My Body Made This

Looking around at the kitchen counter littered with what are becoming
artifacts of my learning, and of my anxiety, I am uncomfortable.
It is not that the painting and the gluing is joyless, that part I am finding
solace in. The painting and gluing. The cutting and drawing. The momentary pauses
before selecting the right shade of watercolor or the right thickness of pen. These
actions recall me to childhood. To coloring books and tiny mounds of clay. To butcher
paper on the driveway and drop in classes at the local art center.
In re-enacting, re-embodying these activities of my childhood, I am at ease.
My fingers wrapping delicately around a dripping paintbrush. My body pressing
against a freshly glued, curling page.
What I am uncomfortable with is the meaning. And what I am uncomfortable
with is the sitting.
An anxiety riddled, content junkie proclivities conveniently veiled by the
demands of higher education it is not often necessary for me to sit on information.
It is not often that I wait with my feelings, or with my thoughts.
My thinking mostly happens in short bursts on a screen (as it is now). My
sitting happens at a desk, still except for my shifting hands, and a bouncing right
leg. Or it may occur on a bed, my forearms resting on a pillow, my right big toe
flexing and pointing rapidly. And in short bursts (if Im lucky, long continuous bursts,
but I am rarely lucky), I place my thoughts on the screen. I re-read them to make
sure they make sense, I consider will my reader know what Im talking about? Does
this mean anything? Am I clear? Will they think Im smart? and not long after, I
submit and am (hopefully) free of them.

But I am sitting here, at the kitchen counter, my feet dangling from the tall
stool. Waiting. Sitting. And in front of me are all these artifacts. The reading for the
week1 had left me fascinated and drained. Constantly I thought to myself, This is
me. This is what my head feels like. The trouble, of course, is that I dont really
want to feel like me a lot of the time, often I dont want to walk alone in the
neighborhood of my mind. So I feel my heart in my chest, a little louder. And I feel
my upper arms tingle and vibrate with every page turn. My cheeks flush. I catch
myself gnawing at my lip.
And now, amongst the artifacts, Ive got the quiet hum of my anxiety settled
right under my diaphragm and it rattles a little with every breath. I am ready to
keep going. To distract myself from that hum, but the artifacts arent ready for
meThe project needs me to wait. The project needs to dry before I can move on, it
needs me to hold on and hold off.
So I wait. And I think about the book and its swirling pages, the creeping
tentacles and the wide eyed deer. The sad, ugly children and angry voices. And I
think about what it means to be someone who is creative, but also someone who is
anxious. I think about what I will tell my therapist tomorrow when she asks how
school is going. I think about what it means to silence parts of yourself so that the
rest of you can make it in the world.
The watercolors are drying and warping the pages and I think about the hum.
I imagine pulling it delicately out of my body. Pealing it away from where it sits
nestled at the bottom of my ribcage, its filmy tentacles writhing up my sternum. I
imagine holding it in my hands, the buzzing louder (no longer muffled by my

1 Barry, Linda. What It Is

stomach and lungs and intestines) vibrates the fine bones in my fingers, the
tentacles searching, grasp at my wrists
We are both uncomfortable, the hum and I. It is not used to being examined
in this way, preferring the comfortable shell of my thorax. I prefer it there too,
where we can co-exist, sometimes in symbiosis, others as parasite and host, host
and parasite. Because now as I sit here, it looks so fragile, soft and searching, and I
feel so fragile for how much it scares me. For how much I am afraid it will scare
others who might be unlucky enough to see it.

When I first asked her about the making she has been required to do, she is
so firmly oriented against it that I am taken aback. She has yet to take on the task,
but it is clear that the process that I experience as a salve and an opening, she
experiences as an obstacle.
My emotions get in the way. My emotions get in the way when I am writing, but that
is because I have a hard time balancing my heart (anger, passion, heat, etc.) with
my head (academic intellect). As far as making, my emotions get in the way
because I hate creating things that are not with words. I will do it, but I don't like it.
So nothing I "make" is actually good enough because, quite honestly, neither my
head nor my heart are in it.2
I talk to her later, and when she speaks to me, across the table, her hair in chords
on her shoulders, her body leaning back in her chair, it is seems to me that her
head and her heart are there. But maybe thats the neighborhood she doesnt like to
walk in.
She tells me about the drawing. About making her body on the page. About the
accounting of what others have put on it over the years.
She tells me about soaking her edges in alcohol to soften them.

2 Wonderful Faison, Survey, 9 November, 2014

She tells me about being a child with a crayon. I consider how excited
someone must have been for you to enter the world, to name you Wonderful. She
tells me her sister was always the drawer. Anymore, she says, I dont even
doodle.3
She tells me about the trance of writing, the calm. So different from my own, she
speaks to her body at ease. She says Im always angry and if Im not angry Im
about to be I can write through that
As we wrap up, I ask her if she ever plans on returning to drawing to do her
work. She looks a little conflicted before saying, If I see the needMy opinion on
learning with it has changed - after doing the making my opinion has changed especially if youre not judged on how good it is.

Writing is a way of thinking, I tell my freshman composition students, This

is why its best practice to do multiple drafts. A lot of the time, we dont actually
figure out what it is we are trying to say until we have written our way there. If this
is you, its really great that you got there, but all of that figuring out doesnt need to
live in your paper. You have to be willing to pull all that process work and let your
point stand on its own.
For the most part I believe that. And the research supports it. But something
pulls at me a little as I say it.
Mostly because I dont believe that our narratives about writing, and our
institutions, actually support that story.

3 Wonderful Faison, Interview, 2 December, 2014

Mostly because I know the enormous, paralyzing pressure I feel from a blank
page. Even something as small as a reader response can leave me avoiding my
computer for hours.
I tell them about all the ways I trick myself into writing. Setting timers. Typing
with my eyes closed. The Ill just do a 10 minute free-write and see where it gets
me. The backwards planning. The mapping. The all I need to do is one shitty page
and that will be ok for today.
As an undergraduate I know I wrote hundreds and hundreds of pages. I dont
remember how I got it done. I remember making outlines. I remember flagging
passages and quotes. I remember writing seminar papers in the laundry room to
avoid my roommate and her boyfriend. I remember all-nighters in the dorm
common rooms with my friends. Once I wrote fifteen pages on Plato and the
subjectivity of justice on a car ride from New York with my shitty ex-boyfriend.
And I know I was scared all the time, but I dont remember being scared of
writing.
But now its harder. More of my identity is tied to writing in ways Im not so
comfortable with. Id like to think that before, I was more comfortable not knowing
things, of letting my figuring-it-out sit on the page, but really I think I had an
unbridled confidence that I knew what I was doing, that I was good at this. Now, a
blank page is the quickest place for me to become acutely aware of just how much I
dont know. At a time when I feel like Im supposed to know more, to be more sure
of my knowing, I am less and less.

When I met him, when we were 21 and 22, he was studying sculpture. And
we danced through summer in un-air-conditioned houses and shared bottles of

whiskey. Later that October, just before his birthday, for his final exhibit he would
build a massive wooden structure to destroy it. Planned Obsolescence. To see it you
navigated a tight space with sharp shards of wood encroaching, a little threatening,
I actually cant believe they let me do that, 4 he tells me.
I ask him where it started and he says he liked making things. Kicked off his
freshman year as a journalism major, then graphic design then, eventually,
sculpture. He sanded expensive marbles for a glass blower in Okemos, with two
dogs and a patient wife. I felt at home, he told me, I was really happy doing that
work. He leans forward and smiles at me.
In his basement, next to the washer and dryer, next to his roommates ping
pong table were large bulbous figurines and at waist height, a child (modeled after
his nephew) sculpted around an old TV.
When he starts talking about sculpting, his eyes light up a little. He shapes
the air in front of him with his hands as he tells me about the golden bodies that
hung from the ceiling, arched and angelic. He says he liked making big things; he
liked making things people had to walk around, things that took up space.
Later hed study industrial design. Still making things that people interacted
with. He liked making things with a purpose, and not just a concept.
Now he hand makes shoes in a kitchen-turned-studio. I ask him what
learning to do that was like, Annoying, he says, taxing, but hes smiling. He tells
me about how his fingers ache, he laughs, my big dumb hands get glue
everywhere.
I ask him when he first new he liked making. He says, My dad taught me
how to whittle.
4 Vincent Suchanek, Interview, 3 December 2014

Once I made an abstract mobile for a visual representation of literacy. Tiny

circles of paper and wire like planets, circling and spinning. Because I wasnt afraid;
I believed there were no consequences.
In a space where unless it was a stated rule, it wasnt a rule I made the
thing that seemed the most pleasant to make.
I argued that sometimes we enact our literacies purely because the enacting
of them is joyful. That sometimes the meaning making is simply in the bliss of
making. Sometimes the purpose is in the aesthetic.

She has a face like the moon, her name clicking lightly across my tongue. The
jade in the window soaking up the first sun of December.
Native American Culture, she tells me, is engaged in materials and making
things. I was raised in that culture5
Earlier she placed pebbles and toy soldiers in the top half of a box. Mexican and
American scrapbook sticker flags. A diorama of oppression. A tiny model of
violence. A small plastic body, carrying centuries of meaning, lies torn and prone
amidst the swirling tinsel barbed wire that builds the border between one half and
the other.
She tells me how it was joyful and terrible and whimsical, making those
decisions. That she needed those dimensions to see the text 6. I think that sounds
exactly right.
5 Jaquetta Shade, Interview, 4 December, 2015
6 Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera

I ask her if she ever made a diorama as a kid, No, her eyes shine, this is my first
one.

It is the day after thanksgiving and I sit in my sort-of-childhood home, hidden

in the back room with the dogs holding vigil. I have stayed because the internet is
out, and I hope Ill get more writing done without its endless supply of distractions.
I managed to find others, though. There were leftovers to separate. I needed
to fill my car with gas. A Chinese food lunch with my auntie, cousin and mom while
they rested from shopping. I braved Target on a Black Friday to pick up mascara and
some bottles of travel shampoo.
My feet are a little cold and my nail polish is chipped from washing dishes. My
hips are sore. My notes sit next to me, scribbled in pencil on a childs drawing pad.
Ill write in short bursts. Two or three sentences. A pause. Two or three sentences.
The curser blinks patiently at the end of each one. The hum is curling around my
sternum and rattling my rib cage. Im not sure what Im doing.
Yesterday my cousin, Samantha, sister and I made thanksgiving dinner for 35
of our relatives. With a great deal of guidance from our mothers, and a bit of
manual labor from our younger cousins, we managed with little incident. There were
spread sheets and oven time lines and stacks of recipes, many of them new. We
were laying our hands on what had traditionally been the property of the previous
generation. There were certainly expectations.
I ask the hum why it wasnt there, but I know the answer. My hands were
busy, constantly building and crafting turkeys I wouldnt eat, sweet potato
casserole, cakes and green beans. My mind was at work, but it wasnt a work that
would be recognized as such. I made and made, and coordinated. And my body

stirred and chopped and tossed. And my mind counted down minutes and
calculated serving sizes. And most importantly, I knew that I knew how to do it.

The dough inhales softly on the comal. The smooth, speckled tortilla gets
shifted to a pile of its sisters.
He tells me about how he tries to engage in everyday practice, everyday
things take time.7 He likes to cook after a day of writing. A processing. A thinking
through.
The flour and fat and water and salt a cohesive whole now, he gently rolls them
between his wide palms. Shapes it out into a flat circle with the rolling pin.
He tells me about learning to cook, throwing what he liked in a pan at first,
finding a technique later. That learning to cook like his mother cooks was a way to
take home with him when he moved away.
The writing doesnt happen in complete sentences, but in short thoughts.
Steps and pieces.
He says, The labor of academic work is taxing.
Writing, he says, is not about what it looks like, but about what I am trying
to say
He tells me hes happy with how the tortilla are turning out, I gave them
time to rest. We round back on time, on process. I ask him if part of what he likes
about cooking is that it is temporary. The product is temporary, he shakes his
head, but the process isnt.

7 Victor Del Hierro, Interview, 5 December 2015

For the year, I occupy a small, garden level studio apartment on the river. I
have resigned myself to cohabitating with the odd spider and potato bug, squirrels
peer in my window, my neighbors politely pretend they dont see in when they walk
by.
I have no porch, and it is wet, cold Michigan winter, so I spread the
newspaper ads that fill my mailbox across the kitchen floor and spray adhesive the
paper to the fabric. Even with the window open (a cold concession) it is ill advised.
As I puncture holes across the photo of my back, a pattern to hold the
stitches, I give time, hours, with a perspective on my body that I never spend time
with.
The words slowly grow, slowly, from the center. They are pushed through,
gridded, from the back. The thread is cut and separated, selected and combined.
The ends pressed between my lips and navigated through needle eyes.
The words become a mantra, a psalm, a prayer, a battle hymn. My body
made this. The process declares it and reifies it. The process affirms it as truth.
Last night it took blood. I believed there was give where there wasnt, and
there were minor and uncomfortable consequences. My finger tip too tender, I
called it a night.