‘Tis the season to be jolly! New York City has entered the festive season, with the Rockefeller Christmas tree now standing proudly and the Bryant Park Christmas Market (which resembles Santa’s village) all set up. This has been accompanied by lows of one degrees Celcius (it’s negative one degrees as I write this…); a distinct contrast to the heat back home.
Commencing the Book Section
We started our second last segment this week, the Books Section, which has been focused on exploring and developing our unique voices as writers. Led by writer, author and Educator, Joss Lake, we’ve spent the week developing our own writing voice and looking at ways marginalised communities have been silenced and examining how they are fighting to be heard.
As part of this, we visited The MET again to see the exhibit Before We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room, which pays homage to Seneca Village – a flourishing nineteenth-century community of predominantly Black landowners and tenants that was seized to make way for what we now know as Central Park.
We also visited the New York Public Library (NYPL) to view their Special Collections, which has only recently been made available to the public. The NYPL collection includes items such as a lock of Beethoven’s hairHair, Charles Dickens writing desk and chair, Virginia Woolf’s walking stick and the animal toys that inspired Winnie the Pooh. During our visit, we also checked out the iconic Rose Main Reading Room, which is one of the most beautiful libraries in the world.
Our Guest Speaker this week was writer and author, Daphne Palasi Andreades, whose debut novel Brown Girls was recently released. She discussed her journey finding her own writing voice and the creative process behind her novel. On Friday, we visited the P & T Knitwear Bookstore, where we practised our podcasting skills for our final assignment.Â
Outside of the ‘Classroom’
The rest of the week was peppered with fun activities including a poetry night, a tour of the United Nations Headquarters, ice skating (well, at least trying to) at Bryant Park, attending an Orchestra event at the beautiful Carnegie Hall, a walk through the Highline, and a screening of the final episode of Farmer Wants A Wife (yes, you read correctly). We finished the week off by watching the newly released movie, SHE SAID, which tells the story of the New York Times reporting that sparked the #MeToo Movement. It was a brilliant film (although we spent most of it squealing and pointing about all the same places in the building we’d been in!)
The time is certainly flying and we’re all frantically trying to soak up the last few weeks we have left!
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This opportunity was made possible with support from the Philip Leong Youth Programme.
