WRIT Large (Vol. 9)

WRITL ARGE

2020

VO L . 9

WRIT L ARGE 2020

Š UNIVERSITY OF DENVER WRITING PROGRAM

WRIT Large is published by the University Writing Program at the University of Denver

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No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from the University Writing Program at the University of Denver.

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An Introduction to Volume 9

Every act of writing is an act of making con- Will Fricker makes a compelling case for pronections. Of course, writers combine words to tecting public lands in “The War on Public make meaning, but this is only one dimension Lands: Bears Ears.” By invoking connections of a much larger picture. Skilled writers are also between Bears Ears National Monument and able to connect word to world, story to reality, the communities that treasure it, Fricker takes past to present, present to future, imagination aim at the Trump Administration’s decision to to action, self to other. Some writers invite us to shrink Bears Ears, “opening it up for oil drilling consider connections we never thought possi- and removing previous protections on its fragile ble; others compel us to reconsider the connec- environment.” He ends his essay with a call to tions we’ve made. In this volume of WRIT Large, action, challenging “political complacency” and five undergraduate authors invoke connections its disastrous consequences. both old and new; in the process, they remind us that encountering another’s words is also a Avery Becklenberg’s “Learn, Listen, Teach: The Life of a Self” combines academic research with connection made. personal anecdotes in order to tell a story of In “Smile,” Esther Chung asks readers to rethink family, ageism, and Alzheimer’s disease. Beck“something that is seen so often, yet not much lenberg writes that at the heart of her essay is thought is put into it”: the face. Chung’s essay the question of “self.” She asks, “What is the progresses as a series of notes and anecdotes, self that these individuals [diagnosed with Alzeach one reexamining the idea of “the face” from heimer’s] lost? Where does it come from? Does a different lens: the biological, the psycholog- everyone define it the same way?” In her pursuit ical, the sociological, and the personal. Along of answers, Becklenberg explores both connecthe way, Chung slowly but surely looks “beyond tions made and connections lost. the face,” reflecting on our common desire for connection. She writes that “it’s the things under Finally, Abigail Moreno Zavala’s “Que Dios Te the mask that allow us to understand the person Bendiga” connects to author Langston Hughes’s “Salvation” in the same way that a cover coneven more.” nects to an original song. While Zavala is careful Emma Dent’s “A Mediocre Examination of to point out differences between her story and Incredibly Talented Women” is not simply a Hughes’s, she emphasizes their shared method heartfelt examination of drag culture. It is, in of “telling personal stories in order to establish the author’s own words, “an essay in overshar- a strong ethos in relation to an argument.” The ing…[and] an explanation of who I was in my result is a moving story of family, religion, and first months away from the home I grew up in.” culture.

Writing auto-ethnographically, Dent combines qualitative research and personal storytelling to — David Riche explore her own experience of queerness; in the process, she works to connect not only her past Teaching Assistant Professor to her present, but also her self to others.

University Writing Program VOLUME 9

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Contents 5

SMILE

Esther Chung 13

A MEDIOCRE EXAMINATION OF INCREDIBLY TALENTED WOMEN

21

THE WAR ON PUBLIC LANDS: Bears E ars

27

LEARN, LISTEN, TEACH: The L ife

38

QUE DIOS TE BENDIGA

43

Call for Submissions for Volume 10 (2021)

44

Acknowledgments & Credits

Emma Dent

Will Fricker

Avery Becklenberg

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of a

S elf

Abigail Moreno Zavala

smile

by

Esther Chung

WRIT 1133: Writing & Research | Professor David Riche

“I WONDER WHAT THEY ARE THINKING?” Almost everyone has had this thought run through their head.

I am no different. Wanting to understand what the other person is thinking or feeling—it’s truly impossible to tell.

I remember my teacher in elementary school looking down on me, the corner of her mouth turned downwards, her eyebrows turned upwards, as I extended my hand out to her, a little lizard in my palm.

At the time, I did not understand why she was slowly inching away from me while trying to get me to drop the lizard. I did not understand why her face was contorted in such a weird manner. I did not understand that emotion.i The corners of their lips turned up, their eyes shifting a little bit, revealing an almost moon-like shape; there are no wrinkles in the corners of their eyes. Their pupils were not contracted, nor were they shaped like the moon.

No reflection glinting off them; they almost looked like dark stones.

The human face has forty-three muscles. Forty-three muscles to make seven emotions, yet there are thousands of combinations to convey them. The seven universal emotionsii are classified as disgust, anger, fear, sadness, happiness, surprise, and contempt.iii Despite this, the English language has many different ways to describe emotions. Happiness can be described as cheerful, merry, joyful, VOLUME 9

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grinning, radiant, upbeat, chipper…the list goes on and on. Yet, biologically, a smile can be described very simply…

• The zygomaticus major and minor pull up the corners of the mouth.

• The orbicularis oculi cause the eye to crinkle.

• The levator labii superioris pulls up the corner of the lip and nose.

• The levator anguli oris helps to raise the angle of the mouth.

• The risorius also pulls the corners of mouth to the side of the face. …finally forming a smile.

The eyes widened, radiating intensity, her mouth bunching inwards. Lips pressed together. The corners of her mouth stayed still. Her eyebrows were pulled together, almost as if attached by a string. The inner part of her brows came downward as if wanting to meet her eyes.

Humans communicate non-verbally all the time. A smile to someone you pass on the street.

A well-timed eyebrow raised to a friend across the room. A glance to the person sitting too close to you. While talking to colleagues and friends, our faces can show things that our voices do not. Emotional intelligence allows us as humans to understand what another person may be feeling; it also allows us to empathize. As the Roman politician Cicero puts it: “The face is a picture of the mind with the eyes as its interpreter.”

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His mouth was turned downward ever so slightly, the bottom lip jutting out. His eye brows were raised up, but the ends were turned down. His eyes appeared glassy, looking far off, as if they were no longer there.

While watching a movie with my mother, I turned in surprise to see her shedding tears. I could not fathom why she would be doing such a thing.

In the movie, the protagonist had just died after sacrificing themselves for their family and friends.

The extras were crying and reminiscing about the memories of their lost comrade when large tears started rolling down my mom’s face. It has happened before; I suspect everyone has empathized with a story at least once before. Empathizing allows humans to understand another’s mental state; it gives them the opportunity to be able to respond with an appropriate emotion.iv Being able to read emotions is arguably what allows us to connect and be human. When we talk to each other, the face is what reveals if the topic at hand is serious or not. It is how humans are socialized when they are young.

In addition to surface-level expressions, the face can also tell you what kind of person someone is deep down. Crow’s feet are wrinkles that form around the eyes; they are also known as “happy lines” because they form when one is showing a “true smile.” Older people tend to have crow’s feet around their eyes when they’ve smiled often throughout their lifetime. There are other wrinkles: for example, the wrinkles that form around

the mouth, also known as frown lines, and the horizontal wrinkles on the forehead that are often referred to as worry lines. There are also small scars and sun freckles that may indicate where someone has been and may even reveal how active that person might have been.

Her mouth opened, revealing her teeth, the corners of her mouth rising to meet the wrinkles connecting her nose, looking excited. Little crevasses formed on her cheeks. Her eyebrows resting, and her forehead smooth. The corner of her eyes had three lines exploding from them. She was giving off a warm feeling.

When I was younger, I lost a friend because they claimed I could never understand the situation.v But as I’ve grown, I’ve become more aware of a person’s face. Being able to read if someone is being sarcastic or lying has helped me to understand the person. Facial expressions are a universal system of signals that can reveal a person’s ever changing emotional state. In other words, what we display to others is how we wish to frame ourselves to the world; yet, even faces don’t always show the whole picture. Paul Ekman, a psychologist focusing on facial expressions, uses the term “display rules”; these rules suggest that an emotional expression can be suppressed, de-amplified, exaggerated, or even masked altogether.vi Microexpressions are facial expressions that occur in a fraction of a second; this is the unconsciously shown emotion that displays the person’s true emotion. According to Ekman, understanding and recognizing these

Facial expressions are a universal system of signals that can reveal a person’s ever changing emotional state. In other words, what we display to others is how we wish to frame ourselves to the world; yet, even faces don’t always show the whole picture.

microexpressions can increase one’s emotional awareness.

Their eyebrows ran a few centimeters away from their eyes, which widened as if terrified of what the pupils saw. Their mouth flopped open a little. Their pupils suddenly shrank, turning to the size of a pin.

In contrast, the face can also reveal someone’s health and genes. According to Schieb, Gangestad, and Thornhill (1999), facial symmetry correlates to physical attractiveness.vii Facial symmetry suggests a relatively healthy childhood free from disease; it also reveals one’s current health.viii So, people often choose others based on facial symmetry in order to have healthy offspring.

When I was in high school, the girls in my math class would always be fawning over the most attractive guy in the class.ix Later on in the year, we had to create a presentation connecting mathematical concepts to the real world. In a purely “scientific” manner, a girl gave a presentation to the class about McDreamy (see previous note). She described the

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symmetry of his face, as well as the perfect ratios between his eyes, nose, and mouth. She ended the presentation by placing his face in the golden ratio and then triumphantly asking McDreamy out to prom.x In the current fashion industry, models often appear to have near-perfect facial symmetry. Some people do augmentations to make their faces look more attractive.xi In popular culture, People magazine has been voting for the Sexiest Man Alive since 1944. In 2014, Chris Hemsworth was voted to be the Sexiest Man Alive.xii While observing

In seven seconds, people will create a solid impression of you. Seven seconds to take a glance at your face and judge your entire being. It’s not very long, and you have no control over it.

Chris’s lovely face on the Internet, I noticed that he appears to have a very symmetrical face. While making this observation, I looked back at People’s Sexiest Men Alive, and I noticed that there seems to be a trend of sexy men who all appear to have facial symmetry.

Her face glowed. Cheeks turning the color of a peach. Her mouth was wide in the shape of a halved orange slice. The tips of her eyes slowly turned into a dark shade of pink, almost as if they were sunburned.

She looked…awkward?

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In sociology, “face” is a concept that refers to the need to maintain dignity or status in social situations.xiii Losing face means losing one’s dignity, while saving face means preserving one’s self-respect. When I first learned about this, I was really confused. How could someone lose their face? Did it just fall off? When I learned more English, I understood that this phrase was not literal, but for an extended period of time I thought Americans could slip their faces on and off like a mask.

The face is multidimensional. In dramaturgical theory, humans are seen as actors presenting themselves on stage with masks contracted out of their ideals of self and society.xiv Sociologists agree that all cultures have concerns, or take actions, when it comes to conserving and upgrading one’s face.xv His mouth was plastered in a permanent Cheshire cat grin, as if tacks held his mouth in place. While he grinned, his eyes never followed. Looking forever blue, a hint of what was hiding beneath the grin.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. In seven seconds, people will create a solid impression of you. Seven seconds to take a glance at your face and judge your entire being. It’s not very long, and you have no control over it.

In dramaturgical theory, humans have masks with painted-on emotions that are fluid and always changing. Physiognomy, however, focuses on the mask itself. Specifically, physiognomy focuses on the resting face. The structure of the resting face is relatively stable, possibly revealing one’s character.xvi For example, someone who

has wide-set eyes, a small forehead, and a large nose may be classified as lazy. However, historically, this method has been linked to racial and sexual stereotyping. Resting-bitch face (RBF), a facial expression that seems angry or irritated, is an epidemic that plagues millions of teens across the world. RBF makes it so that the person’s resting face shows others that their character is mean.

According to physiognomy, these people would just be unpleasant individuals. Yet, as far as I can tell, those with RBF are often the nicest of people.

Furthermore, physiognomy has been concluded to have no accuracy.xvii Their eyebrows where scrunched together, fighting for space in between the eyes. Their eyes looked fiery, focusing on the board. Yet their cheeks stayed relaxed, as if not knowing what was happening with the rest of the face.

Imagine seeing the face of your loved one. Their eyes. Their warm smile. Now, imagine not being able to recognize their face from a group of strangers, their face forever unattainable. Prosopagnosia is a neurological impairment that makes one unable to recognize faces. This occurs when the brain has lesions in the occipito-temporal cortex portion of the brain. Those with prosopagnosia are able to describe facial features, but they lack the ability to connect those features with familiar faces.

Is familiarity important in reading emotions?

All emotions have the same baseline look, but having the memory and experience behind a person’s face may enhance one’s ability to read emotions.

There are always those people who don’t really grin when they’re happy or cry when they’re sad.

However, knowing them helps us look for the little

things. Different context clues allow humans to read the person’s inner character instead of their outward shell.

His face looked stern, his mouth grimacing like the Terminator. Yet, in the corner of his eyes, there seemed to be little rays of sun dancing out of his angry-looking eyebrows.

“Are you okay?”

That question always takes me by surprise. How did they know? Did they read my mind? Illuminati confirmed? I never understood how they knew, even though it seems like such a simple equation.

If someone looks sad, then something is wrong. I didn’t think my face looked blue, but they knew.

How? It was never something I understood. To me, those people were merely mind readers, not yet discovered and drafted by the Illuminati. But as I grew older, I started to look beyond the face. On the one hand, emotions allow people to read others like an open book. But on the other hand, it’s the things under the mask that allow us to understand the person even more.

She was staring off into space. She seemed melancholy, although her face refused to show it.

I was sitting outside my little sister’s school waiting for her to come out of her class. As her classmates came spilling out of the door, I tried to recognize some emotion.xviii Like little fireworks going off in my head, I recognized an emotion as a tiny human flew by.

She smiled.

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ENDNOTES i

I want to clarify, that I could see that the teacher was making a face, and it looked like surprise, but I didn’t really

ii

There has actually been research done to show that there might be four universal emotions instead of seven, since fear

iii iv v

understand the implications behind that face or whether that emotion really was trying to convey surprise.

and surprise as well as anger and disgust tend to share many similar facial features. See Jack, Garrod, and Schynz

(2014).

See Ekman (1987).

See Chakrabarti, Bullmore, & Baron-Cohen (2006).

I never really understood the little cues that girls would give to each other. A glance here, a smirk there. It was all

really confusing to me. I was constantly left out of the conversation because I couldn’t understand what my “friend” was feeling and adapt to her situation. It got to the point where I just wanted to have a talk with her thoughts to

understand what was happening. Of course, reading minds is the kind of thing that only occurs in comic books about

vi vii viii

a charming protagonist and wacky villain. Real life is much harder to understand than a story.

See Ekman (2016).

See Scheib, Gangestad, & Thornhill (1999).

Humans are also known to be infatuated with symmetry and perfection, so health might not be the only reason. I understand from art history that, in an art piece, the brush strokes and composition are always scrutinized. Each

blemish and flaw are often looked upon negatively. Just like the face—something that does not have any scars or

ix

blemishes is often more enjoyed than something with pimples and dots, scars and lumps.

I never got to learn his actual name, but the girls in class nicknamed him McDreamy based on the character in the

TV show Grey’s Anatomy. In the TV show, he was only every admired for his face. He had chiseled face and a shiny

white smile. Quite honestly, the guy’s face looked like any other average high school guy’s, with pimples and freckles,

x xi

but his eyes and smile were often the first things others noticed and admired.

In the end, he did say yes to her…although, after the promposal, his face looked as red as a tomato.

Wearing sunglasses can increase the appearance of facial symmetry. This is because the glasses create structure to the face. It also covers the eyes, which are often the first thing people look at when looking at a face. By covering the

xii xiii xiv xv

top of the face, the cheek bones are softened, but the covered eyes create a sense of mystery. See Killip (2016).

See Jordan & Coulton (2014).

See Demello (2012).

See Demello (2012).

The term “face” first arose in China. The Chinese tend to have many terms for face: “selling face,” which means to gain popularity; “ripping up face,” which means to crush someone else’s feelings. To the Chinese, the face represents

xvi xvii xviii

the self. See Demello (2012).

See Hassin & Trope (2000).

See Hassin & Trope (2000).

I did this often to try and get a better grasp on emotional intelligence. It was a sort of game to me. Can you guess

their emotion? Did you get it right? How? Passing by a stranger on the street I would glance at their face to see their

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facial expression. Did their eyebrows look neutral and flat like a toothpick? Did their mouth looked like a dancing

earthworm? I always did so in some vain attempt to understand what others see. Eventually, I got quite good at it.

They are happy because their face shows A, B, and C. They are sad because of Z, X, and Y. Understanding emotions allowed me to react with the appropriate face.

REFERENCES Chakrabarti, B., Bullmore, E., & Baron-Cohen, S. (2006). Empathizing with basic emotions: Common and discrete neural substrates. Social Neuroscience, 1(3–4), 364-384. DOI: 10.1080/17470910601041317

Ekman, P. (2016). Nonverbal messages: Cracking the code. San Francisco: PEG.

Ekman, P., & Friesen, W. V. (1987). Universals and cultural differences in facial expressions. Personality Processes and Individual Differences, 53. Retrieved from https://www.paulekman.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Universals-And-Cultural-Differences-In-The-Judgment-Of-Facia.pdf.

Demello, M. (2012). Face saving and losing face. Faces around the world: A cultural encyclopedia of the human face. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO. Retrieved from http://du.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://search.credoreference.com/ content/entry/abcclioihuo/face_saving_and_losing_face/0?institutionId=1676

Gibbons, S. (2018, June 20). You and your business have 7 seconds to make a first impression: Here’s

how to succeed. Forbes. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/serenitygibbons/2018/06/19/

you-have-7-seconds-to-makea-first-impression-heres-how-to-succeed/#2dddbd7456c2

Hassin, R., & Trope, Y. (2000). Facing faces: Studies on the cognitive aspects of physiognomy. Journal of Person-

ality and Social Psychology, 78, 1–16. Retrieved April 14, 2019, from http://labconscious.huji.ac.il/wp-content/ uploads/2011/01/facingfaces.pdf

Jack, R. E., Garrod, O. G., & Schyns, P. G. (2014). Dynamic facial expressions of emotion transmit an evolving hierar-

chy of signals over time. Current Biology, 24(2), 187-192. Retrieved April 14, 2019, from http://www.sciencedirect. com/science/article/pii/S0960982213015194

Jordan, J., & Coulton, A. Y. (2014, November 19). Chris Hemsworth is PEOPLE’s sexi-

est man alive. People Magazine. Retrieved December 9, 2019, from https://people.com/celebrity/ chris-hemsworth-is-peoples-sexiest-man-alive-2014/

Keating, C. F. (1985). Gender and the physiognomy of dominance and attractiveness. Psychology Quarterly, 48, 61–70.

Retrieved April 15, 2019, from https://www.jstor.org/stable/3033782?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents.

Killip, T. (2016, October 20). Here’s why sunglasses make people look so much better. Complex.com. Retrieved from https://www.complex.com/style/2014/06/science-tells-us-the-linkbetween-sunglasses-and-looking-cool

Scheib, J. E., Gangestad, S. W., & Thornhill, R. (1999). Facial attractiveness, symmetry and cues of good genes. Proc.

Biol. Sci. 266(1431): 1913–1917. Retrieved April 12, 2019, from https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/abs/10.1098/ rspb.1999.0866.

Wierzbeicka, A. (1986). Human emotions: Universal or culture-specific? American Anthropologist New Series,

88(3), 584–594. Retrieved April 14, 2019, from https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1525/ aa.1986.88.3.02a00030

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

image provided by author

Esther Chung currently attends the University of Denver as a psychology and biology double major with a focus in cognitive neuroscience. Though she is not quite sure what she wants to do with her degree, she knows for sure that she wants to help others. She was born and raised in Colorado Springs, Colorado; both of her parents are restaurant owners, and she’s been a restaurant kid her whole life.

Esther is the oldest of two, with a sassy younger sibling. Her hobby is drawing and watercolor-painting surreal landscapes, people, and animals. Esther enjoys cooking and trying out new recipes found on Buzzfeed’s Tasty.

A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR I choose to study faces because of an encounter I had with a friend. In summary, I ended up misreading their face. Because of this, I have spent time observing faces and noticing how they are perceived every day. Last year, I took WRIT 1133 with Dr. David Riche, who asked me to think beyond the mundane and look at research papers through a new lens. In class we were told to embark on a quest—a quest for knowledge and research. By finding something to question, I was able to start a research quest; however, instead of a standard quest, I was able to write my own stories and show my research in my own way. Thanks to this, I was able to bring focus to the face. It’s something that is seen so often, yet not much thought is put into it.

While I was researching my topic, I realized that I didn’t have a good way to connect all my sources. Of course, they all related to faces, but my brain jumbled the pieces of information without creating bridges and connecting them.

I needed something to glue the pieces of my map together in order to venture on my quest.

When I wrote up my research, it began to look like a bunch of notes jotted down. I noticed how this style was similar to a research paper that we read in class, Kierra Aiello’s “Notes on Cupcakes” [from WRIT Large volume 4, 2015]. And 12

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with this example, I had the glue.

I used this note-taking style to my advantage. I began my research paper with broad ideas. How the face worked gave the audience a baseline, a starting place on the map. I then began to introduce the idea that the face can be more than what is seen on the surface. I gave the readers a break between the ideas by adding emotions I observed that were similar to the faces described; this strategy helped the notes to seem more fluid. It also allowed me to write in a way that would be interesting for a popular audience.

Going against the “conventional” research paper was an interesting journey. I was writing a story while being able to bring focus to what lies below the surface of the face. In the end, I hope the reader can appreciate how diverse the face can be. It is something that we see every day.

Just walking past a stranger for a brief period of time—so much can be learned just by taking note of their face. I hope you can use some of the knowledge from this paper and are able to apply it to your everyday life. I believe that this takeaway is important since it could help us forge new relationships or strengthen old ones.

After all, the face is such an underappreciated thing, but to enjoy it, all we need is a smile.

A Mediocre EXAMINATION

OF INCREDIBLY Talented WOMEN by

Emma Dent

WRIT 1133: Writing & Research | Professor April Chapman-Ludwig

I CAME OUT BECAUSE MY MOM WAS SICK. MY MOM WAS diagnosed with terminal esophageal cancer and given an impossibly short amount of time to live when I was fifteen. I was gay, and my mom was dying. I wanted her to know.

I was also the daughter of a Catholic woman—not a terribly ruthless Catholic woman (though that may be redundant), just a Catholic woman. In my experience, religion and love have shaped much of my family’s cruelty. You want your children to be safe, intelligent, respected, successful, and saved. You also want your children to abide by the morality you were taught was right. My mom could be a bitch, but she was because she loved me, because she thought she was doing right by me.

Coming out when you’re a sophomore in high school is weird because nobody believes you, including yourself. Despite how right you may be, youth comes with a funny kind of imposter syndrome.

You are too young to know who you are but old enough to fall under the guise of an assumed heterosexuality. I had an especially hard time because I came out as bisexual. You know, the stepping stone sexuality? The same one where bisexual men are considered gay, and bisexual women are considered straight (because god forbid someone isn’t attracted to a man).

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she didn’t expect at least one of her children to be gay. She basically raised us in various Pottery Barns across the US. That’s gaybaiting. She said I was too young and didn’t know what I wanted. That was the end of the discussion. To be fair, I didn’t know what I wanted, but I knew who I wanted—a girl.

My mother died shortly after I turned sixteen, and for the remainder of my high school experience, I put my sexuality on the backburner. You can’t argue with a dead woman. I’ve tried.

Ellen is on her way to becoming a hyper queen. We’ve spent the last two quarters picking out names and makeup and fashions that do what she wants. She is an artist, like my mother. My mom would have loved her to bitter pieces. Her creative visions are specific without being concise. She is not sure what she wants, but she certainly knows what she doesn’t want.

The problem with putting things on the backburner is that the world doesn’t stop. You don’t change just because you’re not equipped to deal with your current situation. I graduated high school, and I attended my first Pride parade. I found myself on the outside looking in on a community I knew I was a part of since I was eight years old.

I’m learning more and more about queer culture every day because simply being gay doesn’t mean you’re “in.” Over the past three years, my perception of the LGBT community flipped on its head ten times over. We are oddities, commodities, freak shows, grandparents, quiche makers, parents, coworkers, and cool aunts. I am what’s known in the community as a “babygay,” which means I’m young and ignorant—probably because mainstream culture has a habit of acknowledging

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that gay people exist but doesn’t actually show what the communities look like. So, when gay kids turn eighteen, they’re young and novice. They have lots of expectations, questions, and things they (we) do wrong. *** Ellen and I discuss drag like it’s our damn job. She is a creative genius and I am an official queer representative, which makes conversations like this easy and an outright pleasure to facilitate.

“Okay. So, I’m worried about having my name in it because, like, I’m worried that other people in the community will think, you know, “This is our culture, and I don’t want to be appropriating it.”

“Right. Yeah.”

“I know I have a right to perform as a biological female or faux queen—that’s not the issue. But is it okay to do this as a non-queer person? I don’t know.”

I met Ellen during freshman orientation, after a group of people in our hall had knocked on our door and invited me and my roommate to partake in an art night. Ellen was the last to leave. She’s a tiny little blonde thing with a chronic illness and the kind of self-deprecating humor you almost feel bad laughing at. We spent ten minutes brainstorming what she wanted her fake name to be for this project., We eventually came up with Ellen DeMiserly (in contrast to Ellen DeGeneres, a true gay icon). Ellen is on her way to becoming a hyper queen. We’ve spent the last two quarters picking out names and makeup and fashions that do what she wants. Thus far, we’ve accumulated almost nothing she actually likes. Hopefully there is a learning curve. Hopefully the first looks are the hardest.

She is an artist, like my mother. My mom would have loved her to bitter pieces. Her creative visions are specific without being concise. She is not sure what she

Denver Pride 2018 © Adrian Michael / Flickr.com/photos/126438536@N03

wants, but she certainly knows what she doesn’t want.

Most of my drag knowledge comes from her. It was never really my thing before college. The only queen I’d have been able to name was RuPaul. *** Acknowledgment of drag culture is disappointingly clinical. Not all of it is intended to be severe and insensitive. In fact, current drag is much more indicative of the current socio-political climate of LGBT rights, but it’s hard to step in any direction academically without being bombarded with papers that demean drag as a performance art and reduce and dehumanize its participants. Everything written about drag subculture (or any subculture) is seen through individual, private knowledge. Researchers explore the drag community without looking objectively—and rightfully so. You can’t be indifferent to everything, especially when it comes to drag. More often than not, those who are invested in what it means to be a drag performer hold even more solidified opinions of the subculture. This leads to pre-existing colloquial information rooted in confusion, hatred, ignorance, and overwhelming misunderstanding.

to work for her. At the time, my aunt didn’t know her friend was gay. My mom informed her of this fact.

The candy shop she works in is full of old lesbians with cats. Their humor is quick and dry, and my aunt fits in well.

A couple years ago, I called my aunt on Mother’s Day. In passing, I mentioned in I was gay, a fact I thought I had mentioned earlier. She stopped me.

“Emma, did you just say you were gay?”

“Yes.” I hear a chuckle from my uncle in the background.

“Good thing your mom never heard about that.”

“I told her after she was diagnosed.”

“And how did that go?”

“Not well.”

“I didn’t think so.” ***

Current drag is much more indicative of the current socio-political climate of LGBT rights, but it’s hard to step in any direction academically without being bombarded with papers that demean drag as a performance art and reduce and dehumanize its participants.

*** My aunt accidentally found herself entrenched in the queer community. I remember her saying, very clearly in my adolescence, that she has“no problem with gay people. They’re just going to hell.” Casually. In the past five years, she became close friends with a woman who opened her own candy shop. My aunt even left

As far as my aunt is concerned, the gay community starts and ends with the lesbians who work in her candy shop. My introduction into the LGBT community as a true member felt like falling down VOLUME 9

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the rabbit hole. Because the LGBT community is essentially a set of Russian nesting dolls demographically, it’s important to identify what drag culture is. I started my research specifically intending to research “bio queens,” or drag queens who identify as female. There is not nearly as much academic research on “bio queens” as there is on drag queens, which limited my inquiry. “Bio queen” isn’t listed in the Oxford English Dictionary, and “drag queen” only has one definition, which limits a drag queen to someone who is biologically male (2017).

For female identifying performers, these gaps in recognition exist everywhere and are indicative of gender norms—even within a community that denounces gender norms. There are three main contributors to drag performers coming to be: “gender transgression, masquerade, and same-sexuality” (Taylor & Rupp, 2004, p. 119). While true, there is no doubt that male identifying performers benefit from their own gender transgression disproportionately to female identifying performers.

Rose Alice has been a drag performer in Denver for almost two years. Her inspiration came from RuPaul’s Drag Race, and she quickly developed from an obsessive fan to a full-blown participant.

Rose recalls, “I felt like, oh my god, they’re complete weirdos like me with huge personalities and a passion for music, performance, fashion, etc!”

While watching Season 8, she remembers telling herself, “Holy shit, if I were a man, I would be so good at this. But I didn’t think anything of it because I had never heard of a ‘hyper drag queen.’”

I, too, had never heard of a hyper drag queen 16

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until my interview with one. I read several academic papers differentiating drag queens and “bio queens,” and I wrote an ethnography using the words “bio queen.” Yes, hyper queens and “bio queens” mean similar things. I assumed that bio queen is an umbrella term for all female identifying performers, but “bio” is shunned by the drag community as a trans-exclusionary term. Moving forward, these participants will be referred to as hyper queens.

In recent years, academic research on drag has shifted to narrate the gay community’s endorsement of hypermasculinity as a way to distance themselves from the femininity that plays into drag performance (Bishop, Kiss, Morrison, Rusche, & Specht, 2014, pp. 555-564). This begs the question: How do hyper queens reap the consequences of this mentality? Bishop et al. (2014) account for this phenomenon by suggesting that the AIDS crisis caused gay men to reject characteristics they deemed weak to become more socially accepted.

That gay men embraced traditional gender roles provided male privilege as a way to recoup some of the losses of a disenfranchised community but detracted from another (p. 561). It makes sense. It follows logic, but it doesn’t make it fair to performers today who are forced into lesser roles because of the drag climate. Drag queens are still regularly regarded as freaks and novelties, but they are more respected and appreciated now than they have been in decades (Horowitz, 2013, pp. 310-313; Moncrieff & Lienard, 2017, p. 1). It’s as if the accolades for the drag community serve as a cultural deterrent

and a fierce competitor by night. She is also queer.

We briefly touched on sexuality but only so far as to ask, “Are you queer, too?” which was followed by a resounding, “Yes.” It’s hard to examine the relationship between hyper queens and sexuality.

Truth be told, I have no idea if hyper queens are more likely to be queer than heterosexual. Drag has reached an era where its audience is much broader than its former demographic, which will shift the people who choose to perform and engage. I am queer. My gal pal Ellen is straight, and she convinced me of the drag community’s validity.

The drag community has a lot of internalized hatred. Based off my observations, the current drag climate is uneasy and somewhat cringey. Within the community, drag is given accolades as an art form, but drag performers are still disrespected, sometimes right in front of us. *** A small man in a red puffy jacket keeps grabbing at the performers when they walk the front of the stage.

He is called out by several performers. I have seen this man before; there are about five men at Tracks who regularly harass women/drag performers and get thrown out of the club. This man was quickly removed immediately after a drag queen performed.

I’ve found that even in queer clubs, there can be a predatorial environment for female-conforming people. My friends and I had a man thrown out of the club for the same thing, which almost helps you relate to the queens. Even though most are males, while performing, queens are treated with the same disrespect. It’s as if dressing as a woman is an automatic invitation to touch, harass, and disrespect. Even though many men

Yvie Oddly at RuPaul’s DragCon 2019 [Los Angeles] DVSROSS [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)]

in the queer community. Because drag performers are now endorsed more publicly, those in the queer community generally respect their craft but not necessarily their personhood.

I had never seen a drag performance before my first night at Tracks. The availability of queer culture in sunny Colorado Springs, Colorado is, shall we say, limited. Moving to Denver was my out. In a world that caters to default sexuality, it was exactly what I needed. Tracks, a gay nightclub in downtown Denver, is a hotspot for drag performances and booze-fueled consensual hookups.

Gay nightclubs cover a plethora of demographics. There are showoff gays, “too-cool-to-be-here” lesbians, full drag divas, “still-trying-to-figurethings-out” teenagers, your bears, your otters, your polyamorists, and (of course) straight men who go to LGBT clubs to prey on gay women because their guard is down. Can’t forget about them: they are thrown out every night. Before you ask: Yes, straight girls are there. No, no one invited them.

Tracks is also one of many locations where Rose has performed and competed. She refers to Tracks as her breakout introduction to drag: “I moved to Denver, Colorado and I started going to “Drag Nation,” one of the biggest drag shows in the US at Tracks, Denver. They bring in different RPDR queens every month as well as having a regular Denver cast, including Nina Flowers. There, I was immediately drawn to the Denver queen Yvie Oddly. I befriended her soon enough and one night told her that I felt like a drag queen stuck in a woman’s body.” Rose sent me that statement over Facebook, where I did most of my coordinating with her over a few weeks. Rose is a hairstylist by day

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in the club are queer in some regard, it doesn’t exempt them from misogyny. Sexism is still sexism, no matter who does it. The man my friends and I had thrown out had profiled us before. That was the third time we had him removed. *** The origin of negating drag performers is unclear, but it’s led to a culture that treats them as commodities instead of human beings. It’s as if dressing up as a woman encourages people to treat them as a woman, accompanied by all the negativity that women face, multiplied by the audacity of the queer community.

I don’t know what compels men to act that way.

There is a genre of queer people who think the rules of physical touch and human decency don’t apply to them because of their sexuality. While this is not limited by gender, nine times out of ten, it’s cis men who are the aggravators. Moncrieff and Lienard (2017) write that “the cost of the behavior is clearly recognized among gay participants” (p. 4).

The origin of negating drag performers is unclear, but it’s led to a culture that treats them as commodities instead of human beings. It’s as if dressing up as a woman encourages people to treat them as a woman, accompanied by all the negativity that women face, multiplied by the audacity of the queer community.

I don’t really know what conclusions to draw.

This has been an entirely mixed bag. In one regard, hyper queens have challenged what it means to be

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female and to culturally and creatively represent the queer community. They also have channeled obscurity into art. On the other hand, being a drag performer comes with physical, logical, and emotional risks. I have an exorbitant amount of respect for these people, but they are not without flaws.

There is a cost to their craft. I wonder what will happen in Ellen’s hyper queen career. I wonder how she will present, how she will be regarded, and (unfortunately) how she will be victimized. *** My brother and dad hold a collective teacup’s worth of emotional vulnerability. They’re very similar that way—they don’t like to talk the way I do. Generally, they’re pretty cool about who I am. They make fun of astrology, which is blatantly homophobic; but, apart from that, we’ve been doing all right. Occasionally, my dad has outed me at dinner parties to win arguments. I think it’s funny because I would do the same thing. My brother and I talk about girls as much as you can talk about with girls with someone who hosts a weekly board game night. It’s not perfect. I don’t always get the support I need, but I have the support that I have. I’m usually quite pleased with it.

My mother always said it only takes one person to change the way you think about certain demographics forever. If she were still here, she would be more understanding of me. She was an incredibly smart woman, and I like to think she reacted the way she did because she was embarrassed she didn’t know me as well as she thought. I believe in consolation, and I try to think the best of people until they give me reason not to. In the generations that

vegetables, my inability to drink anything until I’ve brushed my teeth, our shared talent for arranging flowers. I’m disappointed I don’t get to share who I am with her now, but I’m not angry at her initial reaction. Things take time to process, something she didn’t have. But I feel her around me in the ways that I compose myself. Whether she supported me or not, there is a little dash of Charlene in queer culture because she made me. I’m grateful for that.

Denver Pride 2018 © Adrian Michael / Flickr.com/photos/126438536@N03

follow, our children will have it easier than us in this regard. I look forward to that.

Adapting is hard. Being gay is hard. Thinking your child is one way and then finding out they are actually a vastly different person than you anticipated is difficult to accept—especially when you know you won’t be around to see your child become that person. With each passing day, I see myself turning into a taller, gayer version of my mom. I see her in so many of the things I do: the way I chop

REFERENCES Bishop, C., Kiss, M., Morrison, T. G., Rushe, D. M., & Specht, J. (2014). The association between gay men’s stereo-

typic beliefs about drag queens and their endorsement of hypermasculinity. Journal of Homosexuality,61(4), 554–567.

doi:10.1080/00918369.2014.865464

Horowitz, K. (2013). The trouble with "Queerness": Drag and the making of two cultures. Journal of Women in Culture & Society, 38(2), 303–326. Retrieved January 27, 2018, from http://eds.b.ebscohost.com.du.idm.oclc.org/ehost/ pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=1&sid=0f03c041-d30f-47a6-b673-fd052ce54563%40sessionmgr102

LeMaster, B. (2015). Discontents of being and becoming fabulous on RuPaul's Drag U: Queer criticism in neoliberal times. Women's Studies in Communication, 38(2), 167–186. Retrieved

January 27, 2018, from http://eds.b.ebscohost.com.du.idm.oclc.org/ehost/pdfviewer/ pdfviewer?vid=1&sid=c90ddcf b-e3e2-4dc0-8e19-84f781f9c499%40sessionmgr104

Moncrieff, M., & Lienard, P. (2017). A natural history of the drag queen phenomenon. Evolutionary Psy-

chology 15(2): 1–14. Retrieved January 27, 2018, from http://journals.sagepub.com.du.idm.oclc.org/doi/ pdf/10.1177/1474704917707591

Rodi, R. (2018, February 29). Drag queen. In Oxford English Dictionary. Retrieved January 29, 2018, from https:// en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/drag_queen

Taylor, V., & Rupp, L. J. (2004). Chicks with dicks, men in dresses: What it means to be a drag queen. Journal of Homosexuality, 64(3/4), 113–133. Retrieved January 27, 2018, from http://eds.a.ebscohost.com.du.idm.oclc.org/ehost/ pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=1&sid=de653d78-25bb-48aa-9c73-633479d30101%40sessionmgr4006

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

image provided by author

Emma Dent is a third-year student from Colorado Springs with concentrations in socio-legal studies and Spanish and a minor in psychology. After receiving her undergraduate degree, Emma plans to teach for a few years before returning to school to get a masters in psychology and become a sex therapist.

A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR I wrote this paper during my second quarter at DU, when I was eighteen. It is a compilation autoethnography of everything I wrote over the course of my first writing class in college. I got a rocky start. I chose to focus my research on queer community, and I experienced one less-than-kind peer review very early on in the quarter. Needless to say, everything I wrote for the remainder of the quarter was very angsty. I felt very angsty at the time.

The paper has since been edited by a slightly-more-stable twenty-year-old Emma. It is still angsty, as I wanted to do justice to the very real emotions I was processing at the time—leaving home, slowly integrating into a community that had loud and proud queer folk, and coming to understand that my familial life as I knew it was ending.

This is an essay on oversharing, as I am one to do. It’s also an explanation of who I was in my first few months away from the home I grew up in. It’s disorganized, sarcastic, observant, and full of grief. April Chapman-Ludwig, my professor at the time and editor of this essay’s final draft, encouraged me to chase those feelings. Reading your old writing can be embarrassing and cringey, but I am grateful for the support I encountered and glad that I let those feelings take shape instead of dissipating into something that could have been.

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WRIT LARGE: 2020

Bears Ears

T HE WA R ON P U BLIC L A NDS:

by

Will Fricker

WRIT 1122: Rhetoric & Academic Writing | Professor Megan Kelly

ALTHOUGH BEARS EARS NATIONAL MONUMENT WAS only established in 2016, its history runs far deeper for the indigenous tribes that reside there. The Hopi and Zuni tribes can trace their origin in the area to at least 2,500 years ago, when the Ancestral Puebloans, their ancestors, began settling there. Since then, these tribes and others, including the Navajo, consider the land sacred, using it for worship, crafting intricate petroglyphs, and creating traditional Navajo hogans. As a result, over 100,000 Native American archaeological and cultural sites can be found in Bears Ears (“Native American�).

Not only has Bears Ears provided value too great to count for these Native Americans, but it has also created a great deal of value in the monetary sense. More recently, Bears Ears National Monument has been a major contributor to the local economy, providing over $1 billion in ecosystem service benefits yearly and hosting over 91,000 people per year for its multitude of outdoor recreation activities, such as hiking, rock climbing, and rafting (Philbrick). Clearly, this land is extremely sacred, beautiful, and beneficial to the Native Americans and outdoor recreators across the country; thus, it deserves protection through national monument status. However, in a devastating move, President Trump ordered an 85% reduction in the size of the national monument on December 4, 2017, opening it up for oil drilling and VOLUME 9

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In a devastating move, President Trump ordered an 85% reduction in the size of the national monument on December 4, 2017, opening it up for oil drilling and removing previous protections on its fragile environment.

removing previous protections on its fragile environment.

The consequences of Trump’s reduction of Bears Ears are numerous and catastrophic to those that hold the land sacred. With visitors to the area increasing every year and a lack of infrastructure to support those visitors, such as visitor centers and park rangers, both the land itself and the thousands of sacred Native American artifacts and sites are suffering. The rate of increase in visitation to the area is truly astounding: it “tripled between 2005 and 2015, doubled again in 2016, and doubled yet again in the first half of 2017” (Nordhaus, “What Trump’s”). With this massive increase in visitation has come damage such as campers using ancient Navajo hogans for firewood and vandalism to precious petroglyphs. As visitation to the area continually increases, and the area no longer has the protection of a national monument, the damage will only accelerate.

Another consequence of 85% of Bears Ears no longer being considered a national monument

© John Fowler / Flickr.com/photos/snowpeak

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is that the area is now open to oil drilling, which would both disrupt the area’s beauty, with massive oil rigs obstructing pristine views, and lead to significant carbon emissions. Possibility for oil drilling played a key role in the decision to reduce Bears Ears, with multiple studies done by the Department of the Interior to determine the economic prosperity of oil drilling in the area (Lipton).

Therefore, the likelihood of oil drilling in the near future is quite high. Additionally, loss of national monument status means loss of habitat protections for endangered species living in the area, such as the California Condor, the Mexican spotted owl, and the greenback cutthroat trout. These species require limited human interaction and careful protection to survive; thus, they are in severe risk without these protections. Compared to other national parks, including Yosemite, Yellowstone, and Rocky Mountain, Bears Ears placed in the top 10% of ecological connectivity and the top 4% for night sky darkness (Rowland-Shea). As a result, Bears Ears is one of the most biodiverse and pristine public lands in the country, and it is imminent that the area receives its national monument status in full.

The beauty and deep history of Bears Ears have allowed it to become a place of healing and sacredness for multitudes of people, Native and not alike. Jim Enote, a member of the Zuni tribe that once resided in Bears Ears, has strong connections to the area. Enote emphasizes these connections: “The people that lived there and built the structures there and carved on the cliffs there, that created

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33033781/

Zuni Houses © Lewis H. Morgan – Internet Archive, Public Domain

the ceramics and the baskets and other things that we see there—the blood of those people is in my veins.” In an interview with National Geographic, Enote describes the rich history of the area, from the Ancestral Puebloans to today, when the Zunis make pilgrimages back to the area to see and feel that history that shaped them and is in their veins.

Enote goes on to say, “The Bears Ears monument is a treasury of time-tested Native American experience. People can learn from that place. It is a library.

It is an archive. It is a museum” (Nordhaus, “What the Bears”). He proudly proclaims Bears Ears as a place of Native American land and experience, a truly brave statement in the face of heavy contention and adversity. Long before this land could even be considered a national monument, Enote’s ancestors lived in peace and harmony with it. Since then, Americans have stolen their land, destroyed their artifacts, and now even taken away a small success by removing the national monument status.

Additionally, Morgan Sjogren, a non-Native trailrunner, practiced the Navajo tradition of running towards the sunrise in Bears Ears on her journey of personal healing soon after a divorce. The Navajo would make this run every morning to visit the spirits that would watch over them and thank them for all the gifts they have received. Sjogren chronicles her experience: “I wanted to focus on this ritual for personal healing during a challenging chapter in my life—and out of the desire to do something, anything, to help raise awareness and protect public lands for the native people, the plants, and the animals that inhabit them and all

who are drawn here to recreate.” Sjogren’s experience in Bears Ears exemplifies how we should be interacting with this land, with respect and honor to the Native Americans that were there before us, but unfortunately that is not the case.

Perhaps the most significant consequence of Trump’s shrinking of Bears Ears is the potential for the loss of other public lands. The shrinking of Bears Ears was a result of a review of all national monuments across the country carried out by former Interior Secretary, Ryan Zinke, which inLong before this land could even be considered a national monument, Enote’s ancestors lived in peace and harmony with it. Since then, Americans have stolen their land, destroyed their artifacts, and now even taken away a small success by removing the national monument status.

cluded the recommendation to shrink Bears Ears and at least five other national monuments. At the same time that Bears Ears was shrunk, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument was cut nearly in half. Both of these reductions in size represent the largest reduction in size of public land in American history and set a precedent, opening up the possibility of more public lands to be reduced in size (Lipton).

Public lands provide beauty and enjoyment to millions of visitors every year and generate billions of dollars of revenue and to lose them would be utVOLUME 9

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Images provided by author

terly devastating. Yet, reducing more public lands would not be a surprising move by Trump, considering other actions he has taken in his war against public lands. Trump passed a bill to allow drilling in the sacred and precious Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, renewed mining leases in Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area, and opened up land next to the Grand Canyon for uranium mining; these are just a few of the actions Trump has taken in his brutal siege of public lands (Greenberg). If Trump is not elected out of office in 2020, this attack will only continue, and the fate of public lands will only become more hopeless.

With the uncertain fate of our public lands, we, as American citizens, must act now to defend them.

While more and more people are voting with each election, political complacency is still a significant threat in the fight to save our public lands, with only about 47% of the voting-eligible population showing up to the polls in the 2018 midterm elections (Domonoske). Fortunately, this is an easy fix: vote! If you are worried about losing our treasured national parks and monuments, vote for politicians and ballot proposals promising to protect these lands and encourage others to do the same. Additionally, calling your representatives to encourage them to vote for public land friendly proposals is an excellent way to take advantage of our democratic system and voice your concern. Finally, to address the vandalism happening in areas like Bears Ears, lead by example when visiting public lands.

When visiting, act responsibly, practice the Leave No Trace Seven Principles, and enjoy the lands the way they’re meant to be enjoyed!

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1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

Plan Ahead & Prepare Travel & Camp on Durable Surfaces Dispose of Waste Properly Leave What You Find Minimize Campfire Impacts Respect Wildlife Be Considerate of Other Visitors © The Leave No Trace Center for Outdoor Ethics

© Bob Wick, Bureau of Land Management / Flickr.com/photos/mypubliclands

WORKS CITED “Bears Ears National Monument.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 22 Feb. 2019, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Bears_Ears_National_Monument

“Conservation Groups File Lawsuit after President Trump Illegally Axed Dinosaur Treasure Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.” Earthjustice, 4 Dec. 2017, earthjustice.org/news/press/2017/conservation-groups-file-lawsuit-after-president-trump-illegally-axed-dinosaur-treasure-grand-staircase-escalante-national-monument

Greenberg, Max. “One Year Ago, Trump Launched His Attack on Our Public Lands. This Is What's Hap-

pened Since Then.” Wilderness.org, The Wilderness Society, 26 Apr. 2018, www.wilderness.org/articles/blog/

one-year-ago-trump-launched-his-attack-our-public-lands-whats-happened-then

Indianz. “Jim Enote: NFL Team Owner Brushed Away Concerns over Mascot.” Indianz, Indianz, 12 Aug. 2014, www. indianz.com/News/2014/08/12/jim-enote-nfl-team-owner-brush.asp

Lipton, Eric, and Lisa Friedman. “Oil Was Central in Decision to Shrink Bears Ears Monument, Emails Show.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 2 Mar. 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/03/02/climate/bears-ears-national-monument.htm

“Native American Connections.” Protect Bears Ears, Bears Ears Coalition, bearsearscoalition.org/ ancestral-and-modern-day-land-users/

Nordhaus, Hannah. “What the Bears Ears Monument Means to a Native American.” National Geo-

graphic, National Geographic, 20 Oct. 2018, www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2018/10/ bears-ears-monument-native-americans-photography/

—. “What Trump's Shrinking of National Monuments Actually Means.” National Geo-

graphic, National Geographic Society, 2 Feb. 2018, news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/12/ trump-shrinks-bears-ears-grand-staircase-escalante-national-monuments/

Philbrick, Cyrus. “Bears Ears and the Value of Public Lands.” Earth Economics, Earth Economics, 5 June 2017, www. eartheconomics.org/latest-news-blog/2017/6/5/bears-ears-and-the-value-of-public-lands

Rowland-Shea, Jenny. “American Treasure at Risk: How Bears Ears National Monument Stacks up to U.S. National

Parks.” Center for American Progress, 5 Apr. 2017, www.americanprogress.org/issues/green/news/2017/04/05/429667/ american-treasure-risk-bears-ears-national-monument-stacks-u-s-national-parks/

Sjogren, Morgan. “Bears Ears: Run to the Sunrise.” REI, REI, 7 June 2018, www.rei.com/blog/run/ bears-ears-run-to-the-sunrise

Udall, Tom, and Raúl M. Grijalva. “It's Clear Trump Illegally Shrunk Bears Ears; the Department of Justice

Doesn't Want to Hear Our Legal Opinion.” The Denver Post, The Denver Post, 6 Dec. 2018, www.denverpost.

com/2018/12/06/its-clear-trump-illegally-shrunk-bears-ears-the-department-of-justice-doesnt-want-to-hear-ourlegal-opinion/

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

image provided by author

Will Fricker is a second-year student majoring in marketing with a minor in sustainability, hoping to have a career in marketing for an environmentally-focused company. He loves doing just about anything outdoors, especially climbing, backpacking, and snowboarding, and also has a passion for protecting the spaces that he does these activities in. Will is currently involved in several sustainability-based organizations on campus, including Divest DU, SusCom, and DU Backpacking Club.

A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR When assigned the task of creating a 4-6-page story of any genre for my WRIT 1122 class, choosing a topic was quite easy. While I had not yet been to those specific areas, I perceived President Trump’s massive reduction of both Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments as a very personal attack.

Almost all of my most formative life experiences have occurred in some form of public land, and this was the greatest attack on public lands in American history. I felt a need to rationalize my anger and hurt through this paper, illustrating why America needs these national monuments and the consequences of their reduction.

Since writing this story, I have visited both Grand Staircase-Escalante and part of the area that used to be considered Bears Ears, experiencing their natural beauty firsthand and making that pain even more personal. While backpacking under the awe-inspiring Jacob Hamblin Arch in Grand Staircase and climbing the perfect sandstone cracks in Bears Ears, I couldn’t help but to think about how important it is that people see these areas.

However, in order for these areas to be able to support more visitation, they need the protections of national monument status, to improve infrastructure and prevent damaging acts from unassuming tourists.

The fight for Bears Ears isn’t over; the native tribes that reside there are still filing lawsuits and speaking out against the damage done to their home. I encourage everyone passionate about protecting public lands to voice their support for these native tribes, raise awareness for this issue, and support politicians who vow to protect America’s beauty.

Opening image on page 19 © Bob Wick, Bureau of Land Management / Flickr.com/photos/mypubliclands

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WRIT LARGE: 2020

LE AR N , LISTE N , TE ACH:

T HE LIF E OF A SE L F by

Avery Becklenberg

WRIT 1633: Advanced Writing and Research | Professor John Tiedemann

AT 4:40 ON A SATURDAY NIGHT IN NOVEMBER OF 2007, May stood, with bare feet, on cold sand. White foam greeted the tips of her toes as waves rolled in and out. Cold air flooded the beach, and wind blew briskly by, tangling her long blonde hair and blowing her brown patterned skirt wildly in all directions. As the sun sank low in the sky, the 7-year-old girl begged to go home, but her mother refused her requests because May’s grandmother had yet to arrive.

They had planned to meet at 4:30 to take a family picture, featuring all three living generations of the family, but May’s visiting grandmother, Mary Ann, was not in sight, and they could not take the picture without her.

Mary Ann had been visiting her son’s family, May’s family, in the small ocean-side town of Pacific Grove, California for about three weeks. When Heidi, Mary Ann’s daughter-in-law, suggested meeting at a nearby beach for a sunset picture to commemorate her trip, Mary Ann enthusiastically agreed. Mary Ann frequently visited that beach, and she had walked there alone countless times before, so when she did not arrive on time for the picture, Heidi began to worry.

The setting sun neared the horizon, and if Mary Ann did not arrive soon, they would have to reschedule the picture.

The sun set at 4:52 that night, and Mary Ann had yet to appear.

The beach plunged into darkness, so the family decided to go look VOLUME 9

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(left) Mary Ann with her husband, John (right) Mary Ann and her husband, John, on their wedding day Courtesy Becklenberg Family

she remembered only bits and pieces of her terrifying moments alone on the beach. Why had she gotten lost? Where was she trying to go? Why did she decide to go on a walk at night? Why had she been all alone? The details escaped her, as they had in a few other situations over the past months. She began to suspect that her frequent lapses of memory were not simply signs of old age; maybe something bigger was wrong.

When Mary Ann returned to her home in Chicago a week later, she and her husband decided the time had come to seek professional help. Their decision mirrored one made by another relatively young woman, Auguste Deter, and her husband, over one hundred years earlier, in 1901. At only fifty years old, Auguste began to act strangely.

She became jealous and resentful of her husband, believing that he was having an affair, despite his repeated denials. She developed problems sleeping, speaking, reading and writing. These symptoms frightened her husband even more than her irrational accusations, as she had long been a literate, socially engaged woman. Her symptoms continued to progress, and she became fearful, paranoid, Why had she gotten lost? Where was she trying to go? and aggressive, seemingly losing herself in hysteWhy did she decide to go on a walk at night? Why had ria. Eventually, she behaved so erratically, unpreshe been all alone? The details escaped her, as they dictably, and dangerously that her husband could had in a few other situations over the past months. no longer handle her alone, so he sought to admit her to a psychiatric hospital at the young age of 51 (Ellison).

Upon her arrival in the hospital, Auguste and The family rode back to Mary Ann’s cottage in her husband met a young doctor named Alois Alzsilence. May, still bitter that she was forced to stand heimer. Alzheimer examined Auguste and found so long on the cold beach, did not pay much atten- that she demonstrated inconsistencies in her basic tion to her grandmother’s distraction and distress. cognitive functions. For example, when asked her When Mary Ann woke up the next morning, name, she responded ‘Auguste,’ but when asked her mind traveled back to the events of the night her husband’s name, she gave her own name again. before. As she tidied the cottage’s small kitchen, Similarly, while she could recognize and name for her. May and her family loaded into the car and drove slowly along the coast, looking for signs of their loved one. After driving about a mile in anxious silence, Heidi’s eyes rested upon the silhouette of woman shivering in the cold on the side of the road. Realizing it was Mary Ann, carrying her favorite purse and wearing gold earrings and red lipstick, they pulled over, stopped the car, and motioned for her to climb in.

Mary Ann reluctantly approached the car, a concerned, bewildered look in her eyes. She sat down in the vehicle, and Heidi began to ask questions.

“Are you alright?” she exclaimed, expressing her concern. “Where were you? What happened? Was I unclear about which beach we went to?”

Mary Ann, clearly confused but relieved to have found her family, seemed to believe that her family, not herself, had gotten lost; she did not realize that the section of beach where she had waited was not their usual meeting spot.

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one that Auguste died before receiving and that made Alois Alzheimer famous. She demonstrated some of the same symptoms as Auguste had onehundred-ten years before her, though Mary Ann and her family hoped for a more positive prognosis.

In the following months, Mary Ann, her husband John, their three children, and their families attempted to comprehend the surprising, devastating news that was her diagnosis. Alzheimer’s disease has no known cure, and, as evidenced by Auguste, the outlook for a diagnosed individual, especially one so young, is grim.

Of course, at eight years old, May was not included in heavy conversations about the future of her beloved grandmother with whom she dressed up, put on plays, and went to the park. In fact, May was not aware of any bad news or change until the following summer, June of 2008, when she attended a family wedding and overheard her dad and aunts discussing her grandmother. When they realized May was listening, they quickly explained to her that “Gran” was sick, and that sometimes she had trouble remembering certain things. May had not noticed anything wrong with Gran (who still appeared well dressed and competent, with nice earrings and lipstick in hand), but she heard the gravity of her father’s voice and recognized something serious going on.

That night at the wedding, May listened to Gran tell her a story about a horse named Cha-Cha that she had owned in her childhood. Gran told the same story three times.

Mary Ann’s story about the horse named

Mary Ann and her horse, Cha-Cha Courtesy Becklenberg Family

some objects, “like a pencil, a key, a cigar, when asked what she was eating she would reply ‘spinach’ even though she was eating pork” (American Senior Communities). The results of this examination puzzled Alzheimer. Auguste demonstrated all the symptoms of dementia, but the doctor’s previous learning informed him that his patient was far too young to truly have the disorder commonly ascribed to elderly individuals, usually over sixty-five years old (American Senior Communities).

Ultimately, Alzheimer diagnosed Auguste with “presenile dementia” (as opposed to the more typical “senile dementia” (Ellison).

Auguste spent her final years in the mental hospital, finally passing away on April 8, 1906, at 55 years old. After her death, Alzheimer performed a biopsy on his deceased patient’s brain. What he found surprised him: “her brain revealed abnormalities and extensive atrophy in the cortex—the outer layer that is responsible for memory, language, judgment and thought in general. While these findings were not unusual, it was Deter’s age that made them remarkable. Previously, these abnormalities were seen only in patients in their seventies” (American Senior Communities). It appeared that Auguste had sustained the kind of mental deterioration associated with senile dementia, but because of her young age, her doctor did not have a name for her condition. Had Auguste lived today, or even in as early as the 1950s, she would have been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease.

Mary Ann received that very diagnosis—the

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Cha-Cha went something like this: as a child, she lived with her four siblings in a large house near Chicago’s North Shore, where her parents socialized at golf courses and cocktail lounges. Though they lived in the city, her father promised her that, if ever the family owned enough land, Mary Ann could have a pet pony. Of course, at the time that he made this promise, Mary Ann’s father did not believe they would ever have such a property.

However, when Mary Ann was twelve, her family moved out of the city, to Ohio, to a home on many acres of land: enough space to keep a horse.

Her father kept his promise, and Mary Ann got the horse of which she had always dreamt.

May learned a lot about Cha-Cha, and about other details of Mary Ann’s childhood as she descended into her illness. Each time she saw her grandmother, she heard the same stories over and over. This behavior—recounting memories from childhood—is generally expected of individuals with Alzheimer’s disease. They lose their most recent memories along with their ability to make new memories, and their understandings of the world start to rely more heavily on childhood experiences. It seems as though they revert to a previous ‘self,’ one that is more childlike.

The documentary 56 Up comments on the similarities and differences between a person’s “self ” in childhood and adulthood and on the impact that life experiences can have on a person’s perception of their self. The film follows the lives of eight individuals from the time they turn seven until they reach 56, tracking their personal development and insights. One of the more poignant moments

(left) Mary Ann’s first communion in 1951 (right) Mary Ann with her grandchildren on Halloween, 2006, in Pacific Grove, California Courtesy Becklenberg Family

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in the film occurs when a 56-year-old woman named Lynn comments that “when you look at the 7-year-old us, it’s hard to believe it’s us” (Apted et al.). Lynn’s words fall like stones straight into the hearts of people who feel dissociated from their childlike selves. They imply that people change over the courses of their lives, and they strike a chord with individuals who have lost touch with their childlike nature and innocence.

In the film, Lynn’s comments imply that the reason she no longer identifies with her young self, the reason she cannot believe that it’s her, is that she has learned more about life in the past 49 years than her seven-year-old self knew. Her life experiences and the things she has learned from them about happiness, success, failure, grief, disappointment, and everything in between, shape the way she views herself. Middle-aged Lynn knows much more, simply because she has learned from her experiences. Just like Lynn, Mary Ann learned from the experiences that she accumulated over the course of her life, and those lessons shaped her ‘self.’

Her experiences taught her to love her family, to succeed in her career, and to live passionately.

But when Mary Ann developed Alzheimer’s disease, her brain stopped allowing her to learn.

She stopped relating to the present, and she ceased to remember her most recent experiences, instead recounting stories from her childhood, like the one about Cha-Cha the horse. About the progression of her disease, Mary Ann once said, “I began to realize that I wasn’t the gal I used to be. It was different inside my head” (PBS). Though Mary Ann’s cognition and ability to learn from present experiences

and on websites.

Courtesy Becklenberg Family

This picture appeared in magazines

Mary Ann and her husband, John.

decreased rapidly, she retained many of the qualities that had always made her unique, including her childlike sense of wonder, exploration, and fun.

She sang out loud. She played games at the park.

She ran around. She wore silly costumes, dressing up for Halloween with face paint and all. She loved her children and grandchildren, and she always carried herself with poise and dignity.

In 2008, shortly after her diagnosis, Mary Ann’s health began to decline obviously. She found herself forgetting important details and neglecting tasks at work, so she left her job as a social worker and hospice care director. With no cure for Alzheimer’s in sight, she recognized that her disease would inevitably and quickly consume her mind, and she opted to make the most of her situation.

Mary Ann, a perpetually bold, gregarious, classy, put-together woman, decided that, rather than give in to the degradation of her brilliant mind, she would embrace the unwanted disease by telling her story and teaching others while she still could.

Her brave decision to teach, even as she teetered on the edge of the self that she had always known, initiated a new era of simultaneous hope and decay in Mary Ann’s life. She realized that, though Alzheimer’s would ultimately claim her life, the time for that had not yet come. In the meantime, she had an important story to tell. She began speaking out about her experience with Alzheimer’s as she, her husband, and her family learned to cope with their new reality. She started her mission by traveling to speak at conventions and in discussions, both locally and around the country, as a panelist for the National Alzheimer’s Association. Then, as she became a figurehead for the organization, her story spread to local newspapers along with USA Today and Time Magazine. She even appeared in

a PBS documentary, Life Part Two, and in a series of other, smaller recorded interviews. Even today, more than two years after her death, Chicago-area publications still mention Mary Ann. When Mary Ann began speaking, teaching people across the nation about aging and Alzheimer’s disease, she already had the disease. It had already taken hold in her brain, tearing bits and pieces of her memory away in a manner similar to that of a crazed shopper tearing merchandise off of department store shelves on black Friday. At this point, Mary Ann frequently repeated stories about Cha-Cha, and she struggled to make sense of her Her brave decision to teach, even as she teetered on the edge of the self that she had always known, initiated a new era of simultaneous hope and decay in Mary Ann’s life. She realized that, though Alzheimer’s would ultimately claim her life, the time for that had not yet come. In the meantime, she had an important story to tell.

surroundings or learn from present experiences.

Nevertheless, she continued to present herself in front of audiences with pride, class, and dignity, wearing bright red lipstick and her favorite gold earrings, carrying her favorite handbags wherever she went. She believed she had something to teach the world.

Mary Ann believed correctly; she did have lessons to teach. Her experience with Alzheimer’s disease gave her the unique ability to speak about what it feels like to lose touch with the person she’d always been: something that very few people are brave and experienced enough to discuss. If one listens only to a person like Lynn, whose comments VOLUME 9

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Mary Ann at a family reunion.

Courtesy Becklenberg Family

capacity and spoke publicly about her condition.

Now she sprayed the bathroom sink with sunscreen instead of cleaning solution.

After their trip, life seemed to change for Mary Ann and her husband. They knew that Alzheimer’s had truly taken over their lives, and little could be done about it. Mary Ann withdrew from conversations, began smoking cigarettes, and instead of obsessively cleaning, she sat in her messy kitchen, tearing up paper towels for hours on end. By 2016, the decision to move Mary Ann into hospice care (the same hospice program that she herself had managed in her years as a social worker) was a clear one.

In the words of Ronni Bennett, a 68-year-old blogger, “one of the biggest changes in old age is not within ourselves as much as in how other, mostly younger, people treat us. We are dismissed, ignored and made invisible based solely on our appearance.

Put the same words, thoughts and Throughout history and in modern culture, elderly opinions we have in a younger body and the world individuals, especially those afflicted with Alzheimer’s pays attention.” Bennett’s sentiments describe the disease and other mental illnesses, have suffered the phenomenon commonly referred to as ‘ageism,’ most at the hands of the negative, ageist biases held our habit of stereotyping people, of discriminatby younger people in Western societies. ing against them on the basis of their age (World Health Organization). Throughout history and in modern culture, elderly individuals, especially those afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease and other form complete sentences; she frequently began a mental illnesses, have suffered the most at the phrase, mumbled some words, then fell silent. She hands of the negative, ageist biases held by younger often stood in the kitchen holding a rag, but she no people in Western societies.

The almshouses, workhouses, and charitable longer knew to wipe off the counter tops. She could not be trusted to walk into a room by herself or homes of Britain and the United States in the early stroll around the neighborhood as she used to. May 20th century exemplify discrimination and poor recognized that something big had happened to treatment of elderly people in the Western world.

Gran, but what had happened exactly? How could According to The Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Datsuch a change occur? Only a few months earlier, ing to colonial days, the almshouse was used as a she maintained almost full mental and physical dumping ground for the mentally ill, the epileptic, suggest that an individual’s ‘self ’ only develops as they learn from experiences, then they would discount the fact that the lessons an individual can teach also contribute to who they are. Even as Mary Ann lost the capacity to learn, she taught brilliantly.

Her story proves that everyone has something to teach, and the lessons they teach to others define their ‘self ’ just as much as the lessons they learn.

Mary Ann’s condition further declined, and her speaking engagements ended five years after they began, in 2013. That summer, she and her husband took their last trip together, flying across the country to visit May’s family and celebrate the fourth of July. May had seen her grandmother at least once a year since her diagnosis, but on this trip, something was different. While Gran still wore bright red lipstick and gold hoop earrings, she could no longer

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the mentally retarded, the blind, the deaf and dumb, the crippled, the tuberculous, and the destitute aged, as well as for vagrants, petty criminals, prostitutes, unmarried mothers, and abandoned and neglected children.” Needless to say, life in an almshouse was not pleasant. While almshouses, workhouses, and charitable homes offered adequate shelter for their residents—a mélange of people rejected from society—they were often unclean, unsafe, infected with illness, and lacking the medical and psychological care required by their inhabitants. It is as a result of ageism in Western society that healthy, able-bodied, elderly individuals who had no family willing to care for them were sent to almshouses instead of safer homes.

While able-bodied, healthy seniors often found themselves in almshouses and other institutions, “old people with dementia were [also] admitted to lunatic asylums, workhouses, and charitable homes but were not welcome there” (Andrews). In fact, old people, especially the mentally-ill, were, and still are, seen as “intractable burdens” on society (Andrews). Eventually, at the beginning of the 20th century, almshouses began to fall out of favor. However, unstable, ‘burdensome’ elderly people still required care. When state governments began to assume the cost of care for mentally-ill seniors, younger people still did not wish to take care of the elderly; thus, government-supported mental hospitals and institutions gained popularity, replacing traditional almshouses. While hospitalization sounds like a safer solution for care than almshouses, mental hospitals proved to be almost as neglectful of old people with dementia as preceding institutions. For example, between about 1900 and 1950, social workers “saw little use in providing casework to older adults” (Lacey 104).

Professionals believed that mentally-ill old people

had no hope for recovery, so they were sent to the “back wards” of mental hospitals, “in which the task was defined as the provision of humane custodial care,” not as increasing quality of life or improving health (Lacey 109). Not only were elderly people sent away without proper care, they often received treatments in the form of experimental new drugs that caused more harm than good.

Eventually, in the 1950s, the burden of caring for the “demented aged” grew too heavy for mental hospitals, which had become warehouses for this population, to bear (Lacey 108). A movement to deinstitutionalize mentally-ill patients began in 1955; efforts to send current patients home and to decrease new admittances commenced. In 1965, the de-institutionalization movement encountered a turning point with the enactment of Medicare and Medicaid legislation. According to Hugh Richard Slotten, Medicare “made federal money available for nursing-home care [and] led to a massive shift of older patients with dementia out of public psychiatric hospitals.” Since the establishment of Medicare and the nation-wide shift towards favoring nursing homes over institutions, the former have become mainstream fixtures in society.

No longer do elderly individuals, especially those with dementia, Alzheimer’s, or other mental illness receive life-sentences to miserable almshouses and institutions. Instead, they frequently find themselves in nursing homes and hospice centers that look more like warm, inviting houses than barren hospitals. These nursing homes offer therapeutic treatments from social workers, gerontologists, and other doctors who aim to make their residents’ last years comfortable.

Ageism, as Ronni Bennett argues, still exists.

Elderly people, especially those with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, continue to feel ignored,

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invisible, and alienated from the younger people with whom they interact. Their feelings of alienation surely increase when they are placed in senior living facilities, even in nice facilities instead of almshouses or mental hospitals. Nursing homes, hospitalization of the elderly, and ageism as described by Bennett establish and maintain a wide gap between the young and the old. To bridge this gap requires teachers like Mary Ann, who are unafraid to speak out, and who can bring light to questions of mortality that all people, not just the elderly, consider.

In Life Part Two, a PBS documentary, Mary Ann sagely states that “to know that [I] won’t bring this self to the end-stage of [my] life, that I won’t be clear about what’s happening to me, it’s the ultimate loss.” According to the Alzheimer’s Association, one in three people will die with some form of Alzheimer’s disease or dementia. Even people who do not develop Alzheimer’s disease or dementia will age, and therefore, everyone, at some point in their life, is at risk of experiencing the devastating feeling that they are losing their ‘self.’ By talking about this feeling, Mary Ann taught younger people, including May and her family, to humanize the elderly and to better understand the issue of mental deterioration. If young people choose to tuck elderly people who suffer from those hidden ailments away in institutions, ignoring their voices and the lessons they teach, then they miss an opportunity to consider the heartbreaking loss that they too may face one day.

Mary Ann on the beach in California.

Courtesy Becklenberg Family

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When Mary Ann and other activists raise questions pertaining to the psychology and livelihood of both the young and the old, they teach valuable lessons about what it means to be human, and about how humans (including elderly ones) deserve to be treated. Just as Mary Ann used her Alzheimer’s disease to teach valuable lessons, all people have an equal capacity to share the things that make their human ‘self ’ unique, and everyone deserves an audience of people willing to listen to the lessons they teach.

On July 5th, 2016, May sat in a garden of flowers in full bloom with her dad and her Gran. Mary Ann’s eyes appeared to sink into her head as she stared straight ahead. She did not wear lipstick or earrings. She did not move or make any sounds.

Butterflies flew around the garden, landing for a second upon a flower before moving on to the next, and the next, and the next. May and Jim spoke to Mary Ann about the Fourth of July holiday they had celebrated without her the day before at Mary Ann’s family home. They discussed their favorite memories at that house, the lessons they had learned there, the laughter they had shared, and Jim sang his mother a song. May held her grandmother’s hand.

When the song ended, May kissed Mary Ann on the cheek and said goodbye. That was the last time May saw her grandmother.

Mary Ann passed away on September 20th, 2016, eight years after her diagnosis. Some might say that Alzheimer’s won, that Mary Ann lost her battle

Grove, California, in November of 2007.

Courtesy Becklenberg Family

Mary Ann and her family on the beach in Pacific

and her ‘self ’ because she passed away, but that is not the case. As May discovered in the months following her grandmother’s death, Mary Ann taught and inspired. She poured herself out for the world to see, even when she could no longer make sense of her world. She taught countless lessons and led the way for Alzheimer’s research. She advocated for and participated in clinical trials, accepted interviews, appeared on TV, in a PBS documentary, and in influential magazines. She rose to the challenge

that her diagnosis posed, and she lived the last few years of her life with the same passionate, classy, and fast sense of “self ” that she had always propagated. Alzheimer’s ruthlessly stole her ability to learn, but it never stole her ability to teach. Mary Ann remained Mary Ann, her true, beautiful self, even when learning new things became hard. She and her legacy will never stop teaching, as long as others are willing to learn.

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WORKS CITED 56 Up. Directed by Michael Apted, performances by Michael Apted, Claire Lewis Bruce Balden, Jacqueline Bassett, Symon Basterfield, Roger Ebert, George Jesse Turner, Kathryn Millis, and Kim Horton, ITV Studios, 2012.

“Ageism.” World Health Organization, 18 Oct. 2017, www.who.int/ageing/ageism/en/. Accessed 9 Feb. 2019.

“Almshouse.” Encyclopedia Brittanica, 2019, www.britannica.com/topic/almshouse. Accessed 18 Dec. 2018.

“Alzheimer’s Disease.” Concise Medical Dictionary, edited by Elizabeth Martin. 9th ed., Oxford University Press, 2015, www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199687817.001.0001/acref-9780199687817-e-

12161?rskey=Z1WelL&result=1. 18 Dec. 2019.

Andrews, Emily Stella. “Institutionalising Senile Dementia in 19th-Century Britain.” Sociological Health and Illness, vol. 39, no. 2, 2017, pp. 244-257, Doi:10.1111/1467-9566.12452.

Bennet, Ronnie. “What It’s Like to Get Old.” Time Goes By: What It’s Really Like to Get Old, www.timegoesby.net/ weblog/2009/04/what-its-like-to-get-old.html. 24 April 2009.

Cipriani, Gabriele, Cristina Dolciotti, Lucia Picchi, and Ubaldi Bonuccelli. “Alzheimer and His Disease: A Brief History.” Neurological Sciences, vol. 32, no. 2, 2011, pp. 275-9, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10072-0100454-7. Accessed 18 Dec. 2019.

Dovey, Ceridwen. “What Old Age Is Really Like.” The New Yorker. 1 Oct. 2015, www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/what-old-age-is-really-like. Accessed 18 Dec. 2019.

Ellison, James M. “The History of Alzheimer’s Disease.” Bright Focus Foundation, 26 Nov. 2019, www.brightfocus.org/ alzheimers/article/history-alzheimers-disease. 12 Feb. 2019.

Lacey, Debra. “The Evolution of Care: A 100-Year History of Institutionalization of People with Alzheimer’s Disease.”

Journal of Gerontological Social Work, vol. 31, no. 3-4, 1999, pp. 101-131, doi 10.1300/J083v31n03_07.

“Life Part Two: The New Face of Alzheimer’s.” YouTube, Uploaded by PBS, 2 Nov. 2009, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=sIRb--Nauwk.

Maldrum, Marcia. “Alzheimer’s Disease.” The Oxford Companion to United States History. Edited by Paul S. Boyer. Oxford University Press, 2001, www.oxfordreference.com/search?source=%2F10.1093%-

2Facref%2F9780195082098.001.0001%2Facref-9780195082098&q=alzheimer%27s. Accessed 18 Dec. 2019.

Mizikar, Alisa, editor. The Oxford Encyclopedia of the History of American Science, Medicine, and Technology. Oxford University Press, 2014, www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780195082098.001.0001/acref-9780195082098.

Accessed 18 Dec. 2019.

Simm, Louise A., et al. “Making Sense of Self in Alzheimer’s Disease: Reflective Function and Memory.” Aging &

Mental Health, vol. 21, no. 5, 2017, www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13607863.2015.1120706. Accessed 18 Dec. 2019.

Slotten, Hugh Richard. “Alzheimer’s Disease and Dementia.” The Oxford Encyclopedia of the History of American Sci-

ence, Medicine, and Technology, 2019, Oxford University Press, 2015, www-oxfordreference-com.du.idm.oclc.org/.

Accessed 18 Dec. 2019.

“The Story of Auguste Deter.” American Senior Communities, 11 Sept. 2014, www.asccare.com/story-auguste-deter/.

Accessed 13 Feb. 2019.

Wegerer, Jennifer. “6 Alzheimer’s Care Options.” Alzheimers.net, 22 May 2014, www.alzheimers.net/care-options-for-alzheimers/. 22 March 2019.

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Avery Becklenberg is a second-year student majoring in international studies and communications, with minors in leadership studies and Spanish. While originally from California, Avery loves skiing, snowboarding, hiking, paddle boarding, and adventuring in the Colorado mountains. She isn’t yet sure what she would like to pursue after college, but she finds meaning in traveling, meeting new people, and sharing stories.

image provided by author

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR Truth be told, I begrudgingly received the assignment that led me to this paper in my required writing class. In high school, I convinced myself that I didn’t like writing, and though the openended, potentially-interesting prompt tasked me to research, consider, and write about a topic of personal curiosity, I approached the essay as yet another chore due at the end of the quarter.

At first, I struggled to identify a topic for my essay. Then, one day, it dawned on me: I know very, very little about Alzheimer’s, a disease that runs in my family and so many others, which will likely invade my life more than once again. As I began to research the disease, I repeatedly read phrases like “he did not recognize himself and his family” or “she lost herself in the disease.” What is the self that these individuals lost? Where does it come from?

Does everyone define it the same way?

Those questions caught my attention and captivated me for months as I constructed this paper. Not only did I learn about the human brain, a ravenous disease, and American culture, I reflected on my own life, my grandmother, and my family’s encounter with Alzheimer’s. I thoroughly enjoyed connecting personal anecdotes to academic research as I constructed my final product. Overall, the process taught me a valuable lesson: that academic inquiry is not separate from real life. In fact, combining research with reality can even be fun.

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Que Dios te Bendiga

by

Abigail Moreno Zavala

WRIT 1122: Rhetoric and Academic Writing | Professor Blake Sanz

WHEN I WAS SIX YEARS OLD, MY MOM ASKED ME TO PUT on a fluffy white dress and pinned on a sparkly crown to my head. I was being fussy, and I didn’t want to do anything but lie in my abuelita’s air-conditioned room watching cartoons.

So she told me I was going to become a princess.

And I believed her.

All of us—my aunts, uncles, cousins, abuela, my mom, and I— packed into three cars and we drove to a giant church towards the center of the city. It was early. The sun was just rising from the horizon as a light breeze made my aunts and I huddle closer together. The birds chirped as we walked into the brightly lit church and through the creaky pews towards the far right side of the building.

It felt like several hours had passed before my mom finally took my hand and guided me to the front of the church where the pastor stood next to a basin of holy water. He grabbed my face as he wiped the holy water on my forehead in the shape of a cross.

I wasn’t receiving my first communion.

I was becoming a princess.

When I was nine years old, my mom took me to a church near our house and had me join their choir. I loved singing! Any chance I could get, I would sing. And, because my mom loved to hear me sing, joining the choir was something I’d gladly do for her. I mean, my 38

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friends were in the choir too, which was pretty fun.

I didn’t know what I was singing.

I would just flip through a thick binder filled with pages of lyrics, and sing out whatever words were written on them. I didn’t know what any of the words meant. Our choir teacher would tell us things like, “Sing with more emotion! Think about who you’re singing for!” And, honestly, I’d get confused. These lyrics meant nothing to me: they were in Spanish, they talked about not sinning and supporting some guy who’s always watching you, and I only sang them because I liked singing. The only emotion I sang with was joy, knowing that I would get cookies after the service.

At some point, however, I got tired of going to practice every week, and when I told my mom I no longer wanted to go, she yelled at me for being so disrespectful towards God. I didn’t understand what it meant to “disrespect God,” but it felt horrible being yelled at, so I kept going to practice and never complained to my mom again.

When the leader of the choir group had to move away and the group no longer had to meet, I was happy. My mom was disappointed, but she never made me join another choir ever again.

When I was eleven years old, I yelled at my mom for placing a tall, lit candle under one of the shelves in our kitchen. The smoke from the candle was leaving marks under the shelf, and I told her it was a fire hazard.

She said I was evil.

The candle was lit for La Virgin de Guadalupe, so that she could protect us. I cried. What could the candle be protecting us from if it nearly caused a fire in our house? Why was I seen as a horrible person? I didn’t want to hurt anybody!

The next day, my mother moved the candle.

She placed it above the sink, and it only stayed lit at night. I still saw it as a hazard, but I never said anything about it, and I apologized to my mom for hurting her. It hurt me to see her so angry.

When I was twelve years old, my mom placed a dish full of dry white rice on top of the microwave “Sing with more emotion! Think about who you’re singing for!” These lyrics meant nothing to me: they were in Spanish, they talked about not sinning and supporting some guy who’s always watching you, and I only sang them because I liked singing. The only emotion I sang with was joy, knowing that I would get cookies after the service.

and asked us to put all of our spare change into the platter when we could. When I asked her why she put it on top of the microwave, she laughed and said it was because we used the microwave so often to heat up food, so she knew we would see it often enough to remember to put our change in it.

I got angry when I asked her what we were saving up for and she said it was for the church.

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We were saving up money to give to the church?

It wasn’t even a month before that we had been left cold in the dark because our electricity and gas were shut off for missing a payment.

I told her that we needed that money more than the church, and she yelled at me.

She said that if we gave to the church, they would give us something back. But I was smarter then—I knew the church never gave you anything back. They only gave you “prayers” that never worked. Prayers didn’t keep us out of the cold, or put food on the table, or keep us clothed. We had to work for what we had, and “prayers” had nothing to do with that.

I went and cried in my mother’s arms. I was hysterical.

We lost the house.

It was my fault.

I didn’t pray enough.

I asked God to help us, to save us and protect us.

And he didn’t listen.

It was my fault.

I didn’t believe enough.

EXPLANATION OF QUE DIOS TE BENDIGA Reading Langston Hughes’ “Salvation,” I was immediately reminded of my childhood and the times I spent in church wondering why I was there and what the point of any of it was. Hughes was able to describe the overwhelming and almost But I was smarter then—I knew the church never traumatic experience of being “saved” at church in gave you anything back. They only gave you such an artistic way that it evoked so many emo“prayers” that never worked. Prayers didn’t keep us tionally charged memories from my childhood and out of the cold, or put food on the table, or keep convinced me of an argument that wasn’t explicitly us clothed. We had to work for what we had, and stated. Being forced to support and practice a reli“prayers” had nothing to do with that. gion without being given the chance to understand and develop your own healthy relationship with spirituality as a child can have long-lasting, harmFrom that day forward, I would steal quarters ful effects. It can lead to a child feeling guilty for from the dish and spend them on scented pencils at not understanding something so important to their school. The church didn’t need our spare change. I parents or even lead them to resent religion. needed it more than them.

I agreed with Hughes’ overall argument, and so, When I was thirteen years old, my mom held I kept it in my cover of his piece. However, I used on tightly to my hand as she wiped away her tears different rhetorical devices and commonplaces with the other. I’d never seen her cry before. And I within my piece in order to make the argument knew I never wanted to see her cry again. more applicable to an audience of Mexican-AmerHer eyes were bloodshot red. The bags under ican Catholics who grew up during the 2000s. them were deep. Her hands, although holding on Langston Hughes was a famous black writer who to me tightly, felt fragile and weak… ready to just… contributed greatly to the Harlem Renaissance let go… She was tired. She asked me to pray with from the 1920s until his death in the 1960s. He her. And I did. wrote of the shared experience of the black comI held her hand as she prayed for our family, for munity during that era, which made him distinus to be able to afford the house, for better health, guishable from other black writers of his time.

“Que Dios nos proteja.” That God protects us.

Many other writers had begun to write more about I didn’t know who I was speaking to… who was themselves, while he specifically wanted his work listening. So I made some wishes… . to be accessible to a community of black people “God, please let us keep our house. Please keep who could relate to it. I am a 19-year-old, Hispanic, my parents together. Please let us be happy.” agnostic woman writing this piece for a college Everything was okay for a while. Until one day, publication. To me, this piece helped me explore I came home. My mom looked at me, again, with the role religion played in my life growing up, and her tired eyes and she said, “Abigail, perdimos la it allowed me to explain the complicated relationcasa”. ship I’ve had with religion to an audience of people We lost the house. who probably don’t get it.

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In the case of Hughes, he wrote about experiences he lived through in a Black, Christian Church; specifically, about being saved and witnessing the Holy Ghost. Although there were certain sermons at the church I grew up going to where I witnessed the Holy Spirit being evoked, I, personally, was not so greatly impacted by these images as a child in the way that Hughes was.

This is why, in my piece, instead of having just one defining story that shaped my relationship with Catholicism, I included several stories that ultimately made me develop a sort of skepticism and distrust of the religion.

I also included images that commonly reflect the shared experience of growing up in a Hispanic household in America. Tall jar candles with images of Catholic saints and phrases like “Que dios te bendiga” (“God bless you”) are commonly used within Hispanic households and hold large cultural significance. They are things that we use when we are going through tough times.

Overall, however, I used Hughes’ method of telling personal stories in order to establish a strong ethos in relation to an argument. Because a reader learns that what we are arguing about is something that we have personally lived through and suffered the consequences of, we are found more credible

and we are able to evoke some sort of empathy and understanding from the reader, and that makes the reader more likely to accept our argument. In writing a personal narrative, the use of dialogue (for example, my mom talking to me in my piece and Hughes’ aunt talking to him in his piece) and detailed imagery allow for a reader almost to relive these moments themselves.

I was also able to use asyndeton in my piece much as Hughes used it in his own. This rhetorical device allowed us to develop a rhythm within our pieces, and, much like Hughes I was able to use it within the final sentences in my work in order to dramatize the ending and express the guilty and overbearing thoughts I had in that moment in my life. Each short line is followed by a pause, which gives a reader time to fully absorb and understand the emotions attached to those thoughts.

Langston Hughes’ “Salvation” was a piece reflective of religion within black communities of Hughes’ time and was able to indirectly convey the argument that forcing religion onto children may lead to them developing an unhealthy and harmful relationship with spirituality and religion. By using Hughes’ rhetorical strategies with my own cultural commonplaces, I was able to convey a similar argument, but to a different audience.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

image provided by author

Abigail Moreno Zavala is a sophomore at DU majoring in molecular biology with a concentration in cognitive neuroscience.

She was born and raised in Greeley, Colorado; however, she spent many of her winters with her family in Culiacán, Sinaloa, Mexico. Although she is passionate about learning about the brain and hopes to become a neuroengineer, she also values expressing herself through many artistic mediums including making music, writing, and doodling. She ultimately aspires to live a healthy and fun life and looks forward to the many exciting adventures she will take on within her lifetime.

A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR During the winter quarter of my freshman year of college, I was prompted by my writing professor to analyze a rhetorical piece

by Langston Hughes called “Salvation” and implement some of the rhetorical methods Hughes used in his piece into my own transformation of his work. This came around the same time I had started actively pursuing therapy for my anxiety and reading Hughes’ piece had immediately reminded me of how a resentment of religion I’d developed in my childhood had led to me feeling disconnected from my own spirituality which ultimately kept me disconnected from my super Catholic mother. It was through writing this piece that I found a form of therapy and was able to really analyze moments from my childhood and begin to understand how they might have shaped me into the person I am today.

I was vulnerable when I wrote this piece, which not only allowed me to establish an ethos and give my piece a unique and powerful voice, but personally allowed me to become comfortable with expressing the vulnerable parts of myself. I hope that a reader can get that from this piece, too, and that they’re inspired to confront any parts of their past they keep wanting to run away from and are motivated to also put themselves out into the world without fear.

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Submit Your Work

We welcome not only essays and research papers but also scientific and business reports, creative nonfiction, multimodal projects, and more. If accepted for publication, your work will appear in 2021’s Volume 10.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: Texts may be submitted electronically (by students or by instructors on behalf of students, with their permission) to the Editorial Board at writlarge.du@gmail.com by June 15, 2020.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES: • Submissions must be the original, previously unpublished work of the authors (group submissions are also accepted).

• Authors must assume full responsibility for the accuracy and documentation of their submission, and a bibliography must be included, when appropriate.

• Authors selected for publication must agree to work with an editorial team (of faculty and students) throughout the Fall 2020 quarter and to participate in all editorial activities.

• Please limit each submission to 20 double-spaced pages or fewer.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We are very grateful to Doug Hesse, Joe Ponce, and the DU University Writing Program for funding and supporting this project.

We would like to thank all of our present and former colleagues who have generously contributed to WRIT Large over the past nine years.

FACULTY EDITORS April Chapman-Ludwig, David Daniels, Megan Kelly, David Riche, & Blake Sanz.

2019–2020 EDITORIAL BOARD David Daniels, Megan Kelly, Heather Martin, Juli Parrish, & LP Picard.

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