Description:
What are we looking for?
We give you the same instructions that we gave our authors. From your
experience living or working in the world's poorest countries (or poor
regions of developed nations), tell about a personal journey you have
had doing enterprise solutions to poverty. Teach us something about
your work, a useful experience, a person you met, or a framework you
have developed or used. Tell us about something you contributed, or
more interestingly, some action or assumption that turned out to be
wrong and what you learned from it. Give us your beliefs, goals,
attitudes, and assumptions. Do not settle just for self- expression,
though; give us high-level craft and try for art. Your writing can be
loose, exploratory, and digressive; it can be about failure with or
without redemption. But locate yourself in the solitary endeavor of
writing, at the crossing of the self and others, process and outcome,
experience and meaning. Recognize that what you write is important. It
shows what you do, and who you want to be.
Submissions should be 2000 words or less; should be well-written and a
pleasure to read; deeply introspective and probe the author's emotions
and journey within development, globalization, and enterprise
solutions to poverty. Take a theme from the book, or from life, and
make it your own by infusing it with your insights and your story.
We believe that the short essay format is a powerful and underutilized
mechanism in development thinking. It is a versatile medium that
requires succinct, insightful writing that can be published in
multiple venues. We look forward to your submissions.
The following excerpt from the Introduction to "In the River They
Swim" further examines the essay form, and what we hope competition
authors will aspire to.
Why the Essay?
The essay represents a long proud tradition of a humble form, that of
Montaigne, Bacon, Johnson, Woolf, and Orwell, to cite a few of its
masters. And though we cannot pretend to reach the height of their
eloquence, we do attempt to take the rules of their form and to apply
it to the domain of economic and human development - specifically to
enterprise solutions to poverty.
We asked ourselves several questions: What if we changed everything
about how we work? What if we used a "second - class genre", the
essay, that reached the height of its popularity a century and a half
ago and that some have called the “formless form”? What if we adapted
the premise that we can hardly advocate the merits of change without
changing ourselves first? What if we stopped preaching and eschewed
the epic pretension of advisors to nations, and revealed our greater
discontentment with our ability to change the world than with the
world itself? What if we displayed all our warts: our vanity,
exaggerations, misplaced hopes, rage, and ignominious failures? If
failure speeds up learning, would it help to show others what worked
and did not work for us? Could it help others who want to try to help
the world to feel grounded and less lonesome and freakish? If success
comes after learning to fail fast, frequently, and most importantly,
originally, would writing essays be a start?
Essays allow us to become the crucible in which our own experience is
tested. There is a personal nature to our work that rigorous analysis
alone cannot explain. We have the freedom to explore, in these pieces,
a learning process that is iterative, messy, and sometimes deeply
introspective. The essay is supposed to be digressive, reflecting the
sloppy process of how one learns; more than any other genre, it shows
the learning taking place, almost in real time. We want to show life
itself as it is forming on the pages. Though some of the authors
achieve it better than others, there is merit in the struggle that
each has faced.
These contributors come from and know every part of the world; they
speak over twenty languages including Swahili, Wolof, Pushtu, and
Kinyarwanda, but that is not what was important to us. What was
important was whether they could turn an eye inward to find and know
better places in the mind; to know that, while education exists
outside of oneself in the mundane world, each person is an education
unto herself, interminably engaged in the apprenticeship of knowing
himself better, through his or her relationship with others and, in
some instances, with God.
We, the editors of this book, gave the contributors the following
instructions: from your experience working in the world's poorest
countries, tell about a personal journey you have had doing enterprise
solutions to poverty. Teach us something about the work, a useful
experience, or a framework you have developed or used. Tell us about
something you contributed that turned out to be wrong. Give us your
beliefs, goals, attitudes, and assumptions. Do not settle just for
self- expression, though; give us a high level of craft and try for
art. Your writing can be loose, exploratory, and digressive; it can be
about failure with or without redemption. But locate yourself in the
solitary endeavor of writing, at the crossing of the self and others,
process and outcome, experience and meaning. Recognize that it is
important what you write. It shows what you do, who you want to be.
You can be confident that some development experts will read our essay
book, but will some lovers of the essay read our development book?
Applicable Majors:
All Fields of Study Website
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