Category Archives: Guest Posts

Applying, Guest Posts, Uncategorized

Take 1: NYU Bound

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You’d think after two years of pure hype anticipation for FINALLY being qualified to write for this blog I’d know how to introduce myself. But I don’t. My name’s Micah… I like making playlists. I make films and wear space buns. I love Cheerwine and I write plays. I’m about to graduate from UVA and you can’t convince me that Jesus was not Black. But, most recently, I’M A BLACK GIRL [ABOUT TO DO] GRAD SCHOOL!

The past six weeks have felt, in a word, brazy. I’ve gotten recognized three times by the Kennedy Center and accepted to three graduate programs of my dreams, all while making two films and staging a play. I also got baptized again—I’m especially happy about that. Everything has felt so incredibly surreal. I mean, literally. I walk around UVA’s grounds and people want to congratulate and interview me and I always feel like they’re looking for the wrong person. Like my communities have crafted me in their minds as some artistic prodigy. Sure, that sounds great (and tbh this entire paragraph is obnoxious), but it feels really bananas when I’m focusing on making sure I sleep and editing scripts and trying not to fall in love with Jonathan McReynolds. So I don’t really know who it is that everyone is asking for a quote from, but I’ve just been eating my pb&j and grinding. The present is all that’s felt real to me.

But today I feel infinite. And exhausted.

So why now?

One—because I’ve been promising Ravynn I would write something before I even put the words grad and school together.  Two—because I actually verbalized the phrase “I’m going to NYU.” this week. Three—because this is the first time that I’ve been excited about the future. I mean really excited. I’m not saying that I’ve been dreading the future, or that I’ve even had low expectations for myself (I mean, have y’all even met my God yet!?). But until this week everything has been so abstract. It’s been me trying to articulate myself into a statement of purpose. Or wiping spit from my ear after some nice church lady tells me that “God’s got plenty of plans for you.” Or my collaborators telling me that they’re gonna ride my coattails (stop it y’all! We’re in this grind TOGETHER.) But throughout this entire process, the future felt sometimes achievable, but never tangible.

Speaking of this process, let me run that back for y’all real quick:

In a very distant way, grad school has always been a part of the plan. Not as something that I necessarily wanted to do, but as another box on the “Twice As Good Checklist.” I didn’t really want it for myself until my second year of undergrad (l said “undergrad;” Am I a grownup now?) when I watched Ravynn and Kelsey go through their application processes during The Black Monologues. I wanted to love my work so much that I had to pursue it. That’s been reinforced by my hourly conversations with Ravynn about Blackness, literature, art, superheroes, film, afrofuturism, Buzzfeed quizzes. We’ve become so intellectually hungry together. I’ve gotten to a point where I have to satiate that desire. Add on to that my cohort/squad/family of Black artists at UVA that make me want to continue working with collaborators.

So I decided to apply to MFA programs in screenwriting and/or playwriting. The process didn’t go as smoothly as I would have hoped. Against the wishes of my brilliant mother/life advisor/future agent, I procrastinated attacking these applications until eh, say, October? Mind you, my first app was due November 1st. I figured that I’d already written the [copious] play and screenplay samples and could write a personal statement in my sleep, right? Wrong. I didn’t realize that this process would require so much of me. Not only were the apps more involved than anticipated (@Common App, I miss you, babe), but they also required me to bare my soul in a way that I wasn’t prepared for. I had to be able to tell the world in 500 words who I was and who I wanted to be. I don’t even think I’d even worked that out with God at that moment.

But I did it. And waited. And prayed. And fasted.

Then my acceptances came in and my life started to feel like the season finale of Grown-ish. All three programs had incredible things to offer. Honestly, I would have been happy attending any one of them. But there was one place that just felt…right. It’s the place that God had been showing me in prayer, the place in which my community envisioned me, and the place that I just haven’t been able to get out of my head. It’s the place that both scares and excites me the most. So just so we all know what I’m talking about: next fall, I will begin pursuing my MFA in Dramatic Writing at New York University Tisch School of the Arts…and it just got real…

As I write this, I am in the middle of the national Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival with a bunch of uber talented MFA and undergrad students. I think I’ll mark this as my first grad school experience. I’ve been learning from masters, watching and listening to truly incredible and (bonus word) diverse plays, and meeting some the dopest theatre artists I’ve ever encountered. Actually, the meeting folks part is what’s surprising me the most. You’ll learn that networking and being social is really, really difficult for me. It’s not that I don’t like people; it’s not that I’m quiet. It’s that I never quite believe that people will genuinely care about what I have to say. I’ve seen God growing me this week. As I share my ideas and sustain conversations with strangers with whom I want to collaborate and champion, I feel like I’m having an out of body experience. I feel like I’m getting a glimpse of what God’s been seeing all along.

I’m so excited to get my hands dirty and to write like a madwoman, only to have my words get ripped to shreds. Then build them back up again, love them, and repeat. Sure, maybe I’m being idealistic. Lord knows grad school isn’t going to be chocolate and roses everyday. But, even for just a short while, I’m excited for the work. I think I owe myself this moment.

I feel infinite. And exhausted. And confused, and excited, and scared, and limitless, and full, and unprepared, and regal, and infantile, and hungry, and bubbly, and humble, and hype, and reverent.

And hopeful…

P.S.

Actually, making playlists is the first thing I do when I have an idea for a play or film. So let’s think of this post as one of those, yeah?

  1. Diddy Bop x Noname
  2. All The Time x Swoope
  3. Lover of My Soul x Jonathan McReynolds
  4. Weight of the World x John Bellion
  5. All The Stars x Kendrick
  6. Follow You x Christon Gray
  7. DNA x Kendrick
  8. I Got You x Chris Howland

 

Micah Ariel Watson is a filmmaker and playwright. After graduating with a degree in Drama and African-American Studies at the University of Virginia, she will be attending NYU as an MFA student in Dramatic Writing. Her work focuses on the ways in which historical and contemporary events mirror one another, often employing poetry and hip-hop to tell Black stories. The only thing that she loves more than art and Black people is Jesus “Real One” Christ. Twitter: @micah_ariel11

 

 

 

Guest Posts, Mental Health, Uncategorized

Guest post: “Sometimes You’re Santiago”

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When I first read The Old Man and The Sea, I hated it. I truly hated it. I do not think it is fair to make junior high aged students read Ernest Hemingway. But even though I hated the book as a 7th grader, I constantly find myself coming back to that story over and over again in my head. And I think as I started graduate school I found myself relating more and more to the Old Man, Santiago.

I am sure you are wondering how a twenty-four-year-old Black woman can relate to a character written centuries ago by a white American man; however, have no fear I am going to explain.

It is only right that I use a classic novel to explain my struggles as a graduate student. I would even call it ironic because at the age of twenty-three I found out I have a reading impairment, along with two other learning disabilities.

In my first semester of graduate school I had hit a wall so to speak. It seemed like week after week I was unable to pass a quiz in class or even write a decent enough paper for my professors. I literally felt like Santiago who had not caught a fish for eighty-four days. Nothing seemed to be going right.

I knew that I had general anxiety disorder before I moved from Texas to Iowa City, Iowa; however, I really had not had too many anxiety attacks until I started graduate level classes. I even began to question who in the hell told me to sign up for this shit; however, I knew I had goals to reach so I pushed through.

And even with all of my personal perseverance—again much like Santiago—it really did not matter. It actually made me feel like I was not good enough to even be in this program. And to make it worse, I was the only black person in almost all of my classes, so I felt like they were just calling me the stupid black girl in their meetings. (I later found out that they weren’t calling me stupid, but they were saying that I was incapable of doing their work—that’s a story for another day).

I do not know if you have ever had that feeling of something being so close but yet being so far away at the same time. Like Santiago fighting with the fish to get it shore and with every mile he got closer but the struggle also got harder and harder. That is how I felt in every class and even after finding out there was a reason behind why I had been struggling so much, it still felt like I still had so much further to go.

How was a I supposed to process this information about these learning disabilities when I literally have a processing disorder? It honestly makes no sense and if you have the answers, please let me know. All I am trying to convey is that I really did not know what to do even though I was happy I received some answers.

But what does having a learning disability look like in graduate school? Will professors think I am making it up? Will they care? Will they work with me? How do I talk about it and not make it sound like an excuse? Obviously you can see that this new diagnosis caused quite a bit of anxiety in me—and I already had enough. The questions just kept coming of how and what I should do. I finally just had a complete breakdown; and to be quite honest it felt amazing to the tears to flow down my face because it was some sort of release.

Even after that release, I still did not have the answers; however, I knew that I could find them and that it may take some time.

Santiago was very prideful and that is why he did not give up with the fish and I can relate to that; however, I the fight he had with the fish just to bring it to shore left not just the fish but him as well, extremely mangled and broken. I knew that I did not want my graduate career to leave me like that. I did not want my pride to end up breaking me just to prove a point. And that is when I realized that I was going to have to reach out for help and that meant letting the university know about my diagnosis. If I did not tell them, I was going to fail out of school just to not disclose learning disabilities. Honestly, I do not want to pressure people reading this to disclose your personal business; however, people cannot help you if they do not know what is going on.

Learning this lesson was hard to learn. I am not a person who likes asking for help. It felt weird to make a conscious decision to be vulnerable when it came to my schooling. I can write a blog about my struggles with depression and anxiety but I liked people thinking I had school under control (because I had for so long).

I have written about my learning disabilities on my personal blog and I even allowed the university to use me for an awareness campaign and I even was interviewed for the school website. I realized that my pride was not going to not only hinder me from achieving greatness in my academics but it also was not going to stop me from being a voice for others.

I do not think that I will ever read Old Man and The Sea again, but I never knew a book that I read in 7th grade could later be used as an analogy for my life—I guess that is why it is called a classic. I guess the moral of my story is that the struggle has a purpose and that pride can really hold you back.

I hope that this story helps someone and if it doesn’t, it helped me to write about it once again.

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Joy Melody Woods, masters student at the University of Iowa studying sociology of education and sport. She is a native Texan and loves all things southern cooking. She is an advocate for mental health and learning disabilities. Her writing can be found on withoutaspace.com and her podcast Morning Joy.

morningjoypodcast@gmail.com

Twitter @smileitsjoy

Guest Posts, Uncategorized

Grad School – 1 Leah – 1 Part Two

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First things first, sorry for the wait, life. LOL

But Happy New Year!!!

So the group project I wrote about last time, actually went much better than I expected. We came together to analyze how effectively the leadership of Chipotle handled the E.Coli Outbreak in 2015. Our professor enjoyed our analysis (no really, all positive feedback from the professor, lol) and gave us an “A”.
We were all pretty happy about the overall project, thanked each other for the hard work and went our separate ways. It’s pretty awesome how a people who have never met are able to collaborate (with the help of technology, of course) and pull together a research paper and a narrated presentation.

I finished the class with an overall “B” which is dope because it’s what I expected (know thyself, lol). So there, first semester of Grad School COMPLETE *insert fireworks*!!!! I made it! Thanks to the best support from my family and friends, and I mean the best support, one down 5 semesters to go!

Winter sessions start soon. This course is expected to be a bit more intense but I’m so ready. The classes I am taking are actually interesting because they are helping me determine steps needed to achieve the production company dreams.

Speaking of dreams, work is going well! I am currently planning my first baby at my job. It’s an inaugural Rentals Open House. Visitors will be able to sample catered specialties, chat with local vendors about future event plans, and visit studios onsite for gifts and décor for their event. Most of the planning is done, just cant wait to execute it. The open house will kick off the season this year and I am excited to launch this first time ever event!

Full Speed Ahead….
Second Semester starts soon….
Stay Tuned………..The Game Ain’t Over Yet.