Date: April 8, 2020
Time of post: 11:28 PM
Quarantine Day: 24
Last Song I Listened To: “TiedTogether with a Smile” by TaylorSwift
Last Person I Communicated With: email
to Dr. Kara Northway
Last Thing I Ate: ice cream sandwich
Last Thing I Read: classmates’
History of the Book projects
Current Mood: it’s varied; I’ve
been excited and content and also nervous
One Thing I’ve Accomplished Today: got
a good bit of Apocalypse and History of the Book HW done
One Thing I Want To Accomplish
Today: watch the short film for class
One Reason I’m Stressed Today: Oh,
you know…the future
One Reason I’m Happy Today: Dr.
Northway gave us an extension on our research paper proposal! (Also, I watched 3
Harry Potter movies today [6, 7.1, and 7.2], which always puts me in a good
mood!)
Dear Apocalypsers,
We’ve been talking about various
futurisms in class the last few weeks—Afrofuturisms, Indigenous futurisms.
Futurisms are all about reimagining what life could look like. In his essay, “Afrofuturism
2.0 & the Black Speculative Arts Movement: Notes on a Manifesto,” Reynaldo
Anderson gives a few definitions of Afrofuturism, specifically. Anderson says
that, according to Kodwo Eshun, “Afrofuturism may be characterized as a program
for recovering the histories of counter-futures created in a century hostile to
Afrodiasporic projection” (qtd. in Anderson 228) and that the movement “is a critical
project with the mission of laying the groundwork for a humanity that is not
bound up with the ideals of white Enlightenment universalism, critical theory,
science or technology” (Jones qtd. in Anderson 228-229). In light of imagining
these different futures, I took some time to imagine my own future.
I’ve always taken comfort in the
future; it just always seemed so much exciting than my present. My mom used to
get onto me a child because she said I was “wishing my life away,” but I just
get so excited for what’s to come. Of course, there have been times where the
future terrifies me more than anything, so, when that happens, I ignore all the
sticky uncertainty of the immediate future (“Where will I work over the summer?”
“Where will I live next year?” “Where will I work?” “When will this quarantine
be over and how will it affect me long-term?”) and imagine my end goal—the proverbial
white picket fence life.
Today, I was particularly missing
my cohort, and I thought about our perfect world. This is what I came up with
and sent to our GroupMe, because, naturally, I’m going to share my “headcanon” about
us with them:
 |
| Can't wait to write books on Harry Potter and YA and trauma theory one day with wonderful woman (and all our friends)! |
“I can't help but imagine this
group chat in like 20 years, and Rebecca is our publisher, and she's juggling
V's book tour and constantly in here reminding us about deadlines, and we joke
that "Lexi won't start her chapter until the day it's due," and
Dustin is the model author and meets all HIS deadlines for his next
best-selling novel, and any time we need a Marxist lens we just @ Cailey, and
Mikayla is always here to explain the trauma theory that she wrote and
revolutionized Children's Lit with, and Gina and Nick are always trading ideas
for their scary horror novels, and Noelle knows that she can always ask any of
us to Zoom with her students, and when Molly does she convinces them that she
and Noelle are married, and we make plans to go to conferences together where
we'll catch up with all our old profs and new colleague-friends and sit at the
same table during the closing banquet and giggle the whole time.”
Right now, that’s the dream. It
encompasses so much of what I want “when this is all over” (whatever that
means). In this future, we’re all still friends, using the same old group chat
we started in grad school. We’re all in the fields we dreamed of; we’re happy
and successful, and we’re still helping each other be our best. I want more
than anything to see that future come to fruition. I’ve seen it happen before.
Dr. Tatonetti spoke so kindly of Daniel Heath Justice, telling us that they
knew each other from grad school, and Justice even mentioned Dr. T in his
acknowledgements of The Way of Thorn and Thunder. For me, that’s the dream, to
watch someone you care about and have worked so closely with for so long succeed
at all their goals and get the recognition they deserve.
 |
| One day, Dustin will do the "dress like a book cover" challenge with his own book! Mark my words! (And he'll definitely put us all to shame with his timeliness! Rebecca will have her hands full for sure!) |
This whole post reminds me of
Taylor Swift’s song “Sweeter Than Fiction” from the movie One Chance (2013). In
a way, the song kind of imagines a futurism for the people its about. It’s told
from Swift’s POV as she watches someone she loves struggle toward their dreams.
It starts off all too familiar for grad students: “Only sound that you hear is
"no" / You never saw it coming / Slipped when you started running / And
now you've come undone,” but the whole point of the song is the line in the
pre-chorus “Someday you won't remember / This pain you thought would last
forever and ever” (Swift). This song never fails to make me happy. It’s upbeat
and optimistic, and it’s like my whole personality in a song. And the bridge—God,
Taylor Swift writes the best bridges in all of pop music, and no one can change
my mind about that—the bridge is what I’ve always wanted to say to someone, and
it’s such a fitting message as graduation comes around: “And when they call
your name / And they put your picture in a frame / You know that I'll be there
time and again / […] / I will say, I knew it all along / Your eyes wider than
distance / This life's sweeter than fiction” (Swift).
I know so many writers, both
creative writers and scholars. I know people who want to be teachers and
publishers and librarians. And these aren’t easy things to become. Years of
grad school, multiple rejections, grueling years of “paying your dues” to the
industry, none of that is easy. But I have to imagine a future that makes all
of this worth it.
Maybe it’s naïve. But it’s the
light at the end of the tunnel that’s getting me through right now.
So when I close with “May the odds
be ever in our favor,” this time I don’t just mean it in the COVID-19 sense. I
mean it in every way. From now until forever, I hope the odds are in our favor.
Katie
Works Cited:
Anderson, Reynaldo. “Afrofuturism
2.0 & the Black Speculative Arts Movement: Notes on a Manifesto.” Obsidian:
Literature in the African Diaspora, vol. 42, iss. 1-2, Illinois State University,
Spring-Winter 2016, pp. 228-236.
Swift, Taylor. “Sweeter Than
Fiction.” One Chance: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, Sony, 22 October 2013.
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