Welcome.

There are few living platforms at Colgate that bring people together to find voice and speak life from the margins. This limits our individual and collective abilities, as members of the Colgate community, to understand how each other’s struggles, passions, and the expression of these struggles and passions, are inherently linked to others, and instrumental in shaping our entire lives. Collective Breathing (learn more here) is a space where unheard contemporary voices from the Colgate community  engage in a collaborative process of breathing life into our stories for ourselves and the wider Colgate community.


As a member of Collective Breathing I, Sharon Nicol, designed a companion independent study entitled Collective Breathing: The Making and Memory of a Feminist Art/Performance Collective. This blog is the home of my work in the course and an archive of my experiences within the collective.


The Collective Breathing course is centered around three major themes—Shaping(Making), Telling(Living), Remembering(Archiving). These themes exist as a framework for the present collective and future generations. Shaping the Collective Breathing project involves developing the vision for the current collective, understanding who is part of the vision, and determining how the vision will be realized. Telling the project means executing the vision, whether it be a communal creative space and/or an end-of-semester performance. Telling is not only about the end-product, but all that exists between. Remembering the project focuses on how a project’s herstory is preserved for those involved and future generations. Remembering is in conversation with content and medium, asking what do participants want to be remembered and how? These processes can occur simultaneously, at varying lengths, out of order, and sometimes not at all, yet having engaged with other models that uptake such a structure and in recording the collective’s experiences with these themes as they happen, we will be better able to return to order/the vision if there are any missteps during the process, and better contextualize our outcomes post-vision. Through this blog, I will document my reflections as I move through the Collective Breathing syllabus (which can be viewed here, along with the independent study proposal) 


This is my attempt at remaining accountable and transparent with my own thoughts and further humanizing the process myself and fellow collective breathers are engaged in, for generations to come. I am imperfect, and I recognize the value of sharing the imperfections of the building process in order to sustain this work.

I welcome feedback and hope that you will stay engaged throughout our journey. Please visit the larger Collective Breathing Blog/Archive that will feature voices of the whole group.



Saturday 6 May 2017

The Role of Heartbreak


 "In particular, this paper explores the role of art in facilitating that heartbreak—that moment of breakage that opens up an unsettled pedagogical space where students and teacher might begin to
imagine, vulnerably, an alternate mode of being together, of convivencia—a movement or
“decolonial movida” towards what I am attempting to name as “a pedagogy and politics that
breaks your heart.”
- RĂ­os-Rojas, A. (2016). “Pedagogies of the Broken-Hearted”: Notes on a Pedagogy of Breakage, Women of Color Feminist Decolonial Movidas, and Armed Love in the Classroom/Academy. Paper presented at the NWSA, Montreal, BC.


If we, as students, educators, creators, citizens of the world, are not shaken on an emotional and spiritual level by the injustices present in our world at large, but also spaces of institutional learning, we have no incentive to create new practices, realities, and ways of learning in these spaces. It is only through heartbreak that change is made possible, yet heartbreak cannot be the final destination. The question becomes, how can we creates practices of learning that piece our hearts back together, in community? Collective Breathing has been an experiment at answering this question. On their own, the memories and experiences that inspired the pieces we produced could only bring about pain and (re)trauma. Yet because we came together, fostered a community of support and care, and focused our joint energies towards excavating our stories for a purpose, we were able to find individual and collective strength and healing through what once only hurt us. We shared our heartbreak in the hope that something transformative could be drawn from the vocalization of the depths at which we feel for ourselves as individuals and for others, and the attempt to visibly work through those depths in community. Collective Breathing would not have been if I and others had not had our hearts broken by the erasure and silencing of our identities and experiences in other performance centered productions and if we had not experienced heartbreak from the lack of interpersonal care in other community-oriented spaces on campus. We needed our hearts to be broken for us to move from dreaming up a different way of being, to implementing as an attempt to piece ourselves back together. These attempts at piecing our hearts back together in the midst of heartbreak are what serve as the foundation for the pedagogies that we carry on in our teaching and learning routines, and become the basis for how those we teach and learn with conceptualize their own ability to create in the midst of heartbreak.


Tuesday 25 April 2017

Making the Memory

I thought I needed to include a diversity of readings in this independent study so that I could be most knowledgeable about the potential identities and experiences that would be represented in the Collective Breathing space, and so that I could be best equipped to facilitate a space in which people's needs could vary based on their experiences, but now I realize that for a space situated most intentionally in praxis and experimentation (even while it is a space of theorization), I could not prepare.

I have gained knowledge from individual's telling of their experiences, rather than the written knowledge that I thought was supposed to educate me about experiences. I've learned how to facilitate space based on my encounters with individual's needs throughout the process, and the various ways that they have communicated their needs. This is not to say that I did not gain from the materials that I read, I benefited from them greatly, just not in the manner I had intended. I chose the readings on the syllabus with no real understanding of what I hoped to take from them, although I knew I would benefit. I see now that each reading, or at least what I wanted each reading to be, was in conversation with some part of my personal process of "memory and making"/memory making. Each reading brings light to a theme/experience/idea that I wanted to spend more time with in this last season of my formal education (that I know of), either because it represents a topic/issue I re-member that has made me, or a topic I have been exposed to and am trying to make intentional sense of.

As a senior in my last semester at Colgate, the reflection process has crept into every aspect of my life and work, in a manner that is seemingly more paramount than at any other point in my educational experience. Starting something new in a season that was supposed to be about reflecting put two seemingly dichotomous actions intimately together, and that brought forth much anxiety and uncertainty in my understanding of what I was supposed to be doing, how, and why. I've been thriving in classrooms for (at least) the past two years, and all of a sudden a freeform blog post, defined entirely by me, for a class I created, with readings I chose, seemed an intimidating, impossible task. The feeling of impossibility was a symptom of being uncomfortably wedged between what I thought were forces moving in equal but opposite directions. As I emerge from the thick of this semester, and in anticipation of a new season, I see that the two do not have to oppose one another. Education/creating/community building is a continuous process of experimenting and reflecting. It is using the memory in the process of making, and recognizing the making process as another memory for that which will be made in the future. This independent study has focused on memory-work specifically, while the Collective Breathing praxis focuses on the making, yet the two are part of the same larger process. They've both come together to define my semester, and serve as evidence that we can create the classes/collectives/performances/communities that we want. These small manifestations give us the hope, ultimately, that we can create the world we want.

In this manner, I suppose I have done what I set out to do, and yet want to acknowledge that I did not know what I was doing. Yet, even that was part of the process. The process was the desired outcome, and the unexpected outcome was exactly what was needed. It has been beautiful, consistently insecure, unsettled, anxious, but beautiful.

Trust building/Trust giving?


As a collective, we've recognized that trust is essential for our efforts to be successful. We concluded that trust is ultimately only developed over time, there are no practices we can establish to bring trust out of people. Yet in attempting to establish a collective in a limited period of time, with members that may or may not have had previous relationships with one another, we do not have the luxury of time, and have had to form new conceptualizations of how trust can be developed. I have conceptualized that there is nothing an external force can do to acquire or secure trust if I am unwilling to give it. The work that we are doing requires that trust be given with trust; freely, and with the hope that those it is given to will not betray it. So now, I operate on the assumption that no one in Collective Breathing wants to hurt me. I hope that we can give one another our trust, and I hope that we each hold our respective gifts of trust with care.

Thursday 6 April 2017

Guiding Questions

These are the questions guide me through my readings. My blog posts address these questions in various forms


How is the story told?
Why is it told (in this form)? What does this form add that has not been seen before?
How do storytellers choose to engage/acknowledge the personal in the collective work?
What can I learn for my own storytelling practice?
What has this work implanted in my memory? If I had to build a tribute to the work, what would it look like? If I could write a note to the authors, what would I say?





Ourselves | Black : Empowering the Black Community by Promoting Mental Health

If I could write a note to the authors, what would it say?

Dear Dr. Sarah Y. Vinson (creator of Ourselves | Black) and contributors,

Thank you for developing this resource to support members of the Black community who have been harmed by silences surrounding mental health in our communities. I wish I'd earlier had the language to address the emotional and mental issues that impacted my childhood experiences. I appreciate the varying perspectives that the articles and resources come from, as no experience is the same and various pathways to conversation, support, and healing are possible. I noticed your resources for parents to help support children that are dealing with a wide range of mental and emotional health issues, yet I wish there were resources to help children/young adults address issues of mental health with their parents.

I have been learning how to see elders in my life as equally human and capable of suffering from the similar human issues as myself, and in this process I have come to see how adults in my life (particularly my stepfather) were not given support in their mental health journeys. Recently I read a piece from Colonize This on... and I wondered whether the author had ever spoken to her mother about her mental health experiences? I know that part of the difficulty in initiating any difficult conversation from the point of the child to the parent is in recognizing (and respecting) the lines that have been drawn between elders and children to secure childhood innocence and foster respect for elder, yet in coming to see elders as equally human, it is necessary to come to see them as equally in need of support that a child may be able to give in some ways.

I appreciate the letters from mothers to daughters and daughters to mothers in the asian american woman in case of emergency pack because it breaks down the social barriers of parent and child to allow both to see the humanity (and possible brokenness) in the other so that they can be involved in the healing process. I can't be an ally/aide in someone's healing process if they cannot honestly share with me what they suffer from.

,but even if I still had a relationship with him, I still don't think I would be able to address his experiences with mental health and the silences that surrounded his diagnosis, treatment (or lack thereof), and life with him.

The Making of A Womxn of Color Archival Collection

I find you in folders and boxes stored away
Were you waiting for me?
Because I have been dreaming of you and your stories
Were you dreaming about me and my friends?
Were you thinking of us when asked for Black and Gay?
Were you thinking of yourselves and just how badd you were/are?
-Excerpt from "The Archive -- Poetry in the Finding blog post by Dr. Kai M. Green

I was told that we were not worthy of being remembered, that past students, staff, and faculty who look like me never did anything worthy of remembering. Our position in Colgate's institutional memory is limited and rarely from our perspective. 
Yet every time a history of our impact on this campus is uncovered, and every time my peers and myself carry out radical work that calls the nature of this campus and its neglected responsibilities to us into question, I am asked to challenge the erasures that plague the history of women of color's impact on this institution. As Collective Breathing adds to the history of women of color creating space for our voices to be heard , the question of memory becomes more personal than it has ever been. I do not know what the future of Collective Breathing will be, but as a founding member I am invested in ensuring that our existence is not erased or untraceable. I want future members of Collective Breathing to know that the collective was created with them in mind. Today, I do dream of the women of color in class years to come. I want them to feel empowered to share their stories, knowing that someone who came before them cares, even if the realities of their present moment do not offer the same level of care. 

This semester, I have worked to create a Womxn of Color collection in the University Archives. If you would like to know more about the project, you can find the vision statement here. If you are a current or past womxn of color at Colgate and would like to be part of the collection, please email me at sevelynwrites@gmail.com 

Tuesday 21 March 2017

The Grounded Vessel

As performers allowing stories to be expressed through our bodies how can we remember why we do the work that we do and what keeps us from losing ourselves (whether our intentions/motivations or our sense of self) in the moment of performance? In reading the accompanying guide of the Panza Monologues, Virginia Grise and Irma Mayorga advocate for grounding oneself in the performative space both physically and symbolically. In their production notes, Grise and Mayorga highlight the movement of the actors body as an intentional act. They warn against performers meandering across the stage, and suggest props that "anchor" performers to a specific locations the power of the words is not lost in the movement of the body. When the performer is anchored, all their energy is channeled into justly channeling the story... but where does this initial energy come from? What is the source of power for a performer in the moment of performance. The answer is different for everyone. My personal source of energy is my God, my culture, and my (fore)mother(s). As I think about building the onstage altar that Grise and Mayorga offer as a grounding piece in productions of the Panza Monologues I will include words that have grounded me throughout the semester. As I reflect on these words in the everyday, knowing that they are onstage with me will serve as a reminder of why I have chosen to become a vessel for this story.

Actions to carry through:

Ask collective whether we would like to build/create an altar onstage that grounds our work and reminds us of the people, intentions, and energies we carry w



Monday 20 March 2017

Playwriting Workshop with Maestra Moraga

Before attending the playwriting workshops with Maestra Cherrie Moraga, I had approached my writing as a space for autobiography. It is not until Maestra Moraga said that "we are often our worst and most underdeveloped character" because we are too closely aligned to our stories and unable to view them with an artistically critical eye, that I began to consider my writing as having the potential and necessity to be something more than just my personal story. Maestra Moraga took participants through exercises that helped us identify the fullness of our characters through their backstories: fears, quirks, memories, relationships and more. Insodoing, I saw an opportunity for my characters to be, even if influenced by my personal life, more than my real world context allows me to be. I learned that the power of fiction is in making statements and creating outcomes that the everyday prohibits.

The differentiation between theatre as an transformative experience for those involved and that which is made simply for aesthetic pleasure of the writer is in the agency of the forces that influence the work. Theatre made solely for the self can follow a predetermined structure according to the story the writer knows they want to tell. Theatre as a process of being impacted/impactful however, requires that the writer(s) is responsive to where their personal and social environments as well as the experiences of the character are directing the story. Maestra Moraga calls this manifestation of theatre the form play (as opposed to the formula play) because the work is propelled by itself, telling the writer what form it will take, not the other way around. It is within this form play, and a further metaform play, that theatre can become a ritualistic and healing practice. As the writer dedicates themselves to unlocking the direction in which the play will unfold, they learn from the development process things that they wouldn't have expected. As these pieces are revealed through the work, the writer also has the responsibility to themselves to understand what the form the play has taken is trying to communicate to them and their audience. It can be difficult for the writer to find these answers alone. Through the workshop I experienced the benefit of reading and receiving feedback on my work. As others told me the impact and interpretations of my work, I was able to better understand my work as a communal experience. Their feedback caused me to think not only of myself but what I wanted to communicate and the limitlessness of its impact.

Thursday 9 March 2017

The Life of Nicole Salloway




 ------What is Nicole's biggest fear?--------
Nicole Salloway is tired. She thinks she's been tired for all of her 37 years. She's scared that all she'll ever be is a sad and tired woman who was once a sad and tired little girl. She is hyperaware of the plate in front of her and can feel every morsel as she eats. She's worried that this week will be another bad one. She hopes that Nancy doesn't come over and throw her food out. The deafening silence is claustrophobic and is only broken with the precise move of the fork. "No one loves me" she often thinks. "I have done nothing to standout in this world, why would anyone care?"

--------The five most important memories in Nicole's life------
1) her niece's first communion
2) Her high school graduation
3)When her most serious boyfriend said "I love you"
4) When she said it back 4 months later; she let him in
5) When he died in a car crash seven years ago


---------What keeps Nicole up at night?-------
Sometimes he visits me at night. I bought oregano last week because I read something about it helpin with spirits and heartache.. or maybe it was heartburn.. Oh well, either way it'll be a nice addition to my vegetable soup. They say that soup is filling. I'm giving it a try so maybe I won't feel so empty, and maybe I can pretend I'm healthy... I always look forward to going to sleep at night even though it's been so long since it's actually happened. When I put on my PJs, silk ones the woman in the department store recommended and coincidentally one of the only ones they had in my size, I always think about the pink slippery PJs I wore as a little girl. Back then mama would lay me across her lap and brush my hair, then she'd take off my glasses, because I always fell asleep with them on. Sometimes when I'm wearing contacts I wish a had a nice big pair of glasses and mama was around to take them off for me, but ever since the divorce its been hard for Nancy to see me.



Thursday 2 March 2017

Staging Social Justice

Staging Social Justice is an anthology that highlights the work of those who have been involved in the Fringe Benefits Institute theatre group and the impact that being part of the group has had on their work going forward. The chapters of the book are organized to address certain themes pertaining to developing community "devised" theatre under which past participants relay their thoughts and experiences. I've learned that developing community theatre is not an isolated experience. Theatre in itself is finite, but its power comes in how the participants and audience allow the experience of creating with others for a specific artist objective to affect aspects of their life moving forward.

The anthology is edited by the founders of the Fringe Benefits and it is inspiring to see how they not only created space for others to tell gain the tools and practice of performing their stories through the Fringe Benefits Institute, but brought the same ideology into the framing of the anthology. The founders' intentions with bringing together the works are found in the introduction of each chapter, yet ultimately they allow participants work to speak for itself. It is a necessary for all visionaries/innovators/pioneers to be able to surrender their vision to be impacted and informed by the people involved. This is how innovative spaces retain their relevance and impact. Ultimately, the impact of theatre is only possible when those involved are willing to be impacted and follow through with the actions that make impact possible. In terms of theatre at Colgate and Collective Breathing this stands as a challenge to the notion of the "universal transformative", the productions on are campus that are widely believed to be impactful yet yield little/no long lasting or significant change. This lack of tangible impact is not a failure of the moment of production and performance but our own failure to put in the daily work that makes that impact sustainable. Many people have shown interest in the vision of Collective Breathing, few people have shown up to the weekly meetings. If we want to have transformative and collaborative experiences on our campus, we can't only show up on the show day.

The Work of Memory (and Performance), Channeling Energy

In the post Bruising for Besos Q&A Adelina Anthony said that “we’re always trying to tell the same story… hopefully each iteration gets better as we discover the nuances.” The “same story” we attempt to tell is not only our own, but that of our familial and community histories and their definitive impact on our lives. Anthony said our art tells the stories of our mothers, and our mothers’ mothers, and so on. We do not exist without influence. Anthony’s remarks speak realities of familial/cultural inheritance and, in some cases, trauma that when coupled with societal forces acting on people living life on the margins (especially in environments that do not recognize the lasting effects of these inheritances), manifest in our everyday interactions and relationships.

Anthony's work is an expression of our ability to take agency over those influences through art and memory work. Bruising for Besos' central character, Yoli, was an artist who used puppetry to cope with the traumas of her past. As the puppet master Yoli literally took agency over the members of her family and herself represented by puppets in the retelling of her story. As Anthony said, memory is a work of the imagination, and people re-member past experiences as necessary to constitute certain presents (and futures); yet in Yoli's memorywork there was a fixation. Yoli was stuck in her past and even her agency over it did not allow her to re-member it in a way that would make room for healing in her present and future. At the end of Bruising for Besos we see Yoli embarking on a journey to reencounter that past in a manner that may lead to closure and breakthrough.

In the Collective Breathing workshop Adelina we practiced the embodiment of our agency over memory. In one exercise, the group conjured the most fierce individual in our lives. Anthony asked not only to picture them, but to bring them into the room by mirroring their fierce body language. We then voiced one of their popular sayings, attempting to mimic their tone. Anthony explained that the process of embodying another is not devoid of effect, the way that people hold their bodies and speak carries a specific energy and memory. For example if a person is constantly weighed down by life's emotional and mental burdens, they may begin to carry that weight in their shoulders. The way the body is held determines what will come from it, therefore as performers we must be connected to our bodies; aware of our own natural energy and of the energy that a character/scene requires. Understanding our own bodies, the experiences that have molded them and the energy we carry on a regular basis allows us to remained centered in our performative practice. When we know what energy is not ours, we can let it go when we no longer need it, yet we have to have an identifiable space to come back to. When Adelina asked us to find our neutral space, in body and breath, it was a time that required intimate awareness of that which I often take for granted. I have to come to know my body so that I can return to it when circumstances, given or pursued, cause me to separate from it, taken refuge or causing harm in my head.

The process of channeling energy seems solitary, yet because there was the opportunity to share and see others move from themselves into their various characters, as well as be seen, community was formed. Adelina's work caused me to think of how, in the multiple iterations involved in our continuous pursuit of the single story, we can involve others in the process. As someone who has rarely written fiction, every story that I tell has a direct link to something I have experienced. With this, I am often worried about telling the story "correctly" and feel guilty when I say things different from how they happened either because I cannot remember or to create greater impact. In the second exercise of the workshop Adelina asked us to share with a partner the story of the first time we lied. Already that was a challenge because I've told so many small lies in my life that I couldn't pinpoint the first one. My story ended up being a lie I told at 14 to my mother about my nose piercing. It was certainly not the first lie I'd told but it came out for a reason. I had to ask myself what is the meaning behind this story,why is this the lie that stuck out in your mind as major/representative of a turning point? Through my telling of the story I gained insight into what I considered important/memorable. Now I can see that it is more important in my storytelling to determine why a story matters to me and what I am trying to convey than to ask if it is "the truth" (in an objective sense). The truth comes when I am able to deliver the message I mean to deliver in a manner that I am satisfied with. In the second part of the exercise, our partner had to retell our story as they remembered it, taking on our character (body language, voice, etc). Seeing myself reenacted by someone else allowed me to further let go of the focus on getting it exactly right, because what is right is merely up to our interpretation anyway, and allow the piece/performance/story to be what we need it to be, whether a replica of the source of inspiration or not. It was beautiful to see that my life and thoughts could be the inspiration for someone else's work. In that moment a community formed, with me as the foundation, and went on to be more than it could have been if it was limited to my precise collection of the experience performed by me.

The work of collective creating is understanding how we bring others into the process of telling this ongoing/recurring story with respect for our individual intentions and corporate satisfaction. This is beautifully demonstrated throughout Tragic Bitches as a line from one of the writers poems is used as the section title under the influence of which all the writers write. For example

Tuesday 21 February 2017

The Conflict of Dialogue

"As a result, the difficulties are not in the theatre. The difficulties-- and essential difficulties-- are in the oppressions the group, class, or community wants to confront, and in the struggle to reestablish dialogue" -Theatre for Community, Conflict & Dialogue pg. xi

As a group, we identified that we did not want to replicate many of the toxic practices we'd seen modeled in cores on campus. In our other experiences, toxic practices ultimately led to environments in which people were not able to get to know one another deeply, and subsequently unable to form supportive communities around experiences that affect daily living on campus. Given our desires to form and facilitate a supportive community, it was necessary to proactively address issues that hindered our past and present attempts at community building. In response to this desire, we did an activity that posed the questions:

  • Why am I here?
  • What do I need from this group? What are some tangible ways to fulfill my needs?
  • How do I deal with conflict?
  • What’s something that people often misinterpret about me? How do I want this action to be interpreted?

These questions were meant to get the group thinking about how we interact with others and practicing the vulnerability and critical self reflection necessary to accomplish the mission of Collective Breathing, recognizing that conflict is an inevitable reality in groups.

Mirroring Rohd's assertion of the difficulty of (re)establishing dialogue, especially in conversations about pain, marginalization, and oppression, I recognize that the group was plagued by and had to fight against silence in the face of difficulty/conflict.


In response to the question of "how do I deal with conflict" almost everyone in the meeting responded that they do not address it, shrink back, talk to people outside of the situation, and ultimately never find voice for conquering the issue in the space that it exists. The group felt this was an unfortunate reality, but ultimately a representation of who we are and unsubject to change. We come into Collective Breathing with our relationships, conflicts, all aspects of our personal and Colgate-related lives that have in many ways taught us not to be vocal about what hurts us. Yet if we are unwilling to open up in conflict (with ourselves or others), ultimately we are replicating a culture that stifles honest dialogue, and harming our ability to develop a collective meant to facilitate healing from this very culture. Having read Rohd's explanation of this inability to dialogue as the most difficult part of the community creating process, I see that an unwillingness to change the habits with which we come into a space will result in the exact same spaces that we critique and attempt to run away from. In order to do different work, we have to be willing to be different people. We have to be willing to be dialoguers around our difficulties even if, or especially if, not addressing conflict has become essential to us.

This collective is not necessarily a safe space in that it allows us to practice what makes us comfortable, but that we are able to have support in addressing the very cores of who we are and critiquing how these cores have become. Our workshop this week with Poppy Liu was mostly focused on writing. Most of the writing we did did not have to be shared, but on one occasion we were able to practice speaking to and through our issues and relationships to ourselves, to campus, and to the outside world. Sharing our writing is an act of refusing the silences that we've become accustomed to. It's another assignment in our work as re-dialoguers. In the foreword to Theatre for Community, Doug Paterson said that "we make each other through dialogue" (xii). What we are able to talk about reflects what we are able to be. As we share our work throughout the process in collective breathing, we bring ourselves to collective being.





Saturday 28 January 2017

Creating Multitudes w/ Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs

When I initially created the independent study syllabus, I did not want to include work that was authored by an individual. I've seen the limits of singular visions in telling stories that speak for/to the experiences of many. However, as I thought more critically about the syllabus in relation to authors that inspired my thinking about archiving and creating last semester, as well as events at Colgate featuring some of those authors, artists, creatives, etc, and understanding the purpose and potential in an independent study course to be defined by my intellectual curiosities (especially where those curiosities have not been fulfilled in other courses), I had to include Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs' Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity on the syllabus.

 Dr. Gumbs was featured at the first WMST Brown Bag of the semester as part of MLK Week. Her presentation "Evidence: A Black Feminist Archive of the Impossible" further challenged my assumptions on individual ability to "create multitude" (in Dr. Gumbs' words), that is, to express the influence of other humans and their experiences in the shaping of one's own experiences and intellectual becoming. In Dr. Gumb's presentation, she used multiple exercises to channel her intellectual, spiritual, and personal influences as well as the audiences. One exercise asked audience members to talk about one artifact they carry with them that represents an influential person in their life. We do not always have the opportunity to physically be surrounded by the people that influence our lives and creative work, but it is still possible to create space for those people and make their influences known. In lieu of a traditional Q&A, Dr. Gumbs activated an Oracle Q&A in which she answered carefully-reflected-upon questions from the audience with a story from the life of one of the Black feminists central to her research. Nothing Dr. Gumbs did was without influence from and care for a community and lineage beyond herself. The same sentiment is expressed in Spill. Spill is a compilation of poetic representations of Black women in different phases of "fugitivity", the practice of getting free. The poems appear disjointed within themselves and in relation to one another, but this seems to be a direct representation of fugitivity. The practice of getting free is messy, unpredicted and, true to Gumbs' title, a spilling of self to the unknown or uncharted. I have come into this course questioning the notion of linearity, yet there is still something that brings different pieces of a story together. I would like to center my analysis of the works in this course around Dr. Gumbs' notion of creating multitude. My goal is to uncover what brings each work in this course together in its binding and in relation to other works in the course and who/what each author carries into the work. I hope that this will go beyond what is explicitly stated by the authors. Gumbs equally questions desires for linearity in her dedication to "Black women who make and break narrative." The thread that links the pieces in Spill, alongside Gumbs' influence by Hortense Spillers, is the definition and practice of "spill(ing)." Each poem is prefaced by a unique definition of spill. The vast territory covered by one word is significant, and enough to bring together the vast experiences of the women and girls represented in spill.

Collective Breathing for me, is not only about telling a story for my own sake, but also about telling one that matters because it is situated in a larger discourse about what it means to be a first-generation Black immigrant lower middle class intellectual, on a campus that does not recognize these identities as important. I hope that Breathing, in whatever way it is defined by each individual in collective breathing is a strong enough thread to center our work together.