MULTIPLATFORM WRITING
At Brown, I found a writing home in the Literary Arts department with its rich interdisciplinary curriculum exchange with the English and Modern Culture and Media departments that allowed me to study writing and storytelling in all its forms from creative nonfiction (true stories, well told) to narrative journalism (fact-driven, research-based, often with interviews), fiction (stories, poetry, and screenwriting), and digital language arts that incorporate hypermedia, computer graphics, animation, and video.
Click on the "Sarah White” image to the right (or here) to read a story I wrote in a (tongue-in-cheek) narrative journalism style and here for a piece employing the vividly descriptive Ekphrasis style of prose.
Kindly click on the image for the full story.
As the president of Fashion@Brown, I set the editorial vision and calendar of the organization, in addition to identifying innovative and relevant content for our online features, social media, and website. Overseeing the editorial and social media departments, I also created organization style and branding guidelines and instructions for each project. Through these successful collaborations, we grew our platforms to reinforce Fashion@Brown’s position as the premier incubator of style and fashion industry knowhow on campus.
The writing of my honors thesis – a novella of historical fiction employing modernist conventions that challenge representations of reality and concepts of time and consciousness – has been a highpoint in my writing career but a love of storytelling in its various forms has been a narrative thread that has run throughout my life.
Looking back, my love of writing and content creation dates back to sixth grade when I launched a middle school beauty and style magazine fabulously named Fame! and assumed every role from editor-in-chief to features writer, advice column therapist, photographer, graphic designer, and publisher—or rather, photocopy machine operator. Selling for 25 cents apiece, Fame! had a distribution of 100 copies each month and ran for three years.
Around that time, I also tried my hand at penning a fantasy-adventure novel that grew to some 250 pages by eighth grade—at which point I scraped the first half and started again since my sixth-grade prose seemed so clearly inferior to my more “mature” eighth-grade style.
In high school, I was appointed editor-in-chief of my school’s literary magazine where I led the student staff in weekly reviews of classmates’ writings and artwork for inclusion in our annual publication, The Key. I was also the foremost contributor of stories and sketches.
Writing poetry was another favorite pastime and as a junior in high school, I was the “Short List Winner” for an environment poem in full rhyme that I submitted to the New York Browning Society Poetry High School Competition.
Winners were honored at the Society’s annual meeting at the historic National Arts Club in Manhattan (pictured at right), where we presented our work to the full membership.
Filmmaking was an irresistible extension of storytelling and after teaching myself Final Cut Pro as a youngster, a passion for visual storytelling was set in motion that has continued throughout my years at Brown.
From the writing and filming of creative shorts to research-based documentary style productions for classes, instructional how-tos for internships/work, and the documenting of my grandmother’s life, filmmaking is an expressive medium that has provided a creative outlet to explore, examine, and present issues in new and evocative ways.
A selection of films I’ve created can be viewed on my Vimeo page.