- William Morgan, Editor
- Leeore Schnairsohn, Managing Editor
- Megan Maxfield, Madison Hilligoss, and Jules Talbot, Junior Editors
Welcome to New York University and to your first-year writing class in the Expository Writing Program! This year’s issue of Mercer Street presents twenty exceptional essays that were composed by NYU students in their expository writing courses last year. We invite you to read these essays both for your curiosity and to learn how other writers make moves that you can try out in new ways in your writing. We hope that the words, thoughts, and moves of these writers will inspire you!
In their welcome note to you in this anthology, our student editors exhort you to “make the most of each opportunity you have to write—. . . to take risks, to be reflective of your own position, to prioritize truth, and to write from a place of passion and personal connection.” The specific idea they mention that I would like to consider more fully is their encouragement to be reflective about ‘your position.’ Why does reflecting on your position as a writer really matter? What does it entail?
On a surface level, we sometimes think of a writer’s position as their argument, or perhaps their stance toward their sources, their audience, and the expectations for their writing. Yet in your expository writing courses, you’ll be encouraged to see that your positionality derives from much more: from who you are, where you are from, what your experiences have been. While your positionality is not the same thing as your identity, your identity deeply affects your positionality as a writer. In the essays included in this year’s Mercer Street, pay attention to how honestly and earnestly the writers consider their positions in their essays—making sense of their own complex subjectivities as they pose questions, represent and analyze their subjects and controversies, and think critically about the ideas and experiences of others and their own.
Most fundamentally, keeping your positionality—your complex, multifaceted subjectivity—in mind can help you to form better questions for you and your readers to consider. As Stanley Yang reflects on his process developing his essay “Taxi Driver and the Rage of the Incel,” “I initially simply tried to connect Travis Bickle [Taxi Driver’s main character] to the term ‘incel.’ My research question at first was ‘Is Travis an incel?’ . . . . Then, at some point, I started to wonder about the more difficult question of how movies like Taxi Driver set up a problematic form of empathy for a certain kind of man who weaponizes his self-pitying hatred toward women. It was challenging, but I realized that I really needed to ask myself: ‘What does it mean to call Travis an incel but still feel weirdly sympathetic to him?’”
Creating a space in your work—in the questions you ask—that allows you to draw on your own complex thinking as a particular individual will help you to develop your voice in your essays; it will give your readers a sense of you as a thinker that they can hear and respond to. In addition, considering your positionality can also motivate you, as Aidan La Poche describes, to want to do more than check the boxes and complete the assignment. While considering the problem of consumerism in the digital world, especially in the context of their expertise in fashion and their addiction to scrolling on the app TheRealReal, La Poche reflects: “even before writing this essay, I felt somewhat implicated by algorithms that are intended to influence taste, manipulate consumers, and emphasize the importance of constant consumption. Rather than ignoring this feeling, I decided to lean into it, using my own perspective as a habitually online member of Gen Z as an investigative tool.” Because they ‘leaned into’ their position and honestly explored their implication as a Gen Zer in the cultural problem they researched, La Poche writes that “I felt freer to explore my ideas rather than just writing a ‘good’ essay—whatever that means.”
Similarly, in “The Stuyvesant Controversy and the Lose-Lose Fight over Educational Access,” Joyce Li reveals how reflecting on her positionality caused her to grapple with her divided feelings. Writing of both her communal loyalties and her sense of racial justice, Li admits: “As badly as I wanted to portray the Asian American community in a positive light, I had to acknowledge the underlying anti-Blackness embedded in arguments made by some Asian American advocacy groups against admissions reform.” A distinctive strength of Li’s essay is how carefully she sorts through this complex tension, revealing that her thinking doesn’t rest on loyalty to community but instead evolves from her honest, patient, ethical response to what she learns from her research in the context of both her experience and her sense of justice. Just as Li’s position evolved because she fully and courageously considered this tension, your position will evolve too in ways you can’t predict, if you allow yourself to respond patiently and honestly to what you learn from research and analysis in the context of what you know from experience.
Further, when you lean into your positionality and explore its complications, you can give voice to important counter-stories to the dominant narratives of race (see Kailyn Williams, “Black Means Run”), ethnicity and U.S. citizenship (see Ashley Kang, “The Audacity to Hate”), thrifting (see Lea Filidore, “The Ethics of Thrifting”), self-help gurus (see Crystal Baik, “If It Looks like a Cult”), or whatever subject your writing may lead you to pursue. By doing so, you will develop persuasive arguments that are true to your sense of self and that contest unjust conditions, create alliances between you and your classmates, and open inclusive spaces for other “students to consider their own positionality,” as composition scholars Christina V. Cedillo and Phil Bratta have discussed in their 2019 article “Relating Our Experiences: The Practice of Positionality Stories in Student-Centered Pedagogy.”
What I find most remarkable about the essays in this year’s Mercer Street is how these writers build our trust and engage our minds by being honest and transparent about their positions. These writers are consistently self-aware as they cope, grieve, rant, think, make connections, and seek meaning in the face of problems and experiences that are not fully resolvable but that they share with us. And because they grapple so earnestly with such specific, hard questions, with interesting, complex evidence, and with their own positions, their essays feel—for lack of a better word—‘authentic’ to me. As they negotiate with our world, they also call on us to write, think, and live as if our personal integrity depends on our work to hone our capacity to think freely and responsibly about our positionality.
Enjoy these pieces, enjoy writing, and enjoy your time at NYU!
William Morgan
Clinical Professor
Director of the Writing Center
This collection of essays, written (with one exception) by first-year students, is as close to a campus as anything you are likely to encounter at NYU. Students from CAS, Tisch, Steinhardt, and Tandon find a voice here; international students share this forum with those brought up in the US. If you read it front to back, you will hear a deep conversation—about race, technology, gender, the relationship between people and images, and many other vital avenues of interest—a conversation, moreover, between people who have likely never met in person. As you read the essays, you will also see: these are the kinds of things that NYU students think about, talk about, write about.
There are two things I should make clear. First: these essays very often do not reflect topics taught in class, but result from the writers’ following their own interests, using tools and methods taught in class to develop these interests into ideas. Second: without coming from the same courses or using the same approaches, many of these essays have something to say to each other. As you read them, you’ll hear echoes that one essay sends to another; you’ll find clusters forming among them and larger, more complex ideas beginning to grow—in your mind. This feeling of recognition, when you realize that one text has something to say to another, even though the second text has no idea that the first exists—even though they may be about different topics altogether—this is the feeling of idea. This is your mind telling you, through the signaling system of emotion, that you are creating something.
Your instructors are going to teach you about creation: that there is a methodology to the creative process, that you can practice it and gain mastery. This methodology of creation—which leads toward soul as well as toward innovation—is most universally practiced in writing. You will find it applicable in other areas, whether you are an artist, an engineer, a scholar, a nurse, whatever corner of this universe you occupy. Any vocation well heeded requires some skill in responding; this year, you are going to learn something you don’t yet know about response.
My best to you,
Leeore Schnairsohn
Clinical Professor, Expository Writing Program
Managing Editor, Mercer Street
To the Class of 2026 (and other readers of the 2022-2023 edition of Mercer Street),
As junior editors, we had the privilege of seeing each Mercer Street essay through its full journey from initial submission to publication. After selection, we were the first eyes on these essays, taking them through a thorough process of copyediting, fact checking, and further editing. If done well, our work as editors shouldn’t be noticeable; rather, it only confirmed and drew out the author’s voice and ideas. Since Mercer Street’s founding, junior editors have had minimal contact with the student authors. This year, we brought some student authors back into our editorial process, working mutually to reach the essays’ final, published forms. Our goal was to preserve our writers’ agency as much as possible, and present the best of students’ work. While this process wasn’t always easy, it turned out to be well worth it in the end.
This year, the junior editors also had the honor of reading a number of essays and selecting a few for publication. These essays nearly slipped through the cracks among the 374 submissions Mercer Street’s faculty reviewers received, read, and assessed, but we saw voice, passion, and merit fully deserving publication in these pieces. As fellow students and young writers, we are particularly encouraged by the command of voice and understanding of positionality evident in essays across the issue.
Most students wrote from a personal place, foregrounding their own identity and experience. Take a look at Kang’s “The Audacity to Hate” or Williams’ “Black Means Run” as prime examples. Meanwhile, others showcase their unique style through their masterful analysis and synthesis of source material. Nicholas Mahoney writes, “This level of nuance in the interaction between two texts was something I had not encountered before, and it taught me a thing or two about the unforeseen potential that material may carry throughout the writing process.” Further, many of this year’s writers chose to tackle the frustrating but frequently rewarding challenge of working with many complex sources. Joyce Li notes that her research process sometimes left her feeling “frustrated, uncomfortable, and lost,” but in that confusion she found “an issue worth writing about.” As first-year writers, executing the task of representing and synthesizing multiple source texts with accuracy and care is often a novel challenge. The essays by Mahoney, Li, and others all show a deep commitment to working closely with sources to understand the ideas they deemed worthy, rather than doing the comparatively easy work of seeking out information that confirms a bias.
To be published in Mercer Street, an essay doesn’t have to be written from an ivory tower of academia. Many of these essays unearth the meaning and value of pop culture, social media, and the seemingly mundane. Whether it be La Poche’s reflection on cultural significance of scrolling on TheRealReal, Federici’s reaction to and contextualization of Lil Nas X’s “Montero,” or Wang’s rethinking of his dissatisfaction with Chinese food in the United States, these writers prove that you don’t always need to look far beyond yourself to arrive at an original idea; rather, it’s often a close examination of and reaction to your own experience that bears the most surprising ideas.
We were excited and inspired by the risk that writers took in terms of content and form—specifically in how engaged each author must have felt by their chosen subject matter, and how they experimented, provoked, and challenged themselves. As undergraduate writers—or as writers, period, it often feels discouraging that our first drafts will never be perfect. But the essays in this edition of Mercer Street are testament to how an essay evolves from draft to draft; a finished essay is a culmination of countless reworked ideas, many drafts, some brilliant moments of inspiration, and most importantly, a writer’s willingness to keep going and the confidence to push their ideas further. As Ashley Kang writes, “In large part, I am able to attribute my thinking in this essay to letting myself be dumb and okay with it. To write bad, embarrassingly, absurdly, over-dramatically, irrationally, tenderly, childishly—if only to see what would happen. I think it can be a gamble, but it can also pay off.”
It’s our hope that in reading this year’s Mercer Street, you will be encouraged to do just that—write freely ‘if only to see what would happen.’ As young people in a time in which many people feel as if they are losing agency and autonomy, we can find strength in exercising and developing what agency we do have over our own ideas, and the manner in which we express them. We hope that you will make the most of each opportunity you have to write—and when you do, to take risks, to be reflective of your own position, to prioritize truth, and to write from a place of passion and personal connection.
—Megan Maxfield, Madison Hilligoss, and Jules Talbot, Junior Editors