Hannah Steincamp

Hannah Steincamp is an artist and one of our student podcasters. She has collaborated on the episodes of The Creative Process, adding her voice to our interviews with Peter Boal (Artistic Director of Pacific Northwest Ballet, Fmr. Principal Dancer New York City Ballet), and Jill Johnson (dancer, choreographer, educator, producer, Fmr. Director of Harvard University’s Dance Department, Fmr. Principal Dancer Ballet Frankfurt & longtime collaborator of William Forsythe).

She aims for her art to be authentic and playful, while capturing her curiosity and newfound knowledge about the nature surrounding her. 

Polari

As we enter the month of June, a time that many of us have learned to associate almost habitually with the celebration and visibility of the LGBTQ+ community, it’s important to reflect upon how we got here. Pride Month is, of course, a time to celebrate queer identities, but it’s easy to get lost in the sea of rainbow-patterned merchandise on every outfit at your local Pride event and on a display at every business that wants you to think they’re forward-thinking.

It's important to remember that we can celebrate Pride Month only because of the contributions and sacrifices made by those who came before us. Members of the LGBTQ+ community from every decade up to and including the present have endured oppression, discrimination, and vilification for loving and acting in ways the status quo deemed unacceptable. It is thanks to them that a queer identity is something we’re able to celebrate; it is thanks to them that we have Pride.

In homage to early trailblazers in the proliferation of queer culture, I’d like to spotlight Polari (Palare, Palari). Polari is a vernacular “almost-language” that became a coded way to keep communication covert among Britain’s gay community for decades during the mid-nineteenth century and up until the 1960s. Polari was a way for gay people to communicate with one another while remaining innocuous to outsiders at a time when the public met queer identities with blackmail, imprisonment, torture, or death. The language was widely used in the United Kingdom and Ireland until its use began to decline with the passing of the 1967 Sexual Offenses Act which decriminalized adult homosexual acts in England and Wales. Polari gradually fell out of use as being gay was no longer legally punishable, as gay people were no longer legally forced to hide. The language’s decline was further bolstered by the rise, acceptance, and appropriation of gay culture in cities like San Francisco and New York in the United States. Gay culture went from reviled to trendy, and the need to make communication within queer communities incomprehensible to nonmembers disappeared.

Though Polari had a relatively short lifespan, it remains an important piece of queer history, and its legacy is both linguistically and culturally significant. Polari is often referred to as an “anti-language” or an “almost-language.” What do these terms mean? Well, Polari never was and never was intended to be a full and complete language, used to articulate every thought and action of a speaker. Rather, Polari functioned similarly to a trade language, with contributions from Italian, Romani, English slang (from various groups around London including sailors and actors), and Yiddish. Polari speakers were able to carry on conversations but only using a limited lexicon and a simplified English grammatical base. That relatively rudimentary lexicon, however, was so colorful and impactful that its traces remain in the language we associate with gay culture to this day. The words “butch,” “camp,” and “zhoosh” (meaning to fix or neaten), for example, are all Polari terms.

Though colloquial use of Polari has almost completely died out, the language may not be doomed. Revitalization efforts are taking place all over the world and, as the pressure of homophobia wanes, subjects like Polari are being taken more seriously a field of academic study. Polari is an important part of LGBTQ+ history, and its rise and fall shows us how far we’ve come, but also and how far we have yet to go in dismantling the pervasive structures of homophobia.

Further Reading on Polari:
www.pri.org/stories/2012-08-15/polari-gay-slang-flourished-out-prejudice                     
https://babelzine.co.uk/ArticlePDFs/No2%20Article%20-%20Polari.pdf

Image credit: Chemical Engineer. Polari Rainbow Plaque. 8 Nov. 2018, commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Polari_Rainbow_Plaque.jpg

quilla

as the clouds die down your fingers brush
the naked dark
the drier night

and all your presence iridescent
their eyes ascend sweet Halley’s comet

the light engulfs
these wandering hearts
till time brings us apart
you’re still there but you’re not

i wish i could grab hold
to take you with me wherever i go
but you, oh neighbor of Mars
i belong down here and you up in the stars

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

Legacy & Rupture: A Reflection of Space & Time

Legacy and Rupture is an exhibition of seven artists, each reimaging how Black Americans are viewed and understood. This exhibition is curated by interdisciplinary artist and educator Howard el-Yasin. Legacy & Rupturebrings together work expressing the multiplicity of African American identities, framed by the everydayness of precarity, trauma, and memories at the City Gallery in New Haven, CT. The exhibition opens May 1st and ends May 30th of 2021.

Without Black legacy Black people can experience perceptions of fragility or incompleteness. In the void, we seek connection to our indigenous selves or reimage the world in our own image. We strive to assimilate with time and space. Legacy ruptures the narrative of loneliness — blackness does not have to be a vacuum; it can be an enveloping force. Blackness is not darkness — it is expansion.

Being Black means being part of the Black legacy. Being an empowering and unyielding force for the Black ethos rather than a disparate appendage of other people’s judgements of blackness. Having a legacy also means being entitled to space and having access to time. And not just having space but having a celebrated space. Not just existing in time but being seen within time — throughout it.

Time and space measure our reality. Space — three dimensions; four walls, or the world, as we interact with it. Time — the 4th dimension; a biform of the linear and the cyclical. Time, as we experience it, is linear but any historian will tell you that the events and the ideals are cyclical — chronic. Professor and author, Christina Sharpe, reminds us that “the past that is not past reappears, always, to rupture the present.”

Trauma reappears. Too often, the legacy of African American lives is trauma, work, and chronic pain. Those of us who descend from slaves carry the discomfort of displacement with us. Those who emigrant voluntarily carry the fear of the families they left behind. When we do not heal from the wounds of our history the scars will fester and erupt. This creates a dimensionality to trauma that allows it to cause intergenerational suffering — a legacy of trauma.

This exhibition creates a liminal oasis between space and time as a method of healing. Within art we can be seen — finally seen — as our true selves and that is a catalyst for congruence. For African Americans, congruence is especially challenging — allowing one’s view of themselves to no longer conflict with one’s view of Blackness — not only being accepted into the Black community but accepting ourselves as part of the Black community and as an individualized representation of Blackness.

In this exhibition, the artists self-identify within history — within time and space. This art is a refraction of the artists’ identities, allowing the audience to explore differences in representation rather than a reproduction of blackness.

THE ARTISTS & THE ART

Indigenous Trauma, arrows 24” length x 3/8” diameter, sculpture installation with variable dimensions; mixed media: feathers, wood, paint, metals, brass beads, leather, plastic, twine, bone, human hair, stone

Indigenous Trauma corporealizes the intersection of the African Americas experience and the Indigenous North American experience. These two ethnicities have parallel histories of displacement and disenfranchisement, and those histories intersect significantly when the first slaves were brought to the Americas. Artist Ari Montford plays with this intersection by manipulating arrows (a stereotypical and articu­­­late Indigenous symbol).

Each arrow is a story. A story untold about Indigenous history. A story of intergenerational violence and trauma. A story of joy and hope and love. Uniquely decorated but not decoration. More of a demonstration — of histories intertwined. Thinking of African Americans as an indigenous culture is a fairly modern phenomenon. But just like many indigenous communities worldwide, African Americans have been displaced; almost misplaced.

Each arrow relies on the cultural assumptions and the traditional realities of its form. The arrows interrogate histories of genocide and biological warfare throughout, now dismembered, aboriginal American communities, while also celebrating the immersive cultural practices essential to creating such unique works of folk art. They are monuments to undocumented battles, as well as aesthetic expressions of heritage and cultural reverence. Montford’s piece propels the narrative of indigenous art forward. Each arrow explores the multiplicity experiences within the Indigenous American diaspora.

Individually wrapped, intuitively ornamented, and precisely placed –the fabrication of each arrow reflects a ritual practice. The African spiritual observances that utilize North American indigenous species and materials are part of the Hoodoo practice. Most magical practice in African communities have been suppressed by Christian doctrines and negative cultural iconographies. Magic accesses spiritual inheritance by using combinations of physical materials and focused intention to pierce through to the metaphysical plane. The resources used to create Montford’s arrows are ingredients in a spell that allow the artist to transverse a void of understanding, unencumbered by expectation, and rupture the implied entitlement and authority of a white gallery space.

Trickster, skeleton frame: 77 x 60 inches, sculpture installation with variable dimensions; mixed media: wool blanket, sari, wooden sticks, fabric, yarn, ground coffee and acrylic gel

Sika Foyer works with magical and spiritual figures. Through ornamentation and adornments, Trickster celebrates Indigenous African culture and theology. Each stick was attentively and tirelessly wrapped and can be moved independently. They are the building blocks for a living entity. The sticks and yarn and fabric imitate colorfully decorated nucleotides building the adaptive and resilient DNA of an African Trickster god — a chameleon and an enigma. Foyer’s piece negotiates space like a God, being expansive and unashamed. The “collective engagement” of the independently working parts echo the seamless mechanisms of a hive mind.

The trickster reminds us of who we truly are. He mirrors or flaws and exploits our fears, deepening our understanding of our own motivations and conflicts — “what is hidden in plain sight”. His has a legacy of resilience, always escaping to safety at the last minute.

Foyer was born and raised in Lomé, Togo, West Africa and the shapes and colors in this piece link her work to the contours and embellishments of Sub-Saharan African masks. When Foyer was young, she worked beside her mother (a designer and a dressmaker) and experimented with design and construction. The fragments from the Trickster are reminiscent of string and scraps left behind from a dress’ completion, or perhaps they are the starting fabric and thread for a quilt that is yet unrealized.

For this artist, the process is a bullet — a finite thought — that ruptures through the subconscious into your lived experience. And the art is just the shrapnel, the debris. The scattered pieces that are reassembled into music and rhythm.

In a subtle but noticeable change, the pattern is transposed a step- higher; variable, mixed media

Nathanial Donnett works with mundane, overlooked objects such as paper, graphite, books, string to visualized abstract patterns. Each image, at first glance, is a collage of shadow, line & texture but every slight marking requires investigation.

Framed pieces depict meandering maps and mazes without legends or borders. Shadows and hesitation marks overlap to build form. Loose and taut strings connect invisible loci, mapping an expedition through an indistinct ecosystem. But the ecosystem is actually very specific — it is black and white; it is light and dark. Collaged advertisements look up from a sunken abyss and deliberate lines cut across a scattered galaxy. The layers upon layers of material emphasizes the complexity of each experience.

The framed pieces set the tone, but the unframed objects relay the rhythm. Chimes, made from shoelaces and metal eyelets and a hand fan embossed with an image of a dingy brick wall littered with garbage, evoke a singular urban poeisis. The vinyl sleeve for Ornette Coleman’s The Art of the Improvisers and Morgan Natalie Crawford’s book Black Post-Blackness are affixed upside down­­ as a poignant statement against even progressive notions of African American individuality and social mobility. Donnett says about his work, “the install in the gallery is… about extracting meaning in a material from the video piece and trying to create music out of the works as a whole and individually.”

The work documents the unseen parts of universe, the ephemeral things that encircle us but remain out of reach to the physical plane. Dark matter is the invisible substance that makes up 85% of matter in the universe and causes gravitational distortions. Dark matter is looked through — not at — and it interacts with everything on a subatomic level. A reflection of dark matter, the forms and gestures within Donnett’s work, are never in focus but always in frame. They transform texture and dimensionality ­while exploring a notion of incompleteness. Overgrown trails. Faded images. Loose strings connecting abstract interpretations. The images engage the audience to deduce for themselves — to project into the void.

Veil, 73” x 60’; oil and acrylic on canvas

Veil uncovers myths about toxic masculinity. Kamar Thomas studies male performance in public vs private spaces and collides with cultural expectations in his paintings. Historically, Black people are not the subject of portraits, they are props in the background — badges of wealth and decadence. Thomas features Black faces prominently and majestically to bring attention to the humanity of Black men.

The artist layers images of his own painted and masked face with digital flower trimmings. Thomas reverts the expectation of Black people interacting with nature and beauty. As the pandemic hit and people were forced into their homes and forced to cover their faces. Each one of us experienced the sting of being a faceless part of the crowd; being a statistic. We all got to experience a moment in the life of an anonymous Black man. This portrait reminds us of a Black man’s beauty and of his worth. A real man is safe, he is illuminated, he is flourishing.

The legacy of Black portraits is no longer a faded colorless photograph; Black portraits are full of life and freedom and color. Black beauty ruptures the narrative of black insecurity. Black love ruptures the narrative of Black danger. And Black glamour now is a form of Black armor.

Coming Out, 36 x48"; acrylic and collage

Ransome initiates a conversation about identity and sexuality in Coming Out. The subject of intimacy between African American males is controversial and clandestine. Even between fathers and sons, physical expressions of closeness are only recently becoming expected and celebrated. Within heterosexual male communities expressing physical affection is categorized as feminine or childish. Intimacy between men is a powerful rupture of expectation. Love between Black men, as depicted by acrylic paint and paper collage, forges a path towards acceptance and introspection.

For most young, LGBTQ+ individuals coming out is still a major milestone, and it can be an empowering experience or a devastating one. Headlines about recent legislation limiting health care for trans youth contradicts the hope granted by 2015’s historic Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage. Still, exhaustive accounts of anti-gay violence ripple through queer communities. Coming Out exposes the insecurities tied to being seen publicly as one’s true self.

The silhouetted figures are suspended in a forbidden lip lock, physically separated but energetically entwined. Their skin is in shadow — bathed in cold blue — the picture of stoic masculinity. The figures are enrobed in pink and purple and floral patterns to irradiate their societal duplicity. The quilt that conceals their bodies is decorated with a pattern adjacent to the “wedding ring” pattern stitched into quilts as a nuptial gift. The passionate lovers are suspended in time, unable to consummate their secret affections. The couple is almost hidden in plain sight — holding space for their love while subverting their fervent actions.

Untitled, 12’ x 4’ installation

Your absence is my monument, untitled 5; archival ink jet print

Merik Goma has created a stage and has sets the stage with scattered relics to create modern ruins — holding space and suspending time within its walls. These are the ruins of a society misremembered. Repeatedly the African American experience is depicted as loud, aggressive, and action oriented — urban. This installation celebrates the silence, the void, the aftermath. This scene is the quiet after the storm. A mutilated field after a tornado. The absence is essential to its mysticism and its realism.

Magic manifests in this installation through the growth, the undergrowth. Although the room is suspended in time — suspended in memory — the world around it lives on. Growing life betrays the illusion of timelessness. Grass and moss bloom beneath the mattress and spread forever outward to consume these theatrical remnants. I am reminded of the poem Ozymandias by Percy Shelley in which, after decades, sand has overcome the epic monument of the great pharaoh. His heroic shrine is covered, his thunderous words have worn away, and “Nothing besides remains”.

This set is like a recently extinguished candle; smoke still billows forth long after the flame is gone. That moment is suspended — or perhaps slowed — so the audience can absorb the gravity of the event. Even Goma admits to not having the full story, stating plainly, “I can only share a fraction of it”. The only fragment of forensic evidence is the picture placed opposite of the stage that depicts a man, looming over the empty bed, pondering the absence, possibly recollecting the consequences. He is illuminated slightly by the sunset oozing through the feebly boarded windows. His quiet contemplation suggests regret or loss upon revisiting the solemn still life.

Monuments to Escape, approximately 13’ multi-media wall installation

Marissa Williamson’s Monument’s to Escape is an immense art experience. The panels guide the audience through histories untold. The guide maps the stories of whispered histories — warm on your ear and gone with the wind. Each wall panel includes a question or statement designed to scrutinize the viewer’s historic dissonance. The panels are each a snapshot of legacies we refuse to face.

Some panels represent a remembering of the aboriginal American’s intimacy with the land. Another panel compares the stereotypical “Native American” connection to maize with modern America’s mass production and inordinate profit from corn as a source of animal feed and corn syrup. The artist reimagines the slave narrative of incompleteness and loneliness with questions like, “What is your North Star?’ Each panel is fighting against capitalistic, neocolonial memorials with quiet headstones of African American legacy.

There are cosmic energies framing historic figures and symbols and they reflect our energetic inheritance. The Earth and the galaxy also retain scars — physical trauma — and fears — cosmic trauma. The land exposed the histories we cut into it. The chasms of displacement are felt by the planet. The land longs for its biological companions; the plants and animals and life it has birthed and nurtured. Will we leave a legacy of compassion and mutualism or a legacy of parasitic exploitation?

In monuments, the past meets the present. Lives are relived when their stories are told. The artist leaves a time capsule of hope next to her installation in the form of pencils and scraps of paper. A glimmer of the stories of the future — holding space for present impulses. Time is not just the past but the future and the present. Art captures the piece of the soul and displays it as an imperishable timepiece — proof of transformation.

Black legacy disrupts; and rupture will be our legacy. It is essential to continue to bring together expressive and distinctive artistic voices that bridge the cultural crevasse between Black history and Black understanding.

Like the moon through the night sky, time returns in phases. Phases of oppression, anger, revolution, and healing. Legacy & Rupture creates space — an ephemeral passageway — between these phases and promotes healing and cosmic recognition. This exhibition of art ruptures and disrupts the expectations of blackness, the conversations around blackness, and the inheritance of blackness and replaces legend with striking legacy.

Images provided by curator Howard el-Yasin, photo credit to artist, Merik Goma.

Trailer

Hello, my name is Yu Young Lee. I am currently a sophomore attending Georgetown University in Washington DC, and I’m majoring in English. 

Hearing David Rubin talk about the casting process as an unapologetically creative one has made me appreciate just how experimental and unbound the whole filmmaking process is. And how in this freedom that is so intrinsic to this artistic endeavor, there is just so much possibility. Now more than ever, we are going beyond these questions about who best fits a mold, and we’re starting to think about the mold itself. What kinds of stories are we telling? What kinds of stories are we listening to? Whose voices have the mic? And whose voices deserve to have their turn? 

Rubin’s experiences with an array of genres, actors and stories, his advocacy for all sorts of films, especially those outside the quote unquote “mainstream”, resonates deeply with me. I was born in Korea, and I have spent most of my life outside of it, growing up in Indonesia, the United Kingdom, Singapore, and now, the United States. I can’t really say that I have a home in the most conventional terms, but I find one on the bridges intersecting all these facets of myself and the art I immerse myself in. 

Rubin mentions how he takes pride in the changing of the name of the “Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film” to “Best International Feature Film.” and I too believe it’s an important change, a critical one even. 

To some, one word is a subtlety that hardly makes a difference but the bridge of “inter” in internationalism is not lost on me. The abrasiveness of such a word like “foreign” isn’t lost on me either. “Foreign” is akin to “alien.” and to have a concept like “foreign” in such an innately diverse world of film is to demarcate the scopes of the human experience. 

When Parasite won Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay this year, a lot of people asked me what I thought. How did I feel, as a Korean to see a Korean film have such a victory? Was I proud? Well, yes, of course I was. But I was more hopeful of what it represented. Later on in this interview, David Rubin says, “people fundamentally want to be heard and want to be seen,” and in that global moment of Parasite’s recognition, it felt like I was seeing into a peephole of the future where Rubin’s words ring truer than ever.  

It was a victory of art, for art. Because the real success of Parasite is not a translation of the Korean language, although this in itself is not to be dismissed, but rather a transcendence of film as an shared experience. 

When you see a good film, you know. It’s hard to put this universality and power into words, but I’d like to share a short prose poem that I wrote in my attempts to describe it. 

<Trailer or trying to describe what good film is in the span of a shortening minute>

Only in this instance is time measured by your inability to grasp it. The slippage, like porridge through your fingers, only it tastes better. When in the 5th grade, they talked about synesthesia, you didn’t really understand how the senses eloped together and transcended one another, how it could all muddle up so decidedly in your brain. Like you could have taste buds on the soles of your feet, the ground you tread made a palatable palette.

But here, your eyes are eating the moving pictures up like breakfast. Each frame and frequency add up to instances, one heralding the next, and the next thing you know, you are watching many instances; you have forgotten what an instance is. 

They all disappear into one phantasmic feeling that leaves your gut shivering and your heart quaking. 

Photo by Jake Hills on Unsplash

On cinematographer Matthew Libatique

In learning about cinematography, through the eyes and lens of Matthew Libatique, what’s illuminating to me is the conscientiousness that permeates his work.

It’s not to say that that other filmmakers are thoughtless in their creative direction, that every shot is serendipitously stitched together — that most definitely isn’t the case, with so many breathtaking films and renowned cinematographers. It’s more that the depths of Libatique’s thinking and decisions with light and his camera speak to his immense love of the form and awareness of the effect it holds on viewers.

Our attention only goes so far — and yes, although a film dictates our gaze in the first few minutes, this flighty and easily lost thing must be earned throughout the rest of the hour. And it seems that the threshold into focus, a sharp kind of engagement where the moving pictures have an audience pinned in place, is blurrier and difficult to reach, in practice. I’ve noticed that many times, the best films only feel like one after the credits roll. It’s like the idea that I’m actually watching something, that what I’m watching is a movie, disintegrates and the parts only piece themselves together after.

The more films I watch, the more I see how subconsciously, good cinematography captures me. Flashy, pointedness in what’s captured in the frame is sometimes so striking and commanding that it is jarring. But to realize the frame’s holding power on the technical terms, on a very conscious level, rather than subliminally understanding its perfect manifestation within and of the story, is the difference between taking you out of it and drawing you that much closer, between distracting the story, even if it is a beautiful distraction, and ascending it.

It’s also intriguing to me how he talks about how conscious he is about history, legacy, and power — who wrote it, creates it, holds it, and most importantly, who shares and tells others of it and how. What has defined and dominated our artistic appreciation, is so intrinsically tied to a discriminatory curation, a red rope that has left countless voices, stories, visions and ideas go unheard.

So many — especially black and indigenous people, people of color, the LGBTQ+ community, women — have been disenfranchised in creative ways that seem insignificant alongside political and historical injustices, but are in fact, the truth and mark of the political and the historical.

When Libatique speaks about Spike Lee and his first time seeing Do the Right Thing, and how Lee awakened a new understanding of cinema for him, I could feel how monumental that moment was for him. And that realization that this was a possibility, took Libatique to where he is now, making films that hopefully are sparking the same fire in other young aspiring filmmakers and creatives.

Yu Young Lee is our Digital Media Coordinator and Co-Host The Creative Process’ - Poetry & Prose.

Who inspires you ?

What person from History , women experiences inspire you? How to start with ! Spontaneously I would say, Joan of Arc ,Hildegard von Bingen ,Etti Hillesum . … I have been living with Mary Shelley’s story and writings since the last few years and it has changed my life . She became a creative obsession , a ghost haunting my artistic imagination and questioning my own existence .

Mary doesn’t belong to the past and I feel a profound connection and gratitude towards this visionary and contemporary figure. The underlying issues of her writings including the obsession of Science , the search of Immortality and the philosophical and ecological context that shape her stories fundamentally speak about each of us and address to the complexities of our Human Nature.

She became famous with Frankenstein novel but her neglected later book The Last Man (1826) has the most to say to us in our present moment of crisis and global pandemic. The Last Man is a novel of isolation: an isolation that reflected Shelley’s painful circumstances.

Shelley asks her readers to imagine a world in which only humans are becoming extinct. Attacked by a new, unstoppable plague, the human population collapses within a few years. Shelley continues to haunt me.

The compositions of my album “The Waking Dream” are inspired by” 1816 ,The year without Summer” when the young Mary Shelley imagined her novel Frankenstein.

At the time Shelley wrote most prolifically, the world had been plunged into semi-darkness, crop-failure, famine, and a significant increase in riots, murders, and fatal illnesses by the cataclysmic eruption of Mount Tambora, in Indonesia. In this time of Global Pandemic and Grief, looking back to the history and collective dramas is a resonating and a learning process. Hopefully, Awareness can open a room for solace and arouse our vital energy.

For each sonic piece, my creative process is the same : the voice is a spatial and dramatic language.

Words and body sounds become layers,textures,sculptural elements inducing trance like movement and images .

This audio project is not a direct,detailed storyline but a meditative exploration awakened by the present echoing to the past events that generate a dystopian vision in which poetry is merging with soundscapes and vocals.

https://skana.bandcamp.com/

#vocalmusic #vocalexplorations #soniclimbo

Ultimately, Shelley’s novels insists on two things: firstly, our humanity is defined not by art, or faith, or politics, but by the basis of our communities, our fellow-feeling and compassion.

Secondly, we belong to just one of many species on Earth, and we must learn to think of the natural world as existing for its own sake.

We humans, Shelley’s novel makes clear, are expendable.

“Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos.” Mary Shelley


Muriel Louveau is a French composer, artist , performer, and singer.
@louveaumuriel

Lilac

Raised upon coral reefs bathed in lilac waters,
I emerged from the temperate ocean and almost immediately forgot how to swim. I threw myself back into the pool more times than I can count,
Hoping I’d remember how to keep myself afloat.
Each time, however, I nearly drowned
And was painfully reminded
That I am permanently displaced from who I once was.
They say I’ve evolved for the best,
Grown more apt to the environment to which I’ve immigrated,
The environment that’s made me struggle to shape my identity,
The environment that’s made me question whether parts of my identity
Are even acceptable to hold on to.
I couldn’t allow myself to agree.
The moment no one was watching, I returned to my coral reef;
Wanting to prove myself wrong, wanting to prove them wrong.
But upon viewing the decomposing remains of my birthplace,
I realized that part of me died when I first surfaced.
It was the innocence that kept me ignorant to their insincerity,
Unaware of their unwelcoming aloofness,
And blind to their bewitching beliefs.
I never knew how much I’d crave someone else’s approval.
But then again, I never dreamed that their disapproval
Would damn me to disapprove of myself.
After all, why would I need buoyancy
When their intent was to beat me to ground level?
Why would I need a gentle ripple encasing my movements
When they’d only turn them into tsunami waves?
Why would I need a surface undulating and oscillating
When all they want is a semblance of stability and certainty?
It’s ironic how I’d give anything now to feel that drowning sensation again.
At least then I’d feel something.
At least then my body wouldn’t be dry and shriveled and bitter
From too much exposure to the sun.
At least then I’d have something more in my lungs
Than exclamations of self-loathing and bitterness and regret.
At least then the last thing I’d witness would be lilac
Rather than shadow and monochrome and blackness.

Jess Wilber is a recent graduate of Oberlin College, where she double-majored in Environmental Studies & East Asian Studies with a double-minor in Politics & History and a concentration in International Affairs. She has been working with Citizens’ Climate Lobby (CCL) since her freshman year of college and helped to pioneer their current programs for students in Higher Education. She was among the first members of the Campus Leaders Program, which seeks to educate and empower students to become effective climate advocates and organizers in their communities. She founded the Oberlin College CCL Chapter, or OCEAL, and worked alongside other student environmental groups to create a powerful and cohesive climate movement on campus. She was then hired as the organization’s first Great Lakes Regional Fellow, where she managed a network of K-12 and college-level students and educators engaged in climate advocacy. She has also coordinated research and organizing projects with CCL's education, diversity, and international teams. Beyond her climate work, Jess is a musician, poet, certified mediator, and nationally and world-ranked equestrian in the Morgan Horse circuit. To learn more about CCL and their Higher Education Team, please visit citizensclimatelobby.org and citizensclimatehighered.org.

Home’n’Homer, Portmanteau

A blank wall, I ask you, how’s a girl supposed to act against a blank wall? How’s she supposed to brandish a sword and growl an imprecation, when all she’s facing is a big square sound-absorbent nothing? Alya realized she worked in the Dream Factory. She was hanging in, at any rate, and long familiar with the improbabilities of the business, such as fighting to the death in club lipstick. Such as this soft-porn version of the Ionic chiton (KIY-tuhn, insisted the dialog coach, KIY-tuhn). Years ago, on her first project, Alya had learned to brandish her cleavage as well as a weapon, give the fanboys what they want, even the S-&-M tease of struggling in chains (latex, no heavier than one of her kid’s toys). But for this project she had to work with a wall. A convincing scream can be an actress’s worst challenge, people didn’t understand, but the only threat before her was the shadow of an X, a cross-hairs projected on beige matte, a placeholder for a monster. X marks the monster — and this when the fear was supposed to be primal. The ogres under development, over in GGI, were supposed to loom up out of our muckiest pre-rational sediments. Out of the dawn of Western Civ.

Alya had every right to know where the killing blow might come from. She had every right to a plausible fight choreography, even if it meant taking time from the shooting schedule. Her director however handled her as if he wasn’t much more than a fanboy himself. One silver-tongued devil of a fanboy: An actress of your caliber, he’d murmur, of your stature…. all beside the point, especially when you considered that flattery was in the job description, for a director. His sweet nothings included the project’s tagline for the press: Part nano-tech 3-D action-adventure, part date-night, chick-friendly.

Okay, but Alya was the chick in question, she could still play nubile, hanging in, and a week into shooting she got her director to admit he hadn’t read the book. Come on, he grumped, an adaptation. Okay, but if he’d known the original he could’ve provided a clearer sense of the dangers facing Alya and her romantic lead — and that guy was no help either. Seven years younger, a former Disney androgyne buffed up for the role, her co-star remained a cuddle-toy. In skirt and sandals, no less. A week into shooting, she had no option except to exercise what was left of her starpower.

CGI lay just across the lot. Felt like another planet, granted, a world in which the sentient beings bore only a rough resemblance, pocked and untucked, to the men on her side of the galaxy. The nerd who opened the “Oddeyes” file for Alya was just such an otherworldly creature, his comb apparently mistaken for a garden tool, plus this Zachary couldn’t hide his crush on her. He couldn’t even begin to hide it, his stare like the full moon, and beneath the moon curved its golden reflection, his wedding ring. You couldn’t help but notice the ring, the poor guy didn’t know what to do with his hands, and for a moment there the actress worried that the studio’s go-cart had carried her back to high school. Was she going to wind up contending with an octopus, all grope and nibble? But as Zachary tweaked his software preferences, he regained his motor control, and Alya could suss out how, here on the Planet of the Function Keys, this get-together was a demonstration of his power. His wonkpower. She knew an invidious look when she saw one, and hadn’t she seen more than one here in the labs, sharp looks, transparently invidious? The Morlocks had spun on their stools to watch her pass.

Then the man had the mockups open, the claws and wings and the wings with claws, plus the beaks and tentacles, and besides that a no-neck head on which, above a boxer’s flattened nose, there bulged a single red-veined eye — and with all that popping open, on the biggest screen in the room, Alya left off fretting over the state of the guy’s marriage or the degree of his Asperger’s. This was about the work. About facing off against a critter as if you knew where the killing blow could come from, and she made a point of getting the names straight; you couldn’t very well develop a decent choreography if you didn’t know the enemy’s name. Kharybdis, kay-RIB-dis, was that it, and what did you call this hulking one-eye over here? Pah, Polly, Polyphemus? One hellacious beastie by any name, that one, and she did wish she could see it move, she told her CGI-guy, meantime indulging in feminine wiles, a dimpling, a simpering. She came up with a name for him, “Zak-Man,” and with that he worked up further animation. She got to see how the wings would unfold from the shoulders, the claws unfold from the wings, and when one troll unleashed its triple-spiked tail, whipping it around a horned carapace, Alya tried out a bit of Thai mixed-martial, maneuvers she’d picked up two or three projects back.

She came nowhere near her chaperone, but he was startled off his stool.

See but…, he said then, see but, I won, I wonder about a movie like this as a career move.

A movie like this? 3-D, CGI, FX? Cartoon action adventure?

On the level of the career, see. I wonder, an actress of your caliber…

Don’t you remember Meryl working with special effects? She did a whole scene with her neck in a spiral like Rubber Woman. Didn’t you see that?

Meryl was Rubber Woman?

They’ve all got a movie like this. Meryl, Sissy, Uma. Cher, Goldie, Sigourney.

See but, the Aliens thing…

That was Sigourney, her franchise, totally.

I, I do get how this project is special. It’s only part 3-D nano-tech …

I know, right? — because has anyone done a movie like this? Think about it. Has any actress gotten a stretch like this?

The woman who wrote the Odyssey. The Awe, Authoress of the Odyssey.

The authoress of the Odyssey. Her secret has lasted a thousand years, three thousand, but now at last the truth comes out. We rip away her disguise.

Her one-man Geek Squad, averting his eyes, clambered back on his stool. Alya bit back a smirk: Rip away her disguise?

Aloud, she went on: Plus there’s a mystery, right, a natural MacGuffin.

See but, that you even know that expression, “Macguffin,” see…

Who wrote the greatest poem in history? Who’s the blind old cripple? Turns out it was a young Greek noblewoman!

Zachary kept his eyes on the screen, the latest hell-spawn. You, you’ve read the book?

The two of them had met hardly half an hour ago, and already he sat there telling her about his dyslexia. Zachary could never make his way through a text so slow and antique, with words like “authoress” — but he assured her he was long familiar with the monsters, he wasn’t that weird, and, see, hadn’t Alya said something about getting a stretch? See, how about his stretch? His team was on board for the full gig, right through to any pickup scenes post-production, because in their corner of the industry, who wouldn’t want to romp with terrors that were part of the, see, the cultural inheritance? Bad craziness, out of the pre-rational originally, yet now, like, cardinal freaks?

Plus a project like this, like action-tech, you, you know how they pay…

Yet to bring up the money sent him into diminuendo. Alya’s new friend dipped his head, frowning, silent, and twisted and twisted his ring.

She could suss things out. Behind her storklike companion she could spy the room’s 800-pound gorilla. The man was thinking of her divorce, to bring up the money brought up the divorce, the irreconcilable differences, everybody on the lot had heard, and on the next lot too, and the next and the next, and anywhere the news spread, anyone with half a brain could figure it was costing a bundle. Simply to return to her own home, this evening — that cost a bundle. That made a role as action-tech eye-candy look like a career move.

Now Alya could softpedal her goodbyes, dimpling again for the Monster Wrangler. She could text her assistant a bland reminder about morning makeup. But both these people, like most of the players in town, kept the same gorilla on a leash. They knew what it cost to maintain a spread-wing home while at the same time grappling in the mud-pit of child custody. The ex too could throw around some power. Nevertheless, once she got home, she enjoyed again the melody of the new security code. She could find the zen in throwing dinner together (tonight, pasta primavera) and eyeballing her pour (Falanghina), keeping it under six ounces. So too she got her warm’n’fuzzies with the kid, though tonight they only spoke on the phone. At least with Caller ID the ex didn’t butt in, and afterwards Alya crossed the house to the gym, thinking yoga but slipping, instead, into mixed-martial. You go, girl. You got some moves, for those homunculi. Scaly old homunculi, they can’t handle your moves. By the time the actress tottered back into her office, she might plop down at her desk and pull out some financials, she really needed to check those financials, but she couldn’t make her way through a single transaction. She couldn’t handle any computations more difficult than the pros and cons of sleeping in yogawear. As for her pour of Grey Goose, the shot was a tad enhanced, the glass a gift from On The Rox, and later on, thinking back, trying to make sense, Alya understood she’d drifted off before her papers and laptop, there in the Aero-Chair, before the monster hopped up onto her desk. She’d woken to find the creature scrabbling through a couple of quarterly statements.

Later on, thinking back, she recalled the vague notion that this must be a prank — sophisticated as all get-out and vicious beyond belief, a prank cooked up south of Satan — and yet she’d had that notion, a flicker of false illumination: this bastard on her desk could only be someone’s idea of a joke. A rat-tailed, hook-nailed bastard, also mantis-armed, plate-faced, terrier-toothed, all no more than a foot high and scrabbling through her papers. One good eyeful and any better thinking was out the window, off along the migration lanes, and Alya was left with vague and impossible notions, or flashes of indignant aggro (those papers were private…), nothing in her head so potent as her screams, an office-full of screams, a double-wing-full, so that if she were getting punk’d she gave the joker just what he wanted, the total scaredy-cat, though nothing so nimble as a cat, rather maybe a marionette in the hands of an epileptic. Her top rode up, her pants slipped down. If this were all a mean trick (and she wouldn’t put it past her babyfaced lead, he’d never seen a piece of scenery he couldn’t chew…), then Alya gave them such a bellowing funkadelic hop-scotch, with so much skin showing, that the video would go viral before the echoes faded. At some point her screams cohered into threats: she’d call 911, she’d call the service, she had Mace, she had a hammer, a poker from the fireplace, and then her head cleared enough for her to find the biggest kitchen knife, a cleaver longer than the critter itself. Her panic relented enough for her to throw in a couple of moves, if she were on video she might as well show some moves, roundhouse from the left, from the right, not too shabby, at least it got the attention of the ogre nosing through her stuff. The little abortion hunkered down, there on the latest bank statement, you might even say it cowered, ducking behind its claws with its tail coiling around its, its ankles or whatever they were. Ugly little animule or whatever it was. Still it waited out her threats, her Thai aggro, it squatted over deposits and withdrawals like the worst nightmare of an audit, and finally Alya returned her right mind, more or less. She could recognize the notion of a prank as insipid, totally, another insipid dream of how your real life must be elsewhere. The dream in which you’re under observation and earning good grades.

Then came the low comedy with the neighbor.

Alya had neighbors, part of the script that she and the ex had been following. No ranch in Montana for them, no compound on Virgin Gorda, they lived in a neighborhood, they walked to the store, even if it what they bought there were saffron and morels. Once in a while, too, they could gab over the fence. They could share a sack of tomatoes or a peek into another soul, and come a night when somebody sent up screams powerful enough to set the spoons and wineglasses tinkling, well, that person had neighbors.

Thank God — or, considering Alya’s current project, the gods? — the face at her door turned out to be phlegmatic. Decidedly phlegmatic, deeply wrinkled, the face of the widower who lived uphill, an industry longtimer who could always say he’d heard worse. He could play it like a trump: he’d seen so much back in Da Nang, everything else was No Thang. He’d caught a magic carpet to the States, he’d swooped down amid the other Vietnamese in sets and costume (they ran the union for years), and tonight was just another ripple in the ride. Just another white girl gone bat-shit, and never mind that she was wearing VC pajamas and a face that called to mind a napalm victim. As for the monster, it’d gone scoot. The gargoyl-ino had shown off its leap at the first long syllable of the doorbell, ahnnng-, and it leaped, -gehlll-l, and it caromed farther, lamp to divan, legs dangling, you thought of a wasp with jet propulsion, and Alya might’ve been startled but she was done with screaming. As the creature scuttled behind the divan, she only let go a long, low syllable of her own, a sigh out of doo-wop.

After that, as she stood in the doorway before the refugee-made-good, well, talk about sets and costumes. Alya cloaked herself in a story. She kept her back to her house.

The neighbor took it quietly, his wrinkles staying put, through from time to time he brushed his thumb across his iPhone, keeping the screen aglow. You could see he’d brought up the speed-dial, one touch would summon the police — and it was kind of the man that he’d come to her first. It was kind of him to think how it would look if she had a black’n’white show up at the house. The paparazzi had a sixth sense for this, a star with her head on a pike, but Alya lived alongside the local sachem, an industry sachem.

Thank God, or the gods. Yet even as she told him so, her smile genuine or almost, the actress stuck to her story. She insisted that tonight was about the work.

A convincing scream, she said, people don’t understand, it’s work.

Now it was his turn to sigh, more Delta than doo-wop.

You’ve been there. Never enough rehearsal, the budget is such a, a bogeyman. Now, tonight, here, I’m sorry, but, where else?

I’ve heard worse, he said.

The screen on his phone had gone dark.

A comedy, that encounter, call it The Beggar At the Gate, except Alya came away feeling as if she’d been the beggar and her neighbor had brought just what she needed. A cup of apathy, he’d brought her, because now as her creepy stowaway re-emerged, wasting no time hopping back up on her desk, she went on past without breaking stride, making for the guest bath. In there she fished out the stub of a spliff from the baggie at the bottom of the ibuprofen jar, her assistant had a dispensary permit, and as she got her first toke she came back into the room and stretched out on the divan. If she’d had a feather boa she would’ve draped it around herself. She sipped on her spliff and sized up her new house pet.

And vice-versa, insofar as she could tell where it was looking, this hybrid of rat and crab and hornet. Its triceratops-head hung above the bookkeeping, long enough for the reluctant host to stop picturing herself with her throat torn open, or with dæmon larva in her belly. Rather she fretted about her wrinkles. At this hour her dimples lost their charm, and the smoking didn’t help, especially not month-old weed, stale enough to send her into a fit of coughing. By the time Ayla got her next level breath, her hideous guest had returned to its invasion of her privacy. Pawing once more through her financials, its movements almost polite, it appeared to be concentrating. It extended a longer claw into a desk drawer and pincer’d out her checkbook. Alya was old-school about the checkbook, too, she kept her own set of figures, and the drawer might’ve popped open during the earlier ruckus. In any case it was time to quench the spliff and drop it back in her baggie, time to fold the baggie back under the ibuprofen and run the bottle back into the guest bath (where a guest might’ve left it, see…). If there were any psychedelia stranger than a monster in your house, it was a monster with a CPA.

Its movements were almost polite, delicate with the check register, and the actress saw no reason not to draw nearer. No reason not to study how the limbs and torso, if about ten times their size, might strike a killing blow. And look, lo — what was prophesied by Zacharia did come to pass!

Today’s mockups, ka-ching! Look, lo, the wings, their veins and texture. So too the tail, the flex of the unused claws, these had an ugliness entirely familiar, as did the ribbing and abdomen. Alya fell into a bob and weave, her offense, her defense, taking full advantage of the synchronicity, her swami-nerd who’d seen the future. Because didn’t every actress have a story like this? A career move that would never have happened without some mad synchronicity? They all had a story like this, some gift freak they’d known better than to look in the mouth, and Gwyneth had ended up with an Academy Award. A gilded dingus without hair or genitals, now there was a household monster Alya could use, and so tonight she parried and kicked, she skipped and threw jabs, and she came up with questions.

Is that all you got?

The wee mooncalf once more raised its head.

Don’t you want to rip out my guts, gnaw on my bones, and leave me nothing but a spot on the floor?

Its mandible retracted, almost sheepish.

Not that Alya could go on trying to read the thing’s mind all night, not with the medical MJ burning in the throat and weighing on the brain. That Grey Goose in the freezer was calling: time to migrate. As for her ugly nocturnal emission here, she had plenty to keep it busy, a couple of scary notices about her investments for instance. And how about that photo album from before the breakup? She and the ex had kept a photo album, sure, printouts and stickum were part of the narrative, and now she dug the book from its hiding place and opened it across the mess on her desk. The shots from the Maldives, why not, she’d rocked that bikini. When some scum with a telephoto lens had caught her topless, when he’d sold the pics to TMZ, well, she’d rocked that too.

Through some miracle she made it to the far end of the bedroom wing — I know, right? — and after that insured herself hours upon hours of unconsciousness, setting her Droid on mute. She figured she retained starpower enough to keep the studio from sending a gofer, for one morning anyway. And when Alya showed up on the lot, it was refreshed and without apology. She hid the chill of what she’d seen before leaving the house, the nips the bastard’s claws had made in the photo album. The book wound up back where she’d buried it, of course, but before that she couldn’t help but notice: divots, nibbles, nips, along the edges of a page or three. Also on a bank alert about a recent withdrawal, itty cuts and slashes, as if her life were a whittle-stick. The recollection gave her a chill, but she could hide the chill, she had enough to contend with right here on the sound stages, in particular her romantic lead. Her solicitous pretty boy: Got your beauty rest? You feeling it, now? If the kid had his druthers, she’d sleep longer than Snow White. He’d prefer just one name above the title, one set of abs flaunted against that blank screen, and come to think, wasn’t that the worst of what Alya had to contend with? Wasn’t that the fission core, that rectangle of dumb pale matte? High time she stood up on her hind legs and showed off her chops, what had she been doing since yesterday if not the work, the chops, and before the boy lost his concerned pout (adorable, Brando goes Disney), she was back in her chiton and cleavage. She had her dialog, that had never been the problem, and the actress got her sword out, she began sketching Z’s before a spot on the wall, and at that point the director had his nose in the latest budget report, but in half a minute he let the papers drop. He nudged aside the principal cameraman. The director needed to see this, a girl and her monster soaring to a height from which they could peer into the very goop of the Unconscious, and choreography wasn’t even the word, not any longer, not the way Alya was feeling it, not the way she was hearing it, the director’s new pitch to the press, another dream of another life taking shape as a murmur in her head, a burst of movieola patter, the words all insect-segments, like “postapocalyptic” or “Pixar-Matrix­,” “splatter-saga” or “aggro-buzz” or “B.O.-whammo,” or maybe “S-&-M-Whack-a-Mole,” or then again “myth-o-matic,” “freak-smack” or “Clyteme-nation,” way past the old school like “thumbs-up” or “topline,” instead perhaps “nano-alchemy,” “wanna-palooza,” “blog-catnip,” “retro-viral,” “widget-able,” “gawk’n’gag,” or then again “Oscar-prime” or “Oscar-pimp,” or could be “3D-world,” “world-boff,” “world-preem,” “world-whammo”…

When she came out of the scene the director got her eyeball to eyeball. Loudly he announced that, next, they were doing a full dragonslaying. A Scylla-slaying, and as for the romantic lead, he should dial down.

What?, asked the boy. You want me to play sidekick?

His pout soured. Alya wanted to tell the kid the bile did him good, it was his ticket out of the Mouseketeers, but she didn’t feel like getting her head bit off.

Besides, it wasn’t any second-line player she needed to speak with now. After the Scylla was slain, after she was back at the makeup station getting the gore scrubbed away, she had her assistant call over to the Geek Ghetto. This time the nerd would get the go-cart, and wouldn’t you know it, just talking with Zachary left Alya’s girl with supernatural powers. Suddenly the assistant could read minds. After the call she handed over a folder in which, stashed among the documents, there lay a fat spliff fresh from the dispensary.

As his cart pulled up, her bad-hair boy was on the phone, the conversation intense. He had to use Alya’s name twice before he could ring off.

Awe, awesome, he declared. They’re into a whole 3D-redo.

He kept hold of the phone, perhaps to keep from grabbing her.

They’re back to the storyboards, he declared. Xena-rific, they’re saying.

The guy wasn’t a director, and this made his sweet-talk that much more tasty. The folks from makeup were still in earshot, too.

Warrior Princess Queen of the Underworld. Franchise-ready.

Also Alya knew what the computer jockey got out of being seen with her, and why not indulge him? Why not soften him up?

Finally: Zachary, I ask you — where do you get your ideas?

Overhead, the floodlights had come on, and against the tarmac, the trailer siding, his shadow lengthened and hooked.

See but, Al, Alya, what? I told you I haven’t read the book.

The book, well, a smart guy like you doesn’t need to read it. Smart guy like you, you can imagine what it’s like, for this woman. A gifted young woman.

You, you can tell where it’s going.

You can tell a mile off, no MacGuffin about it, where the girl got her ideas.

The way he gripped his phone, you noticed his wedding band.

The author too, Alya went on, he’s no mystery, one of those old Brit polymaths. If anyone were going to rewrite the Odyssey… But then there’s you.

Behind him, his crooked shadow might’ve come out of a horror-show.

Where do you get your ideas? Do you just close your eyes and, where are we, another world? Everyday you face that blank wall.

Uhh, a blank screen…

She went on staring, narrowly, avid, while with his free hand the nerd found his other, he cradled his phone and fingered his ring, and though he’d switched the Droid to mute it kept blowing up, its message-lights blooming across his narrow chest. When at last he spoke, what came out was distracted and clueless: Cultural inheritance? Nonetheless the actress let it go. What further clarity did she need, when she had the guy’s own breastbone, aglow with its Bat-Signal? He didn’t want to talk about it, her Zak-Man, he couldn’t chase down that pill, because it led back behind the bones, into that breathless, bloody darkness, with its throbbing omnivorous hulks, and after Alya had once more made her goodbyes, after she’d negotiated the traffic and the alarm and she was once more alone in the house, she knew just how to bring her night caller around. She knew how to get her papers scratched and gnawed on, her interiors tagged with rowdy graffiti. She might’ve started growing a claw herself, she had such a grip on her spliff while she dug for the sex tape. She didn’t want the tape she was using to threaten the ex, no, but the one he’d never been able to find, the tape with her previous ex, plus a dose of X, not to mention an extra, a girl from On the Rox. That ought to interest the little troglodyte more than her financials, and she had better paperwork for it too, like the receipts for her abortions. She had the mugshot from when they’d busted the escort service. Alya had taken care of herself a long time before she had to take care of a child, indeed before anyone had called her Alya, and in the photo from the bust, the stare she was giving the officer in charge, she was making sure he got the message — if he gave her the mugshot, she’d be his freak — and she had the shot now, didn’t she? She had rags and offal enough to occupy her nights for a lifetime, and with it, no end of outrageous promise.

ode to ancient closeness

Lavender legends of history’s hiding rite, we seek your stories still; rise busted

beauty queens, secrets of desire archives- unlatch sacred

soul corridors!

Come, “close friends,”

to call in code of unblood family, ones starved for buried hearts, spurning

scholars blind

to this love that bears its name celestial, its confessing breath

unspooling stars and moons —

(Achilles absent Patroclus’ ashes is not

Achilles;

Sappho’s glance encircled girls’ softness).

Palms alight with your preserved eternities, spun-myth and scorn, battle and

dance, we praise:

May our spirits never meet as strangers

in the necessary night.

The Art of Preservation — An Interview with Dimitrios Pandermalis

Listening to Mia Funk’s interview with Dimitrios Pandermalis, the director of the Acropolis Museum, I often heard Pandermalis speaking about the way his museum is designed. The Acropolis Museum serves to preserve the manner in which its pieces were meant to be exhibited and engaged with. Whether it be the way the sunlight illuminates the space, the orientation of the pieces, or the invitation for visitors to provide feedback, Pandermalis has clearly put the time and energy into creating an authentic atmosphere. As he mentions, being from a country with such a renowned and important history, the responsibility of upholding such a legacy in a respectable and honest way is a great one. About a year ago, I was lucky enough to be in Athens and to walk through the Acropolis. I remember being perplexed by the state of some of the ruins. I had not walked through an institution that was conducting renovations and preservation projects in such a transparent and open way, for everyone to see. Just as Dimitrios Pandermalis works to engage the museum’s guests with the history they observing, he also allows them to engage with the process of preserving that history. I am an active proponent of the inclusion of method and process in presenting works, whether it be those of my own or of others. When an audience is invited into the process, works of fine art and historical preservation are able to take a step off of their pedestal and come back down to earth where they are easiest to engage with and be inspired by. History is often considered to be a dying breed, with less students choosing as their focus of study each year. Like the fine arts, it can seem intimidating and hard to relate to. However, making it so that the public can observe and engage with the process of historical preservation allows for those who might have never considered such a profession to see it for what it truly is. Archaeologists and historians like Dimitrios Pandermalis are making it so that the process of discovering and preserving history is seen as it should be: essential, exciting, and for everyone.

the real girl

I wrote this poem surprisingly quickly as I reflected on the movie Lars and the Real Girl, a movie that David Rubin, recently interviewed by The Creative Process, worked on as the Casting Director. I have watched this movie twice, at first just to watch Ryan Gosling in something, and was struck by the humor and deep sadness that walk hand-in-hand throughout it. It is a very gentle film and what left me particularly moved was what the movie proposed about loneliness, and so:

the real girl

when loneliness takes shape and form

she has the loveliest eyes and the sweetest breath.

she pretends acts of service.

you may know her,

laugh with her,

escape with her.

she lets you lay still with her.

when she, with lovely eyes, leaves you,

she does so by sinking deep into you;

resting in your rib cage, presiding in

your lungs. when you breathe,

you think of her.

when you breathe, it is now sweet.

her final act of service:

you now breathe.

–Joelle Saunders
Student at Fordham University majoring in International Studies
Find more of my poetry on Instagram @/speak.and.play.poetry

Our Village Library and I/我和我们的乡村图书馆

＿＿我们的乡村图书馆，其实规模不大，藏书室加阅览室，总计约80平米，藏书近4000册，分为：传统文化，农业科技，医药健康，科学教育、儿童读物，工具词典、文学小说、政治法规、影视、其他，十大类，另有二台电脑，一台打印机。这个小小的图书馆，坐落在云南省瑞丽市户育乡芒村（包括雷贡村），从2013年建立至今已经走过了7年。这里的主体民族是景颇族和德昂族，现有100多户。他们都是从昔日刀耕火种、刻木记事的少数民族直接进入新社会的民族（用官方的流行话，叫“直过民族”）。
＿＿曾经有很多人都在问我，为什么要跑到这个小山村来建一个图书馆？仔细想来，其实源于一个情愫（或是情结）。因为，50年前，当社会的潮流无情的将我们这群世事未喑的年青学生抛到农村时，我和我的先生都曾经在这个小山村上山下乡当知青。当时，这里的物质条件极度匮乏，且缺医少药，凭着自学，我在这里担任赤脚医生，我还在这里结婚生子，一待就是7年。那时虽然很苦，但我们用自己的真诚和善良，将青春的汗水洒在了这里，一生当中最美好的年华都在这里度过，我不仅学会了他们的语言，还融入了他们的生活，和他们建立了深厚的感情。
＿＿接下来的岁月，我们虽然都又重新回到了城市，读书、工作，但经常魂牵梦绕的仍然是这个小山村和这里的乡亲们。以后在昆明工作的20多年时间里，只要有机会，只要能够争取到公益的扶贫项目，我都会重新回到这个小山村，联系从未中断。
＿＿所以，2012年底，我们又回来了。这一次，在社会各界爱心人士和当地政府的支持下，在家里亲人的支持下，建起了这个小小图书馆。目的只有一个，帮助这里的孩子们，多读书，爱读书，走出乡村，走出贫困。如果要说私利，那就是我在这里找到了一种精神的寄托和心灵的安慰，而且，这里环境优美，宁静，我喜欢这样的生活。我们这一代人，经历了太多的苦难，但苦难也是一种财富。现年老了，还能够继续为乡亲和孩子们服务，感到很幸福。7年来，我们开展的工作主要有：1.借阅图书；2.为中小学生辅导课外作业；3.利用寒暑假，举办孩子们喜爱的各种活动和培训等。仅以近2年为例，2019年6月，与瑞丽市妇女儿童中心联合举办“维护儿童权益和安全的培训”，1天，28个孩子参加；7月初，在户育乡“关心下一代工作委员会”的支持下，举办2019年夏令营，7天，23个孩子参加，主要内容是学习兴趣英语和绘画，教师由来自深圳国际学校的三名志愿者担任；7月初，在瑞丽市图书馆的支助下，举办“书法与绘画”培训班，9天，共有39个孩子参加，教师由当地小学的美术老师担任；9月初，经过一个月的排练，带着村子里的6个孩子（4男2女），参加瑞丽市海关举办的国庆70周年庆祝活动，我们的孩子主要是参加经典咏流传的“声律启蒙”演唱。2020年3月，疫情期间，经过一个月的筹备，举办了有11个孩子参加的读书交流会。
＿＿通过这一系列的活动，图书馆在当地村民和孩子们当中，有了一定的影响力和凝聚力，只要我们举办活动，周边其他村寨的孩子们都会闻讯赶来参加。这些，也为政府倡导的文化扶贫和教育扶贫作出了一定的贡献。但是，我们目前也碰到了一些困难，主要是：没有固定的资金来源，筹资越来越难；自己年岁纪已的（71岁），图书馆的管理，没有接班人。
＿＿不管怎样，只要自己还有能力，我都将坚持下去。

执笔人：李春瑞
2020.7.23

付件：喜爱的作品
1、《平凡的世界》，路遥著；
2、《白鹿原》，陈忠实著；
3、《小妇人》（美），爱尔科特著，徐爽、孔春艳译；
4、《血色黄昏》，老鬼著。
…

“Our Village Library and I” is a short essay written by Li Chunrui, founder of the Mang Village Library in Ruili, Yunnan, China. In the essay, the 71-year-old Li tells the story of this small library that she has been running for seven years. The library serves as one of the few intellectual resources for several surrounding villages, standing next to the border between China and Burma, and it is the result of Li’s passion for community service, children’s education, and decades of involvement with local minorities. This essay will be translated into English and be published soon.

Endless Shapes

In response to the celebration of films telling stories about women I share a vocal piece creating landscapes of sounds and languages which is inspired by the writing and Life of Mary Shelley , author of the seminal novel Frankenstein but not only…She was way ahead of her time.

https://soundcloud.com/muriellouveau/endless-shapes-mary-shelley

What's In a Name? (An Ode to Transness)

This piece took me a few weeks to write — the entirety of that time, even when I finalized this piece, was spent wrestling with my identity as I travelled from place to place. With influences from Romeo and Juliet, this was born out of my confusion, and then out of my discovering the answers to the questions below.

I

who am i? who am i really?

with this title, who resides within me?

with this title, who holds onto me?

what do i owe without this title?

II

will this body

by any other name

still taste as sweet?

"What's In A Name? (An Ode to Transness)" is an excerpt from Alexander's work-in-progress book. See more of them: https://www.instagram.com/theoryofx/, https://www.creativeprocess.info/other-voices-10

Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian & Associate Curator Paul Chaat Smith

I’m Jesse Jensen, an undergraduate student from the University of Iowa and associate producer for the Creative Process. During this interview Paul questions the education,or lack thereof, we are receiving in America around past and current Native American history. When reflecting on my own education I find that the miniscule amount of time and effort that was spent around these topics is insulting to Native Americans and also harmful to the youth who will grow up to be the future with a clouded and misleading education about American History. In school i was taught what Paul describes as a “brief chapter” where Native Americans were introduced to us in what textbooks describe as the “beginning of america”, but from that point forward in the book it’s as if they didn’t exist in our history. It’s not that their history stopped in the 1700’s, it’s that our education system has failed to acknowledge their existence. This is why I find the work that Paul and the Smithsonian do to be so important as they continue to challenge our modern understandings around American history and Native American culture. As an American who inherits America’s awful bloody history, it isn’t Paul’s objective to evoke emotions of guilt or pity, but rather he hopes his work at the museum and books bring about what he calls “collective responsibility.” Part of this responsibility would consist of correcting our education system so that they will acknowledge that this country was taken during a genocide of Native Americans and was build apon the backs of the enslaved. Those that continue to deny or ignore these facts will ultimately find themselves dancing near the wrong side of history. It’s easy for us in the 21st century to label our slave-owning presidents or the early colonizers as being on the wrong side of history, however there are so many circumstantial, environmental, and contextual factors that somehow convinced them at that time that their acts were justifiable. It’s hard to say if these same people were placed in our current society with a modern education if they would feel regret or remorse for their actions hundreds of years ago. This idea of being on the wrong side of history can be applied to our current situation as well. Once again it’s hard to say if our president and his supporters will feel remorse or guilt for spreading and rebooting racist and xenophobic behavior through their policies and rhetoric but only time will tell. We’ve come a long way since the colonization of this country which subsequently brought on the destruction of Native American culture. So what do we do now? Many of us are trying to better equip ourselves with education and experiences that help us be better allies to minority groups and people of color so we can help combat racism when it is presented. During this dark time in American history it’s great to have voices and artists such as Paul Chaat Smith who are able to address our past while offering education and insight into Native American Culture.

when i mean what i say

I share this poem in response to the idea of African-American History and Culture as it connects The Creative Process’s association with the Smithsonian National Museum of African-American History and Culture. I wrote it when they were still circulating the video of George Floyd, before they figured they probably shouldn’t. That is to say that the processing and outrage about this death this time was still early and raw. This was my attempt to grasp at my reaction, at how to feel and talk myself through what was going on, how to conceptualize and reconceptualize my blackness and what it means about my place in the world. Enjoy!

when i mean what i say

nothing tastes sweet anymore.

one day they’ll collect this in an anthology or something…

they’ll ask: what did she mean when she said what she said?

that nothing tastes sweet anymore.

well look around at the world around you, take in the world around you; what would you say is the flavor of the air?

i did just that and nothing — nothing tastes sweet like they said it would.

when you know nothing, mud pies in backyards might as well be cherry, apple, peach.

but growth is the salt of tears — it’s not sweet.

reality like blood leaves a bitter taste in the mouth — it’s not sweet.

compassion is sugar, it’s candy — it’s the sweetest there is.

begging for it is sour, not sweet.

when they take your voice, they nick your tongue — can’t taste anything anymore.

and when you can’t breathe, you can’t taste shit.

the world is not sweet.

it never was but it is sad that you can taste it now.

that is what i mean when i say what i say.

that is all i mean.

Joelle Saunders
Student at Fordham University majoring in International Studies
Find more of my poetry on Instagram @/speak.and.play.poetry.