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Last June, the Neighborhood Story Project published five books by teenagers documenting life before Hurricane Katrina in inner-city New Orleans, including the Ninth and Sixth Wards. The books feature interviews and photographs of the writers’ families and neighbors, as well as personal stories, such as how residents in a public housing complex became one young writer’s surrogate family once her mother, who struggled with drugs, passed away.
The books were an instant local hit last summer, selling 2,000 copies at New Orleans bookstores, corner stores, and block parties. A print run of 4,000 more copies was scheduled when Katrina struck, and all existing books-for-sale disappeared in the storm and ensuing flood.
Soft Skull Press, a Brooklyn-based independent book publisher, quickly got involved, agreeing to help raise money for another print run. Via an email interview, Soft Skull publisher Richard Nash talked with Youth Media Reporter about his collaboration with the project and how the books can help contribute to New Orleans’s reconstruction.

Why did Soft Skull decide to get involved with the Neighborhood Story Project after Hurricane Katrina?

In effect, those books show you who was flooded.
In the reporting being done about the hurricane, people mostly hear either about the collapse of civic order (whomever you might blame—federal government or local, or poverty, or what have you). Or they hear about the physical devastation of Katrina. But a crucial and too often overlooked element, especially when thinking about what is to come is: What are the social networks of people in the Sixth and Ninth Wards? How do you rebuild using the knowledge of the people who actually live there?
The Neighborhood Story Project books are ethnographies of the blocks. They tell you about the people. And when thinking about reconstructing the city there’s a danger both from laissez-faire conservatives (who say, “give them tax credits and school vouchers”) and from liberal urbanists (who say, “here’s a massive plan for fixing the whole shebang”) that the people will be ignored in the process. These books are documents of the people.

The neighborhood books have sold well in New Orleans. Do you think residents outside of the city will be interested in them?

People want to learn about the world in which they live. This is especially the case when it’s a world that is insufficiently documented. That’s why they’ve sold in NOLA.
In the rest of the country, it will be much harder. The books in and of themselves are valuable—a couple of them are awfully strong—but there would ordinarily be a perception that these books speak only to New Orleans, and under ordinary circumstances it would have been rather difficult for a publisher to overcome that perception, given how reliant any publisher is on booksellers and the media to get the word out to consumers.
(A publisher is just one little part of things, and we operate at the mercy of other sectors, and we talk, talk, ’til we’re blue in the face about how important the content of books might be, but if folks don’t believe us, that’s that.)
But because of what happened in NOLA, we believe interest will be higher, and that’s what gives these books a shot at a national audience. Perversely.
But really, fundamentally, no one in publishing knows why some books are hits and others aren’t. Sometimes a connection is made, and we have explanations ex post facto, but really we’re just blind people grasping elephants.

The neighborhood books appear on Soft Skull’s homepage. How are sales going so far?

No idea. Way too early to tell!

Is this the first youth media project Soft Skull has gotten involved in?

A whole chunk of our books overlap in some fashion with youth media. You look at the totality of our list, and there are a gazillion different actual and potential overlaps: Bomb the Suburbs, No More Prisons, Hey Kidz, Buy This Book, Please Feed Me, Life and Limb, Zine Yearbook, How to Get Stupid White Men Out of Office, That’s Revolting, Get Your War On, Classified, You Don’t Have to Fuck People Over to Survive, all books that we’ve published or are about to publish.

What is your arrangement with the project?

This is being done as a benefit, so we are structuring the deal whereby the neighborhood project is getting an enormous proportion of the revenues from the sales, a proportion that would ordinarily be impossible for Soft Skull to survive on, but morally that’s what is necessary under the circumstances.
The Neighborhood Story Project plans to use proceeds to help refugee high school students document the stories of life in the Astrodome.

How did you hear about the neighborhood project?

Well there’s a long a complicated back-story to that. Abram Himelstein, one of the neighborhood project’s two founding schoolteachers, was known in the indie publishing world because of his popular, self-published book Tales of a Punk Rock Nothing. Plus two of our staff knew him even better. Plus one of those two folks had actually moved down to NOLA and was working for Soft Skull from a home office.

How has the experience of working with them been so far? Any future plans with the organization?

Oh I love them, I’m really proud to have the opportunity to help. I hope I can keep doing so.

What’s the best way for youth media groups to approach independent publishers?

Email the publisher. That’s where you can start.

Anything else you’d like to add?

Given the questions you’re asking, probably what’s necessary is a conference. We know that the Right—both Christian and secular—has been networking and conferencing, logrolling, quite frankly for 30 years, and progressives should start doing that. Think tanks, policy institutes, grassroots organizations, web and print media, publishers, should all be meeting, ideally with funding from the kinds of organizations who are throwing money at Democratic Party candidates, since a tiny percentage of that money could do wonders for developing more robust approaches to progressive ideas in the coming decade and beyond.
Above left: Palmyra Street, by Jana Dennis, published by the Neighborhood Story Project, 2005.

Continue reading Eyes of the Hurricane

Because of the secretive nature of illicit drug use, there is usually a lag between the appearance of a new drug trend and public information about it. After studying 26 different European magazines for youth, the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) recently concluded that media read by youth “constitutes a useful and low-cost source of information for monitoring and understanding drug trends among defined readerships by reflecting lifestyles that reveal much about young people’s drug behaviour and attitudes that official statistics do not reveal.”
Furthermore, the study found, “Youth magazines studied were more likely than mainstream magazines to cover both the risks and benefits of cannabis and ecstasy use. In contrast, they adopted more proscriptive approaches to heroin and crack.”

In Bakersfield, California, three student editors are suing their school’s superintendent for pulling the plug on an issue of their newspaper that explored the topic of gay teenagers, reported the Monterey Herald. As more student journalists express interest in writing about gay and lesbian topics, censorship in school newspapers appears to be on the rise, said Mark Goodman of the Student Press Law Center. It’s striking that such censorship is occurring in California, one of only six states granting student journalists the same freedom of speech as professional journalists. “Without a question, it’s fair to say the students are more comfortable with the topic than administrators,” said Goodman.

Excerpting Jonathan Kozol’s new book, The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, a Harper’s Magazine September cover story (here via Mindfully.org) makes the case that segregation is thriving in American urban public schools, and not by accident.
Kozol also lays bare the economic disparity of money spent on kids and their teachers in suburban schools compared to those in inner cities. Explaining how she and her classmates understood the racial segregation of their neighborhood and schools, one Harlem teenager told the author, “It’s as if you have been put in a garage where, if they don’t have room for something but aren’t sure if they should throw it out, they put it there where they don’t need to think of it again.”
Kozol’s findings are all the more poignant in light of debates over where to school the 372,000 displaced children of Hurricane Katrina. Supported by the Bush administration, a number of states want to teach them in shelters, despite a landmark federal law banning the educational segregation of homeless children, reports theWall Street Journal.

Not long ago, many of us working in youth media did not consider ourselves part of a field. And, really, why would we? Opportunities to share practices and collaborate with others working on teen-produced media were few and far between. Conferences tended to lump us together based on our means of communication—print, radio, film, the web—not on how or with whom we worked.
Foundations did not earmark funding specifically for youth media, isolating organizations further. Competing for grants, many groups felt pressured to package themselves in the categories funders sought—as either activist-oriented or artistic, focused on product or process, or preoccupied with distribution or education reform.
But as foundations like the Open Society Institute and that of Time Warner have recognized and funded youth media as a field, grantees at resulting conferences have begun to see far more similarities in our philosophies, missions, and approaches to our work than previously imagined.
Since then, youth media as a topic in and of itself began making the agenda at related conferences, like last June’s Ethnic Media Expo as well as Scholarship in the Digital Age, hosted last year by the Institute for Multimedia Literacy.
These opportunities have led to a new phase of reflection. Educators have begun thinking and planning on a macro level, placing a premium on not just continuing the work of helping teens make media, but reflecting on that work—on codifying practices and evaluating impacts, on determining where youth media fits and diverges from the many fields and movements it borrows from and builds upon—such as alternative education, narrative therapy, and independent media.
“There’s an obvious thirst for dialogue, for tools, for sharing best practices among people working to support youth media,” said Rachel Alterman Wallack, executive director of the Atlanta-based youth publication VOX, at the Ethnic Media Expo.
The new premium on reflection is apparent in the many conferences and collaborations that have emerged over the last five years, in new and unprecedented opportunities for practitioners to develop professionally, and in the increase in research and writing about the field. Recent conferences, collaborations, and venues for professional development include:
– A collaboration between the Educational Video Center and the Education Development Center’s YouthLearn Initiative to create new resources for the field, including a peer network linking youth media educators to each other.
– The National Alliance for Media Art’s and Culture’s Youth Media Leadership Institute, where 20 educators from around the country received fellowships to convene in Oregon where they set goals for leading and advancing the field.

– The formation of the New York City Learning Network, a group of film educators who meet monthly to discuss their work and topics such as critical literacy.
Research and writing about youth media include:
– The Education Development Center’s YouthLearn Initiative’s ongoing research into how youth media programs evaluate their impact.
– The film Born into Brothels, about a youth media project in India, which won the Oscar for best documentary this year. The film reflects a growing trend in media produced by youth media educators that explores their line of work, often placing it in an academic context.
– The intensified push by a number of individual organizations to better understand, evaluate, research, and codify their work. Berkeley-based Youth Radio has an in-house researcher who helps staff and youth develop, document, and evaluate learning at the program. L.A. Youth, Youth Radio, and Youth Communication have mental health professionals on-call for managing and understanding the emotional issues of the job. At Youth Communication, where I work, staff has recently undertaken an effort to define our practice through documenting our work—practices, strategies, philosophies and lessons—in an ever-growing manual.
Over the next several months, Youth Media Reporter will run articles that look closely at the different types of reflection happening in the field, as well as what youth media groups and educators are gaining from it and whether it is likely to bring more money to the field.
Of course, most of a youth media professional’s day is spent not in reflection, but raising funds, working with teens, and putting out a product. But it’s the moments when we do get glimpses of the bigger picture—the conferences, collaborations, time to view the work of colleagues—which can sometimes be unexpectedly exhilarating, leading to new ways of thinking and planning for how this line of work can continue to grow and evolve. (In this sense, feeling part of something larger than one’s own organization can help prevent burnout and quick turnover at nonprofits.)
The relaunched Youth Media Reporter, now six months old, is itself part of this new phase of introspection, and the comment page of some articles—like Ken Ikeda’s review of Born into Brothels—make apparent how ready youth media educators are to engage in dialogue about their work. My hope is that all youth media educators can help make it the most useful tool possible for reflecting on their practice and sharing ideas and tools by sending feedback and ideas.
Kendra Hurley, editor of Youth Media Reporter, can be reached at editor@youthmediareporter.com.
Above left: Youth media educators discuss ways to evaluate their organizations at a 2005 conference hosted by the Time Warner Foundation.

Continue reading Time to Reflect

How did media depictions affect our understanding of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath? Whose stories were told, and whose biases were represented? The Alliance for a Media Literate America is offering educators a free, downloadable media literacy guide to help young people better understand the disaster and how the media covered it.

Last April, 20 youth media leaders convened in the foothills of Oregon’s Cascade Mountains to participate in the Youth Media Leadership Institute (YMLI), part of the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture‘s Youth Media Initiative. For five days, they discussed their work and strategized. “I felt connected to my peers and more ready than ever to help move forward toward our collective goals,” wrote YMLI delegate Cynthia Carrion, outreach coordinator of Manhattan Neighborhood Network, in an article for the MediaRights website.
Carrion interviewed other youth media leaders about what they took from their week in Oregon, ways they’ve collaborated with other youth media organizations since then, where they hope to see the field be in five years, and what the challenges will be getting there. “I felt as if I walked into YMLI as an indivdual and left feeling part of the youth media community,” said Andrea Isabel Quijada, director of educational programs at the New Mexico Media Literacy Project.

Last year, two New Orleans high school teachers began the Neighborhood Story Project, which enables local, predominantly African-American students to write about their lives. Since then the project has published five books of personal stories, such as how residents in a downtown Lafitte public housing complex became one young writer’s surrogate family after her mother, who struggled with drugs, passed away, the Associated Press (via USA Today) reported.
The books sold 2,000 copies at local bookstores, corner stores, and block parties. A print run of 4,000 more copies was slated to go when Hurricane Katrina struck, and all existing books-for-sale disappeared in the storm and ensuing flood. Soft Skull Press is helping raise money to print more books. The Neighborhood Story Project plans to use proceeds to help refugee high school students document the stories of life in the Astrodome, the blog Galleycat noted.
If you are working on youth media related to Hurricane Katrina, please contact Youth Media Reporter at editor@youthmediareporter.org.

Two recent publications provide an intimate view of teens surviving war and just surviving adolescence. Last Sunday, the Washington Post ran the first of a three-part series excerpting a 14-year-old Baghdad girl’s diary, which details her family’s daily struggle to survive war.
In conjunction with the cover story “Being Thirteen,” Time magazine published a collection of 13 essays by and about 13-year-olds. Topics include anxieties over grades, peer pressure, sports, friendship, family, diversity, and hope.

During my first year editing Represent, a magazine by and for teens in foster care, a writer I’ll call Leah began a story that painfully detailed her father’s sexual abuse. Though Leah assured me she needed and wanted to write the story, with each new draft she seemed to slip deeper into despair.
Though normally meticulous in appearance, Leah’s long, blonde hair became stringy and unkempt, and she began to smell like she wasn’t bathing frequently. One day she showed up at the office with a black eye, which she would not explain. Leah did say she was thinking constantly about the abuse that had happened several years ago. She found herself crying all the time and said the girls at her group home made fun of her for it. The other day, when her boyfriend hugged her, she said, she got flashbacks to the abuse and began sobbing uncontrollably. “I’m a freak,” she said.
I trusted Leah’s sense that it was important for her to tell her story and work through the thoughts and feelings it stirred up, painful as they were. But I could also see she was suffering, and that worried me. I had no social work training, and I felt unsure how to proceed. Was I doing enough to support her? Who was I, really, to say that she should be working on such a painful story?
My boss’s office was filled with books like Writing as a Way of Healing and Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions, which, he told me, confirmed through research my sense that working with Leah on her story would ultimately help, not harm her. But as with many of the more sensitive stories I edited that first year, overseeing it left me in a constant state of self-doubt.
It was fortuitous, then, that I attended a seminar on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), a condition that can affect people who have experienced trauma such as sexual abuse. There I learned how creating a narrative about the trauma can help heal the damage. While awareness of the potential therapeutic benefit of my work at Represent did not dramatically change the way I managed my writers, it did provide the framework I desperately needed to feel more confident in guiding young people telling painful, personal stories. It also reminded me that because I did not have social work training, I shouldn’t hesitate to seek out mental health professionals’ advice when I felt in over my head. I was able to work more effectively with my writers and avoid becoming overwhelmed myself.
Since then, editors at Represent have understood how useful it is for us to pick up social work skills wherever possible. We’ve made a point of attending seminars that give a therapeutic perspective to our work and have come up with guidelines to help both writers and editors feel more secure when a young person is plowing away at a particularly painful story. The following tips resulted from attending conferences for therapists, talking with student writers about Represent‘s process, sharing tips with colleagues in the field, and working directly with teens on narratives about trauma.

Create a sense of trust and safety from the get-go.

“When a young person brings up a traumatic event, the way adults respond to it is very important,” says Libby Hartigan, who has worked at the teen-written paper L.A. Youth since 1989. “If someone says, ‘I was raped’ during a group discussion, it’s critical for the adult in the room to say something like, ‘I’m really sorry to hear that,’ or, ‘I didn’t know that happened to you.’ It doesn’t have to be a lot. Just ‘I heard what you said and I have a response to it, and that response is that it makes me sad to hear that and I appreciate your courage to bring it up.’ It helps not only that kid, but the other kids in the room.”
But avoid asking intrusive questions initially, especially in front of a group. “Show you’re receptive to it and not nosey. Nosey can come later,” says Hartigan.

Assess whether the timing is right.

It takes time to acquire the necessary perspective to reflect productively on a painful, personal event. To determine if a writer is ready, gauge whether they have moved beyond merely recounting an event to being able to reflect on their role in it or how it has affected them. Hartigan has found that this takes about six to nine months, which is exactly what psychiatrist Edward Rynearson, an expert on violent death, discovered through his research.

Know your legal responsibilities.

In certain states you are required to report abuse when you hear about it. Know what your legal responsibilities are and be upfront about them with your young people.

Educate yourself about PTSD, and don’t hesitate to seek help and refer young people to mental health professionals.

Ten to forty percent of youth in violence-ridden neighborhoods may develop PTSD. This can leave them in a chronic state of hypersensitivity and anxiety, so that they feel certain they’ll be able to get out of a bad situation fast. Chances are, a young person recalling an intense personal trauma, whether through writing or talking, may experience PTSD symptoms as well.
Purposefully calling forth a traumatic event in a safe environment with boundaries, dignity, and a trustworthy adult is how therapists help a person associate the trauma with something manageable. Through that association, a person can eventually have some control over trauma and feel less overwhelmed by it. (This process is similar to those used at many programs pioneering therapeutic models for using narrative to engage hard-to-work youth, including Represent or The Beat Within, a publication by incarcerated youth in the San Francisco Bay Area.)
As I learned with Leah, things can get worse before they improve. Memories of trauma may bring with them the old feelings of helplessness, depression, or worthlessness, or suicidal thoughts.
When working with a young person, stay alert to these symptoms and educate yourself about why they are happening. Seek help from professionally trained therapists and social workers whenever you feel uncertain about how to proceed. Remember that your role is not that of a social worker’s, and you are not expected to be one. Identify therapeutic resources young people can use. At Represent, editors often refer writers to programs offering teens free therapy, like The Door in New York City.

Identify and normalize the symptoms of PTSD.

Let a young person know upfront that tackling a difficult and personal subject is likely to bring up a lot of emotions. To normalize the experience for the young person, explain PTSD and its symptoms.
Let the young person know that people with symptoms of PTSD may have many of the feelings my writer Leah experienced: recurring flashbacks or nightmares, or unexpected outbursts of feelings such as extreme anger or helplessness.
PTSD can also involve “trigger” responses, where something unexpected—like the tone of someone’s voice—can cause a person to overreact impulsively and sometimes violently, or to have panic attacks.
Because the hypersensitivity that comes with PTSD is exhausting, many people with symptoms will numb themselves through drinking, drugs, or sex. They may also learn to avoid situations that trigger them, which can be fine, unless that leads to trying to avoid the unavoidable, like relationships, jobs, or going to school.
Giving young people an overview of these symptoms may help make them feel less frightened about what they’re experiencing and more comfortable exploring their feelings and reactions in their narratives, resulting in richer stories.

Assign a lighter story.

My first summer at Represent, one teen said she had flashbacks of being beaten with a bat. She wrote about being abused in the present tense, even though the rest of her story was in the past. She soon stopped participating in group meetings, putting her head on the table whenever her peers spoke. Her writing was affecting not just her, but all of the staff, including me.
I’d attended the PTSD seminar by that time, so I had an idea of what was happening. After talking with her about PTSD, to no avail, I eventually told her I could not continue working with her on the traumatic story anymore if she did not also start another, lighter story. So she began a story about how much she loved running. This helped immensely.
Working on a story about something light and “normal”—like a sport, first love, or hobby—can remind a young person that there’s more to life than pain. It also makes the workload more manageable for the adult in charge.

Ask about the future.

When a writer dwells on something difficult in her past—especially a situation she had no control over—balance her perspective by asking her to take a break to write about the future. Ask her to describe who she wants to be in five years, what she wants to be doing, what kind of people she hopes to be surrounded by, and how she plans to get there. This reminds a young person that as she gets older she’ll have more control to create a life she wants. It’s also helpful for the adult collaborator to be reminded of the writer’s resiliency and future hopes.

Build trust by being persistent, nonjudgmental, and patient.

“It’s all about timing,” explained Antwaun Garcia, who has written for Represent for over 5 years. “You have to be patient for that individual to tell their story on their time, and persistent in getting it out of them. After a while the adolescent sees this person is really caring, and they’re not just doing it ’cause it’s their job. That’s when they’ll open up.”
Avoid putting a story about personal difficulty on a tight deadline, added Garcia. Highly personal stories develop at an unpredictable, often idiosyncratic clip, and it’s most respectful to allow young people to explore them at their own pace.

Help identify triggers.

Ask the young person whether any current situations set her off, making her feel the way the original trauma did. Pinpointing how a trauma continues to affect a young person not only helps the writer gain more control over her reactions, it will make the narrative stronger.

Help identify avoidance or numbing techniques.

This could mean using drinking or drugs to numb feelings, or it could involve avoiding certain types of situations or relationships. Identifying these coping mechanisms can help a young person explore more direct ways to deal with feelings associated with trauma.

Take care of yourself and don’t be overly attached to outcomes.

Identify coworkers you can speak with about what you’re hearing and how you’re feeling. Stick to a manageable schedule and workload. If you don’t know how to proceed, ask for help. And try not to be too attached to a young person’s progress.
Of course, all of us working with young people who have been through trying circumstances want to see our teens flourish. After working at Represent for several years, I have seen firsthand how writing can exorcise demons from the past and make room for other concerns, like school.
At the same time, experts say that many who’ve gone through severe trauma never recover completely, and that those who do, do so on their own schedule. Expecting clear evidence of a young person’s growth—something out of your control—can be a recipe for burnout.
Instead, appreciate the fact that unlike teachers or therapists, you have evidence of tangible progress—a product—that you and the teen have collaborated on together. When one of the young people you work with is in trouble, allow this evidence of achievement to remind you that the young people really are accomplishing a lot.
Despite what experts say about who does and does not get past trauma, take inspiration from Garcia who, having written dozens of personal stories, is convinced that finding one’s voice through youth media is one of the best ways to begin processing and moving on from a difficult childhood. “I think most troubled kids just need that one person who listens to them,” Garcia told me. “Soon as you have that one person and give them that voice everything else just falls into place.”
Above photo: Writer Antwaun Garcia says he is wary of therapists but enjoys writing about his life and even finds it therapeutic.

Continue reading Social Work 101