This week, the writer Jennifer Percy visited my Tutorial Advising class to discuss several of her own reported pieces, including one for the New York Times Magazine that sent her into Syria to get the story of American vigilantes trying to fight ISIS, and also to reflect a little on the writing of Leslie Jamison. Percy raised an important issue in our discussion, I thought, about the relationship between our emotional lives and our intellectual lives. I often worry that in the melee of college life, students don’t get to see examples of professional or artistic people for whom cultivating their emotional lives is essential. She related some harrowing tales of international reporting (without failing to mention the journalist James Foley, who was executed by ISIS in 2014).
Photo: Moises Saman/Magnum, for The New York Times
Hearing Jennifer Percy talk to us about her job as a reporter and writer, a profession that is collaborative, full of excitement, and COURAGE, was a very enlightening experience for me. I always thought of my writing as an art and being edited felt like a violation. But it’s not that, as Jen discussed, it’s a collaboration that must be welcomed, we can be attached, but never regretful. Moreover, Percy was generous in telling us about all of her travels, and wow, she is BRAVE! Her courage to bring a story home and the determination it required to see it through was inspiring for me as a writer who is still learning that courage in all it’s different forms. She said something smart that I frantically noted…that we are “constantly disillusioning ourselves,” working to bring the truth to ourselves, and society. As I move forward as a writer I want to keep these three words in mind because she is absolutely right. As human beings we often have this ‘idealized self’ and I believe it hinders us from our exploration and allowing ourselves to be changed by our work, or as Percy stated, “to move with experience.”
It’s a great point, this one about the ways we find to tell ourselves—or work to understand—the truth about a given situation. Joan Didion’s losing her “conviction that lights would always turn green” for her is another way to put this, I suppose. In order to disillusion ourselves we must also work hard to identify the illusions. Thanks for the comment, Amanda.