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" data-medium-file="https://i0.wp.com/www.michigandaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/ORIGIN-10-1-scaled.jpg?fit=1024%2C683&ssl=1" data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/www.michigandaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/ORIGIN-10-1-scaled.jpg?fit=780%2C520&ssl=1" /> Origins, when we manage to unearth them, seldom clarify the cobbled nature of the present. Instead, they often string us along a path of imagined priorities, allowing us to feel qualified in recognizing how the past must inform our current agendas. In the spirit of the Origin Edition, we write to our readership as the editorial team of The Statement — The Michigan Daily’s weekly magazine — with our own origins under the microscope. The Statement we’ve inherited has, by nature of being a college publication, undergone nearly seven decades of change, spurred by institutional shifts, individual leaders’ interests and commitments, and campus and social upheaval. We’ve inherited a dynamic, mercurial force.
But The Statement wasn’t always “The Statement.” Students wanting to pen editorial and features writing did so for the then-labeled “weekend magazine,” which seemed to have dipped in and out of existence since The Daily’s own inception in 1890 — that is, until August of 1963, when then-editor Gloria Bowles affirmed the magazine’s presence, promising a bi-monthly appearance. In the years following, the magazine would shorten its title to a curt “WEEKEND” and feature photo essays, fashion and literature editions, and even initiate a witty “junk drawer.”
Then, in September of 2005, tucked below The Daily’s masthead in a pithy “From the Editor’s” note, then-Editor in Chief Jason Z. Pesick and then-Magazine Editor Doug Wernert announced the inception of The Statement, which would “feature more in-depth reporting on issues affecting both the University and the city of Ann Arbor. It is more intelligent,” they continued, “with the goal of exposing new ideas and information to readers in a magazine format.”
In the same edition, planted above The Daily’s masthead, read: “Weekend Magazine Is Dead — Long Live The Statement.” Their choice in language may seem a curiously hostile rhetoric to employ, but Wernert and Pesick would oversee the greatest change to The Daily’s feature-writing capabilities since the advent of the Weekend Magazine. What they understood was a veritable need for focused, exploratory journalism, with an opportunity for the creative to make its way into the fold.
Beyond the editorial shift, the magazine’s name-change to The Statement paid homage to The Port Huron Statement, a founding text of 1960s counterculture, and authored by The Daily’s own Tom Hayden. In a 2021 Statement article by former-columnist Leah Leszczynski, Wernert and Pesick would clarify that “using the Port Huron Statement as the magazine’s eponym was not necessarily due to ideological admiration for the document.” Yet, their choice in namesake seems hardly incidental.
Hayden, a U-M alum and former Editor in Chief of The Daily in 1960, went on to found the Students for a Democratic Society, prompt JFK’s proposal of the Peace Corps on the steps of the Michigan Union and serve as pallbearer after the president’s assassination. He also inspired President Johnson’s infamous “Great Society” speech and served in the California State Assembly, while still managing to contribute to The Daily.
In June of 1962, Hayden would travel ninety-eight miles east of Ann Arbor along with nearly four dozen other members of SDS to compose the Port Huron Statement, working for five days straight to perfect a document that would become the New Left’s founding manifesto. Their chosen site — Port Huron, Michigan — sits as an idle waterfront town, starkly unexceptional in character yet redeemable by nature of its proximity to Lake Huron.
Our editorial team made the same ninety-eight mile drive. We wanted to immerse ourselves in the environment Hayden and SDS had selected as a site of change, even if the site itself seemed to be nothing more than a matter of convenience, a lake to swim in during breaks from the writing sessions. But what we found, both unexpectedly and not, contextualizes our commitment to the Statement as host to a similar kind of journalistic fervor that Hayden embodied.
In the following sections, we make our values as editors explicit, examine the contemporary condition of The Statement and its duties, as well as the role of creative writing and journalism today more broadly. Here, we affirm The Statement’s commitment to producing work that carries the assuredness of fact, the depth and liberty of prose, and the ardor of poetry.
Taylor Schott: How creative writing is and isn’t nurtured
The last few decades have been bleak for the writing world. Beloved literary magazines — even those that have been in circulation since the mid ’90s, like the New York City-based Bookforum — have shuttered, or are struggling to stay afloat. The number of college students matriculating into the humanities is down markedly. Print journalism, too, is facing considerable changes.
Online publishing platforms such as Substack, which have won the favor of some novelists, are seeing a rise in popularity. These platforms are providing a good, necessary service. But, as New Yorker writer Kyle Chaka aptly notes, “There is no replacement for institutions that cultivate a point of view over time.” We know that magazines are seldom profitable. They survive while they can, and close promptly when they can’t.
Creative writing housed within a newspaper faces an entirely different set of obstacles. First, the style guide: every respectable paper has one, and every respectable writer defies one. It is in publications like these where you can hyperlink to all hell, and where jumpy, pixelated advertisements crowd out your paragraphs. It is a land dominated by typically provocative, SEO-bred titles, and where athletic, concise analysis takes precedence over vaguer, more sparing, language.
Of course, consistency benefits any organization — particularly a newspaper, where words are currency. But to consider a style guide as biblical — to let it have the last say — is to deeply misunderstand the work that sections such as The Statement aim for.
The forces propelling journalism, too: truth, accuracy, objectivity — where the “I” is meant to dissolve, if it exists at all, behind the curtain of reportage — seem diametrically opposed to the motivations underlining creative writing: establishing voice, patiently crafting a plot, experimenting with syntax. Following these tenets tend to require committing a few journalistic sins.
The borders between fiction and nonfiction are, admittedly, massively less interesting to me than the actual language used to define, delineate, and designate how we experience the world. And I am, of course, full of passionate bias. But how not to be?
These observations seem to circle a rather unavoidable question: does creative writing even belong in journalism? Some would go so far as to say that the two are entirely different species, a rhetoric which I find polarizing, if accurate. But in what world can a term like creative journalism be announced and not immediately register as paradoxical?
It’s been said that The Statement is not a literary journal, either. It’s true, we’re not. We have some funds, institutional backing, and boast a wide regional audience. Very few literary journals — the exceptions being The Paris Review and The New Yorker, though the latter is technically a magazine — are afforded these kinds of privileges.
But imagine if literary journals — or the kind of writing that they attract — were awarded the same resources, credibility, and public fervor of legacy publications? Print journalism isn’t exactly lucrative, this we know, but far more people readily accept the idea of journalism as a public good than they will the same of literary journals.
So I land, however uneasily, on this axis of priorities. I’m not a journalist; I’m a writer who has happened to find herself at a place with the resources to support good writing. Any opportunity I have to smuggle fictive qualities through the vehicle of journalism, and to be frank about my commitment to emotional truth as opposed to public record, I feverishly seize.
Reese Martin: The story of an “I”
I showed up to the newsroom for our 9:00 a.m. departure to Port Huron with nothing more than my phone, wallet, a pen and a singular piece of paper folded in my coat pocket. Meanwhile, my lovely co-editors carried travel-sized notebooks, pens for their thoughts, protein bars, a swiss army knife, multiple tissues and, of course, The Daily’s signed copy of “The Port Huron Statement.” When I woke up that morning, I suppose, the only thing I truly deemed necessary was that I made it to the car on time and intentionally put myself in the “I” behind my narrative.
As a writer, I struggle to think of myself as a character — an entity that must be made real to the reader. It’s easy to let my personhood hide behind the implications of a story when the alternative threatens to expose the raw identity buried within the all-encompassing “I” of my sentences. In the words of American essayist and fiction writer, Philip Lopate, I’d rather let my readers perceive the “I” of my narrative as a “slender telephone pole standing in the sentence, trying to catch a few signals.” Yet, as a Statement columnist turned editor, I’ve been taught to appreciate the characterization of my “I.” Those who used this most personal pronoun before me had the courage to reach for the intangible threads of a story and pull at the seams between fiction and reality. They used “I” to fill the gap between storytelling and journalism — immersing themselves in the heart of a revolutionary genre and time in our history.
Joan Didion was a force to be reckoned with in the 1960s. As a pioneer in the new journalism genre, Joan Didion’s “I” carried the weight of her voice in each of her stories. According to Mark Z. Muggli, professor Emeritus of English at Luther College, “Her ‘I’ goes beyond the intentionally neutral voice of the daily news reporter — it is a created, shifting character who speaks memorably and who sometimes anatomizes her own responses.” Likewise, author Katie Rophie told The New York Times in an interview, “She managed to channel the spirit of the 1960s and ’70s through her own highly idiosyncratic and personal — that is, seemingly personal — writing…with her slightly paranoid, slightly hysterical, high-strung sensibility. It was a perfect conjunction of the writer with the moment.” Didion showed the world how to let an author’s voice and the implications of a story work together to create an understanding beyond the whos and whats of standard reporting. She paved the way for journalists to make meaning in the nuanced details of a subject and dig into the forces that draw readers in.
Though Tom Hayden’s role as a ’60s counterculture activist was not as a narrative journalist like Didion, his work in the newsroom put him at the center of a movement and voice in the era. The Port Huron Statement, as a manifesto, is the culmination of student ideals and Hayden’s talent as an author. He too felt the weight of his voice in the narratives he chose to write — and so do “I” and so should we.
Sarah Akaaboune: To write is to heal
The first person to edit and publish my work was Neema Roshania Patel for The Washington Post. Neema died last October and I miss knowing a world with her in it. She believed in me when not many editors from places like The Washington Post believed in 18-year-old girls, when the world rarely ever made an effort to see us or hear us or believe us, to give our words the value and weight they so truly deserved. We spent an entire afternoon working on an essay entitled “At 18, I’m facing a choice that will define my adulthood: Should I wear hijab?” There is a picture in that piece of my grandmother, and we weren’t yet heavy with all the things that come with living. I still loved girlhood and she still loved me. I remember calling my grandmother the day my story was published and screaming into the phone “GRANDMA GRANDMA YOU’RE IN THE WASHINGTON POST CAN YOU BELIEVE IT? OH HOW I MISS YOU AND I CAN’T WAIT TO SEE YOU AGAIN.” My grandmother died three weeks later, the night before I began my freshman year of college. I never did get to see her again.
I joined The Michigan Daily because Neema saw something in me, and because I missed my grandmother and mostly because I so desperately wanted to heal. I spent my first two years at The Daily at Michigan in Color where I wrote “To Restitute,” one of the most important essays I have ever written.
In it I wrote, “writing about your pain is a complicated matter; it demands courage and bravery and power of will even if what little you have left is directed towards living instead. It is an inherently violent act, in that you must choose how much of it the reader will bear, choose how much they can handle, choose what they’ll think afterwards and choose how they’ll feel, choose which pieces of you they’ll keep forever,” because people listen when you write in a way they never truly did before.
The Statement is the sort of place that finds you and only when you’re truly ready. It is when healing is no longer entirely a solitary endeavor, when healing becomes about telling the world’s stories instead, the kind of stories that no one really seems to be able to find a place for anywhere else, stories about all the ways we love and grieve, all the ways we come undone and all the ways we learn to live again. The Statement was founded because journalism has always been about people first, about narratives and places and lovely wonderful ways of living that have so desperately needed a voice. There is something about The Statement that is so profoundly humane, how our writers find meaning in the most mundane of places, in fake IDs and train stations and fairy doors, and mostly, in the places that people never seem to look twice.
John Jackson: On protest as a collective action problem
Tom Hayden’s work reached me by fortunate accident, carried on the wing of a friend who’d just watched “The Trial of the Chicago 7,” and assured me its fast-paced, witty drama was well-suited to my own more political impulses. Writer and director Aaron Sorkin paints protagonist Hayden (Eddie Redmayne, “Les Misérables”) as a passionate but straight-laced political activist, and follows the chaos that unfolds at a protest turned riot.
After watching the film, I immediately called my father, who listened patiently while I explained, frantic, how there’d been a revolution: the New Left crashed down on the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. I’d missed it. The year was 1968.
I should’ve been there. At The Daily, with Tom Hayden. In the streets, defending friends from police brutality. Atop lampposts, shouting with a megaphone.
“Too bad there’s nothing to protest anymore,” said my father.
His tone implied I needed to take the hint: injustice hadn’t disappeared, only my peers’ will to spark revolution.
If protests from the left quieted, so too did I. If The Daily reported in dignified silence, I stayed my hand from more extreme words that needed writing.
Tom Hayden marched for the lives of the approximately 58,000 American soldiers who died in the Vietnam War. When 7,000 American soldiers died in Iraq and Afghanistan, Americans marched again (along with Tom Hayden). In the last five years, police officers have killed more than 5,000 Americans.
Now I wonder, how many lives does it take to wake up a generation?
To claim a complete absence of modern protest would be not only negligent, but outright disrespectful. Rather, I contend the relevance of a protest to an individual consists of its population and proximity.
Population’s inclusion as a factor stems from the idea of the collective action problem, the social dilemma taught in every introductory political science course. For those uninitiated, professors introduce the collective action problem as a catch-all excuse for poor citizen behavior, including tax evasion, fossil fuel use and draft dodging. The lesson quickly morphs, however, into an oversimplified explanation of lackluster voter turnout: If everyone votes, one vote is meaningless. If one vote is meaningless, why bother voting?
Needless to say, a more harmful theory has never been devised.
What, then, could one vote save, standing against millions?
Everything.
Hayden, via Sorkin, grapples with the unparalleled importance of voter turnout in “The Trial of The Chicago 7” when fellow revolutionary Abbie Hoffman asks him,
“Winning elections is the first thing on your wishlist? Equality, justice, education, poverty, and progress, they’re second?”
Hayden replies, “If you don’t win elections, it doesn’t matter what’s second.”
With a stable population of voters and protestors in hand, a given movement impacts an individual largely based on his or her proximity. Often, as a logical matter of convenience, people protest in the communities where they live. Such protests, however, are not usually in full view of those with the power to enact change. Hence, citizens travel to where their voices might be heard loudest: at the White House gates, the European Council or the Democratic National Convention.
If students march on the Diag, who will hear us but ourselves?
As Hayden said, “If our blood is going to flow, let it flow all over the city.”
Appraisals from Port Huron
When our editorial team decided to make the one-and-a-half-hour drive to Port Huron, Mich., where Hayden and nearly four dozen members of SDS composed the 1962 manifesto, our ambitions were high and our expectations higher still: we imagined unearthing documents that our peers back in Ann Arbor could envy, we envisioned deep revelations, hours spent dissecting the power of good journalism.
But when we arrive at the town’s main drag, the cold is clarifying, and reality quickly arranges itself before us. The area resembles our own, disappointingly-familiar Midwestern hometowns, and the only other people out on the sidewalks are buzzed, middle-aged celebrants of a St. Patrick’s Day bar crawl. Those who do engage us in conversation — shopowners and locals — surprise us by claiming no recognition at the mention of Hayden’s name, or of the Port Huron Statement. Out on the street again, we dissolve into laughter, imagining that we’ve come to the wrong Port Huron.
In speaking with one of the shopowners, though, we learn that many of the museums in Port Huron are free, renewing our energies. The nearest is the Port Huron Museum at Carnegie Center, which we come upon in a matter of minutes — a building that, in the snow’s bleak expanse, is easy to miss.
The museum spans four floors, and is crammed with naval artifacts: yellowed maps and archived ship logs, wheel helms to spin and impossibly heavy copper diving helmets — but no mentions of Tom Hayden, or of The Port Huron Statement. When we approach the museum’s receptionist, hopeful with inquiry, she delicately shields her unfamiliarity with intrigue.
We pass the signed copy of The Port Huron Statement, which we’ve brought along — I think as a kind of talisman — over to her. She receives it tenderly, slides a business card for the museum’s archivist over the lip of the desk in return, and promptly begins to thumb a binder full of donation sheets to serve as an ad-hoc information request form.
I think we’ve gone into the museum — the town, really — with higher, or perhaps outsized, expectations of the town’s interest in Hayden’s legacy. Maybe people who start civil unrest don’t often get statues. After all, we arrived to find the site of a revolution swept away by a forlorn ocean of parking lots.
Having exhausted the downtown area, we head to Lakeport State Park — formerly a United Auto Workers (UAW) retreat — and where The Port Huron Statement, over the course of five tireless days, was written. We hear the water before we can see it, and those of us with low-top shoes begin to lament the existence of low-top shoes. Mud splashes our ankles as we trudge along the path and towards the shore.
Finding a seat on which to hold conversation proves more challenging; no surface is without snow. Finally having located a log to sit on, we waste no time in jumping into the conversation we’ve been building up to all day. We playfully lament the cyclical nature of college journalism, brief iterations of leadership which make it difficult to affect any long-standing change. What it comes down to, it seems, is trust. Inspiration. Subtler, smoother impressions that can’t be codified, leadership inherited.
Where to go from here? We can shepherd our signed copy of The Port Huron Statement back to the newsroom in Ann Arbor; we can look fondly back on the pictures we took and the notes we scrawled standing up, but we hadn’t wound up really changing anything. We didn’t protest at the Democratic National Convention, or start a new cultural movement. We couldn’t even have the Oxford comma added to The Daily’s style guide.
We’d driven out to Port Huron though, and told a few people about Hayden’s legacy. We’d documented our experience, and our priorities here in writing, so that our efforts might turn up in a decade or two when someone else goes digging through the archives.
Even if we went to Port Huron and nobody knew who Tom Hayden was — which nobody did — the point was that we knew who he was, and that we cared enough to find out.
The Statement Editorial Staff, Taylor Schott, Reese Martin, Sarah Akaaboune and John Jackson, can be reached at statement@michigandaily.com.