Thank you!

Thanks Man

Thanks Chioma

Thank you so much for your kind words I appreciate 🙏

Thank you boss I appreciate your mentorship always!!!

Thanks Dammy

Thanks Debby

Thank you Dad for always coming through for me.

Thanks Bro

Thanks Bro

The degradation product identity might be there. Thanks!

Hi Mady! That's a great question - the CDC has some data on most prevalent mental health disorders among children in the US (link below). Most common are ADHD, behavioral difficulties, anxiety, and depression. Another common issue is Adverse Childhood Experiences (or ACEs). These are difficult events that happen at home, school, or in communities that could be potentially traumatic for a child. Preventing or responding to ACEs can help prevent emotional and physical difficulties. It's estimated that 61% of adults have experienced at least one ACE. Both mental health disorders and ACEs can stem from personal factors, stressful home environments, stressful community environments, or difficulty with peers or at school. Intervention/prevention works best when it can reach all of these areas - reaching all of these areas, however, can be very difficult to do! Children Mental Health Disorders: www.cdc.gov/childrensmentalhealth/data.html ACES: www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/aces/index.html

Thank you so much for your kind words and questions! Yes, I have experimented with personal letters and voice recordings. What I'm finding is that the greater the variety of types of text the more diverse my poems become in theme, tone, voice, etc. For example, the poems I wrote from letters are more abstract and subjective (e.g. "Marry me / to a spiral staircase"). However, the poems I wrote from third-person stories out of the Reader's Digest books are more "visual" and grounded in space and time (e.g. "The pionola chokes back / a sob..."). This is primarily because there are more verbs as well as place- and period-associated nouns available to me in the Reader's Digest stories. So, unlike in most of the "letter poems" where the reader takes the role of confidant to the speaker, the reader in these new poems takes the role of the observer. To answer your second question, the female voice that came to dominate my "letter poems" was not intentional. As I looked for source materials, I found that most of these letters were written by women (with the exception of letters written by soldiers, which I chose not to use for this project because the themes and topics of those were so starkly different), and a majority of them were written by rural women. So, the female voices developed organically from the source materials I was working with. I have considered, however, doing a separate project from the male perspective.

@@khaarina Wow! Thank you for such a thorough response! I LOVE your description of the reader as "confidant to the speaker" -- what a truly beautiful concept! I have one last question : did you learn or appreciate anything new about your own personal letters and voice recordings? Did you find this rendered them even more intimate or were they on the contrary more distant after they were spliced apart? In short, did this change at all your perception of your own identity, or the relationships held with your correspondents? And was it easier or harder to write while knowing the complete backgrounds of those texts? (I guess that was more than one question after all -- sorry, I'm just so interested in your project as an English Literature major!)

@@madyneal8960 No apology necessary! I love talking about this project. Using my own text and voice recordings was a strange experience. I had to somehow remove myself from the text in order to create something genuinely new. The best way I found to create that space between myself and the text was to randomize the words, search for interesting new word combinations and phrases, and then use those phrases to start building the poems. What I found was that the closer to the source text I was, the more I needed to separate myself from it, and vice versa. When I work with less personal texts, which for me has been the Reader's Digest poems, I'm able to allow myself to use phrases, rather than just words, and I don't need to resist making connections in any way whatsoever. So, strangely enough, the less personal the source text, the more I end up in the poem--though you wouldn't know it without knowing me well. Another point worth noting is that I try to avoid reading the outside source texts before I draft the poem. That way I don't have to take that extra step of keeping separate what the source text is saying and what the poem wants to say.

Mady, thanks, I appreciate your comment! Honestly, as an artist, I find myself coming back to ideas of self as an evolving and subjective state, so I'm drawn to being as a complexity to which I return; not because I have found a solution, but perhaps because I haven't. That chase after what being looks like in art is the ineffable that I continue to wrestle with.

Yes, entanglement is a type of correlation between particles. In quantum mechanics a many body state is the quantum mechanical state of a many body system. Mostly, the particles that make a many body system are highly entangled but sometimes they might not have any entanglement at all. Hope this makes it clearer.

​@@pawankhatiwada5853 Thanks, made a little bit easier to understand.

Your presentation was really informative. You did a great job. I would love to see more presentation from you in the near future.

Thanks Rupa