Author: Antonia Vrana

In my previous experiment, I tried shortening the content of my personal narrative origin piece to fit within 200 words but retain its emotional impact. For my next experiment, I would like to take this idea further and really distill the emotion and story of my personal narrative in the form of a Rupi Kaur inspired anthology.

Rupi Kaur is one of my all time favorite poets, and my favorite books of hers are Milk and Honey, and The Sun and Her Flowers. In both books, she combines poetry, prose, and simple drawings to deliver powerful messages about her life to the reader. I think that by converting my origin piece into an anthology similar to Kaur’s, I could have a very cohesive project that conveys both the story and emotional aspects I want, while also following my desire to make my origin piece more short and concise. This shortness and conciseness is what I think will draw more interest from the readers.

In a Writer’s Digest entitled “Hearing Voices: 6 Steps I Used for Creating an Anthology,” the following steps are listed for writing a powerful anthology:

1. Find a unique theme
2. Set Goals for Your Anthology
3. Create Guidelines for Contributors
4. Search For A Publisher
5. Call For Submissions
6. Secure Release Forms

Okay, so this is a pretty easy list to accomplish considering numbers 3-6 don’t really apply to what I’d be trying to accomplish. In my last experiment, I opened up my project to include the stories of friends and family. After considering doing the same for this Anthology, I decided I would like to keep this experiment exclusively my own. I would do this in order to, as step number 1 advises, “find a unique theme,” which in this case would be my own story.

As for number 2, “Set Goals for Your Anthology,” my goal would be to express positivity in the face of one of my most tragic memories. Rupi Kaur divides her writing into 4 parts: the loving, the breaking, the hurting, and the healing. I would try to do something along these lines to draw my theme together (though the actual divisions of the story are TBD).

In another article by The Writer Mag, called “How to create a salable anthology proposal,” it is suggested that the idea should be made “razor-sharp” and “unique.” Both of these goals can be accomplished in my anthology’s case by tailoring the compilation to my personal story and the things I learned from it.

I think the biggest challenge of writing this anthology will be staying on a single topic and making it a theme that a wide audience can relate to, as Rupi Kaur does in her anthologies. In Writer’s Weekly, on writing an anthology it is important to know who your target audience is. In my case, my target audience is all who have lived through what they would consider a tragic experience. I need to be able to take a personal story and open it up to a larger world view. Though this aspect seems intimidating, I think with more research (and re-reading Rupi’s books a few more times) it could be accomplishable.

For my origin piece, I’m using a personal narrative detailing a car accident I was in when I was 18. The story is pretty personal, but something I want to work with and alter to make relatable to a wider audience. I also feel like when I was doing the original writing, I was constrained by my page limit and used over-explanations and superfluous language to meet a certain page number. For these reasons, I originally thought I’d like to convert my piece into a magazine type human interest story, but then I got some feedback on an idea I had to mimic a sub-genre of human interest story modeled after the brief and monologue-like Humans of New York stories, and decided to roll with that.

I love the HONY series because the author does a great job of using an opening statement that draws the reader in, and the stories are able to convey so much about the person in as few words as possible, something I want to mimic to an extent with my own writing.

For this project, I would collect not only my story, rewritten in quotations, but also the stories of other people who have gone through tragic/life changing events. I would try to get approximately 10 different stories from different people, each under 200 words but with enough information to transmit the same effect as a full story, just as the Humans of New York project does.

In order to understand what makes a human interest story itself so interesting, I looked at an article entitled “How to Write a Good Human Interest Story” on booksoarus.com. According to this, there are 5 main keys to writing a good human interest story:

– pick a topic that you like, something that appeals you

– focus on getting the emotion right- think about what you want the reader to feel

– highlight positivity

-describe people, places, attire, and time so people can picture the story

– end it on a positive note

This same article also states that headline choice is important because you want something that draws the reader in without giving to much away about the center of your story. Additionally, you want to include a conclusion that leaves a “good taste” in the reader’s mind.

In another article entitled “The Power of the Human Interest Story” on zazzlemedia.uk.co, it is stated that a human interest story serves to put “people at the heart of the events,” which is what I’d like to do with my writing. Another part of this article that I find interesting is when it goes on to explain how news stories in the past were usually framed around certain people and events as a way to more effectively explain emotional situations, like war.

I’ve never really had the opportunity to write HONY style human-interest stories. Even in my high school newspaper class I was always a sports and news writer, and since I’ve been in college, all I have done is research papers and limited creative writing. I think this will make this experiment a challenge for me as I find the excessive emphasis of emotional conveyance within this genre very daunting.

My name is Nia and I come from a small town. Like, really really microscopic-level small. I tell people I graduated with 80 people in my class and their first response is “Oh cool you went to a private school!” to which I reply: nope. It was painfully public.
Laingsburg is located 30 minutes north of Lansing (the city I tell people I’m from in every college icebreaker) and is surrounded by corn fields for ten miles in any given direction. A quarter of the school population is in FFA (Future Farmers of America, for those of you who don’t know), there is an annual “drive your tractor to school day,’ and yes, like the country school stereotype, almost everyone is related by blood or marriage. After all, it’s a town that no one leaves or enters. An island in the middle of Michigan. But when I was growing up, I was an island within that island.

My mom is from New York, my dad is from North Dakota, both taught at MSU when I was young, so I lived equidistant from the highway that leads to Lansing and Laingsburg. My parents thought it would be good for me to be involved in a small town community, but little did they know the exclusion that came without having any family ties within the town.

This isn’t to say I didn’t have friends growing up. Two of the most important people in my life are my childhood friends Erica and Addi, but it wasn’t until I was older that I realized the start of our friendship was mostly due to our collective difference from the other people of Laingsburg than our similarities to each other. Addi was adopted when she was in third grade, and Erica’s parents moved to Laingsburg from different areas of Lansing. The three of us were an unlikely trio of nomads without bloodlines rooting us to Laingsburg.
As dismaying as this fact was when I was in grade school and all the brownie points came from whose parents were related to whom, I could not be happier now for my detachment.

Laingsburg is a lovely little town, but with more emphasis on little. The people who live there have had parents who lived there, and grandparents who lived there, some all the way back to the town’s founding. And this fact makes me glad to have had the experiences I have had, and to have been able to experience different cultures in the urban and liberal environment of Ann Arbor.

My parent’s always told me to reserve my judgment, and I think the duality of my rural upbringing and metropolitan college experience is what really solidifies that for me. In both cases, you cannot judge people from different backgrounds. I don’t hate Laingsburg or the people within it. Yes I wish they could experience more of the world and be more informed about different cultures and styles of living, but I wish the same for many of the people I have met in liberal Ann Arbor. I wish they understood what it means to be from a small town, with the comfort of everyone knowing your name.

Each life style comes with it’s own pluses and minuses, but the point is: go and exist where you are comfortable and happy, and reserve your judgment from those who choose to live differently. I have legitimately been called a “Hick” in Ann Arbor, and a “City Girl” (not a good connotation) in Laingsburg. Living on both sides of the spectrum during formative years of my life makes it so crystal clear to me that your lifestyle is exactly that: YOURS. Be where you are happy and healthy and surrounded by people who support and love you. The people of Laingsburg are happy where they are. The people of Ann Arbor are happy where they are. My hope is that you are happy where you are too, and can respect the happiness of those in other places.

Other important thing about me: I’m really obsessed with corgis, here’s a gif of one wigglin it’s bunz 🙂