#my knowledge of other people's poetry comes from high school and college english classes only

[xyliaxart]

Executioner

Dragging like chains the train of her diamond dress The sound a warning, already mourning the soon-to-be mess

Mourning this man, the lamb, albatross hung on his neck Out in the storm, already worn, thrown from the deck

Eyes so clear, no stench of fear, a shame that looks can't kill A spear of revolt, to cut his throat, and let sweet ichor spill

Claiming that which, with wicked tricks, she has truly earned Ill-gotten gains, his former claims, now they belong to her

She now walks down a moonlit aisle, a crimson step turned crimson mile Out amongst the rank and file, the bloody teeth to a twisted smile

[shirophantomvox]

Leorio, Hisoka, Illumi, and Chrollo Head Canons #2

What’s up y’all! Thank you so much to the people who have given me feedback about what posts you all would like to see! This post will be about the “Adult Trio” and Leorio about how they would help their significant other with a subject in college. This one is a good suggestion! I’m going to incorporate fluff in this, as I am a sucker for fluff. I hope you all enjoy this! I most certainly do. This post is about 2687 words but don't worry, it's worth the read! These head canons came from my mind its a coincidence that some of these pictures match the thoughts. Portentous (old English) means wonderful or marvelous (in modern English) FYI: I am thinking about creating a discord server for both Voltron and Hunter x Hunter fans. I don’t know how to use the fancy perks of discord yet, so if you know how to and can help me out, send me a message! Alright, let’s get to it! Obviously these images are from Pinterest.

Discord Server for Voltron and HxH fans!

Leorio

“Mr. Leorio”, as we all know, is a sharp guy. He dresses in a suit, carries a suitcase, and wants to be a doctor. This man knows everything about academics, especially math and science. He will need to know these subjects to be a successful medical doctor.

Leorio received an A- in Calculus II and a B+ in Organic Chemistry. He was the only one that passed with flying colors while everyone else barely made it. He didn’t gloat in their faces but as soon as he got into the hallway he jumped for joy.

He was extremely happy about his progress and counted the days until graduation even though that was in 5 years. Wow! Don’t we love graduate school?!

He deserved the high grades because he spent countless nights studying missing parties, football games, and being with you just to make sure he was on the right track to graduating on time.

As we all know, Leorio wanted to pursue this career because he witnessed his best friend dying in front of him powerless to save him. The care for his friend would have been too expensive. Obtaining his degree was in honor of his friend; he’d save countless children, women, and men who’d all thank him for his hard work.

Leorio didn’t socialize much, but he did find himself hanging around a group of classmates that were a part of a co-ed fraternity that provided information on scholarship money for graduate school and job opportunities. This is where he met you. You didn’t want to be a doctor but instead wanted to be a computer scientist and decided to volunteer for this fraternity job fair.

As he rejoiced, his smile faded when he saw you walking down the hallway; tears falling from your face not caring who stared at you. He quickly walked up to you, put his arm around your back, and gave you a soft hug.

“What’s the matter,” he asks.

You were failing Calculus, a class you’ve been taking since the 12th grade but for some reason, you couldn’t pass it. Everyone else had A’s and B’s, while you had a D. D’s aren't accaetable in college; most make you retake the class.

“Don’t worry. I’ve just passed my midterm. I can help you study. You’ll pass; trust me.”

Later on that evening, he kept his promise but gave it a unique twist. He kept the lights off and lit 4 Yankee-sized candles in the room that smelled like Lavender. In the background, he had piano jazz playing on his speaker. You felt confused for a moment. You and Leorio weren’t necessarily dating but you both flirted with each other here and there. He wasn’t a social butterfly, but he felt comfortable talking to you.

“Um...what’s the music for?”

“It helps me concentrate. Believe it or not, it helps my brain flow. You like it don’t you?”

“No, actually I don’t.” Truth be told you loved it but you wanted to pull his strings a little. He looked up with a confused look.

“Ok. I’ll turn it off.”

“I'm kidding! It’s great!”

Whenever he cannot solve a Calculus question, he reviews similar problems from Algebra II. He applies this knowledge to your problem.

“Perform the indicated function evaluations for f(x)=3−5x−2x^2 . I’ll solve the first part for an example: f(6+t) simply means you will exchange “x” for 6+t. It will look like f(6+t)=3-5(6+t)-2(6+t)^2=-49 . You’d distribute -5 and -2 to the numbers inside of the brackets in which they are next to.”

Wow, that was easy! Wait, not he must think you’re stupid.

“You must think I’m stupid, don’t you?”

“Of course not! It took me a while to understand it too. You’ll apply the same knowledge for the rest.”

After what seemed like 4 hours (which was 2), you finally finished your homework! It was probably wrong but at least you made it past the 1st question! As you blew out the candles and turned on your LED lights instead, you see Leorio sleeping on your couch. Something about his soft face made you smile and place your hand over your heart.

“My little doctor,” you whispered to yourself.

“Well, come give this doctor some company then. I’m freezing over here!”

The throw blanket was large enough for you both. Snuggling on the couch was a great end to a stressful day.

Chrollo

To everyone else Chrollo was “Boss” or “Boss Man” but to you, he was Chrollo. Big C was known for his love for poetry and language.

He read poetry any chance he had at lunch and even dinner. It had gotten so bad that you had to tell him for the millionth time “No books at the table!”

Given his past, he always read at least 2 hours a day or one book a week. Reading is what got him through the day.

He was staying in your dorm for the day to relax because he had taken and passed his midterms to. The young thief thought about hiding in the closet but he didn’t because he sensed that you’d be tense because of midterms.

As you walked through the door, you looked angry, so angry that you could punch a wall. He immediately rose to his feet, threw his arms straight out in front of him, and motioned for you to stop. You just stared at him blankly.

“Come here,” he said like you, on cue, melted in his arms. He was warm and the deepness of his cooing voice vibrated against your neck. “What’s the problem?”

“I’m failing this stupid Shakespeare class!”

“Really?”

“Yes and if I don’t pass this midterm I’m going to fail the class for the 3rd time. I want to drop out! Who needs this scam anyway?!”

Chrollo held you a bit longer until you were ready to sit down and get to business. You pulled out your college’s book about Shakespeare plays and how he used Old English. Chrollo was the perfect man for the job! He’s read Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet several times!

Chrollo read a few stanzas and explained them. He then had you read some on your own and explain them...still you can’t.

He notices the problem immediately. He catches you snuggling comfortably against his toned arm, nearly falling asleep.

Chrollo laid at the very corner of the couch as you lay horizontally placing your head against his chest. You were comfortable but you weren’t able to focus. He notices this and slightly demands that you go sit at the table. When it came to academics, he was serious.

For as long as he had been reading, he has an arsenal of vocabulary words ready to be of use. He created flashcards for you and had you flip them over for nearly an hour. You start to memorize the words!

But you’re not done yet.

“Say the word ‘portentous’.”

“Por-ten-trious…?”

“No. Por-ten-tas.”

“Tias…?”

He moved his chair next to you, just an inch away from your face. He cups your mouth and moves it as he speaks again. This wasn’t a hard clutch, it was soft and he wasn’t irritated but he could sense that you were becoming irritated.

“Por-ten-tas,” he said again.

Instead of letting your cheeks go, his eyes diverted to your lips. They were moist and plump, ready to be met by his.

“Your lips are gorgeous. Kisseth me quite quaint.”

Oh no. Look at the monster you’ve created.

Chrollo created a reward system. Whenever he did things right as a child, he was rewarded with money and jewels. For every word you pronounced and defined correctly, he kissed you once. For each word you got correct in a row, he’d kiss you twice.

Soon enough he had kissed you so much that you couldn’t see straight!

The kisses worked because you passed your midterm! Each kiss placed a stain in your brain that made you remember the definition and how to pronounce it.

You and Chrollo celebrated by drinking champagne and listened to him read Sonnet 23 and 57.

Hisoka

As unusual as it seems, Hisoka is gifted when it comes to Chemistry specifically. That is why you two work well together...there is some chemistry going on between you two.

His hair down and his glasses were his alter ego, it was something that made him act completely different than what you were used to.

When you all were freshmen, he would skip class, attend parties, and would be hungover almost every week but once he was called into the Dean’s office, he changed.

You slightly missed that edgy side of him, but you enjoyed having a serious beau.

Hisoka is a social butterfly and is the life of the conversation and you loved him for it but sometimes it was awkward.

While he was chatting away about Calcium (Ca) and Iron (Fe), you stood there nodding like an idiot. You had NO IDEA about what he was talking about and that is why you were going to drop your chemistry class.

“I saw an imbecile put aluminum foil in the microwave and it burst into flames. How did they not know that Microwaves are the radio waves falling under frequency around 2500 megahertz? Any metallic object detected by radio waves inside the microwave acts as a reflector of radio waves.”

You shove his arm hard. He was acting arrogant in front of his friends. You were used to this but it got on your nerves. You made mistakes, everyone does!...even those that almost burn down the entire dorm room.

You two leave the party and head to his dorm room. Once you were settled, you released a can of anger and threw it all over your boyfriend.

“Hisoka? You just humiliated me.”

“Oh? No one knows that I was talking about you, my dear.”

“Don’t ‘my dear’ me! I asked for your help and you’re ignoring me. I don’t appreciate that. I didn’t ignore you when you sprained your ankle, did I?”

“No, you didn’t, dear. I supposed I have a few hours to kill. What do you need help with?”

Hisoka’s way of studying was much different from other students. He exercises like crazy before he opens his textbook.

He listens to EDM instrumentals while on the treadmill and when he lifts weights. You weren’t standing there like a trophy, he made you lift too.

“Being healthy will help your brain flow more easily. Lift this dumbbell as heavy as you can.”

He ran a mile on the track upstairs. Sweat dripped from his face like he had been standing outside in the rain.

By the time you returned to his dorm, you were beyond tired. You laid your head on his pillow but just as you closed your eyes, he pulled you up on your feet.”

“Not on my watch,” he tutted. “It’s chemistry time.”

You were having trouble memorizing Chemical Formulas and this by far was the most difficult concept you had come across.

To make you stay awake, he turned on a bright LED light and faced it towards the table. The bright light nearly made your head fall off from the pain it reflected in your eyes.

Hisoka grabbed his book and began to write down the major chemicals on the periodic table and their charges.

“Pay attention to the following abbreviations and charges: Calcium is Ca, Chloride is Cl+2, Carbide is C+2, and Carbon Dioxide is CO+2. Read these over and I’ll test you again.”

He did just that but you still weren’t understanding. You were ready to give up.

Stupid scam. Why do I need a piece of paper to determine what I can do? You thought to yourself. Well, it’s obvious. If you can’t do the work now, what makes you think you can do it at a job? Harsh, I know.

“Let me try this,” He said. He carried you to his bedroom and gently placed you on it. He took off his shirt and removed his glasses. “Aluminum has a charge of +3 and Oxygen has -2. If there were three of me and two of my clones disappeared, how many of me are left?”

“Just you, right? One”

“Correct! Excellent.”

Wow, everything started making sense once he took his shirt off.

From then, he just inserted himself into the equation and then it started to make sense! He apologized for running his mouth earlier and promised to keep any more secrets between you two. The night ended with you sleeping in his bed wrapped in a cotton blanket just cuddling and that was it. And bam! You slept as sound.

Illumi

Dating the “hot” quiet history buff was a flex of its own. Sure Illumi didn’t talk to anyone besides you, but it didn’t matter. People swooned if he looked in their direction.

History was a popular major during your era. People were not like their grandparents; they wanted to learn about other cultures besides their own. Illumi’s specialty was in world history and civilizations. The class was very interesting to you but there was so much information, you could barely process it.

Illumi often wrote his essays in one day proofread and all! He often charged people to look their essays over.

One time he made $500 in one year!

Glancing at your transcripts, he notices that you have a C- and offers to help.

“Why are you looking through my stuff?”

Hey, he’s your boyfriend! But still, he should ask.

“Sorry. It was up on the screen,” he said, throwing his hands in the air.

You began to blush in embarrassment. The hottest smartest man in the building now knew that you were failing one of the easiest classes on campus.

Placing his thumb under your chin, he lifted your head to meet his gaze. “There’s nothing to be embarrassed about. I can help you.”

“How? I am so behind! I zoned out after chapter 2!”

“We’ll watch a movie.”

“Oh, God! Not one from PBS is it?!”

“Yes. How else are you supposed to learn?”

He turns on the movie and allows you to lay your head on his shoulder but not too much. He is aware of your tricks and he wants you to pay attention.

Every 15 minutes, he pauses the movie and asks you checkpoint questions. If you got them wrong, you had to stand up with your underclothes on (t-shirt and shorts) in the cool room for 10 minutes. If you got the questions right, he allows you to lay more comfortably. You were already in your underclothes but you were under the blanket.

He made you write down key definitions and the embarrassment of each section.

After the movie, he blindfolds you and reads out a term. Surprisingly, you got them all correct!

As a reward for your past midterm, he takes you to dinner at a restaurant where he slips a promise ring on your finger containing your birthstone.

[skepticalcatfrog]

Aurora High School (Introduction Part One)

Introduction Part One Introduction Part Two Masterpost

Summary: After starting their junior year in high school, the Jones twins find themselves meeting new people, setting them on a track towards new friendships, new romances, new heartbreaks, and many new adventures.

Pairings: (Eventual) Scarlett Jones x Finian de Seel, Tyler Jones x Saedii Gilwraeth, and Aurora O'Malley x Kaliis Gilwraeth

Word count: 4,708

Author's Notes: This is the new project I've been raving about! I've been very into this book series lately, and I was feeling inspired. However, this won't be like my other two projects, so it won't be in the regular rotation! Instead of being a chaptered fic, this is going to be a series of oneshots that gets developed as people request ideas. I do have some more ideas up my sleeve, but I will be accepting requests very soon!

Important Author's Notes: This story contains a character who uses a wheelchair. I did do some research, but since I don't experience it, it's virtually impossible for me to be an expert on this topic. If you are more knowledgeable about this than I might be, and you notice an inaccuracy, please let me know what it is and I'll try to fix it!

It was a Friday in October. October was one of the best times of the year in the opinion of one Scarlett Jones. It was after September, so everyone had already gotten used to being at school. But it wasn't quite December yet, so you could go outside without having to wear eight jackets. Plus the slightly warmer fall months were some of the best times of the year for fashion, and Scarlett would know. She had plenty of experience in that field. The amounts of people wearing scarves and sweaters increased tenfold, which could be a good thing or a bad thing depending on the rest of their outfits.

But the fashion habits of her classmates didn't really matter, despite the fact that she could go on and on about the topic. What mattered slightly more was the fact that her brother was desperately trying to get her attention as they approached the school.

"Scar? Scarlett?" Tyler waved his hand in front of his sister's face.

"Hm?" She quirked an eyebrow. "I wasn't listening, what was that?"

Tyler rolled his eyes and adjusted the way his backpack was resting on his shoulder. "I was saying that I need you to tell Coach de Stoy that I can't make practice tonight. I've got too much work to catch up on, and I don't want to fall behind this early in the year."

"Yeah, yeah, we get it. Mr. Tyler Jones, star player on the football team, passing all his classes with flying colors." Scarlett nudged her brother, not hard enough to hurt, but just hard enough to be a little annoying. "Careful, or you'll make everyone feel bad about themselves."

"Oh shut up." Tyler smiled, standing up a little bit taller to look for someone in the crowd of people flooding through the front doors. When he spotted her, he raised his hand high above his head and waved.

Cat Brannock slowed down her walk to fall into step alongside the twins. Somehow, despite the cool and cloudy weather, she was still wearing a short sleeved shirt that showed off the tattoos on her arms. She had the most tattoos of any high schooler Scarlett had ever seen. But they were very well done, so she could understand why her friend wanted them to be visible. Cat had skipped the 5th grade, so she was a senior even though the Joneses were juniors. She was already looking towards college. Neither of the twins were looking forward to her leave. It would be weird to not have her around all the time, the three of them were rarely very far apart since they'd met in kindergarten. But they couldn't really do much to stop her from going, after all, college was what she wanted.

"Hey, kids." Cat smirked. "Let me guess, Tyler's fretting over his errands and Scar's making fun of him for it?" She gestured to each person as she mentioned them.

"Just the daily routine." Scarlett winked, linking elbows with her friend.

Cat laughed. "Do you two ever get tired of doing the same shit every day?"

"Never. Routines are what lead to mastery." Tyler said proudly.

"Just say 'practice makes perfect', Ty." Scar shook her head. "If you try to get too fancy with your words, no one's going to know what you're talking about."

"That's easy for you to say, no one ever knows what you're talking about." Tyler retorted. Scarlett stuck her tongue out at him. "It's not my fault that-"

Tyler was cut off by a girl bumping into him. She'd been very absorbed in whatever she was doing on her phone, so she didn't see him coming. The shock of bumping into someone made her look up, giving the rest of them a better look at her face. The first thing you'd notice about her would be that she had a streak of white dyed in her otherwise black hair. The second thing you'd notice would be that one of her eyes was dark brown, and the other one was really light blue. Almost colorless. She hugged her notebooks close to her chest.

"I'm- I'm sorry, I wasn't looking where I was going. I should've been watching." She apologized sheepishly.

"Don't worry about it, it's fine. I should've been paying attention too." Tyler shrugged.

"Oh… thanks." The girl looked slightly confused, as if she expected someone as intimidating-looking as Tyler to react less calmly. But despite his appearance, he was practically the human embodiment of a golden retriever. "Well, I should really get to class."

And just like that, the mystery girl was gone. Scarlett couldn't help but notice that she'd never seen that girl before. It wouldn't have been surprising if she just didn't like to be the center of attention. Or maybe they just didn't have any of the same classes. Either way, Scar would be lying if she said that she wasn't intrigued.

A few minutes later, Scarlett and Tyler were sitting at their desks in the first class of the day while the morning announcements droned on in the background. Scarlett knew the girl who did them every day. Her name was Zila Madran, she'd been Scarlett's tutor in freshman year. They still talked occasionally, but they ran in very different circles, so they didn't see each other often. Eventually, the announcements ended, and the second bell rang. The first bell was always more of a warning, like 'okay, you'd better at least be in the building'. But the second bell was the 'get your asses to class' bell. And if you were still in the hallway after the second bell, then you were screwed.

Scarlett was fully prepared to fully zone out and stare at a guy across the room for the entirety of class, until of course Miss Mystery walked in. She looked like she was going to just sit down at a free desk and call it a day, but the teacher stopped her.

"Ah, Miss O' Malley! I see you've found your way here. Class, this is the new student, Aurora O' Malley. She will be joining us for the remainder of the year." The teacher explained. "Please make her feel welcome."

Oh, so she's a new kid. Scarlett thought to herself. That's why I haven't seen her around before.

Frankly, Aurora looked quite embarrassed after the surprise introduction. Maybe Scarlett had been right about her not enjoying the spotlight. Whatever the case, that was the last interesting thing that happened for the entire rest of class. The rest of it was spent going over poetry… or was it a play? She wasn't paying any kind of attention, it could've been fractions and decimals for all she knew, despite the fact that they were in English class. She didn't need to know about Shakespeare and all of his friends, it wasn't like she was ever going to meet them. She had better things to do anyway.

Time ticked by slowly. Scarlett was sure she almost dozed off once or twice. She was only fully awake again when the bell rang, then she practically jumped out of her seat. It only took her a minute to put her notebook and pen back into her bag, but by the time she'd finished, Tyler was already talking to Aurora. Scarlett listened in on their conversation.

"I was just wondering if maybe you could show me around?" Aurora asked. "I know we don't know each other too well, but you're the only person I've talked to all day, and I get lost really easily around here."

"Sure. This place is like a maze to anyone new, so I'd be happy to show you the ropes." Tyler nodded.

"Well that was fast. I didn't even have to tell you that you get to skip two class periods." Aurora smiled.

That had Scarlett's interest piqued. It wasn't that she didn't like school, but she was feeling especially done with the world that day. A two-period break sounded like exactly what she needed. "Do you mind if I tag along?"

"Oh, um, sure." Aurora nodded. She looked back at Tyler. "You know her, right? I saw you guys walking together this morning."

"Yeah, I know her. This is my sister, Scarlett." Tyler gestured to his sister.

"Nice to meet you." Scarlett smiled. "I like your hair, by the way."

"Thanks." Aurora looked a little surprised at the compliment, but not in a bad way. It had done a good job of breaking the ice.

The next two hours were okay, if not slightly boring. Scarlett had severely overestimated how fun this would be. She was at least glad that their absence from class was officially excused. That was the bright side. The first place they went was the multi-purpose lab, which was used for most of the science classes. Next, they went to all of the important classrooms. Math, Social Studies, the works. Then on to the important but less necessary rooms, like the auditorium, the cafeteria, and the gym. They only briefly went over the principal's office, figuring that she had to have been there already. Just as they were finishing their tour, the bell rang to signify the end of period three. Students began flooding out of classrooms.

"And I guess that's all we have time for." Tyler clapped his hands once. "Welcome to Aurora High School."

"You know, I just realized how weird it's going to be to go to a school that I share a name with." Aurora glanced at a nearby banner that had the school's name on it.

"You'll get used to it eventually." Scarlett tapped her on the shoulder.

For a moment, things were looking up. Their little tour was over and done with, there were only six periods left in the day, and Scarlett had gotten to miss math and a study hall, one of which was one of her least favorite classes. But that little bit of optimism was quickly shot down. As the three of them rounded a corner, everything exploded into a burst of noise and motion. Faster than you could blink, a fight had broken out. It had to be about four or five guys, all beating the absolute shit out of each other. It didn't take long for a crowd to gather. Tyler took it upon himself to see what was going on. He pushed through all the people to get to the center of things.

"Hey! What's going on here?" Tyler barely had time to finish his sentence before he got decked in the face. Apparently this group didn't take kindly to people trying to mediate things.

Aurora gasped as Tyler was dragged into the fight. Scarlett felt for her. It was only her first day, and things were already going wrong. That must not have made her feel too good. Her mismatched eyes darted back and forth as she tried to keep up with all the flying fists. Scarlett suspected that she'd never seen a real fight before. She looked nervous.

"I'll… I'll catch up with you later." Aurora decided, turning around and speed-walking away. Scarlett watched her leave.

When she turned to face the action again, she saw Principal Adams making his way through the crowd. Three of the guys had fled the scene, leaving just Tyler and one other boy to take the blame. She didn't know who the second guy was, but he was taller than Tyler, which wasn't the easiest thing to be.

"What do you two think you're doing?" Adams crossed his arms.

"I'm sorry sir. I was just trying to stop the fight, I swear." Tyler's shoulders sagged. The other boy stayed eerily quiet, but still stood tall, seemingly not as ashamed of himself as Tyler was.

"Yes, well, joining in on the fight isn't really stopping it." Adams shook his head. "I'm afraid I'll need both of you to pay a visit to my office." He looked around at the rest of the students. "The rest of you, get to class. There's nothing to see here anymore."

It took a minute for everyone to leave, but eventually they did, until the last one left was Scarlett. "Ty, do you want me to come with you?"

Tyler nodded. Whenever possible, if they had to face a potentially scary situation, they would do it together. It had been that way since they were little kids. At that point, it had become a reflex for them to ask if the other needed support.

"Alright Miss Jones, you can come, but I will need to talk to these two separately. You weren't a part of the fight, so you don't have to be a part of the punishment." Adams told her. He began walking away, and the three of them followed.

A moment later, they found themselves in the waiting room of the principal's office. Tyler and the other boy sat next to each other on one end of the room, and Scarlett sat next to a different boy on the other end. Tyler mostly just stared at the floor, but he would occasionally glance at the guy next to him. This dude was very tall. Even Tyler was pretty intimidated, and that was completely unrelated to the fact that he'd just been beaten up by this guy. He had long black hair and dark blue eyes. He looked like someone straight out of a fantasy novel. And apparently, he was also very attentive, because he noticed Tyler looking at him.

"Is there something you wanted to tell me?" The boy asked. His voice was deep and serious, and he had a faint accent that Tyler couldn't quite place.

"Oh. No, not really." Tyler offered his hand. "I'm Tyler, by the way."

"I am aware. My name is Kaliis, though my friends call me Kal." The boy answered, not shaking Ty's hand and instead opting to ignore it.

"You put up a real fight back there, Kal. Do you do sports?" Tyler asked him.

"I don't participate in school sports, no. I take fencing lessons outside of school." Kal said.

"Cool." Tyler nodded appreciatively. "But if you ever wanted to join the football team, I'm sure we'd be able to find a spot for you."

Kal smiled, but just a little. It was barely noticeable. "My sister would kill me if I joined the football team. She thinks all of you are buffoons."

"Wow, harsh." Tyler laughed. "But hey, no harm no foul. Do you have any paper I could use?"

"I don't. Why do you ask?" Kal raised an eyebrow.

"I'll write down my number, maybe we could hang out sometime." Tyler looked around for a second, then got up to grab a napkin and a pen. He wrote down his name and phone number, then handed the napkin to Kal. "There you go."

"Thank you." Kal folded the napkin up and put it into his pocket. They both looked up as the door to the principal's office opened.

"Tyler Jones? Kaliis Gilwraeth? You can come in." Adams gestured for them to follow him, and they did.

Scarlett had been eavesdropping on Tyler and Kal's entire conversation. It seemed like Tyler had made a new friend, which was good. And also strange, given the fact that they'd met during a fist fight. But good nonetheless. However, when they vanished into the principal's office, she became eternally bored. She turned to look at the boy next to her. He was busy scrolling through the homepage of some website on his phone. She couldn't quite tell what it was, so she looked up at his face instead. He was quite possibly the palest person she had ever seen. It looked like the sun had never touched his skin. His hair was a light, light blond to match. The only thing that threw off his whole snow prince vibe were his eyes, which were such a dark brown that they almost looked black. She couldn't tell the difference between his irises and pupils. He wasn't the most impressive guy she'd ever seen, but all things considered, he was a little attractive.

"Whatcha doing?" Scarlett asked, leaning towards him and resting on the arm of her chair.

"Checking notifications. I've been in here for a hot minute and Adams still hasn't found time for me." The boy shook his head. "I guess two guys beating each other up is more important than little old me."

"Well what are you in for?" Scarlett brushed her hair out of her face.

"Someone locked three teachers' car keys into their cars. They assumed it was me because I kept leaving class." He shrugged.

"I'm going to take a wild guess: it was you, wasn't it?" She smiled.

"Oh, yeah, totally." He laughed. "Frankly, I would've been intimidated if it wasn't. I like to think that I'm the only guy in this whole school who can pull off a stunt that awesome."

"How did you do it?" Scar crossed her legs.

"You ask a lot of questions. This isn't an interrogation, is it? Did Adams put you up to this?" The boy smirked. He switched the tab on his phone to a time killer game.

"Don't worry, I'm not a secret agent. I'm just curious." She said coyly. The boy's smile dropped. He looked genuinely surprised that anyone would actually want to listen to him, which made her feel kind of bad. But she would've felt worse if he was actually looking at her instead of at his phone. "Anyway, what do you do around here? Outside of this room, I mean."

"I'm on the tech crew for the school play. I used to go to robotics club too, but I dropped out after I realized that I was making everyone feel bad about themselves." And just like that, his sarcastic facade was back up.

"With what, your skills in robotics or your charming personality?" Scarlett retorted.

"Why can't it be both?" He pointed out.

"It can be both when you tell me what I'm supposed to call you." She countered. "I'm Scarlett. Scarlett Jones."

"Touché." He turned off his phone for the first time since they'd started talking, and looked up at her. The moment he saw her face, his eyes widened and he sputtered like a broken engine for a moment before finding his words. "I'm single. Are you Fin?"

Scarlett tried her absolute best to hold back a laugh. This was something she'd witnessed many times before. He'd been trying to ask if she was single, but had failed miserably. "I'm actually not Fin, but I think you might be."

"...Oh." Fin realized his mistake. He shook his head a little to get himself back on track. "Yeah… Yeah, I'm Fin. Finian if you want to be fancy about it. Or Finian de Karran-de Seel if you're mad at me."

"I'll try not to be mad at you then, because that's a mouthful." Scarlett nudged his shoulder with her own.

Fin shrugged. "Yeah, it's hyphenated. It almost never fits on the line when I have to write my name on an assignment."

Scarlett smiled. "I'll tell you what, how about I put my number into that phone of yours, and I'll text you later?"

"Sure." Fin was quick to open up his contacts and hand over his phone.

"Do you have a habit of handing your phone to complete strangers?" Scar asked, typing in her name and number. The phone looked very new, and very expensive. There was no denying that.

"Not always. But one time I gave my phone to one of my cousins expecting him to give it back right away, and he didn't give it back for eight days. He's older than me, so I couldn't really do anything about it, but my mom and aunts got mad at him." Fin rambled. "He's kind of an ass, to be honest. Not to mention that I owe him a favor from one time when he washed the dishes for me. He's been holding it over my head for weeks. And I borrowed twenty bucks from him, so I owe him that too."

Scarlett handed his phone back to him, and just as he finished talking, the door opened. Tyler and Kal stepped out. Fin looked them over and let out a low whistle. Scarlett decided to do a science experiment, and glanced at him. He was checking out her brother. She made a mental note of that.

"Have you been chatting it up out here, Scar?" Tyler asked.

"Maybe." She stood up. "Don't worry, he didn't ask me out."

"You say that as if I would assume that he did." Tyler smiled. Scarlett conducted another experiment, knowing that Ty's smile had quite the fanbase. Fin was leaning back in his chair, eyes slightly widened. Yeah, he was definitely checking out her brother.

The door to the principal's office opened a second time, and Adams poked his head out. "Finian de Karran-de Seel?"

"Well would you look at that. I guess our time together has come to an end." Fin started to go towards the door. "But I'll see you around, hopefully."

Scarlett hadn't noticed before, but when he moved, she saw that Fin was in a wheelchair. She hadn't taken the time to really look, so she'd just assumed he was sitting in the same kind of chair that she was. She'd assumed that he was just wearing gloves because he liked them. Evidently, she was wrong. It was honestly pretty interesting, and she had plenty of questions, but figured that it would probably be best not to ask them. They'd only known each other for about fifteen minutes, it wasn't necessarily time to get super personal.

"Yeah. I'll text you later." Scarlett waved to him, and he waved back.

Then she, Kal, and Tyler left the office. As soon as the door closed behind them, Tyler let out a sigh of relief. "I'm so glad we're out of there. I don't know how much longer I could deal with Adams' 'disappointed' look."

"What'd he say?" Scarlett asked.

"He said that he was not mad, only disappointed, and that the two of us should have known better." Kal explained briefly.

"We got off with a week's worth of after school detention, starting Monday." Tyler frowned.

"Who would've thought! Star student Tyler Jones, in detention? Unbelievable." Scarlett pretended to be indignant.

"I know, it's not-" Tyler caught on to her sarcasm. "Oh, okay, I get it. But don't expect my sympathy if you ever get detention for a week."

"I wasn't expecting it anyway, you absolute child." She tapped him on the shoulder.

"Scarlett, you are three minutes older than me." Tyler said, gesturing with his hands out of frustration.

"Yup, three very long and important minutes." Scarlett nodded. "I'm glad you're with me on this one."

"I feel like this is not a conversation that I need to be a part of." Kal decided.

"Yeah, probably not, but we still like having you around." Scarlett winked jokingly.

The three of them walked down the hallway together, parting ways only when they had to go to their separate classes. Tyler had gym, Kal had math, and Scarlett had social studies. It was one of the only classes that she actually enjoyed going to. It might seem strange to some people, considering the rest of her personality, but history had always fascinated her. She liked learning about different conflicts and how they were solved. That was why she joined the debate team. She liked arguing when she knew it wasn't for real, and she was very persuasive.

Periods five, six, seven, eight, and nine crawled by slowly. When your day had been as exciting as Scarlett's had, anything less interesting was boring. After social studies was art. Then lunch. After that was science. And finally, gym. She hated going home after gym, because her hair and makeup would always get messed up, then she had to go on the bus that way. She wished that Coach de Stoy would let them take a few minutes after class to get cleaned up, but instead the class always went right to the bell. It was annoying. Plus, then she had to run to the bus every day, which was like a second gym class.

The bus ride home wasn't very eventful, thankfully. Usually there would be at least someone in the back yelling, or playing their music too loud, but not that day. And frankly, it was very refreshing.

When Scarlett and Tyler got home, they took off their bags and jackets and hung them on the hooks by the door. It was quiet for a moment, but not a long moment.

"Welcome home, you two." A voice called from the living room.

"Hey, Adams." The twins responded in unison.

They'd been living with Principal Adams since their father died when they were kids. The two had been close friends, and since their mother wasn't around, he was the next highest choice. The Joneses were also the only ones with permission to call him by only his last name. They usually tried to keep school and home separate, except for a few rare occasions. That day was one of those occasions. Upon walking into the living room, Tyler got another one of those disappointed parent looks. Scarlett took this opportunity to sneak upstairs.

"Tyler. Why, exactly, did you think that trying to intervene in a fight was the right choice?" Adams asked, putting down the book that he was reading.

"I don't know, they were really hurting each other! I had to do something!" Tyler raised his voice a little.

"You don't need to get upset with me. I'm not upset with you. I'm just worried about you." Adams clarified. Tyler pulled up a chair to sit across from him. "Sometimes you do have to try to help. But you also have to pick your battles."

Tyler sighed. "I understand."

"Good. That's all I needed from you." Adams picked up the book again. Tyler put the chair back and went upstairs to his room.

He sat down on his bed and picked up his phone from where it had been charging on the nightstand all day. He never brought it to school, it was a distraction. Upon opening it, he saw that he had a message from a few hours ago.

Kal G: Hello. This is Kal.

Tyler added him to his contacts and slid the notification away, then moved on. He opened up the chat he had with Scarlett.

Tyler J: Adams gave me a talking to. 

Tyler J: I thought the talk today at school was enough, but I guess not.

Scarlett J: Is he mad?

Tyler J: He said no, but I think he is.

Scarlett J: Maybe if we get out of the house for a while, you'll feel better?

Scarlett J: Fresh air could be good, we should go to the park.

Tyler J: Could we invite some friends?

Scarlett J: Yeah, you text some people and I'll text some people.

Scarlett J: Meet me downstairs in 5?

Tyler J: Got it.

Tyler hit send on the last message, then switched chats. He sent messages to Kal, Aurora, and Cat.

Tyler J: Scarlett and I are going to the park, want to come with?

He got responses from each of them in no time.

Kal G: I am free for the rest of the day. I will have to bring my sister though, if that's alright.

Cat B: I bet I'll get there faster than you.

Aurora O'M: Can you tell me which one? If so, I'll be there.

After quickly responding to each of them, he got up and put his phone in his pocket. He speed-walked down the stairs and grabbed his sweatshirt. Scarlett was already waiting for him, having donned a light jacket and scarf. She was using her phone camera to reapply her lipstick when Tyler came down. After a final touch-up, she zipped her phone into her jacket pocket and smiled at her brother.

"Ready to go?" She asked.

"Ready." Tyler nodded. Then, they were out the door and on their way to the park.

Taglist: @taco-taco-belle

[dragonssparkle]

a critical role s2 pining beau/jester college au concept I will never do anything with but planned extensively ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Beau: Sophomore. Already jaded. Doing her best. Plays field hockey very aggressively. (also does some martial arts club stuff) Everyone thinks she’s here on a sports scholarship but nope! she’s majoring in history and is REALLY smart actually and is here on a full ride scholarship cause her parents refused to help her pay through college after trouble she caused in high school. She wants no one to know this and would rather be perceived as ‘uncaring jock’

>> Classes: World Wars, War in Literature, Theater I, History of Musical Theater

Jester: Freshman. Bubbly. READY TO GO! She’s an art major and LIVING HER BEST LIFE! Her mom is VERY wealthy and putting her through college easily. Is trying to start a cult (but in like a joking college way... they think. they’re pretty sure.)

>> Classes: Drawing Fundamentals, Painting Fundamentals, Freshman Writing Course, Poetry Workshop Fjord: Freshman. Not sure what he wants to major in yet. Was going to do business but the RA keeps nudging him towards switching majors because he is VERY stressed and doesn’t like his major at all. it’s only been a month

>> Classes: Statistics, Freshman Writing Course, Calculus, Into to Psychology

Cad: Senior? They think... No one is sure and he refuses to give a straight answer. A lot of people seem to think he’s been around longer than 4 years. Calm. Religions studies dual major with psychology. Doesn’t do well on exams yet is very knowledgeable and doesn’t seem to actually be failing his classes? Help him. RA. All the freshmen go to him for advice. Sometimes he will come to them before they even realize they need advice. An enigma.

>> Classes: Thesis…. class? (man idk i’m only going in junior year and i’m an art major) Religion and Nature, Religion and Medicine, (some sort of psychology class)

Veth (nickname to certain friends: Nott): Junior. Chemistry major. Has been accused of stealing things from unlocked rooms multiple times. Has yet to be caught. Unsure if she’s actually done these things. Is always seen with Caleb and hanging around his classes. Does she actually go to her own classes? Unknown. Also an enigma but a different kind. Dating the intro to chem TA (first year grad student).

>> Classes: The Organic Chemistry of Polymers, Molecular Neurobiology, Chemical Thermodynamics and Kinetics, Theater I

Caleb: Junior. English major. Has an emotional support cat that is sometimes permitted to wander the hall. He’s not supposed to let it out of his room but Cad never tells on him. Doesn’t really talk to people much. Very diligent with class and studies. There are some whispers about some really bad stuff happening at his high school, but few people know what happened.

>> Classes: War in Literature, The American Renaissance, Poetry Workshop, Multivariable Calculus

Molly: Junior. Film major, theater minor. Transferred from another college and changed his entire vibe after. New place new face. (there are some whispers there’s more to the change. something about a bad accident. he doesn’t talk about it). Always seems to be around. Has defo gotten in trouble a few times.

>> Classes: Poetry Workshop, History of Musical Theater, Social Justice in Film, Musical Production Participation

Yasha: doesn’t actually go to school here. Stays in molly’s room when she comes by. Quiet. Big. Some shit went down a while back. She keeps the flowers in molly’s room alive. he’s bad at it. Oh this thing was WAY longer than I thought. More content under the cut!

Shared Classes: War in Literature: Beau, Caleb

Theater I: Beau, Nott

History of Musical Theater: Beau, Molly

Freshman Writing Course: Jester, Fjord

Poetry Workshop: Jester, Molly, Caleb Rooms:

Beau and Jester’s Room:

Jester’s side is decorated with frills and the walls are practically covered in clothesline ropes and clips for hanging doodles. So many plushies. Everything is more or less tidy and clean. There’s a photo of her mom on her desk. Shrine to the traveler on her desk. She is running a cult someone stop her. Jester put fairy lights all over the room. Beau’s side is pretty plain all things considered. She has sports gear and some other stuff. Blue covers. No photos. A bunch of books on her shelf and notes all over her desk. Beau is… messy.

Caleb and Veth’s Room:

A fucking disaster someone help them. There are books and papers everywhere. Veth’s bed can be better described as a nest. Where is her desk? is it under that pile of random things? Possibly. No one is sure. They have not cleaned the floor ever. At least they take out the trash? Has anyone ever seen them in the laundry room? Do they do laundry? There’s a cat tree in there. It’s the only surface without things on it. The cat runs the room. It has only been a month. Veth isn’t even always there, often goes to Yeza’s apartment

Molly’s Room (also sorta of yasha’s):

A surprising amount of flowers in pots. He has a bunch of tapestries on the walls. Fairy lights. Lots of fancy pillows. He’s taken over the other bed with pillows, blankets, and clothes after Fjord left to stay with Cad a month in. Lot of wild clothes everywhere. Makeup and hair products on the desk along with assorted jewelry. He has his schedule hanging up on his closet door.

Caduceus’s Room:

Started in the room alone before he let Fjord move over. So many plants. Including succulents and funguses. Some of them may be poisonous? Some crystals. A little shrine in the corner. He has a tank of pet beetles. He loves them very much but doesn’t seem to care much if one dies? He just puts them with the funguses if they do and makes little necklaces with the wing shells. Some glow mushrooms. His whole room smells like tea and he usually has a little pot going on a hot tray. The top bunk used to be for plants. Now it is for Fjord.

Plot points in no particular order:

Getting to campus

Meeting hall mates

when beau first gets to room jester is already set up and her first thought is “god damn it i’m suck with a girly girl”

beau listening to jester talk forever and ever about fjord. it is killing her

Meeting jester (and they were Roommates. my god they were roommates)

beau leads a ‘yoga class’ for her friends

beau gets in, like, an actual fight

molly gets really badly beat up. at one point because of something idk. probably was cheeky to the wrong drunk person. DOES NOT DIE FUCK YOU

Tattoos!!!!! 

Beau talking with molly. he gives her advice

Caduceus just watching her closely. He doesn’t bring it up but has his eye on her. gotta love that high wisdom

Molly directs a musical theater show for a club he’s in

Veth comes to War in Literature with caleb every class. beau is confused to find out she is not, in fact,  in this class when she doesn’t show up for an exam

Theater time with Veth and Molly

Confessing to Veth. who offers to do something but doesn’t when beau begs her not to

seeing jester get together with fjord and sad times

confessing and jester kisses her. jester has TWO! HANDS!

classes with caleb (veth is also there)

beau switches to a different room halfway through the year cause she can’t do this

meals with the crew

Jester birthday time!!!

Some sort of nightlife adventure

DRINKING TIME PARTY!

gay thoughts about yasha but knowing it wouldn’t work. not doting on it much. Yasha was her freshman crush, but has someone else

Beau goes to one of jester’s cult meetings. there is a concern

Haha. A lot. I’d as that if someone wants to do something with all (gestures vaguely) this please ask though ask or dm first. When will the hiatus end

[cha-d]

Early in the formidable new essay collection “Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning,” the poet Cathy Park Hong delivers a fatalistic state-of-the-race survey. “In the popular imagination,” she writes, “Asian Americans inhabit a vague purgatorial status . . . distrusted by African Americans, ignored by whites, unless we’re being used by whites to keep the black man down.” Asians, she observes, are perceived to be emotionless functionaries, and yet she is always “frantically paddling my feet underwater, always overcompensating to hide my devouring feelings of inadequacy.” Not enough has been said, Hong thinks, about the self-hatred that Asian-Americans experience. It becomes “a comfort,” she writes, “to peck yourself to death. You don’t like how you look, how you sound. You think your Asian features are undefined, like God started pinching out your features and then abandoned you. You hate that there are so many Asians in the room. Who let in all the Asians? you rant in your head.”

Hong, who teaches at Rutgers, is the author of three poetry collections, including “Dance Dance Revolution,” which was published in 2007, and is set in a surreal fictional waystation called the Desert, where the inhabitants speak a constantly evolving creole. (“Me fadder sees dis y decide to learn Engrish righteo dere,” the narrator says.) “Minor Feelings” consists of seven essays; Hong explains the book’s title in an essay called “Stand Up” that centers on Richard Pryor’s “Live in Concert.” Minor feelings are “the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic.” One such minor feeling: the deadening sensation of seeing an Asian face on a movie screen and bracing for the ching-chong joke. Another: eating lunch with white schoolmates and perceiving the social tableaux as a frieze in which “everyone else was a relief, while I felt recessed, the declivity that gave everyone else shape.” Minor feelings involve a sense of lack, the knowledge that this lack is a social construction, and resentment of those who constructed it.

In “The End of White Innocence,” Hong describes her childhood home as “tense and petless, with sharp witchy stenches.” Her father drank; her mother, she writes, “beat my sister and me with a fury intended for my father.” Her parents grew up in postwar poverty in Korea—as a child, her father caught sparrows to eat. In order to get a visa to immigrate to the United States, he pretended to be a mechanic, and ended up working for Ryder trucks in Pennsylvania, where he was injured, and fired. He moved to Los Angeles and found a job selling life insurance in Koreatown, then bought a dry-cleaning supply warehouse, and became successful enough to send Hong to private high school and college. He recognized that Americans valued emotional forthrightness in business and developed a particular way of speaking at work. “Thanks for getting those orders in,” Hong remembers him saying on the phone. “Oh, and Kirby, I love you.”

Hong feels ashamed, but not of her proximity to awkward English, or her features, or witchy domestic stenches. “My shame is not cultural but political,” she writes. She is ashamed of the conflicted position of Asian-Americans in the racial and capital hierarchy—the way that subjugation mingles with promise. “If the indebted Asian immigrant thinks they owe their life to America, the child thinks they owe their livelihood to their parents for their suffering,” Hong writes. “The indebted Asian American is therefore the ideal neoliberal subject.” She becomes a “dog cone of shame,” a “urinal cake of shame.” Hong’s metaphors are crafted with stinging care. To be Asian-American, she suggests, is to be tasked with making an injury inaccessible to the body that has been injured. It is to be pissed on at regular intervals while dutifully minimizing the odor of piss.

For a long time, Hong recounts in the book’s first essay, she did not want to write about her Asian identity. By the time she began studying for her M.F.A., at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she had concluded that doing so was “juvenile”—and she couldn’t find the right form, anyway. The confessional lyric felt too operatic, and realist fiction wasn’t right, either: “I didn’t care to injection-mold my thoughts into an anthropological experience where the reader, after reading my novel, would think, The life of Koreans is so heartbreaking!” In “Stand Up,” she asks, “Will there be a future where I, on the page, am simply I, on the page, and not I, proxy for a whole ethnicity, imploring you to believe we are human beings who feel pain?” The predicament of the Asian-American writer, as Hong articulates it, is to fear that both your existence and your interpretation of that existence will always be read the wrong way. At Iowa, Hong noticed other writers of color stripping out markers of race from their poems and stories to avoid being “branded as identitarians.” It was only later that Hong realized that all of the writers she had noticed doing this were Asian-American.

I read “Minor Feelings” in a fugue of enveloping recognition and distancing flinch. I have tended to interpret my own acquiescence to and resentment of capitalism in generational terms rather than racial ones; many people my age seem to accept economic structures that we find humiliating because we reached adulthood when the margins of resistance appeared to be shrinking. I know, too, that my desire to attain financial stability is connected with a hope, bordering on practical obligation, to protect my parents, as they grow older, from the worst of the country that they immigrated to for my benefit. But, for some reason, I haven’t written very much about that. Was I, like Hong’s grad-school classmates, afraid of being branded as an identitarian? Had I considered the possibility of being positioned as a proxy for an entire ethnic group, and, unlike Hong, turned away?The term “Asian-American” was invented by student activists in California, in the late sixties, who were inspired by the civil-rights movement and dreamed of activating a coalition of people from immigrant backgrounds who might organize against structural inequality. This is not what happened; for years, Asian-Americans were predominantly conservative, though that began changing, gradually, during the Obama years, then sharply under Trump. Today, “Asian-American” mainly signifies people with East Asian ancestry: most Americans, Hong writes, think “Chinese is synecdoche for Asians the way Kleenex is for tissues.” The term, for many people—and for Hollywood—seems to conjure upper-middle-class images: doctors, bankers. (We are imagined as the human equivalent of stainless-steel countertops: serviceable and interchangeable and blandly high-end.) But, although rich Asians earn more money than any other group of people in America, income inequality is also more extreme among Asians than it is within any other racial category. In New York, Asians are the poorest immigrant group.Hong describes a visit to a nail salon, where a surly Vietnamese teen-age boy gives her a painful pedicure. She imagines him and herself as “two negative ions repelling each other,” united and then divided by their discomfort in their own particular Asian positions. Then she pauses. “What evidence do I have that he hated himself?” she wonders. “I wished I had the confidence to bludgeon the public with we like a thousand trumpets against them,” she writes elsewhere. “But I feared the weight of my experiences—as East Asian, professional class, cis female, atheist, contrarian—tipped the scales of a racial group that remains so nonspecific that I wondered if there was any shared language between us. And so, like a snail’s antenna that’s been touched, I retracted the first person plural.” Hong doesn’t fully retract it—“we” appears fairly often in the book—but she favors the second person, deploying a “you” that really means “I,” in the hope that her experience might carry shards of the Asian-American universal.

Throughout the book, Hong at once presumes and doesn’t presume to speak for people whose families come from India, say, or Sri Lanka, or Thailand, or Laos—or the Philippines, where my parents were born. The Philippines were under Spanish control from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, and under American control until the middle of the twentieth. Many Filipinos have Spanish last names and come to the States speaking English; many have dark skin. In his book “The Latinos of Asia,” the sociologist Anthony Christian Ocampo argues that Filipinos tend to manifest a sort of ethnic flexibility, feeling more at home, compared with members of other Asian ethnic groups, with whites, African-Americans, Latinos, and other Asians. The experience of translating for one’s parents is often framed as definitive for Asian-Americans, but it’s not one that many Filipinos of my generation share; my parents came to North America listening to James Taylor and the Allman Brothers, speaking Tagalog only when they didn’t want their kids to listen. I grew up in a mixed extended family, with uncles who are black and Mexican and Chinese and white. Ocampo cites a study which found that less than half of Filipino-Americans checked “Asian” on forms that asked for racial background—a significant portion of them checked “Pacific Islander,” for no real reason. It denoted proximity to Asian-Americanness, perhaps, without indicating a direct claim to it. (About a month ago, at a doctor’s appointment, an East Asian nurse checked “Pacific Islander” when filling out a form for me.)

“Koreans are self-hating,” one of Hong’s Filipino friends tell her. “Filipinos, not so much.” My experience of racism has been different than Hong’s, as has my response to it. Much of the discourse around Asian-American identity centers on racist images associated with the stereotypical East Asian face: single-lidded eyes, yellow-toned skin, a supposed air of placid impassivity. I don’t have that face, exactly, and I’m not sure that I’ve confronted quite the same assumptions; when I hear people perform gross imitations of “Chinese” accents, I don’t know if it hurts the way it does because I’m an Asian person or because I come from a family of immigrants or simply because racism is embarrassing and foul.

If you escape the dominant experience of Asian-American marginalization, have you necessarily done so by way of avoidance, or denial, or conformity? What can you do when colonization is embedded in your family’s history, in your genetic background, in your very face? If I feel comforted in a room full of Asian people rather than alarmed at the possibility that my inner racial anxieties have been cloned all around me, is this another effect of the psychic freedom I’ve been granted with double eyelids and an ambiguously Western last name, or does it mark progress in the form of a meaningful generational shift? In the decade that separates me from Hong, the currency of whiteness has lost some of its inflated cultural value; one now sees Asian artists and chefs and skateboarders and dirtbags and novelists on the Internet, in the newspaper, and on TV. Is this freedom, or is it the latest form of assimilation? For Asian-Americans, can the two ever be fully distinct?

“Minor Feelings” bled a dormant discomfort out of me with surgical precision. Hong is deeply wary of living and writing to earn the favor of white institutions; like many of us, she has been raised and educated to earn white approval, and the book is an attempt to both acknowledge and excise such tendencies in real time. “Even to declare that I’m writing for myself would still mean I’m writing to a part of me that wants to please white people,” she explains. She’s circling the edges of a trap that often appears in Asian-American consciousness, in which love is suspicious and being unloved is even worse. The editors of “Aiiieeeee!,” one of the first anthologies of Asian-American literature—it was published in 1974—argued that “euphemized white racist love” had combined with legislative racism to mire the Asian-American psyche in a swamp of “self-contempt, self-rejection, and disintegration.” A quarter century later, in her book “The Melancholy of Race,” the literary theorist Anne Anlin Cheng described “the double bind that fetters the racially and ethnically denigrated subject: How is one to love oneself and the other when the very movement toward love is conditioned by the anticipation of denial and failure?” In the introduction to his essay collection “The Souls of Yellow Folk,” published in 2018, Wesley Yang writes about a realization that he regards as “unspeakable precisely because it need never be spoken: that as the bearer of an Asian face in America, you paid some incremental penalty, never absolute, but always omnipresent, that meant that you were default unlovable and unloved.”

The question of lovability, and desirability, is freighted for Asian men and Asian women in very different ways—and “Minor Feelings” serves as a case study in how a feminist point of view can both deepen an inquiry and widen its resonances to something like universality. Essays and articles about Asian-American consciousness often invoke issues of dominance and submission, and they often frame these issues according to the experiences of disenfranchised men. The editors of “Aiiieeeee!” call the stereotypical Asian-American “contemptible because he is womanly”; Yang often identifies the Asian-American condition with male rejection and disaffection. Hong reframes the quandary of negotiating dominance and submission—of desiring dominance, of hating the terms of that dominance, of submitting in the hopes of achieving some facsimile of dominance anyway—as a capitalist dilemma. I found myself thinking about how the interest and favor of white people, white men in particular, both professionally and personally, have insulated me from the feeling of being sidelined by America while compromising my instincts at a level I can barely access. Hong writes, “My ego is in free fall while my superego is boundless, railing that my existence is not enough, never enough, so I become compulsive in my efforts to do better, be better, blindly following this country’s gospel of self-interest, proving my individual worth by expanding my net worth, until I vanish.”

I hate my Asian self the way I worry about being written off as a woman writer—which is to say, not at all. Hong concedes that the self-hating Asian may be “on its way out” with her generation: for me, the formulation still has weight, but does not capture the efflorescence of the present. The question, then, is whether the movement toward love, as Anne Anlin Cheng put it, can be made outside the grasp of coercion. Is there a future of Asian-American identity that’s fundamentally expansive—that can encompass the divergent economic and cultural experiences of Asians in the United States, and form a bridge to the experiences of other marginalized groups?The answer depends on whom Asian-Americans choose to feel affinity and loyalty toward—whether we direct our sympathies to those with more power than us or less, not just outside our jerry-rigged ethnic coalition but within it. The history of Asian-Americans has involved repression and assimilation; it has also, to a degree that is often forgotten, involved radicalism and invention. “Aiiieeeee!” was published by Howard University Press, partly as a result of the friendship that one of its editors, Frank Chin, formed with the radical black writer Ishmael Reed. Gidra, an Asian-American zine that was published in Los Angeles in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, called for the “birth of a new Asian—one who will recognize and deal with injustices.” (Gidra reported on cases of local discrimination and profiled activists such as Yuri Kochiyama; it’s now back in print.) To occupy a conflicted position is also to inhabit a continual opportunity—the chance, to borrow Hong’s words, to “do better, be better,” but in moral and political rather than economic terms.In one of the essays in “Minor Feelings,” called “An Education,” Hong looks back on her friendships in college with two other Asian-American girls—brash, unstable hellions named Erin and Helen. They made art together, they traded poetry, they got drunk and fought and made up. “We had the confidence of white men,” Hong recalls, “which was swiftly cut down after graduation, upon our separation, when each of us had to prove ourselves again and again, because we were, at every stage of our career, underestimated.” The story of their friendship is a story about the way that loving others is often a less complex and more worthy act than loving ourselves—and the way that love can blunt the psychological force of marginalization. If structural oppression is the denial of justice, and if justice is what love looks like in public, then love demonstrated in private sometimes provides what the world doesn’t. Hong is writing in agonized pursuit of a liberation that doesn’t look white—a new sound, a new affect, a new consciousness—and the result feels like what she was waiting for. Her book is a reminder that we can be, and maybe have to be, what others are waiting for, too.

[calmsoulhaven-blog]

Writing Saved My Life

When I was a little girl, I always had something to say. Talking, literally was my thing. My mom would make contests up for me to see how long I could be quiet. Since I always had what they call an “old soul”, I felt the annoyance of those whose ears I talked off. Once the realization became apparent, I would try to sit there quietly, trying not to burst. I had questions, I had ideas, I had solutions, I had insight, and I absolutely had jokes. But because I was just a child, I was often told to be quiet, especially when grownups were talking. 

To counter the silence, I decided to start writing. I would write songs, I’d write in my diary, and I even wrote short stories. I remember when I was about 7 years old, I used to watch a show on television called “Creature Feature”. This show was hosted by a character named Elvira, who would dress quite scantily, showed scary stories every week on the show. I watched faithfully. One day, Elvira announced a contest for kids. I was so excited because I learned that it was a contest to create a scary story. I hopped on the task immediately. I can’t recall the details of the story, but I knew that what I had written would catch the eye of anyone who read it. Weeks had gone by and one day my mom yelled upstairs to let me know I had a letter come in the mail. I ran downstairs to retrieve this letter and found that it was addressed from channel 41. I ripped the letter open and read it aloud in excitement. I won, I think. They sent me a letter letting me know my story was great and scary and there was a prize involved that I can’t recall, but even if I hadn’t won first place, in my mind, I won, and from that day forward, I knew that writing was something that I was destined to do.

As I got older, I became interested in poetry. However since school forced us to write (computers weren’t invented yet), I became less interested in it because it had become a requirement. I had lost a bit of my excitement because I didn’t feel that I was doing something creative anymore. I felt pressed to write and that was no longer a joy. I found myself writing day in and day out about things that I just wasn’t interested in and the grades that I received for my work now became critical and judgmental. I started writing simply for the grades and if I’m being honest, being a C average student couldn’t have been as creative as I once thought. My writing dreams had disappeared and poetry even became a bummer to me because of my literature class.

After I graduated high school, I tried to go to college for a year. Since I didn’t do that well in high school, college was not the best idea for me at that time. I had to be realistic with myself and decide what I wanted to do with my life. I was working odd jobs just to show my parents that I didn’t want to be completely shiftless, but I even got fired from a temporary stocking job. How was that even possible? I had started making bad life decisions and I knew that living under my parent’s roof, outside influences wouldn’t be the death of me, but they would! So, it was at that point that I decided to take my life a little bit serious. I joined the United States Air Force. What could be so hard about that, right? Little to my knowledge, there was this thing called basic training. Basic training although  not as strenuous as some of the military basic training experiences, still posed a bit of pressure for a shiftless recently let go temporary warehouse employee. There were so many things happening to me that I was just not accustomed to and so many unfamiliar faces. I had no peace, but then I was told that we would be able to write home to our loved ones. I was trapped mentally and dealing with things internally that I couldn’t express outward because of how I would be perceived, but when the announcement came that we could write, I felt all hope was not lost. I started writing every single person I knew. Especially, the ones who I thought would pray for me to become invisible until graduation day. I wrote every single day to any and everybody who I knew had an address. I started asking my mom to get more addresses for me so that I could reach out to even more people to help me become invisible. I realized, in basic training, that I loved to write and it was something that kept me sane, so I did it often until I graduated.

After graduation from basic training and tech school, I received orders to my first duty station, Arkansas, well so I had thought. Having been only a C average student in high school, I soon realized that I did not pay enough attention in geography class, and in actuality AK stood for Alaska! OMG!! Unsure of the distance between my home town and this place called Alaska, I ran to a map. I discovered that Alaska wasn’t even connected physically on a map, so to me, I was going to another country. I cried and cried. I talked to my mother and she assured me that it was going to be alright. Once I got to Alaska, I dove back into writing letters because that was soothing to me. I finally got over the distance thing and began to make friends. One friend I got to know a little too well and decided that it was time to write my mom a profound letter to let her know that she was going to become a grandmother. She wasn’t as excited about this inspired writing as all my others, but she encouraged me none the less. 

Years had gone by before I had even thought about writing again. I had become a new mother and all my time surrounded motherhood. I didn’t think about writing again until around 2004. I was active duty reserves by that time, and I had enrolled in college. Now going to school on my own terms, I was able to select classes that I liked and not just classes that I needed to graduate. I started taking an English course and we studied all types of writing. One day we entered the section of poetry, and it was then that I rediscovered my love for writing, again. I remember that I started writing poems every single day, sometimes twice  a day. I would write love poems, poems about my children, and anything I felt at any given moment. Although writing was something that I was required to do academically once again, I figured out how to incorporate what I loved and it didn’t seem so bad doing it that way.

Life went on and in 2011, I had 2 children and I graduated with my Masters degree in Adult Education, totally unpredictable, right? Well it happened, a mediocre high school student transformed into a well rounded educator. I worked in the field of education for several years, and in 2013 started pursuing my doctorate. Although I was fond of teaching writing at that point, I had now been abused by the red pen of academic writing by my professors. Writing became a love hate thing and I couldn’t find a balance. 

For many years to come, I had been in school for what seemed like forever, I began to despise writing again. I only found myself writing out of complete necessity. I was annoyed with it and when it was time to write, I found every excuse for me not to write. Some years had passed, and I was still scraping my way up the hill to that doctoral journey. Life happened and well, that’s that. By that time, I had become stressed, overworked, and writing played a factor in some of that. In December of that year, my father passed away and that added an area of grief to my life. Although things were coming at me from every direction, I hadn’t slowed down to take care of myself. 

In February, I experienced what some may call a mental breakdown. I didn’t know people really had those and I wasn’t even sure if I believed they were real. Throughout the process I just continued to ask why this happened to me and I tried to figure out how it happened to me. One day I went to talk to someone who my mother recommended, and she suggested that I do something that she had no idea was once a huge part of me, and that was to write. She suggested that I start using a journal to write my feelings and thoughts down. Since I usually had a plan of action for my writing, I asked her what she thought I should write and how she thought I should write. She told me that there doesn’t have to be a rhyme or reason, just write.

So for about a week, I looked at the journal that my mom and sister had personalized for me. I thought about writing but at that point simply thinking about writing gave me anxiety. It wasn’t until a week later that I picked up my journal, and started writing. I started off writing about how I felt at that moment and about other things that I was feeling and I felt okay, as I wrote. As days went by, I felt better and I realized that writing was actually therapy for me. I wrote every day. I decided to become more intentional about my writing, so I decided to write at a specific time every day and dedicated that time to me. The writings are sometimes all over the place and sometimes I jump from thought to thought, but I learned that that is okay. I soon saw that writing in my journal took me mentally back to my childhood. It took me back to when I used to talk for hours and ask millions of questions. It took me back to simple times. A time when I could just live in the moment and be me. It took me back to a time when I didn’t have a care in the world. I realized writing helped my healing process. Who knew that something that I once learned to loved as a child, but then took for granted, would one day bring me out of a dark place and save my life once again. 

[teatimewithtess]

My Experience at a 4 Week Summer School

Arkansas Governor’s School is a 4 week summer program where the 400 most gifted and talented students meet to discuss the future of the worlds’ current mindset while also gaining new insight from experienced college professors and top high school teachers. The daily schedule is divided into three areas: Area I, an assigned class focused on one specific education (i.e. English, math, social science, natural science, instrumental music, etc.), area II, a philosophy based course focused on critical thinking skills, and area III, the class where we used the critical thinking techniques from area II to apply them to the social issues of today, such as racism, school shootings, climate change, etc. In order to become a student of AGS, one must fill out the simple application process which includes the following: an essay regarding the provided prompt, 2 recommendation letters, a list of achievements/accomplishments in high school, a writing assignment about your reasoning for choosing your desired area I subject, and another essay about why you want to attend AGS. After completing all required materials in the admission process, you then wait until you receive an email granting your secured spot in attending AGS. Receiving that specific email was a step towards the road of change, and I was completely unaware.

Now, let me post a slight disclaimer: I might use the same type of wording in order to express how AGS went for me, but I simply cannot help it. I will not over hype nor will I under exaggerate the experience as a whole. I will speak of my time, what I did, who I met, and how I felt. Let us begin.

First, I wrote in a black leather bound journal every day. I titled each day “AGS Day -- July --” in order to keep my days straight because I honestly did not ever have an idea of what day it was, or what time it was. The first two weeks we were not allowed to have our phones and it was one of the most refreshing times, mentally. I was glad I never knew what time it was; I was going through each day with no worry. I never had a thought about who I need to text, what other people were up to, or what was happening in the news. Having met so many new, different people at one time without having my cellphone was an oasis for my mind. I could openly connect with other different ways of thinking, which overall affected me in a positive way because I forced myself to listen purely- not listen to speak. By speaking less and observing more, I was able to do so much more. For me, it was writing. Now, the writing in this journal was not for feelings and “he loves me, he loves me not” ideas, it was simply to physically document everything that happened that day because if I did not, I would forget them. Time shows no mercy for our memories, and I wanted to make sure that they lived forever.

Secondly, I took notes on EVERYTHING. When lectures occurred at 4:00pm and 6:00pm, I would go to as many as I could and gain as much knowledge as I could. With that, I now have many pages filled in my journal and many other notebooks of what experienced professors had to say. The topics ranged from food psychology to life beyond Earth, the ending of a story to the psychology of self talk in sports, and the debate between science and god to the dissection of short films. If you can think it, there was a lecture on it. Of course I did not want to forget any of those talks either, especially when they were delivering valuable information that is not even mentioned in high school, so I documented the ones that were most interesting to me. The memories of knowledge can be refreshed.

Next, one of the most impactful habits I began was writing down questions. Whenever I started to read philosophy about a year ago, I developed a new, open way of thinking. With this new way of thinking, I started to have more and more questions about everything, which eventually led me to discover the psychological side of it in philosophy via research papers. However, I never thought about writing these down because I thought they were ridiculous or other people would quickly dismiss them; but, as soon as I sat through the first day of area II realizing I had already written down a full page of questions, I knew I needed to continue this practice. Luckily, I met a few very impactful people that allowed me to ask these questions and actually nurtured the methodology I had. 

With that, I prepare for the most important part of my AGS experience: the professors.

I met approximately 5 people that influenced me in the greatest of ways. The first one is a satirical, yet highly intelligent English professor that taught my afternoon area I class, English. He was the first person that noticed my reading of philosophy and became ecstatic at the idea of a student my age reading these works this early. I continued to converse with him occasionally after class and during lunch, where he introduced me to the process of acquiring a PhD in English, and English in college as a whole. He gave me many book titles, notes he took in college, and most importantly a confidence in sharing my ideas. Unfortunately, in my English area I class specifically, I encountered many roadblocks regarding peoples’ way of thinking that forced me to refrain from expressing my ideas/logic. This professor however witnessed I was occurring this phenomenon and later wrote to me that my ideas need to be spread. Since we are on the topic of English professors, there was another mentor that encouraged me to do more creative writing. This old fellow was a master of poetry, but somehow adored my work and pursued me to write a novel after reading one of my pieces. He also endorsed my reading of philosophy, and will also stay in touch post AGS. The instrumental music teacher and I became great friends after attending one of his many Jazz classes. He was a quirky professor of jazz that truly represented the epitome of what a musician is. You could see his love for music in his performing, and I respect and praise that from a student perspective, being a musician myself. He noticed how much I supported my fellow musicians and loved the idea of me doing so. He inspired me to keep smiling as much as I do, and that simple gesture stuck with me. No one has ever told me to continue ‘being happy’, they only question why I do smile. Coming from an older, loving musician, it meant a lot to me. I also met with a library technician that informed me on the world of publishing and writing for the public. She gave me tremendous advice that will help me as soon as I begin writing research articles in college, and I am forever grateful for her insight. Finally, there is one professor that influenced me the greatest. He is an optimistic psychologist that taught my area II class of philosophy/critical thinking. After talking to him several times post class, it gradually became a regular thing after lectures and movies, and even during dinner or lunch. After one  specific talk, he helped me gain traction on what my career goals were. He introduced me to psychology, which I had never even thought about before, and unconsciously opened this academic door that will help me as I complete my final year of college and begin my long journey of becoming an academic. Each conversation posed new questions I immediately needed to document or write about later, and it all eventually led to my reading list reach an unfathomable amount. He nurtured my constant need of questions, unlike other teachers that quickly dismiss them to junk since I am still a teenager, which means it is irrational for me to ask such questions even though they themselves cannot likely define what irrationality is. I cannot praise in written word anymore how impactful this professor was. I will forever be in his debt.

The best part of AGS was the professors because they volunteered to work with these 400 kids. They helped shape me into me. They helped guide me into the right area of assessing who I am and what do I know, and who are the others and what do they know. The atmosphere they created was unlike any other; it was comforting, yet challenging, welcoming, but serious. Even in just the small time I had with these mentors, I believed I could trust them with any thought I had. In some ways, it felt as if they were trying to figure me out, which made the camp even more entertaining. They welcomed my thoughts and ideas with open arms which allowed me to grow exponentially. 

Because of this whole experience, I resulted in developing particular habits that might not make much sense to many people but I know it makes sense to these mentors and fellow students of the camp.

1) Every time I have a memory, flashback, dream, nightmare, vision, or daydream, I write it down. I came to the conclusion that if I do not write down these events then I will forget them, and I need them to use as inspiration.

2) When I have a question, I write it down as well. I hope in the future I can answer some of them, but not all of them.

3) I read some type of research paper and/or listen to a podcast related to my future field of study.

4) I take a heavy amount of notes on everything I hear/read. I did not realize until after this camp how much I enjoy taking notes, especially when it is just verbal, so I have to exercise my comprehension skills. I also, depending on the importance of the talk, will record certain lectures given it is relevant information that I need later on.

Alongside these habits I also developed lasting friendships with fellow students all across the state. Our wavelengths are compatible, which presents positive signs for a lasting relationship with one another. I know I will see them in the near future. 

I will never forget this meta strophic event that planted itself in my teenage years, and I hope my search for the same atmosphere I was in for 4 weeks is successful.

[humansofoz]

October 2nd, 2018

"Take your blessings, put them in your pocket, let them jingle like loose change, let them remind you that they exist." -Sally Familia

Sally Familia. 20. SUNY Oswego Senior.

HoOz- What was your greatest struggle at 16?

Sally- Age 16? So Age 16 that was junior year of high school, correct? Oh man. My greatest struggle was trying to figure out if I wanted to go to an art school or just a regular school. Because since the beginning of time I knew I wanted to study writing, and that’s what I’m studying here- I’m a creative writing major, but I didn’t know if I wanted to go to a liberal arts school where I would have a broader knowledge of different things or go to a conservatory and just do writing. So I feel like I was really struggling to figure out where exactly I wanted to be in the future, like in terms of my craft, and writing, and the arts...I lost my train of thought. But yeah I was just really struggling to figure out how exactly I wanted to reach my goal of being a writer.

HoOz- So, what different factors did you consider when it came to making the decision?

Sally- I mean I was considering if the school was good first of all. Like if I was actually going to be learning about the things that I wanted to. I was considering distance because I wanted to go as far away as possible but also not too far that like, I couldn’t afford it. I was thinking about diversity. That was way too important for me. But the way that I was thinking about it back then was very closed minded because I didn’t wanna be around people of color. Yes. It’s bad. Because, like I grew up in Washington Heights. I moved over here when I was six years old. Like I emigrated here when I was six and then I moved into Washington Heights, so I was always around people of color. So I was like ugh. It had a lot to do with some kind of self-hatred definitely. Because I was like ugh people of color, they’re just so annoying, they’re so loud, they don’t know how to shut up, they’re just so out there. At the time when I was growing up, my mom is very conservative, so I was taught to not be like that. So then I was like okay, I’m just gonna go and live a “caucasian life.” I wanted to be white- ugh disgusting. So I wanted to be as far as possible from people of color. So when I say I was thinking about diversity, I wasn’t thinking of it like oh this is what I want, I was thinking like this is what I need to be away from. So it was... Yeah. It was deep.

HoOz- That is very interesting because usually, it’s the other way around, right?

Sally- Yeah and now when I got here, I’m just like what did I do? Like I had to be around people that were just like me. Because culture shock for me was really bad when I got here. I came here before for EOP and it was bad. Like I had multiple panic attacks. I was just like I can’t breathe around so many people who are not like me. I wasn’t able to communicate because I learned English as my second language, so of course, I always spoke Spanish and English. So I was like who am I gonna talk to? Nobody understands what I’m saying! Haha. So it was just hard.

HoOz- So how do you feel you’ve transitioned from that? Like what helped you change your mindset and get more comfortable?

Sally- This is gonna be really long! I got here and I was very closed minded. Clearly, as I said, I didn’t want to be around people of color even though I am one. So, I feel that when I first..this is gonna sound so corny and cliche..but when I first learned about LSU, I was like okay, these might be people that I can actually communicate with. Because they know my language, they know about my background. I could relate to these people. So, freshman year I didn’t do much. I was just hanging out with the same people in EOP and I just kept to myself. But sophomore year I decided to do something. Because I was getting bored, I wasn’t learning anything new, it was just my classes and going home. I wasn’t meeting new people. I felt really closed off and really isolated. So, I went to an LSU program, and the president at the time- wait no she was actually the PR at the time. She came up to me and she was speaking to me and I was just like so blown away by how friendly she was that I was like okay, I’m gonna be more involved. And then with time I started being more involved with LSU, then I became the Vice President, then became the President. But my mentality has changed so much like in the classroom and outside of it like with my extracurriculars. I learned more about my history and that’s something that- at least for the Latino community, you don’t learn about the Latino community. Like in high school, they talk about either if you’re white or you’re black, they don’t talk about the Hispanic community. So, I never knew anything about it. Because I emigrated here when I was six, so I never really got to learn about the history of my personal culture because I was raised in America. So when I got here I started learning more about the Latino community, I took classes that were focused on Latino literature, about Latino poetry. I found out things about myself and my culture through what I loved, which is writing and literature. If somebody was like “no you have to learn this” then I wouldn’t have learned it, but I was learning about what I love and about myself, together through LSU and through my literature.

HoOz- I love that! Okay, something that I also wanted to ask you about from hearing your story. You came here when you were six, how was that transition for you?

Sally- Um, it was difficult. It’s gonna sound funny- well it’s not that funny, but it’s gonna sound funny. Because I’m white passing. If you see me you’re gonna be like “ah she’s white.” Because this is not my natural hair color, I’m blonde. So my hair is blonde, I have green eyes and I’m super, super white. So you can only tell when I speak because I have like a small accent now, but it was difficult because people didn’t know I didn’t know how to speak the language. So people would come up to me and try to speak to me and I’m just like, I don’t know. I would be in my classes and I honestly didn’t think people in America knew Spanish *laughs.* So I honestly didn’t speak to anyone for like months in my classes. I’m like nobody knows Spanish, who am I gonna speak to? I’m just gonna have to be in the corner by myself and not knowing the language, not speaking to anyone. And it’s hard when you’re so young. You wanna hang out with your friends and when you’re at recess you wanna play. But like, It sucks because I isolated myself. Like I did it to myself because although I didn’t know the language, I feel like I should’ve put myself out there to see if anyone else does. But I isolated myself because I was scared to find the people that I needed, you know? And I feel like that’s why when I came to college I actually put myself out there. Because I’m like just because I don’t see it doesn’t mean they’re not around. Like sometimes you have to put yourself out there because it’s not gonna come to you. So, the language was obviously the hardest part. I couldn’t speak the language, I didn’t know the culture, but I was really young so it wasn’t as difficult as it would’ve been if I came here when I was in high school. It took me about three years to fully learn it, and it would’ve been faster if they put me in ESL. They put me in ESL when I was in fourth grade, and I came when I was in first grade. Yeah, and I feel like that’s why I love literature so much and writing. Because I had to study the language so much, I just like fell in love with it. Now I just write, and I love it.

HoOz- Alright let’s switch gears a little bit. What would you say is your biggest flaw?

Sally- My biggest flaw? At the moment... ah man. I think my biggest flaw is getting out of my business professional kind of like- it’s not a facade because this is how I act, but like I feel like I always have to be in this position where I’m carrying myself a certain way because I’m a student leader on campus. So I’m very, very strict like I don’t like acting like a person my age should be acting. You see how people be out and they be dancing and twerking, and I don’t like doing that because I’m like “nah I’m the president of LSU, you can’t see me doing this.” So I feel like my biggest flaw right now is getting out of that mentality. Like I could still be a student. People know I’m a student like I’m not a faculty, they know I’m a student. So I need to stop thinking about how people are perceiving me outside of it. I always want to be like this professional person where I’m just like being a leader, but sometimes I just have to be a student *laughs.* So I think that’s my biggest flaw right now.

HoOz- And what would you say is your biggest strength?

Sally- My biggest strength? I think my biggest strength right now is just being able to be a leader on campus. I was speaking to one of my high school teachers and she was like “I would’ve never thought you would have been the person you are right now.” Because when I was in high school, a leader? Never. I was always a follower, I hated assuming responsibility, I hated telling people what to do, I was very passive. And just the fact that I was put into this position- I was put into this position by mistake first of all. Something happened with the president at the time and I had to assume responsibility because I was the vice president. So, I feel like the fact that I was able to get in that position so fast, and like I had to ignore my fears of being a leader. My biggest strength is just being able to get over my fear. I hated the thought of being bossy, I hated telling people what to do especially since we’re all students. Like I can’t be telling you what to do, you’re my age. Or sometimes even older than me. So it’s like I feel like since I’m in this position I’m now able to carry myself in a way that I’m respected but I’m also seen as a student on campus.

HoOz- So where do you see yourself in five to ten years?

Sally- Five to ten years. I’m putting it out into the universe, I see myself as a writer. I see myself as an author. I see myself having at least one book published. I’m not gonna go crazy and whatever, but I feel like in five to ten years I’ll have a book out. That’s where I see myself.

HoOz- What kind of book would you want to publish?

Sally- Poetry. Yeah, so I definitely see myself with at least one poetry anthology out. Oh my God, the thought of it!

HoOz- One last question, if you could tell your future self one thing, what would it be?

Sally- Stop being scared that you’re going to lose friends because of your character. Because I have a very strong personality. Very strong. And I have this thing that I lose four friends average in a year. Literally, it’s true, like I lost four friends this year. It's crazy. So I feel like I tone myself down so I don’t scare people off. Because I’m very blunt, I’m very honest, I’m really loud, I’m very dramatic and I’m very big. Sometimes, when I lose a friend, I’m like maybe I should tone it down, maybe I should like stop being so loud and being so like, dramatic because clearly people don’t like that and I’m losing friends. I feel like I have to keep reminding myself that if I’m losing friends it’s because they can’t handle me and they’re not supposed to be in my life. So I shouldn’t be thinking about the people I’m losing. I should be thinking about the people that I could gain that actually love how I act and actually love who I am as a person. That’s what I would tell my future self.

[aggievoices]

The Joy Fergoda Library: Bringing the Margins to the Center

Emma Hoppough

Photos by Rafael Velasco

When I was in high school, my mom would wave me out of the car on rainy mornings with a reminder: “Please just go to the library before class!” Instead, I would roll my eyes and meet my friends in the stuffy gym locker room—a place where we could theoretically goof off, but where we usually just complained about the weather before trudging to first period. I can’t explain my past aversion to the library—I always loved books, and English was my favorite class—but something about it, about the eagle-eyed librarians and the textbook-focused collection, never drew me in.

Fast-forward to 2017, when I stepped timidly into the Joy Fergoda Library in the UC Davis Women’s Resources and Research Center (WRRC): immediately, I spotted cushioned chairs, tea and coffee, and studious-looking undergrads dotting the cozy space. Looking more closely, I realized that it was not a typical library at all. The shelves were filled with books written by women authors, and with topics ranging ranging from ecofeminism to Native American mythology. The counter held pamphlets on self-care, and the hallway outside displayed a poster about gender-neutral pronouns. This was a library I felt comfortable in.

Although the library occupies just one room in North Hall, it feature an increasingly large collection and an impressive history. Named for the WRRC’s first full-time librarian, the Joy Fergoda library opened in the 1970s with only 150 books on the shelves. Nearly 50 years later, that collection has grown to hold over 12,000 books, films and more; meanwhile, its mission has similarly expanded to focus on student self-care, intersectional feminism and judgement-free learning. But how can such a small space meet these ambitious goals?

To learn more about the library, I spoke with three people who know it best: Mary Rasooli, the first-ever student library coordinator and a recent UC Davis graduate; Lulu Zhang, the library’s Volunteer of the Year and a graduating US History major; and Jessica Castellon, the assistant director of education for the WRRC. Our conversations showed me that the Joy Fergoda Library’s small-scale collection does not limit its impact, but instead enables it to address large-scale issues one Dewey Decimal number at a time.

Q: IN YOUR OWN WORDS, WHAT IS THE GOAL OF THE JOY FERGODA LIBRARY?

Mary: I think this is a different type of library...Here you can find so much on queer theory, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity—all these things that affect all of us, that we don't necessarily have access to or that we might not be comfortable going in spaces [to request information about].

Lulu: While students are spending their time here, they get to learn more about gender equity. Even in the restrooms—we have two gender-inclusive restrooms to expose students to the idea that you can challenge the gender binary norms. On the back of the door on each stall, right now, there are two statements: “You are valid,” and “I love you.”

Q: BUT WHY SEPARATE THIS COLLECTION FROM THE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY? HOW DOES THE SPACE—THE WRRC—AFFECT HOW STUDENTS INTERACT WITH THESE BOOKS?

Jessica: When it’s a larger collection, it’s easier to get lost. We have some autonomy and agency to pick what goes in our library...For example, we have zines, comic books, poetry books. Sometimes these things aren’t seen as scholarly, but we feel like they are scholarly because it’s knowledge, so we’re bringing the margins to the center.

Mary: We look at what [artists, writers or poets] have released and published recently, and pick and choose what fits for our center. For us, it’s really anything; we want to be able to represent an array of subjects. For the most part a lot of the books we have here, Shields [the university library] doesn’t have. It’s just really new stuff.

Q: GIVEN THAT THE LIBRARY IS PART OF A “RESOURCES AND RESEARCH” CENTER, WHAT RESOURCES DOES IT PROVIDE FOR STUDENTS?

Jessica: We have multiple material resources in the library: coffee and tea, printing services, a charging station, blue books for finals and midterms, a GRE loan program for folks to check out study materials and a reserve library for classes.

Lulu: There are lots of flyers, pamphlets and resources for people of different needs. We don’t just provide people with information on birth control, we also provide them with [information on] how to help yourself and your friends during a crisis: how to fight depression, accidental pregnancy, stalking behavior and more...It’s pretty radical, now that I’m telling you about it.

Q: ARE THERE LIBRARY-SPECIFIC PROGRAMS AS WELL?

Mary: We run the Feminist Dialogues speaker series [a collaboration with the Feminist Research Institute]. We want folks to have access to these individuals who have gotten through academia or maybe aren’t doing stuff in academia but are impacting the way we produce knowledge in some other way...We had someone [participate in the series] who had their PhD in different forms of parenting and mothering, so she gave us a really cool talk about her research. It was a way for people to meet someone who had graduated but was also still doing work in academia—and really cool radical work.

Lulu: The library also has a program called STEM Cafe. It provides free tutoring for people—especially women—in STEM [science, technology, engineering and mathematics]. Twice a month we have a set date and location; you just come in with your questions.

Q: SO WHO CAN USE THE LIBRARY? WHO CAN COME INTO THE WRRC?

Jessica: So many people use our library. There are particular folks who feel safe in the space—I think queer and trans, femme folks do feel safe in this space to come in, eat their lunch, have dialogue. A lot of our volunteers for STEM cafe are men—but I think they come with the understanding that we’re doing this with a feminist perspective

Lulu: Some male students told me that because it’s called the “women’s” center they thought it was for women exclusively, which is not right...Anyone can come, no matter your identities.

Q: ARE YOU HOPING TO SEE ANY CHANGES IN THE NEXT YEAR?

Mary: I want to see more engagement with students in the library. Students come here for our tea, our coffee, our quiet spaces and printing resources, but I would like to see us do more long-term programming, like ways to engage people with the amazing literature that we have and all the cool stuff we’ve been ordering for the library.

Q: LASTLY, DO YOU HAVE A FAVORITE BOOK FROM THE COLLECTION?

Mary: I like Salt, by Nayyirah Waheed. Her poetry is incredible. It’s pretty new, and she’s just someone we wanted to support because she’s amazing.

Jessica: I love the children’s books; I think what’s unique about our library is that we have children’s books that focus on race and class and gender. I love the one called [Morris Micklewhite and] the Tangerine Dress: it’s about a child, assigned “boy” at birth, who plays with gender identity. People, especially first-time parents, are trying to teach their kids these concepts.

Lulu: 100 Most Important Women of the 20th Century—it’s a brief overview of influential women...I remember reading about a Chinese revolutionary woman who I didn’t read much about before I came here. It’s kind of like, if you have a four-year college degree, you should know these women; otherwise, how could you claim that you went through college?

You can find the Joy Fergoda Library, part of the Women’s Resources and Research Center, in the first floor of North Hall at UC Davis. To learn more about the library and the WRRC, check out these links:

Joy Fergoda Library database

WRRC website

WRRC Facebook page (for events & scholarship news)

Emma Hoppough is a recent UC Davis alumna. When she’s not writing or painting, she’s probably planning a picnic or rewatching episodes of The Office. 

[howardschatzphotography]

On Seeing: A Journal - #259 June 12th, 2018

"Above & Beyond with Adam Gopnik”

Adam Gopnik is a Renaissance Man’s Renaissance Man. A long-time staff writer at The New Yorker, he is an essayist, a critic, a playwright, a novelist, an author of children’s books…in short, the epitome of the enlightened human. I read his writing avidly, and, a few weeks ago, invited him to our studio to participate in my project “ABOVE and BEYOND.” A three-time winner of the National Magazine Award, Gopnik has amazingly broad knowledge of many areas, including: Art and art history, culture, politics, music, even sports. His first essay in The New Yorker, "Quattrocento Baseball," appeared in May of 1986, and he served as the magazine’s art critic from 1987 to 1995. During our interview, he spoke in perfectly structured, literate English, as clear and precise as his written words. Here are some of Gopnik’s thoughts that I found especially compelling from our interview: HS: So prolific, I wonder how you organize your life. When do you write? When do you read? When do you think? When do you go to museums, see friends, have a life? You must have some efficiently organized method in order to produce as much as you do. AG: I have a very standard routine. I start drinking strong coffee early in the morning. I go off to my little study and I write for four hours. I have many sisters, one of them a distinguished psychologist, and she says that you can only do creative work intently for four hours at a stretch. So, I do four hours from nine til one, every day. I try not to do anything else. I’m just there to write. I do it in a way that makes it maximally uncomfortable for anyone else who intrudes on me, because I can only write if I’m playing extremely loud rock music from my high school years: Jethro Tull; Eric Clapton with Derek & The Dominos, that great Layla album; Jimi Hendrix; all of that music. HS:  You play this music, and loudly, as you write? AG: I can’t think if I don’t have the music, that’s the funny thing. I also overheat terribly as I’m writing, so I have to keep the windows open in the middle of winter. I’ve had a series of wonderful assistants just coming out of college, and they’re sort of excited about the job. You know, “I’m going to be a writer’s assistant and see the elegance of a New Yorker writer’s life," and instead it’s just a little man, four hours a day, in a brutally cold room with incredibly loud music playing, and that’s their experience. So, they’d retreat into the hallway and spend the time talking with my wife.

HS:  Where and how do you think your work has had greatest impact given the political and cultural bias of The New Yorker? AG: Writing for The New Yorker, which is a traditionally liberal magazine, of course you ask yourself a question, "what am I really affecting here?" because I’m writing to people who agree with me in advance. But, if you look at the greatest political editorialists who have ever lived, Albert Camus, for instance, they were writing themed journals that were directed to people who were inclined to agree with them in the first place. What we do, I think, as citizens, writing, is not so much to change minds as to bear witness. What you want to say is not, “here’s an argument that will convince you of the opposite of what you believe already, but here’s the kind of argument you ought to be making to the people who don’t agree with you." HS: We live in a time with a bully in the White House. And, yet, despite the mean-spirited and hypocritical behavior, there are still thirty to forty percent of Americans… AG: Who love him. HS: And my question on changing people’s minds comes from something you wrote in your wonderful book, "At the Strangers’ Gate," that was astounding. I’d like to read it and perhaps you can comment on it: "No one really surrenders an illusion in the face of a fact. We prefer the illusion to the fact. The more  facts you invoke, in fact, the stronger the illusion becomes. All faith is immune to all facts to the contrary, or else we would not have such hearty faiths and such oft-resisted facts. If your faith is in life’s poetry, as ours was, a tiny room inadequate by any human standard and designed to make life borderline impossible looks appealing. The less possible it becomes the more beautiful the illusion looks. Such illusions – call them delusions; I won’t argue now – grow under the pressure of absurdity, as champagne grapes sweeten under the stress of cold ground." AG: Yes, I think that’s true. I mean, I was writing specifically there about the reality that when Martha, my then girlfriend, now wife for many years, and I moved to New York, we were enraptured with an idea of poetry, a kind of metropolitan poetry. And, the apartment we moved into was 9x11 basement room overrun by cockroaches in which there was about as little poetry as you could expect to find in the world. But, we weren’t disillusioned by it. We simply doubled-down on the myths that we were self-creating, and I think that’s generally true. You know, no one is ever argued out of a religious faith by contrary facts. No one is every argued out of a political ideology. That’s the problem we’re faced with: You can’t resist a figure like Trump by appealing to the facts, by saying he lies all the time, because the people who admire him like the fact that he lies all the time. The lies, in a certain way, are appealing to them because it gives them license to indulge their own fantasies. In other words, if somebody tells you three million people voted illegally in California, it’s an outright, absurd lie. But, that an authority figure says it gives you a right to believe in it. If your question is what do you do then, when you have a leader who is completely allergic to facts and who appeals to an audience that’s resistant to facts, I think the answer is that you can’t fantasize that you’re going to convert those folks. What happens is that you get new generations who just don’t buy it. If you think about the great social changes, the great positive social changes of our time, they tend not to happen because you have people who are entrenched in a bigoted or old-fashioned reactionary position who are converted. What tends to happen, is the young generations who come along simply don’t enlist in the bigotry.

HS: I’d like to talk about the natural history of creativity, its life-cycle. There’s sort of an apex, a fertile period of creativity, then a downturn. Recently, I heard Dylan say when asked about his seminal work of 50 years ago, "Who writes like that?!" Probably everybody’s curve is different and maybe some people have a second curve. Do you have any thoughts about that? AG: I think that any honest, creative person is bound to confess that when one looks at other artists and creative people, you tend to see that they have a high period and then a falling off period. Bob Dylan is a remarkable character, but there’s no question that the Dylan between 1966 and 1974, between Blonde on Blonde and Blood on the Tracks is the Dylan who we’ll remember. Paul McCartney is a musician of limitless melodic invention, but the McCartney we’ll remember is between 1965 and 1969. So, there’s a lot be said for the idea that artists ought to retire in a way that fighters ought to retire before they get punch-drunk and lazy-legged and all the rest of it. However, what I do think is true is that even if you accept that all creativity is cyclical and has a falling off point, there’s still an enormous value in artists persisting, because artists don’t just give us the gift of their products, they give us the gift of their example. Dylan 2018 is not writing songs the way Dylan 1968 did, but it’s wonderful to see him continuing to stand up there with his croaky voice and his little mustache bearing witness to what it is to have been Bob Dylan. HS: Do some artists have two periods of great work? AG: Yes, I think they do. Matisse did unimaginably beautiful work between 1905 and 1920; went on doing interesting, not nearly as profound work and then, suddenly, as an old man changed his medium, started using scissors instead of a paint brush and, once again, did utterly sublime work. De Kooning, another artist who had a great late blooming. Philip Roth, to take a name that doesn’t seem to sit with de Kooning and Matisse, maybe, at first, through sheer dint and intelligence continued to blaze new kinds of witness, new kinds of writing, in part, because he had the enormously smart idea that he should write about what it was like when he was young again. Instead of trying to bear witness again and again to the new world, he wrote very much about New York in the 1940s. I don’t think silence is a good answer for an artist, even if an artist is aware that it’s a general rule that you do your best work at a particular moment; the work that people will remember most. HS: What are your thoughts on the larger issues of the day, especially fake news and how, in a way, it threatens our democracy? AG: Fake news is one of those things that has managed, through the mendacious spin of a very mendacious man, to totally reverse meaning. When fake news was first talked about people meant actually manufactured fraudulent stories that were being passed around on the internet, very often to the benefit of Donald Trump. He turned it around to make it an accusation at people who were actually doing real news: CNN, The New York Times and so on, who do their work in the same flawed and imperfect way that we all do our work, but who genuinely are trying to report the world as it is. It’s Trump, the man who speaks loudest about fake news, who is the most culpable of spreading fake news… “three million people voted illegally, I had the biggest crowd," and on and on and on. So, I don’t feel fake news is as big a problem as the people crying about fake news. In other words, it’s when the governing class decides to demoralize the population by telling them they can’t believe anything that they’re being told. That’s when you get the crisis. I’m not worried about fake news. I’m worried about fake politicians.

[howardstudent]

Second College Essay

A little preface is that this was my second ever college essay. I received a 19.5/20 on it. There are some grammatical and citation errors that maybe I will fix if I ever have the time, and/or feel it is worth it. I could post the prompt but I don’t want my prof to copyright me or anything. Essentially, in this class we are studying prominent African American Literature until 1940, and this, the first essay of the course, listed three prompts from which were to choose one. I chose a prompt about how literacy was utilized by black authors and how the deprivation of literacy was weaponized by white supremacists. My professor did criticize my underutilization of Frederick Douglass’ autobiography, but besides that I mainly received positive feedback.

English 054/African American Literature 1

7 October 2020

Literacy: Through the Eyes of the Oppressed and the Oppressor

In this, the twenty-first century, it can be argued that everyone understands the importance of written tradition. Within and beyond the 400 years of African American bondage, literacy can be observed as being a gift to the oppressed that grants agency, education, and expression while simultaneously, access to said literacy is intentionally denied by the oppressor to maintain a status quo. Early African American authors and their collective works exemplify the power but perceived threat of permitting literacy among oppressed people. Namely, that African Americans, like Phyllis Wheatley, are able to compete with white people when it comes to intelligence and crafting beautiful works of art. The other primary flaw is that an educated black man, like Frederick Douglass, will develop a thirst for knowledge and justice which knows no bounds. To the oppressor, black literacy destroys their white supremacist ideologies about black people, while also encouraging the oppressed to think critically and fight back against their oppressors. Furthermore, this narrative exceeds physical subjugation; the education of the Negro is still the most powerful and threatening instrument to white supremacy in this modern age.

White supremacy relies on the basis that white people are superior to all other races, and it entices people to subscribe to this thought through demonstrable measures. In the eighteenth century, literacy was one of the primary measures used to perpetuate white supremacy. It is interesting to note how the goalpost of “superiority” shifted as black people would surpass these arbitrarily placed expectations. It seems that literacy was chosen because Europeans did not know of any black Africans who were distinguished in written literacy (Gates 137). This is not by coincidence though, as “Europeans ignored the fact that African literatures tended to be oral rather than written (Gates 137).” Initially, the concept was that black people are incapable of reading and writing, then it was black people cannot read and write in the languages the white man values, and then it was well, even if black people can learn, that doesn’t mean they can possess the same finesse and mastery of literature as white people. This belief was shattered when Poem on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral by Phyllis Wheatley, Negro Servant to Mr. John Wheatley of Boston, in New England was published. The work was “stunning news to whites” in London in 1773, because Wheatley was an African-born slave woman who was able to write in English (Gates 137). Wheatley was purchased from Africa to be a slave when she was between the ages of seven and eight, and after a mere four years of being exposed to the English language, she began to write poetry (Gates 138). She was no more than twelve years old when she first published her poem, and by twenty she had achieved international recognition (Gates 138). Even to the educated white elites, the beliefs that black people were incapable of feats such poetic expression and mathematics, which were considered to be “the highest forms of civilization,” were held in great esteem (Gates 137). Wheatley challenged these notions and she alone proved “the capacity of the African's intellect for improvement (Gates 139).” White supremacy served to rationalize the enslavement of a race of people. If black people were dehumanized, by falsely claiming that they were unable to reason and think critically, and furthermore were unable to be compete with Europeans, then their enslavement was justified.

Literacy was withheld from slaves to not only prevent the dismantling of white supremacist ideologies, but also to keep the oppressed disenfranchised. Outlawing the education of black people was done intentionally, but not exclusively, to further dehumanize the Negro. When the access to literacy is restricted, it is much easier to convince the general white population that black people cannot possibly be literate, before ever given the opportunity to prove otherwise.  The Narrative Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself references white men’s uninhibited thoughts on these subjects. For example, in defense of slaughtering a disobedient slave, Mr. Austin Gore said:

Demby had become unmanageable. He was setting a dangerous example to the other slaves,—one which, if suffered to pass without some such demonstration on his part, would finally lead to the total subversion of all rule and order upon the plantation. He argued that if one slave refused to be corrected, and escaped with his life, the other slaves would soon copy the example; the result of which would be, the freedom of the slaves, and the enslavement of the whites. (Douglass 20)

He uses two primary white supremacist tropes. Mr. Gore plays off the idea that treating slaves, and furthermore any oppressed class, as if they possess human dignity, will humanize them and lead them to seek rebellion.  He also utilized the fear tactic that oppressed people will surpass the desire for equality, and will seek the same dominant position the oppressor currently holds.  These ideas are also echoed by Mr. Auld’s words to his wife after discovering she had been teaching Frederick Douglass the alphabet:

To use his own words, further, he said, “If you give a nigger an inch, he will take an ell. A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master—to do as he is told to do. Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world. Now,” said he, “if you teach that nigger

(speaking of myself) how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable, and of no value to his master. As to himself, it could do him no good, but a great deal of harm. It would make him discontented and unhappy.” (Douglass 29)

As Douglass became more educated, he began to agree with Mr. Auld. The white man understands that, to keep the Negro ignorant, is to keep him subdued. Literacy exposed slaves to the rights they were denied, to the treatment they were denied, and to the lives they deserved to have. It was this access to literacy that allowed Douglass to see how utterly abhorrently slaves were treated, it motivated him to write, it is what granted him the agency to voice his thoughts, and it gave him the platform to discuss the matter of abolition with Abraham Lincoln.  

When the oppressed is kept denied enlightenment, they know not what they don’t know. This is why the United States has continued to suppress black literacy.  “The Role of Parent Education and Parenting Knowledge in Children’s Language and Literacy Skills among White, Black, and Latino Families” found that “one way to eliminate socioeconomic status achievement gaps in children’s early language and literacy skills may be to focus on parents’ knowledge of child development (Rowe 1).”  One way to improve minority literacy would be to implement programs that educate parents on child development.  However, Jeffrey Shulman argues that:

What slave masters knew firsthand—that, in Douglass’s phrase, “knowledge makes a [person] unfit to be a slave”—was no secret to their nineteenth- and twentieth-century successors: They fought the efforts of the Freedmen’s Bureau to establish public schools during Reconstruction; they closed their own public schools after Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), prohibited de jure public school segregation. Having denied access to literacy on racial grounds, they then made literacy a prerequisite to full participation in the political life of our nation. (A Right)  

He points out that basing school funding on property taxes intentionally creates educational disparities, and is de facto segregation (Shulman). Thus, another approach to bridging the literacy gap would be to increase funding to black schools. However, this serves to uphold white standards of literacy.

Black literacy can be understood in two ways: literacy as utilized by black people and as black people’s ability to conform to “white literacy.” The history of black literacy is rooted in oral traditions. Black literacy involves Negro Spirituals and Hip-hop, primarily genres that are not held in high regard by white people. Navigating white literacy is an important skill to possess in America; it signals to the majority white population that one is intelligent, educated, and worthy of being listened to.

Works Cited

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave: Written by Himself. Newcastle Group, 2014.

Gates, Henry Louis, and Valerie Smith. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. 3rd ed., vol. 1 2, W.W. Norton & Company, 2014.

Rowe, Meredith L., et al. “The Role of Parent Education and Parenting Knowledge in Childrens Language and Literacy Skills among White, Black, and Latino Families.” Infant and Child Development, vol. 25, no. 2, 2015, pp. 198–220., doi:10.1002/icd.1924.

Shulman , Jeffrey. “A Right to Literacy as the ‘Pathway from Slavery to Freedom’?” National Constitution Center – Constitutioncenter.org, 3 Aug. 2018, constitutioncenter.org/blog/a-right-to-literacy-as-the-pathway-from-slavery-to-freedom.

[justsome-di]

I Hate How People View My Major

No, I’m not going to be a teacher. That other field you’re suggesting is more complicated than you think and isn’t “fun”. And please don’t try writing a novel. Just don’t. 

I’m an English major with a concentration in writing. I love it. I’ve never been so comfortable studying something in my whole. Writing has been a passion of mine since I was little, and I wrote almost everyday through elementary and middle school. Even as I was busier in high school, I still found time to work on projects. I was always writing. And now I’m studying how to do it better in college. It comes a little easy to me because of my experience and practice (and just total raw determination), but I also find some really good challenges.

But, people haven’t always been supportive of my area of study. I was asked by other high school seniors a couple years ago, “What kind of job are you going to get with that?” And I get asked all the time now by non-majors, “Oh, so you’re going to be a teacher?” It shows the total lack of value of English. People think that it’s only something that can be taught and never implemented in real life. Which is crazy. It’s literally the language a good chunk of the world speaks. You would think a degree in the analysis of beautifully crafted works and the writing of long papers in this language would be of more value to people. You would suspect people would immediately think, “If you’re good at writing and understanding language, you’re good to go in multiple fields.” But no. People only see boring teachers in classrooms, forcing their students to read books they couldn’t care less about. They don’t see the world of possibilities out there for English majors.

For starters, that also completely devalues English teachers. I can’t imagine the stress that goes behind being one. I could never grade the mediocre papers of students who didn’t even the books, try to pull some insight out of half-asleep students, and plan for these lessons every day. That’s why I’m not studying education at college. I’m studying English. Also, I don’t like kids. I could never work with them all day every day. Teachers are special people. Appreciate them.

It also shows the complete lack of understanding of what English is as a major. People imagine that it’s just students sitting around, talking about whatever classic book they read, making literary references that go beyond everyone else’s head for the sake of making others feel dumb, and not doing any real work. English is a tough major. The best way to make me happy and proud of myself and fellow majors is to tell me that you think English is hard. English may not have math or chemical formulas, but there is a certain science to it. It’s carefully peeling away the author’s words to understand why they chose to write that. Then, it’s pouring over notes and context and our laptops to write 5 pages on that subject. There’s theories behind literature. It’s complex. It’s not just reading and stating feelings. It’s not easy participation.  There’s no area of academia that is easy. Let’s leave it at that.

When I tell people about the writing concentration part of my major, that’s when I get really upset. Now, I would like to say at this point of the rant that I do not get visibly upset. I nod and correct the person I’m talking to. I restrain myself and blow up in my head. I’m mature about it, but I would like people to still understand. 

The response is usually that writing is easy. That everyone is a writer. That “it must be so much fun!” Yeah, it is fun, actually. For the most part. Not when you meet with your professor, and he tells you to scrap the majority of your project and start over with a different approach. It’s not easy when you’re pouring over your textbook, trying to understand the next step of your fake grant application. It’s not any of that when you get a 70% on a poem you worked hard on simply because you struggle to make your words flow without cliches. I can admit my weaknesses. Poetry and grant writing aren’t my areas of comfort. Writing is hard. Even when it isn’t, it is.

Before I started this current semester, my mom told me I should go into grant writing professionally. I flipped through my new grant writing textbook and made a face as a skimmed the pages of lingo and research methods. Why did she tell me to do this? Because it seems fun to her. It seems fun to apply for grants and help people get money. In a very idealistic way, she’s right. There would be some good, mushy feelings when you get a non-profit funding for their project. But she was forgetting that 1) grants are highly competitive. There would be more rejection than winning. And 2) grant writing takes a lot of work. It’s a lot of research, it’s a lot of backwards thinking, it’s a lot of writing, it’s a lot of shaping things to match the funder’s language, and it’s a very long process. It also doesn’t pay as well as she thinks. But it’s hard. It’s my least favorite writing class at the moment. It’s draining, and it’s complicated. I have a lot of wasted research right now, and I have to do more soon. Like in the next couple days soon. And you know what? I probably won’t use all the research I find. I’ll just have a lot of knowledge on conservative politician’s views on non-profit health clinics. It’ll be a fun party trick, but I don’t think it’ll be fun right now.

Just the other day, my girlfriend found out her university offers a writing major. She’s an art major, and she’s trying to find a second major to raise her chances of finding work. She writes occasionally. I read her stuff. I write with her. I love her stories. But she suggested she take up writing (or more specifically creative writing) as her second major. I advised against it because creative writing is a little too niche, I think. And also because writing isn’t a field you can just jump into. There’s also not a glamorous job market out there for creative writing. I love my girlfriend, but I had to tell her to not do it. Writing of any kind isn’t something someone can just pick up. It takes some years of prep before college, I think, to get ready. It’s like art. She’s been an artist for years. She’s been practicing for a long time. It’s a skill she’s picked up after years of dedication. I am so proud of how far she has come, and I’m even prouder thinking of all the progress she has yet to make. Art and writing aren’t like science or math. It’s not something you can go into with high school level knowledge and be ready to go with a little hardwork and Khan Academy. A lot of schools need portfolios before they accept you if they have a special program (the more elite schools at least). 

I also always see people who think they can be a writer. I think that everyone has a right to write. I would never discourage someone from being creative. I love to encourage people, actually, to write. It’s a nice hobby. I see young teenagers post their writing online all the time. It’s nice to see. I love that. What I hate, though, is adults who think that because they have an edgy idea, they should write a book. We all know the joke on TV, write? The man whose been working on the next great American novel for years and has only gotten a sentence about how rainy it is outside? Yeah, I know people like that in real life. People can write. That’s fine. I can’t stress enough how much I love people being creative. But don’t think you’re going to be the next Stephen King, okay? Jack Whyte has a lovely entry on his website about this:

As an aside, I heard a lovely story about a retiring brain surgeon who, when asked what he would do next, said, “Oh, I think I’ll write a book.” One of his dinner companions, a female author in her fifties, laughed and said. “I hope you will. I can’t wait to read it. When I retire I intend to try my hand at brain surgery.” 

English and writing are not things everyone is capable of. It takes time to learn. It’s not fun all the time. It’s staying up late and waking up early. It’s a lot of conferences with professors. It’s a lot of research. It’s a lot of boring stuff. It’s something I have a real passion for. I wouldn’t change studying this for the world. I’m very proud of my field. I love my professors. I love my peers (for the most part). I feel like I fit in with English. And when people say to me, “Good for you studying English! I could never do it!” I smile and thank them. On the inside, I think (maybe a bit offensively), “Yeah... you couldn’t.” 

[sundayeveningthoughts]

The Talk in Three Phases: Part 1 — Young Minds

Sunday Evening Thoughts

January 26, 2020

Dear Paul and Rachel,

               The Talk in 3 Phases: Part One — Young Minds

     Your two breasts are like fawns,

          twins of a gazelle,

               that graze among the lilies. Song of Songs 4:5 (Translation by Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible)

On a warm spring day your youngest brother, 4-years-old at the time, walked into your other (about 12-years-old) brother’s bedroom that had a colorful poster of Kathy Ireland selling Guinness beer hanging on the wall, and inquired, “Timmy, you like “breastisies” don’t you?”

Tim, pondered the question for a moment and answered, “Yes Tommy, I do.”

End of discussion, as “breastisies” must be something good.

Contrast that discussion with your three uncles, who, at our house a couple of years ago were having a baughty conversation about a different well-developed actress, when your mom, hearing enough inappropriate talk, instructed them, “Breasts are partially sweat glands, which aid the production of milk.”

Your uncles cowered, “Sweat glands huh, kind of loses their appeal.”

I never remember having “the talk” with any of you. Mainly because in my mind dinner conversation about human sexuality and reproduction flowed as freely as conversation about who was in the lead at the Tour de France. Since Mom taught Human Sexuality at the college level, we always believed conversation and knowledge should come organically. Descriptions of human anatomy and physiology might well be explained as factually by her as I could explain the derailleur system of a bicycle.

But that did not mean anything goes with words to describe your questions. Our rule: You must use proper words at all times, or be gently corrected. Thus, if you used a slang word for breasts within her earshot be ready for a 45-minute lecture about lactoferrin, a chemical component in human breast milk that binds iron ions and is innate to the immune system, but also aids as an anti-cancer, anti-allergic function. Nevertheless, “breastisies” is acceptable for a 4-year-old.

Why are we having “The Talk” now? Because I just finished a new translation of the Song of Songs in the Hebrew Bible. Superb!

Your gift to me this Christmas, a complete copy of The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary (Vol. Three-Volume Set) by Robert Alter is greatly appreciated. Alter is a brilliant professor of Comparative Hebrew Literature at U. of California, Berkeley, who has the ability to write insightfully and clearly, something I am sure all of us will agree some academics lack.

Having borrowed the first two volumes from Norfolk Public Library for much of the first semester, your gift came at a timely place, as I am beginning the third part of my study of the Hebrew Scriptures: the Ketuv’im.

A brief summary. The Tanakh (or Hebrew Bible, or for our discussion the Old Testament) is composed of three parts: The Torah (the first five books - Genesis, etc.), the Nevi’im (the prophets - Isaiah, etc.), and the Ketuv’im (the writings - the Psalms, etc.). Song of Songs is found in the Ketuv’im.

What is the Song of Songs? It is a fourth century BCE collection of six to 12 love poems between a woman and a man, each expressing their love for each other most often by describing the physical characteristics of the other using nature as metaphors for their physical bodies and emotional feelings. Boy, talk about getting high school juniors to pay attention in class, read (and explain!) Song of Songs and they are all-ears.

Traditionally in Jewish culture, Song of Songs tells the story of the LORD’s love for Israel, and in Christianity, traditionally it is the story of Christ and the Church. St. Bernard of Clairvaux wrote a famous, long treaty on the topic as a comparison of God’s love for humankind. Bernard was a Benedictine priest who was a major impetus for the reformation of Benedictines (12th Century about 1120) developing into the Cistercians and Trappists, a more contemplative religious order and makers of great beer. Today, few scholars view Song of Songs in such simplistic terms as Bernard. Most scholars think it is a graphic, love poem of physical love-making and emotional bonding. Of course, though both Jewish and Christian traditions made different comparisons in the past, they never completely abandoned the allegory used by the Song of Songs author for human physical love, because it is found in both Jewish and Christian medieval art describing the book.

(The Leipzig Mahsor - A Jewish Prayer Book from 1310)

(The Westminster Bible of the 1300′s)

(If you study the details of both pieces of art, you will notice a clear, detail of cheerfulness, playfulness, in reference to the Song of Songs.)

Like Mom’s lecture on lactoferrin – when your initial thoughts had little to do with that, a serious discussion about Song of Songs must include conversation about literary forms of ancient Hebrew poetry. For example, Song of Songs contains parallelism - how one verse is read and the next verse is either a direct parallel in thought or an opposite parallel thought; sequence - how the author starts the first verse of a poem with a Hebrew letter, then each sequential verse begins with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet (note: consonants only); and especially wordplay, where the author uses a homonym or a similar sounding word at the start of each line for effect on the reader. Unfortunately, so many of these literary images are lost on us in even the best English translations.

Song of Songs is ascribed to Solomon in the opening editorial verse, clearly a late editorial ascription. Not only is the text written in about 320 BCE and Solomon lived in 980 BCE, but assigning a book to Solomon gives the voice of importance to the text, as Solomon is a wise and great leader in Jewish tradition. And besides, he had 700 wives and 300 concubines (1 Kings 11:3 - whew, I get tired thinking about that!).

Two final thoughts for tonight. First, Song of Songs is the only book in the whole Bible that does not mention God by any name. I find that very interesting, but can reach no conclusion as to that significance, only speculations. Secondly, there is no mention in the text that the man and woman are married. In all of my studies of ancient Hebrew literature and much of the New Testament too, this is not an issue. It’s only in the late books of the New Testament, where sex/marriage become an issue. It should be noted that those are the very books of the New Testament that emphasise church structure, doctrine, hierarchies of importance of people, and less significance for women in society, something Jesus never talks about, or when he did, he said the opposite, “the kingdom of God is within you” (less structure), “the last shall be first” (the lowest people are the best), and “I say, love your enemies” (love, simply love).

Pretty good advice!

Have a good week…

Love,

Dad

P.S. This is the earliest live recording of Elton John’s “Your Song.” I don’t know if Elton John had Song of Songs in mind when he wrote it, probably not, but it certainly is a romantic ballad. Crank it up!

[blschaos3000-blog]

Its 3:45 pm hazy/humid

Welcome to “8 Questions with……”

One of the coolest things that I have really enjoyed is the complete international flavor of the artists I get to chat with. I now have done over 50 of these interviews and the number of countries that our guests have come from keeps expanding. I have from gone from mostly United States and Great Britain interviews to countries like Romania,Australia,Italy,Egypt,Greece and Germany. To hear and experience other cultures and how they see the world is incredibly enriching to one’s spirit,even if the answers they share aren’t the most cheerful. I rather take raw honesty and openess then fake cheer and a plastic smile,right?

So with this in mind,meet Mehrnaz Mohammadi. Born in Iran and is now living in America where she pursues her dream as a actress. She has overcome many barriers in her short life and its clear in talking with her that she has a fierce independent streak and a thirst for knowledge which used to an American calling card. She is very prolific and has already accomplished so much in such a short time,Mehrnaz is definitely putting in the work to become a success in whatever she chooses to do be it on stage,in front of the camera or calling the shots from behind the scenes. With such a busy schedule,I better dash in and ask my 8 Questions while I still can! I might need some help from Michael,Mehrnaz’s husband to help convince the cheetah to do The Clown School however…….

 Please introduce yourself and tell us about your latest project

My name is Mehrnaz Mohammadi. I’m a Los Angeles based actor and currently, I’m in a production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle, one of Brecht’s masterpieces, directed by Stephanie Shoyer at Antaeus Theatre.

 You were born and raised in Iran – what was that like growing up there?

Growing up in Iran was just like growing up anywhere else I guess. The human ability to adapt to any situation is fascinating. I hadn’t experienced living in any other country so I had nothing to compare my life to. But looking back at it now, after experiencing living in other countries, I can say it was hard. I had experienced and seen a lot of injustice. That being said, I did have a rebellious nature. I was a fighter and still am. I was very opinionated and always was trying to find ways to express myself and of course, that got me into a lot of trouble. First time I got arrested, I was fifteen years old. I got arrested because of what I was wearing (a tight baby blue long dress, jeans, and a white scarf that covered my hair) which was considered scandalous, and I was talking to a boy. I spent three nights in a holding cell before my court date. To be honest, part of me was proud of getting arrested even though It was really scary because it meant I was alive and I didn’t accept their oppression.

 How much artistic freedom did you have living in Iran?    Is there an active film community there?

It’s tough being an artist in Iran for sure! Unfortunately or fortunately, I had never got a chance to work as an actor in Iran. I left after I just turned 20 and before that, I had worked as a graphic designer. Not only does the government monitor the artists’ work, but also they censor any work of art from outside of Iran. My major was Graphic design in high school and we had to take art history classes. I studied many Europian painters but I only saw a limited number of their paintings until I left Iran. If there was a naked body or even any body parts in the books, the government would blur out that section of the painting. I never forget my first trip to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tehran. There was a painting by Picasso and in the middle of the painting, there was a white paper covering the naked body of a woman. Ridiculous, I know. A year before leaving Iran, I had a chance to be a stage manager. I witnessed first hand the way the government censors. In this particular project, an official popped up in one of the rehearsals and watch the play. Then he gave a piece of paper to the director with his edits and cuts, that’s it. No dialogue, no question, no objection. And you have to do it or you can’t go up for the performance. Not much artistic freedom, but what’s fascinating is that I’ve seen some of the best works of art from Iran from poetry to film making. Because of the censorship, the artists have to find a way to express themselves within the confines of the law, and that’s when the magic happens. You have to that much more creative in order to express yourself truthfully while being able to pass through the filters of government censorship. The art becomes complex, sophisticated and revolutionary.

There is definitely an amazing film community in Iran and their work in fantastic. A filmmaker that particularly stands out is Asghar Farhadi, A Separation (won the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film) and The Salesman.

 When did you know you wanted to be an actress? What was the reaction like when you let your family know your goal?

I think I’ve always had a fascination for the art of acting, but in my time in Iran, I didn’t really get a chance to cultivate this desire. My family didn’t really know what to think of it. My mom tried many times to talk me out of pursuing acting. I am the only one in my family that I know of who pursues art and above that acting. It was not familiar to them. Although Persians are famous for their artistic nature, it’s mostly in poetry and music. When it comes to acting, I believe culturally acting is not a respected profession. Where was I, oh yes, my family. They thought it was just a passing aspiration and that it would go away eventually. Now here I am almost a decade later and I’m an actor. Sometimes I wish they supported me at the beginning of my acting career. But they’re supportive now and that means a lot to me.

 What were the three biggest culture shocks when you moved to the United States?

Racism. Gun shootings. Consumerism.

 You have had an amazing start to your career with five projects in 2018 alone How did you land these roles so quickly?

Thank you! When I was in school, I thought when I graduate from acting school, my job is to act. Very quickly I realized that my job is to connect with people and audition and if the stars line up, I get a chance to act. So that’s what I’ve been doing, connecting with filmmakers and auditioning.

 You wrote, produced and directed your first short film “ThisHonest”, can you walk us through how this film came about?

In July 2018, I was chatting with my husband Michael (mostly complaining) about it being a quiet summer in terms of auditioning. He is also an actor. Then we decided to write a short film that we can shoot tomorrow if we wanted. It ended up taking a few months and hours of preparation. When I met my husband, we used to play a game to get to know each other better and see how honest we can be with each other. The game goes like this: we’d ask each other “what’s one thing that’s difficult for you to share with me right now?” Then we had to see if we can bring ourselves to tell the truth. So we wrote about that. We wanted the story to be simple and honest. We sent the script to our dear friend Aaron Alpert, he is a talented cinematographer. He liked the script, we met over coffee, I explained my vision. Then over the month leading up to the shoot, I sent him a storyboard and we went back and forth collaborating on the shots and the way we wanted to tell the story. We met one Saturday morning and shot the whole thing. Since we knew exactly what we wanted and it was all planned out, we did one take for the camera, one take for the actors and that’s it.

 Where do you want to be in three years professionally?

I see myself being a working tv and film actor (isn’t that the dream?), but more than that, I desire to tell my story, be able to bring my flavor, my artwork, the way I see the world. I also see myself directing theatre and indie films. In addition, I’m writing a non-fiction book and in three years I’m hoping it will be done and published.

 What has your college experience been like so far? What have been your three favorites classes and what made them special?

I love learning and I think there is nothing more joyful than being in a classroom. So I’ve been fortunate to have had a wonderful experience with college. I did my undergrad at Concordia University in Montreal. My favorite class was Biomechanics. I got a chance to get to know my body at a very basic level. It was a delight to be reintroduced to my body and I grew a fascination for it, almost like a child discovering her hands and feet. I did my MFA in Acting at USC and my favorite classes were Movement and Text with Andy Robinson and Voice with Natsuko Ohama. These two classes got me in touch with my inner world. They exposed me to my own psyche. In order to learn acting techniques, I had to become aware of the blocks and masks I’d created for myself over the years in order to survive.

What has been the most challenging thing you have encountered and how did you overcome it?

Language. I learned English when I was 20 years old. Language is not just a set of words combined in a correct way, grammar. It has nuances and history. I worked really hard to be able to understand English not only to communicate on a daily basis, but to really understand its soul. Also, because of the nature of the language being an oral way of communication, it’s connected to the voice itself and we all have our history with our voice. I don’t know if I would use the word overcome, but It’s been a journey. The way I approach this challenge is with practicing the language itself on a regular basis and also strengthening my own voice and developing my own authentic sound.

 The cheetah and I are coming to watch you act and direct your newest film but we are a day early and now you are playing tour guide, what are we doing? 

I invite you to my apartment, I cook you a delicious Persian dish and we talk about humanity and philosophize. Then we would go for a hike at Griffith Park because we need to walking after eating all that Persian food.    When we come back, I’ll take you guys to The Clown school to have a day with the clowns. We run around, scream, jump up and down and experience life through the lens of a clown.     We go to Malibu beach, lie down on the sand and look up at the stars and talk about the mysteries of the world.

    I like to say “Thank You” to Mehrnaz for sharing her story and thoughts. I’m very grateful to have gotten a chance to talk with such a deep and interesting soul. I hope you,the reader,also enjoyed getting to know Mehrnaz.

You can follow Mehrnaz on her IMDb page. You callow Mehrnaz on her Twitter page.

Feel free to leave a comment or question below. Thank you for your continued support!

8 Questions with…………actress Mehrnaz Mohammadi Its 3:45 pm hazy/humid Welcome to "8 Questions with......" One of the coolest things that I have really enjoyed is the complete international flavor of the artists I get to chat with.

[wordsparks]

An Attempt to Explain My WIPs (Warning: GIF Heavy)

Music Land Maestress

A magical girl story, only set in England, with high school girls (and one ten year old to represent magical girl teams usually having a younger member...is that an actual trope? I don't know).

Part Sailor Moon

(Cause it's my fave mahou shoujo show & also cause what mahou shoujo story these days isn't inspired by it?)

With combat more of the PreCure sort (where there's physical combat involved not just magical attacks)

+ Some of the "save a fantasy world" aspects of my favorite CLAMP work, Magic Knight Rayearth

+ The "human mentors instead of animal mascots" idea and the idea that the girls' mission is really the mentors', both from Tokyo Mew Mew. (Only the mentors in my story are from a magical land and are a magical swordsman and a young magical prodigy respectively). The Monsters-of-The-Day are also possibly inspired by TMM's Chimera Anima, not sure though.

+ other things, including music.

***

The CYA Files

The seed of this dates back to my high school years, around 2002-2003, though I didn't start writing a proper MS till 2-3 years ago. Thus it comes out of my "writing really preachy things" period, back when I was still largely in my sheltered Christian bubble. Because of this, my dislike for superhero movies (I'd seen the 2002 Spiderman and a few others and wasn't that into them; I'm still not really THAT into them, though that might be cause I've never been into Marvel & DC Comics really...though now that I'm watching and very much enjoying Supergirl that might change), and maybe some guilt over the very-X-Men-inspired superhero comic "Lightning Girl" I'd written, I came up with this story with people who save future London using powered suits and their spiritual gifts. "Christian Superheroes," basically. When I work on it for NaNoWriMo this year I may have to reevaluate it to see if it's too preachy or not.

Anyway, this novel was inspired by two things mostly:

Superheroes

And mecha

(Not Eva-style specifically, but at the time I came up with the story, I think NGE was the only mecha series I'd seen, so no doubt it had an influence)

***

Nukata: A Novel

My NaNo novel last year (which won! yay!) and the one I'm working on right now. It's a historical romance about Nukata no Ôkimi, a real-life princess from 7th-century Japan who also became one of Japan's first lyric poets of note, and the love triangle she is thought to have had with Emperors Tenji and Temmu. But aside from that it's also a story about maintaining your dignity in a strange world, and about a girl who wants respect for her mind more than for her body. Nukata, Tenji, and Temmu are the main characters, along with Tenji's good friend and chief advisor Nakatomi no Kamatari, who was the ancestor of the famous Fujiwara clan that was the power behind the throne in Japan for centuries (shortly before Kamatari's death, Tenji granted him the family name Fujiwara).

Not much has been written about Nukata in English, and only 9 of her poems (maybe 11 if you count ones attributed to others but thought to be hers) survive, all by way of an 8th-century anthology called the Man'yôshû. I first encountered Nukata in my Brit Lit 1 class believe it or not. My degree program had a global focus, so every class had to have a global element, and thus this class included reading medieval Chinese and Japanese poetry as part of that. The poem we read was Poem 16, her poem comparing spring and autumn leaves, which is probably her most famous.

Nukata is still known in Japan today. There is a Takarazuka play about her (Akane Sasu Murasaki no Hana) and she is briefly mentioned in episode 12 of the anime Chihayafuru.

Not sure of the influences here since research basically wrote the plot, but I'd say Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha and Lisa See's Snow Flower and the Secret Fan were probably influences, even though they are written about later eras.

This is also my first straight-up historical fiction novel (my other attempt was time travel) and my first romance. (I tend to avoid romances in my work because I've never dated, so I don't feel qualified to be writing romance...also it's a genre I really don't read). So kinda nervous but trying my best.

***

The Case of The Canterbury Colony Ship

My first sci-fi mystery, and the beginning of a series of probably 4 books (one for each year the heroines are in university). My Camp NaNo April 2017 winning novel (yay!). Also an attempt to explore my own autism, since the heroine, like me, has Asperger's, and subtly vent frustrations I have about autism (the seeming lack of treatment for autistic adults in the U.S. and a lack of awareness of girls with autism - mind you these are based on my own knowledge and experience only). She forms a mystery-solving club with a neurotypical policeman's daughter whose father wants her to go into law enforcement but who secretly loves ancient lit, a science whiz girl with Social Anxiety Disorder, and a former scholar athlete who got too into partying and drugs and is now trying to rebuild her life after checking herself into rehab for a year. She gets tired of the mundane cases they get and wants something better, which happens when they get involved with a case baffling the police - the mysterious disappearance of the passengers and crew of a generation ship.

It's kinda the classic "amateurs helping out police/law enforcement agency who might not like them but needs them" trope that has been popular on TV of late via shows like Fringe, Psych, Castle, Sherlock, its American cousin Elementary, Scorpion, Alphas, and most recently Blindspot.

But the series has a decidedly literary bent, in case the title didn't tip you off. Protagonist Sophie Hughes started her life in a writing project I did in Brit Lit 1 where we were supposed to adapt one of the texts we read into a creative writing piece. I chose The Canterbury Tales. Due to page limits, I only wrote the end. Since then, the story and Sophie have evolved into what I have today.

This may also end up being a diverse book. Being white and having had very little experience of POCs growing up, my novels don't tend to have POC characters. But in this one, I ended up making Paige (the girl with SAD) black kinda randomly when doing her character sheet, and Sophie ended up becoming half-Mexican (probably cause I made her be from Miami, and also my mom was watching Jane The Virgin at the time...and also cause I needed some kind of hearty soup Sophie could cook in a dorm room, and my first thought was posole, cause I've seen my Hispanic coworkers eat it a lot). I guess it's diverse in terms of not everyone being neurotypical too (maybe). Can someone who actually understands this whole #WeNeedDiverseBooks thing explain to me how this all works?

So it has that "amateurs helping out police/law enforcement agency who might not like them but needs them" trope (though you could probably replace “law enforcement agency” with “FBI” cause it always seems to be the FBI) but has more of a literary bent. The main inspirations for the literary bent are the awesome TNT show The Librarians (the movies it’s a spin-off of are great too, especially if you want to see how Flynn started out) and the anime Read or Die: The TV, which I was introduced to by my junior college anime club around 2003, shortly before it got licensed here. (The manga version, R.O.D.: Read or Dream, as well as the anime and manga versions of the OAV that stars Yomiko Readman, are also available in English).

(ROD gif from @nothingforkings)

***

The Stars Above Us

This was my NaNo novel 2 years ago, and the first one where I wrote a novel especially for NaNo, rather than using NaNo as an excuse to make progress on an existing work. It’s set in the 3200′s and is about a girl named Katia Sewick who is living a miserable, apathetic, lonely life in Brooklyn and doesn’t picture it getting any better...and then she inherits a space station from her grandfather. She doesn’t know the first thing about running a space station, but she decides to at least go check it out. The staff does not accept her immediately, making her prove herself before she can take command. Then, shortly after she does that, a biological threat is discovered onboard that could kill everyone if not dealt with.

I’m not really sure how it will end, but with everyone living at any rate. Also, Katia will find meaning for her life at last.

This novel actually originated from a prompt in a writing prompts book (“Upon inheriting a working space station from her grandfather, a woman tries to make it run smoothly”), so it didn’t really have inspiration in that sense. The title came about cause someone in my NaNo group said she usually looked to Shakespeare for title ideas. (The quote I used for this title is from King Lear: “It is the stars,/The stars above us, govern our conditions." I’m not sure it fits the book, but it was the only Shakespeare quote I could find that talked about stars).

The biological threat plot is, I think, partially inspired by this kinda obscure anime movie from the ‘80s, They Were Eleven. They released it here in the U.S. on subtitled VHS in the early ‘90s, but a dub also exists. The sub is what I have seen. It’s about these young space cadets whose final test for space academy is to survive for a specified number of days on an abandoned spaceship, with no contact or involvement from outside. There are supposed to be 10 in their group, but when they arrive on the ship, they find there are 11 of them -- and no one is certain who the intruder is. Meanwhile, they discover some weird plant on the ship that makes people ill, among other things.

I also did a fair amount of research about space stations, including designs that have been proposed over the years.

This book also owes a debt to Star Trek (mostly TOS cause that’s the generation I’m most familiar with, having seen a number of the TOS movies even if I have yet to see the TV show) because I wasn’t sure how to structure the station crew (like what sort of crewmembers you would need) and ended up using the TOS crew as a model.

***

Tales of Walden

My high fantasy universe, currently consisting of short stories and poems and a work in progress since 2005. I tried to write a novel in this universe, but never finished it.

I’m still trying to find a long-term goal for this universe; for now I just write stories or poems for it when I feel like it (or like when I did it for Camp NaNo and Story-a-Day in May).

As for inspirations, Lord of the Rings is a huge one.

I’m not going to lie, this universe was very influenced by Tolkien. But then what epic fantasy these days isn’t?

Narnia - the first fantasy series I was ever exposed to - has an influence here too though.

(Narnia GIF from Giphy)

***

Other WIPs

I have some minor WIPs too.

Fairy*Net and Fairy*Radio, a duo of comics I drew art for for NaNoMangO 2015

Some unfinished stories from Story-A-Day 2015

A couple story ideas from Story-A-Day 2015 I want to develop further: one about using biohacking to become pop idols, and another about two Asian idols who are forbidden to be together cause of the “no boyfriends” clause in many female Asian idols’ contracts. (The latter was inspired by this list; I also wrote a short story about sasaeng inspired by this list).

A LOT of fanfic ideas that aren’t yet written (so I guess they’re not WIPs yet, except for the Osaka Naru one, which I have partially written).

Two huge Doctor Who fanfic projects: “The Companion’s Diary of Alyson ‘Alys’ Reed,” a diary-style fanfic about the adventures of a couple OC Companions with Eleven, and “The Linguist’s Story,” a mostly Classic Who-set group of stories about an OC Time Lady.

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Hope you liked this post!

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A light I can reflect from me to them

From The Power of Story Arizona State University Turning Points Magazine

In the Fall 2018 semester at Arizona State University, the Turning Points team approached our storyboard and asked, “How can we shed light on ASU’s amazing Indigenous faculty and staff?” The answer to that question was a section within our content titled “Faculty Highlight.” One of the two faculty highlighted in the Fall 2018 is renowned poet Natalie Diaz, where she highlights her advice to Native American college students on seeking mentorship, the notion of visibility, and “acts of resistance” as an Indigenous being.

Congratulations on being named one of the 25 winners of this year’s MacArthur Foundation fellowships. What does this fellowship mean to you as an Indigenous, Latinx and queer woman, and what does it mean to Indigenous communities?

Natalie Diaz: Gracias for the congratulations. It has been a lucky set of months. I am still realizing what it means to me. I think it means connection — not so much a connection to me, I am the least of it. What I mean is that I think it gives people a way to begin connecting the many Indigenous women who are doing meaningful and powerful work in Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities. When I was in junior high school my aunt was tribal chairperson of our Mojave tribe and I worked alongside Grace Thorpe to fight a nuclear waste dump on the reservation where I grew up, Fort Mojave. So this maybe means most to my communities, a light I can reflect from me to them, because I am part of a long line of strong, intelligent, and imaginative women. I was raised at Fort Mojave but I am enrolled at Gila River. (Shout out to District 3.)

What role does Indigenous languages play in your life?

Diaz: Indigenous language is more than a role, it is a blood in me, a river. It is who I am. It is always who I have been, even when the language was quiet in me, before I learned to bring it out, before I had the luck of so many teachers, in particular my uncle and teacher Hubert McCord. I am more “me“ now that I have my language. English was designed to let me be only a part of myself. Now that I have my other languages, including Spanish and Makav (Mojave), I am the most me, and closer to the person I am still becoming. My language makes me strong in the ways that it has made my people strong for hundreds of years, since it was first given to us.

You are an award-winning poet, linguist and essayist who holds many recognition and awards under your belt. You also teach in the Creative Writing MFA program at ASU- what has your experience been in teaching on the traditional homelands of the Akimel O’otham and Pee Posh peoples?

Diaz: These are my homelands. I am enrolled at Gila River, and also Mojave. I am walking in the energies and storylands of my people. This is where I dream best, where I think best, and where I am strongest. It is important for people to know this land and the people who were built up from this land, as well as the language this land formed and the water that this land gave birth to. They are all connected — body, land, water.

You have previously talked about “the power of story and the necessity of stories to make us visible.” Writing our stories may be difficult truths to confront and discuss with others- what advice would you pass onto students who wish to incorporate truth into their work?

Diaz: I think it’s important to know that truth belongs to each one of us, and so it will look different to each one of us. But know that ASU is a place full of people and instructors who are here to make space for you to tell your stories. I believe that ASU is a place where you can contribute to the future that only you can make possible here, a better future. There is not future of America without acknowledging and heeding the knowledges and wisdoms of Natives of these lands and waters.

Your work discusses the importance of visibility. On October 26th, Native people took to Twitter to discuss how invisibility is a modern form of racism and used the hashtags #NativeTwitter, #WeAreStillHere, #InvisibilityisRacism, #IllumiNative, and #NativeTruth. How can students reclaim visibility while in college?

Diaz: Visibility is difficult to claim since it relies on the “sight” or “gaze” or vision of another in relationship to you. What I mean by this is that Indigenous invisibility is often not our problem, rather it is the problem of non-Natives and institutions. Native invisibility is a principal America was founded on — to erase us — so it is still present in the bloodlines and thoughtlines of American institutions, practices, etiquettes (such as words like civilized or intellectual or educated or mastery), etc.

That being said, we first and foremost have to make one another visible. ASU is a campus filled with amazing minds and hearts, including Indigenous professors and faculty and staff — we need to reach out, to begin to fill the spaces that are here, spaces that have always been Indigenous. I have found ASU a place where my own work and wonders can become more possible — and this is what I have to offer my Native students, those same avenues and paths to your futures, whether they involve returning home or leaving home. And we must support one another. Often, because we have become used to there being so few spaces for us, so few recognitions or awards, we tend to bump each other out of the way, competing for those few prizes. What if we instead linked arms and demanded we all arrive in those spaces together, as more, not as a homogenized group of Natives, but as autonomous individuals with nuanced imaginations and questions. We would then be visible, in numbers, in our own self recognition, and they would have to make more space for us, because we were making it for ourselves.

Indigenous scholars discuss the term “activism” and say Indigenous students attending institutions is a form of rhetorical sovereignty, meaning attending institutions that weren’t originally designed for us is a form of activism in itself. What are your thoughts on this?

Diaz: I grew up on a reservation. Reservations were not built to shape my future. They were built to ensure I had no future. That I would be erased. Here we are, how many hundreds of years later? We are thriving. We are dreaming. We are making love. We are teaching. We are traditional and modern. Every day I wake up, even when the morning is heavy-feeling, even when the day feels like it might be too big for me, I find a way to leap into it, to make it mine, to share it with others, to find ways to be kind to myself and to people around me. This is maybe one of the greatest acts of resistance, that I live, and I try hard to live the best that I can and to share that with my families and communities. Some days I think the greatest act of resistance isn’t necessarily to write a poem critiquing America but instead to love myself in the midst of America, and even sometimes despite America. Because even though I am more than America, because I come from what existed before it, I am also American. And to love yourself in this country is a revolutionary act.

One of the themes Turning Points Magazine strives to pass onto our readership is the importance of mentors and mentorship in academia. What is your advice to students on how they can seek mentors and maintain relationships with them?

Diaz: I was raised in a culture in which we didn’t ask questions — we were taught to listen. This made it hard for me to seek out mentorship when I was in grad school. I’m much more comfortable making a joke than asking someone for a help that might inconvenience them. I mean, when I was little, even when we were on trips, if someone offered us food, my mother had trained us to say, No thank you. Even if we were hungry. But since leaving home I’ve been lucky to meet so many generous mentors who noticed this in me and reached out first. I try to be that type of person with my students, the type of mentor who reaches out, who tells a story or a joke, to make it clear that I am interested in you and how your heart is doing today, that I am invested in the wonderful things you might build or make happen in this world. All this to say, yes, it’s great to reach out, but I also know that culturally, some of us have a different way of understanding this.

What tools and resources would you recommend that students utilize on expressing themselves through their selected majors?

Diaz: I’m going to advertise the classes I teach in creative writing, such as poetry, or fiction. We put a fancy word on it, and call it creative writing, but really, it is just storytelling. And we Natives know how to tell stories. Stories are the reason why we have survived. We have a humor like no other. Our imaginations are timeless — it’s hard for non-Natives to understand how we can be traditional and rooted to our pasts while also modern and living in and contributing to this contemporary world. We are the true America — what was and what can still be. One of the ways we can understand and question history and imagine our futures is through writing. So, look me up, find me and take a course with me, even if you aren’t majoring in English or creative writing. I teach with an Indigenous lens because it is one of the many lenses I live by. And my colleagues are also incredible teachers. Our creative writing program will only be made better by bringing Indigenous stories, the stories that are rooted in the very earth ASU is built on, to the community at large. I hope that we soon see more majors in creative writing and more Indigenous students in the MFA program.

Who are some Indigenous writers and artists you’d recommend students to check out?

Diaz: Shoot, the lists are endless. A few quick ones.

Poets: Michael Wasson, Jake Skeets, Layli Long Soldier, Bojan Louis, Henry Quintero, Tracey M Atsitty, Joan Kane, Orlando White, Sherwin Bitsui, Laura Tohe, Simon Ortiz, Heid Erdrich, Joy Harjo, Kimberly Blaeser, Sara Marie Ortiz, Laura Da’

Prose: Robin Wall Kimmerer, Louise Erdrich, Terese Mailhot, Tommy Orange, Rebecca Roanhorse, Cherie Dimaline, Debra Earling, Eden Robinson, Susan Power, Erika Wurth

Artists: Nicholas Galanin, Postcommodity, Nani Chacon, Cara Romero, Laura Ortman, Maria Hupfield, Christine Sandoval