:34:19-06:00

ID

108577

Comment

I really like your column we're about to publish, by the way. I like bringing the public into the dilemmas we face as journalists. Or should face if we're also human.

Author

DonnaLadd

Date

2006-11-28T13:36:32-06:00

ID

108578

Comment

In a haunting passage in "Against Forgetting: 20th Century Poetry of Witness", Carolyn Forche' tells how the Hungarian poet Radnoti, sent on a 1944 death march, wrote the final 10 poems of his life in a notebook that he managed to keep. After the war, the poet's wife, with others, exhumed the mass grave where her husband and others had been dumped. There she found his small notebook, "soaked in the fluids of his own body and blackened by the wet earth", as the coroner's report for corpse #12 noted. In one of these poems, "Picture Post Cards", a man about to be executed pens these final lines: I fell beside him: his body turned over, already taut as a string about to snap, shot in the back of the neck. That's how you will end, I whispered to myself; just lie quietly. Patience now flowers into death. Der springt nach auf, a voice said above me. (He's still moving) On my ear, blood dried, mixed with filth. The poem, still crying out to us six decades later, stands for the capacity of the human spirit to transmute lived personal experience into something greater. One's words, as Nelson Mandela reminds us, "cannot block a bullet," but they can bear witness, cultivate flowers in a graveyard. Anne Russell Mayeaux

Author

anne mayeaux

Date

2006-11-28T15:51:56-06:00

ID

108579

Comment

what a beautiful story, Anne. Thank you so much for sharing that. I have to find that book now! And thank you for reminding, me, too.

Author

casey

Date

2006-11-28T16:07:57-06:00

ID

108580

Comment

You're so welcome, Casey. There's another poignant work that you would appreciate, "The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart" by Ruth Behar (Beacon Press). See the review in The University Record, January 28, 1997.

Author

anne mayeaux

Date

2006-11-28T22:58:59-06:00

ID

108581

Comment

Keep writing! Every writing opportunity is an opportunity to share your story with new people, and your story is one people need to hear. The danger isn't that the story will lose its power, but that you'll lose touch with it. But that probably is inevitable, anyway. Reach as many people as possible with this story while you can. With time, your memories will lose some of their vividness, and with it will go your ability to explain them. But your experience have made an imprint on your life that will never leave and will forever influence your life. Tell the story while you can, and then see what that inprint will lead you to next. After all, where you've been isn't nearly as important as where you're going. How can you continuously stay affected and still communicate it to others? One option is to take another trip. As a sophomore I took an eye-opening trip to South Africa. After I returned, like you I wanted to use my story to reach others. But as time passed, my memories became more distant and I had greater difficulty expressing what I had experienced so I took another trip. While the second trip was obviously different from the first, I had a whole new host of experiences and was able to engage people anew. Inbetween trips, I also read everything I could related to South Africa and poverty. I was able to explain to people what I saw - the houses made of garbage, the children with distended bellies, the patients in the hospice dying of AIDS - but I found that I knew far less about how these problems came about let alone how to solve them. I remember talking to my dad one day, rattling off a whole slew of grim statistics about hunger and mortality, and he stopped me and asked, "You've done a good job identifying the problems, but what are the solutions?" I didn't know. I still don't, but after years of reading history and economics book, I'm getting some better ideas. Your trip will eventually become old news, but I imagine it will fuel a lifetime of curiosity searching for ways to fix the atrocities you experienced over there. Dive in and let us know what you find. It can be so difficult to get people here to care about poverty thousands of miles away in Africa. Your beautiful storytelling has a tremendous ability to engage people and motivate them to act. If you can suggest how they might act too, well, then you'll have made a big contribution to helping an awful lot of people. Keep up the good work! Brian

Author

Brian

Date

2006-11-30T05:14:36-06:00