Creative Practice Showcases
Jagiellonian University
From Memory to Fiction and Back Again: Writing About War, Lost Art, and Identity View Digital Media
Creative Practice Showcase Margaret Luongo
In my short stories, I’ve strived to transform memory and silence into narrative, an act of reclamation and knowing. Missing familial narratives become speculative forays into intimacy, via the themes of lost art and war: in my short story “Repatriation,” a woman returns to her childhood home to find that her recently deceased father has sold everything—house, property, possessions, every physical reminder of her early life erased, including a portrait bust brought home illegally from the second world war. The woman tries to piece together a coherent picture of her father in order to understand. Her strongest memories of him, she suspects, may be imaginary. My in-progress essay collection, Attribution of Influence, blends personal and researched essays to explore loss, influence, and desire. The title essay weaves stories about my father’s and uncle’s PTSD and the theme of lost art, including the life of Lina Franziska "Fränzi" Fehrmann, model for the Die Brücke artists. Each essay shows the influence of the absent—the missing person, abandoned places, objects of desire, and ghost lives that drive or subsume us without our realizing it. Like Lina, my father and uncle survived World War II—or versions of them did. What exactly was lost?
Collaborative Oral History and Graphic Illustration with Peer Harm Reduction Workers View Digital Media
Creative Practice Showcase Aaron Michael Goodman
This study highlights an innovative and collaborative study aimed at amplifying the voices and experiences of harm reduction workers, known as peers, who work at the frontlines of the ongoing toxic drug supply crisis in British Columbia (B.C.), Canada. The project draws on community-based participatory research (CBPR), community-centered journalism, oral history, and graphic illustration. The project is timely and important because more than 30,000 people across Canada have experienced fatal overdoses since a public health crisis was declared in 2016. Peers play a critical role in helping to save lives and reducing harms in this unfolding situation that has affected virtually every community in Canada. The study engages 12 peers in regular remote conversations and invites them to share details about work-related stressors, which include precarious employment, financial insecurity, and trauma as a result of continually witnessing fatal overdoses, and more. Their testimonies challenge dominant journalism narratives that frequently stigmatize people who use drugs (PWUD), individuals who experience fatal overdoses, as well as their loved ones. These narratives will be disseminated with the public as part of a podcast, and student researchers specializing in Fine Arts will create graphic illustrations in order to creatively communicate their experiences.
Joe...The Geography of Here: A Performance Piece
Creative Practice Showcase Robert Tracy, Louis Kavouras
Joe….The Geography of Here Joe….the individual as a metaphor for a landscape Joe….the individual as a metaphor for a universe or an idea Joe…what has Joe said about artists, their need to travel, citizenship, boundaries, or borders? (A Performance Piece) “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” (Jane Jacobs) We share a performance piece examining the everyday person, Joe. We explore Joe through painted images by Las Vegas artist Joe Watson, through a stream of consciousness text, Modern Dance choreography, and Contemporary Music. Through text, visual imagery, movement, and music, Joe is placed within his community-based urban living environment in the 21st Century. Joe is assessed within the notion that cities are for people; they are ‘ecosystems’ for living, breathing, everyday people. Buildings, streets, and neighborhoods enable active life for people and life-giving organisms. Joe is found on sidewalks, within local communities, and in ethnic neighborhoods, as he strives to live synergistically within the natural ecosystem of 21st Century American cities. Joe demonstrates that local expertise is far better suited for providing insightful community development than the distant analysis of outside expertise, which is foreign and inconsistent with the real-life activities and functioning of 21st-century city neighborhoods and communities. Joe knows the neighborhood, and his experience is better suited for the present; a high concentration of people vital for city life!
Making Books that Matter : A Collaborative, Social-Justice Publishing Venture at DePaul University in Chicago View Digital Media
Creative Practice Showcase Miles Harvey, Chris Green, Michele Morano
In this creative practice showcase, three writing professors at DePaul University in Chicago discuss Big Shoulders Books (BSB), an innovative, social-justice-oriented publishing initiative that is celebrating its tenth anniversary in 2023. In the past decade, BSB has produced seven full-length books by and about Chicagoans whose voices might not otherwise be amplified, with a total distribution of more than 100,000 copies worldwide. All BSB books—which include volumes on gang violence, gun proliferation, teenage love, young people at war and Chicago during the COVID crisis—are distributed free of charge, with a target audience of nontraditional readers, including students from underfunded schools, at-risk young people in summer programs and juvenile offenders at various prisons. Founding editors Chris Green, Michele Morano and Miles Harvey highlight a unique curriculum that has given hundreds of DePaul students hands-on training in book publishing through regularly offered courses in topics such as book editing, book production and book publicity. All BSB projects are the result of a unique collaboration between DePaul faculty members, creative-writing students and members of the Chicago community—an example of “a new breed of college courses” that promise to “shape the future of teaching and learning,” as the Princeton University researchers Ken Bain and Marsha Marshall Bain recently explained in The Chronicle of Higher Education. These so-called “super courses” help turn students from passive learners to active participants by emphasizing collaboration and community engagement, while focusing “on big, fascinating, important, and often beautiful questions and problems that spark intrinsic interest.”
