Reflective Narrative
I have come into this class knowing nothing about digital storytelling in any way, shape, or form. To me, painting a picture with words was the only form of storytelling that I knew and appreciated. Visual elements in a story published in the digital media space were merely design choices to attract readers. At least, that is what I thought, until I started this term.
That assumption began to change with the first project for the class, Personal Narrative, which asked me to pick a story from my own life and tell it. The exercises with questions from the NYTimes we went through in class jogged my memory for story ideas. Along with the class readings and examples from other Digital Storytellers, discussing my ideas with a small group of peers in an intimate setting to help each other identify ways to narrate the story was invaluable. My confidence grew with these discussions. I initially conceptualized a much longer digital narrative for the personal narrative, going into and explaining the cultural background behind why this has happened. But through the discussions, I have come to focus on the audience and the important aspects of the story that I was trying to tell. That is how I ended up centering the story around the concept of name and ended up using the quote, “A name has no solid ground, unlike me.” The optimization that came from editing the story and putting together materials for the digital story made me understand the importance of using representative, contextual images with the audience in mind. Thinking back, I see this as my first step in evolution as a digital storyteller with my digital story, Fish Town Boy.
The sense of place project took me on a ride. I had a tough time choosing a place that is comfortable enough for me to travel to frequently and that has something to say about it. Being an immigrant meant I fell in love with many areas of the United States way more than the place I ended up choosing for this project. If I had the resources and time, I would choose the Kenai Fjords National Park (KFNP) for this project. The ten days I spent there changed me on a molecular level. After working on this project depicting my feelings about “The Big Creek” trails park, a sense of place article about KFNP is in my future. The Big Creek Park is a well-hidden park located in the city of Roswell and close to my residence. I frequent this park for hikes/walks with my dog and for my own search for peace when I need it. My spouse loves the concrete paved path, and I love the section of trails through nature. So, this became central to one of the fictional articles I created from the perspective of deer that live in the area. When I first visited Big Creek, I asked the question, “Where is the said Big Creek?” I am incredibly used to this place at this point, and so the question slowly faded out of my mind the more I visited. Poetry has been my go-to form of expression for my feelings. Poetry deals with concrete language that show the places, emotions, or ideas rather than just telling the same. In my mind, a poem can capture my feelings toward a place better than any other form. The sense of place project helped refocus the question of ‘Big Creek?’ for me again, which ended up being the central question of the entry point to my interactive article, a poem, asking, “Where is the namesake of this place?”
Personal passion project, as the last project in this term, helped put all the pieces of the puzzle into place for me. I chose to speak about legal immigration to the United States and to present immigrant stories that are often overlooked in this project. While gathering the stories of immigrants I worked with for this project, structuring the digital article, and collecting visual materials, I came to understand the value of visual elements in digital media. The only part of a writer that resides in their work is their words, by definition, but carefully selecting each image and designing the artwork showed me a new level of closeness to the audience that I had not felt before. That answered my predicament that I entered this class with.
I purposely did not create too many navigable points in the article, as my goals were to make sure the reader leaves the page as few times as possible. Apart from the research links in the article, the only other navigable link is to the online tool to step into the shoes of an immigrant. For the passion project, I battled between using references to famous immigrants that entered the American psyche, but after reading and chronicling the stories of immigrants, I chose to stick to using one example: “That cashier’s son, coming from a long line of immigrants to everywhere in the world, was named Farrokh Bulsara at birth and later adopted the name Freddie Mercury.” I am content with ending the article with that sentence.