Dissertation, Ravynn, Ravynn: Act 6, The Journey, Uncategorized

Ravynn Stringfield, Ph.D.

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Hi, I’m Ravynn!

Some time around October [2015] I decided that I was going to grad school. Unlike applying to undergrad, I did not have my ducks in a row. I hustled and hurried and scrambled to get my documents in order. In the end, I’ll admit that I didn’t do as much research as I should have. But never mind how I got here; the point is, now I’m here. A Black girl who broke into the Academy by way of a Masters/Ph.D. program in American Studies.

To anyone who read any of the 194 Black Girl Does Grad School posts, followed along with my journey, or became part of it in some other way: thank you.

With love,

Ravynn K. Stringfield, Ph.D.

Personal Essays, Projects, Ravynn, Ravynn: Act 5, Ravynn: Act 5, Scene 2, Ravynn: Act 5, Scene 2, Service, Teaching, The Journey, Working

Taxing Labor, Energizing Work

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My relationship with academia is fraught. The years I have spent in graduate school have been filled with intellectual epiphanies, community building in digital spaces, and a lot of time to search for answers to my long list of questions. Instead of answers, I have often found more questions. Some have been intellectually generative, and push my scholarship further; others underscore the limitations on freedom in academia for a Black girl. 

As a result of time in the academy and currently participating in more service work than I ever have, the questions I have become more urgent and constitute a fairly constant refrain in my mind: Why is my institution, and many across the board, unable to retain faculty of color? Why are we unable to fund diversity efforts and support our contingent faculty? Why are non-tenure track faculty, staff and graduate students’ voices and opinions shunted to the side, as if only tenured professors and students make up a campus? If we know that something (like hiring practices or tenure and promotion, for examples) can reinscribe hierarchies and oppressive systems, why do we continue to prioritize meeting those expectations? Why do we (as an institutional body) still think talking in circles around issues is moving us forward? 

The longer I am here and the more I do, the angrier I get and the more I want to do— and then don’t. Being in academia is a never-ending process of seeing an issue… and then going to seventeen meetings about it, and at the end of which, everything remains the same. It’s made me jaded, it makes me resentful and it will likely make me pursue a career outside of the academy. 

I think often about Toni Morrison’s statement about the function of racism is to distract you. At Portland State University in 1975, she said, “The function, the very serious function of racism, is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.” Well the fact is, racism is keeping me from doing my work, making me tired and all I want to do is rest. In short, it’s doing its job, it’s doing it well, and I am, unfortunately, failing to continue to muster the energy to do anything about it.

I’m torn between wanting to keep working and doing and hoping that maybe I can do something, anything, to change the culture of the institution, but at the end of every meeting, I am exhausted. Not just exhausted, I am often near tears. My therapist, bless her, is likely at her wits end with me signing onto our sessions already crying. Many Black folks and people of color in the academy build up a tolerance for institutional bullshit, but I am still green. Every time someone raises their voice, I bristle; when I am talked over, I feel defeated; when (white) folks express shock that I could have a useful idea, I scowl; when they compliment me on my well formulated responses, I hear “articulate” and cringe because, of course, I couldn’t be. And I am TIRED. 

And I just started.

This is taxing labor, labor that I pay for with my time and energy and tears.

It keeps me from what I find to be energizing work: teaching, workshopping, and collaborating. 

I recently had the opportunity to speak with Stanford’s Black Studies Collective. This hour long conversation with the students was electric: we built off of each other’s energy, traded tips, offered advice, and enjoyed this moment of congregation together, filled with smiles and laughter. This work can be joyous. It can look like discussing the myriad of ways to translate your research into publicly consumable knowledge, it can look like helping folks think through the ways they organize themselves to get the most out of their day, it can look like explaining how I learned to fly.

I find that this work is most joyous in community.

This is why having collaborative aspects of my first course is important to me. For their introductory/get to know you assignment, I had my students contribute at least one song to a collective and thematic class playlist. I wanted to get a sense how they are thinking about the intersections of Black girlhood, fantasy and digital culture, what sorts of considerations and questions they will bring to the table and offer an opportunity to begin working together towards a shareable product. Building together helps me feel like I am contributing something. I am no longer just interested in making the space, but I want to play in the space I’ve created to see how we can construct the impossible. 

That feels like energizing work, soul fulfilling work. 

And the Academy makes it as hard as possible to revel in the joy of communal building with my students, peers and other faculty and staff. 

I want better for us, and I will be completely honest, I don’t know if I’m the person to be a part of the move towards tearing down what no longer serves us and in its place, crafting a better university. Just from my special combination of mental health issues, if I can avoid stressors as a way of keeping mood episodes under control, I will. I sacrifice my health to fight as hard as I do. And I want so much better for us, but I only get one life, one body, one me. 

And while I want better for us, I also want better for me. 

I don’t have an answer. I may never.

What I do know is that I got to look at a screen with a lot of Black faces on Friday, all eager and ready to learn from me and each other. It was joyous. And it keeps me going. 

They keep me going.

Conferences, Dissertation, Mental Health, Personal Essays, Ravynn, Ravynn: Act 5, Ravynn: Act 5, Scene 1, The Journey, Uncategorized, Working

Dissertation Check-In #5: Rejecting “Business as Usual”

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As always, when I sit down to write for BGDGS these days, I have to wonder what factors led to all the space between the last post and the one you are reading. General pandemic panic is more than enough reason, but in recent weeks/days, I’ve also been contending with an immediate family hospitalization, my own illness and, of course, the coup. The build-up of difficult feelings stemming from impossible situations has pushed me to a breaking point.

Naturally, when you don’t think you can take anymore, someone or something always comes along and pushes you right over the brink.

One of my committee members had what I’m sure were valid comments on my dissertation first draft that unfortunately were couched in stinging language. In a moment where I couldn’t take much more, that was the thing that convinced me that I couldn’t do this anymore. After spending the whole day prior writing affirmations and goals and timelines for how and when and why I would finish my project, not twenty-four hours later, a single ping of my inbox destroyed all the progress I’d made in building my confidence.

And so I cried.

I cried because in a world where everything is on the verge of shattering for literally everyone at any given moment, it’s still business as usual for academia: enforcing the gatekeeping practices that keep white supremacy happy and well-cared for in this institution. I still have innumerable deadlines, diversity and equity committee meetings to attend, research to conduct, writing to do, all with the expectation that I will continue to give and give and give and give because if I don’t, the threat of an ill-defined “they” will come to reject my access to the Ivory Tower.

On a good day, it is the business of the academy, fueled by the power of white supremacy, to keep us busy and run down so that we can’t fight back (to think through and paraphrase a sentiment by Toni Morrison). It is the business of this institution to keep us preoccupied with trying to make space for our research, our shared knowledge, our work, while tending the needs of our students and often fighting for justice, which we do with love, so that we will not, cannot, take these small moments of rupture in stride. Because the small moment is one of a thousand or more, and this was the weight which caused the collapse of a back not designed to carry this impossible load. I find my day to day in the academy saturated with moments that give me pause, that strike me like a hot iron, that cause me to recoil, and I often bare them quietly. This is business as usual in the academy.

It is not business as usual.

We (Black folks, Indigenous folks, queer folks, women, etc. etc.) deal with aggression and violence and trauma on a near daily basis in this institution, filled with folks who should know better, and theoretically do on paper. We deal with this unkindness (an understatement) on a good day, and it is truly shocking to me that some people find it in their hearts to do this in a pandemic.

Y’all are really choosing violence in a pandemic?

I was recently in a roundtable discussion for the MLA on access in the academy, where we discussed the various ways this institution is designed to prey on precarity, which in turn keeps so many people (who are not rich, cis, white, male) out. We discussed the ways that the pandemic exacerbates many of the issues that already exist in the academy. And it remains grating to me that for many people, the issues that they are now experiencing because of the pandemic that force them to think about and center their students and their well-being, for instance, are questions and concerns that folks who teach in the margins have been speaking and writing about forever.

The idea that this moment has opened the eyes of many to injustice and inequity incenses me, because that tells me with great clarity what we already knew: that the default until now was to operate in the status quo of this institution, which I have outlined as being fueled by white supremacy, among other metrics of oppression.

I snapped over the comments on my dissertation, because in between the lines, there was the sentiment that there is no place for this project I have chosen to undertake. It doesn’t work, not because it lacks rigorous intellectual inquiry, but because the form is not one in which they have been groomed to understand as “scholarship.” It reinscribed harmful notions that there is no place for differing expressions of cultural knowledge.

How many times must we fight this fight before we move on from this battleground?

What is the cost?

I recently tweeted that my personal feed is nothing but arts and crafts updates because I’ve reached a point where if I talk about my work/dissertation or grad school writ large, there is a high likelihood that I will start crying. A friend pointed out that this feeling is a largely accepted part of the process.

I reject the notion that I should be driven to tears by this work on a near daily basis and that this is normal.

This is not business as usual.

This institution does not get to continue to ask of me when its general orientation towards me is one of hostility and violence.

This is not business as usual; nor should it be.

Personal Essays, Ravynn, Ravynn: Act 5, Ravynn: Act 5, Scene 1, The Journey, Uncategorized, writing

The Writing (R)evolution of Ravynn KaMia Stringfield

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The one year anniversary of a few important days has snuck up on me. On October 23, 2019, I had the opportunity to see author Nic Stone in conversation with fellow children’s author, Lamar Giles, in Richmond. On October 25, 2019, my first published piece dropped on Black Youth Project. And on October 28, 2019, I entered #DVPit with the novel I drafted over the summer, Love in 280 Characters or Less.

One year ago, I had no idea that meeting Nic and getting to talk to her would be exactly the confidence boost I would need to pitch 280 in #DVPit just a few days later. I had no idea that my piece for Black Youth Project would just be the first of many (ten!) pieces to come in the next twelve months. I couldn’t have imagined that in just a few month’s time, I would give a keynote at a young writers conference and sign with my agent, and now be on submission trying to sell a book or two.

It’s wild to me that in a year, I really started to establish myself as a writer. This is ultimately what I always wanted to do. When I think back to the thirteen-year-old carting around a spiral notebook, turning her life into a novel, and the sixteen-year-old religiously participating in NaNoWriMo, and the twenty-year-old trying to make her creative writing class work…all these various versions of myself would have always wanted to end up here. And the version of me who sat in that study room on the second floor of Clemmons at UVA surrounded by members of Black Monologues, spitting poetry and performing off the cuff monologues, feeling inspired and safe for the first time— she was the beginning of this transformation.

It wasn’t a linear journey to this point. At all. Though I started to feel more confident in myself after BM, I definitely haltingly dipped toes into the water of publishing. I finished a novel that I eventually queried— to one agent. Who rejected it. And that was the end of that pursuit. Instead, I shelved that project and focused instead on writing smaller pieces for small magazines and this blog. I even did a short stint as a writer for Literally, Darling, and produced some good writing my first time working with editors.

As I got more comfortable with academic writing over the course of my time in coursework, I realized that that style wasn’t all I wanted. I still wanted to be able to share my thoughts and musings in more public forums. Those first couple years of grad school were tough. I really lost myself trying to prove I could do things the way the rigid system wanted me to without understanding that I was not built to operate in that way. My mind wanted a freedom incompatible with the “intellectual freedom” the Academy performatively offers. And most importantly, I wasn’t happy.

But 2018 was a year that gave some answers. I found my place in Black Digital Humanities and let myself be inspired and guided by the Black women scholars who existed as a constellation of possibilities: public work, digital humanities, history, Black feminist thought, art. I realized it didn’t have to be either or. I could do what I wanted to do and the Academy would just have to deal with it, or I would make another space.

That confidence helped me ease back into writing publicly. After my comprehensive exams, I wanted to read absolutely nothing for months. So I wrote instead. And from about June 2019-June 2020, I wrote three fiction manuscripts: two novels and a graphic novel script. I couldn’t stop because this was what felt right.

So I chased that feeling.

Which was how I found myself pitching shorter stories about love and Black feminism and digital things. I started following the sound of the stories that were on my heart and let them lead.

After a year of following stories, I think I can safely say that my lane is an interesting sort of mix of cultural criticism and memoir. While I love everything I’ve produced over the past year, I’m proudest of the two personal essays I wrote for Catapult, “How a Black Girl Learned to Fly” and “How Legend of Korra Gave a Big Black Girl Permission to Be Broken.” I can’t totally explain why…but these pieces feel like the closest I’ll ever get to flying my own self (to paraphrase Toni Morrison).

*

I think I needed to do this reflection because recently I’ve been feeling so stressed and tired and ready to quit writing. Being on submission is truly not for the faint of heart.

And though so much is still hanging in the balance, and with so much still to come, I don’t think I’ve fully taken a moment to appreciate how far I’ve come already.

Even though I’m not where I want to be yet, I think back to who I was at twenty-one and know that girl would look at me with awe in her eyes, full of hope and pride.

Who am I to deny myself a genuine moment of gratitude for the road I am traveling, truly walking by faith and not by sight?

Dissertation, Ravynn, Ravynn: Act 5, Ravynn: Act 5, Scene 1, The Journey, Uncategorized, writing

Dissertation Check-In #4: The Council of Superfriends

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My usually carefully planned out, weekly grad school blog has fallen woefully to the wayside since March. All things considered, it’s to be expected. Aside from the pandemic and uprisings and the impending election, it’s already difficult to write a dissertation and to sustain other writing projects while doing so.

So Black Girl Does Grad School has taken a backseat this year.

Nevertheless, I’m still here—albeit sporadically.

I’m currently in the editing phase of dissertation writing. I got the bare bones of what I’m trying to do and say down on the page, and now it’s about tweaking and adding and reading more and fleshing out the ideas that I already have.

Sounds simple. Unfortunately, at least for me, it’s not.

Editing is actually the hardest part of writing for me. I think it’s the most valuable part. Much of the diamonds of your thoughts are excavated during editing. The push and pull of working and reworking your writing feels a lot like kneading dough. It’s hard, intense work that requires you to get your hands dirty, and do what looks more or less like destroying your hard work. But if you don’t knead— and importantly, if you don’t let your work sit, or prove, to extend the metaphor— you won’t have much worth showing at the end. It’ll be an underdeveloped bit of mess.

As much as I respect this part of the process, I find it really difficult to do on my own, and with my own writing. Even with feedback from my chair, I still feel rather alone in this journey. The loneliness also stems from writing this particular project about Black girls and fantasy and the digital without having a Black woman on my committee.

Yes, I am aware of how this looks. The truth of it is, when I entered grad school, I knew nothing of the politics of crafting a committee. This was information I learned on the fly. And at that time, a committee didn’t matter much to me, because four or five years ago, when I was applying and starting out, I didn’t know this was the project I wanted. Perhaps a little foresight might have directed me to a different program, with a different set of support systems in place, specifically the hand of Black women scholars.

But I just wasn’t thinking like that yet.

Now I am thinking about these things as I write this creative and genre defying manuscript, knowing in my heart of hearts, that in all likelihood my committee’s not going to get it.

And having to defend my project, and by extension, myself in the process, was enough to paralyze me going forward into edits. I needed to talk to people who would understand, with little to no explanation the why of what I was trying to do as well as the what and how.

So I called a meeting of the Council of Superfriends.

My Council of Superfriends is a collection of Black women I love and who love me from different parts of my life, who all think about Black girls and girlhood in various ways: there’s Dr. Autumn, Black girl literacy scholar and one of my dearest internet friends; Chardé, an anthropology Ph.D. student at my university; Taylor, a theatre artist I met doing Black Monologues at the University of Virginia; and, of course, my filmmaking soul sister, Micah.

I asked them for an hour of their time, to just listen to me try to articulate my project as it exists so far, and offer feedback, suggestions and questions. And as soon as we started, I knew calling this particular group of thinkers together was just what my project needed. More than I needed to be pushed and prodded in my thinking, I needed community. I needed Black women who could show me where the bounds of my own mind were with love and care. They were able to ask the hard questions, and the ones that matter most: if this is a project about the freest manifestation(s) of Black girls’ selfhood, why are you limiting yourself to what you think a dissertation has to look like? Would you even be writing a dissertation to answer this question? Can a dissertation, the way you imagine it, answer this question to your satisfaction? Why did you choose this form? If you’re not planning to stay in academia, why does it matter so much to do this in such a constricting way?

For a project about the potential of limitlessness, I realized I was trapped on every side by everyone else’s expectations. The reason I was feeling so paralyzed by the project was because I couldn’t even imagine what true intellectual freedom would mean and look like for myself under the system that currently exists. And that was the trap. I was trying to fly in a cage. Just because I made the cage bigger so I couldn’t always see the bars, didn’t mean they weren’t still there.

Over the years, I have gotten so good at doing what I want to do inside the lines, inside the cage, that I haven’t truly dared let myself imagine what exploding the lines completely would look like for me. Sure, it’s impressive to be able to do this sort of alchemy within, but that’s not the truest form of my self-expression.

I can’t lie to myself and also do this project.

What a waste. Of time, of energy.

If I’m doing this for who I say I’m doing this for, and if I’m truly doing what I want to do, there is no more trying to fly in the cage.

And in conversation with the Superfriends, Chardé brought up a good point: this is a Hurstonian project. I am a student of Zora Neale Hurston. I am not, nor have I ever been, the only Black woman to find the constraints of the academy and the way things have “always been done,” completely misaligned with my personal mission. I have people I can return to, whose work I can think through and build on, to craft something to ultimately matters to me.

We began the meeting sort of discussing the long standing irritation I have at having to “justify” my dissertation work. I shouldn’t have to explain why my work about Black girls matters: to question that is to question the essential importance of Black girls. And though I didn’t necessarily come to this conclusion in that hour, I did begin to realize that the first step in freeing myself to do this project justice is to stop answering that question. Stop wasting breath on people who need to be taught that Black girls’ lives matter.

It’s time to focus on the questions that do matter, and the people who are asking them.

The Superfriends reminded me who I’m doing this for, and why I’m doing it.

They reminded me that I still have a lot to learn and unlearn and relearn, and that this process is for me. Perhaps this isn’t why other people pursue Ph.D.s, but my project is a labor of love and care.

And it always will be.

Book Review, Ravynn, Readings, Research, Teaching, The Journey, Uncategorized

The Teachability of Legendborn

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I’d already rearranged the syllabus for my spring 2021 Magical Black Girls class once– back in June when Bethany C. Morrow released A Song Below Water. It was too good not to teach, especially when it specifically spoke to themes of the violence and silencing Black girls too often endure, the matrilineal nature of our power, and the strength of sisterfriends.

I told myself that I would not be readjusting again, no matter what new thing I discovered.

And then I was able to get my hands on an ARC of Legendborn.

Tracy Deonn pens a modern take on Arthurian legend reimagined as a secret society at a Southern Predominately White Institution (PWI). The protagonist, Bree Matthews, falls head first into this world, and it’s made abundantly clear to her by the others in the reimagined “Order” that Bree does not fit.

Any Black person at a PWI, particularly a Southern one, knows the experiences Bree endures intimately. We know the malevolent administrator who sneers at our presence. We have met the parents who are quick to label us as “Affirmative Action” and believe that us occupying a space on those campuses has somehow stolen something from their children. We have befriended the seemingly innocuous white person, who says something racist and when you call them on it they’re quick to dismiss your retort, saying, “You know what I mean.”

All of that would be enough to make anyone’s blood boil just below the surface, but add to it the depths of Bree’s grief and being thrown into an unknown magical world, where the same essence may have a different name to different people. Where the intersections of experience and history collide in unexpected ways. Deonn seamlessly weaves a tale based in uncomfortable truths about the relationship between Black and white people in the South that span centuries. Though born from those uncomfortable truths, it takes up the strength and power generated by Black individuals and families and shows how we have risen and continue to rise.

For all of that, Legendborn is the rare kind of book that satisfies the appetite of all the various portions of my personality and interests. Most times, it’s a pick and choose type of situation: perhaps you get high fantasy but lack depictions of Black girlhood, or you get Black girlhood but not as the heroine of the story.

With Tracy Deonn’s Legendborn, I didn’t have to choose. I got to bring all the sides of my magic-loving, history-seeking, smart-mouthed Black girl self to the table when I settled down to read a chapter or two. As a Black girl who has spent a significant amount of time at two Southern Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs) with big reputations for both my bachelors and masters/Ph.D. programs, the difficult, conflictual feelings Bree has about Carolina didn’t need to be explained. I understood the instinctual pull Bree felt to a campus that was not built with her in mind, and yet needing to know it intimately because it would bring her closer to a parent.

Reading Legendborn pulled to the surface all the things I didn’t know about my undergraduate institution, but that I learned in great detail at my graduate institution. I spent two years as a graduate assistant for The Lemon Project: A Journey of Reconciliation, my campus’ attempt at making the history of Black people readily available, to bring forth that which the institution would rather hide. In that time, I learned not only about the enslaved people who built my university, but met the Black folks who would much later integrate our Southern PWI, and build with the Black students who still work to make it a better place.

I know the high fantasy is the draw of Legendborn, but it is the richness with which Deonn weaves so much of what is important to me as the backdrop of this narrative. It’s the vibrancy with which Deonn allows Bree to be a Black girl and revel in all the complexity of what that means. Yes, I love the way she has reimagined Arthuriana, I love the strong characters, the elements of the magic that underlies this whole world, but it is the way Bree is simply in this world, whether she fits or not, that makes it near and dear to my heart and what makes it perfectly teachable.

Bree is the result of centuries of racial conflict and the deep love Black women have for each other. She is both softness and hard edges; strength and fragility. She is deliciously human and wondrously exceptional.

That she is all of these things and stunningly magical is a revolution.

It’s legendary.

Intermission 4, The Journey, Uncategorized, writing

Requiem For The King

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Chadwick Boseman joined the ancestors on the evening of August 28th. It was revealed that he had been diagnosed with stage three colon cancer four years ago, which progressed to stage four, and eventually took him.

Boseman rightfully deserves the most beautiful of elegies, ones that paint a stunning portrait of how impactful his corpus of work has been. As my good friend Kelsey said as we mourned together, Boseman’s artistry bridged past, present and future in a way that was impossible and necessary. He deserves words that reflect this. I, most certainly, am not the one to give it. I didn’t know him.

But I knew Black Panther.

Professor Claudrena Harold introduced me to Black Panther, in a circuitous way. We were having lunch together early in my last year of college, plotting my journey to graduate school, when she asked, “Did you know Ta-Nehisi Coates is writing the new Black Panther comics?”

Professor Harold is not the kind of person from whom you can hide your ignorance; so I owned up to being unaware, and the side eye I received was enough to send me home ready to do a thorough Google search. Fast forward a few months and I had read (and fallen in love with) Between the World and Me, become a Coates stan and was reading old Atlantic articles in my spare time, and was eagerly awaiting the first issue of the new Black Panther.

When the first issue landed in my Comixology account in late spring 2016, I turned the lights off in my dorm room and read the issue under my covers. I wanted as few distractions as possible as I drank in this comic. I emerged with a new obsession, which was only intensified by the announcement of the forthcoming movie that summer.

The film connected the work I was doing at the time as a comics scholar with the work my good friend, Micah, was doing as a film scholar, both of us interested in stories where Black people were centered in the ways we saw ourselves but that white media could not imagine. We both had questions, some answers, a lot of thoughts about what this film could mean, could do, could represent, and we both brought a particular expertise to the conversation. We founded King of the Black Millennials, a short lived blog where we worked out those early thoughts that summer, an endeavor that solidified our relationship as writing collaborators as well as friends.

I entered graduate school in fall 2016 with no sense of what I was doing or wanted to do; in some ways, I came armed with only my love of comics, and specifically, in that moment, Black Panther. So I clung to that. My first graduate level research paper for my Popular Culture class was rather mediocre, but I saw the beginnings of a real project forming. That paper led to my first conference presentation at the Southeastern American Studies Association conference in spring 2017; my first archival trip to work with Black Panther comics at VCU that summer, which became the basis of my Master’s portfolio that I defended that fall.

All that said, it must come as no surprise that the closer the film came, my eagerness grew. I planned out my outfits for opening night months before and secured my ticket for opening night the day they were available. To most of my friends’ surprise, I was firm in my resolve to see the film just once by myself before I saw it with anyone else. They thought it was because I feared I might have criticism; I knew it was because I would sob through the entire film.

When Wakanda unfurled before my eyes for the very first time on screen, I wept.

Perhaps white men had created Wakanda, but Black people had reclaimed it and cultivated this.

In the months after I defended my Master’s thesis, I regularly told my people I was going to take the Master’s and leave. I was uninspired and burnt out. I felt harassed and often patronized in my classes. I didn’t have another plan, but a few days after I had decided I was going to leave my program, a classmate sent me an email. Attached as an article about a Black man who had illustrated Black Panther comics in the 1970s: Billy Graham. Interested, but still unenthused and unwilling to do more research, I clicked it away.

By the grace of God, that classmate brought up the email again in class and directed my attention to the granddaughter mentioned in the article, Shawnna, who currently had Graham’s archives at her home in Williamsburg.

Meeting Shawnna and getting to work in the archives with her for a short while was enough to sustain me for another few months. I never did anything with that research other than write a seminar paper, but I realized after a while, that perhaps that work was simply meant to pull me through. It sustained me. It was what I needed to be okay.

When I first stumbled across the Associated Press article announcing Boseman’s death, I, like most people, thought it was a cruel hoax. It took less than a minute for me to confirm, and moments after that to completely break down. I cried for an hour straight, my heart broken over someone I had never met.

I woke today with a deep sadness settling over me like a weighted blanket. It took most of the day, and mourning with friends, to come close to articulating what losing Chadwick Boseman meant in this moment.

He was our joy. Our superhero. Our king.

Criticisms of the film still stand, but the way Black Panther became a cultural phenomena is unmatched. I had never seen such collective Black joy until the week of the release of Black Panther. It was a reason to celebrate, whether you liked superhero movies or not.

And, boy, did we celebrate.

The specter of Death looms over Black people in a particular way. Our health worries do not only include Coronavirus in this moment, but police violence, domestic abuse, assault, inadequate health care as a result of so many interconnected factors.

Tragedy has come to call again and again and again; its presence is unwelcome, yet it lingers.

We started the year with the loss of a legend, Kobe Bryant, and every day since has been another crisis, another loss, yet another moment that calls for mourning.

But this hit different.

Days after the Jacob Blake shooting, we lost a man who we came to associate with the purest form of Black joy.

It seemed pointed and cruel to lose a King of Joy in a moment that desperately called for any bit of hope.

Chadwick Boseman deserves the most peaceful rest.

To the King.

Dissertation, Ravynn, Ravynn: Act 4, Ravynn: Act 4, Scene 2, Research, The Journey, Uncategorized, writing

Dissertation Check-In #2: Motivation

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I’m unsure if it was the pandemic or just how I was feeling, but the other day, I was daydreaming about what would happen if I just didn’t finish my dissertation. It had been days, weeks, since I’d touched it meaningfully. Ultimately, I knew it would be fine if I didn’t finish. The world wouldn’t stop and I would eventually find some sort of job. To no one’s surprise, images of myself with a stack of novels–ones that I had written–danced through my mind. I could just step out on faith and pursue writing novels full time. The thought of infinite time, uninterrupted by dissertation work, to write the stories on my heart was tantalizing.

But as quickly as the moment came, it was gone, and I was back working on the conclusion for a chapter as if the events of the previous couple of weeks had been a bad fever dream. (Which admittedly, they kind of were.)

Earlier in the week, I watched two panels featuring Black women authors speaking on their forthcoming, and, in some cases, recently published YA fantasy novels on Black Girls Create. They made me think about the future of Black girls in fantasy, and how bright it was. The feeling sustained me for days, though I didn’t immediately write about it. It gave me a reason to reaffirm why I was even doing this dissertation project.

So I pulled out my dissertation journal, flipping to a blank page, and wrote at the top:

“Motivation Prompt:

Who are you writing this dissertation for?

Why are you writing this dissertation?

Why does it matter?”

In theory and in practice, you should know the answers to these questions. It’s what your chair and committee will ask of you before you even embark on your project. This means, you probably have a rehearsed answer. You probably have what we may think of as “the right” answer.

I needed to give myself permission to answer these questions openly and honestly, without judgment or expectation, because if I didn’t have a good answer, it would have been time for me to make some major reevaluations.

To my surprise, as I sat with the questions I had posed myself, answers–and not the ones I’d been rehearsing for months– sprung forth.

Who are you writing this dissertation for?

Me. 

Yes, I was also writing this for all the Black girls who fly and the Black women who write them, but at the core, I was writing for me. For present me, who couldn’t imagine writing anything else; for future me, who would be extremely disappointed if I don’t give the world this piece of myself; and for past me, who would have been awe-struck to see how many Black girls fly these days.

Especially for little me, whose grandfather always greeted me with, “What you got? That Harry Potter?” when he saw me approach his and my grandma’s house, toting a book and pushing my glasses back up my nose.

She would have been so overjoyed to see that I still believe in magic.

Why are you writing this dissertation? 

How could I not?

What else would I write about?

What else moves me like this?

And also why not?

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about our now ancestor, Cheryl Wall, and the photographs that other Black women scholars and writers have been sharing on social media of themselves with her. I love looking at those pictures, because they often are groups of Black women scholars and writers, lots of love connections in one image. When you look closely, you see that they are of all disciplines– literary theorists, anthropologists and poets… and they all know each other, love on each other, read each others’ words, are inspired by them, and work with them. It’s more than citational politics, this community of creation that Black women have fostered gives them infinite opportunities to be seen and known.

I want to be a part of that practice and lineage.

It also made me realize that I’m already doing some of that work. It’s what Micah and I have found in each other as we build off of each other’s work, getting inspired by each other’s words, finding peace and solace in the other’s worlds.

Some might think it’s self-indulgent to write about a good friend’s work; but this is how Black women writers and scholars have begun to build scholarly and personal community.

This is a love practice.

How could you see that in what is possible in your work and not want to be a part?

Why does it matter? 

Because Black women and girls matter. 

There was a moment where I realized the justification didn’t necessarily need to be much deeper than that. If we love and care about Black women and girls, we need to love the work that’s on their souls.

This is how I’m loving on Black women and girls. This is the work that’s on my soul.

This is the story I want to tell right now. 

If you get stuck writing your dissertation, I recommend giving yourself permission and time to sit with these questions, or your own, and see what’s on your heart. Let it motivate you. And write it down, so that when you lose sight of what’s important, you can return to the core of your inquiry whenever you need it.

*

 

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“Agented!”: Writing Across Genres

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If you follow me on Twitter or Instagram, you’ll know that I recently announced that I am now represented by Leah Pierre of Ladderbird Literary Agency. I’m super excited to begin working with her and hopefully get my words on a bookstore shelf near you.

That said, I’m sure there are questions, so I figured a quick Q&A would be helpful!

  1. How did you find your agent?

One morning in October, I woke up to find there was this Twitter pitching contest happening, #DVPit, which happens to specialize in connecting marginalized voices with agents and editors. I had finished drafting Love in 280 over the summer, so I thought, well, may as well give it a shot. I got interest from three agents, two of whom I submitted queries. When one of the agents passed on my manuscript in December, I actually emailed her to ask if there was anyone else on her team that’d be interested– I’d been doing a lot of reading about Ladderbird and wanted to be there. Incidentally, this agent had been trying to forward my manuscript to Leah, and maybe a month later, I got my offer from her.

  1. Why do you need an agent?

You don’t necessarily need an agent if you’re doing academic writing and publishing, but I write novels and am interested in trade publishing, which is much harder to enter without an agent. Many editors, particularly at bigger publishing houses, don’t acquire manuscripts from unagented writers. So, if I want to have a larger audience, having an agent means I have a better shot.

Also it’s great to have someone who loves your words in your corner to advocate for you and help you navigate the industry. I am absolutely transparent about the fact that I have no idea what I’m doing in the Academy and also in publishing, but I’m just writing what I need to write, the way it needs to be written, and worrying about whether it will find a home after.

  1. What happens next?

Now we do some edits to the manuscript before we start sending it to editors. I’m unsure how long this process will take and there’s always a chance we can’t sell the book, but even getting this far is exciting to me.

  1. Why are you writing across genres?

It’s just right. I’ve always written novels and short stories as long as I can remember. I used to write novel length stories about what I thought my friends’ lives and my own would be like in twenty years. I wrote Harry Potter fan fiction and X-Men stories to entertain people. I entered NaNoWriMo every year (and won) for about five years. I used to write comics and whole newspapers for my family. I’ve blogged for years and found homes for my words across the internet. I have always been a creative writer and trying to tell myself that I was only ever going to write academic pieces for the rest of my life was disregarding everything I had ever done in my life up until this point.

I write across genres because different stories require different forms or containers to be most effective. Some ideas require an article, others a short, still others a novel. And within those forms, I’m still going to experiment and push boundaries because that’s just what I do.

This is me walking in my purpose. This is right.

  1. How do you balance it all, your academic writing and creative writing?

I get this question a lot, actually.

It’s all about time management. I know that my academic writing pays the bills, so to speak, so I prioritize that. I set a weekly writing goal, which I then break down further. If my goal is 1,250 words per week, I need to average 250 words per week day. It only takes me an hour or so per day to get there, so I have the rest of the day to read and research, and work on my other projects.

One thing that happens is that I often get carried away by my creative projects and I can write a lot more and faster than I write my researched work. I usually cap a day’s work at 1,000 words for creative projects, and try not to write much more than that on a give day so I don’t get carried away.

Remember, some people work better with word limits/guidelines, others with time limits. Find what works best for you and work with that.

(I really should hold a time management webinar; if you’re interested leave a comment below.)

  1. Are you happy?

Yes.

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Should I Stay or Should I Go?: How I Came to My Final Decision to Leave My Full-time Job to Pursue Full-time School

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by Ebony Davis

Happy spring semester to all of you GOATs out there on a journey to pursuing higher education! Whether it is a master’s or a Ph.D. program you are in, welcome to the chat. Over my winter break, I spent a lot of time pondering, questioning, reassuring myself, affirming myself, challenging my thoughts and habits all while in the midst of getting some serious well-needed rest (I literally drooled on my pillows every night) and catering to my inner adventurous self by having a little fun. The last two weeks of winter break consisted of me overthinking one plan of action: whether I should stay at my current full-time job or leave.

I currently work full-time at a social service agency in Chicago. The agency is a non-profit and is contracted through the Department of Children and Families (DCFS) here. My undergraduate degree is in Social Work and my graduate degree will be in Social Work as well. I have been working in the field for a little over a year now and my master’s degree program entails two full-time internships at two social service agencies all while spending time in class unpacking more layers of the field and what it means to be a social worker and working. All in all, my life is social work piled on top of social work piled on top of more social work and it has been that way for a while. Last semester, when my last class of the night was over, I was going home to prep and gear myself up to go to work.

Oh, did I mention I work during the day and overnights? My work schedule is pretty jam packed. I spend most of my time at work with the children I serve.

Well, over winter break, I started thinking to myself how different I wanted my spring semester to be.

First of all, I knew I wanted to switch over to being a full-time student, and I knew full-time work would not mesh with the demands of being enrolled full-time. This commitment resulted in me having to make a decision. A hard one. If I did not want to be exhausted, I knew I had to give up working in order to pursue and focus on school but my decision boiled down to a few things:

  1. I knew I was never happy with where I was. The pay this place started me off at was terrible. I literally had money to pay ONE bill a month, which was rent. Aside from that, it was just me consistently living check to check for the first five months I lived in Chicago. That feeling was miserable. Having to divide up my check to see which bills were going to get paid in a month and which were not was probably one of THE most humiliating things I have ever experienced. Do not be like me and settle for something like this.
  2. The work environment was extremely toxic, distracting and unhealthy. You all don’t know, but my friends heard how much I wanted to leave every single day. It was so hard trying to ‘do the right thing’ and serve a vulnerable population in the midst of unwarranted chaos. Drama between staff unfolded every day and some of the employees were borderline verbally abusive to the youth at this agency. It started to become concerning, and no one seemed to see that there was anything wrong.
  3. The final reason why I decided to leave and knew that it was time to go is because I never felt supported at my job. Yes, there were good days, but I took it hard when I was not receiving adequate supervision and support from my team. It’s like everyone was just stuck on ‘DUH’ and did not care about growth and the effectiveness of how the agency is run.

Even with these reasons in mind, it STILL was hard to leave the job. I felt so much resistance and through myself for a loop every time I got ready to submit my formal notice. A lot swayed my decision. I thought about that flow of income I would be cutting myself away from, I thought about my bills, I thought about what would happen to the children I served and worked with and how my decision to leave would affect them, and I thought about what people would say about me.

When my mind started to become heavy, I prayed and asked God to send me a sign or vision that would reveal the best decision for me. I prayed over my sanity and mental wellness and asked God to remove resistance and remind my mind and body that I am okay currently, and I am going to be okay in the future. I prayed about the contemplation and unrest the decision to stay or go was causing me.

Ultimately, God gave me a sign. He gave me a sign a long time ago and He is giving me another sign now. I am writing this because this is your sign. If you are not well because of a job, leave. If you are pursuing school and work full-time and cannot seem to find time for yourself, your children, your family or your partner, leave. If you have been putting off taking care of yourself for a job, leave. If the work environment is toxic and you do not see growth, leave. Because 1) the work you are putting in now, while in school, is going to create and expand opportunity for you. 2) Work will always be there, for all of us. Our peace, sanity and joy are things you and I cannot afford to sacrifice anymore.

You are still a Queen if you choose to leave. It’s going to be okay.

download (2)Ebony Davis is a 23-year-old from Kansas City, KS. She recently relocated to Chicago, IL to embark on her graduate school journey, and pursue some dreams she has had in mind for herself. She attends Loyola University Chicago, and is in school for her master’s degree in Social Work. She has been working in the social service field for a total of four years now, and she feels like she right where she needs to be.

Working in this field is her calling. Ebony enjoys being a source of support to other people, and she loves challenging and uprooting individuals into the very best version of themselves. Aside from all the social work she does, Ebony also writes and has been writing since she can remember. She enjoys journaling in her free time, and is working toward being a freelancer all 2020.

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A Semester in Review: My Favorite Films From Cinema and Modernization of U.S. Culture

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Friday afternoon at 11:50 AM marked the end of my first semester of TA’ing. It had its ups and downs, but ultimately I learned a lot, I bonded with my students, and most importantly, I survived. (I do have to help proctor and grade the exams, but that’s just one day, so as far as I’m concerned, I’m done.)

In the aftermath of the semester, I’ve been thinking a lot about the films we watched and the conversations we had because of them. Thus, here is a list of a few films that stuck with me over the course of the semester:

imitation-of-life-still-03_758_427_81_s

Imitation of Life (1959).

This was my favorite film of the semester, hands down. Early in my graduate training, I took a class called “Interracialism,” which dealt in large part with passing literature. Though the film is filtered through Lora’s eyes, I found myself most aligned with Sarah Jane and her struggle to make sense of her “mix-matched” outward appearance and racial identity. I found the mother-daughter relationships deep and rich; the friendships complex and nuanced; and the social commentary important. Though most critics of the time referred to it dismissively as a “woman’s film,” I chose to reclaim the term. The female and interracial narratives are beautifully done, in a way that I wouldn’t have expected from a 1950s films. It was particularly thought-provoking and I believe it will stay with me for a long time to come.

this_is_thewithinourgates_original

Within Our Gates (1920).  

Oscar Micheaux was one of the only Black filmmakers we studied over the course of the semester, so naturally his 1920 silent film, Within Our Gates, gets a place on my list. We watched it in comparison to the (notorious) D. W. Griffith film, Birth of a Nation, and while that is an important way to conceptualize the film, I was also particularly interested in the way Micheaux depicts Black mobility. There’s the literal conception of mobility as Sylvia, the protagonists, makes moves from the North to the South and back again over the cover of the film; but also within lies an interesting depiction of upward mobility for the Black characters. Yes, Micheaux does include some stereotypical images of Black rural and uneducated characters, which are supposed to be a juxtaposition of the doctors and teachers shown in the film. I found it disconcerting that Micheaux’s interest in and depiction of Black upward mobility relied on classist stereotypes of Black folks unable to access education.

WOG is not excluded from critique. But it’s also a struggle when you are only presented with one film by a Black filmmaker, because then that film, by virtue of being the only example, becomes the representative of an entire body of works. It’s unfortunate to say the least. Nevertheless, I did enjoy WOG and thinking critically about it’s position in early American cinema.

she-done-him-wrong

She Done Him Wrong (1933)

I hated the ending of this film, and much of the plot, if we’re being honest, but I really enjoyed learning about Mae West. The film was based on an earlier play that she wrote herself. She’s an older, more mature film star, despite the emphasis on young ingenues. She’s witty (yes, it’s scripted), but she delivers with confidence that is mesmerizing to me. I love an independent woman in media (though, again, the ending ruins that for me), but Mae West is an intriguing figure in cinema and I would love to continue learning more about her.

filmsociety

In the Heat of the Night (1967)

Sidney Poitier. Do I need to say more? No, but I will. As an active reader about Black history, I knew a fair amount about Sidney Poitier’s body of work, but had never seen more than a few clips of him acting. I was excited to see him in action. Again, this is a film where the context and learning about Poitier was more exciting than watching the actual film (it’s a gritty mystery– though a poorly plotted one…I figured out who the murderer was half way through). I thought this film was nicely supplemented by writing by James Baldwin, who was a friend of Poitier, and I enjoyed leading discussion section on this one, because most of my students had never encountered Baldwin before.

Honorable Mentions:

  1. Blood of Jesus (1941)
  2. I am a Fugitive From A Chain Gang! (1932)
  3. It (1927)

I’m now much more knowledgeable about early American cinema up until about 1970, which is an interesting thing, but something I’ve been sitting with recently. Many of the films were troubling and uncomfortable, something that one of my students picked up on and wrote about during our last class together. Having to sit through some films, like Birth of A Nation (1915) and Easy Rider (1969), and try to cobble something coherent and intellectual to say about them was actually very difficult. But as a different student pointed out, film is a representation of American history, and American history is uncomfortable and troubling, so it only makes sense that this is the sense we get from watching “representative” films. (They troubled that term and I didn’t even have to lead them to do so.)

Nevertheless, I’m always willing to engage with new modes of thinking, and this experience expanded my ability to grapple with some of my dissertation texts. I’m grateful for my students, who challenged me on a weekly basis, and the intellectual community that we built together over the course of the semester (even when it frequently involved minor rabbit holes into the plot of Paddington 2 and the Marvel Cinematic Universe.)

Things don’t always happen when you want them to, but they happen when they need to, and this semester’s work has taught me that– if nothing else.

Ravynn, Ravynn: Act 4, Ravynn: Act 4, Scene 1, Teaching, The Journey, Uncategorized

TA Observations and Great Students

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The semester is drawing to a close so naturally it was time for my observation. If you’re unfamiliar, often the professors under whom their Teaching Assistants (TAs) work will observe them as they teach. This process simply helps TAs, who will potentially go on to become professors of their own classes, become a little more reflective about their pedagogy and refine their practices with input from folks who have been in the game longer.

I have not gotten my feedback yet but I do have a few thoughts on being observed. I think the process is extremely necessary and as someone who cares a lot about pedagogy, I’m always looking for ways to strengthen my teaching. I noticed though that having the instructor of record in our class(es) throws off the vibe. On the one hand, students who don’t speak as much are prompted to participate a little more so the conversations are a little bit more lively. But on the other, the sense of being surveilled changes the dynamics that I have developed with my students over the course of the semester.

In particular, I have one discussion section with whom I have developed a truly wonderful rapport over the course of the semester. We joke (we have several inside jokes at this point), we laugh, we have easy conversation, but we get the work done. And while I worried about them not being able to stay on track during my observation, they showed up and showed out in ways I could have never imagined. Truly, I do think that the relationship I’ve developed with them influenced how they showed up– they wanted to look good, but I think they wanted me to look good in front of my “boss,” too.

With that class, we fell into a different rhythm while I was being observed, but still a rhythm nonetheless. Fortunately, I can think on my feet and I was able to rock with them pretty quickly. I also think it really helped that we watched Imitation of Life (1959) that week, so they had some thoughts. I was fielding questions, leading the conversation around, bridging intellectual gaps, on the white board for some of it– truly flying, and then all of a sudden the 50 minutes were over.

There’s a part of my soul that is fed by teaching, and that class was soul food. At this point, the feedback will be appreciated, but I’m truly astounded and grateful for the ways that both of my classes showed up for me during my observation. I’m glad that I was observed in moments where I knew I was walking in my purpose.

My students mean the world to me. They’ve made this experience meaningful, especially considering I was so bitter coming into it. They’ve reminded me that it doesn’t really matter the circumstances– if I’m teaching, I am walking in my purpose. They’ve shown me that my perspective matters and I have something to offer in the classroom. And they take every opportunity to learn from me, in the classroom and otherwise. I love that I have folks show up to my office hours with a question, but then hang for the good vibes and conversation.

With students like the ones I have now, teaching will never get old.

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Metamorphosis | Butterfly Wings Recap

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This week’s episode of Black Enough, “Butterfly Wings,” showed many of the characters in struggle– or in the words of creator Micah Ariel Watson, in metamorphosis. Amaya endeavors to find a new look that encapsulates who she is becoming; Jaheem finds that his big bro, Dre, doesn’t rock with his rapping; and Lena stumbles in her engineering classes. Even supposedly self-assured Vaughn lets Amaya in on a little secret– she’s been rejected recently, too. The poetry that provides a narrative through line in this episode is about becoming, and it is decidedly not pretty, easy, or smooth. It is difficult and complicated, and we have to believe that it will make us into something better, otherwise the process will break us.

Perspective is hard in that moment when you are flooded with sadness, anger, anxiety…all the feelings that course through “Butterfly Wings.” In the moment that Dre tells Jaheem that perhaps rapping isn’t for him, he can’t hold on to the feeling of limitlessness that he associates with music and that viewers see just moments before in a bright shot of Jaheem rapping, surrounded by greenery like a Kehinde Wiley portrait. Lena cannot find the self-assuredness she normally exudes when thinking about her path as she cries in the bathroom after class. Only Vaughn manages to find a little perspective when Amaya compliments her hoops during their check-in, and seeming to remember herself, she replies, “You’d be surprised how much power they hold.”

“Butterflies grow wings, but Black girls? We grow hoops. Gold ones.”

 

This episode is about growth; it’s about detaching ourselves from notions about who we believed we were and giving ourselves completely to the journey towards who we will become. It is about sitting in that hard, uncomfortable space where there is no one but ourselves and God, and being still. Then, we work to understand the power of everything that came to a head for us to be who we are in that moment. As Dr. Stephanie Crumpton says so poignantly in her interview, “your grown woman self might be like ‘I remember when I was little I wanted to take over the world’ but your grown self is the one who has to show up.” Dr. Crumpton is insistent on the battle to become– it is not magical, it is work, and one cannot forget that.

And I’m interested in that, as a scholar– how we understand, communicate and transform the battle to become. In my interview clip that’s used at the end of this episode, I discuss my interest in how we as Black people, and especially Black girls and women, take the weight, the chains, or the battles that create us and turn it into wings. I think Dr. Crumpton is absolutely right to insist on making our battle to become visible, but I want to push past this into an even more beautiful plane of existence. Where can Black girls go to become the fullest version of themselves? Where can we exist beyond our wildest dreams, and then some? Where can we take all the battles that make us and craft them not into anchors but wings that propel us higher and further? What are Black girls in our imaginations, when our imaginations are not forced into one conceptualization of the world and the beings in it? When we are allowed to take up as much space as we want, what do Black girls imagine themselves to be?

In short: What does Black girlhood and womanhood look like when we can fly?

 

I think Watson takes up these questions in the entire webseries, but in this episode in particular. While we may not have comprehensive answers, I do think that Black Enough as a webseries, a form of digital Black self-making, constructs the beginnings of an answer. Despite the many shortcomings of the digital, I find the self-making possibilities in this space infinite and deeply satisfying.

So it makes sense to me that Amaya would begin her journey to feeling whole in the digital.

To modify Shange, “I found God in myself [online] and I loved her fiercely.”

Further Reading:

Check out Tanisha C. Ford’s non-exhaustive list of key texts on fashion, beauty culture and body politics in an African Diasporic context: http://www.tanishacford.com/resources/

Becoming, Michelle Obama

“Alter Egos and Infinite Literacies, Part III: How to Build a Real Gyrl in 3 Easy Steps,” Jessica Marie Johnson & Kismet Nunez

Ravynn K. Stringfield is a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies at William & Mary. Her research focuses on Black women and girls as creators and protagonists of futuristic, fantastic and digital narratives in new media. She often likes to say she writes about Black girls flying. When she’s not researching, you can find her writing for her blog, Black Girl Does Grad School; learning new yoga poses; or bullet journaling.

Black Enough Recaps, Dissertation, Ravynn, Ravynn: Act 4, Ravynn: Act 4, Scene 1, Research, The Journey, Uncategorized, writing

“Straight and Easy” | Celie’s Rites Recap

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“Celie’s Rites,” this week’s episode of Black Enough, grapples with beauty and depicts the creation of Black women’s community around hair. Implicit in the question that returns throughout the webseries, “what is Black enough?” is “what is beautiful enough?” 

Amaya goes to visit Ember for her appointment for braids, in spite of the catastrophe that was the Weston Crown Scholars’ Spades Night. Ember is kind and takes Amaya in, a move that is perhaps also metaphorical. The music, soft and emotive, helps viewers to understand that this space, Ember’s space, is an arena in which Amaya can be all of herself. Ember deepens this feeling by telling Amaya a little about her childhood understanding of her own hair as she braids. Amaya listens carefully, and inspired by the film the two are watching (which we are to understand is The Color Purple), she offers up her own childhood hair story. 

The two girls fall into an easy silence when Ember’s roommate Hadiyah bursts in. The girls enjoy each other’s company until Dre knocks at the door, looking for Ember. His appearance sparks a shouting match between Ember and Hadiyah, during which viewers realize that Dre is Hadiyah’s ex. Forced to answer the door and cover for Ember, who is supposed to be at a meeting, Hadiyah begins to let us in on a moment of vulnerability. She screams at Ember when she accuses Hadiyah of letting Dre run her life, pleading for her to understand that she is “trying to learn to love [herself] in private again.” 

The episode ends with the three girls creating a sister circle, sealed by the sacred ritual of doing one another’s hair. Ember continues braiding Amaya’s hair, while she helps Hadiyah with hers. They are quiet after realizing they’re each going through something: Ember appears to be on a weight loss journey, Amaya is searching for God in herself, and Hadiyah struggles to remember how to love. They are all exploring what beauty means, and specifically, what it means to Black women. 

The creation of the sister circle around tending to hair is a theme that appears in other works by Micah Ariel Watson, most notably, in her production for stage, Canaan (2018). In Canaan, protagonist Louie’s affections are split between church going, good girl Lisa and activist and revolutionary Camille which causes a rift between the two girls before they even have a chance to meet. After Camille leaves a protest that turned violent, she runs into Lisa, who extends an olive branch in the form of offering to help Camille with her hair. We understand that a sisterhood is forming in that moment, much in the same way we see it in this episode of Black Enough.

Watson is in a long tradition of Black women who are interested in the way community is formed around hair, and also in beauty shops. The beauty shop becomes a public sphere for Black women, in which they can gossip, talk politics and church business, in one of the few spaces that was often for them and them alone. It also is the site where familial bonds are forged. For many, visits to the salon with their mother, auntie, grandmother, sister or cousin, became time that they belonged only to each other and could honor that. I remember always having mother’s full attention on our Saturday morning drives to the salon, as I prattled about nothing and looked forward to the inevitable stop at Dairy Queen for dinner on our way back, as I tossed my long, shiny, relaxed hair just to watch it move. As much of a Daddy’s girl as I’ve always been, I could always count on a good long conversation with my mother as she sat me between her long legs and pulled my hair into whatever style she thought was cute on those days in between our Saturday adventures to the salon.

Though Ember characterizes having relaxed hair as “straight and easy,” there are always complications with even the most seemingly effortless styles. In this case, it comes with identity questions– is it really you if your face is half hidden behind a curtain of hair that was often was never meant to hang that way? Black girls explore our inner, and outer, worlds through our hair. 

What will Amaya discover?

Further Reading:

The Color Purple, Alice Walker

Poetic Justice, directed by John Singleton

The Virtual Beauty Shop: Crafting a Digital Black Feminism in the Blogosphere, Catherine Knight Steele

“Black Hair, Black Voice,” Ravynn K. Stringfield

Hair Story: Understanding the Roots of Black Hair in America, Ayana Bird & Lori Tharps

 

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Black Excellence & Hip-Hop? | Talented Tenth Recap

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Amaya tries out a new look in this week’s episode of Black Enough, “Talented Tenth.” In the last three episodes, viewers became accustomed to Amaya’s casual look, either clad in yellow shirts and dresses or decked out in her dancer gear. Lena picks at her for buying a whole new outfit to hang out with an old flame (?) in a new context, but in the end, Amaya arrives to play spades with the Weston Crown Scholars in a dashiki and earrings in the shape of the continent.

The Weston Crown Scholars are varying degrees of welcoming to Amaya. Once the game starts, the conversation turns to Barack Obama, the first Black president. The debate is lively, and revealing: Dre questions whether Obama did enough, Ember defends him and his policies, while Vaughn lands on the side believing his very presence in the White House was a political statement in and of itself. Dre accuses Vaughn of engaging in “respectability politics,” when she states that “Black Excellence” has to account for something. Eventually, they ask Amaya to weigh in and she carefully notes his introduction of ObamaCare. When the conversation spins out even further, she cites her Diaspora Studies class as the basis for her interpretation of Blackness as subjective– a move that causes Vaughn to lash out.

After Vaughn’s verbal dressing down, things move on smoothly…until Amaya reneges.

How many of y’all play spades? If you do, and even if you don’t, you probably know that reneging is one of the most telling signs you don’t know how to play. In Amaya’s case, the example is that she played a spade when she had a heart she could have played.

Yikes.

 

The Weston Crown Scholars are unforgiving, particularly Vaughn and, surprisingly, Tryston. What should have been just a game turned into yet another moment in which Amaya felt as if she did not belong.

She runs out crying, only to be discovered by Jaheem as he walks home from work. He consoles her with music: back to back, they listen to music in a shot that draws directly from the original cinematic love letter to hip-hop, Brown Sugar (2002).

In a beautiful moment, deepened by “Loveyou” by KAT ft. Deja, Jaheem reaches for Amaya and tells her, “You good.” And in that moment, in the space between beats, we believe Amaya is safe.

While it would be easy to attribute that safety to Jaheem, I want to complicate that notion and consider that it’s the music, hip-hop, that throws Amaya the life line. Amaya is a dancer– music is the backdrop of her entire life. Music is dance’s soul sister, so it follows that with this song Jaheem is able to speak Amaya’s language. For once, she’s not worried about being “enough” in any capacity. Instead, she’s whole.

This is what hip-hop can do for us.

 

Further Reading:

“The Talented Tenth,” W. E. B. Du Bois (1903)

“My President Was Black,” Ta-Nehisi Coates (2017)

Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women, Brittney C. Cooper (2017)

“Brown Sugar Is Still A Love Letter to the Golden Age of Hip-Hop,” Tari Ngangura (2018)

Black Enough Recaps, Dissertation, Ravynn, Ravynn: Act 4, Ravynn: Act 4, Scene 1, Teaching, The Journey, Uncategorized

A (Future) Black Professor’s Prayer | Toussaint Recap

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Responsibility

This week’s episode of Black Enough, like the other two episodes, begins with a quotation from Ta-Nehisi that comes across like a prayer. One of the words that my mind clung to in the opening was responsibility. The words implore the viewer to think about the responsibility that Black boys (and Black girls) carry despite the impulse to be carefree. However, I was still mulling over responsibility when we cut to a classroom, where Professor Rekia is giving a rather compelling introductory lecture to a group of moderately engaged students, including Amaya. Jaheem’s late entrance only briefly interrupts the flow Rekia has going.

“We breathe in struggle, and exhale innovation.”

When Rekia has dismissed the class for the day, Amaya and Jaheem strike up casual conversation, that leads to them going on an adventure to find the bookstore together. They chat about the reading, the white girls from Amaya’s dance class, Chicago and the remnants of suburbia in Amaya’s hair. At the bookstore, both Amaya and Jaheem pick up copies of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, which Rekia quoted from in class.

“For the first time my eyes swayed across the page as the same pace as my hips…”

It feels only right that this episode ends with words from Dr. Stephanie Crumpton on her discussion of community based Black Girl Magic. The innovation of the professor, the teacher, reminds viewers how formative these figures are in our lives. Crumpton is spot on when she says that we do not make magic on our own; in my opinion, teachers have a very integral part in helping foster (or sometimes destroy) our magic.

Black women scholars are an integral part of this episode, and it had me wondering what it means to be a Black Professor. I often think about the legacies I am a part of, those which I uphold and those I work to change.

So from one (future) Black Professor to her someday students, here is my prayer:

I pray that I am able to care for myself. I will never be able to give you, my student, the breath out of my body. My breath is for me and God, so I pray I will be able to keep myself healthy and holy, so that I can share all that I can with you.

Know that I do this for you. I’m riding for you. I’m rooting for you. All of my struggle is for nothing if I can’t pass it on, if I can’t help to lift you up and encourage you to fly.

Which means that I jump through the hoops to put myself in the best possible position to help you.

And I write. Don’t forget that I write, but that’s for you, too. For my little sister with her nose in a book and dreams bigger than her Afro. For my brother searching for a way to make sense of the world. For my homie that needs to be heard.

I see you.

It is my dream to write about all the ways you will design to teach yourself to fly. I’m here to cultivate innovation, nourish creativity and to push you to think critically, carefully and closely.

But to be the best version of myself to carry out this purpose I read widely, reflect constantly and write fiercely because someone has to imagine a future for us, so why not me?

And everyday that you come to class, I hope you’ll realize why I have you learn the past. There is no future without looking back. We call it Sankofa, we call it Building on the Legacy.

This is the way God works through me.

And it’s worth it when I am able to open up my office door to the Black girl in my 11 AM lecture and assure her that her Black Girl Magic will level up to Black Woman Sorcery, knowing all the while God was preparing me to be a testimony.

This is the way God works through me.

Further Reading:

Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates

For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf, Ntozake Shange

“Becoming Full Professor While Black,” Marlene L. Daut

Mental Health, Ravynn, Ravynn: Act 4, Ravynn: Act 4, Scene 1, The Journey, Uncategorized

Creating and Maintaining My Wellness Routine

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At the beginning of the semester I wrote a post about rediscovering my wellness, detailing my not so great habits that led to a sedentary lifestyle, my descent into poor eating decisions, and what I intended to do about it. Six weeks after committing to some of the changes I laid out in the same post, it’s time to do a wellness check in.

When I added yoga classes to my semester timetable, I was unsure how this would all play out. I had no idea that after just a few classes I would have the Yoga Bug. Six weeks and nearly twenty classes later, it feels weird not to do a few poses even if I don’t have a class scheduled for that day. One of my new favorite things is showing off my new poses to my parents, who are increasingly shocked at how difficult some of them look. As a result of my 3-4 times a week practice schedule, I look and feel stronger, my mood is stable, and I’m proud of my diligent work ethic.

If I could recommend yoga to everyone, I would. My current practice includes Yin yoga one hour per week and two Vinyasa classes. I also took a four week “Intro to Yoga” mini series, where I got to practice foundations and learn modifications to poses that help me feel more confident practicing in class settings. However, there are lots of things that don’t necessarily make yoga classes accessible or comfortable for everyone. Classes are free for me as a student on a campus, but not everyone has that luxury. Stereotypes about yoga are stereotypes for a reason: classes typically are filled with thin white girls, which often makes me feel hyper visible and acutely aware that I cannot wrap my arm around my big thigh to come into Bird of Paradise like everyone else can. And, truthfully, who really has the time to go to classes?

Of course, there’s always the option to do YouTube yoga classes or find studios that cater towards folks of color, if you’re in an environment where that sort of thing might be possible, but there are so many limitations. In terms of finding time for wellness practices, I do have actual suggestions. Sitting down at the beginning of the semester to block out my regular obligations on paper helped me see how much time I truly had to do my own thing. I started with blocking out time I knew I had to devote to TA’ing: I blocked out lectures, discussion sections, meeting times, and office hours. From there I added regular meetings and appointments. Then I was left with a lot of space. I saw where I could insert an hour practice here and another there. Once I was satisfied, then I added regular dissertation work time. I think for the average PhD student, we tend to work around our writing, but I realized that if I was going to commit to my wellness, my priorities had to shift. Writing would fit into my predetermined schedule, rather than be a monster that took up all of my time like an inescapable dark void.

To be sure, I have made other changes as well. Really, it’s making decisions every day that lead up to a lifestyle change. I have been working on developing boundaries between my work life and my home life, which means that if I can help it, grading stays in my office. Do I always honor that? Absolutely not, but I try. I limit my consumption of fast food and do small, weekly grocery hauls so that I always have fresh and good things to eat at the house, even if I don’t feel like cooking. I also rejoined the Mindfulness Meditation group that I was a part of last year to encourage regular meditation practice.

It’s worth remembering that even though I was shaken into a recognition that I was failing myself and my own health, these are the things I needed to do for myself anyway. Yes, I am an overworked graduate student and that by itself comes with a load of stressors that wellness practices can help, but I also live with Bipolar II disorder. Managing moods has always been…a task. I often walk through the world as if a fog has settled right over my face and I can’t see beyond the joy or sadness, whichever, or whatever, is present in that moment. It’s super cliché, but when doctors tell you moving and exercise will help your mood, it actually will. I’ll be perfectly honest, I never wanted to do that. I hate exercise. But between yoga, being properly medicated, and eating better foods, I’ve never felt more clear-headed.

While I’ve spent most of this post being a walking advertisement for yoga, I do want to acknowledge the fact that it’s really difficult for some people to enjoy for a whole host of very valid reasons. And beyond that, finding a good yoga studio, teacher, and specific practice can be very much like finding a good therapist. Some teachers’ methods of practicing will really resonate with you, and others will turn you off. You have to be willing to try a few varieties to know what you enjoy doing: you may love the fast movement Vinyasa but find Restorative Yoga entirely too slow. And you might like a teacher and their class, but the studio might not feel welcoming. All of that is okay.

What’s most important is developing your wellness toolkit. Right now, mine includes yoga, good eating, meditation, journaling, art and warm comfort drinks, but do know that you should regularly attend to your wellness toolkit. Think of them as seasonal. Things that work for you right now, may not work for you in six months. Update as needed. Do things that help you keep in tune with what your body needs from you. It’s hard, but let me tell you, it’s well worth the effort.

Notetaking, Ravynn, Ravynn: Act 4, Ravynn: Act 4, Scene 1, The Journey, Uncategorized, writing

Creative Note-taking

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If you follow me on Twitter, or on my creative instagram account (@RavynnCreates), you know that I love creating aesthetically pleasing notes. People often have questions about them, so I thought I’d create a FAQ post about my notes.

  1. Why do you make your notes like that?

Well, first, it’s super fun! I love making things. It also helps me focus, and it makes my notes easier to read and study when I have to go back to them.

2. What do you mean it helps you focus?

Making creative notes is almost like making a mind map. I think about the relationship of sections and words. For example, if we’re talking about the features of the “Classical Hollywood Narration,” it helps to make that heading large, and make the features smaller underneath, or close to the heading. Sometimes it helps to box things in so I know everything in that section goes together. It can also help to color code. If my heading is gold, I might use a different gold pen to number or bullet point everything that falls under that category. Sometimes I use a combination of all of these methods.

3. Do you make them during class? Like while the professor is lecturing?

Yep. Again, it helps me focus.

4. So you don’t just take quick notes and then rewrite them?

No. I do not.

5. What do you use to take notes? Pens? Notebooks?

My semester notebook is a burgundy Leuchtturm A4+ Master Slim with 121 dotted pages that I got from Jenni Bick in Dupont Circle in DC. Yes, it is personalized.

I use a variety of different pens. For headings and small brush lettering, I use Pentel Sign pens. For shadows and highlights, I use Mildliner Brush Pens. For detailing, I use Metallic Gelly Roll pens. For regular writing, my main text, I most often use a Lamy Safari fountain pen. If I’m not feeling the Lamy (or if I have run out of ink), I use Zebra Sarasa 0.7 ballpoint pens.

6. Wow, that’s really specific. Why do you use those brands?

Leuchtturm journals have thick pages that don’t ghost (show ink on the other side) and they are pre-numbered. Pentel pens are super reliable, and they come in really great, bold colors. Mildliners, I don’t use as much, but I still like them for background and contrast. Gelly Roll pens have really strong color, and they’re also reliable and relatively easy to find. I’m using a Lamy pen because I wanted a good fountain pen and I thought it might be cool to invest in a utensil that I would love to use. It’s beautiful and yellow and I do in fact love it! When my students from Keio offer me stationery gifts, they’re often Sarasa/Zebra pens and Japanese stationery is the best, so usually I’m just using the pens they gift me.

7. So do you just, like, travel with all those notebooks and pens?

Yep.

8. How many pens and notebooks do you carry with you daily?

Between 2-3 journals. I always have my semester bullet journal with me and I often have my dissertation journal. Sometimes I’ll bring my leather bound diary if I haven’t written in a while.

I honestly don’t know how many pens I have at any given time. I have at least 3 of each type of pen in different colors (except the Lamy) in my purse. I mean…probably at least two dozen.

9. Do you let people borrow your pens?

No.

10. Really?

Really. I keep a couple of regular Bic ballpoint pens in my purse to give to my students if they need a writing utensil in a pinch.

11. But how do you make such pretty pages?

Honestly, I don’t know. It’s the equivalent of doodling. My hands just kind of do their own thing. I don’t lay out my spreads prior to class, they just sort of happen. I more or less start on the top left of the page and just build from there.

12. Do you have any suggestions for folks that want to try creative notetaking?

I do! First, try not to take it so seriously; let it happen naturally. The more you try to make it pretty, the more pressure you put on yourself and then you likely won’t be satisfied with the way your notes look. Second, experiment with fonts and colors in relation to others on the page. If you have a keyword in gold script on the right in a square with writing around it, maybe try bold blue uppercase letters for your next piece. Third, practice! I’ve been making notes like this for years and it took me a while to get to a point where I could make these pages. Lastly, comparison is the thief of joy. Your notes will not look like mine. My notes will not look like yours. Embrace the uniqueness of this little way of expressing yourself!

Ravynn, Ravynn: Act 4, Ravynn: Act 4, Scene 1, Readings, Teaching, Uncategorized, writing

Teaching Writing

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The most gratifying part of being a Teaching Assistant (TA) this semester has been the work I’ve been able to do with students on their writing. I didn’t even realize how important teaching writing was to me until I had to do it. But I love when students email me, knock on my door or catch me after class to ask to work on their papers. I love when I have a question about a sentence or a phrase, then they tell me what they were trying to say, and I’m able to reply, “Yes. You need to write exactly what you just said.” And I love handing back A papers to students who think they’re weak writers because someone told them once upon a time that they weren’t.

I had a chat with my students recently about writing. I encouraged them to shift the way they think about it, with the understanding that in some ways, they can’t. Taking approximately 15-18 credits requires likely dozens of papers a semester and it’s very difficult to give the proper amount of time and attention to each and every paper. You often don’t have the time to write drafts well in advance to get feedback from your professor or TA. You’re simply trying to crank those babies out to make sure you have something to turn in.

When that’s your reality, it’s difficult to think of papers as anything but a means to an end, a hoop you have to jump through. In all honesty, I can count on one hand the number of papers I actually remember writing in undergrad. Remember, as a French and Comparative Literature double major, and an International Relations minor, I probably wrote hundreds of papers. And yet.

Still, with all of that in mind, I still proposed a perspective shift. Instead of thinking of writing as another thing you have to do, think of it as an opportunity to share the thoughts and opinions you have about our films, backed up with evidence and careful analysis.

Yet another problem I’m up against as a TA is the way we present writing as an individualistic enterprise. Because folks have so many papers to write during the semester, it feels like you have to lock yourself up in a study room in the library until you have no more words. I reminded my students that that’s absolutely not how writing works professionally. Every writer that we read in class, every book that you get in the bookstore…all published writers have editors. They have friends and family and mentors that read their words with a red pen of love at the ready. They workshop their words. That’s why the “Acknowledgements” section of books exist. Writing is a communal process, but we present it as something you do alone. So I try to make it as clear as possible that I am willing and able to work with them on their words, because they shouldn’t have to be in this alone.

I try to be as sincere as possible when I tell them I look forward to reading their words. Yes, it is my job to read and comment, but I’m curious as to what they think and how they think, especially if they’re quieter in class and discussion. Papers are a chance for you to flex a little, but it gives you the time and space to think through your response if you’re not as willing to jump in to a conversation with only a half formed thought. I try not to think of their papers as more work for me, but a chance to get to know my students a little better. I think of my comments as engagement with their thoughts.

I perhaps do all of these because I want them to love writing as much as I do. I know my efforts won’t matter to many of them, no perspective shift will occur. And that’s fine. But as long as I’m clear that for at least this semester, they have someone who cares deeply about writing and their words, I will have done my job.

So many articles exist on best writing practices and how the greatest writers write, but so much of that is crap. No, you don’t have to write every day to be an effective writer. You should practice as regularly as you can, but every body is different, every life is different, every circumstance is different. As much as I would love to write fiction all day every day, I mostly write during the summer and winter break when I have extended periods of time to devote to that manuscript. Do I write every day? Mostly every day, yes. But I consider many different things to be a part of the writing process. Tweeting is writing, blogging is writing, journaling is writing, reading is writing, note taking is writing, outlining is writing, drafting is writing, revising and editing is writing. I do at least one or more of those things every single day, but not because I’m practicing every day writing. Writing is part of my self-care, my self-expression, how I feel whole.

What I didn’t know also makes me feel whole is helping someone else craft clear and substantive prose, helping someone find their voice and run with it, and encouraging them at every step of the process. I love being a sounding board, an editor, a cheerleader– all important parts of writing. I love it all. Teaching writing is difficult, as is writing, but I still manage to find joy in it every day.

Mental Health, Ravynn, Ravynn: Act 4, Ravynn: Act 4, Scene 1, The Journey, Uncategorized

Doubt, Failure and Rejection

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If you follow me on Twitter, or even here on Black Girl Does Grad School, it’s evident that I’ve been in a bit of a funk for a little while. Okay, a lot of a funk and for a long while.

The truth is, it happens and it happens frequently. Grad school is just like that: some weeks you are fine, you feel like you are killing the game, you’re writing, you’re reading, your productivity is through the roof. And some weeks (or several of them…in a row) are about opening rejection emails before you’ve even left your bed in the morning, blank word documents, institutional drama, and the increasingly depressing feeling of trying to keep afloat in the middle of the ocean, knowing that any moment it could swallow you whole.

In particular, rejection letters really have the ability to drown me when I’m already barely afloat. On a day when I’m balanced, feeling healthy and whole, surrounded by love and support, rejections barely cross my radar. On a day where I’m already irritated and isolated (often self-imposed) due to circumstances outside of my control, rejections take me out. Negative self talk is already the soundtrack of my day, I’m feeling like my writing is particularly weak, and then bam– the worst sort of confirmation.

I sort of came to an understanding with myself. I stopped trying to fight the labels that academics were using to make me legible. I instead focused on simply doing work that fed my soul and that I felt was a direct expression of me walking in my purpose, worrying less about categorizing it and making it marketable, and more on making my words fly. This mental shift helped me prioritize, focus on and execute my work in a way that was meaningful to me.

And it worked.

Until it didn’t.

I now believed in my capacity to produce substantive, rigorous and complex work; I was focused enough to write it; I was becoming brave enough to submit it but nobody seemed to believe in me as much as I now believed in myself. It was enough to crack even the strongest of foundations and then the doubts seeped in. The worries that I had finally managed to shake reached through those cracks, grabbed ahold of my soul and squeezed. As often as I jokingly recount the tale of how I became Peanut Festival Queen of Suffolk, Virginia, the nagging thought that follows like a bad aftertaste is, Did I peak in high school? It seemed that making your dreams come true was a concoction of ambition, consistent hard work and a dreamer’s heart, but I lacked that dash of magic that seemed to be the key.

When all is said and done, I know I usually like to end my blog posts with a neat bow. I am nothing if not a (somewhat performative) optimist. I like to believe that even if I haven’t yet, I will overcome adversity and the fruits of my labor will be rewarded. And while I do have faith that everything will work out for me, I’m still living in a moment in which I am constantly stewing in a stale pot of doubt, failure and rejection, instead of perfecting my recipe for Black Girl Magic. I’m learning to live in the space between my imperfections and my potential, coming to embrace the harmony that failure and resiliency produces. Practically speaking, it means I honor my feelings, because even if I know that my future is bright, today’s forecast is overcast and rainy. It means that I take a moment to be transparent in my writing about what this moment is for me, instead of hiding from it, as if it doesn’t exist.

And perhaps…the answers that I have been hearing are not a no.

It’s an implied not yet.

Ravynn, Ravynn: Act 4, Ravynn: Act 4, Scene 1, Teaching, The Journey, Uncategorized

Misadventures in TA’ing

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One of the things I most looked forward to when I found out I was going to grad school was teaching. After spending my last semester of undergrad at UVA teaching my own self-designed course, I was eager to get back to the front of a classroom, maybe breaking down some literature with first year students or offering writing support during office hours.

But my dream situation got put on hold. There were several factors: I was now at a relatively small(ish) liberal arts university with overall tiny class sizes, which reduced the need for Teaching Assistants (TA’s). While we were guaranteed to teach at some point, if we wanted, TA-ships were not as easy to come by as I had originally imagined in this setting. Then there was the unspoken understanding that often times, first year students weren’t always placed in TA-ships. In terms of the content I wanted to focus on in the classroom, my university didn’t have graduate programs in English or Africana Studies; so in addition to the small class sizes, I wouldn’t really have an opportunity to TA where my heart was (unless, of course, I managed to snag a course cross-listed with English, which were few and far between).

So I pouted, but in spite of all of that, the prospect of TA-ing still appealed to me. I was placed in a programmatic graduate assistantship my first year with the Omohundro Institute; then with the Lemon Project, which I stayed with for my third year as well, much to my surprise. I loved working for the Lemon Project, but my desire to teach was flaring up, as well as my concern that it was getting to be so late in my graduate career and I hadn’t had any formal teaching experience, aside from leading workshops with Lemon and Course Instructing for Keio.

By the time I actually got a TA assignment, I was headed into my fourth year, almost formally dissertating. With only the prospectus standing in my way, I had moved past wanting to TA, and was ready to teach my own course, for which I had created a well-developed and, frankly, exciting, syllabus. However, due to an undocumented “policy,” I was denied my course and placed in a TAship that I had spent my first three years daydreaming about.

The circumstances under which I was placed in this position certainly marred my enthusiasm, but even so, as I gathered my thoughts about my teaching philosophy, and grand ideas for my first discussion sections, I was inflated by the prospect of being surrounded by gifted thinkers whom I got to help guide.

My cute little bubble of hope and optimism slowly deflated as I attended meetings and prepared for the start of the semester. Things were not shaking out as I had expected and, most importantly for me, I was already feeling like I couldn’t make my own decisions about how I wanted my classrooms to run, and by extension, feel. I was confined by more limitations than I had anticipated. The inability to put my own personal stamp on the two little classes I could call my own, and really express the fullest version of myself as an educator had me feeling claustrophobic and honestly, jaded.

There’s a part of me that understands this is part of the process. You learn to follow the rules before you can make your own.

But there’s another, much larger part of me, that has never particularly subscribed to this manner of thinking.

When the first day of discussion sections rolled around, I was even more nervous than I had reason to be. The professor for whom I was TA-ing would be there on the first day, mostly to talk about the syllabus, but also to lead the class in an exercise.

It felt strange, not being able to set the tone the way I wanted on the first day, and I felt myself shrinking, trying to take up the least amount of space possible. I left after my first set of classes, relieved that they were over, but also feeling an undeniable urge to cry. It had been so long since I had actively attempted to make myself small. I hated the feeling, but more than that, I hated myself for complying.

I wanted badly to get back in the classroom this week to restart, but due to the hurricane (which was more like a very windy drizzle), the school was closed and the students, and I, were off the hook.

I find myself deeply conflicted, but also very aware that it’s only been two weeks and I have plenty of time to turn this experience around. I’m conflicted because I finally get the opportunity to do what I’ve always wanted to do, but it seems like I keep stepping into one misadventure after the next. I love teaching– I always have. I very rarely played with my cousins on Sundays and holidays in the backroom at my grandparents’, preferring to read on the floor at my mother’s knees, but when I did, it was guaranteed to be a game of school, in which I got to be the teacher. It was an easy enough role to slide into, when most of the adults you knew intimately were educators. My mother was a fifth grade teacher, two of her sisters were teachers, her friends were teachers. I grew up drenched in questions of pedagogy and learning what was good practice based on which teaching policies my mother fumed about or praised while trading war stories with her sisters on the phone after school each night.

I knew from listening in on those conversations that teaching was not easy. It was a headache and it drove you crazy, but as I grew older, I realized that those conversations would not have been so heated if they were not fueled by a love of their job and their mission. My mom, her sisters, and their friends took educating seriously. Educating and education mattered. And I knew it was worth it every time she ran into a former student in the local Wal-Mart. She may not remember their name, but she remembered their face– a feat I’ve always found astounding given how much people change from when they’re ten to when they’re, say, twenty. The former students always want to stop my mom to show her they turned out okay; that they’re in college, or they have a family, or they have a great job.

Over my life, watching my mom and her sisters not only teach, but also care for students, has given me a model for how I want to approach teaching. Educating is as important to me as researching.

I think it’s important to remind myself of that from time to time, especially when I feel like my first experience TA-ing has been nothing but a series of misadventures. It may not have been the perfect timing for me, but who knows? Maybe there’s a student that will change my life. Maybe I’ll change one of theirs. Whatever comes next, I’m going to try to write as much of the story as I can.

Mental Health, Ravynn, Ravynn: Act 4, Ravynn: Act 4, Scene 1, The Journey

Rediscovering Wellness

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In the past year, I’ve gained an astronomical amount of weight. I can attribute the unwanted gain mostly to comps. I sat, virtually immobile, for an entire semester, eating any and everything I could find as a way to manage the stress of having to read hundreds of books before the end of April. I pride myself on having finished comps with my mental health in tact but my overall wellness was severely lacking.

I found myself constantly looking at old photos of myself from my fourth year of UVA and crying over pants that no longer fit. Though I looked at UVA through rose-tinted glasses, the truth was that I was stressed, often depressed, barely eating and walking uphill to classes every day. I naturally lost weight without trying and it came off suddenly.

One day I was unexpectedly able to wear my mother’s clothes.

Then another day, I wasn’t.

My descent to this pit of bad eating practices and barely moving came on over the course of a year. I formerly despised fast food, eating it only when I visited my parents. Now, I don’t want to even think about how many times I ate Popeyes and Cookout in the last month. I found myself too emotionally distressed or mentally fatigued to move, let alone cook. I had somehow replaced my stove top popcorn, lightly salted, for salt and vinegar chips. The decision I made at age ten to stop drinking soda had become void.

I was, in short, a mess.

But I didn’t wake up to my serious lapse in health until a visit to the doctor a few days ago. If the number on the scale didn’t shock me, the realization that I would be unable to safely continue taking one of my medications because of my weight certainly did.

I was letting grad school not only steal my mental health but my physical wellness too.

After a brief check in with myself, I made some decisions to help me prioritize my wellness. These were a series of choices I could make every day that would eventually add up to a lifestyle change:

  • MOVEMENT: One thing that was abundantly clear was how sedentary I had become. So I decided the first thing I could do was make the decision to move more. My school offers a free gym membership that I signed up for, and with the encouragement of a classmate, I joined her for my first ever yoga session. Together, picked three days out out of the week where we would do a yoga class. I decided I would do this for a couple weeks, to start build strength and endurance, and when I felt stronger I might add a cardio class to my line up.
    FOOD: I sincerely believe that the most important thing you can do for yourself is be conscientious about what you put in your body. I decided to change the way I think about food. Food, going forward, will be a manner of fueling my body, after giving careful attention to what it needs. The right food can be medicinal even. Realistically, this means making a concerted effort to plan out my grocery lists and buy a variety of good “fuel” to keep in my apartment so I’m less inclined to eat out.
    DRINK: I’m going to stop drinking my calories. I’ve decided to move away from flavored bottled waters and powders, and making an effort to drink more plain water and tea.
    MENTAL HEALTH: I’m recommitting myself to taking my medicine daily; going to therapy at least every two weeks; and reintroducing journaling into my every day routine. In addition, I want to integrate a regular morning and evening routine to help me steel myself for the day and then unwind from the chaos, which will include: meditation, journaling, coffee/tea, outside time with Genghis, spiritual practice, gratitude logs and prayer.
    SPIRITUAL WELLNESS: I am recommitting myself to Sunday’s as a day of rest and worship, I will do no work on Sundays. (I usually write my BGDGS posts before Sunday, so not to worry, I will be breaking no rules by continuing to post on Sundays.)
    JOY: I will relentlessly prioritize my joy and continually choose to do things that I love. This means, more time with friends, visiting the farmers market, visiting the water for rejuvenation, and rekindling my love of making art.

A few things are clear to me: one, is that I have failed to truly practice what I preach, which is to hold onto your wholeness while in pursuit of the PhD. Another is that I will not finish if I am not taking care of myself with the same vigor with which I approach my work. The last is that I deserve better that what I have given myself recently. I deserve a clean space, nourishing food, regular wellness practices and the space to pursue my ow joy. Nobody can give me those things except for me, and I heartily accept the challenge of putting myself first.

Intermission 3, Projects, Research, The Journey, Uncategorized

#RaceDH: Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) 2019

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I have, on multiple occasions, discussed my hesitation to label myself as a digital humanist.

Honestly, it’s hard to say you’re not a digital humanist when you spend approximately six hours on a plane traveling across North America to attend the Digital Humanities Summer Institute– more fondly known as DHSI.

DHSI is part professional development, part summer class, and part summer camp. You pick a class and spend five super intense days in said class, taking a deep dive into your chosen digital humanities topic.

Some people might have been poring over the course schedule as soon as it was available, but I waited until I knew for sure that I could even afford to go. Tuition by itself was something like $950– but as luck would have it, I got a tuition waiver from W&M Libraries. There was still the matter of flying cross country and housing, but I figured I would be able to scrape together some money from my program to help cover the cost.

Once the matter of money was settled, then I looked at course offerings– for a solid ten seconds. I knew as soon as I saw the Race, Social Justice and DH: Applied Theories and Methods course offered by two of my DH heroes, Angel David Nieves and Dorothy Kim. I had been exposed to their work at Race, Memory and the Digital Humanities and My Mother Was a Computer symposia, respectively, and getting a chance to work closely with them was an opportunity I was not about to pass up.

So I hopped on a plane headed for Victoria, British Columbia, traveling to Canada and the Pacific Northwest for the first time. The cross country flight to Seattle was relatively uneventful, as I waited for my connecting flight to Victoria in the airport, I began to make friends. In typical Ravynn fashion, I sent out a tweet using the hashtag, #DHSI19, to see if anyone was traveling to DHSI on my flight. The tweet attracted a small group of people, which seemed to bode well for my digital hijinks over the course of the week.

After a quiet first night in the dorms, I was ready and eager for class to start. Compared to the rest of the institute, my class was filled with a lot of different types of people, most of them women. I was excited to be surrounded by them, and my excitement was met with lively discourse from a range of viewpoints on the various topics Drs. Nieves and Kim had devised for us: archives, mapping, social media, digital ethics, multimodality, data, labor, games and data visualization. Our nearly 1,000 page course packet included thought provoking articles and chapters from authors such as Roopika Risam, Robin DiAngelo, Nick Sousanis, Wendy Chun, Lauren Klein, Lisa Nakamura, Adrienne Shaw and Tara McPherson.

While all of the conversations that happened in that room on UVic’s campus were valuable, I find myself returning to project that we collectively created for the end “showcase” at the end of the week. It was a four-part project digital (and analog) project that questioned the infrastructure of DHSI by doing a break down of who is represented among the instructors at the Institute; that offered guidelines for creating an ethical digital project; questions to ask yourself before and as you get started on your project; and a reading guide for pieces to get you started on your journey with race and social justice in the digital humanities. We created a google slides presentation that was displayed on a laptop, but we also wrote each of the sections on huge sheets of paper and occupied an entire corner of MacLaurin Hall, plastering our signs on the walls– a display that was all but impossible to ignore. As Nalubega Ross aptly stated as the class admired our handy work, “We came, we saw, we took up space.”

One of my long standing concerns with the digital humanities is how often we create projects because they’re “cool” or because “we can,” without thinking about how these technologies can be harmful to communities or even weaponized. The questions we developed (and circulated via Twitter to the DHSI community) encouraged people to stop and reflect on the projects they were creating in their own classes. Technology inherits the biases of the people that create them; they are not neutral and it is imperative we stop treating it as if it is. (If you want an excellent study on this phenomena, check out Safiya Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression.)

It took me until DHSI to realize just how deeply invested I am in the digital humanities. I care about justice in the work itself, the spaces we inhabit to do the work (both digital and physical), and for the marginalized people in the field, creating “digital alchemy” as Moya Z. Bailey would say. I realized that in order to do justice oriented work, we have to work on the infrastructure of our institutions to make sure that we are safe and supported. It is astounding to me how much magic comes out of a system deliberately crafted to keep us out, but it is my goal to ensure that, at some point, doing this work will not be so soul wrenching of a task.

Digital humanists, as Jacque Wernimont said in her Institute lecture on June 3, 2019, are the “makers, breakers and killjoys.” We are wired to break things apart and reassemble them so they work better, faster, smarter. I am wired to make and break. When I care about something, I want it to be the best possible version it can be. It will drive me to work and will drive me to tears, but once I start, I am unstoppable.

It took me until DHSI this year to truly claim what I have known is true for months now: I am a digital humanist, and I belong.

If you’re interested in more about Race, Social Justice and DH, tweets about our class can be found using the #RaceDH tag on Twitter!

Comps, Ravynn, Ravynn: Act 3, Ravynn: Act 3, Scene 2, Readings, The Journey, Uncategorized

A Debrief on Oral Comprehensive Exams

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I passed.

Not just the written, not just the oral– the whole thing.

I have now advanced to candidacy and am All But Dissertation (ABD).*

*(Note: This distinction varies from program to program. I know a lot of people who aren’t ABD until they defend their prospectus, including some people in a different field at my institution. I think the primary reason I get to declare candidacy and ABD now is because we in American Studies at W&M do not necessarily “defend” a prospectus. You write one, you get it approved by your advisor, and then you meet for a colloquium with a committee for feedback on it, but it’s more of a conversation than a defense.)

I had almost a week between the end of the written exams and the oral. After I did 24 total hours of written testing, my brain stuttered to a complete halt. I knew I should at least try to prepare, but in the end, my preparation consisted of attending Free Comic Book Day, buying ten new books, and sitting in on my friend’s MA defense. As I have said before, there was nothing I could say in an hour that would negate the 24 hours of written testing that I did, nothing particularly new that I could cram in my head beforehand that would make that much of a difference.

I thought about the oral exam as if it were a short class session for which I had done the reading.

It seemed to work for me.

The day before the oral, I was in Target, spending more time than I want to own up to, trying to conceive of the perfect exam outfit. My dad always tells me dress for the job you want, not the job you have, and while that doesn’t work for everyone, for me, it’s solid advice. If I look good, I feel good, then I do good.

After cleaning up and a face mask Thursday morning, I left the house in a black swing dress as a base, a pink, orange, and burgundy color blocked scarf, a bright orange purse and platform sandals. I had done my nails, given myself a pedicure and headed for Aromas with my notes so I could review for a the few minutes I had until the exam started.

With maybe half an hour to go, I made my way to College Apartments to make sure I had all the appropriate paperwork in the event that I passed. I nervously walked around the building, nearly running into my advisor on several occasions.

Then finally, it was time.

Everyone had convened by exactly 11 and I sat at the head of the table in room 5 with my committee around me. I was allowed to pick the order that I received questions, so I started with African American Intellectual History. Dr. Ely definitely scared me a little bit, asking me about specific passages from books that were now fuzzy and ill defined from others, asking me to spin out lines of thoughts I could barely follow, but fortunately many of his questions were leading and when he saw me stumble, he would redirect his question to help me regain some confidence in my answer. I didn’t start having fun until Dr. Pinson asked me about the ‘bonus unit’ I added to the syllabus I created for one of her answers. Essentially, I had created a syllabus of modern African American literature, and added a bonus unit on a Black Women Writers’ Renaissance in the Digital Age, citing writers like Brittney Cooper, Tressie McMillan Cottom, Eve Ewing and Morgan Jerkins to name a few. She asked me to draw connections between these writers and our Black feminist ancestors– and I was off.

After that, I began to settle into myself, answering questions with much more grace. I often stopped myself after talking for a while as I answered, to make sure I was answering the question I had been asked and not just talking off into a corner, as what happened quite a few times as I answered Dr. Losh’s questions.

Before I knew it, there were mere minutes left in the hour long exam and my advisor, Dr. Weiss, simply asked me to reflect on why I had chosen Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass to represent African American literature from pre-Civil War. I stumbled over my answer, though ultimately I think I answered well enough.

Then I was asked to leave the room while my committee deliberated. As I stood in the hallway, Chris poked his head over the third floor bannister to ask me how it had gone. I was still recapping when the door opened again and my advisor stepped out to get me.

“Okay, Ms. ABD.” she said with a smile.

I let out a loud “YES!” then re-entered the room so we could do the appropriate paperwork.

***

I celebrated my latest victory at Nawab immediately afterwards, as one does, surrounded by all my W&M friends. I even showed up at the American Studies pre-graduation celebration later the night. I got the best sleep I had gotten in months.

I had conquered my latest obstacle.

I returned to Suffolk to chants of “ABD! ABD! ABD!” by my father and hugs from my mother.

And though I deserve the most restful of breaks, I’m going to capitalize on my post-comps energy and do the faculty writing retreat starting Monday to start on my prospectus.

Now, I just have to write a dissertation. One step at a time.

Comps, Ravynn, Ravynn: Act 3, Ravynn: Act 3, Scene 2, The Journey, Uncategorized

Let the Games Begin…

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I start my exams tomorrow at 10 AM.

I have four exams to take, six hours in which to take each of them, spread over four days, adding up to a total of 24 hours of testing.

Schedule:

Monday, April 29: African American Intellectual History

Tuesday, April 30: Comics & Media Studies

Wednesday, May 1: off day

Thursday, May 2: African American Literature, pt. 1

Friday, May 3: African American Literature, pt. 2

I’m already tired, y’all.

But I will see this through. So many people believe in me and my ability to do this but most importantly, I believe in myself.

I’m thinking about what I’m feeling right now and for the most part, the inside of my head feels remarkably calm. I feel at peace. I want to attribute that to the care I took this week to feed my soul and rest my body and mind. I did all kinds of fun things: I got to meet my littlest friend, I took myself out to see Avengers: Endgame,  and I beat out my anxiety on some drums at the Lemon Project Drum Circle. I was on a panel about grad school, hung out with my friends and did several face masks. And today, I spent a few hours in Charlottesville, surrounded by some of the people I love and admire most in this world.

Yeah, I reviewed a little bit each day, but I was mostly concerned with keeping myself calm and steady, because the more I pushed myself, the less likely it was that I’d be in the mental state to actually take the test. I read for five months; I read over 250 things. I know this material. All I have to do now is show my committee I know it. It was more important this last week to cultivate a positive energy and do only that which enhanced my mood and confidence rather than try to read a dozen more books.

I’m ready.

Let the games begin.

Comps, Ravynn, Ravynn: Act 3, Ravynn: Act 3, Scene 2, Readings, The Journey, Uncategorized

It Takes a Village

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Well, I’m about a week away from starting my comprehensive exams. I want to take this moment to thank everyone who has encouraged me throughout this process.

Thank you to:

  • My parents, who have patiently listened to me count individual texts that I have left to read, gripe about arguments that don’t make sense and the rants about the possibility of me failing these exams. You both have been so encouraging, letting me know that even though this might be hard, I can do it.
  • My committee: Lynn Weiss, Hermine Pinson, Liz Losh and Mel Ely. Dr. Weiss, thanks for continually talking me off a ledge with these exams and convincing me that I’m going to be okay. Dr. Pinson, thank you for spending time with me despite your busy schedule and taking this on. You’ve really challenged me and worked hard with me to make sure I understand and can articulate the main arguments of my field and for that, I am forever grateful. Dr. Losh, thanks for always believing in me; it means more than you know. Dr. Ely, thank you for encouraging and affirming my sort of left of center ways of thinking, and always letting me express my knowledge the best way I know how.
  • My sister circle: Kelsey, Micah, Alexis and Leah. Y’all have held me up through this process, listened to me complain and moan, and affirmed me on the days I felt like I could actually do this. Thank you for the daily check-ins throughout this process and reminding me to be a human every once in a while.
  • My W&M friends: Chris, Hyunyoung, Khanh, Jennifer R., Jessica, Laura, Jennifer E., and Chardé. Chris, I honestly don’t think I would have gotten this far in the program without you looking out for me, so thanks for all that you do for me out of the kindness of your heart. Hyunyoung, your love and support is everything to me and I hope that next year we actually get to see each other more. Khanh, Jenn, Jessica, my Equality Lab crew, thanks for always supporting me and offering up your time and energy to help me succeed. Laura, one of my newest buds, thank you for being a little ball of sunshine whenever I see you and always offering up support. Jennifer and Chardé, thanks for always commiserating with me and making me laugh. I can’t wait til we can all celebrate our respective accomplishments in May together!
  • Joy Melody Woods Bennett. Girl, your friendship is so important to me. Thank you for always encouraging me. And thank you for the card. It made me smile and I needed that.
  • Dr. Tamara Wilkerson Dias. There are honestly no words for how loved I felt in the moment I was unpacking the care package you sent me. You saw potential in a girl you didn’t know, who went to your undergrad, who was walking the same path you walked, and decided to invest in her. I can’t wait to do what you did for me for someone else.
  • Leiaka. I have not forgotten that moment of honest to God kindness that you gifted me when I was really struggling in this process. That Indian food was bomb. Thank you.
  • Professor Harold. Thanks for seeing this life for me before I could see it for myself.
  • The Lemon Project Team. Jody, thanks for working it out so I could focus on comps these last few weeks. Sarah, thanks for always listening to me. You’re one of my favorite people, I hope you know that. Vineeta, I just want to be like you when I grow up. Kind, compassionate, but fiercely invested in the quality of my work and the impact it will have on the people around me. Just know that the way you walk through the world is an example for young scholars like me who need someone to look up to. You’re doing the work I want to do someday.
  • Literally everyone (particularly other grad students) who has been in my replies and DMs wishing me good luck on comps. There are entirely too many of you all to name individually, but each of you bring me such joy and I wish you all nothing but the best.
  • The senior scholars who have been encouraging me, particularly Roopika Risam, Karin Wulf, and Jessica Parr. Dr. Risam, thanks for always having a kind word for me. Dr. Wulf, thanks for always reminding me that it’s a process, and that I’ll be okay. Dr. Parr, thanks for always believing in me and my work and connecting me with other scholars and opportunities. You’ve taken me under your wing in a lot of ways, and I’m grateful for it.
  • My BGDGS editorial team, Taylor, Trayc, and Rae’Jean. Thanks for dealing with my last minute posts to be edited and sporadic scheduling while I’ve been preoccupied with comps. Thanks for baring with me.
  • My W&M undergrad friends who always ask me how comps is going whenever I see them: Ka’myia, Zach, Leonor, and Brendan. I know I’m stressing y’all out with my sad tweets but it’ll be over soon!
  • Anyone who has done or said something kind to me since January. You have no idea how one little comment or act can turn someone’s day around.

It takes a village. A village got me to this point and a village will carry me through this storm and out the otherside.

Thanks for everything, y’all.

Dating, Ravynn, Ravynn: Act 3, Ravynn: Act 3, Scene 2, The Journey, Uncategorized

The Wasteland: Dating in Grad School

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I’ve been single for so long that none of my current friends have known me with a partner.

My dating life for the past seven years has been a series of starts and stops, misunderstandings and miscommunications, and unrequited loves galore. It’s particularly bad because I spend months, or even years at a time completely floored by mood episodes that leave me unable to care for myself, forget dating. When I can afford to think about dating, I’m usually hung up on some guy that either strung me along or didn’t want me, causing me to believe in the falsehood that I was unworthy of their love. If I fall, when I fall, I fall hard and am essentially inconsolable until I completely move on, which, to the chagrin of my inner circle, could be years. (I honestly still cringe at the number of hours I spent crying over the dude I was in love with the last half of college. Whew, chillay.)

In undergrad, everything was so ephemeral and there was no pressure. Not to mention, I was at UVA on a mission to get that degree and nothing else mattered. My blinders were on and I didn’t stray from the path. When I emerged four years later, with a degree in hand, I barely had any relationships to show for it, friends or otherwise. But now? Now I’m putting the pieces in place to build the life I’ve always wanted. Being a grad student is the start of my career, not just preparation. Everything in my academic career is falling into place: I’ve developed a brand that’s based in large part on transparency and public facing work, I have a publication in the works, I’m getting ready to pass my comprehensive exams and propose the course of my dreams to teach next year. I have a platform and my words are making their way out into the world. My social life, however, is an actual wasteland.

There are plenty of things that account for that. 1) Williamsburg, VA is not where you go when you’re in your mid-twenties and you’re figuring out your life. It’s where you go when you want a nice place to retire, and yes, I figured that out after I accepted my place here. So there’s a scarcity of young people; specifically young Black people that aren’t undergraduates, so 2) my pool is limited. Then, even if there were young Black people to meet in my area, 3) I don’t go out. I spend most of my time holed up in my apartment working, and when I’m not there, I’m holed up at my parents’ doing work. So, it’s partially my fault, but also even if I wanted to go out, there’s nothing to do, which is related to point 1.

Then, once we get past those factors, there are the more troubling concerns that no one really wants to talk about. A plus-sized, solidly brown-skinned girl is rarely anyone’s top choice. Drop my degrees, ambition, height and willingness to stand up for myself into the mix and you’ve got an “intimidating” woman, who should be avoided at all costs. (I can already anticipate the dudes in my mentions once I post this article trying to refute these claims, but you try being single for seven years and then we’ll talk.)

The worst part is, once you get past all the superficial reasons why I’m single, you get to the core–is it me? That guy from undergrad seemed to have a cutting word about me for almost every letter of the alphabet. Some days, I was “abrasive,” others I was “bossy” and “demanding.” Did those words actually describe me? Maybe. But at my core, underneath the sarcasm and hard exterior, few people could see me for who I am: an over-emotional, empathetic, but loveable piece of work.

While working in a profession that makes me doubt myself daily, my lack of social life really makes me doubt my worthiness. After spending all day worrying if I’ll pass comps, if I’ll ever get published, if I’m good enough to teach, I get to spend all night wondering why I haven’t been good enough for anyone in nearly seven years. My engaged friend soothes, my church girl prays, my other single friend commiserates but at the end of the day, I’m still me, alone and stuck in this spot for as long as the dissertation dictates, with no prospects and no hope.

Well, not quite. “The hopeless romantic in me won’t let the hope die,” as my friend Alexis would say. I hope I can have my career and a family one day. The good news? I’m still young and there’s plenty of time for things to change, but for now I guess I’m just chilling in the Wasteland, waiting for Future Husbae to appear.

I can’t wait to meet him.

Dissertation, Ravynn, Ravynn: Act 6

One Last Time

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There were so many times I could have written since December: stories I could tell from the job market, the struggles of finishing a dissertation, when my defense date was scheduled, when I submitted my defense draft to my committee… These were all things I would have wanted to know about as a first year Ph.D. student, but the truth is, the last year I have completely fried. So tomorrow, after I defend my dissertation, all I want to do is rest.

If you’re reading this, you likely know that the academic job market is brutal. Search committees that ghost you or rough interviews, spending weeks on huge application packages only to be passed over in the first round and every plot twist you couldn’t imagine. I didn’t even apply to as many jobs as most of my peers did, and I still came out on the other side battered and exhausted from the experience, while still trying to find the energy to wrap up my project.

As far as the defense goes, most people on my committee, my friends, other scholars have assured me that this shouldn’t be the bad part. I understand when they all tell me that this presentation and conversation should be an opportunity for you to show off the work you’ve done for the last several years, and get some guidance on areas for growth for the book project. I know that. I also know that I have a great committee, many of them folks I’ve worked with throughout my graduate school journey.

And yet.

My brain has been wracking my body with horrible anxiety symptoms for weeks. Nearly every morning as I have my coffee, my brain cycles through every possible thing that could go wrong for my defense, adding a couple new and terrifying possibilities each day. I have imagined tech difficulties, rescheduling dilemmas, committee members missing the meeting, having to get forms resigned, someone finding a piece of evidence that unravels the whole project, not being passed…I think about it during the day and dream about it at night. So maybe I know that it will be fine, but anxiety is skilled at wrecking any possibility of peace.

It all comes down to tomorrow: after coursework, exams, and writing this monstrosity of a project over six years, I will stand at the finish line.

It’s amazing and, in some ways, unbelievable.

Most strikingly, it occurs to me that this blog truly will be ending for real soon. Black Girl Does Grad School will be the project that was active from 2016-2022, the time I spent on my Ph.D. This blog has gone through so many changes. It went from a space that I came to decompress after every week of grad school, to a place I offered others to share their experiences, to something of a magazine, complete with columnists and editors in addition to the writing I was doing. The pandemic slowed everything down, but I think, as I have written before, I was already starting to move away from BGDGS, because I didn’t need it as much.

But this blog has connected me with people who have become lifelong friends and diehard supporters, offered refuge to students needing a place to reflect on their experiences, and most importantly, instilled confidence in myself as a writer and thinker when it was hard to get that consistently in school.

I wouldn’t be half the writer, thinker or scholar I am today if I hadn’t sat down in August 2016 and decided to create this corner of the internet for myself. So I will be forever grateful to my precious site.

And to you, dear readers, who have been with me all this time: thank you, from the bottom of my heart.

And tomorrow, I hope to be able to experience the milestone every Ph.D. student dreams of, and to share that with all of you here, one last time.

Dissertation, Projects, Ravynn, Ravynn: Act 5, Ravynn: Act 5, Scene 2, Teaching, The Journey, Working, writing

Semester Still Life: Portraits of a DIGITAL Black girl Magic Class

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  • My office, i.e. a corner of my childhood bedroom that I decorated just to teach this class.
  • The personal essay I wrote on Black girl fantasy for Catapult.
  • Student Truthtellers
  • Dissertation Woes
  • Birthday Twins with Miss Greater Richmond
  • Marked up Legendborn and The Source of Self-Regard
  • “Micah Watson did something with Black Enough.”
  • Professor Still Life
  • The Teaching Assistant, Genghis.
  • When there is lots happening in your house.
  • Music. Life.
  • Micah Watson’s visit to class.
  • Dissertation. Again.
  • Good-bye.

https://blkgirlsinthefuture.tumblr.com/

My attempt at joining the Academy