Brooklyn based journalist Dvora Meyers has been researching her niche since she was eight, as her mother liked to say. She practiced gymnastics for 12 years, and even after she stopped, because of back surgery for severe scoliosis, she still obsessed about it. So she turned it into her writing niche.<\/p>\n
\u201cGymnastics became the prism through which I understood my body, my strict Orthodox Jewish upbringing, my family and even my place as a woman in 2012\u201d, she writes in her self-published collection of essays titled,\u00a0\u201cHeresy on the High Beam: Confessions of an Unbalanced Jewess.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n Dvora discovered the sport after her parents got divorced. She found in it an escape, a coping mechanism, but also structure, at a time when she felt “everything around her was spinning out of control”. She didn\u2019t excel at it, she says<\/a>, but loved it and kept on thinking about it over the years.<\/p>\n At 23, about to start grad school in Creative Nonfiction, she was<\/a> \u201cstill checking the online message boards devoted to the sport daily in order to learn which Romanian gymnast had a new vault or who was injured and or who quit and so on\u201d.<\/p>\n Trying to figure out the topic for a first essay, her mind kept drifting to gymnastics, which she hadn\u2019t written much before. \u201cI\u2019m still as obsessed with gymnastics in my 20s as I was at seven. In a very Seinfeldian way, I wondered \u2014 What\u2019s that about?\u201d\u00a0 So she wrote her first essay exploring the role of gymnastics in her life, which helped her understand better\u00a0 the role that her family\u2019s strict observance of\u00a0Orthodox Jewish<\/a>\u00a0rules was playing in her participation in the sport and how it added fuel to the fire of her obsession.<\/p>\n While in grad school, she started freelancing for several publications, starting with Jewish ones – places like Tablet Magazine and the\u00a0Forward<\/em>. After a few years, she started branching out and pitching to other publications, and eventually got pieces into\u00a0The<\/em>\u00a0New York Times<\/em>, Slate, Salon, etc.<\/p>\n When 2012, an Olympic year, approached, she set for herself the goal of writing about gymnastics for the Summer Games, taking advantage of a year when interest in the sport she loved and knew so much about would be at the highest. She started writing for Slate and Deadspin \u201cthe sort of analysis I had always been dying to see about the sport\u201d.<\/p>\n Her passion and knowledge of a niche sport got her her first book deal. \u201cThe End of the Perfect Ten: The Making and Breaking of Gymnastics’s Top Score – From Nadia To Now\u201d<\/a> was published just in time for the Summer’s Olympics, one that marks the 40th anniversary of Nadia Com\u0103neci\u2019s perfect 10\u2019s in Montreal, the first for a female gymnast in Olympic competition.<\/p>\n Here are some of Dvora\u2019s gymnastics articles, just in time for the Olympic Games:<\/p>\n Simone Biles\u2019 Mental Gymnastics<\/a><\/em>: A portrait of 19-year-old phenomenon Simone Biles, considered one of the best in the history of the sport and expected to dominate the coming Olympics<\/p>\n \u2022<\/span> Romania\u2019s Olympic gymnastics failure: where did it all go wrong?<\/a> <\/em>An analysis of why Romania failed to qualify to the Olympics, where it used to shine.<\/p>\n \u2022<\/span> The decades of black gymnasts who paved the way for Simone\u00a0Biles<\/em>.<\/a> How does the mental image of the ideal gymnast influence the diversity in a sport once dominated by east-europeans?<\/p>\n \u2022<\/span> The Complete Evolution of the Gymnastics Leotard<\/em><\/a>. A history of how gymnasts\u2019 leotards evolved along the years and how those changes reflected and influenced the evolution of the sport.<\/p>\n Register\u00a0here <\/a>for the 6th edition of The Power of Storytelling to find out more about Dvora.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Brooklyn based journalist Dvora Meyers has been researching her niche since she was eight, as her mother liked to say. She practiced gymnastics for 12 years, and even after she stopped, because of back surgery for severe scoliosis, she still obsessed about it. So she turned it into her writing niche. \u201cGymnastics became the prism … Continue reading Dvora Meyers on writing about your passion<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":2205,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[24],"tags":[60,112],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2204"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2204"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2204\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3070,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2204\/revisions\/3070"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2205"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}