Radio Chthulucene 87.9 FM

Having considered multiple possibilities for what I want my project to look like, I wrote my piece last night for this week’s workshop in a frenzy. I knew what I wanted to write but hadn’t yet put pen to paper (or, in our case, fingers to keys).

I used to draw a lot when I was younger and had more time; I only ever drew portraits because approaching the body felt intimidating to me, and in my attempts to learn and be more comfortable with branching my art out, I had to learn to be comfortable with disliking my drawings and to work on them until I liked them. I think this applies to writing too: even though I definitely felt like a cornball writing a poem to my dead dog, I need to let myself be unhappy with my writing — because writing anything is better than sitting for hours with a blinking cursor on a blank screen.

I’m quite excited for workshop and I hope it will stir my brain into how to improve my piece even further. My piece has two sides: one in English and one in Spanish. The Spanish side, however, is missing a couple of words — I chose to use empty brackets like this [] — and that is because those are words in which I couldn’t for the life of me remember a translation from English to Spanish. I was attempting to showcase the Spanish that I had lost in my mind from living in an English-speaking country. I guess this brings up a good question from me to introduce during workshop: are there any other ways in which I could demonstrate the loss of my mother tongue? Is there any way I could connect that to the passing of my childhood dog?

I also wrote this piece first as a letter and then went through and broke up the text into a poem. I wanted to split up the sentences into lines that would force the reader to breathe in awkward spots of the text. I took a lower-division poetry class here at UCSD and I found that I preferred writing poems with short and awkward syntax (is even the right word for what I want to say?). I’m by no means a poet and so I find that method working the best for me. Either way, I’m excited for the feedback I’ll be receiving during workshop — especially when it comes to converting my piece into a radio recording; I hope that everyone felt as inspired by today’s visit from Marco Werman the way I was!