When I chose to join the Sweetland Minor in Writing program, it was, admittedly, a very last minute decision. Some of my friends were joining the program and I had just taken a children’s book writing class that reignited my passion for writing, overall it just felt right. Though, at first, I wasn’t sure what else I could learn from the class that I didn’t already know. I didn’t mean to say that I thought I was a writing master, I just didn’t quite know what the program could teach me yet.

My origin piece came from an art history class I took Fall semester called “Sexual Objects”. “Sexual Objects” focused on expressions of sex and sexuality in contemporary art and culture. We looked at artists like Francis Bacon, Amber Hawk Swanson, and Robert Mapplethorpe and examined how their art interacted with these ideas of sexuality. We also watched a lot of documentaries, including the one that I would basically devote my entire semester to critiquing and deconstructing called “Guys and Dolls”; a documentary about men who own Real Doll sex dolls. My origin piece was a synthesis and critique of “Guys and Dolls”, “Passion and Power”, a documentary about the history of the vibrator and women’s sexual freedoms, and “Sleeping with the Devil”, a documentary and art piece about artist Alisa Yang, an online exorcist, and the patronizing, predatory sexual shaming she receives at the hands of said hack exorcist. I was really interested in how the messages and topics of each documentary seemed to play off of one another. “Passion and Power” was this story of the history of women’s sexual repression, “Guys and Dolls” was about how, for many men, the perfect woman is one who exists for their pleasure, and “Sleeping with the Devil”, when shown between the two, became this transcendent piece of a woman resisting the attempts of a man trying to control her through shaming her sexual history. I didn’t quite love the way the piece turned out, but the ideas I started to reach in it really inspired me to try again through my Gateway course. Eventually, I would break almost entirely away from the subject matter of my origin piece, but I never really left the ideas I began to explore behind.

My first iteration was a personal essay piece. I realized that one of the reasons I didn’t feel satisfied with my origin piece was that I had to write it from an art criticism standpoint. I felt that writing from that position stopped me from being able to understand why I had been so affected by the documentaries I watched. I decided to look towards the kinds of critical essays that emotionally resonated with me, and I found that most of them incorporated elements of a personal essay. Studying these mentor pieces I felt confident I could finally reach what I really wanted to say with this genre. Though I later figured out I didn’t have to follow this genre directly to get what I wanted from this experiment, I found it allowed me to reach the conclusion I wanted, but couldn’t reach, through my origin piece. In using a personal angle to explore the ideas in my origin piece, I found that what truly scared me about the men featured in “Guys and Dolls”, was the idea of impressing/controlling the consciousness of their non-living partners. I related the act of playing with dolls as a child - imagining their stories, speculating what could be going on inside their hollow heads - to the men who would scorn their exes and worship the women who couldn’t talk back to them, at least in the physical realm. I would end up following this thread of consciousness, autonomy, and childhood in my next experiments.

The second experiment I started was a zine on a few characters I had loved in The Twilight Zone. We had done a small section on science fiction in-class, and I started thinking about how the sheer amount of stories about non-human women in the sci-fi genre. I figured it would be an interesting way to apply my thoughts on consciousness in non human women to stories where these women could speak for themselves. I ended up focusing on The Twilight Zone because I knew there were a bunch of episodes focusing on non-human women, and because it was a show that was near and dear to my heart. I chose the genre of zines because I just love zines and I thought it was a neat way to combine my interests in retro science fiction and stories about women’s issues, a throwback to sci-fi and riot grrl zines of old. I unsurprisingly ended up really loving this project, it let me combine art and writing in a creative no-holds-barred approach that I found really freeing, and the subject matter was a great combination of nostalgic and modern at the same time. I feel the only problem with this project was that I knew I wanted to focus on this as my origin piece right off the bat, and my third project kind of suffered for it.

My third, and final, sketch experiment draft was a horror comic based in the ideas that I had been exploring in my last two experiments. If that sounds vague, that’s because it was: no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t make myself focus on finding a story I wanted to tell. It was pretty disappointing at the time, especially since I am a self-identifying comics FIEND. I love all kinds of comics, especially horror comics, so not being able to crack this, even when there really weren’t any obligations for me to finish the project made me kind of depressed. Part of it, as I mentioned in my reflection, is that writing good, original horror pieces is just really hard, and that finding horror pieces that aren’t based in incredibly outdated ideas of womanhood (or, at least, don’t involve men in the writing and directing process) is also really hard! But I think most of all, I just really wanted to get to my final project piece already and make the damn zine a reality.

Making that damn zine a reality was a trickier process than I thought it would be. Though I was fully prepared at the beginning to write about all of the non-human women episodes I found in The Twilight Zone, I found that for the sake of my health, and the quality of the piece as a whole, I ended up having to cut two characters from my “rotation” of women. I also had to make sure each piece was unique to the characters, and that I put equal amount of thought into the reasons/ways I incorporated all of my writing in the book itself. Despite those challenges, and a serious rearranging of my very vague timeline for the piece, I ended up crafting something that I really cared about. I ended up really valuing the creative freedom and guidance this program gave me to focus on the projects I wanted to grow into something bigger than the sum of its parts. For that, I’m really grateful and super happy I ended up joining this program!