This last week has felt incredibly busy by the fact that there is somewhere I have to be at some point every single day, and many of the days have been incredibly long days. It’s good to know that I have things to do and that I’m accomplishing things. But it’s also hard to pause for a moment or sit down and get a chunk of writing or reading done.
Over the last week I’ve been able to attend two of the three Vice President of Equity Vice Provost student candidate forums. They have taken a lot of energy to attend, even for the relatively observational and shorter role I took. They have been tense and powerful and painful and I do not have words to describe the feelings that come up or to understand where I have been positionally in those spaces or in the work that is happening around those topics, and I would never want my words to get in the way of words from someone who understands better or is more involved or more affected by what is happening. So I note them here as important and powerful and that I am thinking about, but not as my place to speak when I don’t fully understand and can’t fully contribute to what progress needs to happen.
During the last week I have also spent time putting together pieces of my own event, putting up fliers and making announcements on social media and through various online forums I am part of. I spent some time at the tail end of the Seeds of Familia fundraiser night, in time to hear about the work they’ve been doing as a student club and as student leaders working to create a retention program to be in place for the coming years.
I also attended one of the showings for American Idiot on campus. I include this because I’ve always been fascinated by the way music, satire, life performance, art, and politics meet and mix. I don’t know much about Green Day or American Idiot, and there were times during the show when I lost track of which characters were which and what was happening. But the way music that was not created for the purpose of telling a story put in order and in context to tell a story is a really interesting creative method. It reminds me of the show I saw several years ago called We Will Rock You, a musical story put together with Queen songs. And both of these performances were to my eyes, pretty dang political. And I really like thinking about and feeling those interconnections and uses of different ways of storytelling and changing between storytelling forms and other art forms. It’s really hard to express how you think about these mixtures, or how they make you feel, but I think it’s really important to think and feel and experience this kind of medium mixing and expression even if you can’t explain it in so many words.
I’ve put some thought over the last week into my writing, into justifying why the pieces of writing I have done this quarter should exist and why they should be connected to and important to the work I set out to do this quarter, and into how the ideas I’ve had this quarter and started working on started. It’s hard to track ideas most times, but for this quarter, I can pinpoint exact moments when many of the ideas I had clicked. And that’s been primarily because most of my ideas over the last quarter have come from a line or a phrase or a word that someone has said in conversation, that was a joke or a pun, or that I saw written in someone else’s writing and gently borrowed to craft into my own writing. For this quarter it’s been a lot of ‘oh that sounds cool’ or ‘that phrase makes me think of this’ or even ‘it would be fun to take this one liner and make it a fancy one liner that surprises you when you read it’.
My final reflection paper will be the culmination of my thinking on how these sometimes silly little pieces of text fit in with the experience I set out to have in terms of writing this quarter, but a lot of it has to do with feeling freedom to write, and adding in subtle details and diversity in writing. I can’t exactly write an epic narrative that rings true to the experiences of a particular identity that I don’t hold myself, and to try would be disingenuous and dubiously ethical. But I can write in the world as I see it, with many different kinds of people and experiences that make up a rich world. It’s making sure the characters don’t all look alike and don’t all have the same experiences or go through the same story in their own lives.
In the writing that has been filled out enough and polished enough to be posted on my blog that’s a little hard to tell, but in the writing that’s on its way, and in the ideas that have still been jangling around in my head, that is there and present, and talking about those experiences will be part of my end of quarter reflection.
I wanted to note here also a very interesting article that I read this week about languages and names in fantasy of science fiction writing. There were a lot of linguistic or grammatical pieces of jargon that I don’t really understand because I don’t have that understanding or training, but the basics of understanding languages and naming in terms of sounds and origin and how names are connected to origin and how to work with that in a way that’s not racist or awful to languages that really exist in the world was really fascinating to think about. It made me think about a process that I had put little thought into before: naming. Creating names that fit with languages that exist or especially languages that have been made up for the writing. How to create languages for fiction, and what to pay attention when you do or when you’re working with someone else to create that language.
It’s really awesome that thinking about that layer, even a small amount, can add a really rich layer of meaning into your work. And it doesn’t matter if it’s noticeable outwardly or not, it’s like much of other writing. Much of character backstories and information is not in the work itself. It’s in the authors’ head or scribbled on post it notes or into a well categorized organizational system. But when the author knows it, the story becomes exponentially richer. And from this article and things it makes you think about, language and naming can do that also.