Different Types of Storytelling

Jaed Coffin's "My Father, Out to Sea" was particularly interesting for me to read because I recently interviewed him for a profile story I was writing. I had seen him speak at an event at UNH my sophomore year and was intrigued by his stories and the adventures he'd been on. In our interview I asked him about the theme of masculinity that is prevalent through a lot of his writing, and he told me about the struggles of trying to be a "man" in the traditional sense, in the way that his father was. This was similar to what he wrote about in this essay, with the idea of trying to discover his identity through two very different cultures. I liked the essay style of memoir writing because it was short and simple but still reflective. It didn't have to go into too much detail to get the point across. From a journalistic perspective, I liked this piece, because being concise is something that we have been told to do in my journalism classes, so I liked how he wrote a very powerful essay without a ton of words.

I also enjoyed George Watsky's "How to Ruin Everything" video. I liked the video with the narrator's voice in the background. The video was fairly simple, which made it easy to focus on the words and how the images and words flowed together. His descriptions of the world around him and his travels were very detailed without being boring, but you could hear in his voice how tired he was when he was talking about certain things, such as his commute in Boston. I liked this way of storytelling much more than I thought I would. I usually like reading and letting my imagination picture the narrator and the environment, but I actually think that the video made me pay more attention to the words. Hearing his voice and seeing his face all while hearing the narration, which felt like his inner monologue, made this really interesting to listen to.