Nick Kristof

Nick Kristof's articles cover a lot of topics and he has a handle on all of them.  I really enjoyed his articles that deal with human rights, especially "What About American Girls Sold on the Streets?" and "'Three Cups of Tea,' Spilled."  I felt that these two pieces are really different but also very similar.  "What About American Girls Sold on the Streets?" talks about the issues of teenage prostitutes while "'Three Cups of Tea,' Spilled" focuses on building schools in underprivileged areas around the world.  But education is a theme in both of these pieces.  Without an education, these groups of underprivileged people suffer.  I felt there was a very similar takeaway from both articles.

"'Three Cups of Tea,' Spilled" touched on some interesting things.  Kristof talks about Greg's point that Americans should be focused on outreach in Muslim countries because "building schools tends to promote stability more than dropping bombs."  This was a very refreshing idea to me.  But I'm guessing that most Americans would be against this idea -- why would we go to Afghanistan to help their schools when 1) we're at war with them and 2) our schools also need help. People need to stop and think more about these issues.  Kristof also points out another flaw of the American public when he talks about the scandal surrounded by Greg and how his actions might not be legitimate.  Americans won't want to look at his ideas about helping people and won't be encouraged by his ideas because they will immediately look at the scandal surrounding him.  Reading Kristof's articles are educational but this one especially made me upset about how easily judgmental and resistant our country can be.

"What About American Girls Sold on the Streets?" also made me think a lot.  Kristof points out the flaws in our system that target teenage prostitutes.  I agree with him that they are not being treated in the right way.  Clearly, something bad is going on when a 12-year-old girl has to take up prostitution and a juvenile detention center isn't going to help her in the right way.  Kristof is right, these girls need "sympathy and social services." 

I like how Kristof's pieces flow.  In these two pieces, he starts out with some background information and then leads you into the story and what he wants you to think about.  He has very keen insights on what is going on in his articles.  He isn't just telling the reader a story, he is also introducing questions and sneaks his opinion in there also.  He doesn't just tell the reader his opinion and list them all out but I am able to understand where he is coming from.  I really appreciated that.

Low Lows vs. High Highs

 

  When I was younger, running felt like some sort of punishment.  Ms. Parr, my elementary school gym teacher, made my class run the mile a couple of times a year.  I hated it.  For some reason, we always ran the mile in the gym.  This meant each student had to run around the gym 27 times.  Since we were little and therefore not required of the responsibility to remember the amount of laps we needed to do, we were given 27 straws and we would drop one in a trashcan each time we finished a lap.  The combination of running a mile in a tiny gym with 20 or so other kids and wearing jeans was torture.  I hated running.

            My relationship with running continued like this into middle school although it got a little better since we were allowed to change into shorts when we had to run the mile.  I still thought having to run the mile for P.E. was stupid but I didn’t mind it as much.  For reasons primarily fueled by my social life, I joined the track team in eighth grade.  Track was fun because it turned out that running wasn’t that difficult and I got to hang out with my friends all the time.  Middle school track turned into high school cross country and somewhere in there I became a runner but I had a lot to learn. 

First I had to learn the simple stuff like what shoes to buy and how long a cross country race was.  My high school cross country coach always said that with running, there are really high highs and really low lows.  During high school, I experienced the high highs but never really the low lows.  I went to practice each day, the meets on the weekends and each year I got progressively faster.  Occasionally, I would have a bad race but it was usually because it was a hard course or I just wasn’t feeling great that day.  My bad races were my lowest of lows which really aren’t lows at all, they happen to every runner.

Once my high school running career came to a halt, I started to receive acceptance letters from colleges.  While my times for cross country were decent and had sometimes put me on the varsity team, it’s not like I was getting recruited to run Division I school.  When I was first accepted to Kalamazoo College, I wasn’t that excited about it.  But as winter dragged on, it dawned on me that going to a Division III school, like Kalamazoo College, I could still run on a team.  I planned a visit, met the team, and my decision was made.  I would go to Kalamazoo College and run on the team.

My first year as a collegiate athlete, I took it pretty light heartedly and used it as a social vehicle.  My two best friends were from the team and we were inseparable.  My times were okay and it was a good way to stay in shape.  Sophomore year changed.  I actually trained seriously during the summer and was ready for the upcoming season.  For the first race and the first time in college, I ran varsity, progressively getting faster. 

The last race of my sophomore season was at Kalamazoo’s home course.   Lots of parents and people from the Kalamazoo community were present at the race.  The men’s basketball team volunteered and helped work the race.  It was a beautiful November morning and I went into the race feeling confident but cautious about my upcoming six kilometers.  I started out in my usual spot, in the middle of the team.  As the race progressed, I moved up, passing girls consistently.  I was feeling good, my legs felt good.  They felt fast and controlled.  I rounded into the 5K mark and a friend of mine, Jeff, from the basketball team yelled out my time.  At the pace I was going, I was looking at a new personal record.  I kept my pace in control just until there were 200 meters left.  I let loose and flew through the last meters.  I opened up my stride and sped up, picking up a few girls as I went into the finish and catching the clock to notice that I was almost a minute faster than my last 6K.  Setting a new personal record is like running at a wall as fast as you can, knowing it will be hard then realizing you can actually break through it and that it feels awesome.  It gets you high.

Junior year meant study abroad and my training lessened.  When I arrived back on campus for my junior spring, I started to sense that there was something wrong.  My gait just felt off.  I’d go running for a couple of days in a row, each time trying to figure out what my legs were doing that made me feel so awkward.  Usually my legs felt so natural doing this, running, putting one foot in front of the other.  I went to talk to the athletic trainer and she said maybe it was a calf strain and showed me some ways to fix it.  I did them but nothing made my running feel better.  Something was out of whack and since I couldn’t figure it out and apparently the trainer couldn’t figure it out, I just fell out of it for a while.  When there was perfect running weather out, I would force myself out there but still something was wrong.

Once it was summer, I decided it was my shoes.  I went to the local running store and chose a new pair of shoes, a different brand since something was now wrong with my old trusted Asics.  With a false hope that my problem was solved, I went for a run in my neighborhood.  It was incredibly hot out and the sun was blazing but I was determined to go for a run.  The pain was always there but it was gradual.  I’d start off on my run and it was tolerable.  Around the one mile, it would usually crawl out of the manageable and tolerable zone into the blatantly apparent zone.  It was always talking to me and telling me how to run.  When it was hurting more it was taunting me, telling me I couldn’t ignore it.  I had almost finished my three mile loop when my right shin was hurting like crazy.  My shin felt was throbbing, it had a pulse of its own.  I stopped for a second to maybe try a stretch or two but as soon as I did, tears were running down my face.  It was the middle of July and my last cross country season was fast approaching and I had this sinking feeling that it wasn’t going to go like I wanted it to.  I walked home sweaty and blurry eyed.

I had never had a serious injury during my running career.  But finally I was faced with one.  I started going to see a chiropractor who specializes with runners.  He started by aligning my hips and making some adjustments.  It helped somewhat and I continued running.  The last day I was going to see him before I headed to Kalamazoo for preseason, he was just feeling curious and decided to take an x-ray of my right lower leg.  He had a hunch that I had stress fractures.  He came back with the x-rays and he was right.  Two tiny lines ran across my upper and lower shin.  Those two lines were the cause of all the trouble I had been dealing with my running for the past months.  I hated those two little lines.  He said I’d have to start off with taking a couple of weeks off.  Those two tiny lines benched me. 

The next couple of weeks I was confined to a stationary bike and aqua jogging in the pool.  I went to the trainer each day to get treatment and tried to stay off my legs as much as possible.  Meanwhile, the weather had finally cooled down and it was prime running weather.  I watched my teammates take full advantage while I was in the pool pretending to run.   I became best friends with my iPod on the days I rode the bike, while my teammates went on long runs together, gossiping and creating inside jokes with each other.  I counted down the days until I would be able to try running again.  My trainer would say “maybe next week you will get to try running.”  My first day back I was allotted ten minutes to run and that was it.  I was told if I felt any pain, I had to stop.  Running had started to become a privilege.  The bike and the pool were my chores and then every so often I was given minutes to run, my ten minute reward. 

With the third race of the season coming up, I was given more time to run.  My trainer started to give me miles instead of minutes and things were looking up.  The days we had hard work outs, I was given a shortened version and was told to take it easy, not to push too hard.  When race day came, my legs felt better but not 100% better.  I started off slow, really slow, not in my usual place of the team.  I was second to last.  My parents and boyfriend cheered me on, showing their support.  I was embarrassed, wishing they weren’t there, wishing hadn’t wasted their time coming to watch me “race.”  I wasn’t racing, I was prodding along, up and down the hills of the course until it hurt too much.  I had tried to push it off, tried to ignore how I really felt.  What I felt was pain, pain that was telling me to stop and I ignored it for half the race until I had to walk off.  I made sure I had passed my support group before walking off the course.  I needed a minute alone before I could face them.  I went to the trainers’ tent, fighting back tears as I tried to tell them that I just needed some ice.  I went to the finish to cheer on my team and watched them run by.  I had never dropped out of a race before.

The last race of the season I was able to run and I finished the whole race.  But I didn’t finish it the way I wanted to.  I was slow, towards the end of the pack, way far away from my personal record.  When I came into the finish, there weren’t many spectators left watching, just my teammates and my parents.  While my season didn’t end the way I had wanted it to, I did have it back.  I had it back, but it wasn’t the same.  Running has been a lot of things to me.  For a lot of people, it’s a punishment.  Sometimes you’ll see the quote “My sport is your sport’s punishment” on the backs of runners’ t-shirts.  But running had hurt me, knocked me down, made me wonder why I liked it in the first place.  If running was my boyfriend, my friends would tell me to break up with it and tell me all the obvious reasons why.  But for me, I have way more of an appreciation for it than I ever thought I would.  It changes from day to day or even during a run.  Sometimes it feels like work or a chore.  Something you want to put off until tomorrow.  Sometimes I take it for granted, like you might do with anything you love.  But almost always, it gets me high.

My Franklin Outline:

Complication:  Running injures Kristin.

Kristin hates running.

Kristin loves running.

Kristin loses running.

Resolution: Kristin reclaims running.

Telling True Stories

As I've been thinking about what to do for my profile, I've been really nervous about it since I have not written journalism before or done anything that involves reporting.  Telling True Stories was so helpful!  While, I can't lie, that I am still a little nervous about writing a profile, it helped to read journalists' experiences with reporting. 

Jacqui Banasynzki writes about profiles.  I've been trying to figure out how interviewing goes into writing about a place and what types of questions to ask. Banasynzki talks about that when writing about a top Olympic runner.  While this runner had the résumé of a "woman who had it all," she was asked what was missing from her life.  I don't think I would have thought of that question.  I probably would have asked her what was going on with all that stuff that was already listed on her résumé.  This example will help me come up with questions that aren't about the obviousness of my subject.

Banasynzki also gives us two questions that someone who doesn't know anything about the subject should be able to answer at the end of your profile.  These two questions: "How would you characterize this person?" and "At the end of the piece, do you know whether or not you like the person?" (68) will help me while I'm writing my profile.  Am I going to be able provide the right information to the reader so that they can answer these questions after reading my profile?  (I hope so!)  I'll definitely be thinking about these questions.

I also enjoyed reading "Every Profile Is an Epic Story" by Tomas Alex Tizon.  His four insights were really something to think about.  Realizing that your subject is as complicated as you are is an important thing for a writer to realize because that's probably where you'll find the story and how the writer needs to create not just a one-dimensional character.  People aren't just one dimension and I want to be conscious of that.  As he said, "Each person has a dark side" (71).  That is so true.


I ended up reading a little bit further than we were supposed to but I'm glad I did.  I don't really know how the whole reporting process goes and how people get quotes or how they get the correct quote.  I was glad I read the section about to bring a tape recorder or not.  Personally, if I was being interviewed I wouldn't really feel comfortable with a tape recorder so that makes me assume other people would feel that way too and I wouldn't want to use them.  It was relieving to me to hear that a lot of journalists don't use them.  I think it would make me lazy, which some of them also confess and that paraphrasing is another option.


Reading Telling True Stories was really helpful to me and has put me at ease for when I have to write my profile.  I took a lot away from this reading.

Choose Your Own Assignment

Originally, I was trying to find a profile of a place but this one is more about a person.  But it does seem like a hybrid of person and place since it is important to know about the city that this person lives in.  "Body Collector in Detroit Answers When Death Calls" follows a man, Mike Thomas, in Detroit who collects corpses for a living.  Charlie LeDuff sets Detroit as the backdrop of Mike Thomas' current life where he goes around looking for dead bodies in order to feed his children.  I read a couple of Charlie LeDuff's other pieces before picking this one.  (One was a profile of Flint's diminishing police force).  This one stuck out to me because Mike Thomas' job relies on other people dying in Detroit where murders are high.  But he is grateful for his job in these economic times, especially in Detroit where the unemployment rate is much higher than the national average.  His job relies, in most cases, on murders and suicides.

Jon Franklin's Writing for Story covers so much ground.  I enjoyed reading his own pieces in order to see what you can do with narrative journalism, especially since his two examples were very different.  In "Mrs. Kelly's Monster" you get a snapshot of a couple of hours in a doctor's day while "The Ballad of Old Man Peters" captures a person's entire life.

The way he dissected his writing was helpful because I think a lot of times, writers say they didn't mean to do what they were doing with their writing.  Maybe in certain parts of writing that happens, but he made his writing process very deliberate and said that the writer needs to know where they are going.  That is why the introduction of the complication/resolution process was helpful to me.  He showed how broke his stories down into simple phrases in his outlines to show himself where to go.  He says that the resolution needs to relate back to the complication, which sounds simple enough but sometimes I get lost in that while writing.  A lot of the writing I have done recently is nonfiction so it was especially hard for me to think of the complication and resolution of the character which usually was me.  I don't think of myself as a character so I don't think of nonfiction as having a plot with characters and a conflict/resolution.  But Franklin is right.  When writing about myself, I should think of myself as the character and find where the complication and the resolution are.

I hate doing outlines but he made them look easier.  They don't need to be full of roman numerals.  Outlines just need to be a map of where you want to go and they should describe your story in the simplest terms.  The way he describes the writer without an outline is something I can definitely relate to.  But I've also never really thought about making outlines for more creative pieces.  I use them when I am writing an essay analyzing literature or history but I've never used them for my creative writing classes.  I think of outlines as the opposite of creative but now I can see how they could help to get my story together.  His advice about using action verbs ties into the outline because they are necessary to get the point across in the outline.  Sometimes it is easy to not realizes when I am using static verbs but if my outline contained them, I think it would make me more conscious of the verbs I am choosing.  Since "stories consist of action" (118), I need to get rid of my weak verbs and train myself not to use them.

Another point Franklin has is about getting rid of the woodwork.  This was especially eye-opening for me.  Woodwork is also related to the outline because with an outline, maybe I wouldn't get lost in the woodwork.  Beautiful writing that isn't necessary to the story is hard to take out.  I know there have been times when I've been stubborn about this but in order for stories to flow and remain on focus, the woodwork needs to go.  I think it is definitely something I need to work on and I wasn't always conscious of it because I never had a name for it.

I thought his comment on how the story will affect the reader was interesting.  He talks about this when he was trying to figure out how "Mrs. Kelly's Monster" is going to end.  He says that having a story end on a sad note doesn't do anything for the reader.  It doesn't make them contemplate anything, at the end they are just feeling sad for whoever the character was.  But when he changed the focus of the story onto the doctor and shows how his life goes on and how death is a part of life, the end of the story was then much more powerful.  I've never really thought of about this.  I thought it was really an interesting idea but it also makes me nervous.  How am I supposed to get my reader to do that?  I want my reader to be able to take away some meaningful message and I'm glad he point out how he changed the focus in his story in order to accomplish that.  Maybe that is what I'll need to do with my pieces.

Franklin's book caused me to think about my writing a lot.  While I was reading it, I stopped a lot and thought about what he was saying and how my most recent piece could be changed and how to go about revising it.  It made me want to go and fix my writing problems right away.  Writing for Story also pointed out some ugly truths about my writing process that I intend to work on.  Maybe I'll even start to love outlines.

writing about running

I struggled a lot to write my piece about running.  Injuries happen to all sorts of athletes and many of them are more serious than mine so I didn't want to come off as melodramatic or like I was the only runner ever to have something go wrong.  Running is such a physical thing that sometimes it is hard for me to describe the way it really makes me feel, it's euphoric and painful at the same time.  Also, I knew how I wanted to start this piece but not really sure where it was going, what path it was taking.  Since I am still somewhat struggling with this, it was hard for me to come to a solid conclusion.

            When I was younger, running felt like some sort of punishment.  Ms. Parr, my elementary school gym teacher, made my class run the mile a couple of times a year.  I hated it.  For some reason, we always ran the mile in the gym.  This meant each student had to run around the gym 27 times.  Since we were little and therefore not required of the responsibility to remember the amount of laps we needed to do, we were given 27 straws and we would drop one in a trashcan each time we finished a lap.  The combination of running a mile in a tiny gym with 20 or so other kids and wearing jeans was torture.  I hated running.

            My relationship with running continued like this into middle school although it got a little better since we were allowed to change into shorts when we had to run the mile.  I still thought having to run the mile for P.E. was stupid but I didn’t mind it as much.  For reasons primarily fueled by my social life, I joined the track team in eighth grade.  Track was fun because it turned out that running wasn’t that difficult and I got to hang out with my friends all the time.  Middle school track turned into high school cross country and somewhere in there I became a runner but I had a lot to learn. 

First I had to learn the simple stuff like what shoes to buy and how long a cross country race was.  My high school cross country coach always said that with running, there are really high highs and really low lows.  During high school, I experienced the high highs but never really the low lows.  I went to practice each day, the meets on the weekends and each year I got progressively faster.  Occasionally, I would have a bad race but it was usually because it was a hard course or I just wasn’t feeling great that day.  My bad races were my lowest of lows which really aren’t lows at all, they happen to every runner.

Last spring, I started to sense that there was something wrong.  My gait just felt off.  I’d go running for a couple of days in a row, each time trying to figure out what my legs were doing that made me feel so awkward.  Usually my legs felt so natural doing this, running, putting one foot in front of the other.  I went to talk to the athletic trainer and she said maybe it was a calf strain and told me some therapies to help it.  I did them but nothing made my running feel better.  Something was out of whack and since I couldn’t figure it out and apparently the trainer couldn’t figure it out, I just fell out of it for a while.  When there was perfect running weather out, I would force myself out there but still something was wrong.

Once it was summer, I decided it was my shoes.  I went to the local running store and chose a new pair of shoes, a different brand since something was now wrong with my old trusted Asics.  With a false hope that my problem was solved, I went for a run in my neighborhood.  It was incredibly hot out and the sun was blazing but I was determined to go for a run.  I had almost finished my three mile loop when my right shin was hurting like crazy.  I stopped for a second to maybe try a stretch or two but as soon as I did, tears were running down my face.  It was the middle of July and my last cross country season was fast approaching and I had this sinking feeling that it wasn’t going to go like I wanted it to.  I walked home sweaty and blurry eyed.

I had never had a serious injury during my running career.  But finally I was faced with one.  I started going to see a chiropractor who specializes with runners.  He started by aligning my hips and making some adjustments.  It helped somewhat and I continued running.  The last day I was going to see him before I headed to Kalamazoo for preseason, he was just feeling curious and decided to take an x-ray of my right lower leg.  He had a hunch that I had stress fractures.  He came back with the x-rays and he was right.  Two tiny lines ran across my upper and lower shin.  Those two lines were the cause of all the trouble I had been dealing with my running for the past months.  I hated those two little lines.  He said I’d have to start off with taking a couple of weeks off.  Those two tiny lines benched me. 

The next couple of weeks I was confined to a stationary bike and aqua jogging in the pool.  I went to the trainer each day to get treatment and tried to stay off my legs as much as possible.  Meanwhile, the weather had finally cooled down and it was prime running weather.  My teammates got to take full advantage while I was in the pool pretending to run.   I counted down the days until I would be able to try running again.  My trainer would say “maybe next week you will get to try running.”  My first day back I was allotted ten minutes to run and that was it.  I was told if I felt any pain, I had to stop.  Running had start to become a privilege, something that was given to me only a couple of times a week until my stress fractures healed.  The bike and the pool were my chores and then every so often I was given minutes to run, my ten minute reward.

Running has been a lot of things to me.  For a lot of people, it’s a punishment.  Sometimes you’ll see the quote “My sport is your sport’s punishment” on the backs of runners’ t-shirts.  For me, I have way more of an appreciation for it than I ever thought I would.  It changes from day to day or even during a run.  Sometimes it feels like work or a chore.  Something you want to put off until tomorrow.  Sometimes I take it for granted, like you might do with anything you love.  But I always know that after a run, I will feel so much better off than I did before.

Intended publication: Life & Times section of Runner's World.