Iris: Art + Lit
Vol. IV, May 2020
St. Paul Academy and Summit School 1712 Randolph Avenue
Saint Paul, MN 55105
Phone: 651-696-1459
email: irisartlit.spa@gmail.com
Website: irisartlitspa.wixsite.com/litmag @irisartlit on Instagram
Cover Design: Quinn Christensen
Remember the feeling of coming home: at the end of a school day, out on a Friday night, after a trip? It may be hard to recall because we are all already home... at least in a physical sense.
Iris was designed and published from our homes as the COVID-19 pandemic dramatically changed how our community operates, spends time, and moves through the world. Every aspect of life is refined again and again as we search for the new normal in an ever-changing world. We are all learning to find community while being physically separated.
But you already know this.
This year’s volume of Iris: Art + Lit, explores definitions of home, of artifacts, and of how tickets unlock experiences. 2020 has been a year when tickets have lost their value. If movie theaters, concerts, and travel are temporarily shut-down, what are tickets good for?
So, dear reader, I want to ask: how has your sense of home changed since the pandemic began? How has creativity guided you through this time of uncertainty? How do you find serenity amidst the chaos?
Tickets unlock the door to new opportunities, memories, and perspectives. We invite you to embark on an adventure tucked safely at home. Within these pages. This is your ticket.
Are you ready to go?
POLAROID POSTCARD
Cotton Candy __ Photography
I LOVE YOU SO__ Print
How to Miss... __ Poem
Josh Meitz
Annabelle Bond
Julia Scott
ESSAY _ FICTION __ THEATER __POETRY __ SPEECH
How to Skip a Stone __ Poetry Soliciting __ Poetry Weather Poem __ Poetry
Bug Hunting __ Poetry
Sky of Dolphins __ Poetry
Childhood __ Poetry
Hollow Melodies _ Lyric
What Can I Pick...Flowery __ Poetry
Mother __ Play
The Edge of the Mountain __ Poetry
Bleeding __ Poetry
A Murderous Wave __ Poetry
Chameleon __ Poetry
Migration: Road to... __ Essay
Write My Life __ Poetry
ABECedarian __ Poetry
Steve __ Poetry
Road Trip __ Poetry
Crown of Lies __ Poetry
Snelling and Grand __ Poetry
A Battle __ Poetry
The Way it Flowed__ Poetry
Untitled __ Poetry
Yona Ketema
Pia Schultz
Nina Starchook
Sarina Charpentier
Maggie Fields
Harper Enneking-
Norton
Nina Smetana
Lulu Priede
Adrienne Gaylord
Garrett Pauly
Ivan Starchook
Nikolas Liepins
Pia Schultz
Carly St. Martin-
Norburg
Elizabeth Trevathan
Ashley Su
Will Sedo
Rafael Barocas
Sophie Cullen
Addy Eby
Josh Meitz
Addy Eby
Jack Hlavka
Disquiet Musings... __ Poetry
Era __ Poetry
Theme...American Lit __ Poetry
How to Fall Asleep __ Poetry
The Stoats__ Poetry
High School Sweetheart __ Essay
Dust Songs __ Essay
How to Get Along with... __ Poetry
Out of Context __ Poetry
Bitter __ Poetry
Your Shoes __ Poetry
How to Remain Surprised __ Poetry
Ode to Chance __ Poetry
Going Everywhere __ Poetry
lto Churumazu, 2004 __ Poetry
Summer Storm __ Poetry
Ice Age __ Poetry
Energy __ Poetry
Persephone’s Letter __ Poetry
Ode to Theme for English B__ Poetry
A Biographical Analysis__ Essay
Life of No One__ Poetry
Friday, __ Poetry
A Cry for Help __ Poetry
Great Depression __ Poetry
Orlando __ Poetry
An Avian Simile __ Poetry
Taking Up Space __ Speech
Rockefeller __ Poem
Last Looks __ Poem
Language Learning __ Interview
Pyro __ Poem
Untitled __ Poem
The River and the Rock __ Poem
Death-Defying...Act __ Interview
Sam Hanson
Bev O’Malley
Dante Gilbert
Pia Schultz
Dante Gilbert
Aman Rahman
Evelyn SampsellJones
Sara Browne
RJ Worral
Gabriella Thompson
Yona Ketema
Sam Hanson
Alek Radsan
Lucie Bond
Nikolas Liepins
Melissa Nie
Anna Snider
Max Endorf
Katherine Goodman
Lulu Priede
Isabel Toghramadjian
Nina Smetana
Quinn Christensen
Jamuna Corsaro
Julian Duffy
Anna Snider
Gavin Kimmel
Anna Snider
Evan Thissen
Evelyn SampsellJones
Lucy Benson
Adrienne Gaylord
Milo Zelle
Quenby Wilson
Ananya Narayan
Clearing the Way __ Videography
For a Girl I Know... __ Videography
White Deer __ Videography
Drowsy __ Videography
Spiral Jetty __ Photography
Welcoming Party __ Photography
Hidden Falls __ Photography
Day on the Lake __ Photograpy
Greened __ Photography
Landscape __ Photography
Gullfoss __ Photography
Fleurs du Nord __ Photography
Lighthouse... __ Photograpy
The View __ Photograpy
Virtual Celebration __ Photography
Ophelia Triptych __ Photography
Vinicunca __ Photograpy
Minnehaha Blur__ Photography
The Stained Lady __ Photography
what is...__ Photo Illustration
Untitled __ Photography
The Other Side __ Photography
Reflections...__ Photography
Head in the Clouds __ Photography
Railroad __ Photography
Wild Rose __ Photography
Catching Stars __ Photography
My Grandma’s... __ Photography
Summer __ Photography
Self Portrait __ Photography
Morning Drive __ Photography
Beach Jeans __ Darkroom Print
St. Paul’s...Sunset __ Photography
Sunrise Over... __ Photography
Arches __ Photography
Nan Besse
Liv Larsen
Clark Waltz
Henry Vlietstra Gabri-
ella Thompson
Jonas Bray
Freya Brokken
Ian Matenaer
Henry Hoeglund
Harry Mahmic
Aman Rahman
Victoria Greenman
Anonymous
Sutton Lillygreen
Noor Christava
Martha Slaven
John Hall
Rachel Swenson
Maya Coates Cush
Karla Garcia
Vivian Johnson
Anja Trierweiler
Isabel Lutgen
Ian Matenaer
Isabel Lutgen
Mikey Barshack
Sarah Oppenheim
Henry Burkhardt
Erin Magnuson
Evelyn Lillemoe
Ruby Fields
Addie Morrisette
Nikolas Liepins
John Hall
Grant Mortenson
Nikolas Liepins 006
Minnehaha’s... __ Photography
Teo
Annika
Isobel Alm
Isobel Alm
Addie Morrisette
Mimi Huelster
Celeste Parke-Reimer
Boden Strafelda
Ashley Su
Wyatt Tait
Ashley Su
Celeste Parke-Reimer
Hannah
Lorenz-Meyer
Maggie Baxter
Katherine Goodman
Ben Hanson
Maggie Baxter
Max Endorf
Andrea Gist
Vase
Lidded
Cups
Vase (7x7x13)
Vase (10x10x13)
Jack O’Brien
Tommy Verhey
Zoe Cheng Pinto
Sameer
In one fluid motion. Any size stone will do, a smooth stone, however, saves time: a smooth stone is best. Finding a stone you trust is key. Your agenda shouldn’t tangle with the stones. It should also be rather flat to aid its glide across the surface. Make a C with the index finger and the thumb of your dominant hand, and mold the C around your stone. Pull your arm behind your back. Make sure your arm is lined parallel to the water’s surface. The water is asleep; It could wake it with the drop of a crumb. Your stone is only there for a quick stay. You want the stone to glide like a bat. Bend down to minimize the angle of impact, and throw the stone. Be sure to watch: Watch, as it bounds in a crest across the water, creating waves of its own and quaintly falls through, five or six skips later, into the ocean.
Nobody has shoveled their sidewalks. My footprints flank me, an autobiography. Eyes follow me from steamy windows. I exhale, and my breath searches for a glass pane to call home. Instead, it is enveloped into the wind. It howls.
Snowflakes merge with my white mittens, relinquished rhythmically with each knock on the door.
I wait, one two. I knock, onetwo. I wait.
The house is now silent, fictitiously so. Smoke erupts from the chimney. I know the dance on the other side of the door. I once danced. No longer. Now I wait.
One two.
One dancer prevails. The door creaks open.
Our eyes don’t yet meet. One two.
My spiel has legs of its own. I let it fly.
Meanwhile, I wait for you to slam the door
The rain cuts the windows barriers
It’s screens starts to dance
The wood rim becomes wet, smelling like old fire
The sight of the mixing of colors becomes so clear to her, she starts to taste the smell so strongly,
And hear the noise of the rain as it grows.
The screens never danced, When she closes the shades, her brother will finally arrive home yelling ‘Nina come here, this Minnesotan weather is too typical,’
The cat prances across the carpet
Wondering if the food is vegan
‘She needs to be taken care of,’ is repeated many times into her ears
She gets up and leaves the room
She cried until her pillow was as soaked as an empty bin, and she shut the door with her mind
Nina then looked at the window only to not be surprised that the rain was indeed, continuing to fall
Soon enough, the clouds will clear and the sun will shine again. The lights became obnoxious, but once the sun comes out the storm will not be gone
is heard from the distance, and her feet began to move her The door begged to not be opened, but no one was there to listen
Just like when the candles in ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ try to help Belle out.
014
Butterfly wing through different lenses - Teo Dieperink
His youth is a zephyr and I am an autumn leaf, to which I comply. Two pairs of eyeballs attentively watch the ants who are not quite sure where their keys are. The sun tastes like a glacier in global warming. Her fingerprints are stickily caked with wing dust and glazed nori.
She swoops the butterfly net with accuracy and They smell the adequate praying mantis’s silent screaming. Store-bought plastic walls confine it to admire.
The cerulean sky in Nagasaki sounds like promises of a new adventure. Ho-kun’s fingerlets picks up the shell of a beetle.
“It’s sleeping,” his familiar tongue shapes foreignly. She sets it in the box, understanding. The store-bought box has no walls. If they take too many ice cream breaks, then the insects will invade the city.
“Onaka heteru?” O bāchan says and they are as overstuffed as a balloon without air. He excitedly grabs the box, brings it inside, then reaches for an ice cream cone.
To be happy, one has to be sad, so when O bāchan greets the box with fascinated distaste she hides it from Ho-kun. Ho-kun runs around the table while Sarin-chan washes his hands. The musical sink, now awakened, gurgles a cheery song And gobbles up the dirt remnants in a swirl of duds. Not long will bugs lose the excitement of a quest and become a minor incessance in the ear to the boy. The box with an array of insects sits by the window while the family eats on a hot day.
The stars are a river of light.
The earth
The trees
The flowers
The soil are swimming in the river of light.
The light screamed like a sleeping dolphin. It was loud, It was quiet, It was the taste of freshly-baked cookies on a day that smelled like rain.
People traveled To see the stars everywhere.
They heard
“Have a good day,”
“Ha en hyggelig dag.”
They have to go, so they can decide to stay.
The dolphin floated to the surface To greet you.
You put out your hand and it rested its head in your palm. You smiled.
The dolphin bounded away, Playing its favorite music as it swam.
You jumped in the hopeful water after it, but you didn’t get wet.
If everything that is going to be the same is, then everything will end up being different.
Maggie and a dolphin in Florida.
Do you smile as I do when the saltwater stings your eyes, Reminding you of your formative years, as it does mine? The childish age of before, When my only responsibility involved the spilled juice or organizing my toys.
The saltwater is reminiscent of summers and boat rides in Ipswich: The tube floating across the great and unbroken force of the ocean as I clung on to the handles, Nestled safely into the comfort of a lifejacket. The lifejacket, which saw me through infancy into adolescence; escaping the emaciation of childhood, I shed the jacket altogether and plunged into the water. Do you find your thoughts cumbersome and tiring, as I often do? Keeping you up at night, do they prompt you to plead with yourself to stop thinking and sleep?
Persistent and distracting, my thoughts never seem to settle. They are humorous in their triviality and tiresome with their weight. And so I find myself comforted by music; serenading my thoughts into a lull, and I suppose you do, too, at times. On the radio, I flip impartially between stations. Taylor Swift and the White Stripes graciously saw me through childhood while Drake and J Cole have co-parented me my way into adolescence. You must agree that as life progresses, you add to your repertoire of music, something new with which to mollify your ever-increasing responsibility.
However, there’s always an outlet; a brief (if not imagined) release from responsibility.
Do you find your thoughts cumbersome and tiring, as I often do?
It is this release I feel admiring Utah from the ledge of a canyon. The state holds so much: the paucity of buildings and the abundance of Unknown;
The expansiveness of the desert, and the intricacies of a single rock. It’s always the fear that engulfs and reassures me as I overlook an abyss that has witnessed more sunrises and endured more storms than I ever have or will.
Returning to your responsibilities, you must admire yourself, as I do me, for how unreservedly you abandoned that lifejacket in your naivety, throwing yourself into a world for which you born unprepared.
if a bird sings a song in an empty forest is it really singing? does it make a sound at all? once i believed that of course it would that something still exists if no one’s there to hear it sound is a principle so strong so impenetrable that it exists even without validation because i think, therefore i am right? in tenth grade my history teacher told me no we live in a society where we exist only if we are believed to exist only if other people tell us we exist whether i think i exist or not doesn’t matter we see ourselves through the lens of everyone else by that logic that song from that bird in that empty, lonely forest doesn’t exist it never existed in the first place sticky tree sap envelopes the noise that didn’t exist in the first place the restless, hollow wind rustles silent leaves that fall onto the noiseless ground filled with the quietest pine needles you’ve ever heard
so then who am i where do i lie? if no one sees me if you don’t hear me where do i lie? do i exist in the forest with the silent bird and its silent song? i used to think i meant something to someone other than me but now i’m not even sure i mean that much to me either did i ever?
i am screaming screaming into the void can something echo without making a sound? my lungs are burning i’m breathing in fire and i’m breathing in ice my throat is raw and i’m so so tired tired of waiting for you to hear me for you to see me for you to listen the branches break beneath me they crack and crunch under my feet silently can you even imagine silent branches? or silent footsteps? they fall like raindrops onto soft green leaves or rather, from soft green leaves like the baby birds who are pushed out of their nest what happens if they can’t fly? what if they decide not to flap their wings?
i am suffocating in this forest filled with air in this place where the wind swirls around me i cannot breathe i want to breathe dear god, i want to breathe
maybe it’s time to find a different forest maybe that’s what the bird is searching for one where the creeks whisper where the pine needles crunch where the breeze rustles the leaves and you can hear it and you listen and you listen and you listen why won’t you listen my wings are broken my voice is raw my feathers are rusting but i will not be that silent bird in that empty forest i will sing until you hear me i will sing until my voice breaks and so my wings might be rusty but i am flapping them up and down up and down slowly moving forward through the hollow air the wind is pushing me back but i’m moving to be honest i’m not sure it was the bird who couldn’t sing it wasn’t about the tune it never was it was the forest it stole the song it turned up the volume of the silence this time, i will find a different forest i will find a forest where it will listen where you will listen where i will listen and i will sing and i will make a sound and i will make a sound and i will make my sound.
He’d fly
A hundred miles to Do an act in the service of his country, But drop your presence
At the farther end of the room; The honor of presenting it to you Before it fell.
I protest, Insupportable creature!
I fear him.
You judge my affection, Against the extremes.
His conversation made church, But I never prayed, But on one occasion I exchanged His conversation For a psalm, Rather melancholy.
On stage is a writhing pile of human flesh. Humanoid bodies grunt and moan as they are littered across the stage. They’re all mangled and bloodied, mostly still, but occasionally whirring or jerking. Their cries are in anguish. In the middle of the stage is the largest mound. A head pops out from the middle of the pile. It’s a duckling with a small chunk of eggshell on its head. It smiles, looks around, then pops all the way up.
DUCKLING: Where is my mother?
The duckling waits. The cursed bodies drone on.
DUCKLING: I must have a mother. For all baby ducks do.
The duckling turns and walks out of the mound. On every step it squishes into some new forlorn soul and they release a sound of discomfort. The duckling makes its way out of the pile and turns around to look at it.
DUCKLING: Are you my mother?
The bodies continue to moan grotesquely.
DUCKLING: No. You are not. For you do not have a beak.
The duckling turns around slightly defeated and walks away from the pile. The duckling waddles around the stage until it spots a shaking figure curled over on stage right. The duckling brightens up and waffles over. As the duckling gets closer, the figure can be heard more loudly letting out muffled cries and gurgles.
DUCKLING: Are you my mother?
The figure slowly turns around to reveal the place where they could have a face is sliced clean off. The open wound is bleeding and the muscles and tubes within the flesh is loudly sputtering. Fluids splatter on the duckling as the figure depressingly attempts to do what at one point might have been speak. Bellowing groans fill the background.
DUCKLING: No. You are not. For you do not make the same noise as me.
The duckling happily quacks. Then it runs around, once again disheartened. It waddles away from the figure. The figure stares as the duck walks away. The duckling travels toward stage left.
A raspy voice whispers: WOMAN: help me. please. help. somebody please...
The duck waddles toward the voice as it radiates from stage left. The duckling stands and listens, then pushes aside a limp body to reveal a woman’s face. She’s badly hurt and bleeding. When she sees the light her pleas turn to thanks.
WOMAN: Oh thank you. finally. God’s not dead…
DUCKLING: Are you my mother?
WOMAN: I’m not, but I am so grateful to you for saving me. I thought no one would c…
The duckling stares blankly then interrupts the woman.
DUCKLING: No. You are not. For you do not float.
The duckling shoves the time woman off the stage. There’s an audible splash. She’s gone. The duckling waddles sadly towards
center stage. It begins to cry. It stops when it reaches the center of the stage.
DUCKLING: I’ll never find my mother!
The duckling hunkers down and sweetly, adorably, cries. The stinking piles of flesh all start to creep slowly towards the duckling, including the faceless figure. Their groans now sound hungry. But on the back wall a shadow forms. It’s of a large duck, and it’s getting larger. The bodies quicken in pace as the shadow grows larger. Tension grows. The moans are faster and louder than ever before. The rotting corpses are almost onto the duckling when the shadow finally arrives!! But when the shadow’s caster finally appears on stage it’s just another, larger, more mobile, decrepit amoeba of human meat that happens to cast a shadow that looks kind of like a duck. The wretched beings crowd around the duckling. Circling. Enshrouding. And finally consuming. A burp. CURTAIN
Upon the rocks of a thousand seas, you’ve laid your head to rest Astride a falcon’s clipped wings, chest to chest, we rest, Together.
Rising in mirth from our eyes, a thousand stars gleam wide! A million lives, yours and mine, converge, for Them.
Bright, luminescent things they are, dancing in your moonlight We’ve imagined we could take each other beyond the sun, fire to wring out the dark. And yet, we can’t. We won’t. Stuck, Cracked, Broken, crashing it spills, tumbling over knoll and grass as green as You, and me.
Forgotten now our memories be, lost inside our stormy sea. The hurricanes’ eye sings it lofty melody, as we move past our sunset shores
To wings of our own to sweep us home, Again to see our lonesome lands, our houses made of taken sand. Tiny windows into our lives, being watched as slip into our sleep We’re never really alone, My love and I.
Not until they take away our Little Sky.
My heart visited a lake last fall. To be frank maybe it was an ocean. Endless and foggy, yet calm. Each wave crashing to the slow beat of a heart.
Out on the horizon stood a tree alone, with red leaves stagnant and limp. The stench of fire dominated the land, invasive to the cool breeze.
I never knew loss before. All I knew was repetition. Each day is monotonous. Not brave. I’d rather chip my pride than lose my mind out here.
A giant was slain. Bleeding continuously. Blazing tree bark being brought down, as surreal as the fall colors may be.
My heart visited a lake last fall. Crimson with flakes of blood. A tree bleeding just as I am.
Except I’m brave.
The bodyboard emblazoned with cerulean frees itself from my fingers. The homecoming of broken waves steals the board fused with my wrist from the ether’s eye. Its tentacles seize my ankles, dragging me to Its unlit, unbreathable underworld. Scathing my bare flesh across the floor of Its ruthless abyss, the blackened blue demon leaves me gripping the ungrippable sand as It pulls me away from life. It consumes my choroids. my world is black. It strikes my septum. my body is breathless. It batters my bones. i cry out, but my tears are lost and my screams only widen Its access.
Until a light—
My foot grabs hold— My senses are freed— and I stand.
I take showers in with the lights off Perpetually chasing my own company.
To my friends I am ears, insouciance.
My barista knows I am anything but a morning person Sometimes I find an extra shot of espresso in my blonde latte, a gift.
My cat knows I make my bed every morning, unless she lays on the covers. Sometimes I come home and she is still there. With my mom I am sullen, but never enough that a bowl with the right proportion of baby carrots and pretzels couldn’t help. We watch Jeopardy, and she pauses each question until she can think of the answer. I am annoyed. But she has never lost a game.
My spotify plays me Fleetwood Mac at night, Mac Miller in the morning. I play rap when I’m not alone.
I hate to text. My tone never comes out right. To my camper’s parents, I am a rubber ball of joy. “Your daughter will have so much fun! She’ll never want to come home!” To my campers I am joy, but not bouncing. Young girls learn To be a girl does not require constant cheer.
In the dark, standing in my bathtub, water that is never quite the right temperature melts my skin exposing the gooey parts of me.
Finally alone, I choose to ignore myself, and focus on the sound of water.
- Carly St. Martin Norburg
The paths to the library were hidden under a blanket of snow and ice, the tall tree branches canopied the isolated campus and white snow replaced the once vibrant red, orange, and yellow colors of fall. The air was frigid and dry, turning her exhales into puffs of smoke. The remnants visibly lingered in the space as if frozen in time. Familiar with palm trees, walking in sandals, and clear ocean, she wrapped her newly purchased winter coat around herself, tighter and tighter until the chill from the biting wind failed to reach her body. Pink cheeks, red lips, breath trailing in the air. This was not home.
I met Gail Chang Bohr when I was 7 years old, dropping literature off for her campaign for Ramsey County Minnesota judiciary. As a
young Asian-American girl, I looked up to Gail, who would become the first Asian American woman judge in Minnesota. Ten years later and we still grab lunch to catch up. During my interview with Gail this fall, we looked back on a life largely defined by a single decision: to attend college in the U.S. Born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica, along with 14 siblings, Gail faced numerous challenges that influenced her decision to apply to colleges in the U.S. As the ninth child out of fifteen, Gail relied on financial aid for college. Additionally, competition for spots at top schools was extreme; Jamaica was still a British colony at the time. Thus, by applying to the colleges available to her, she was competing with students from other British colonies and students from the UK. In that way her decision to attend Wellesley College in the U.S. was a decision mostly made for her already.
International study was not always as popular and widespread as it is today. When Gail went to Wellesley in 1962, both her parents and friends were unfamiliar with the concept and the application process. While many friends applied to the default school, the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, Gail got a full-ride scholarship to attend Wellesley. A large part of her finding and applying is credited to a former college professor, Father Carroll. Without his guidance on the SATs and college applications, Gail strongly believes she would not have applied to schools in the U.S.
Today studying internationally, particularly in the U.S., has significantly increased in popularity. Research from 2016-17 shows that the U.S. holds the top spot for international student destinations; in 2017, the country hosted 1.1 million students out of the total 4.6 million (Zong and Batalova 2018). According to The Atlantic, the U.S. has over 4,000 more colleges than any other country, and while U.S. universities are very competitive, countries like China and India have even fewer universities in relation to population, making competition for top schools very high (Mckenna 2015). The research clearly demonstrates that education in America is top-notch and in demand around the world.
It was an unnaturally bright day for October, but the sunlight streaming through the enormous windows of the newly built atrium warmed my body from the chilly fall day. Upon seeing my approach, a new ac-
quaintance contacted through my sister’s friend at Grinnell College in Iowa introduced me to her roommate, Aleksandra Kochetkova, who comes from Moscow, Russia.
I sat down across from Aleksandra in the spacious booth. Her brown hair styled in a pixie cut, only slightly brushing her ears, her dimples showed when she smiled at me. “Hi, how are you?” she asked.
Her distinct Russian accent stood out, and her gentle tone matched her petite figure.
“I’m doing well, how about you?” I replied.
“It’s the week before fall break, so it’s a pretty busy time.”
“Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me.”
“Of course. So you want to know about my decision to attend Grinnell College?”
I nod enthusiastically in an effort to match her friendly demeanor.
She began: “I applied to many U.S. colleges because the college process was similar across the board and I wanted options. During the application process, my friends and mom were very supportive; however, my dad was very skeptical about the idea of me moving to a different country, although many of my friends were doing the same thing I was: applying to American universities, hoping to get out of Russia. It was helpful because we were able to relate and bond over the similarities of the college process. My father, on the other hand, did not come around until I got accepted and decided to go to Grinnell.”
“What do you mean by, ‘they wanted to get out of Russia’?” I ask.
“Russian universities have prewritten courses that high school seniors have to apply to according to what they want to major in. This gives students no freedom to explore other interests and limits course options. I didn’t know what I wanted to pursue after high school, just that I knew I wanted a career in the humanities. Not only would my education be restricted, but most Russian universities don’t support the humanities nearly as much as STEM majors. I can say for sure that after leaving Russia, my life is better overall.”
For Aleksandra, Grinnell’s commitment to liberal arts empowered her to take classes specific to her potential major but also explore completely different areas of study. She says the open curriculum, the ability to take any class has been eye-opening. She is able to study what she is interested in without the pressure of having to plan her whole fu-
ture. Grinnell is only one example, but it represents the appeal of U.S. universities. For many students, the U.S. school system provides more freedom of exploration, individual choice, and academic opportunity.
Not only do international students benefit from what U.S. schools have to offer, but they are important assets for colleges. Only about 20% of international students receive financial aid; the rest pay full tuition (Mckenna 2015). The revenue from international students contributes to university resources. According to the Association of International Educators, international graduates have contributed nearly $37 billion to the economy and have either created or supported more than 450,000 U.S. jobs (Zong and Batalova 2018). Beyond the economic benefits, international students bring diverse perspectives and backgrounds on campus and in the classroom. Their presence encourages students to immerse themselves in different cultures and communication styles outside of their comfort zones (Krislov 2019). International students enrich campus culture, help shape citizens of the world, contribute billions to the economy, and are crucial contributors to college revenue.
With unfamiliarity comes challenges. In our interview, Gail talked earnestly about the obstacles she faced during her time at Wellesley.
“The biggest thing I had to get used to was the way people talked. This might sound surprising but having been surrounded by British accents in Jamaica, I missed a lot of content during lectures because the professors spoke with an American accent I was not accustomed to.”
“I bet the weather was also a really big adjustment,” I said.
“Jamaica is warm all year around. Seasons don’t really exist like they do in Massachusetts. I really had to get used to the cold winters, including buying a winter coat, boots, a hat, gloves. I live in Minnesota now and I still don’t like the cold,” she added jokingly.
“Was it difficult to make friends?” I asked.
“It wasn’t as hard as I expected. I connected quickly with the other foreign students and I also lived with some for a few years on campus.
So you want to know about my decision to attend Grinnell College.
We were able to relate to each other and bond over missing home along with the ups and downs of adjusting to American culture.”
Gail’s comfort in befriending other international students is a common sentiment felt by international students. In Sarah Thankam Mathews, “How to Get Your Green Card in America,” she finds comfort when she befriends an Asain American first-generation student on her first day of high school (Mathews 2015). They form a bond that was shaped by a mutual unfamiliarity of U.S. high schools. While Mathews felt the pressure to explain her identity and citizenship status to her classmates, Gail was met with genuine curiosity from fellow foreign students. These two examples demonstrate that migrants are more likely to be happier and more at home if they find friends who accept them.
More recently, colleges have created specific programs for foreign students to get to know each other. For example, Aleksandra attended a week-long orientation for international students. She said it helped her make friends with her fellow international students and she is still good friends with them. Grouping international students together creates a safe space to bond over homesickness and culture shock.
In 2016, the United States experienced the first-ever drop in international student enrollment since international study was introduced in the U.S. According to the Migration Policy Institute, enrollment dropped 4% between 2001-2017, when in the same period of time, enrollment had doubled in previous years (Zong and Batalova 2018). International student enrollment unsurprisingly fluctuates based on world events. The significant drop in 2016 came at a time of extreme anti-immigration rhetoric and the introduction of a nativist president. Since Donald Trump has taken office, international student enrollment has decreased amidst escalating anti-foreigner rhetoric, discouraging potential international students from enrolling. The Trump administration has also increased application fees and implemented a stricter visa policy. The policy, implemented in 2018, changes how the USCIS evaluates “unlawful presence,” meaning it makes it easier to deport
In 2016, the U.S. experienced the first ever drop in international student enrollment.
people on student visas (Federis 2018). The administration has also made it harder for post-college graduates to obtain permits to get a job (Federis 2018). All of these factors affect a student’s ability to enter and exit the country, maintain legal status, and find work. This policy and numerous other proposals deny potential international students from investing in their education and thus their future.
Gail Chang Bohr graduated from Wellesley College in 1966, with a degree in social work, was elected to be the first Asain-American woman judge in Minnesota, and is now retired in St. Paul, Minnesota with her husband. Aleksandra Kochetkova is still young but continues to be successful at Grinnell College. She plans on staying in the U.S. for graduate school and later for her career. The lives they have led are owed to a single decision: coming to the U.S. for college. They left their home and everything they knew to take a chance on themselves and by doing so, invested time, energy, and money in their futures.
For many people, like Gail and Aleksandra, migration is about taking the leap into the unknown, uncharted territory. Sometimes this is voluntary, other times involuntary, and more times than not, it is in the gray area between the two. Both Gail and Aleksandra were not forced to leave their homes to go to the U.S. but instead chose to leave for a lack of better options in their home countries. Migration is about exploration and the journey. It is scary and unfamiliar but for those that do leave, they risk a lot for the possibility of a better future. That is ultimately what anyone who migrates is after. Be it an international student or a war refugee, migrants are connected by the shared perusal of better opportunities, better life, and better future in any shape or form.
Chang Bohr, Gail. Interview. 30 Oct. 2019.
Federis, Marnette. “Visa Rules Are Restricting the Future of International Students in the US.” Public Radio International, 20 June 2019.
“How International Students Are Changing U.S. Colleges.” Wall Street Journal. Kochetkova, Aleksandra. Interview. Conducted by Carly St. Martin-Norburg, 24 Oct. 2019.
Krislov, Marvin. “Why International Students Are Good for Colleges, Universities and America.” Forbes, 22 Mar. 2019,
Mathews, Sarah Thankam. “How To Get Your Green Card In America.” Buzzfeed News, 22 Nov. 2015.
Mckenna, Laura. “The Globalization of America’s Colleges.” The Atlantic, 18 Nov. 2015, Tan, Sharon. Telephone interview. Conducted by Carly St. Martin-Norburg, 26 Oct. 2019.
Zong, Jie, and Jeanne Batalova. “International Students in the United States.” Migration Policy Institute, 9 May 2018.
author will write a book inspired by your life. The writer in the last scenario is Alice Hoffman, who will open the 20th season of Talking After a reading at a Florida library, a well-dressed woman collared Hoffman, whose bestsellers include “Practical Magic” and “The Dovekeepers.” “The woman said she was a ‘hidden child,’ ” said what that was at the time, but she told me that her parents put her in a convent and if I didn’t tell her story, it would be lost. I said, ‘I don’t have the right to tell that story.’ But as time passed, I kept thinking about how I didn’t know about the ‘hidden children’ and that the next generation was even less likely to know about them. So maybe I should write “It” is Hoffman’s new novel “The World That We Knew,” which comes out Tuesday, and features one of her trademark elements — magic — in the form of a golem named Ava. (Read an As the Nazis grip Berlin, a woman realizes her daughter, Lea, must get out. “Very often, I go into a book not knowing anything. I have a question and I want to know the answer. So I went to France and visited these châteaus — homes for the children — and I met “One really amazing often writes about, and it would take the form of a folk tale about losing a child. Current events also informed the writing, particularly stories about people detained at the “I was writing about what hate does, the effects of the fear of people who are ‘other.’ I didn’t realize that so much of what was happening in France during World War II ish but simply anti-refugee. So I found myself writing about how it’s really a choice, about how easy it can be to look in the other direction. These things happen slowly and then, all of a sudden, they have happened.” Hoffman is eager to discuss “The World That We Knew” at Talking Volumes and other stops on the book tour that begins Tuesday at Harvard. (She lives in Boston.) “I know the feeling that writers are — they’re a part of your life. I was afraid to meet Ray Bradbury, so I mostly had contact with him over the phone, but he was even than I ‘You know what? I had to stop to cry a couple of times when I was writing.’ And I bet they were the same times.” ‘Maybe we’ll meet again’ “Maybe I needed her to pick me. Maybe I was just lucky.”
“American. Born. Chinese.”
Dad would say every time he introduced my sister and I to his high school friends. First, of course, was my name. My chinese name, notably, nevergiven before my English name. Hung between two distinctive cultures, and too hard to ignore one, I became unluckily defined as an ABC. Never not being judged for my weight, height, skin, and studies. Those words continuing to kill my confidence. I quickly learned to laugh at the jokes that carried my name because it was easier.
“Maybe”s and “if”s constantly crowded my thoughts, bringing nothing but hostility towards my Chinese culture, negativity toward myself. Yet, I will always be offended by the ignorance of others and protective of the two cultures I exist within. Standing quietly as a fighter, not a flyer. I so vividly remember the kids who’d only know me by my last name. Who’d say “I’m gonna sue you Ashley Su”. Or worst of all, the teachers who would say, “you should be a lawyer with that last name.”
American Born, Especially, Chinese
Those unforgetful phrases that taught me more than any history or English class showed me how vulnerability was power. Now, no longer hidden behind my laughter, I wait, impatiently, for the next time I can go back to beautiful Xi’an and hear the warming tones of my family’s mother tongue. Discovering yet another piece of my puzzling identity. Slowly, but surely, finding my way to Zì ài (self love).
048
Pouring Vessel (11x11x10) - Sarina Charpentier
You are the dead horse Steve a dead horse growing tall and strong. The horse smells soft. It looks positively alive. It sounds completely warm. It feels absolutely moist. It tastes wholly delicious. And like steve the funky alive horse, You will keep growing forever but not as fast as we will all keep slowly marching on, crawling to the grave. Only if you die will you keep growing. As the kids say, “C’est la vie” You sit down and listen, knowing full well that the children are the way of the future You may be as sad as a balloon, But when you rise high up like one you will make it to Mars like Billy
It will be a delicious journey, with the balloon laughing all the way. But to get there you will soon have less to go and unless you go soon you should not lest you go.
Dead horses in balloons make fabulous birthday presents.
The two barns stand in mirror on either side of a dirt circle. The new one is old already and the old one has collapsed. Paint of every shade— light grey, dark grey, brownish grey— covers the walls, so faded that one cannot tell if it was grey in the first place. The roof is rent open, shattered not like ice but like paper, a great gash marring its corrugated armor. A small silo surveys the tableau. Its roof is more rusted than the barn’s, but it watches still, back sagging like an old man, a sentinel to its own desolation.
I was a sturdy castle of pride and accomplishment, built on a foundation of feathers. You wore a crown of lies.
You made me feel a strange hurt, I wanted to leave all the good in my life to rely on the bad.
The forest smells like pine needles. The smoke that comes from his mouth looks like a painting of delicate helices.
I bet that smoke tastes like escapism. I hope that the sounds and colors he “sees” are his way out. In that forest, the haunted children run together into the lonely woods, looking for belonging.
I would never want to associate with those that want to manipulate me.
We look for a way out of this dark hole by approaching a bright and blinding danger.
Standing in front of that boulder on a belay, I had walls to climb
If you let me fall, the sky will shatter, the world will shake, and my mother’s hopes and dreams will break.
“It’s not a phase mom,” yelled another climber. He told me to trust the process.
She once lived in a world that was like a film in monochrome, filled with colors that were not there.
I climbed to the top of that mountain to see the peak of another and then jumped down and played cards.
Sophie likes risk.
At some point, the ocean will cover the beach and we won’t be able to walk on the sand.
The tattoo on his finger was a permanent reminder of his perplexing pain: all but temporary.
I now know that the sky is blue because I sat next to a baby on the plane.
“Vivre pour le frisson de tout cela,”
The wind screamed at my window.
A log fire next to the highway was surrounded by the future of this country.
I was waiting for the bus at a busy intersection. Cars were humming as they waiting for the light to change. And then the light turned green and they all stayed still. It’s funny to think how weird it would’ve looked to me if I hadn’t seen the ambulance or heard it from miles away. I would’ve probably wondered why everything stood still in silence or maybe I just would’ve thought it was pretty nice.
Almost like a rave, they march in like waves on a field, green as my baby self— or blue as my heart? Tall famished pounders dash over each ripple, like bayonets tickling the tips of grass. Spartans line the battlefield— crying they leave a footprint of fear filled by each step like a wet sponge wadding wisdom teeth.
I stride through the daggers left in my right side as they pop the swollen cannonballs floating through the air like the wheezing of ballooned bronchi; at the peak a surfer rides the high tide, the dead heap and red seeps through the calm blue— cherry Gatorade cramping like a shoe tree.
I am behind enemy lines almost alone, but my isolated vision— speckled into an image of black and white popcorn on the stove guides my clone. coming to color as the bullet hits him in the head like a push-button puppet he hits the ground— after about three miles.
Lidded
Cups with decals (4x4x5) - Ayla Straub
We come from water from how the wood was grown to harbor the ships that tore us from our home
and carried us to the land of wet soil
it was the water that washed away our culture and rocked us across the ocean
and it was the same water used to grow the cotton weeds we calloused our hands picking
it was water in the rivers that stole the stench and allowed our children to escape the fields
and it was water that filled our eyes when our sons were hung like dangerous fruit eyes bugging necks bleeding and feet half burnt
and now it is water — between us and our ancestors
the ones that jumped, and the ones that sent us away
I wonder if it is water that will take us home?
The forest trees are lightbulbs on wheels.
Jack flies underneath the ground to reach the cave. He drops his book, then walks in the door, searching for the animal that gave him such a great infection.
The splenetic bear, smelling of rancid lavender, reaches out of his den,
Tearing through the ferns on his head.
The rocks lamented their loss, yelling “I did something bad.”
If only the bear would bite his left paw, then the rabbits would grow to ten feet tall.
Those beautiful rabbits that feel like a classical sonata, they love to Buy carrots at the store to replant in the ground.
They look as smooth as the shaven head of the bear.
All of the animals come together to meet and discuss the latest episode of Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me.
After listening to the dissonant screeching of the podcast, they taste the decadent,
slightly salty roses which look like great drops of blood.
The leader, Sally the salamander comes from Slovenia.
At the end of the convention, the animals will yell “Hasta la vista” to each other.
Toadstools are as sticky as just-washed stainless steel.
Preferring the open air they live inside hollowed-out logs.
They must be destroyed in order to let the fungi live.
The caramel apples fall from the great bushes.
Reimer
As autumn shadows stretched, The Oldest Ones leaned against their gazes, Waiting, heads bowed under the sagged ceiling. “How squarely Marevelous to bask in a bed of lard,” said a voice near the window, Melting into the afternoon humdrum. The mustached One Looked up from the intricacies of crochet cheese: “Minions, Today is no day to knead the rising dough of desire,
For there remains much milling to be desired.”
The custard door-frame shuddered, perspired gazes
Shifted. The raven-eyed one de-perched: “My minion Message as such: that across stone mirrors in city squares Run carriages of daylight.” The oldest One
Raised a syrupy eyelid as the windows
Opened their gravid panes to windowless Eyes: “Feed the newcomers to their heart’s desire”
And they fluttered in and out, parading across cake shingles from one Abundance to another. The stout-legged one gazed Them farewell, as he pondered sitting on a proper square Table, away from the false dominions
Of salted meat. The yawning chamber quickly dominoed Into the loosely-set jaw of daybreak. “Hark, the window Of our peachy empire finds the vagrant scholar a square Smudge,” loosed the chicken of morn. “What desire The will of our duplicitous elder?” All gazed At her for she was all eyes. “The One
Has spoken: let the exiled dine and be one With the disquiet of our clergy dirgy minions.”
The bony one sprang from bed, breaking the clingy gauze Of milken entrances: “Let the glass of windows No longer mirror the depths of hunger—feast, one To a limb!” The waxen one, silent all along, stood square, But the trail of lard was already squarely Out of sight. “Perhaps,” muttered the poison-tongued one, “The frozen tapioca of youth, desired By many, shall no longer disturb the chromatic dominion Of our migrated becoming.” The windows
Sighed with the silence of ice as a new gaze
Filled the chamber. It was an iron gaze, inedible, Splicing the windows of icing with square eyes. The oldest One Sighed, writhing: how quaint to fall under the blade of time’s desire.
064
The Stained Lady - Maya Coates Cush
I watched her as she slipped away But couldn’t quite comprehend That I was losing her Til she was already lost, Shadow dripping along behind her And melting into gold under the Streetlamps, smoke clouding her face And in the eerie, sudden silence She didn’t hear me whisper “Maybe in another life, my dear.”
I have dreams, you know just like any boy. Dreams to taste the sky and touch the stars. To land my feet on a ground that is not my own Not yours nor anyone else’s.
My veins run with the blood of a Gallego yet, that is not my home, in the land of Santiago where the dry land becomes vibrant the green replacing the yellow. It is, though, the home of those who love me. They are the ones who fill it with life. And so, the land is my own.
You may not have a place like this, a place across a sea from your home a place where the people live just to see you a place so full of love for you, that your departure is a tragedy. But I do know you live in a house, so I will tell you about that
I live in a quiet house, so full of silence that thoughts form beads on your brow, and stairs sounds like gunshots in the night. Except, I’m not alone, there are four Beatles buzzing about my ears, four Zeppelins circling my head, four Clearwater rivers trickling nearby, and four Queens faintly heard. That is my theme for American Lit
The Split Tree - Boden Strafelda
Submerge into white sheets. Let your spine mollify. Let your eyes forget to watch. Forget to think.
When your body stiffens as you relive days past, let it soften. Forgive yourself.
Relegate the past to only memories, obscure tokens of a former identity.
Memories are relics of a distant person. Watch them float away like a lazy balloon, air bubbles escaping underwater lips.
To sleep is to live in the now. to be overcome by the present. Think about thinking, about not thinking, think, until your brain is midnight after a snowfall. Clear, muffled.
The wind is an earthquake over the snow. The stoats whisper in their silent tongue. The white foxes scamper silently across the white plane. The muskox’s roar tastes damp and bitter. The hares hop if they are restrained. The owl of Paul the writer of Rome, Perches on his great tree and pens: Veni, Vidi, Vici.
Mother’s sizzling succotash keeps the chill out. And Father says: “I have already given you all of the details.” And after he goes outside, He opens the door he left through. Glibes wanders the snowy desert, that’s as boisterous as the grave, and Will murmur in its sleep:
“The day will not begin until before the night has come.” And the stars howl, for There are no stoats, No foxes, No muskoxen, No hares. Just the owl, The great horned owl of Tabernath.
“ The day will not begin until before the night has come.
-
If you didn’t watch the High School Musical series during your teenage years, you haven’t experienced the true artwork of film. Written by Peter Barsocchini and directed by Kenny Ortega, the first High School Musical movie (2006) quickly became a staple in Disney Channel Original Movie history. Although Disney has been known for its sexist, heteronormative, and racist tendencies, there is a lot that can be learned from Disney’s past. High School Musical was considered progressive for its time due to the diverse cast with three African Americans and one Hispanic American character, who all play important roles in the movie. This inclusiveness catered to a larger audience and brought the idea of intersectionality to Disney: people of color and, specifically, women of color in important roles.
The first movie follows a love story between Troy Bolton, a white boy who is a basketball team captain, and Gabriella Montez, a Hispanic-American girl transfer student that loves math and science. These two characters are from opposite cliques: the jocks vs. the nerds. Together, they break stereotypes and try out for the school’s musical.
Gabriella makes a new best friend, Taylor McKessie. Taylor fits the African American girl stereotype with her strong, bossy, and snappy personality. For two women of color to be main characters was uncommon; considering Disney’s sexist tendencies, it was bold.
Taylor and Gabriella first break stereotypes when Gabriella joins Taylor on the decathlon team indicating that they are powerful, intelligent, and independent women: an uncommon idea that isn’t seen with traditional gender roles. Women are usually put into one of two cate-
gories: fragile, dependent, and loyal vs. evil and a vixen. Being smart and strong-headed doesn’t fall into these categories and along with all these things, Gabriella and Taylor are nice and caring. Once Gabriella joined the decathlon team, they had to compete in their hardest match of the season. Taylor recruited Gabriella; she needed someone with Gabriella’s level of intelligence. Both of the girls being intelligent women of color which shows a new side to Disney.
Gabriella’s relationship with Troy doesn’t affect her ability to think on her own; she doesn’t become dependent on him, showing strength and independence as a woman. Gabriella and Troy were both hesitant about trying out for their high school’s musical and even though the auditions were considered over, Gabriella takes a leap and decides to audition. This pushes Troy to sing with her. Troy followed Gabriella’s steps and this shows her power over him. Also, Gabriella pushes, not only herself but also Troy outside of his comfort zone since Troy had never really explored anything outside of sports. With Gabriella’s help, Troy lands a lead in the musical. Gabriella possesses a masculine role when she influences Troy and this breaks the stereotype that men are leaders that women follow. It changes the dynamic and represents not only how women can be in power but women of color can have power and be leaders. This perpetuates intersectionality by showing that not only white women can change dynamics in relationships, but women of color can also do this.
Another example is when Gabriella finds out that she is accepted into Stanford University. Gabriella calls Troy a couple of days later and tells him that she loves him, but she can’t come back to Albuquerque for prom or graduation. This prompts Troy to follow her and visit Stanford. This shows how the power dynamics have shifted; Gabriella has more pull over Troy. Gabriella gets accepted into Stanford’s Freshman Honors Program which encapsulates her intelligence, breaking traditional stereotypes. Gabriella doesn’t question her future for a high school sweetheart because she knows that going to Stanford is the best choice for her life. In terms of how important this is for represen-
“ Gabriella doesn’t question her future for a high school sweetheart.
tation, Gabriella’s acceptance shows young women of color this is a possibility and reality for them too. It is clear that Gabriella is her own person and destroys any relationship stereotypes while maintaining her power and influence in her relationship with Troy.
The last prominent instance of Taylor and Gabriella exerting power is in High School Musical 3 when Taylor stands her ground against Chad, shifting the power dynamic and breaking the stereotype of women existing to be validated by men. Chad decides to ask Taylor out to prom with a bouquet of flowers during lunch, but Taylor doesn’t settle for a small promposal. She tells Chad to try harder until he gets up on a table and announces the question. Taylor discusses for a minute with Gabriella, leaving Chad anxious and impatient. Obviously, she said yes but Taylor makes sure to not settle for less than she is worth. This breaks the stereotype that women are desperate and happy about any guy asking them out. Taylor gains power over Chad by making him improve his promposal and by making him wait for her answer. Yes, the gender norm that a man should ask a woman out is still prevalent, yet this role isn’t nearly as important as the actions that follow. Taylor’s resistance towards Chad shows to the audience they should know their worth and it also shows black girls that they are wanted and deemed attractive since, usually, the girls who get asked out are white. Taylor is independent and knows how she should be treated, specificlly by men.
It’s clear that together, Gabriella and Taylor are a powerful duo that know their worth and don’t succumb to boys that show interest in them. They are independent, intelligent, and strong, portraying a message to viewers that share a similar identity to these two women that they should never back down from something different or outside of their comfort zone. They also know how to be their own person in a relationship and make sure their thoughts and feelings are considered. Along with this, Gabriella and Taylor show that any girl can do what they are interested in, no matter what others think. The two shift power dynamics, break prevalent stereotypes, and reverse gender roles.
Although High School Musical portrays two women of color in prominent roles that reverse power dynamics and gender roles, and
break traditional stereotypes, ultimately the movie fails to do so. The women still embody stereotypes which results in them being overpowered by their boyfriends: Troy Bolton and Chad Danforth.
As soon as Gabriella begins to date Troy, her wardrobe becomes feminine: more dresses, skirts, and accessories. In the first scene where Gabriella and Troy meet, Gabriella is wearing black pants with a light blue sweater which isn’t as feminine as wearing a dress or skirt. On the first day of school, Gabriella wears a light olive green blazer and light pink shirt which shows how she is a strong woman since blazers are considered a sophisticated and confident piece of clothing. Yet, by the end of the movie after Troy and Gabriella have started dating, Gabriella is wearing a short, red dress to Troy’s basketball game. Gabriella dresses more and more feminine only once she begins a relationship. This enforces gender stereotypes and roles because women need to dress femininely to be attractive and if they don’t, they will not please men or be seen as likable. This sets up a notion to female viewers that they need to dress for boys. It also sets a precedent for people who identify as gender-fluid to dress a certain way to be respected and wanted. Therefore, Gabriella’s relationship with Troy shows gender roles and stereotypes are still present and applicable.
Once Taylor gets into a relationship with Chad, her personality becomes more mellow which shows how she changes herself for Chad. Right off the bat, Taylor’s sassy and bossy personality is seen in Ms. Darbus’ class. She has a snappy comeback to Chad’s comment about nerds are on the decathlon team, when she makes it clear that she believes basketball players and cheerleaders are stupid and dumb. She embodies the typical African American girl: bossy, loud, doesn’t take crap, and knows her worth. Yet, when Taylor begins to fall for and date Chad she becomes more submissive. It implies that a woman must change herself for a man to be liked and more attractive. Taylor enforces traditional gender stereotypes by making her personality more obedient to her significant other. By doing this, Taylor is enforcing gender roles because she acts in ways in which women were taught to.
Gabriella’s main reason for considering to stay in Albuquerque is that she would have to leave Troy and be so far from him, which shows her enforcing traditional gender roles, stereotypes, and power dynamics. Gabriella was eager when she found out about her acceptance to
Stanford, but quickly realized how far she would be from Troy. This caused conflict for Gabriella, who didn’t want to leave Troy behind for an important milestone and achievement. Once Troy found out about Gabriella’s opportunity, he told her she should go. Gabriella decides to accept, which shows she needed Troy’s validation and is dependent on him to help her make decisions. If Troy hadn’t told her to go, she would have most likely passed up an amazing opportunity. Yes, Troy and Gabriella have a strong connection but Gabriella shouldn’t have to choose between Stanford and a high school sweetheart. This precedent set by Gabriella needing Troy’s validation shows viewers that women are essentially incompetent in making decisions on their own. Troy is given so much power in this situation because of how much pull his influence has on Gabriella and her decision, showing how gender stereotypes, roles, and power dynamics are still enforced in the movie.
It’s clear that Disney is a victim of the patriarchy because, besides the High School Musical Series, many other DCOMs have sexist tendencies and perpetuate heteronormative ideology and even rape culture. Obviously, everyone is subject to the patriarchy when that is the environment they are brought up in. Yet, the majority of the learning people do is through looking at mistakes others have made. What can be learned from this series and other DCOMs? Don’t take Disney’s movies too seriously because they often portray underlying messages of sexism, racism, rape culture, and heteronormativity. Yet, be aware stereotypes that have been enforced for many years. Disney movies should remain as a form of entertainment; what better way to end a long week than to watch a cheesy rom-com that doesn’t require a lot of thinking or attention?
Works Cited
High School Musical. 2006. Directed by Kenny Ortega, Buena Vista Television, 2007. High School Musical 3: Senior Year. 2008. Directed by Kenny Ortega, Walt Disney Studios Motion Picture, 2009.
“ Disney is a victim of the patriarchy.
By the time we arrived in the southwestern corner of Colorado, we were already seasoned in the religion of the desert. We had entangled our limbs with the spikes of tiny cacti and we were used to seeing them everywhere. We had felt the rocky ground beneath our feet quiver, weighted down by restless canyon spirits. We knew that the air tasted different out there, sweet and transparent so that you could see the stars simply by glancing upwards. But I don’t think we were prepared, necessarily, for the wonders we would encounter there. We got off the bus with pre-calloused feet from long, rocky hikes. We were tired, sun-dried, and reddened from days spent under the merciless sun and nights spent trying to rest in tents on rocky ground. We had been camping for a week on our school-sponsored expedition, and it had taken a toll on us. Every single bone between the fifty children and ten adults was aching, ready for hot food and comfortable beds. The archaeological center promised all of that, and more treasures we were yet to discover. The campus was umber, dotted with shrubs and blanketed in dust. The people were kind and welcoming as they could be to group of disruptive preteens. There were sandy volleyball courts to run in long past sunset, wooden benches and swings that creaked sweetly with every movement, and numerous bronze-hued buildings alluding to a history that wasn’t so distant. It was enchanting for us to run around there, bronzing beneath the unfiltered light and cleansing our snow-hardened brains of the worlds they grew up in. We attached ourselves to a new universe of dust songs and ancient legends.
Though we were wild young adolescents, we were there to learn. That had been pressed into our minds with red-hot iron from the first day we got on the bus. This wasn’t vacation. This was school. We were archaeologists, not tourists. But though we were learning every moment we spent in the desert, it felt like an escape into a realm we didn’t entirely understand yet.
Our teachers had long since traded in formality for floppy bucket hats and guitar strumming at night. There was no question about it; we were not a regular school.
On the first morning, we rose from a long-awaited comfortable sleep to immediately put on outdoorsy clothes and explore. We walked around the campus of the center for a while, guided by different instructors, until we reached a small structure with flaky dust walls supported by a few wood planks. Called a pithouse, it was an adobe shell built over a shallow pit- an early type of housing for the Native Americans of the area. This was a replica for the purpose of education, uninhabited except for a few recreated artifacts, but it felt so real as we entered. Our clumsy adolescent hands tried in vain to start a fire with the old wooden pegs and boards we were afforded, but we were too awestruck by the world we had entered to succeed. We felt like our own lives could do no justice to the lives of the people whose history was preserved beneath layers of sand, whose dusty bones lay in unmarked graves, whose stories took root belowground and cracked the dry surface of the earth, sprouting up like yucca plants.
We knew that all of this learning was getting us somewhere, because one of these days we were going to actually dig, but there was lots of preparation to be done. We had to be wellversed in the history of ancestral Puebloans, their stories, and their artifacts before we could uncover their world for ourselves.
One day, we walked up a steep hill at the edge of the campus to a re-created Pueblo village. It was reminiscent of the photos we’d seen in our textbooks, but it lacked some feeling that we couldn’t place yet. As we took in the artlike buildings that surrounded us, one person asked our instructor why the village lacked a kiva. We’d been told that the kivas were the center of daily life and spiritual beliefs.
Our instructor responded, “It’s really a spiritual thing for many Native Americans in this area. We don’t want to appropriate that. We want to respect it.”
It rained some that day, and some of us were stranded in the village during the storm. As the rain subsided into sprinkles, we sat beneath a pergola and tried to make charms out of pipestone. We watched a man whittle a piece of obsidian into a spear tip and wondered what it would be like to throw that spear, to pierce the desert air with its sharp edges.
The last day before the dig, we left the archaeological center and boarded a bus to the Escalante Ruin. This was one of many sites dotted aroundw the four corners that housed dozens of kivas, pithouses, and pueblos. Our instructor gave us her lecture as we looked around.
Suddenly, it hit us. The feeling that was missing from the re-created village was the feeling of being inhabited. These ruins were brimming with life if you looked close enough. We felt we could hear people laughing, singing, and whispering in our ears. We strained to hear their stories, the bits of history that are so often erased. It was magical; we were walking through the world that we originally thought only resided underground.
Our instructor went silent for a long moment, and then she broke us from the ruins’ spell when she looked directly at us, dead in the eyes, and said, “Our president wants to get rid of this. All of it.”
We grew rather silent after that. The bus ride back to campus was long, silent, and filled with sorrowful glances at the looming Ute Mountain.
The next day had been waiting on the horizon, and it popped out excitedly when it arrived. It was time to use our knowledge to actually discover parts of the world we had learned about for ourselves.
The morning was long and tiresome, but when afternoon came, every single one of us was overflowing with anticipation. We were long-sleeved and protected, warned to save ourselves from the glaring eyes of the sun. The paler students applied layer after layer of sunscreen until our math teacher joked that if you held any one of us up to the sun you could see our bones. We frowned. Only the students who didn’t need sunscreen laughed at the joke.
We were refreshed on the rules of archaeological digging. First of all, no stabbing the ground. That was off-limits, because we couldn’t take the risk of denting a looming artifact and vandalizing the ancient world. We were to remove layer by layer of infertile soil with our trowels until we made a discovery, and even then we had to be cautious. There was no yanking items out of the ground. We were to brush around the objects and scrape off layers until they surfaced. We were told that even tiny potsherds were important, and though discoveries varied in size they all contributed to our knowledge. We learned that sandstone could be a foolish impostor, pretending to be a real artifact in order to sneak a peek at the past. Lastly, we learned that if we saw human bones, we had to stop digging. By this point, we had learned enough about respect that nobody had to ask why.
The day could have easily been drudgery if we weren’t so fascinated with our findings. Occasionally we’d all hear a shout, and then turn to see a peer holding up an intricately painted mug which they had uncovered. I went about precisely, only uncovering tiny sherds and pieces of sandstone that crumpled in my hands until late in the day when the center of my excavation area began to gleam with a dim luster. My hands trembled as they reached forward to trace the outline of the broken bone-knife. I was truly lost at this point, so enchanted by the world of archaeology that it took me weeks to fully come back to the present day.
The days spent in the desert were hot and neverending, but not a single one of us would trade them for anything else. I can still feel the outline of the fragmented knife, the ancient sun thrumming with the magic of another world, and the sandstone crumpling in my palm as every student looked up and took one last glance at the starry Colorado sky.
Leave space in the bathroom mirror for flossing and gossip.
Make room on the couch for their cold feet and math problems. Never yell without being able to take it back and make up over grilled cheese.
Be cautious.
6:47 am: not the time for catching up. Avoid meddling with the shower temperature. Wait your turn.
Remember, everything you think you own–your room, the food on your plate, your closet, your taste in music–you don’t.
Let them know how they push and prod
every nerve in the system when you are forced to order, and speak when they go mute
On occasion you may let them know how they impress you and how much they’ve grown but not too much Keep to yourself knowing your opinion weighs down every decision. Every ugly shirt and weird song translates to attempted nonchalance in effort for approval.
I am the main actor, looking out at the wide audience
Who all are wearing gamboge clown noses that smelled like Horses running through the plains
One of them had a name, clearly visible on their Razzmatazz nose
Joe Buck was his name
Just the sound of his voice made me hate him
It sounded like a goose, honking terrible analysis of his project called How to reanimate a pencil
Clearly it wouldn’t work, as his experiment looked like Oscar the Grouch’s trash can
I stood up, unable to listen to his ignorance
And took his soft pencil which felt like a brick
But suddenly, the pencil came to life and shouted
“Ay caramba, Joe es mala”
Everyone thought this was as funny as the death of a loved one but really
It tasted like cake, getting Joe exposed in front of everyone
The next day RJ jumped through the window, exhilarated to expose Joe again
Because that is the best way to make friends
The only way to end somebody is to pretend they never existed
I hate Joe Buck’s stupid face
You, holistic recipe of ugly grace in watery bones, who owned yourself but don’t have the space to keep me, kiss my curls, mix one part dead and three parts murder wash me out and dry me, cover me with ashes and farewells, remind me of what I’m missing so I can look around for myself, whisper a story of the census, of classrooms, silently scream how power I don’t believe in kept millions alive, how power I wish I couldn’t reap, even more, how one drop keeps a woman in but paper bags keep her out, how the child belongs to the father, how we can’t find redemption but it’s right behind us, line me up, take sides, and make me a compromise, I’ll give you years to cover my eyes and desist the ceaseless How can you be?: that is, you set upon me with scoreboard and scope, you’re the graceless gravity rending me into terror.
My days used to look like feet. Black and white checkered Vans, Cherry Chuck Taylors. Sometimes I would see new Nikes
Squeaking down the hallway. I became comfortable looking at my own dirty hand-me-down Adidas.
Days bled into each other for weeks, months, years.
Until one day, my last day of feet, I saw your small, soft, brown boots. I was captivated.
Not by your boots, but now by your smile, your flowery scent, your coffee worried eyes, your pink, rippling hair, and your encouraging presence. Your laugh reached for my mouth, and stretched a grin of my own across my face. Your voice grabbed my hands and helped me to walk, stride by stride. You made me want more from my days. After you, my days were more faces.
I saw gray and yellow cars, tall blue and green buildings, warm brown and orange trees. I breathed in salty wind and air. I saw smiles, care, and kindness. I saw life.
I never saw my shoes again.
Your voice grabbed my hands and helped me to walk, stride by stride.
At the dash of pain, from the punching bag that punches back, to the windmilling arms that brush Greek vases to glittering shards, remain surprised that you did not also rouse the fauns couched deeply in your dusted tapestry.
And while you are there, carpeted in the astonishment of being, awaiting the dull clunk of the 10 o’clock mail, remember how the forest turned you in your tracks, how the owl responded politely to your dreary whistle.
Though amazement may brush your arm, let it rest in your palm instead, like a pile of uranium ore — let it sit as a morsel on your fingertip, ready to be flicked into unsurprising places.
Yes, sometimes owls eat other owls, and this is normal, as they conjure the tangy nuttiness of vole, the shock of joy entering one’s gizzard, and guilt, too.
But think not, and let the far-off scuttles tilt your head into flight,
allowing sudden silences to dip you into the tall grass of the unexpected.
But most important, jump into the talons of surprise, gently, to watch above your homely perch, the faun that sleeps despite the unravelling of its silk.
You’re the cast of the dice before its fall, observed by all in an excited bliss. You’re the whizzing car’s very narrow miss, making one glad to be alive at all. Everyone wishes for your blessed call, hoping to win Lady Luck’s fickle kiss! But the other case, we cannot dismiss: that of being trapped in your cursed squall.
In both your embraces and your reproach I must still continue to woo your love, for you hold, in your hallowed hands, my fate. Please, I’m merely asking you to approach me once more. Come down from your place above, grant me the hope for which I supplicate!
Alek Radsan
In both your embraces and your reproach, I must still continue to woo your love...
The sidewalk between our houses is an everlasting bridge, going nowhere.
I’ll have to walk somewhere if I want to get anywhere. As I walk, my feet don’t leave the ground. The beaming rays of sun are as hot as the snow. I look down to see my bright red shoes melting into a puddle on the sidewalk.
My feet are gone, but I keep walking.
I can no longer hear the screeching of the dusty light bulb in my living room.
My hands begin to feel hot as I turn on the light that fails to illuminate the singing walls. Without the single light of the dusty lightbulb in my living room, the world will forever be dark.
The scent of burning rubber and eucalyptus escapes through my door. I sprint outside to avoid the potent scent that fills my nose, only to find myself sitting on the top of a roof in Iceland, peering at cows grazing in the distance. The taste of tea-leaved willows stains my mouth as I continue to remain seated. Lucie has never been to Iceland.
“There are so many wonders in a cow’s head;” Það eru margar undur í höfuðkúpu.
Tomorrow, the cow will jump off the roof into the ear-splitting grass below. He will take large steps as he walks off the soft grass, and onto the unforgiving sidewalk that goes everywhere.
The cow walks forever.
The photographer approaches The tears.
The boy raises the gun to his head. He shoots—
i. drizzling
my plants grow firm from rainwater & sunshine. it’s been raining a lot lately. they live in a plastic tank that used to house an unending parade of unfortunate betta fish. green thrives where blue and yellow and red died, sipping water from droplets caught between fragile but fierce thorns. collecting starlight, rose-tinged leaves sing praises to the setting sun.
ii. raining
june colors fade into just three: red, white, blue. recycled and reused in so many ways: star-dappled, crossed, stacked. freedom, they say, free as a bird’s flight, but free to turn away from small brown hands reaching out for a motherland that will not love them. free to turn away from girls still grappling with long division as cells divide within them. the tank fills up with unclean water.
iii. thundering
i have forgotten what it is like to live in a world without hatred. perhaps i have never known. lightning splits the earth beneath my swollen plants and unleashes the bitter roots of human despair, the saline tears of a slain goddess betrayed by children she made. vitriolic ozone fills the air. the sky holds her breath and waits for the right moment to exhale. it never comes.
iv. flooding
my front door swings open and a torrent of ochre water sweeps me away, whispering false promises into my ears with a strange, bubbling voice. my plants are dead: uprooted, drowned, snapped in half through brute force by the very element that once gave them life. my open mouth screams for help but i choke on the hurtful words that pour in. i close my eyes. it is better this way. it is for my own good. the water knows best.
v. rainbow
but i have survived summer storm after summer storm. violent floodwaters must recede eventually. i count the days until my rebirth. in the tank where my plants once lived, new life sprouts from the damp earth. small, vulnerable, filled with an undeniable hope, they grow and adapt. the sun comes out. it shines, and so do i.
I like to imagine the year that we were together as an ice age. One where nothing grew; where the earth was frozen for miles underground.
They say that your body can go into survival mode. Your brain goes on autopilot & its only goal is to get you through the famine.
I don’t think my body has outgrown this.
Once, I stood out in the snow for over an hour; waited for the coldness to seep through my socks to my skin.
When I was little, I learned to swallow pills by washing down little pieces of ice,
& ten years later
I am still coughing up cold shards.
My therapist asks me where I feel the sadness and I tell him
that there is a snowbank sitting on my chest. He reminds me that the storm has been over for two years eight months and thirteen days (including today) but I heard that the last ice age ended over eleven thousand years ago and look at the stories we still tell about it.
I wonder if the earth has forgotten about the freezing. About the way that nothing could grow for thousands of years. The ice carved rivers in the dirt when it melted. The oceans rose & rose & rose as water from the glaciers flooded the seas.
I hear that in some places the ground is still rising after the weight was lifted off of it.
The landscape tells a story: I have not felt my toes since the storm.
& by storm I mean you.
& by toes I mean anything.
& when the doctor asks me about the starving
I tell her that this ground has never been soft enough to cradle a living thing.
Never been firm enough to levee me against a flood.
I don’t know how to love the uncertain soil that this body has sprouted from or how to stop coughing up ice cubes
but I want to write a poem about something other than brokenness and so I put lotion on my hands when the cold cracks them open.
I laugh until the feeling in my cheeks comes back with a tingle. I write until there is a crack in the ice.
The most incredible thing about ice ages is how the ground is still the ground even when it is frozen. How the earth can relearn the art of growing no matter how long it has been covered with ice.
Plant Still Life - Hannah Lorenz-Meyer
Your energy radiates throughout the room
Like feedback through an old amp at the end of a set
Your eyes essentially falling out of your sockets
Captivated by the feeling of seeing
Clearly
This place is for you
Das gefaellt mir
Gunflint
Stolen happiness from the chest I keep it.
Your energy disgusts me
I hate you sometimes, always
I don’t agree
Max no likey
Max no hikey
I jump out of my skin and run from this place
The husk billowing behind me in the wind
Back to where “I’m good here”
I’ll find happiness later,
But not hiking
Wild Rose - Mikey Barshack
Husband-
I’ve been thinking about this half year of yours.
I know that you feel it is ours
And I would never begrudge our time
Spent together
But it is yours
And what I want is time
For you to be mine.
You opened your kingdom below for me
Gave me fields of asphodel
And a river to call home
And I want to open up to you
Like a flower in your hand
My kingdom above.
I have gone among ghosts gladly
And I want to see you walk in the sun.
I know you are busy
But you can spare at least
A half of my half of a year
With me.
Maybe we have been this way forever
But I think this would be better
Come soon
And if you can Come sooner.
You said, Go home and write a page tonight. And let that page come out of youThen, it will be true. So here I am sitting here watching my own eyes and remembering me so I can explain to you;
How I come from two different homes
One where we host parties and I walk to Lake Harriet and Calhoun And one where the car doors are always locked and we roll down the windows so we don’t waste the air conditioning.
How I come from pine trees and small chairs and I am 15, from Minnesota and I am the land of the lakes and I think of my thoughts too much, sometimes.
How I should tell you about the places I’ve been but I’m busy feeling the vibrations of Downtown pulsing As I listen to what I was raised upon Sugarhill Gang Prince Run-DMC and then Salt n Pepa They stroll beside me and We all lipsync
How I am still stuck with my past but I am going to be tough because that’s what my mom did And look at her now
How I’ve had Play That Funky Music memorized since I was eight and one time in a small bar I queued it on a jukebox and a man told my dad he had raised his daughter right
and my dad replied It was all her mom And he’s right.
How maybe that’s why my Dad and I don’t talk so much But I know if I told him how
I never noticed our face structures were so alike and my nose is exactly like his, he would beam and describe where I came from.
The feisty, red-headed, 7-year-old named Madeline has become an enduring cultural icon since the publishing of the original Madeline book in 1939, but the character was in fact based on someone who was quite the opposite of the French schoolgirl so many admire. There are many striking similarities between the lives of author Ludwig Bemelmans and Madeline, so much so that he is widely considered to have based the character off of himself. However, there are several key aspects of the story including the gender and popularity of the protagonist and the setting that differ from the author’s biography. While it would reasonably seem that these changes were made for the sole purpose of making the story more pleasing and relatable for children, by studying Bemelmans’s biography more closely, it becomes apparent that the alterations were made to omit negative aspects of his life that he attributed to the actions of his father. There are obvious parallels between the life of Ludwig Bemelmans and his protagonist, stemming from his early childhood when he was raised by a French governess he referred to as “Gazelle”—his version of “mademoiselle”—just as Madeline was raised by Miss Clavel instead of her parents. While the only mention of Madeline’s parents is when she receives toys, candy, and a dollhouse from her Papa while she is hospitalized, Ludwig’s only contact with his father as a child was when he would occasionally send him “a toy motorcar or some other plaything” (Bemelmans 32), (Wernick). When Bemelmans was six, his father ran off with another woman, causing Gazelle—who was pregnant with his child—to commit suicide and leaving Ludwig to live with his mother (Ludwig Bemelmans). While living with his mother, Bemelmans was eventually sent to boarding school in Regensburg, Germany, where he, like Madeline, was the smallest one (Madeline’s New York Moment). However, with the multitude of similarities come a few major differences.
One of the main factors that could have led to [the switch in gender] is the basic discrepancy between the education available to girls and boys in Europe around the time of the book. Boys were sent to schools where they learned “the classical humanities [and] the skills and values associated with the muscular Christian gentleman” (Rogers). Girls, on the other hand, had far fewer opportunities for education, typically staying home to be taught by governesses or family members. In general, girls’ schools had an air of feminine grace and virtue, while those for boys taught them values of strength and dominance.
Practically, the storyline for Madeline probably would not have fit into the setting of a boys’ school. While Madeline’s ostensible weakness shown by her appendicitis is emphasized and her long recovery is embraced, the values of “muscular Christian [gentlemenhood]” likely would have held disdain for such a display of fragility.
Another quite obvious change between the life of Bemelmans and the story of Madeline is the shift in location from Austria and Germany, where Bemelmans grew up, to Paris. The idyllic setting of the story is emphasized many times over in the book, especially through Bemelmans’s colorful watercolor landscapes of iconic locations throughout the city. The obvious explanation for this switch would be the romanticization of Paris in the American psyche, which would ostensibly make the book more endearing for potential readers and increase its demand and success (Becoming Americans). However, the transposition of the story to Paris also removes it from the pain that life in Germany caused to Bemelmans, instead linking it to the paradisiacal time spent with Gazelle. The most difficult part of the move to Germany was the fact that upon his initial introduction into the German public school system, Ludwig spoke only French. This was a result of his years of education from Gazelle, which were brought to a halt only by his father’s departure. His inability to speak German led to him failing and having to repeat several grades (Marciano 5). The comparison between his “French” years, characterized by the doting
The alterations were made to omit negative aspects of his life.
Gazelle, and his “German” years, marked by social isolation and academic failure, make it clear why he would prefer to highlight one era over the other. By moving the story to Paris, Bemelmans erased the suffering and failure he experienced as a result of his father’s abandonment from his biography.
While both [Madeline and Bemelmans] have been described as “freewheeling” and “always getting into and somehow out of impossible situations”, Madeline is rewarded for such behavior while Bemelmans was punished (Wernick). Madeline interacts with mice in the kitchen, taunts the tiger in the zoo, walks on the railing of a bridge over the Seine, and generally alarms Miss Clavel (Bemelmans). However, she transcends her role as the smallest member of her community to become a leader— her peers seem to follow her antics. At the end of the day, everyone is quite fond and protective of her, as
evidenced by their collective distress when she gets appendicitis— “everybody had to cry[,] not a single eye was dry” (Bemelmans 21).
When she is sick in bed, her peers come to visit her in the hospital and to ogle at her magnificent scar, and later they cry because they want to have appendicitis just like her.
In all respects, Madeline’s troublemaking brings her more attention and popularity than discipline and ostracism. Bemelmans, on the other hand, largely suffered as a result of his personality. As a child in boarding school, he was expelled for being “unruly, impertinent, never serious, always late, and keeping bad company” (Wernick). Quite the opposite of Madeline, Bemelmans was punished for his behavior and his early life was characterized by isolation. In addition to the aforementioned difficulties adapting from speaking French to German, during his time in public school he wore strange clothing that his father sent him, causing further ostracism by his peers (Marciano 5). While there are obvious advantages to the plot of Madeline to have the protagonist be popular among her classmates, Ludwig’s isolation throughout his life can be attributed to his father and was thus omitted from his story.
Through the examination of the life of Ludwig Bemelmans and how it related to the formation of his Madeline, it becomes apparent that he carried much of what happened to him as a young child with him for the rest of his life. While Madeline has endured as an iconic story of a spunky young girl living in an idealized interwar Paris, the context of Bemelmans’s life makes it apparent that she is not only a depiction of who he was as a person, but also of what he was not able to become due to the disruptive actions of his father.
Works Cited
Bemelmans, Ludwig. Madeline. Children’s Choice book club ed., New York, Viking, 1967.
“Ludwig Bemelmans.” Encyclopedia of World Biography Online, vol. 38, Gale, 2018. Gale In Context: High School.
“Madeline’s New York Moment: Ludwig Bemelmans’ Heroine Comes Home.” Daily Beast, 8 July 2014. Gale In Context: High School.
Marciano, John Bemelmans. Bemelmans: The Life and Art of Madeline’s Creator. New York, Viking, 1999.
Rogers, Rebecca. “Educating Europeans.” Digital Encyclopedia of European History.
Synopsis of Becoming Americans in Paris: Transatlantic Politics and Culture between the World Wars. BU History, Boston University.
Wernick, Robert. “The Man Who Dreamed up Madeline.” Smithsonian, vol. 29, no. 4, July 1998. EBSCOhost.
anyone was a love of mine his name still frozen in my time summer autumn winter spring always more than everything he thought he wasn’t(i knew he was) he lived alone, just because he said his love was only his he’d stay that way as long he lives
and so he went, faceless and lost his eyes cast downwards, legs kept crossed he cursed the sky and wept the rain that no one loved him more by more
he didn’t know he’d said my name he didn’t know he’d seen my rain he only lived to die alone (but still I loved him more by more)
the invisible man does his dance he sings his songs and laughs his laughs spring summer autumn winter never seen and never heard
but anyone wasn’t, he never was he lived alone, just because he buried himself and lost the world never seen and never heard
i met him on a summer’s day i can’t forget that hollow gray i
seeked to cure, i longed to love for him it never was enough i laughed his cryings and did his dance and yet i never stood a chance i laughed his joy, i cried his grief (and still i loved him more by more)
and so i married my everyone moon stars rain sun (anyone’s any was all to me) but all my nothing was none to him
i slept i woke i hoped and then i watched him hide himself again invisible man, invisible thoughts i was his but he was not
(but who was i if not his love) for him it never was enough sun stars moon rain and so i lost my always name and through the empty gray i saw anyone’s icy pathways thaw but cold grew mine with passing years and frozen grew those salty tears
i watched him grow to gray and old a thousand stories never told summer autumn winter spring i listened to his silence ring
well one day anyone died, i guess
it wasn’t much change, i confess invisible man, invisible thoughts he was mine but i was not
he was anyone, he always was he loved alone, just because i was no one of concern (and i was his, more by more)
but aren’t we all no ones just the same our faces blank, our lives unnamed who are you to say i’m wrong that i wasn’t no one all along
we are no one, we always were becoming nameless hims and hers we watch our everyones disappear not too far but never near never close but never distant anyones sit and wait and listen you say the name will make us weak
purposeless and bittersweet
that who are we if we don’t know what will we be if we don’t grow the answer’s hidden, hard to find (i guess it never crossed my mind who can i be if i am not am i not me without his thoughts only everyone if i am his can i not dance, can i not live?)
the thought it passes, slow and sure i’d never thought of it before he wasn’t anyone, i wasn’t not we aren’t just someone’s fading thought
we live to see not to be seen we make ourselves in the in-between and i’m not no one, i have a name sun stars moon rain
Portrait Unfortunate - Katherine Goodman
bring me a business card, please lost & found at coffee shop corner. Elysium Society, it reads calling for morbidly-inclined mourners.
I hold it and marvel at this gifta treasure to pocket, to keep knowing that someone somewhere loves to sift through stories the way I do before I sleep.
today I pass through an old love’s stomping ground armed with nothing but this scrap of knowledge that someone in my city is spellbound by life, death, and all things symbolic.
but that’s enough. it is all I need. so thank you, Friday, for a gift well-received.
I am a mountain, I stand tall, rooted to the ground. Nothing consumes me, for nothing is as small and unstable as I. The only thing that can overpower me, is the air around me, Each breath, a toxin I breathe. The bears want to run and reach a magical place; another world away.
They jump on clouds and planets and stars. I want to run with them, because I am as frightened as a lion, traveling through the endless space, to seek a safer place beyond, to feel the fresh breeze on my skin, to smell the flowers as I walk outside, to taste the bittersweet berries. 郭星月会伤心得离开这个生活。
Hopefully Ganga would come with me.
I would have to pack clothes, and many valuables, to prepare for the long trip ahead.
I wish I could put my experiences into a suitcase, to keep them safe and everlasting, but I can’t.
I would have to forget all of my happy memories to be happy. I’ll have to leave behind the dusty and angry Nepal, the tallest and most terrified mountains.
The deepest waters of the Earth, forever drown in their tears of everlasting sorrow.
I would have to leave that behind too. So will you, if you seek a better life.
To breathe again, we must leave. But we can’t.
Nobody is listening to the cries of help for change, So now, we have to fix something that wasn’t our fault, Or everything will die.
“We will never forgive you.”
- Greta ThunbergThere is exhaust in the air, and polar bears are struggling to survive on their homes of melting ice.
Each next day the Cold grits leftover from Thursdays breakfast Today was Monday.
As if the sky was crumbling The snow danced its way down. Numbing unprotected skin.
Coldness
No longer unfamiliar. Left a smooth ringing in the ears.
But sometimes it wasn’t cold at all.
Sometimes The cold was hot.
The heat that dreams. The heat that makes you Feel like you can still be something.
The heat that gives you hanker And made the snow fall in reverse.
“You don’t get cold”
Karen said
As I floated from our tent
Maybe thats true
But passion is like quiet suffering.
False hope is what kills the ones without the bitter taste of affliction anyways.
Someday the stock market will go up
Someday we will get a house With a white picket fence, stained with the smell of BBQ.
Maybe
Though liquor suffocates the truth in words. He knows its déjà vu.
Grey day dimensioned only by the thin layer of snow over dead grass.
Hundreds of queer bodies flood the streets. There are rainbows and glitter and drag queens.
I am seventeen and watching the pride parade with my girlfriend. Everyone thinks I’m at a restaurant with a school friend. I know that lying for survival is different than lying for deception -but sometimes it still feels like lying.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Me: sitting in the closet, still. There was a speech planned. A whole list of comebacks. I wrote them in green pen. In June. During pride month.
I learned how quickly a song can shatter into gunshots. How the twitch of a finger can paint a whole nightclub red.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this: me, ashamed, and holding my queerness at arm’s length as if babysitting somebody else’s child. Like I swear -this screaming body does not belong to me. Does not know grief and all the ways she cannot pull heartbreak from my body. Like my body is not a battlefield of bullets and dumb luck.
Have you ever noticed how quickly a rainbow fades when the whole world is staring at it?
How devastatingly mortal we are.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. But sometimes lonely is the safest word I have for survival.
When I was telling you how your worries are like birds circling your head as if it’s carrion, you smiled your smile that reminds me of the girl from the tv show whose name is crawling her way up my tongue, but isn’t quite there yet.
And when I told you that the birds are only harmful if you let them make a nest out of your hair, you nodded and blinked and giggled, sadly.
And when I made you promise not to let the birds stick straw and twigs in the folds of your brain, you said “I won’t. I promise. Sorry.”
Sorry? What are you sorry for?
“I don’t know. Sorry.”
It was then, as the streetlamps streaked their worn-out light across the roof of my car, I remembered how you told me, once, that you just wanted to grab a pigeon and squeeze it as hard as you can.
I take up too much space. My body is too big. My words are too messy to form a sentence. I think it’s being seen that makes me want to disappear. When people look at me, my face turns tomato red. When I get nervous, my words stick together like bubblegum; wrap themselves around my vocal cords. You sound like you are going to cry. Nobody can hear you when you talk so quietly. Nothing can function properly when it’s being suffocated.
If you do not use a muscle for long enough, it atrophies. Atrophy: “the general physiological process of reabsorption and breakdown of tissues, involving apoptosis.”
I imagine that my vocal cords began reabsorption during all of the years that I stayed silent. And maybe it’s just the poet in me trying to connect anything back to everything, but I think that my body knew what would happen when I finally opened my mouth. I want to believe that this too was a trauma response; my body’s way of protecting me. Like, if I don’t tell anyone, no one can blame me.
If I don’t talk about it, it’s impossible to doubt my story.
What I know about trauma, is that memories have a way of wrapping themselves around our psyche. Experiences do not file into the correct place in our minds when they are stained with violence. Remembrance is a fabric that we weave with the strands of our memories. Trauma tangles up the fibers. Sometimes a scent will pull a stitch loose. Sometimes a name. Sometimes a laugh will send me falling through years of time. Where do you go when your body feels unsafe? How do you cope with a constant retelling of a story that does not even feel like yours?
I turned back to what I knew: I take up too much space. Being seen makes me want to disappear. My face turns tomato red and my words stick together like bubblegum. I believed that if I was smaller, my trauma would have less space to exist. A bad habit can spiral into a disorder before you even know what’s happening. Before I knew what was happening, my body was shutting down. Clumps of my hair lined the shower drain. Everything else dimmed -- the trauma, the people, the memories -- because my body was fighting to stay alive. But I was numb and people were beginning to notice and
isn’t that what I wanted all along? Something tangible to prove my suffering?
I take up too much space. But isn’t that what we teach our girls? Look pretty, sound pretty, act pretty. Prove why you deserve to be here with each word, each silence, each chime of laughter that we force from our throats. Don’t we all have a history of violence and a bad habit of shrinking?
My love, I know that getting smaller is the only place that feels like home, I know that self-love pinches in all the wrong places. I can’t promise that it will feel better to start down this journey of healing than it does to stand there feeling numb, but I promise that you deserve to heal. Your body is not wrong. You did nothing wrong.
This is a battle that nobody should be drafted in. But here you are. You made it through. I believe you. I believe that it hurts so much you want to shrink until there’s nothing left of your body. I believe that you are sick, even if you take up the same amount of space as you used to. You are worthy of joy. You are worthy of a love that leaves you expanding. You are worthy of every inch of space you take up. I promise.
This thing we are depending on, Could plummet below us at any moment. Fast winds cut like knives, Chilling us to the bones.
We sit on top of The trophy of wealth And corruption. The man pays us nothing, But right now nothing is Better than most people.
This thing we depend on, Has crashed and isn’t Looking better. As the suffering continues, The man doesn’t help And neither do his friends.
And why would they? Ironically, they’re sitting high While we’re sinking. This thing has collapsed This thing can collapse, And I don’t care.
Fast winds cut like knives, chilling us to the bones.
St. Paul’s Cathedral
Sunset - Nikolas Liepins
Sunrise over Machu Picchu - John Hall
the window is stained by smoke looking back but the firelight i can still see reflected, leaping between many sets of eyes
i glanced between them, hoping someone would lock me in their last looks
wishing something, anything would crawl out of the fire and hold me in the last looks
because the sky was dark we were the nightlights; the only sailors on a dark sea every little flame a lighthouse every last look dug into my skin, stung; a cigarette burn, matches that float around my mind setting my skull aflame when they surface
The students file in and take their seats. The room is much warmer in comparison to the rest of the school building. They are surrounded on all angles. Children from across the world smile down at the students from their photos plastered across the whiteboard. More stand in front of Machu Picchu beaming outwards toward the classroom, bunched together, the photo is taken from afar to accommodate the size of the group. It is here that you will not find the grammar or vocabulary lesson one might expect of a Spanish classroom but the students know this going in. They’re familiar with the daily lessons sidetracked through political discussion, though even the lessons themselves center around social studies, history, and on occasion Spanish grammar. The goal is not to learn the proper Spanish vocabulary but to learn about the world. Laughter and chaos ensue as the class begins, at its center is Rolando Castellanos.
When I talked to Señor, we moved mostly chronologically through his life, talking about big events and landmarks. But toward the end of the interview we went in a full circle. We returned to the ideas that had inspired him and his experiences that had pushed him into Spanish teaching and his involvement with organizations and leading trips. But this time they were the ideas he applied to pushing his students forward.
Throughout his life language learning was never just about language. It was about culture and connection. This is another one of the things he brings into his teaching. “By not only speaking the language, but the culture that’s the basis for that language and understanding that there are other perspectives of life, and other values out there.” He gestures to the whiteboard, “when you look at that wall and see all those many childrens from different parts of the world,” he says, “and you go
like you know we are in a human race but we need to make an effort to understand each other, appreciate and value each other.”
His efforts aren’t lost on his students and most receive his ideas with the openness that he hopes they’ll have to the world. In his class the world meets the classroom. When I went to visit this classroom, not having known him very well before, as a French student, I got this impression too. He spoke passionately about his frustration with the President, who is arrogant and dismissive of other people and cultures, he hopes his students will approach the world with a much different perspective.
“We live, more and more and more, in an interconnected situation, where we not only depend on that interconnectivity, but we have to treasure that and do it in a way that is intentional and with sensitivity to other people. Not with the idea that we are the U.S., and we have the money and the power, but we also have a heart and a brain, and to do that you have to actually know places and look at people in the face and eat something that they eat and listen to the music and admire the beauty that is there and see what it is that maybe we can do for this world,” Castellanos says. “So, that has been why I [teach], and the school came up with this mission [statement], long after I had my idea that you have to bring children to the world, that ‘we are shaping the minds of the hearts of the people who change the world.’ And now I add to that… if you want to change the world, you have to get to know the world because if you don’t know the world, what are you to do with this world?”
If you want to change the world, you have to get to know the world because if you don’t know the world, what are you to do with this world?
The brittle blacked skin curls up in thin strips. Ash masquerades aglow about the dark.
It pounds deafening drones, moans, crackling. A prickling radiates from the furnace in buoyant light.
The embers are the words, peeling off the crumbling board.
The polypheme lost it’s final eye.
The city was a hollow sight, it’s streets were empty
The corner stores were shouting at Milo while he walked to work
The skyscrapers screamed and threatened his family
And he heard it all like ontology
The skyline tasted like smoke and industry
The gutters were full of people, like a cheery hospital waiting room and New York and New York and New York and Shanghai and Istanbul and Moscow and Aloysius O’Hare
The city will be full, not one more thing will enter without it bursting
If nobody can see it, it’s quite a sight
Si Vis Pacem Para Bellum
I have not been myself lately
It’s quite cheerful for a well-attended funeral
The overwhelming sight of humans
Arches - Grant MortensonThe rock started out on land, surrounded by others who knew it, and the river nearby was only a set-piece.
But the rock wanted to get closer, so it tumbled into the river. Water only accentuates a stone’s beauty.
At least at first.
Because the water began to run muddy, and the river watched its rock turn to sand under the too intense, too opaque, too inconstant waters.
A rock this beautiful belongs in a lake. Somewhere where the waters are still, and the currents predictable.
Yet this rock fell into a river. It knew not what it was doing, when it saw the way the fish swam with the water’s current,
and the little boats were carried on the back of the river, And couldn’t help but to follow.
But a rock is not a fish, because fish are new, and naive, and are easily pulled by mild currents.
And a rock is not a boat, because boats are still separate from the river, And so they can be lifted up without the river leaking into them.
A rock is a rock. A rock is wiser, more beautiful, more exquisitely rare and unique than any fish or boat.
The river was lucky to have the rock, and in the beginning, the rock enjoyed being in the river.
But the river began to erode the rock ever so slowly,
so the rock never understood that it was shrinking. Until it was too small to escape.
And when the river realized this, it tried to tell the rock it wasn’t its fault. but the rock had been shaped by the river and thus didn’t believe a thing it said.
The river cried and flooded and when it realised that the water only hurt the rock further, dried its shores up and begged the rock not to come closer.
But the rock tumbled down into the river which was now a stream and secretly the stream was glad, because it loved that rock so dearly and was selfishly attached to it. Still, the stream knew it was only harming the rock, so it dried itself up once more.
And this time, the rock understood,
and tumbled away. As far away as possible.
The next time it rained, the stream was revived and saw that the rock was gone, and as the water from the skies joined with the water of the earth, the stream begged the universe to spare the rock from falling into another river, lest the rock be too worn down to escape a second time.
Minnehaha’s Frozen Falls - Nikolas Liepins
We are sitting on the baby blue couch in the family room of our house in Uptown, Minneapolis. My mother is engaged in an argument with my little brother about the state of his incomplete homework and the ever-growing pile of laundry underneath his bed. I finally manage to redirect her attention, and she shoos my disgruntled brother out of the room. “Why did you leave?” I ask her as I sip my steaming cardamom tea. She thinks for a moment before she sips her own tea and responds. “I didn’t need to leave,” she says firmly. My mother lived a very fulfilling and comfortable life in India. There was nothing pushing her out, only dreams and goals pulling her away. She tells me that the weight of her decision to leave was immense, rearing its ugly head in every aspect of her life during the weeks leading up to her departure. My grandparents told me that they were thrilled at the idea of my mother leaving home and following her dream. But my mother’s story paints a very different picture. “She wasn’t ready for me to leave,” she says in reference to my grandmother. In addition to the fact that she was a child “leaving the nest,” my mother also had to grapple with the responsibilities that come with being an Indian daughter. “Ajji (my grandmother) wanted me to get married first,” she tells me.
“I was 25, and Ajji thought I would die an old maid and she was really concerned that I wasn’t “settled.” So there were all these eligible bachelors that she would ‘parade’ in front of me. There was a routine to it. There would be a few phone calls, and sometimes the horoscopes were sent to be matched. And then there was the whole meeting, very choreographed. I never went to anybody’s house, they always came to our home. That was my one condition, that I would never go anywhere. Typically an entourage arrived, the potential groom, the groom’s par-
ents, maybe a sister. Then there’d be this awkward ‘oh you should go off to the terrace maybe to talk,’ but talk about what? And then they’d leave as quickly as they came, thank god. And I found that I would just get angrier and angrier after each visit.”
Despite her mother’s persistence, my mother managed to leave India without the baggage of an unwanted husband. And she wasn’t the only one leaving. As a result of the Immigration Act of 1990, the number of Indian immigrants in the United States increased exponentially at the end of the twentieth century. As one face in the crowd of Indians gravitating towards the U.S. for a “better life,” my mother ended up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She had applied and received admission to Duquesne University, where she planned to study phenomenology. When I asked her what it was like to be a “fresh off the boat” immigrant, she looked down into steadily depleting tea. “There is such a feeling of isolation here,” she says as she swirls the tea leaves at the bottom of her mug around. She tells me that it’s not just physical isolation, but emotional. “People here would ask me ‘how are you’ when they passed me on the street, but I could tell they didn’t really care how I was.” Rather, she explained, they were just fulfilling a pleasantry, a hollow invitation to a conversation they didn’t really want to have.
“Did you ever experience any racism when you first arrived?” I ask her as my brother pokes his head back into the room and sticks his tongue out at me. She tells me that it was never explicit in her case. But she does remember feeling like she was forced to assimilate right away. There was no grace period, no time to adjust to a completely new culture. She remembers a McDonald’s employee yelling at her because she didn’t know what each of the menu items was. The sentiment was that if you are going to come live in our country and take up space, you better figure out how to be American, and you better do it fast.
People would ask me ‘how are you’...but I could tell they were just fulfilling a pleasantry, a hollow invitation to a conversation they didn’t really want to have.
19-20
Editor in Chief __ Quinn Christensen
Assistant Editor in Chief __ Lucy Benson
Managing Editor __ Gavin Kimmel
Iris: Art + Lit Club Presidents __ Quinn Christensen, Anna Snider
Page Designers __ Lucy Benson, Quinn Christensen, Eloise Duncan, Gavin Kimmel, Addie Morisette, Maren Ostrem, Lulu Priede
Advisers __ Kathryn Campbell, CJE, Andrew Inchiosa, Evan Klavon
Torey Erin is a Minneapolis based curator, writer, and multidisciplinary artist primarily working in sculpture, painting, installation, and moving image. Torey holds a Bachelor of Fine Art from the University of Minnesota. She is a recipient of the 2020 Minnesota Artist Initiative Grant, Springboard for the Arts Hinge Artist Residency, and the Blacklock Sanctuary Fellowship. Torey has exhibited at Soo Visual Art Center, Company Projects, Public Functionary, Q2 Gallery, Rosalux Gallery, Yeah Maybe Project Space, FilmNorth, and has created costume and set/interior design at First Avenue, the Palace Theater, and the Cedar Cultural Center in Minneapolis. Torey’s films have been featured in the Duluth Film Festival, Pleasureland at the Trylon Cinema, Saltless Sea Cinema, and Headwaters Film Festival. Torey is the Director of Exhibitions and Artist Programs at Minnesota Center for Book Arts.
Tarfia Faizullah is the author of two poetry collections, Registers of Illuminated Villages (Graywolf 2018) and Seam (SIU 2014). The recipient of a Fulbright fellowship, three Pushcart prizes, and other honors, Tarfia has been featured in periodicals, magazines, and anthologies both here and abroad. Tarfia presents work at institutions and organizations worldwide, and collaborations include photographers, producers, composers, filmmakers, musicians, and visual artists, resulting in several interdisciplinary projects, including an EP, Eat More Mango. In 2016, Tarfia was recognized by Harvard Law School as one of 50 Women Inspiring Change. Tarfia is a 2019 United States Artists Fellow.
Iris: Art + Lit 2020 was printed by Ideal Printing in Saint Paul, MN on 70# Lynch Smooth Text paper. It is bound with wire and semienclosed with a 100# Finch Opaque Vellum Cover and button and string closure.
Body text, headline, credits and folios were designed using the Bookmania font family. Postcard text is P22 Dearest. The polaroid text is Chantal.
All graphic design was completed in Adobe CC during distance learning on home-based laptops or desktops. Files were submitted via Google Suite.
600 copies of the magazine were printed. One copy of the magazine was distributed free of charge to each 9-12 student with the support of the publications budget for the magazine. Additional copies of Iris: Art+Lit can be purchased for $15, subject to availability.
The mission of Iris: Art + Lit is to celebrate the diverse creative voices in our community and encourage engagement with the arts. Poetry, prose, and artwork is submitted via event participation, teacher recommendation of classroom work, and individual student submission. Professional artists and authors jury the work. The art juror ranks the top 20 works in each medium: drawing and painting, ceramics, and photography. Videography recommendations are made by the instructor. Iris staff remove names from the literature submissions and the judge ranks these works on a 5 star scale.
Iris: Art + Lit is an open forum for student expression. The ideas presented in the work, as well as the copyright of each piece, belong to the author or artist who created it. However, the magazine staff reserves the right to deny publication to submissions. The staff may edit pieces for length or typographical errors, with the goal of maintaining the integrity of the original work.
Columbia Scholastic Press Association - Gold Crown Award (2018), Silver Crown Award (2019) Judge’s Selections: Cover - featuring artwork by Celeste Parke-Reimer and design by Quinn Christensen; pp. 26-27 - featuring poetry by Melissa Nie and pottery by Iris Shaker-Check; pp. 50-51 - featuring poetry by Nora Povejsil and photography by Claire Hallaway; pp. 58-59 - featuring poetry by Ben Atmore and painting by Celeste Parke-Reimer. Gold Medalist. Gold Circle Awards: Isobel Alm (Iris) - Single illustration, hand-drawn - 2nd Place; Tyler Christensen (Iris) - Single illustration, hand-drawn - CM. NCTE: REALM First Class (2018), Superior (2019). National Scholastic Press Association - Pacemaker (2019). All-American, Best of Show (Fall 2019) - 2nd Place; Best of Show (Spring 2020) - 1st Place. MHSPA - 1st Place - Best of Show. Gold Medallions for Magazine Art or Illustration - 2nd Place - Ashley Su; Magazine Art or Illustration3rd Place - Katherine Goodman; Magazine Cover Design - 1st Place - Quinn Christensen; Magazine Photograph - 2nd Place - Elea Besse; Magazine Photograph - 3rd Place - Ben Hanson; Magazine Poem - 1st Place - Aidan Lanz; Magazine Poem - 2nd Place - Will Rinkoff; Magazine Spread Design - 1st Place - Quinn Christensen; Magazine Spread Design - 2nd Place - Ashley Su. JEM - All State Gold
Untitled - Andrea Gist