Statement of Discovery

Discovery Rebrand Pitch - Poster 10
Originally uploaded by the last mixtape

Here's an example of a Statement of Discovery:

When I began this project, I wanted to explore the 30 years of friendship I’ve had with my childhood girlfriends. My main focus, I thought, was going to center on two recent instances that pulled the six of us closer together and so I began my research by searching for genre sources based on those two incidents: my one girlfriend's pregnancy and my other friend's recent diagnosis.

I chose my first set of genre sources from my personal documents, pulling from electronic sources such as online conversations, emails, Facebook threads, and articles and also a hardcopy source, in the form of a thank you note. Beginning with a visual source, a picture of my friends and I taken at a baby shower a few weeks ago, I set out to discover the basis of this long lasting friendship by first analyzing the details of that still image. From there, I moved on to comparing two textual sources related to the photo in an attempt to further the meaning behind the image and connect it to my topic at large.

At that point, I realized that I had spent pages talking about my friends but I had only gone into detail about a few of them, so I decided to shift my focus for a moment and describe each of the girls and how we met. I felt this was imperative since a significant amount of attention had been focused on the longevity of our friendship; I want to afford my reader an opportunity to meet each girl as I did, all those years ago.

At that point, I sourced additional genres because I knew I wanted to segue from the role my friend's pregnancy played in reuniting our friendship circle to the role our other friend's diagnosis had in strengthening it. I turned to a well known literary friendship, that of deceased poet Lucy Grealy and current contemporary fiction novelist, Ann Patchett.

Their story served as a meaningful transition between the two parts of the story I was trying to tell and in the end, I discovered that it was the second story that was the most powerful part of the project, which is why I spent 13 pages writing the story that she told to me.

I believe that story says everything about friendship that needs to be said; the discovery and the telling of that story is that makes this project meaningful. This project afforded me an opportunity to take time to explore something that is often taken for granted - the value of our personal relationships and in the end, I've realized just how fortunate I am to have such a lovely circle of friends.