I recently had the fortuitous opportunity to sit down at Second Cup with the lovely Didi Moffat, this month’s Blogger of The Month. A quick bit of background about Didi: She is currently finishing grade 10 at Sir Winston Churchill High School and is in the full IB program. After searching for a quieter place to sit and chat, we eventually gave up and surrendered to road noise and settled for an outdoor table. Although perhaps not the most ideal of places to set up shop, we made do anyway and tried to ignore the clamour of semis and car horns.
We managed to find a spot outside of Second Cup,
where Didi allowed me to practice my mad iPhone photography skills.
Q: What made you first decide to join Youth Are Awesome?
A: Basically, I’m already a member of the Youth Volunteer Corps and I’m also really into writing. But I didn’t know that there was any avenue for youth to actually write and blog. One day I was browsing the Youth Central website and I came across Youth Are Awesome. I thought, “This is really cool. This is something that I would want to do because I’m into writing,” so that’s how I joined.
Q: Was there a certain goal that you hoped to achieve through blogging with Youth Are Awesome?
A: I had never really blogged before but it was something that I was interested in. I was basically already writing because I’m working on my own book, but I had never really done any blogging. I want to do this, right, because I feel like I could do it because I like writing a lot, so with Youth Are Awesome, one of the goals that I wanted to achieve was to first of all explore myself in the blogging area and just to push myself in terms of my writing and to improve overall.
Q: You’re a really diverse writer in that you cover a lot of different topics. Is there a particular subject area that you really enjoy writing about?
A: I really like writing about my views and such, so it’s not a particular subject area per se, it’s more that I just like giving my views on the things that I see around me. One time, I did a blog on when I went to a Model UN conference. One speaker talked about how humans should go back to the era where we were all hunters, and I disagreed with that, so I wrote a blog post about that: (See “Capitalists are the New Hunters“). I’ve also done a post of series that I watch, trying to give people insight into series that they could watch, so basically I would say that it’s not a topic area, more like I like to give my views on things I do and experiences.
Q: That’s actually really cool. Have you noticed your own writing changing since you started with Youth Are Awesome?
A: Yeah, I would definitely say that at first, just because the way I was used to writing was more formal, I would say that my first couple of blog posts were more formal, but as I started writing and getting feedback from Clea [program coordinator], I started to move into the more colloquial, well, not really colloquial, but more youth-oriented voice, expressing my own voice and not being too formal with how I write, so I would definitely say that it’s changed a bit.
Q: Sticking with this, how would you describe your own writing style?
A: I would say that my writing style is very formal slash informal in a sense; it’s very me. It expresses me. For example, when I would write about albums people should listen to, even if I was trying to reach out into all different genres, I still put in my opinions on it and my own spin on it. So it’s very me, it’s very casual, but it’s also very formal in the sense that I try to get a particular message across with each post.
Q: You’ve only been with Youth Are Awesome for a few months, but a lot has changed since you started. What part of belonging to this diverse group of writers are you enjoying the most, to date?
A: I really like it, it really makes me feel like I’m part of this little community, especially when we go to the meetings and we’re all talking and everyone is just so helpful. I know that if I need help with anything with blogging I can just reach out to other youth bloggers and that’s really what’s helped me. When I first did a blog post, I was really confused but just being able to reach out to other bloggers that I knew and even Clea, that really helped me to improve as a writer, as a blogger. I just like being part of this small community where I know that I can reach out to people, not just in the blogging sense, but in general, and improve myself through them.
Q: Of the posts that you’ve written up to date, which did you enjoy writing the most and why?
A: I’d probably say… I can’t choose between two. One would be the one where I wrote about series that I advise people to watch and that would probably be my favourite because series are something I watch a lot. Like, I mean, every day, I watch between 20-30 in full, like I’m really obsessed with them. I got my most views on that one and it was just really nice to see that it’s something that I do every day and that I can just write a blog post about and have lots of people see it. Also the post “Capitalists are the New Hunters” because it was really me and was really my opinion on something.
Q: What do you think makes you stand apart from other writers?
A: I would say that what makes me stand apart from other writers is the fact that I don’t really write about one thing or focus too much on one thing. It’s more about what I’m feeling that day and I feel like some other writers, they mostly want to write about one particular thing because that’s what they’re used to, but I try to reach out. I try to take a perspective on different things around me. I try to go into every different category I can write in, it’s just ‘what am I feeling like that day.’
Q: Has your experience blogging helped in other aspects of your life?
A: Haha, English. When I started blogging, I didn’t know, I think that as a whole, my writing got better and that really helped me in class in expressing myself when I was writing different essays and stuff. Also, in general, just by myself, because I noticed when I wrote my views, I was really sharing my opinion and it made me realize that I can actually do this. Coming into Youth Are Awesome, I wasn’t really sure if I’d be able to do this, but I wanted to give it a shot. Moving as I’ve been progressing, it’s started to help me to say “Oh, I can really do this,” and it’s helped me even with the book I’m writing on my own, to be able to have a better perspective on things and to write better.
Q: So this book, you’ve mentioned it a couple times, what is is about is it fiction… is it uhhh, historical? I really can’t think of any other genres off the top of my head.
A: In the starting point, I’ve written the beginning so many times but this time I really think that I’m really getting into it and it’s basically fiction, but in a way, it kind of reflects me. Like it’s fiction, but it’s also about me. It’s about this one girl, she lives in this isolated part of town, in a farming kind of area and then she moves to New York and it basically talks about her journey through there and how she was able to change and achieve all of her dreams through moving there. It’s really cliché, but in a way, I don’t know, it’s just so me in how I moved just recently.
Q: Where did you move from?
A: I moved from Nigeria about a year ago. It’s been good.
Q: So aside from blogging, what do you do with your time?
A: I do a lot of stuff actually. I’m a member of the Youth Volunteer Corps Steering Committee at my school, so I do a lot of volunteering. I try to do at least one thing every week. I also play field hockey, which is the main sport I play. I play squash and tennis with my family. I also dance, which I’m going into competitively.
A really interesting conversation with an equally interesting blogger. To check out what Didi’s writing , click here.