On May 24, seven of this year’s Youth Speak News team met with editors from The Catholic Register at the Newman Ce nt re in Toronto for the annual Youth Speak News retreat. Members of the team travelled from across Canada to meet in faith, fellowship and an open mind to engage in discussion and workshops surrounding faith-oriented media.
As team members trickled into this historic 1891 building early Friday evening to introduce themselves, I realized I should have paid better attention to which names matched whose faces in our weekly “Speaking Out” columns. We had been writing for the same publication since last September, most of us never meeting one another until now.
After speaking with my fellow writers, the words that they had written flooded back into my head, and I looked forward to a weekend full of us getting to know one another while we learned more about faith-based journalism.
On our first night, speaker Sr. Marie Paul Curley from the Daughters of St. Paul, an order that focuses on media ministry, stated that no matter how much we try to disregard it, our views, beliefs and interests will end up flooding into our work, one way or another.
Hearing this, I looked around the room at the faces I was so used to seeing in the newspaper. That weekend, each team member talked about our plans for the future; we all had desires, and we all made mistakes. Although each of us came from different cities, all different ages and had different experiences, we shared many things: our faith, love for writing and eagerness for new friendships. When I returned home and reread some columns, I noticed each personality shine through with a new clarity through the words on the page. So, it is true: what we write is a reflection of who we are.
The next day, we participated in a photography workshop led by Bill Wittman, who suggested that we should look closely for details when taking pictures and, more importantly, look at each potential image from a different angle. Although he was only discussing photography, his words were advice for us, as both writers and people, to look beyond the obvious.
Friday night, we had walked through the heavy, wooden doors of the Newman Centre as strangers with a desire to learn about one another — even playing the 1970s board game Reunion as if we were old friends — and left the centre Sunday afternoon with hugs, hopeful that we’d meet again in the future.
Even though the air was a little chilly, and the days went by quickly, I am grateful to have met many amazing people. In each of their own ways, they have inspired me and taught me a bit more about myself, and I can only hope that I had a similar effect on each of them. As I continue to write, I will write as though I am talking into a mirror; our audiences tend to be reflections of ourselves. We are all human, after all.
(Joanes, 18, is a first-year concurrent education student at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont.)