Review for
Girls Just Want to Be Dead and in Your Inbox: The Bastardization of Folkloric Oral Tradition for Digital Social Capital
Winner of RISD’s inaugural Redefining Writing Essay Contest
Spring 2024
With its humor, mystery, introspection, and universal themes, this essay beautifully embodies writing redefined. Overall, it lays out a compelling critique on a cutting-edge topic. Readers are taken in by an engaging voice that blends personal and scholarly genres, discussing historical context, personal experience, and careful analysis with casual vernacular uncommon in academic texts. All this is done in a multimodal form that does a lot of work for the piece. The incorporation of images provides real-world texture; the all-caps headings and star-shaped bullet points reinforce voice; and the color scheme of green and white text on a black page evokes nostalgic html aesthetics as well as the “dark forest” beyond the campfire. This piece seems to take up the invitation to push boundaries at every opportunity, but fine-tunes those choices to be purposeful and effective.
—Meredith Barrett
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Excerpt from
On Common Ground: The Weight of an Empty Promise (A Critique)
Fall 2023
I felt particularly watched at this Wednesday dinner. As I ate my carrots I kept making fleeting eye contact across the table, conscious of the many conversations around me, the vast skylight above, the weight of my fork. By the time I finished I was an appetizer and an entrée deep into BArch ’88 Adam Silverman’s Common Ground. Conceptualized in 2019 as a series of vessels, this iteration in March 2023 broadened into a dining experience within the RISD Museum’s Grand Gallery. The dining set consists of 56 bowls, 56 cups, and 56 plates, each made with a conglomerate of dirt and clays from each American state and territory. The sentiment was that as we all shared a meal together, we would look past our differences to instead celebrate our diversity and commonalities. Dinner certainly did satiate the little gnawing cavity I had been nursing since the opening. Still, I could not ignore the implication that there was something I should have been doing but could not bring myself to do. That looming feeling of obligation. To what degree of illusion would I have to convince myself in order to partake in this meal?
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Excerpt from
Fat Halos and Whatnot . . .
Fall 2022
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Excerpt from
someday i’ll love katherine fu
Spring 2022