Finding Their Muse
When Eric Weintraub’s name was announced as first place winner for his short story “La Laguna” at USC’s 2013 Undergraduate Writers’ Conference, he turned to the student next to him, “Did they just say Eric Weintraub?”
Each year since he was a freshman, the senior majoring in narrative studies in USC Dornsife has entered his writing in the contest. This year, he had not only placed, but came in first in the creative writing category.
“It was surreal,” Weintraub said, “and very exciting.”
Weintraub was among approximately 300 USC students from 15 schools and 76 majors who participated in the writing conference. In all, 25 students were honored at the annual event. A first and second place winner and two honorable mentions were selected from four categories: analytical; research; professional writing/moral reasoning; and creative writing. First place winners in each category won $1,000, second place winners $500.
Winners of the Levan Ethics Essay Contest stand with Lyn Boyd-Judson (far left), director of the Levan Institute for Humanities and Ethics, housed in USC Dornsife. Sponsored by the institute, the award recognizes the best papers exploring a current ethical issue or analyses of recent ethics violations in a professional field. Photo by Heather Cartagena.
The 2013 Undergraduate Writers’ Conference took place April 2 in the Ronald Tutor Campus Center. The annual conference, cosponsored by the USC Office of Undergraduate Programs and the USC Dornsife Writing Program, is a celebration of student writers and their writing at USC. All undergraduates are invited to participate; their admission ticket to the event is a submission of their original written work.
Also at the conference, awards were presented for essays in contests sponsored by the Levan Institute for Humanities and Ethics, housed in USC Dornsife, and the USC Schwarzenegger Institute for State and Global Policy, housed in the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy.
The Levan Institute’s essay contest recognized the best papers exploring a current ethical issue or analyses of recent ethics violations in a professional field. For the Schwarzenegger Institute contest, each entry proposed a real-world solution to a serious policy challenge that would improve the lives of people and communities.
Weintraub’s short story “La Laguna” tells the tale of Hector, a former champion swimmer who escapes from Mexico to the United States to avoid the dangerous drug cartels in his hometown of San Juan Atenco, Puebla. However, Hector’s aspirations of achieving the American dream are quickly tempered by the reality of living in the country as an undocumented immigrant with little pay or opportunity for upward mobility.
The idea for the story bloomed when Weintraub took Jody Agius Vallejo’s sociology class “Immigrant America,” which examines the immigrant experience from migration to social integration. Learning about the hardships and frustrations immigrants encounter as they make their new lives in the U.S. resonated with him.
The theme of ethnic struggle cropped up again when Weintraub traveled to the Czech Republic and Germany through an Overseas Studies program. In Poland, he visited the Auschwitz death camp and in Germany, he went to the concentration camp in Dachau. The experience was profound.
It occurred to him that the stories of what was happening to Jews during the Holocaust emerged after the horrors were over, after World War II. This inspired Weintraub to express some of the injustices happening to undocumented immigrants now, while it is ongoing.
“I remember thinking, this is so horrible, no one really knew exactly what happened during the Holocaust until it was already over,” he said. A seed germinated for Weintraub: he would shed light on the experience of undocumented immigrants taking place in the U.S. through a series of short stories for his senior thesis.
“While it’s not on the scale of genocide or the Holocaust, immigration and customs officers in the U.S. are breaking into people’s homes and tearing families apart, sending people back across the border,” he said. “Rather than become an activist, I could express this injustice in another way. I could do what I really love, I could write about it.”
With funding from the Summer Undergraduate Research Fund (SURF), Weintraub traveled to Arizona to learn more about how immigrants are being treated there. He interviewed people from a number of immigrants’ rights groups, and opposing sides such as Joe Arpaio, a five-time elected sheriff of Maricopa County and well-known advocate for strict immigration law enforcement. From those interviews, he produced a series of short stories, which included “La Laguna.”
“Winning this competition taught me that hard work and persistence pay off,” Weintraub said, adding that he hopes to publish his senior thesis stories as a collection of short fictional works.
On April 2, the conference began with an hour-long discussion in which participants broke into small groups to talk about their writing submissions. Producer and television screenwriter Tim Hobert, whose credits include Scrubs and Spin City, delivered the keynote address, which was followed by a banquet dinner and awards ceremony.
Conference leader Norah Ashe-McNalley, associate professor in USC Dornsife’s Writing Program, said the event celebrates writing at the university.
“This conference is a way to reward students for the great writing they do on a daily basis,” Ashe-McNalley said. “We want students to know that their work matters, and that there is an intrinsic reward for intellectual engagement.”
Vellore Adithi called the conference “an amazing experience,” particularly the exchange of ideas that took place during the discussion groups.
Adithi, a senior with a double major in anthropology and linguistics and a minor in gender studies in USC Dornsife, won first place in the professional writing/moral reasoning category. She wrote her essay — which explored problems that arise in humanitarian work — during a study abroad course on global development in Edinburgh, Scotland.
“It was great to have access to my peers in all sorts of disciplines, doing all different types of writing, in one place,” Adithi said. She enjoyed hearing about the different writing processes.
“The strategies we use to get to the endpoint were so completely different for each writer,” she said.
2013 Undergraduate Student Writers’ Conference Winners
Analytical Essay
1st Prize: Adam Phillips, “Neon Cowboy: A Brief History and Analysis of The Man with No Name As Seen in Hammett, Kurosawa, Leone, and Nicolas Winding Refn’s Film, Drive”
2nd Prize: Amanda Griffiths, “Ends and Meanings: ‘Si Guarda al Fine’ and Machiavellian Virtue”
Honorable Mention: Nichole Delaura, “Countercultural Noir”
Researched Essay
1st Prize: Roza Petrosyan, “Voiceless Heroes: Female Resistance during the Armenian Genocide”
2nd Prize: Jordan Nowaskie, “Post-Porn Culture: The Effects of Sexual Media on Social Relationships, Identities, & Desire”
Honorable Mention: Kelsey Bradshaw, Jason Finkelstein and Nicholas Kosturos, “The 16 Years Crisis: Security, Geopolitics, and Conflict in the Arctic”
Honorable Mention: Evan Cohen and Nithya Kubendran, “Hemodynamic Pressure Sensors as a Diagnostic Tool in Physiological Monitoring”
Professional Writing / Moral Reasoning
1st Prize: Vellore Adithi, “Beyond Victimhood, Relief, and Bare Life: Assessing the Pitfalls and Perils of Humanitarianism in Global Development”
2nd Prize: Maheen Sahoo, “Kant and Hume: A Tale of Two Philosophers”
Honorable Mention: Emily Holmes, “Commodifying Humanity: The Ethics of an Open Market for Human Organs”
Creative Work
1st Prize: Eric Weintraub, “La Laguna”
2nd Prize: Sean Fitz-Gerald, “The Boogeymen”
Honorable Mention: Hayden Bennett, “Furniture Music”
Honorable Mention: James (August) Luhrs, “Margaret”
Schwarzenegger Institute for State and Global Policy
1st Prize: Ambrose Soehn, “Why Providing Every Student a Quality Musical Education Makes So Much Sense”
2nd Prize: Kim Vu, “Learning to Choose – Who Decides and How to Decide about Advance Directives”
Honorable Mention: Nahel Kapadia, “Palliative Care: An Alternative to Physician-Assisted Suicide”
Levan Institute Ethics Essay Contest
Global Ethics
Francesca Bessey, “Free To Die: The Sexist Paradox of Women’s Suicide Terror”
Social Justice
Candice Tardif, “Allergic Inmates: Unheard and Unsafe”
Personal Ethics
Paige Sorrentino, “Dante’s Inferno—Canto 12.5”
Professional Ethics
Uriel Kim, “No More Pointing Fingers: Science and Regulation Needed for Fingerprinting’s Future”
Overall Winner
Marissa Roy, “The UN’s 8 Millenium Development Goals and the Legal Status of Distributive Justice”