Happy spring, everyone! Madison has been bouncing between weather in the 20s and 50s this past week, so we’re not out of the woods just yet, but it’s been nice to have brighter and longer days lately. There’s not much new to report on: I’m still grinding, stressing about my thesis, stressing about post-grad life, etc. etc. I do have a few trips/visits lined up for late March and late April, so that’s definitely something to look forward to! I guess right now, there’s not much I can do but stay present, “enjoy” grad school while I can, and trust that whatever is for me while make its way to me. Here’s a pic of a thawing Madison as evidence (it’s not much, but it’s been nice being able to take walks without the real threat of hypothermia constantly looming over you):
THE WEEK IN GRATITUDE
Thank you so much to everyone who chipped in or spread the word about my GoFundMe for the Kenyon Review Writer’s Workshop this summer. Because of y’all, I reached my goal in a little over a week and with the money raised and some savings, I am officially able to attend! Any writer knows that having intentional time to focus on your work is hard to come by, so I’m infinitely grateful for all of the support I received. Funnily enough, I was also offered a spot in a poetry workshop with Korean-American poet Franny Choi at the Juniper Summer Writing Institute—though I’m incredibly honored, it wouldn’t make sense logistically and financially for me to go this time around, but I’m really hoping to go another year!
A lot of editing and revising can happen in two weeks, which is my way of saying that the first chapter of my thesis is looking pretty good and ready to be put away at the moment! Getting more ~academic~ words down on the page has been a little difficult these days, but I’m grateful to have an advisor who supports, inspires, and believes in my work even when I don’t. I had been dreading the thesis-writing process for months before I actually had to do it, but maybe I’ll miss it once it’s over… Maybe. Probably not. Producing knowledge is cool, though!
This past weekend was a busy one: I spent most of it attending events and conducting interviews for my reporting gig at Madison365. Have I gotten used to randomly approaching people and asking them to talk to me? No, but it’s the name of the game and sometimes fun to do. I forgot how unique the energy of event coverage is, and I felt an old badass part of me re-emerge this weekend. In addition to covering the indigenous “Thrival Tools” event at the Madison Public Library-Central, I also had the honor of being at the world premiere of Quan Barry’s play, “The Mytilenean Debate.” You can check my review out here.
POEM OF THE WEEK
In the spirit of celebrating local writers and creators, though Amy Quan Barry can barely be considered only as such (truly a national/global, multi-genre tour de force), I wanted to share a poem from her poetry collection Loose Strife. The war in Ukraine has obviously been top of mind for everyone over the past two weeks—at least for me, in addition to the unimaginable suffering that is taking place, I can’t help but think about (a) what suffering we are turning a blind eye to in other parts of the world (and how it aligns with hierarchies of race) and (b) how much indifference we can choose to embody from oceans away. In “Forward!,” Barry speaks to a call to action in the wake of the Arab Spring, who we might be if we answer the call to “please come,” and what that response could look like in a place as far away as Wisconsin.
Grief is never an easy thing to write about, and it’s something I avoid doing. Since my good friend Angela passed away in 2018, I’ve had trouble navigating my grief, always holding it awkwardly, never knowing where to put it down. Of course, its taken many different forms over the past few years, some of them recognizable and loud, others more subtle and camoflauged. Sometimes you just miss your loved one. Below is an essay on one of those moments of heavy missing. Of “I wish you were here.” It’s a tender one, so I hope you enjoy.
Two months before my best friend Angela passed away after her near two-year battle with cancer, we were supposed to go to a dodie concert together at the Fillmore, a venue not far outside of our college town of Baltimore. As seniors in college, we were still young enough to feel the guilt of paper deadlines, but old enough to decide to go to a weekday concert anyway. For reasons I can’t even remember now, I canceled on her a week or two before the show, and she made plans to go with her boyfriend instead. But by the time the evening rolled around, she had gotten too ill to attend—by the end of her life, seeing her favorite British artist perform live became a dream never actualized.
It was with this unrealized wish of her’s tucked in my heart’s pocket that I found myself outside of The Rave three and a half years later for dodie’s “Build a Problem” tour. My boyfriend and I had cut through the corn fields that separate Madison and Milwaukee just as the squall forecasted for that evening began to pick up. As snowflakes the size of my pinky nail continued to pile onto the pavement, we rushed into the venue, simultaneously flushed and freezing. Already having missed the opener, Lizzie McAlpine, we found the room in the oftentimes dreadful liminal space between acts. But instead of being hit with a wave of palpable impatience, the space was charged with a lively and youthful chatter, the concertgoers excitedly waiting for their musical icon to finally appear on stage.
As we made our way around the perimeter of the crowd of about 300 people, I was awash with a strong sense of nostalgia, the youth and zeal of the audience bringing me back to my own days of frequent concert-going. The group had all the makings of an overwhelming young teen-to-early-20s audience: pops of brightly colored hair, outfits too cold for the weather, and superfans already donning the kind-of-pricey-but-must-have headliner merch. The inner fangirl in me that used to make concert-going a day-long affair—with hours spent in line for meet and greets, reunited with the online friends I only ever saw at shows—would have been appalled at how my boyfriend and I slinked slowly towards the bar, joining the chaperone dads who had been dragged by their diehard kids to this particular event and now sat along the back wall with beers and looks of neutral boredom.
“So this is it now / Twenty four, I still count everyone I kiss.” It’s this perfect balance of vulnerability and self awareness that characterizes dodie’s music, their songs akin to pages ripped out of one’s diary, streams of consciousness accompanied by light piano and guitar. The Essex singer-songwriter’s humble beginnings originate from Youtube, where they began posting their bare-bone melodic confessionals at the age of 15, singing of the woes of love (both unrequited and not), social anxieties, and friendship. It makes perfect sense why dodie attracts the specific crowd they do—“every art kid that attends the nearby college,” my boyfriend joked. Their lyrics capture so wholly the insecurities of trying to figure out who you are (oftentimes shapeshifting to meet others’ desires), and the distinct instability you experience during the time in your life where every small rejection or mishap is a direct reflection of personal failure or flaw.
As they masterfully bounced between piano, guitar, and even clarinet, I could feel how strongly dodie’s songs spoke to their fans, many of whom were still exploring their identities, perhaps still subscribed to the notion that if you try hard enough, you can be everything for everyone. After they performed “When” from their EP Intertwined (a song with lines like “Am I the only one / Wishing life away? / Never caught up in the moment / Busy begging the past to stay” and “I'm waiting to live, still waiting to love / Oh, it'll be over, and I'll still be asking when”), dodie confessed that they no longer resonate with some of the song’s sentiments, but the fact of the matter remains: Through their music, dodie has provided a sort of mirror to the soul whose reflections reverberate even as we leave those same emotions behind.
Though barely out of my early twenties myself, I felt such a wide gap between myself and the awestruck crowd before me (which dodie confessed to being their favorite of this tour so far). I suspect it to be the weight of the unforeseen and barely comprehensible death of a young friend—the tragedy that blindsided and defined my senior year of college, my most profound lesson in love and life. I felt myself to be on the other side of uncertainty, that thing that torments so many hearts and minds, with the permanent truth of death inspiring me to love hard and to love well, to give it unabashedly to everyone, including myself.
Angela had been my teacher in generous love, the kind that devotedly turns outward and brings out the best in people. One evening, during our first year of college, I sat on her dorm room floor with my notebook, writing quietly as she typed away at an assignment. When she asked me what I was doing, I told her I was writing poetry, which she thought was so cool. I had never thought of it as such, and without her encouragement, maybe I never would have.
Much like the way dodie holds up a mirror to people’s hurt and makes it beautiful, Angela, whether knowingly or not, had a way of making people think differently about themselves, encouraging them to shine and celebrate their uniqueness. “God knows where I would be if you hadn't found me / Sitting all alone in the dark,” dodie sings in “Sick of Losing Soulmates.” God knows where I would be if Angela hadn’t been my friend during some of the most formative years of our lives and brought me closer to myself out of an earnest dedication to show her friends—her soulmates—their true power.
Even though I knew nothing about the personal history of those who swayed, jumped, and scream-sang in that room that night—who they’ve loved and who they’ve lost—I was filled with such immense happiness and gratitude for their pure glee, untouched, if only for those few hours, by the heartbreak and anguish that had drawn them to dodie in the first place. During both the upbeat parts of the show and its more somber notes, dodie proved themselves a salve for so many people—a place of refuge, of tenderness, of understanding.
The weekend after Angela’s death, I played “Sick of Losing Soulmates” on loop. As dodie’s gentle and haunting voice filled the small of my single dorm room, the meaning of the song’s lyrics transformed. “What the hell would I be without you?” went from being a theoretical exasperation to a soft coaxing to consider the ways grief can turn into a source of strength over time. I have no choice but to go on without Angela physically by my side, so how can I live a life that she is proud of? I may not be able to speak with her anymore (though sometimes, I still do), but I am far from being without her.
As I stood and watched the crowd—complete strangers that had morphed themselves into a singular, pulsing, and loving mass—I couldn’t help but imagine a version of Angela and I that went to this concert, healthy and whole, pain-free and blissful. How we would’ve mouthed the words of “Would You Be So Kind” to each other, shimmying and hip-checking, or strained our vocal cords screaming the ones to “Party Tattoos,” the temporary tattoo packs from the merch table already tucked into our purses to be applied later that night. How we would’ve been the ones to shout “I love you!” to dodie, and squeal when they said it back. How our “dumb screenshot of youth” would be immortalized forever, an inside joke we’d have with each other, with everyone in that room, with time itself.