The Process

Just under a year ago I woke up with a sense of dread and a need to write that feeling down. It came out messily and rushed, mirroring the state of paranoia, anger, and frustration I found myself in. Taking the form of a poem, I wrote down what it felt like to be a young woman during the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

This poem was deeply personal to me — serving its purpose of letting me voice my frustrations even if it was just to myself. I didn’t necessarily need to share my perspective, but writing them down allowed me to collect everything going through my brain and try to make sense of it. What was once personal, I decided to push the boundaries with, and worked throughout the Sweetland Minor in Writing gateway course to extend beyond just my scope.

Throughout my writing process this semester I inadvertently focused on changing my audience from just myself to be a lot more widespread. In my first phase, I transformed my poem into an opinion piece that could be published in a newspaper. In my second phase I outlined a zine that more aligned with what my poem’s first form was and made it more visually pronounced. With these three different genres, my audience and message changed.

The Opinion Article

When writing this opinion piece, I wanted to mirror a the articles that I see at The Michigan Daily, a student-run independent newspaper at the University of Michigan. For the professional publication I was trying to adhere to a broad market of consumers, to which my narrative was dimmed down and made less explicit. When writing this piece I often confronted my piece with the questions of: how is my opinion different from the rest? What was my hot take? I had limited (if any at all) experience in writing an opinion piece for a large publication, so it was difficult to understand the stakes of my perspective that had first just been a poem for myself. My audience for this experiment were those at the University of Michigan who agreed (or didn’t) with my take on abortion rights. I wanted to appeal to women or people affected by this battle for bodily autonomy and connect this community of people struggling with the same thing. My problem was I had my own personal feelings on this issue, but I felt I lacked a certain amount of credibility on the subject since I had never gotten an abortion myself.

The Zine

For my next experiment, I went with the less strict genre of the zine. Zines are also published works of opinion, but they are self produced instead of published through an organization or business. They do not need any organization except the individual who creates it, and is an extremely accessible and creative way to share your voice. This genre perfectly aligns with my motivations behind this poem and the impact I want it to have. My audience has not changed much from the past experiment, but I think my impact has. When writing the opinion piece for a published paper, I had a hard time with my credibility and stakes on the issue. It often felt like my voice was less substantial because it didn’t have anything new to say. When writing for a professional paper, you want to stand out and draw people in — I just wasn’t sure my article was doing anything new. But where I saw that as a weakness for my opinion paper, I almost found that a strength for my zine. I wanted my zine to highlight the unity that so many people have when it comes to abortion. Our unique stories are our own, but I would argue are not as unique as we might think Woman after woman — person after person — experience the same hardships no one should ever have to go through. Through the zine I wanted to highlight my own voice, but I wanted to extend this further to be bigger than my voice. Because it is.

The Other Voices

This project might have been created by me, but it would not have been possible without the sources linked below.

For designs of my zine, I leaned a lot on available photos, designs, and starting points from Pinterest. The sources online are truly unlimited, allowing my vision to really come to fruition. Images used for my zine, as well as the website, can all be found linked below in my personally curated Pinterest board.

My final project could not have been complete without narratives outside of my own, so I knew I needed to incorporate the stories that were different than mine and the same, the new and the old. Along with the stories are facts that cannot be disputed, in which my sources are also linked. Below you'll be brought to where I found these stories and facts, giving you a chance to explore beyond what I show you here.