So as far as an idea for my final project,

i am kind of considering writing a short story, mainly with pictures (kind of like a comic book)

i really like the idea of summing up the pages with one or two sentences that describe that experience and then drawing a picture to help recall that moment so that i could look back on it and fully engage in that time again. 

i want it to have sort of have a child like vibe to it and be more interactive. Right now it is pretty flat and thought i feel like i have some cool thoughts on there i want my thoughts to come to life with some kind of interactive possibility. i had in mind a children's book with pop up pictures and moveable elements that help the journal to breathe. 

I'm still not 100% sure how this will go but I'm playing with that idea right now. if you have any suggestions or more ideas please let me know!

Writing Down The Bones

         

                 I loved reading through “Writing down the bones” and taking little pieces of her writing out of her book and with me in real life. Like when she said, “Your little will cant do anything. It takes Great Determination. Great Determination doesn’t mean you just making an effort. It means the whole universe is behind you and with you- the birds the trees, sky, moon and ten directions.” it is about embracing the whole world as it is and becoming connected with the universe and it is then that the words will pour out of you into a beautiful string of inspiration. I also liked when she commented about what it means to have a name,“A name is what we carry all of our lives and we respond to its call”. We are called these names all of our lives and that has an effect on our lives. We must embrace our identity in this world and learn to be perfectly ourselves. She also had a lot of great things to say about writing, like she always does.“This is what it means to be a writer; to be the carrier of details that make up history, to care about the orange booths in the coffee shop in owatonna.” I completely agree to this and love how she gets it. She said, “our job is to say a holy yes to the real things of our life as they exist” saying the “real truth” about who we are, paying attention to the details of our surroundings and embracing them as they are and for what they are, which goes beyond the first glance. Being a writer means you take a second look and really experience what you see as if you yourself created it. I absolutely love that Natalie Goldberg can see this and describe it so eloquently. She gets it and you can feel how inspired she is about life because she has learned to fully embrace her surroundings whole heartedly. You can always tell when someone has been inspired because it becomes so easy for them to inspire others. Great read!

Week 6

       I absolutely loved the reading for this week, Paulson is a phenomenal writer. His writing felt both honest and inspiring. I especially loved the first chapter “a recovering jerk”. I fully agree with the author when he says that people have given up on the crucial  “harsh” feedback that is necessary for the improvement in another person. I get it its scary some times to say “Hey! This is not your best work and you could do better” but it is  necessary in order to motivate that person to succeed and be the best that he/she can be. I think that all criticism can be well received if love is at the root of it. When a person truly believes you care about them, they are better able to accept harsher feedback. I really liked when the author said he was a “recovering jerk” for that statement was pretty comical for me. 

I loved his other chapters as well, for I also know so many people who spend most of their time complaining and never actually doing anything about fixing the problem. Often people think they will “feel better” if they just complain about an issue, which in some cases that could be true, I totally understand the need for being validated and venting a problem out of intensity, but at the same time, at the end of that venting, there needs to be some sort of action put forth for change. If this does not happen the venting turns unproductive and ineffective. This was a great read!

   

The first article, Putting Ethnographic Writing, showed some good perspective on how to observe another culture through your own bias and previous experiences of that cultures as well as improving your writing throughout the process. Before I had read this article I had no idea what the term ethnographic writing meant. Now I know that Ethnographic writing is how you write about real people in their cultures and customs. Ethnographic can, as the article mentioned, “make you think about ethics (how you’re presenting information, how that information might affect people if made public, being as accurate as you can) and knowledge (what it is you really know at the end of the project and how you present that knowledge without sounding more confident than you should)”. I think this type of analysis can really help you to create creatively as well and bring a genuine depiction of a character as well as give you an understanding of a character other than what you know. As the article had stated, “ it can improve your understanding of people and their ways of thinking/talking; it can improve the lives of the people you write about; it can help you reflect on your own positions within cultures”. This is good advice for researching cultures. Something else I found was interesting was when the article said, “we adopt a stance that’s both distanced (observing) and interactive (participatory), and good ethno- graphic writing emerges from the juxtaposition of those stances”. I am learning about this in my other class, how one can create a bias on a particular subject based on their past experiences and I thought this was good to consider as you play the “observer” role as a writer. 

Im not really sure what the purpose of reading this article was other than to get us to think deeper about a particular character as you consider their culture and what makes them them. I liked getting my brain in that mode, developing the back story of a person and figuring out why they do what they do.  Not sure if this was the purpose but it’s what I learned. 

The second Article, Participant Observation as a Data Collection Method, I mainly just skimmed over it. I recognized that it had a lot of helpful information about observing your particular subject and how to collect data to benefit you in your writing. It discussed how it was important to play the “observer” role and said, “Observations enable the researcher to describe existing situations using the five senses, providing a "written photograph" of the situation under study”.  It then discussed “fieldwork” and how, “Fieldwork involves "active looking, improving memory, informal interviewing, writing detailed field notes, and perhaps most importantly, patience" and went on with different techniques. It discussed the pros and cons of observation work and getting access to different information. These two articles paired well together but they were a little boring and not very inspiring.