« December 2005 | Main | February 2006 »

January 30, 2006

Anne Firth Murray: Activism and Writing

Anne Firth Murray has been an activist for decades. Founder of the Global Fund for Women, she has years of experience writing grant proposals and reports and Op Eds in support of women’s rights around the world. In our “How I Write” conversation on January 14 , 2006, she spoke of three types of writing that she has done:

First, she spoke of a kind of personal writing: Many years of writing letters to a friend, as well as many years of writing in her journal, along with poems written late at night, all by hand. Very satisfying, relieving the agonies of the struggle, but often slow-going. And in the case of her journal, sometimes with lapses of many years.

Another kind of writing, she explained, are all those grant proposals and reports and opinion pieces. All on the keyboard, first the typewriter, now the computer, and all done very fast and with great ease. Once she knows what her goals are, she noted, she can write a grant proposal quickly, with everything flowing from the goal or focus of the grant.

Now she has embarked on a new writing experience. She has just completed a book, Paradigm Found, which shares her experiences in building the Global Fund for Women so other people can do something similar. It’s a how-to book, in many ways. Writing this involved pulling together all those old proposals and reports and telling her story. This went very well, and Professor Murray was able to use activist sensibility to work through the book.

But now she‘s writing yet another book, this one on critical issues of international health for women. She feels this is a more difficult book because she’s used to writing as an activist and this is supposed to be “academic.” There are a lot of problems she needs to address, such as trafficking in girls and female infanticide, but there has been very little research on these topics. So now she feels stymied because she doesn’t have the material to write about it. How can she say anything academically sound if she just doesn’t have the data to prove it?

This is a difficult situation, and it’s very common for writer’s, especially to students who feel awkward about their sense of authority. I offered Professor Murray some suggestions for how to overcome this block, and in the next post I will share them with you.

But as for the conversation we had that night, it was filled with emotion. There’s a lot of pain and determination involved in struggling year after year in the face of such intractable problems as female genital mutilation. People in the audience asked how she was able to sustain herself. She explained that she had her own spiritual practice, such as walking on the beach, communing with nature, and writing poems late at night, and that refreshed her spirit. Emotions were palpable in the room. Rarely have we had a “How I Write” conversation that brought together such a combination of pain, emotions, determination, spirituality, and writing, and it was a pleasure and an honor for everyone to participate in such an exchange.

Posted by hilton at 02:51 PM | Comments (2)

January 23, 2006

Op Eds Are Tough

I met with honors students who are in the Haas Public Service Scholar program. In this program, students try to have their research apply to some kind of social action, directly or indirectly. One of the things they’re going to try to do is write Op Ed pieces that draw upon their research in one way or other. So, now they have the writing task of producing an Op Ed piece, very different from writing a thesis.

Op Eds are tough.

You have very limited space to persuade readers who may be unfamiliar or dead set against your concerns. You can’t go over the words alloted to you. For one reason, if you write too much, you run the risk of having the newspaper or broadcasting editor cut your piece, and chances are they will cut in ways that will infuriate you or distort your argument. No, you have to write in a very tight manner, and you still want to entice your reader, explain the issue and why it’s urgent to address, and lay out your position. Out of all the complexities you encounter dealing with your issue, you need to focus it, streamline it so that you can argue one main point. You can only allude to complexity. You need to be pointed — there’s simply isn’t enough room. And at the same time you want to be vivid and speak to the level of your intended audience — which is, of course, not the academic audience that would read your research thesis.

Donald Kennedy is an emeritus biology professor, former president of Stanford, and, most important for this discussion, editor of Science magazine. During our How I Write conversation, he spoke about the difficulty of writing editorials. “You can’t ‘Bury the Lead, ’ as newspaper people say — you have to attract people. ” You need to get to the issue in a dramatic, direct way. “You can’t end with a problem, ” he also advised. “If you lead people through your argument, you’ve got to propose something, take them somewhere. ”

This is harder than it sounds. Op Eds are tough.

Posted by hilton at 02:58 PM | Comments (0)