bright spots

1.  sitting next to taylor j. in church today--suddenly realizing we were both shaking with semi-repressed & nearly uncontrollable laughter during the last verse of the last hymn--something about "reproving our every ill desire."

2. receiving my first valentine from moses--this bright yellow heart.

3.  sister tamara.  her stories.  her rocks.  her.

4.  mushroom crepes made by lula and anna.

5.  this bulgari snake watch.  thinking about liz taylor's jewelry. i know it's wrong, but i love rubies a lot.

composer, singer, mother margot glassett murdoch

i met margot ten years ago, as the soprano lead in the opera my husband, composer christian asplund, and i were producing with seattle experimental opera.  margot has a meltingly, mind-blowingly beautiful voice.  and then there's more.  she's also a composer and composer/performer who pushes boundaries, works in electronic music, and does the hard, hard job of raising three little boys.  any one of these things is impressive, of course, but margot does them all.  and, i think female composers are even more rare than female film directors.  correct me if i'm wrong.  definitely check out her music and her performances whenever you get a chance!

Margot Glassett Murdoch, composer and extended vocalist, received her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from Brigham Young University and received her Ph.D. from the University of Utah in 2011.  Her dissertation included an analysis of Luciano Berio’s Sequenza III and a cataloging of extended vocal techniques, as well as a piece for electronics, soprano and string quartet.  She has written for a wide variety of ensembles and written most extensively for voice, harp, and electronics.  An enthusiastic teacher, Margot has taught everything from toddler music classes to music theory and ear training at the university level.  As an extended technique vocalist, she has performed with Seattle Experimental Opera, Uba, a Utah based improvisation group, and as an independent soloist performing her own works as well as works of Cage and Berio.  Margot is currently involved with the Salty Cricket Composer’s Collective in Salt Lake City and sings with Ars Nova, a choir dedicated to performing new music.  She is the mother of three young sons and currently resides in Utah.    

You can listen to some of Margot’s work at http://www.margotglassettmurdoch.com/listening/

What do you hope to accomplish this year?

I hope to run a couple half marathons, to have a successful premiere of my piece “Omni Voice” for Loop Machine and Extended Voice, to visit the ocean, and to be able to say at the end of the year that I’ve made good progress in helping my children to become well adjusted and educated.

What inspires you?

In the past, I have been inspired mainly by other art forms, but lately I find the most inspiration in the sciences.  The scientific method has been informing my work lately and I’m particularly enthralled with particle physics.  I’m not going to pretend that I understand the math of such a tough subject; I’m more of a Nova/National Geographic/podcast kind of science fan.  Hearing scientists talk about their quest for the recently confirmed Higgs Boson or hearing about different scientist’s positions on string theory is inspiring to me, because these scientist have a logic and process driven faith in their theories.  It motivates my own thinking to be more critical, and to be more process oriented and skeptical about my work as a musician. 

Are you in a tight place, and if so, what are you doing about it?

In some ways, things are great right now, but I recently found myself on my way to run errands singing/composing pointalistic, Webernish twelve tone rows with the phrase “How am I going to get through this time in my life?” so I guess my place is a bit tight.  This particular moment in the car was preceded by an afternoon with a teething baby, a tantrum throwing preschooler and a hyperactive kindergartener.  Motherhood and I aren’t always harmonious and raising three boys is a tall order.  At times, I do enjoy that I am able to imagine, meditate, and mentally organize while I am doing housework.  I appreciate the brain space the job allows and I feel really centered.  Other times I find the day to day tasks of house keeping and dealing with children to be mind numbing.  I’m bothered that I’m not as eloquent as I used to be or as well read as I’d like to be.  I’m worried that having three kids will have put an irreversible stall in my career and that I’m losing my chance at doing what I love, since academic jobs in my field are hard to come by for even candidates who have it all together.  I know there are seasons to life; I’ve had lots of women tell me this and it is true that my kids won’t require this intense level of care forever.  I know this, but I just have a hard time settling myself down and being OK with now.  I have a hard time trusting the future. 

What I’m doing about my tight place is 1) continuing to compose and staying current in my field 2) participating in “therapy sessions” in the form of running and making music with other people.  Running helps dissipate anxiety or aggression I feel (I feel these often), making music cleans out and organizes my brain, and having regular social contact with other adults combats the isolation induced social awkwardness that, for me, is a bi-product of motherhood.  

What is your favorite legwear?

My favorite legwear is super-light running shorts with the underwear built in.  Not only are they a 2-for-1 clothing garment, which is admirably efficient, but I feel they are my legwear mascot, my clothing metaphor.  They were engineered to serve a purpose without feeling like they serve a purpose.  They stay out of your way, but you can trust them to keep you modest.  I wish it were socially acceptable to wear them all day.    

T.V. Writer and Pioneer Claire Whitaker

claire whitaker at a celebration for an iconic television show for which she wrote.

my enormous extended family is crowned by a diadem of amazing women who i admire more and more with each passing year of my life.  orma claire whitaker peterson is one of these women.  when i was growing up my mother and her sisters spoke in hushed tones about the sophisticated "cousin orma"--beautiful, brilliant, talented, urbane.  she loomed large in my imagination because she was a professional writer, what i wanted to be when i grew up. so the first time i remember meeting her was at my wedding, and even though it was a big, crazy event more than two decades ago, i still remember her turquoise jewelry and the beautiful gift she gave us from santa fe, her current place of residence.  because she was such a figure in my imagination, my first meeting with her was etched into my brain.  later we struck up some sporadic email and phone conversations and i still remember, seriously, every word she's ever said to me.  two things in particular stand out:  1) we were talking about writing for television, and she told me that she thought the medium had so much potential that it hadn't lived up to.  she was present at the beginning, and has worked on several iconic, important shows in television history.  so she would know.  2) she told me to "find a way to do my poetry."  she advised me not to go into television writing as i would risk becoming a hack.  these words are with me often as i struggle to find a way keep doing poetry in a world that doesn't value it much.  but enough of that.  i'm so honored that claire agreed to write for us.  i want the people in my community to know about this fascinating person, and it is with great pleasure that i introduce her to GITP readers.   --l.c.

Guest Blogger Claire Whitaker:
I am never bored.  Since childhood I have lived in my imagination, which often surprises me.  Sometimes I wonder if I’m not sharing my mind with a stranger – someone more exotic and adventurous.  I am often startled – sometimes shocked – to see what has leaked onto a page.

I am going on 85 and don’t remember when I didn’t write.  The Great Depression was the background for my childhood; it encouraged imaginative play and trips to the library where you formed ideas of alternate worlds that were far more exciting than your own.  I wrote my first poem when I was six.  It began, “I dreamed I was riding a cloud in the sky and saw the moon come floating by….”

In grade school I was editor of our student newspaper. I bluffed my way through high school with theme papers and essays.  I won a college scholarship in a short story contest and after graduation joined the staff of a local newspaper, writing news and trivia.  Under the name of Thalia Boldface I penned a weekly column that somebody told me was boring.  It probably was.

Later I wrote educational films, LDS church films.  I was a stringer for the Deseret News.  I got a job working part-time at an advertising agency.    And there, watching my little dramas of laundry soaps and steam irons acted out in the studio upstairs, I fell in love with television.  It wasn’t an easy segue from a typewriter on the dining room table to an office in Hollywood, not while trying to raise five children, but with a lot of luck and encouragement it came to pass, proving that miracles still happen.

Decades later I discovered the luxury of a retirement that allowed me to continue working.  On my own.  No deadlines.  No network notes or summons to the set.  But here’s where my tight place comes in:  having been reasonably successful I am no longer hungry, and it has made me lazy.

These days I write for my own pleasure -- the ultimate indulgence -- and scuttle fleeting thoughts of sharing my work, except perhaps with family.  Loving the process of writing itself, I am not motivated beyond the final product.  And if I don’t feel like finishing my screenplay I can always move on to that second or third novel-in-progress.  It seems enough to have an audience of one – me – who is enormously entertained by what I write.

But recently I attended the reunion of an ages-past tv show and was touched to have fans approach, old scripts in hand, and ask for an autograph.  If I am remembered for an episode I wrote forty years ago maybe I should try and publish something more lasting.  Something that would say:  this is how and why I lived.  That could be my end-of-year goal -- edit a lifetime of poetry and see if it might find a wider audience.  I’ll think about it.

Meanwhile, life inspires me – every waking day and dream-filled night.  As for legwear, I prefer skin.  I am quite hairless so I don’t even have to shave!  

  

hurricanes & lady pioneer times

people, i haven't heard from julie turley today, but i know she's in lower manhattan, for sure without power, and maybe flooded.  i certainly hope not.  let's muster together and send her our vibes, prayers, and energy.

she might need us to send her a few pairs of new tights next week, too, to soothe the pain and trauma she's experienced from the flood.

i'm wondering what she's doing, eating, drinking, etc.  and wondering if she's having any interesting insights born from the pressure of the tight place only a super storm can bring.

she's already been through 9/11, and has weathered the hardcore New York life for something like twenty years, so you know she's a tough gal.

i wonder if she's thought of her pioneer ancestors at all, as she does without electricity.

one of our fabulous guest bloggers, anna gedal, a docent at the daughters of utah pioneer museum, is running their blog and wrote a post today about hannah andersson erikson, midwife, amateur dentist, centenarian.  i only learned about erikson recently, and found out more about her today in anna's post.

the lady's super, duper rad.  like our own julie turley.

so here's a shout-out to ladies who pull infected teeth by the side of the road, deliver babies in every kind of condition, overcome their fears and obstacles in all kinds of ways.

here's to ladies who weather the storm

rad sahd, guest blogger kevin jensen

& often rocking a fabulous colored denim. . . . 

it occurred to me a month or two ago that kevin jensen was maybe the only true stay-at-home dad i've ever met, both in terms of the quantity and the quality of the time he spent at home raising small children.  he told me about some of his experiences and i realized kevin is definitely a dude deft at navigating tight spaces, and that i really wanted him to blog for us.  kevin's a fantastic dad who seems to have the energy of two and a half people--he manages play dates, coaches his kids' soccer teams, performs massive home improvement projects, now has a full-time job, owns a collection of fabulously colored jeans and somehow always has time left over to party and hang out with friends.

Are you in a tight place?  If so, what are you doing about it?

Hmmm . . . I guess that depends on how you define being in a tight place.  I define it as being in a place that is outside your comfort zone.  With that definition in mind, I feel like I live in a tight place.  As a father of four children and the husband of a university professor, I generally feel like I am moving from one tight place to another. 

What am I doing about it?  I have learned to live in tight places and embrace them. 

In order to understand my tight places a little better, let me back up a bit to 2001.  I was happily working for a company that was quickly growing. My wife had recently finished the course work for her PhD and given birth to our first child.  Life was good, really good.  Until it wasn’t.  A few months later, the company I worked for started to fall apart.  We tried to keep our dying business alive for several months, but in the end the whole industry completely collapsed and we had to walk away.

Meanwhile, my wife was busy being a new mother, writing her dissertation, and teaching an evening school class at Brigham Young University.  As I was trying to resuscitate my career, she was offered a full-time tenure track position at the University.  Suddenly we had a big decision to make.  At that point we knew she would take the position, but deciding what I would do was the most difficult decision of my life.  In the end I chose to put my career on hold and stay at home with our children.

Being an “at-home dad” in Provo, Utah has been the ultimate tight place.  I could fill a book about the challenges of stepping into this role when I did and where I did.  From the beginning I was thrust into uncomfortable situations, almost daily.  I found myself learning the skills I needed to run a household, but was never taught as a young man preparing for a career.  I found myself in a community where I was accepted by some and completely shunned by others because of my lifestyle choice.  I found myself crossing both real and imagined societal and religious boundaries all the time.  For years, living this way drained me emotionally, but over time I started to recognize the new person I was becoming because of the pressure of constantly being in tight places, and I liked the changes.

A couple of years ago, after a decade at home, I decided to go back into the workforce.  Again, this was a tough decision to make.  I had found comfort in my role at home.  Things were going well, but I felt myself slipping into complacency as an individual, so I went out and created a tight place for myself.  A place to change and grow.

As the years have passed, the uncomfortable situations have changed, but I have found that being in a tight place is part of being a parent, a spouse, and an individual.  Stepping away from where I am comfortable, to where I need to be to feel happy and fulfilled is always challenging, but the most rewarding way I have found to live my life.

What do you want to get done this year?

This upcoming year I want to be more creative.  For years, being creative was what helped me feel comfortable in my tight places.  It was how I felt freedom and individuality as an at-home parent of young children. The past couple of years, because of changes in my career, I have exercised that creativity less and less.  I need to get my groove back.  I need to be me. 

What inspires you?  

Passionate people.  I am admittedly an emotional person.  This has gotten me into trouble at times in my life, but over the years I have become quite comfortable being the guy that wears his heart on his sleeve.  Nothing inspires me more than people who love what they do and are comfortable being themselves and pursuing that passion without regard for what others think.

What's your favorite legwear? 

Oh, this is easy.  Denim for sure.  Right now, my employment requires me to dress up and conservatively every single day.  When I get home I tend to embrace dressing in the exact opposite way and nothing is better than a great, colorful pair of jeans.  

happy birthday, baby girl!

picnicking in kingston, ontario.

it's a special day today, julie.

eva as kate in taming of the shrew, 6th grade.

22 years ago, eva snow was born.

i promised her she could get a dog when she grew up & got her own apartment.  hard to believe that day has come.

i love this girl.  she's unspeakably beautiful and talented, kind, smart and funny.

legwear: tomato colored skinny cropped jeans

inspiration: the beautiful eva snow.

looking forward: to celebrating eva's birthday tomorrow.

already magical: introducing rad poet and dedicated advocate brenda scieczkowski

totally rad poet & human being brenda s.

i met brenda a while back in donald revell's poetry workshop.  i never got to know her as well as i wanted to due to our respective circumstances, but from a distance, i could tell she was rad, for real, and had some serious poet-soul.  i'm very pleased to introduce her to our readers, and to recommend her wonderful poetry.  one of the cool things about her work is the eclectic array of sources she draws on.  she's included some of those "magical and bleak" sources for us here.

here's a bit about brenda, from her bio, and some writing she generously agreed to share with us:

Brenda Sieczkowski was born in a Year of the Hare but currently swerves through a Year of the Possum. Her poems and lyric essays have appeared in a wide variety of journals, and her chapbook, Wonder Girl in Monster Land, is available from dancing girl press. A full-length collection, Like Oysters Observing the Sun, will be published by Black Lawrence Press in 2013. Favorite Deformation Events recorded by the Carnegie Mellon Auditory Lab: “Crush cabbage on board,” “Sawing 2-Liter (Japanese saw),” and “Breaking matzo.”  

With the small scraps of writing I’m able to piece out of this fall, I’m stitching together a fable about small-town manufacturing plants and the peculiar (and potentially damaging) crops that sometimes bloom from them. Here’s an excerpt from the rough draft:

The most extravagant flowers fringed the retention pond at the chemical plant—as vividly and intricately colored as the wallpaper blooming behind dreams—though, if the townspeople had paused to examine this conjunction, they would have concluded that their dreams had only been of such a vivid and intricate coloration since the chemical plant, assembled on the six acres of plowed-under soybean field west of town, started synthesizing flavors.

The flowers smelled of roast beef and juniper and nutmeg and kumquat and hot butter and banana cotton candy.

§

That fall, the clouds dissipated into invisible hibernation far beyond the horizon, and the sun burned steadily from raw yolk to cigarette cherry. Crops on the residual farms shriveled. A stiff edge of metal tainted all the soft drinks.  

But the chemical flowers thrived. Well into October, new buds sizzled to life on the hillside. The wives of the junior flavorists continued to congregate in lacquered clumps on the patio of the Wayside Tavern for watermelon mojitos, relishing the quaint smell of fresh-crushed mint, the novelty of a truly natural versus nature-identical scent. October spilled teenagers onto the factory grounds, filling apple baskets and wheelbarrows and burlap feed sacks with the late, radiant blooms. 

Pouring from that long and syrupy fall, the Homecoming Parade smelled of roast beef molasses and peppermint and melted butter and orange peel and unwrapped bubblegum. Miss Beef Skirt and her pageant court swiveled down Main Street on a creamy carpet of butter carnations, waving in circumscribed figures of infinity. The Wilson tractor hauled behind it a swath of bergamot, unfurling from the 782 shasta daisies wired to Doc Murphy’s 8-foot tooth. The backseat of the Mayor’s Mustang convertible was heaped with a mound of purple-throated tulips from which his head and torso emerged in the manner of a bleached and abstemious jack-in-the-box. The cellophane wrappers on the sour apple and cherry and grape candies glittered and crackled as they showered onto the sidewalks.    

(Since my “fable” is still in a very raw state, any editorial suggestions readers would like to offer in the Comments Section to this post would be welcome!)

Fable, however, is not quite the right word.

Yesterday, I was reading about French beekeepers and their puzzlement at the mysterious shades of blue and green honey their bees had begun producing. You can read about it too here.

peculiar

Fable implies whole wheelbarrows and burlap feed sacks stuffed with anthropomorphism. Pithy maxims, mythological wonders, supernatural phenomena. As a teenager, I devoured magical realism—Borges’ “Funes the Memorious” and Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude are enduring favorites. But increasingly, I’m drawn to what I will sloppily call “hyper-realistic magicalism,” the astonishing and haunting realities everywhere apparent in natural history and the contemporary sciences. Several years ago, I was captivated by the story of a Russian surgeon who cut open a patient to find a miniature fir tree growing in his lung.

Reality is already magical.

1) Tell us about yourself.

Right now, I’m the opposite of a tightrope walker. This is not precisely true; I’m more like a tightrope walker performing on parallel wires, constantly hopping back and forth. Though my educational efforts have all been directed towards literature and creative writing, I’m now working full-time providing support and services for homeless individuals (more about this below). And scrambling to find time to write. And scrambling to find time to read for my PhD exams. Scrambling for balance.  

If you would like to read some of my work in slightly more cooked state, you can access a poem sequence, “Quantum Phantomology,” at Sidebrow— 

Here’s a link to Dusie, Issue 13, where you can find more poems—as well as incandescent work by former Guest Blogger, gentleman poet Nathan Hauke— 

I have a chapbook, Wonder Girl in Monster Land, here.

One of the chapbook’s best features is the amazing illustrations provided by Chad Woody—an extremely (almost annoyingly) multi-talented writer, artist-of-all-genres, and potato crusader. You can view some illustrations-in-progress on his website. You’ll want to bookmark his main page and return to it often. 

2) Are you in a tight place right now? If so, what are you doing to get out of it?

I’m in and out of tight places every day. That’s my job description; I work with a population (the chronically homeless) who have fallen, spectacularly in many cases, through the cracks.

In 2008, at the start of the financial crisis (are we still calling it that?), I abruptly and unexpectedly lost university funding, a circumstance I should likely have been prepared for, but certainly wasn’t. Suddenly, I was reeling with the realization that not only would I not be able to complete my degree in anything like a foreseeable future, the teaching I had relied on for (a meager) income had also evaporated. I needed to find a full-time job fast, and 2008 was not a prime time to find full-time jobs. I became intimate with neighborhood pawnshops. I ate spoonfuls of peanut butter out of the jar so I would have enough protein in my system to pass at the plasma donation centers. I could no longer afford my apartment. However, I was still keenly aware that as tight as the place I was in felt, there were thousands and thousands of people rattling around the same city in much tighter spots. I, after all, was donating plasma to buy Christmas gifts, not to eat. (I had peanut butter). I wasn’t battling addiction or severe mental illness. And I had friends who made sure I had a roof over my head. Late in the year I got hired full-time to work in homeless support services.

Four years later, I’m still working in the same field, as a case manager for chronically homeless individuals here in Omaha. It is out of both choice and necessity.

One of my clients jokes that if his EBT card gets stolen one more time, he will have to become a cannibal. One needs an organ transplant, but has no income and no medical coverage. One catches fish out of the pond at a city park.

I said early on in this ramble that I’m drawn to the fantastical and magical phenomena illuminating reality. To me this feels like a compulsion, but I realize it is also an indulgence, a privilege—it is necessary to look, as compulsively, as unblinkingly, at the stark and burnt-out desperation into which we have allowed our fellow humans to fall—poverty, addiction, violence. This is a price I’m willing to (I must) pay for indulging my other aesthetic compulsions. This is the only way, ultimately, I can achieve balance.  

Reality is magical and bleak.     

3) What do you hope to accomplish before the end of the year?

Improve the quality of life for as many clients as I am able.

I would love to make a sizeable dent in my long-suffering PhD-exam reading list, but I’ll settle for making it through Marx’s Das Kapitol, Volume I.

I also hope to finish a three-part chapbook I’m currently working on; the excerpt above is part of one section. Make progress on a longer-range nonfiction project about violence in the Mid-West.

Mail one letter (or collage) a week to a friend/loved one.

Learn more about the brain.

Love more.     

4) What inspires you?

Generosity.     

5) What is your favorite leg wear?

It is with great sadness that I confess I am unable to post a picture here of my favorite sky-blue knee socks populated with pink robots. They were lost during the period of time I didn’t have a stable place to live. This will have to do:

a substitute for the rad sky-blue knee socks.

what happens to me happens to you: guest blogger taylor jacoby

guest blogger taylor jacoby

i've known taylor jacoby for a long time and then some, in a whole bunch of contexts.  the baby of my friend, my niece's playmate in daycare, my daughters' friend, my student, and now, a totally grown up lady about to graduate from college in a high-powered d.c. internship.  taylor works to change the world, and she has a soft heart, plus she's a great writer, as you will soon see.  she spent the summer of '11 in uganda researching trauma healing for victims of sexual violence. taylor's one of the young people who gives me a lot of hope for the future.  i hope you enjoy learning about one of my favorite people, miss taylor jacoby.

Alena Stern and members of the Grassroots Women Association for Development, Gulu Uganda.

Pamela, my favorite translator, is 20 years old. She is very soft-spoken, reserved. She wore the same outfit every time we worked together: pink satin blouse, black polyester skirt, black plastic flats—one with a ripped back so she had to hobble slightly. Her bare legs, hands, and face are covered with scars, mostly small and circular, but plenty of long gashes too. I imagine they form a map of northern villages and the roads connecting them. We’ve learned that Ugandans don’t use maps, yet the drivers never fail to get us where we need to go. No matter how nondescript the village is, no matter how unyielding the surrounding sea of bush.

I never asked Pamela about her scars, or anything about her past, and she never explained. All I know is that Pamela graduated from the Zion Project, a faith-based rehabilitation center for girls who were former “wives” in the Lord’s Resistance Army or who have escaped other forms of sexual exploitation. I only know this because one day Pamela took me to the compound of huts outside town where she lived. With palpable excitement, she showed me the certificate confirming she was trained in jewelry making and catering.

As my translator, Pamela was let off the hook in telling me her story. Instead, she helped me find others who would. Pamela had an extensive social network, which, when coupled with her inexhaustible work ethic, allowed me to interview far more women than I initially thought possible.

I went to Uganda to try and understand the impact of the widespread sexual and other gender-based violence that women had lived through during the country’s long civil war and continued to experience during “peace time.” I believed, with considerable fervor, that such trauma alters those who experience it. I believed that critical mental health needs were being ignored and at the cost of huge individual and societal consequences. Basically, my thesis was that if you use violence to destroy social networks, you also destroy the society’s ability to recover from it.

I came up with this formulation about the long-lasting impact of sexual violence in a preliminary paper I wrote before going to go Uganda, and I was very pleased with myself:

The recurrent, cyclical nature of violence is mirrored in PTSD [Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder]: violence begets PTSD, which begets violence, which begets PTSD. Is it possible that PTSD symptoms formed from previous abuse was what led these perpetrators to abuse others? Could PTSD not be considered a sexually transmitted disease?

To me, the problem was as orderly as it was grave.  And I was no scientist; I could not respect objectivity. I carried my assumptions around with me as I set up my research; they were the red dirt that caked my feet and hair so I had to scrub a part of me off to be rid of them. But soon enough, I did get rid of them. I started meeting Ugandan women, and I failed to produce a satisfying definition of “disabling” psychosocial impact. The day I left, Pamela was on her way to the neighboring district where she had been invited to a youth leadership conference. This kind of behavior didn’t fit my beliefs about survivors of sexual violence, but then again, maybe that was because she had received counseling with the Zion Project.

At the end of the summer, I had met all kinds of women. There were others like Pamela, who I met primarily through NGOs working for women’s health and economic empowerment. I also had the chance to meet the venerable Judy Dushku, who runs such an organization in northern Uganda. Dushku’s stories of women rising up in resilience and healing matched much of what I had seen.  I admired and envied the opportunity she had to watch these women cobble back together their lives and communities over the long-term.    

But there were other women I interviewed who could not make eye contact. Who wrung their hands and jumped whenever there was a sudden movement or sound around them. There were women who listlessly carried babies that didn’t belong to them—babies that they inherited when the mother had been killed; babies that were forced into their wombs by men in uniform and the guns they carried. I completed survey after survey, but I could neither confirm nor deny my prior assumptions.

A few days ago, a BYU reporter called to ask me about the research I did in Uganda because the paper I turned it into recently won a major award. The research turned out to be more academically fruitful than I could ever have envisioned. And I am always excited when the project is recognized in one way or another because I feel like I have succeeded in drawing attention to violence against women. I set off to frame the issue using social science methodology—random sampling and statistical analysis—in order to have it taken seriously. And, to my great surprise, it has been. But I have always felt that the cost of the paper’s success was an oversimplification of the women’s diversity. Statistics cannot tell this story, but I often worry that I cannot either. One of the reporter’s questions was something like, “what was your impression of the women?” And I gave some trite answer, no doubt. The problem of the paper and the interview and my memories remains the same: I don’t have a good enough answer for what happens to the Ugandan women.

Here is all I know: It is the only interview that remains purely distinct. She is seventeen, orphaned, eight-and-a-half months pregnant, HIV positive, and wearing a red parka, despite the heat. She is mostly somber, but she finds the hypothetical scenarios section hilarious. “Would you use the childcare service at this public event if the police were in charge of it? Ha! Them mens wouldn’t last five minutes with the children!” She is still chuckling several minutes later, “Police watching the babies…” At the end of the surveys, she looks up from her lap, directly into my eyes. “We are sisters. Did you know? We are connected. What happens to me, happens to you also. When you write, you tell them this.”  

1) are you in a tight place, and if so, what are you doing about it?

A tight place? I would have to say, yes. I’m currently in Washington DC doing a Brigham Young University internship program. We get an amazing deal on housing, but it means I’m living in restrictive dorm facilities perched on top of the LDS institute building and the LDS Church’s DC Public Relations offices. Basically, I’m spending my last semester of college feeling simultaneously like a freshman and a graduate already in the workforce.  It is a strange limbo indeed.  Yet, getting out of this tight place means going out in the city more.  I’m naturally a home-body, so an uncomfortable living situation here may actually be a good thing. 

I’ve also gotten myself in a tight spot by being pretty unprepared for my internship. I am working at the Department of the Treasury in the East Asia office, despite previously having zero knowledge of East Asia and precious little about financial and macroeconomics. Sometimes when I’m sitting in meetings or listening to the description of a project I’ll need to finish, things are so tight I can practically feel my shoulders scraping against the mounting expectations. At first, my emotional energy was primarily devoted to being frustrated with how useless my degree in economics was and desperately avoiding being “found out” by the others in the office. But lately, I have been realizing that if I devote that energy instead to just working with deliberation and optimism, I can learn some really cool things. Last week, my office sent me to take notes at a conference on China’s upcoming leadership transition, and I found that I already knew almost everything the speakers had to say on China’s economy. I was nodding my head like, “yeah, yeah, investment-led growth is a problem.  Old news. Tell me what it means for the steel industry! State Owned Enterprises!  Give me something I can work with!” And then I had to leave during the Q&A and buy some Diet Dr. Pepper so I could remember who I was and what I stood for.  

can't get enough art deco!

2) what inspires you?

Architecture. On my walk to work I pass all these famous and powerful institutions—The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, various embassies, The Renwick Gallery (i.e. the national arts and crafts museum, definitely an inspiration in and of itself), The White House—and that was all very exciting for the first day or so. Now during the walk my brain is going “those late 19^th century row houses would probably look so cool juxtaposed with an ultra-modern renovation on the interior” Or “my goodness those are fabulous art deco tiles.” I can’t get enough of art deco. This summer, I was running in London’s Hyde Park and stopped in the middle to use the bathrooms at the Serpentine Gallery. The museum shop had this enormous beautiful book on sale, American Masterworks: Houses of the 20^th and 21^st Centuries. I had to buy it, right there on my run, even though it meant throwing away many other things to keep my suitcase under the weight limit for the flight home.

I’m also inspired by excellent but non-pretentious cooking, beautiful but precise writing, long-lasting but progressing relationships (be they romantic, familial, or friendships). The more people I meet, the more I realize how rare and wonderful these things are.    

3) what do you hope to accomplish before the end of the year?

I just hope to transition somewhat gracefully into “the real world.” I hope to narrow down my interests and ambitions into something that would be satisfying and feasible to do as employment (and then find someone to hire me for it). I hope to figure out how to balance a job with creative outlets and exercise and taking care of myself. I want to spend this year remembering how to write creatively, practicing photography on my boyfriend’s fancy camera, cooking new things, learning to run, doing more yoga. But mostly, I hope to emulate just a fraction of the productivity I have seen from the women in my life (and men too). When I get home from an 8 hour work day, I just want to order pizza and go to bed.  I can’t believe all that my mother, grandmothers, aunts, Lara, and so many other women that I admire get done in a day.

taylor's tights, spicing up the d.c. workplace!

4) what is your favorite legwear.

Thus far, it has been too hot to even consider legwear. I’ve got some good tights picked out for the fall/winter though, and I can’t wait to use them to spice up my work clothes. Even when I’m dressing as professionally and conservatively as I can, I still tend to feel like people are looking at me like they looked at Elle Woods when she first shows up at Harvard Law.