Wednesday, October 12, 2011
Lunch with Warren St. John
On Tuesday October 11th I went to the lunch for Warren St. John. We got to have lunch from Panera along with hearing Mr. St. John talk about his experience before, during, and after writing the book Outcasts United. He told us about how he found Clarkston and Luma. He was actually eating dinner with a friend while he was in Georgia and this friend told him about the refugees in Georgia. With one question after another, Warren St. John got into the life of the refugees. He also gave us some information about how and where some of the Fugee players are now. He told us that a lot of Clarkston's citizens and refugees are very thankful to the feedback they have gotten from the book and the New York Times article about the refugees and the soccer situation down south. He also said that Luma was first skeptical of letting him into her fugees' lives as she wanted to protect them from criticism and the public who would read the book. One point Mr. St. John made that I found very interesting was the fact that we dont realize that we are different until someone else points it out. I loved how writing the book has connected Mr. St. John with all the Fugee families and he still stays in touch with a lot of them. The lunch was very interesting and made me like the book a lot more than i did before i went to the lunch.
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I had the privilege of accompanying my lovely roommate Zeenia to this lunch! I completely agree with everything she said and a lot of the same things that resonated with her resonated with me as well. However, to avoid rewording the same post I will come up with different things to say! Going to the Honors and Scholars house was quite the trek for us and as we are inadequate when it comes to the OSU bus system we had no choice but to walk. Once we got there, sweaty and hungry, we were greeted by Warren St. John himself. And by greeted I mean he was standing there, but actually didn't say anything. I was surprised at how much he looked like his picture in the back of the book. I guess that's a dumb thing to say but really he looked like himself. Once we got our lunch (Panera, yum!) we sat in a make shift circle with St. John joining us. I thought it was weird that he didn't actually eat anything and I felt bad that he had to sit there and talk while we ate. The first thing we were asked to do was say our names, majors, and one thing that really stuck out about the book to us. Normally I hate those kinds of things but it really wasn't hard to come up with something to say about "Outcasts United" because it really was a great book. St. John talked to us about the varying ways he was received by those that he chose to include in his book. For example he said the cop that fired so many officers and wanted to revamp the police force was so eager to talk! He joked that he could have written a book all about that officer. St. John also talked a lot about his article that was essentially the first stepping stone toward writing the novel. I had forgotten (or maybe I'd never known) that he wrote a NY Times article first about the Fugees and then went on to write the book. He said his TImes article was far from well-received as he mainly focussed on the mayor and all of his nastiness. He said the people of Clarkston were enraged because they thought his article unfairly portrayed their reaction to the refugees. St. John sympathized with this but he countered this by saying that it wasn't a totally unfair assumption to say that who a town picks as their civil leader does not represent the ideas of the majority of the people. On a different note, like Zeenia, I loved that he kept in touch with many of the refugees. He even said a few of them were like family. It was really nice to hear that he didn't just write this book and move on. I wanted to ask him if he had changed at all from writing it, less in the emotional sense and more in the physical sense. For example, had he become more of a minimalist or does he give more to charities now ? Who knows! Overall, I really liked St. John as a person and liking him as a person made me like him as a writer more. He also threw in some promotions for his first book about when he followed crazy football fans for a year to find out why team sports are so exciting. That books sounded interesting as well! St. John is one cool man!
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