My name is Denise, and I am a current PhD student in Southern California; my research sits at the nexus of several overlapping disciplines in the arts & humanities that I find it easier to show others what I do rather than tell. While my present title is as an academic & instructor, I try my best to not let it define the trajectory of my writing. I don’t think I’m a very fascinating person, but I hope that my research and the stories I can share with others will live beyond my own. While academia is part of my life, one other part of who I am have paws — four little dogs that I call my kids. Other things which dominate my “free” time are Pilates, running, painting, thrifting, bullet journaling, and bowling; I’m not great at most of these things, but I do find them to be vital ways that I tether myself into the real world.
Why a blog?
I have been writing for as long as I can remember — I got my first journal when I was seven years old, complaining about things that drove me into a childhood existentialist crisis: activity handouts from school turned into homework, visiting my grandmother in Houston who never spoke English to us out of stubbornness (and I fought her in Spanish, too), getting the wrong butterfly hair clips at the swap meet, and never having enough time to “do what I wanted.” Those pocket diaries turned into scrapbooks in high school, converted to notebooks by college, and became questions and prose in my Moleskine. Everything worth contemplating is worth my effort of analysis — from popular culture to Indigenous performance practices to critical theory to Latin American nostalgia to questions of humanity and everything in between. My best ‘labor’ often started in the pages of my notebook, asking the simplest of questions: why?
Part of my ‘job’ as an academic is to produce knowledge and information for a very specific audience, which means part of my writing practice can be formulaic and dense. Writing has been such an essential practice in my life, and my current occupation is accommodating academic writing conventions with non-academic customs in my work. So, I am using this space to help establish a balance in my writing style between the different audiences I want to write for. I just want to get back to what I loved about my field in the first place… writing because it brought joy and pleasure, without the subtlety of desire for expected response.
No, really — why this blog?
This blog serves as an outlet from the fatigue of the academic world — preoccupied with the reiterative ‘publish or perish’ incantation, apathetic self-service at the expense of others’ vulnerabilities, permanently stuck in the in-between of traditional rigidity and hopeful adaptability. I am a participant in the academic institution and recognize the dilemma of my existence: tethered to a fixed space, wistfully hoping for genuine transformation. However, this blog also serves as a space to remind myself why I entered academia in the first place: to be the mentor that I wished was looking back at me from the other end of the lecture hall; the teacher that understood diverse life experiences shaped my engagement and place within the learning environment; the mentor whose presence reflected similar adversities; the scholar and researcher that created a language that gave me a space and voice for the intangible senses and perceptions of what it felt to ‘be.’ In this blog, I’m trying to commit to fostering that ‘what if?’ world for others who might just need that, too.
You might find other random scatterings of writing, like teaching approaches or patterns in student writing. These are not failproof nor guaranteed solutions to make anyone want to be a “better” writer. But maybe the right person or audience will find my words and benefit from them… which is what I want this space to be about.
the desire to be dissolved 