After I spent a week or two

                                                                                                                            with my initial blog project, and I was becoming less and less excited about it, I realized that I needed to change my idea—I needed to write about my own experience making work about my family and exposing myself through my work, and then receiving such a pained reaction from my family. It was impacting my writing and my art, as I felt like I couldn’t ever really make anything every again. Not only would this make for an interesting essay, but I also felt like it would help me to work through this difficult situation with my parents, and come to terms with my own creative work.

I began researching some of my favorite artists/writers who also happen to focus on autobiographical stories and family in their work. David Sedaris had a lot of interviews and articles written about him where he talks about the implications of writing about family (and how he doesn’t write about his partner Hugh that much, at the request of Hugh), especially about his sister Tiffany. There are also a lot of interviews with Alison Bechdel, where she discusses her relationship with her mother after writing about her family and her father in her graphic memoirs. Trace Emin is a visual artist who I also researched, who had less input about family, and more about making autobiographical art instead. I also conducted some research to decide what type of format this essay would take, and where it would be published. While I knew that the format would be creative non-fiction, a narrative based research paper, in a way, I needed a place to publish it. I felt like an online art magazine, such as Hyperallergic, would potentially publish something like this.

The most challenging part of this project was deciding how much to include/leave out. It was funny, I thought, that even as I write about the ethics of writing about my family, I still am including my family in the essay. I didn’t want this essay to seem overly emotional and diary-entry-like but it is also an emotional topic. I needed to strike the right balance between analysis and personal stories without searching for pity. Another challenge was my own fears of writing about this topic too much—I felt like I maybe had hit this subject over the head one too many times, and that readers were exhausted of me rambling about my tumultuous relationship with my family. I also ran into the problem of just being emotionally drained from writing about very personal topics. The problem with writing about issues that are still pretty prevalent in your mind is that even if you’re tired of processing the emotions and events, you have to keep going to meet the deadline. You can’t stop. I faced a lot of not wanting to have to think about the issues with my family and my relationship to my parents, but having to do it anyway because the essay had to get finished on time.

However, besides this sometimes-reluctance to want to think more about my family and our relationship, I was genuinely excited to consider critically this topic of ethical writing. The essay allowed me to come to the conclusion that there is no solution to writing about other people. While this was a difficult realization, it also posed new questions about this topic, such as how do you then evaluate the impact of the negative and positive? This essay allowed me to complicate my question even further, which, while frustrating, is important as I consider future works that I make. It also helped me to reconcile my parents’ pain and anger with my artwork, understanding that no matter what I make, someone will be offended. I also think I was able to create a good balance between the narrative and the analysis, and revise my first draft so that it was not so segmented into anecdote and outside sources.

When I first began thinking about project II, my initial instant (for some unknown reason) was to shy away from what I’m “used to”—topics of family, and the form of creative non-fiction. I felt like I needed to “push myself” and to step out of this comfort zone.  I think I also felt like I had been overdoing it lately on the personal narrative style. So, my first proposal was a satirical blog series about an imaginary art student at a fictional art school, that would be very much based on my experience here at the University of Michigan. Styled after Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon stories, this series of fictional blog posts would examine different social and cultural issues of the art school, the quirks and qualms of an education in the arts.

But, what I really wanted to write about was my “Why I Write” piece that I had just finished. This essay reflected on very recent events of my parents finding my artwork online and their negative reaction to it, and why I write and make creative work if it produces such negative reactions. I felt like this piece only began to consider the ethics and implications of writing about other people; I wanted to use project II to take this question further, and to try and understand how other artists have dealt with family within their work, and exposing secrets and the intimate details of family life. I wanted to try and see if there was a way to write about others, without hurting people too.