Vol. 2: Oops

Creativity, failure, the end of the year, etc.

Oh, hello there. You may remember me from Vol. 1 of this newsletter, in which I promised brilliant commentary each and every month. Who knew that starting an ambitious personal project in January could backfire so quickly. 

As an excuse I can only say that my circumstances have changed since the beginning of the year. In April I got a staff job as a newspaper photojournalist. For the first time in more than 10 years, I’m not making a living as a writer. 

In some (read: many) ways this is a relief. Photography has been an avenue for me to get out of my head and into the world, attuned to the moment rather than to my recollections and reflections of it. I like the immediacy of photojournalism and it’s been good for me to concentrate on a craft that demands physicality and being and brainpower of a different sort than writing. I love my new job and I’ve spent most of my time focused on it. 

But it’s December now, a time for reflection, and it’d be a shame if I ended the year without returning to this newsletter and my hopes for it.

My goal was to write publicly and often. In this sense I failed. Taking a more generous view, I learned a lesson. If I’m to keep up a public writing practice, I need a vehicle as frictionless as possible. My self-imposed structure of pairing disparate topics proved too high a hurdle. While constraints are typically conducive to creativity, in this case I needed less structure and more freedom to experiment, play, and fail (but fail forward, not backward). 

There’s an anecdote that comes to mind about creativity that is, coincidentally, tied to photography. Jerry Uelsmann, a photography professor at the University of Florida, divided his students into two groups: a “quantity” group and a “quality” group. At the end of the term, the quantity group would be graded on the amount of work they produced (the more pictures, the higher the grade); the quality group would be graded on the quality of their work (you could turn in one photo, but it had to be perfect to get an A). Uelsmann found that the students in the quantity group ended up making better pictures overall. Consistency proved more important than single-minded attempts at perfection.

All of that is to say that I hope to resuscitate this newsletter in a new and somewhat more consistent form. What that looks like is TBD, and it may include various incarnations. (Maybe a more personal blog rather than attempts at analysis?) I’ll try not to limit myself. 

Here’s to new beginnings. 

What creative projects have you struggled with this year? Are you resuscitating one after a hiatus? Are you starting something new? Shoot me an email, I’d love to hear about it. 

—-

Meanwhile, as this is technically an end-of-year post, please also see below some work I’ve been proud of this year. 

Writing

My essay about my relationship with my name and visiting the town of Arvin, California was published in Zocalo Public Square. Here’s an excerpt:

I’ve always hated Arvin, my uncommon, easy-to-mangle name. For most of my life I didn’t even know where it came from. When I was a kid I asked my father, who is from India, what my name means. He told me, “beautiful face.”

A skeptical child, I didn’t believe him. A recent Google search confirmed my suspicions, revealing no such translation and no correlation between my name and a predisposition to attractive features. So, not long ago, I asked my father again about the origins of my name. This time he had a different story. The common Indian name, he told me, is Arvind—with a “d.” My parents had decided to remove the “d” to make the name sound “more American.”

Hold on. First of all, what happened to the whole “beautiful face” thing? You can’t just take that back after you see how the face turns out. And, second, Arvin is not a common American name.

Photos 

It’s really cool to see some of the images from my first year at the AJC highlighted in an end-of-year gallery. And please check out the work of my talented colleagues Natrice Miller, Steve Schaefer, Jason Getz, Hyosub Shin, Curtis Compton, and Miguel Martinez.

Reading, etc.

My reading list tells me I’ve read a lot of self-help/productivity books this year. I used to be embarrassed about reading these kinds of books, but I’ve found them to be great motivation. I’m particularly a fan of Cal Newport, whose podcast I also enjoy. Next year I think I’d like to try and re-read books that I’ve loved. Also more fiction. Right now giving “The Eye of the World,” a fantasy novel by Robert Jordan that I loved in high school, a shot.

If you have any readings recs, send them my way too!