Secrets of a Southern Goth
In October 2017, I performed a piece titled Secrets of a Southern Goth as part of the fourth season of Place Talks, a series of lectures at the Prelinger Library based in location-oriented inquiry. Secrets was a visual diary essay, a patchwork of memories, ephemera, comics, cartography, and research centered around my early years as an immigrant child in rural Mississippi, a land of fraught racial binary that I inhabited as a tertiary other. Using the lenses of haunting and ghosts, I attempted to examine, contextualize, and confront the layered histories and trauma that shaped my relationships with identity, death, spirituality, citizenship, and the persistent state of white supremacy in the United States. My work and writing around this topic is ongoing and evolving.
Place Talks
A very small subset of slides from my Place Talk – there were 88 total! Personal and found photos, original illustrations, and maps of and from the places and hauntings I grew up in and around.
Notes from an Invasive Species
I wrote an essay, Notes from an Invasive Species, that was published in New Life Quarterly #3. The piece takes place at This Will Take Time, an artist residency in Point Arena, California, revisits some thoughts from my Place Talk on the violence of nature in rural Mississippi, and ponders ideas of wilderness, human-delineated binaries, and overt vs. covert biases and threats.