Years ago a well-known photographer gave me some invaluable advice about his craft that I pass on to you. "Anyone can learn to use a camera," he wrote, "but it's the eye in the viewfinder that determines when and how to capture its subject. How do you train your eye? The way you train for life. You must move beyond your experience to learn its contrasts. Examine other cultures, walk in different neighborhoods. If you can't travel then go to the movies or watch a foreign film, read good books, read trashy ones. How else can you understand the contrast between good and bad taste? Question everything. Read history, it reveals so much about whom we were and who we will become. So when you look through the lens always ask yourself what you see. You'll always see more than just your subject."

The AfriGeneas Writers Forum will help move us past a flat landscape of dates, names and bloodlines to write about our ancestors as three- dimensional people, who throughout five centuries shaped the destiny of the Americas. We face a broader challenge than most in chronicling our ancestors. We are indeed a people of many experiences and many contrasts. It will be an exciting and new journey: from AfriGeneas researcher to writer or publisher. We'll be able to step back from our subject as a photographer or a painter would, to write an objective, focused, balanced and accurate history of our ancestors.

For this reason, the AfriGeneas Writers Forum was created as a support network and resource for those who want to write or publish their research on line, in books, magazines or news articles. Most importantly and closer to our hearts, the Forum will give us the tools to pass on the gift of our history to our family.

The AfriGeneas Writers Forum will only be as interactive as you make it. Questions, suggestions, sharing journalistic writing styles etc are all welcome.

Let's begin.

Sincerely,

Write Away