Category: Meta

Introducing mini memoirs

I’m starting to work on a series of mini memoirs — short, ~250-word recollections of my personal experiences. I’m currently writing about my experiences with race and ethnicity in college, but I’ll probably branch out in the future.

These mini memoirs are quite a change from my usual long essays and stories. That makes them challenging because I have to distill everything I’m thinking into a few hundred words, something that doesn’t leave much room for digression or story or character development. But that also allows me to explore many more themes and experiences than I’d usually get to, and it allows me to isolate ideas from the murky soup that is this world. They’re also a different experience for readers, I’d imagine: you can digest them more easily because they’re so short and direct, but they’re more challenging to make sense of because there’s less explanation.

I drafted about 50 ideas; I narrowed those down to about a dozen, which I’ll publish as I clean them up. Check out the mini memoirs I’ve published so far. Hope you enjoy.

An introduction

A massive Turkish bazaar

Hi. My name’s Neel. I’m nineteen and I go to Harvard. I like technology and baseball and skateboarding and talking to people.

I just finished my freshman year and agreed with my friend Sara that I’ll write something every week this summer. I took a freshman-only seminar where I wrote an 18-page-long short story (it was supposed to be 4 pages), and through that I discovered that writing is an incredible way to discover something about yourself and start conversations with people about what you’re feeling, things that are really hard to do otherwise. So I thought it’d be great to write some essays and reflections and short stories and publish them here.
I’m interested in exploring these concepts:

  • Identity: what determines who we are, and how much should we let things define us?
  • Ethnicity: how does it shape your identity, your interactions with others, and your mindset?
  • Relationships: how do they work, especially in the context of college?
  • America: what does it mean to be American, and what’s unique about this American life?
  • People: what makes people tick, and how do they grow over time?

Continue reading An introduction