Winter Term 2010: Stories of Berkeley

My winter term project didn’t go exactly as planned. My original proposal promised five short stories about Berkeley written while I lived in my brother’s apartment, but what I ended up with was one short story, four poems, and an essay. But I also ended up with tons more knowledge about the city of Berkeley – its history, its diversity, and its struggles. I read a memoir by Maxine Hong Kingston called The Fifth Book of Peace that wove together not only historical events of Berkeley, but the radical ideology of the sixties that has given Berkeley its reputation of “Berserkley.” Not only does she discuss the situation by which she lost her home and manuscript in the Berkeley/Oakland Hills Fires of 1991, one of the focuses on my project, but she also includes her recreation of the manuscript about a bohemian couple exiled from Berkeley during Vietnam who escape to Hawaii, and later, Kingston’s own attempts to alleviate the suffering of the veterans in her own writing workshops for them. I knew I wanted to write, at some point, a short story about the fire, but somehow that didn’t end up happening until the tail end of Winter Term. Next, I read Altars in the Street, the true story of a woman living in a interracial neighborhood in South Berkeley in the 1980s as she and her neighbors organize to try to return their street to the peaceful place it once was before crack cocaine became popular. I don’t want to talk about Altars in the Street too much, because I wrote an essay about it.

Next was a caveat for poetry. On Addison Street in downtown Berkeley, the sidewalk is covered in poems, and, with a book about the Poetry Walk in hand, I perused the poems, read about the authors, and wrote a few of my own inspired by the poems on the street. I took some pictures as I did the Poetry Walk, and it was then that I decided to start a blog about my Berkeley experience.

After the poetry walk, I took a break to study Berkeley’s history. I mostly wanted to touch on the less studied aspects of Berkeley, but I found that the tumultuous 1960s Berkeley is integral to the make-up of the city today. I read selections from Berkeley: A City in History and Berkeley At War: The 1960s, which discussed the Free Speech Movement, People’s Park protests, and rise of the Black Panther Party – not to mention, hippie culture. I also watched a documentary about Berkeley in the ‘60s, which contained interviews by some of the biggest movers and shakers of the time. However, I didn’t find myself inspired to write about this because the topic has been memorialized so often, in everything from the musical Hair to 2007’s Across the Universe. I wanted to write about something else.

Luckily, around this time, as malaise hit me, my mom’s friend who lost her home in the fire called me back. I interviewed her about her experience and was finally able to write my fire story, about a man preparing to leave his wife when the fire destroys their home. I also continued to read selections from Berkeley! A Literary Tribute, which includes selections from everyone from Robert Louis Stevenson to Jack Kerouac, all who spent time being inspired by Berkeley.

An important aspect of my winter term journey that can’t be written about completely is the time I spent with my brother, who is severely physically disabled and also very depressed and lonely. I spent much of my time in Berkeley encouraging my brother to get out of his dark little apartment and go for walks and outings to San Francisco’s The Punch Line comedy club. Despite his mobile difficulties, we went to the Mission District of San Francisco and ate Mexican food, saw two comedy shows, went to see Wicked and saw some movies. Meanwhile, he scored a programming internship with a start-up company and will most likely be graduating, after six years, from Berkeley’s Electrical Engineering/Computer Science Program this spring. Despite these accomplishments, and my efforts to get him out more, none of these things excite him. He was always anxious to leave the house, but rarely had a constructive idea of what we should do. However, I knew deep down that Philip was glad to have me there, and every night as I blew up my air mattress in his living room, I knew that I was glad to be there too.

As a writer, I will take back from this project a new knowledge of the importance of diligent research – historical, anthropological, personal – in writing fiction. I also have a new fondness for the personal essay, and even in the challenges I have faced in attempting to write poetry. I discovered a new passion for blogging, as well as reading my classmates’ blogs. I hope that I will be able to keep up these new interests in the coming semester, and continue to grow as a writer, reader, and person, during my time at Oberlin College.