luddite club scavenger hunt
Hi all,
Hope you're having a lovely summer. I myself have been pulling weeds on a volunteer restoration project (more on that soon) and very slowly beginning to think about book 3...
In the meantime: You may have heard about something called the Luddite Club when they were covered in the NYT a few years back. In short, it’s a group of teens drawing on the legacy of the 19th century Luddites by foregoing social media / smartphones and prioritizing IRL experiences. I had the immense pleasure of meeting a few of them a few weeks ago while recording an interview for an upcoming documentary on their project -- which happens to be directed by their former high school teacher. Talking to them really gave me so much hope, but also made me appreciate the challenges of coming of age during lockdown.
My reason for mentioning this now is that the Luddite Club is doing a scavenger hunt in Brooklyn from this weekend until October 13. If you’re in NYC and have the time, you’ll be rewarded with some excellent little zines and a nice walk. You can get more info on their site or download the map here.
I have always been a fan of scavenger hunts. Just last week, when I got back from New York, I got to participate in a scavenger hunt piece by my dear friend and fellow artist Helen Shewolfe Tseng. It was part of the High Five Festival in San Francisco’s Chinatown, and without it, I’m not sure I would have ever ducked into any of those incredible alleys. Nor would I have looked so carefully, including higher up on buildings than I’m accustomed to. I loved passing other people holding the same card and sharing a conspiratorial smile.
After I’d collected the fragments, I told Helen about a formative experience I’d had at a summer camp, where the counselors had chosen a section of a trail and had us go one at a time. I don’t quite remember how old I was at the time, but I was young enough that it felt novel to be trusted to walk alone like that. The counselors had also left little cards along the way, prompts for things to do or to look at. I remember one in particular simply said, “turn around,” and there was this incredible view that I would’ve passed right by.
I still think of scavenger hunts as a model for my own writing. To me, they’re that perfect combination of guidance with open-endedness, leaving space for a reader or viewer’s own agency. I felt, in a small and genuine way, accomplished having found all of Helen’s clues (“thanks for the dopamine,” I told her later), but that effort was entirely made possible by the careful latticework that she had set up before me. And as I’ve written about before, any piece of art that teaches you new ways of looking can leave you with a life-long lesson. The lights, shapes, and surfaces of everything on Clay Street seemed more palpable to me as I walked back to BART.
Scavenger hunts also reflect a kind of “meeting in the middle” that I have come to appreciate more and more over the years. At something like an art festival, especially if people are in a passive mindset, not everyone is going to want to put the effort into understanding the rules of a participatory project, much less actually do it. It’s asking a lot of someone. But, as I was sitting with Helen at her table, I saw how many people who had taken the time were so glad that they did.
That kind of exchange is also an aspiration I have for my own writing. The lack of straightfoward structure or “takeaways” may seem frustrating and not worth the time for everyone, and that’s fine. It’s just the price one pays for trying to trust and leave space for the reader, in hopes that you have an experience that feels fully your own. (This was, in fact, exactly what happened for me as a reader of Deep Oakland: How Geology Shaped a City, and which I’ve written about here.) The longer my books have been in the world, the more overcome with gratitude I feel for the readers who have brought their own enthusiasm to that journey.
That’s all from me for now. If you’re in NYC, have a crack at that scavenger hunt, and if not: why not try designing one for a friend?
Yours,
Jenny
