I approached the readings for this week more methodologically as I’m thinking about how to structure my own profile. I’m planning to write about Ivan, a Russian activist and writer now living in Berlin after a troubled personal journey that in many ways hunts him to this day. Both Deb’s “Dancing for Their Lives” and Peter Hessler’s “What the Garbageman Knows” helped me think about how to write about someone’s everyday life without overexplaining it. They approach people in very different ways: Deb through immersion, Hessler through close observation and patience. Both methods feel relevant as I figure out how to approach Ivan’s story. I think the biggest challenge is to understand how to portray the suffering in his story without “dumping” all of his trauma onto the page, but still acknowledging and dignifying it.
Deb’s piece works through proximity. She brings the reader into the Damascus nightclub without preface—the smoke, sequins, and noise come first, and the politics stay in the background. What stood out to me is how she doesn’t frame the women as “subjects” or “issues.” Their personalities come through in details: how they fix their makeup, trade photos of their children, and walk into the club like they’re stepping into another life. The writing feels respectful but unsentimental. Deb lets us understand their choices through the rhythm of the night, there is no commentary. For Ivan, I want to follow that same approach. He has this mix of irony and vulnerability that I think works best when shown in small moments, like when he jokes that literature is “a parasite that can eat all your time.”
Hessler’s piece is more methodical. He builds Sayyid’s world slowly, through repetition and return, but always adding something new that helps us to frame him. His writing feels steadier, almost invisible. While Deb’s story unfolds over a single night, Hessler’s happens over months of small interactions. He shows how a person can be both ordinary and essential: Sayyid isn’t described as a symbol of resilience, but by the end, we understand how much he holds the city together. That kind of patience is something I’d like to borrow for Ivan’s profile. His thoughts about exile, writing, and activism accumulated naturally during our conversation, they were not forced into a single theme, and I hope to convey this.
The main difference, I think, is that Deb writes from the inside out, while Hessler writes from the outside in, noticing the patterns around someone until a fuller picture appears. I can see both sides applying to Ivan: he’s introspective and articulate (which invites that closer, inside view), but his life also reflects a broader story of displacement and adaptation that could be shown through his surroundings.
Both readings reminded me that profiles don’t have to be dramatic or conclusive. They can just sit with a person’s contradictions—like Deb’s dancers balancing survival and dignity, or Hessler’s garbageman finding structure in chaos. For Ivan, that contradiction might be between his old identity as an activist and his new one as a writer, and I hope to write in a way that makes space for both.
