I have been struggling for a while now with how I would write my own profile as currently, among those I have interviewed, many have felt like supporting characters, but not the IT STAR. Reading Cross’s piece first in particular provided me with a clear mentality of the direction I want to go. I was particularly fond of Cross’s reference to writer Lane DeGregory and how she asks prospective subjects of her stories if she could come over first, before asking them where they would like to meet. It is through reading Cross’s piece, as well as Deb’s “Dancing for Their Lives” and Hessler’s “Tales of the Trash” that I have come to understand the greater meaning of setting, particularly in covering detailed profiles.
In Deb’s “Dancing for Their Lives,” she immerses herself in a place she is unfamiliar with, and a place by the end of the night that she hopes to never return to as “the undertow of despair was too great.” In Hessler’s piece “Tales of the Trash”, he is somewhere familiar, and joins garbage man Sayyid on his trash runs. Deb enters the club as a guest of Um Nour, a woman who has to live off her body to make ends meet. However, Deb does not just stay alongside Um Nour the entire night, she pivots and makes friends with Abeer, another woman whom she initially met in the women’s restroom earlier on in the night and later on dances with. This is in contrast as Hessler doesn’t have to pivot as much as Deb does, as he is able to remain with Sayyid all the time.
Through both of these pieces, I was pleased with how they were able to tie these profile pieces back to the historical context of where they were occurring, Deb’s piece in Damascus, Syria, and Hessler’s piece in Cairo, Egypt.
I can tell Deb is very observant about how the club is laid out, what particular women are wearing, how the men are behaving? The article is so detailed it’s as if she is writing into a notebook all throughout the night, even while on the dance floor with Abeer. Yet, while she is paying attention to every nook and crevice of the club, she is also trying to find somewhat of a sense of comfortability or relief, and she achieves that once she realizes her translator, Nezar Hussein, unknowingly is in this club at the same time as her.
From Deb’s article, because there were different women and men to follow, I was more focused on Deb, the journalist, rather than the subject? Whereas Hessler’s piece I was more focused on the subject, Sayyid. This begs the question that for journalists like myself, so much of writing a story is making sure your subject is the one comfortable and willing to share with you some of the hardest things they’ve experienced? However, how does a journalist have to go about getting a story when they are the ones less comfortable, and it is the subject that has more control. Deb’s piece offers an answer to this question, showing how discomfort can sharpen a journalist’s eye and deepen empathy, while Hessler’s illustrates what happens when familiarity allows the subject’s world to unfold more naturally.
