Sampsonia Way Magazine

I am currently an intern at Sampsonia Way Magazine: "a Pittsburgh-based non-profit online magazine that writes to support persecuted writers around the world and to celebrate literary freedom of expression, sponsored by City of Asylum/Pittsburgh, a program for giving residency to writers in exile from other countries."

(Photo: Sampsonia Way)

This is the house I enter every day of my internship. I don't know what is written on the walls except that it is a "House Poem" by Huang Xiang, a Chinese poet and first residence of the City of Asylum/Pittsburgh project.

I don't think I could do the magazine justice just by explaining it as I can. But I'll try.

City of Asylum is a residence program for writers in exile from their own countries for about 2 years, which has included Chinese poet Huang Xiang, Salvadoran writer Horacio Castellanos Moya, and Burmese writer Khet Mar who I sometimes see.The program also supports reading events by many, many international writers. The Sampsonia Way magazine thus aims to further the promotion of free speech by reporting on its persecution everywhere around the world. It's important to give voice to those who are forcibly silenced. Besides Sampsonia's Way full issues, it also features a section called "Literary Voices", which involve interviews with or poetry from writers all over the world. Finally, Sampsonia Way also publishes Daily Posts, which has often been the assignment for us interns.

For a Daily Post, I usually have to read news articles from human rights and press freedom supporting organizations such as Reporters Without Borders (based in Paris as Reporters Sans Frontieres), Index on Censorship, Committee to Protect Journalists, or Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Then I may either request permission to re-post an article, write a summary article, or request an interview via email. Of course, anything I do becomes very, very, very thoroughly edited, and the articles with my name attached belong to me very scarcely. However, I do take advantage with Twitter and post links to them anyway (Which you can read on this blog).

I have also been assigned to transcribe interviews, which is very interesting at Sampsonia Way, because we often feature international writers. Because I spent hours transcribing an interview with the very lovely and very verbose Palestinian poet and filmmaker Hind Shoufani, I now know how to spell in English Jahili, Umayyad, and Abbasid - genres of Arabic poetry.

It's been a fantastic experience being an intern there. In fact, it's probably been too fantastic. I have felt that Sampsonia Way is so interesting and ambitious that I have been appropriately humbled and, inappropriately on my part, inadequate. How dare I feel nervous about writing a few paragraphs about authors who have received death threats!? How could I ever be any kind of journalist, thinking of champions of human rights and freedom of expression? How come I can't write a few sentences without seeing red, crossed out lines from the editor. Why am I procrastinating? How could I ever work at someplace like this full-time - or anywhere as a writer full-time?
I can't even succeed much as an intern - the editors have definitely seen me fail. I have my doubts.

But I love Sampsonia Way for the exact same reason I applied - I am fascinated in learning about different places around the world. This interest in geography was given to me by my father, and has grown exponentially since moving to Pittsburgh, whose ethnic diversity continues to astound me, diversity which I have encountered mostly through part-time work. Because of all my work at Sampsonia Way, I can chatter more about journalism in Tibet, Palestine, Colombia, Vietnam, Turkmenistan, Bahrain, and Sri Lanka. More importantly, I have learned more about how dangerous journalism is around the world, and how much more courage is shown by those writers who stand up to those dangers. I will always admire Sampsonia Way for promoting that courage.

Check out the website! More than you did at first glance! http://www.sampsoniaway.org