Recently, I found this personal narrative that depicts a 15-year-old French girl’s experience with depression and how writing fanfiction has helped her cope with her mental health struggles. Republished with the author’s permission.
As long as I remember, I have been fantasizing about an Ideal Home to realize my Ideal-I. Currently, I am working on practical applications of technology to improve the lives of autistic people (for a Special Issue of Applied Sciences). This blog is a collage of free writings that explore the overlap between those two. With a soundtrack! 😉
Last night I had that dream again. I heard a voice of glass and iron, a voice oftobacco and boiling stew, the sound of barns set ablaze. A voice that soundedlike someone I knew, someone I met when I was young. Someone that, for areason surely known to God, I have long since forgotten.
Once in a while, you come across a piece of writing that deeply resonates with what lives inside you, in words you did not have yet. That happened to me, on a sleepless night. I fell in a YouTube rabbit hole and ended up at a recording of Adrienne Rich’ ‘Diving Into the Wreck’, a feminist poem from 1973.
Last year, I jokingly wrote this (alter) ego-inserting fanfic, placing my PhD topic in the story world of Netflix’ The Last Kingdom. It was published on different fora, but lacked a stable place online. So, I decided to republish it here. Enjoy!
The theme for BWQ’s Spring issue is “Firsts” and I wrote a personal essay – with soundtrack! – about two of my first experiences: the first time I felt rejected, judged and excluded as a bi-romantic misfit, and the first time I felt how I could claim my place in space.
The first track of my solo album is about the story of Achtamar, which I learned in Armenia. Using the familiar trope of of star-cross’d lovers, the story of Achtamar is about a young woman named Tamar and the young man who loves her. They meet in secret on an island, until Tamar’s father discovers their trysts and sets a trap for the youth. He manages to escape, but he is mortally wounded and cannot swim across the lake. As he dies, his last action is to whisper her name across the water: ‘Ach, Tamar!’. With the help of my friend Ofelia Melikyan, I translated the famous poem by Hovhannes Tumanyan about this story. And with the help of John Vandenberg, I rewrote it into a poem of …