Write on!
Ariel Felton (M.F.A., writing, 2015) is making her words matter.
In January, 2020, Felton’s article “A Local’s Guide to Savannah, Ga.” was published in the Washington Post. When the tone and tempo of the city were changed by the pandemic, her next Post feature went deeper, addressing the role of (and response to) Black tour guides in a city where “the tourism industry is king” and history is full of discomfiting truths. Meanwhile, her essay “A Letter to My Niece” received a notable mention in the Best American Essays 2020.
A native of Byron, Georgia, Felton is currently the teaching artist and publications manager at Deep Center, the award-winning nonprofit providing free arts and leadership programs for young people in Savannah.
SCAD: What was the impetus for “A Letter to My Niece”?
Ariel Felton: I’d read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Between the World and Me” and James Baldwin’s “A Letter to My Son.” I was inspired by both of them, while noticing they’re written to younger men and wondering, where do the ladies come in? Racial discrimination is often compounded by gender. Sometimes having a young niece helps me think, “Thalia needs to hear this right now in the life stage she’s in.” I actually wrote the letter without considering getting it published. I wrote it as something I would give to her and hope she’d take something from it.
SCAD: How was “A Letter to My Niece” received by your family?
AF: I sent it to my niece and my mom and my sister before it was published. My mom told me Thalia thought it was sweet, and she said, “Your sister’s okay with it being published.” At the time, my mom was also okay with it being published. It wasn’t until later that she was kind of worried about our family mistakes being put out there. I told her, “I don’t think those are mistakes,” which is really the point of the piece, that this is just living, and we shouldn’t shame people for that.
SCAD: How did you choose running as the central metaphor in the piece?
AF: When I write non-fiction, my process often starts with a memory that I can’t seem to forget. The writing becomes figuring out why. I’d written about my sister and me and my niece all being ten years apart, and about being a Black woman in the South, and I’d written a thousand versions of it and it just wasn’t working. Somewhere in my drafts in my Google drive I had this little nugget of my mom telling me about when my niece ran away from home. When I put them all side-by-side, something finally clicked.
SCAD: How did you pitch your piece on Black tour guides in Savannah to the Washington Post?
AF: I originally pitched the piece on Black tour guides as four separate profiles that would run together. In my pitch, I was able to refer back to a previous Washington Post article about pushback from tourists in Charleston who didn’t want to hear about slavery while touring the McLeod Plantation. I said here’s an angle in Savannah, a city that’s focused on tourism, where this issue is being addressed by Black tour guides. It was accepted, and I wrote it in April and it sat on an editor’s desk for months, until the editor asked how the pandemic had changed things in Savannah and asked me to report on that and incorporate that into the story, which finally appeared in late November.
SCAD: How did you go from being a SCAD writing student to writing for top national publications?
AF: For me, it’s meant returning to the roots of my undergrad journalism studies at Valdosta State, combined with elements from non-fiction writing classes at SCAD. At SCAD, I took magazine writing with Lee Griffith, business and professional writing with James Lough, and an elective humor writing class with Harrison Scott Key. In those classes, I was really able to explore my voice and how fiction and personal essay techniques can work in narrative storytelling to makes an article more compelling.
SCAD: As a Georgia native, do you feel a responsibility to tell the stories of this state?
AF: Absolutely. I love the South.
Visit Ariel Felton.
By Peter Relic
