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I'm
Talking By Nathan Black |
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" I'm Talking "
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About the Book:
"I'm Talking" is a collection of over 40 opinion columns and short stories
written by teen commentator Nathan Black. By voicing his strong and diverse
views, he hopes to encourage other teenagers to join the conversations on
the issues that affect our lives - conversations we teenagers are too often
left out of.
About the Author:
Nathan Black is a freshman at Rice University in Houston, Texas. He has
written professionally for nearly four years, and has appeared 30 times in
such publications as the New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, Albany
Times Union, Houston Chronicle, Colorado Springs Gazette, Denver Rocky
Mountain News and Denver Post. The Post nominated him for the 2001 Pulitzer
Prize in Distinguished Commentary. When he graduated from his Littleton,
Colorado high school in May 2002, he was named in the top 20 entering
college freshman in the United States by USA Today. Nathan is a history
major at Rice and is currently consuming himself with a grassroots project
known as "Different Religions Week" (July 11-18, 2003).
E-Mail Nathan Black
Preview:
Mostly, there are two types of adolescents who have voices in the mainstream
media. There is the Chicken Soup for the Soul type, with their poignant
stories of how they beat drugs, or cancer, or romantic rejection, or some
other kind of massive obstacle. That’s the kind of teenager who makes you,
the reader, cry. Secondly, there is the Eminem type (for the rapper Eminem
might as well be considered an adolescent), who scream in your face of how
they are mistreated and ostracized and how they would really love to slit
their mothers’ throats.
That’s the kind of teenager who makes you sick. Well, I’m not going to make
you cry or make you sick—I hope. I do want to make you think. The aim of
this book is not necessarily to change your long-held belief system and
force you to agree with me on one, more or all of the 44 topics I present.
As a Democrat, I realize this would never happen. And my goal is certainly
not to make you think I am a genius—a child prodigy who somehow was blessed
with this inquiring, reasoning mind beyond his years and had nothing better
to do with it than write a book.
Quite the contrary; I want to show you there are more teenagers out there
than the ones who make you weep and vomit. If you looked hard enough around
this country and world, you would find thousands, maybe millions of
adolescents like me, who have plain, reasonable messages about their lives
and others’ and want to be heard. I just beat them to it. One of the
strangest and best friendships I’ve had was with an 80 year old man, known
to me as "Doc." I met Doc when I was writing a guest column for The Denver
Post; after almost every appearance, he would e-mail me to give his often
critical thoughts on the article.
Since we usually disagreed, I would e-mail back and rebuke his points. He
would find a weakness in my argument and e-mail again…and so on. He wrote so
much that my mother decided he was a child molester. What was special about
our relationship was not that through our bantering back and forth, we
eventually became friends, but instead that he bothered to acknowledge my
existence and legitimacy in the first place. I could tell from his long,
philosophical arguments that he had not just given my column in the Post a
quick once-over and thought to himself, "Wow, there’s a sixteen year old in
the paper." He read my columns just as carefully as I wrote them, and spoke
with me as though I were another 80 year old, not a teenager who between
columns had to worry about girls and school and getting a real job that paid
more than a $50 honorarium per piece.
To him, I was intelligent enough to mean what I said, and while he hardly
ever liked my thoughts, he liked that I thought them and shared them with
the Denver area. By publishing this book, I want to find a million more
Docs—a million more people who can respect or learn to respect a teenage
opinion, but who will argue with it too. I’m trying to reassure the adult
readers of this diatribe that there are thinkers in the upcoming
generation—so please reassure me there are thinkers in the older one.
My e-mail address is nwtblack@yahoo.com. No spam, please. As for the teenage
readers, I hope this book shows what you, not I, can do. I’m the managing
editor for my high school newspaper, and frequently I see that what
separates me from the writers on my staff who don’t get published in the
professional press is not talent or even work ethic, but ambition. I’ve met
at least a dozen writers in my high school alone who could easily publish
before millions of people, but they’re content just to turn their brilliant
poetry and prose into ecstatic English teachers for those coveted "A"s and "A+"s.
Please, don’t be content.
The thrill of getting your voice heard before the world—even if you’re
wrong, or unclear—is like no "A" you’ve ever gotten. My drama teacher once
told an actor, who was asking about his chances of making a play, "I can
promise you one thing: if you don’t audition, I won’t cast you." The same
applies for writing, or radio or television or any other way you might want
to express your opinions. If you don’t submit, I can promise you that you’ll
never get exposure. If you do…who knows?
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