Introductory Note
Hello! My name is Amanda Chan, and I study film at Freestyle Academy. During my two years at Freestyle, I’ve worked on numerous expository and narrative filmmaking and writing projects where I’ve strengthened my abilities in storytelling and collaboration. Outside of Freestyle, I love baking, theatre, and true crime podcasts.
In my Showcase, I’ll be presenting two pieces of writing that I’ve made here at Freestyle: my lyrical essay and my personal essay. My lyrical essay focuses on a Chinese immigrant who moved to the United States from England and dealt with racism from a young age. With the information that my subject gave me from their own personal accounts, I was able to focus in on a specific moment. The second piece of writing I’ll be presenting is my personal essay, which is a reflective essay on my experience with being diagnosed with type one diabetes. I was diagnosed with type one diabetes late in my freshman year of high school and had to make major lifestyle changes, especially relating to food.
I’d like feedback on how to make my writing more engaging and how to best evoke emotion through my diction. Did the format of the lyrical essay work to my advantage? Did my personal essay have an effective conclusion, or did it seem rushed? I’d love to make these two pieces as strong as I can, as I think their respective content is important and close to me as a writer.
After I graduate from Freestyle Academy, I’ll be heading up to Lewis and Clark College to study rhetoric and media studies. I’m very excited to be surrounded by a diverse community of people in such a creative and artistic place like Portland. I feel like I can learn so much from the people around me, and I’m eager to find many opportunities for writing and publishing while I’m there.
Feel free to contact me! My email is: amandachan0102@gmail.com
Showcase Pieces
My lyric essay is an expository piece written about a Chinese immigrant who moved to the United States from England. I interviewed my subject and focused in on a specific anecdote he told me about living in San Francisco and dealing with racism from his peers. Since the lyrical essay format is very open ended and experimental, I decided to further convey the emotions of being trapped, uncomfortable, and suffocated.
I enjoyed writing my lyric essay a lot, as I felt like it was a powerful piece of writing that could impact other people who read and identified with it. I discovered how versatile writing could be and how writing doesn’t have to be linear, traditional, or conventional.
My personal essay is a reflection on my experience with being diagnosed with type one diabetes. Being diagnosed with this disease was a huge shock to me and I felt like it was a story that I needed to write not only because diabetic representation is woefully underdeveloped, but because I needed a way to process my recent diagnosis. I decided to open with a very unconventional image of my fridge being a sort of temptation and to provide the reader with explicit images that really personified my relationship with food before my diagnosis.
Writing my personal essay was extremely cathartic for me, and it felt like a subject that I want to write about more and more. Growing up, I was exposed to terrible representations of diabetes in media where it existed purely as a joke. After being diagnosed with diabetes, its become even more apparent to me that even my closest friends don’t know the first thing about it, and I want to remove that ignorance and educate people on the reality of type one diabetes.