Coney Island freak shows, Belle Époque Egypt and Maori tattoo parlors in Victorian Sydney were all featured in my thesis project at Pratt Institute for my undergraduate writing degree. As a writer living in Brooklyn, I thought I’d write the Great German-American novel before I graduated. But writing a terrible novel at age 21 didn’t seem as exciting as I thought at age 18, when I daydreamed of moving to New York to become a writer. The American military bubble I grew up in Germany had gotten too small, and although I had a vague idea that I wanted to do something in international development and health eventually, I wanted to write about Big Important Things first and do it in Brooklyn.
Art school has a way of forcing you to focus inwards. You were chosen from a vast pool of other talented artists in high school because you had something special to say and could write, paint, or draw it well. It can also mean recounting the admittedly limited life experiences you had up to your teens. On the second day of freshmen writing studio, a day after we had submitted our first fiction writing samples, thinking we were bad-ass writers who got into this hardcore writing program, the irritated professor wrote a list of topics none of us were allowed to write about:
- Drug trips
- Road trips
- Dead people
- Dying people including suicide
- Old people
- Disabled people
- First times having sex
- Violence and gore
- Fan fiction
All these topics were shortcuts. Writing to shock or awe our readers about things we had personal experience with or absolutely no experience at all (but we thought we could fake well), so we wouldn’t have to focus on plot, character development, tension, and clear writing. We freshmen knew little about life beyond our own limited experiences, so naturally, we couldn’t write about it well. Professor Newman burst that bubble.
All of us had been voracious readers and were often inspired by the moving or crystalline writing of a particular author. It’s why we wanted to do the same –to suspend disbelief, create a whole world and fill it with unforgettable characters who live off the page. My biggest literary inspiration which also sparked my interest in Africa was The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver about an American family’s move to the Belgian Congo in 1959 to work as missionaries. Their biases, racism, paternalistic attitudes, particularly displayed by the father, a Baptist missionary, comes clearly across their observations of village life and the “savages” they encounter. The Belgian Congo isn’t what they expected it to be and it seems that it wasn’t the villagers’ souls that really needed saving.
I came to the conclusion that to write well, I needed to live an interesting life instead of staring at my navel in Brooklyn. I wanted to learn more about health and development. I also realized that novels rarely save lives. How could I possibly connect the two?
Health and development has touched my family deeply. My mother wore combat boots for 20 years in the US Army and is a family physician, and my Opa and Oma and my Dad were recipients of development aid in war-torn Germany after WWII. I wanted to tell stories that connected people’s experiences, like my Oma receiving a care package tightly wrapped in thick brown paper amid a rubble-filled landscape, to other people in other parts of the world, who could never otherwise imagine or understand such a reality. Falling into a good story builds empathy in the reader, fosters connectedness, and can make our world smaller, better. It’s why people read Things Fall Apart or Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes or Anne Frank’s Diary all over the world and resonate with people in dozens of different languages. Writing can be a force for better understanding of others and ourselves.
I learned that good writing and communications could also save lives from my professors at Johns Hopkins as I worked on my MA in Communications. I learned about writing radio scripts for dramas that incorporate health messages on importance of vaccinating kids can save lives. Editing training materials and job aids on malaria testing and treatment can save lives. Developing easy-to-understand graphics for low-literacy populations on how Ebola is spread. These stories can help change health behaviors and improve people’s lives.
I currently work at the Malaria Elimination and Control Program of Africa within PATH as a different storyteller than my 18-year-old self, developing important communications tools for a massive public health campaign in Zambia’s Southern Province and advocating for increased focus on malaria elimination activities at the national and international level. I can’t wait to tell the story how MACEPA helped defeat malaria in a part of Zambia.
But I am working on a new novel too, Heavy Lift. I now have interesting stories to tell from the experiences of living in Zambia and working alongside an incredible cohort of fellows, thanks to my year at Global Health Corps.