About

The Perspective Project was started at 2a.m. in the summer of 2010. At the time I lived in Brooklyn N.Y. and, as a writer, I was failing miserably.

In journalism school we’d been told to ‘find the story’ (the valuable one – the one that could sell) – and that was just the problem. There were so many things I wanted to write about – so many stories I was living in the midst of – but every time I tried to hammer down a narrative, it melted into something impossible to grasp, rivulets pouring in every direction. There was no just-one-story to anything; there were as many narratives as there were perspectives. Increasingly, truth and value became utterly baffling concepts to me, so entirely did they seem a matter of the perspective one took.

And so that is what I wrote about. For almost fifteen years I’ve been putting the occasional essay here – essays about the subjectivity of the reality we experience, the values that guide us, and the identities we ascribe ourselves and others. I have gradually realized that subjectivity of every story is the story. The fact that we live in this shared world through the unique worlds of our minds has fascinating consequences. So too the fact that, beneath our insurmountable differences and across our rigid tribal divides, we are all shaped very similar stories of longing and fear, and connection and love.

At last, The Perspective Project is closing its doors and re-opening in a far more exciting manifestation: as a publication! A publication devoted to the same themes that have appeared here – but a publication that can host the voices and views of maaaaany people!

Please visit us at The Elephant (theelephant.press) to learn more, and submit your own story or art!

Thank you, always, for reading.