Sundress Reads: Review of Dinner in the Fields

Attracta Fahy’s Dinner in the Fields (Fly on the Wall Press, 2020) captures the essence of small moments, memories, and observations, revealing that a busy world can offer quiet moments of significance if you pause to notice. Fahy guides readers to places where time slows or freezes altogether, creating a space to reflect on the extraordinary in the seemingly ordinary. 

Dinner in the Fields delves into intricately silent lives in the smallest town, laying bare their essence. In “Woman in the Waterside House,” Fahy writes, “I have no reason to trust sympathy, / when I tell you I hid for thirteen / days, waiting for marks to disappear” (8). Her storytelling ability demands attention for every word. Finishing the woman’s story, she writes, “Easier to pretend my life / is full, than to face the shame / in your eyes, mine, / and the shame of the world, / when you are a woman with a fist over your face” (Fahy 8). In a few short lines, Fahy produces incredible characters with rich pasts and emotions.

Between heart-wrenching stories, Fahy’s doleful images and moments prove literature’s potential as a cathartic tool for realization. In “Etchings,” Fahy writes, “There will be no miracles in a graveyard / amongst the dead, little happens / in the quiet presence / of departed souls” (10). Here Fahy creates profound stillness; her words convey the woeful narrative of the poem and also invite the reader to ponder existence. She reminds readers, in the setting of a still and silent graveyard, that life is momentary.   

In “Hy Brasil,” Fahy captures a narrator’s profound and all encompassing affection for a specific person by portraying it as a connection distinct from anything else. She writes: 

“Here on the mainland we are
unforgiving, overindulged, ignoring
the beauty.
I’m anchored, in love, tied like a boat
 to your image.” (Fahy 9) 

Fahy contrasts the mainland’s overindulgent nature by highlighting the tendency to overlook its beauty. The metaphor of being anchored in love and tied to the image of a beloved underscores the narrator’s deep commitment. Her ability to explain extraordinarily complex feelings through nature metaphors is one of the most notable aspects of the collection.  

Fahy also weaves themes of love, loss, and connects it to the relentless force of nature. In “How Did I Love You,” Fahy writes of the secret tragedies nature reveals about humanity: “Love took me to the last foot, / leaving shore, / my love deeper than that first step / into the depth, / the ocean, another land, / sweeping me off my feet, floating / to music, / your smile, / my death” (31). The imagery of moving to the last foot, leaving the shore, and the depth of love symbolized by stepping into the ocean creates a deepened idea of what it means to love.

Dinner in the Fields beckons you to go outside, even on less-than-gorgeous days—revealing beauty in all the places the wind has touched, where water has eroded, and in the spaces nature has reclaimed. Fahy reminds you how remarkable nature is in every word:

“When the stars dance
they arrive at night
in a sheet of sparkling
pleasure, into our heart.
My heart also moves,
raw and bright.” (Fahy 24).

Dinner in the Fields offers another way to look at the world: appreciatively, wistfully, kindly, and expectantly. Fahy paints vivid pictures of the powerful, beautiful forces present in a tree, a bird, a lightning strike. 

The combining, overpowering themes of nature and time’s relentlessness come to a peak in “It is 3am.” With the narrative of walking back from a bar with someone, Fahy turns a seemingly meaningless moment into a slow, beautiful experience. She writes,

“We slip into morning, walking Merchants Road,
our feet pace the moon, its timeless light, cloaks,
just enough to dull this truth: I was young once,
no need for fragile kiss, eyes that search
for depth.
… I would go anywhere tonight
… Still here, I slow to the beat of your steps, tall grey buildings
shadow our frames. We smile to each other, glance
at empty cars, parked like soldiers into little squares.
I’ve moved in circles, tasting paths to love
never found the one,
now there’s you.” (Fahy 25).

Her words remind you to be appreciative of every part of life, the beauty in every time of day. What is usually an hour of anxiety, hecticness, and unplanned disorder, Fahy’s version is slowed down, allowing your mind the opportunity to wander.

Ultimately, Attracta Fahy’s Dinner in the Fields is a truly powerful collection. One statement that well-represents the collection is from “Picking Potatoes:” “With tasks well done, / we believe in a greater life. / Longing connects us to fields / beyond our world. / We will grow into what we leave” (Fahy 27). With rich images and profound words, these poems force introspection and make for a highly engaging read.

Dinner in the Fields is available from Fly on the Wall Press

Caitlin is a young woman, wearing a blue and white striped shirt. She is smiling and has blue eyes and long strawberry blonde hair.

Caitlin Mulqueen is a senior at the University of Tennessee majoring in English and Journalism. She loves reading, playing piano, watching sports, and the Oxford comma. She has worked as an Editorial Graphics Production intern at ESPN, is a copy editor at The Daily Beacon, a student writer for Tennessee Athletics, a graphics and video operator for the SEC Network, and a marketing/social media intern for the Knoxville Ice Bears. With the majority of her undergraduate work being in sports media, literary media has remained her sincerest passion, finding stories that come out of sports to be as moving as those from literature.

Sundress Academy for the Arts Presents “Decolonizing the Diagram: An Experimental Poetry Workshop”

The Sundress Academy for the Arts is excited to present “Decolonizing the Diagram: An Experimental Poetry Workshop,” a workshop led by Felix Lecocq on February 21st, 2024, from 6-7:30 PM. This event will be held over Zoom. Participants can access the event at tiny.utk.edu/sundress (password: safta).

If diagrams are visual representations of knowledge, this class asks: Whose knowledge and for whom? In academia, medicine, and law, the diagram has been used to categorize, racialize, and essentialize bodies of color, as well as queer/trans/disabled bodies. In this class, we will write poems that decolonize the diagram.

Inspired by poets such as Kiki Nicole, Jenifer Sang Eun Park, and Anthony Cody, we will explore how diagrams can be used in poetry to draw out tension, relationship, symmetry, and movement between ideas and images. We will use these discoveries to guide our own poem/diagram creations that subvert traditional logics and knowledge.

Participants of all levels of experience are welcome.

While there is no fee to participate in this workshop, those who are able and appreciative may make donations directly to Felix Lecocq via Venmo @felix-lecocq.

Close-up portrait of a young Vietnamese person with short dark hair and a slight smile. He is wearing an earring depicting a burning cop car.

Felix Lecocq is a writer, game designer, former SAFTA resident, and current Tin House Workshop Reading Fellow. He has taught experimental poetry workshops with the Chicago Asian Writers Workshop, and in May 2023, he independently organized a digital poetry workshop entitled “game design for poets” to raise money for the Chicago Abortion Fund. You can find his work in ANMLY, Black Warrior Review, and Joyland, and on his website at www.felixlecocq.com.

This event is brought to you in part by grants provided by the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry and the Tennessee Arts Commission.

Meet Our New Intern: Isabelle Whittall

I used to bring my books with me to primary school and then keep them underneath the textbooks we worked from, so that even in five-minute breaks I could switch reading material and get a few pages in of whatever story was consuming me that day. On one afternoon, I had switched to Harry Potter and then never switched back. The bell rang, and everybody got up from their desks and left, and I did not. My teacher, Mrs. Pearson, was unfazed. “Third time this week, Isabelle,” she said. “You’re going to have to leave at some point.” While reading, I was capable of being completely unaware of life happening around me.  

So yes, I did have that stuck-in-a-book element as a child. I was also vivacious, athletic, imaginative, and talked all the time. I remember having a running dialogue in my head which was framed as a narrative, as if I was going through life writing my own story. Lines would surface amid my thoughts, sometimes funny quips about baking calamities or beach days, sometimes deeper reflections about siblinghood or coveted friendships. When I was younger and hadn’t quite learned about social norms and appropriate settings, a lot of these words were out loud— to my brother, sister, mom, dad, neighbor, classmate, and often my chickens. (I grew up with a lot of pets, and I chatted to all of them. I was convinced they were listening and responding as they clucked or meowed back).

Amidst this background as a natural storyteller, I also developed a love for words themselves. I liked to try them out in my mouth, considering syllables and sounds, wondering about different ways people pronounced letters. My father helped with this interest in a frustrating way. When I went to him as a child with a “what does ____ mean?” question, he never responded with a definition. He would approach it by asking me questions. What does the prefix mean? Have you seen a prefix like that in other words? What is the root of the word? And once I had figured out what a root was: can you remember other words that sound like that? Does it sound like a word you know in French? His method could be fatiguing. But I learned etymology this way, slowly and surely. Eventually I didn’t need to ask nearly as much, because instead of giving me an answer, my father had given me a toolkit. 

Recognizing the history involved in words was huge for me. All my life, I have had a deep interest in the humans that came before me. How they talked, wrote, thought, cared, dreamed, supposed, interacted. Words offer a portal to a past world, both in antiquated stories and in literal structure. As I have grown, my love of discovery has been spouting a new leaf, a love of creation. Words can be written to capture memories, spin art, decree importance. Words can be spoken to ask questions, share responses, form bonds. I suppose, then, that my commitment to humanity has always been apexed by our ability that sets us apart from other species: our speaking and writing. Our communication. And there is another side, of course, which is listening. A balance of input and output, of sharing and creating space, is where communication becomes power. I am thrilled to be helping Sundress contribute beautiful and important voices to our age’s ongoing conversation.  

Isabelle Whittall (she/her) is from Oakland, California and Montréal, Québec. She is currently pursuing an undergraduate Philosophy degree with a Minor in Political Science at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. A believer in the importance of conversation, Isabelle is bubbly and curious, and co-hosts the radio show Hail! Discordia! on CITR 101.9fm. 

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Reading Berryman to the Dog by Wendy Taylor Carlisle

This selection, chosen by guest editor Kenli Doss, is from Reading Berryman to the Dog by Wendy Taylor Carlisle (Belle Point Press 2023).

Notes for a Childhood I

i.

Words with no meanings—
hibiscus, yes, bougainvillea, croton
and the others, trade winds, Sergeant Majors.
At the edge of the known the octopus
turned inside-out to pink, the nuns
who comb our tangled hair each afternoon
on the porch. Octo is eight,
says mamma and the nuns are named
Sister Owen Phillip, Sister Immaculata.
Even the saccharine smell under the rubber
cone has a name: ether. I need
a word for my hand, for a certain
sort of skin that, surface warm, contains
such cold I shiver every time I look.

ii.

Without looking she slung her forearm
across my middle in those days before
seatbelts when she careened up to
each stop sign as if it would melt
under her cold eye. No.
They always stayed put and warranted
that arm athwart the front seat,
the reliable OOF of a small unwilling chest,
its air puffed out, and God help us
if I hit the dash—the metal hard as sin—
and wore the bruise because of her slow arm
too late to save me. From mamma, I learn
to race toward whatever stops us hating it,
slamming the brakes at the last instant.

iii.

An instant of twirling, hair slung in slow motion,
skirt a vivid absence of color spun out
in abundant circles like the hub of a childhood,
chestnut and sharkskin in that perfect moment
of turning. No screaming. No sweet, sick smell.
No veins on her neck pulsing. Instead,
mamma spins, arms held out like the wings on a B52,
slim fingers curled in, palming the secret
of what a hand might do. Beautiful. Silent.
Turning in the land of ’47 Chevys, Eisenhower
and the GI Bill. Like America after the war,
running right up to the edge,
her breath jarred loose by Buck Rogers,
her future flung forward into decades of fists.

Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives in the Arkansas Ozarks. She is the author of four books and five chapbooks and is the 2020 winner of the Phillip H. McMath Post-Publication Award for her fourth book, The Mercy of Traffic. 


Kenli Doss holds a BA in English and a BA in Theatre-Performance from Jacksonville State University. She is a freelance writer and actress based out of Alabama, and she spends her free time painting scenes from nature or writing poetry for her mom. Ken’s works appear in Something Else (a JSU literary arts journal), Bonemilk II by Gutslut Press, Snowflake Magazine, The Shakespeare Project’s Romeo and Juliet Study Guide and A Midsummer Night’s Dream Study Guide, and The White Cresset Arts Journal.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Astronauts by Amy Miller

This selection, chosen by guest editor Kenli Doss, is from Astronauts by Amy Miller (Beloit Poetry Journal 2022).

Radio Silence

That place had the biggest yard. I lost myself in it, warrens and wire cages, beans looping quiet up their poles. The cat slept in a forest of corn. I told myself my raging sister and I had landed on different planets, that’s all, our signals blocked by moons and storms and boyfriend satellites. One of us might come home a hundred years older. I liked being the only human there. My sister deep in some ocean while I pulled carrots up from a thin surviving crust. I hadn’t imagined this world. Science thought of everything here—music wafting from a silver disc, a vertical curved screen that wrote any book I thought of. You would love this, I wanted to tell her. But her world was somewhere else. My radio wasn’t broken. It sat in perfect working order. I stayed outside and dug so deep in that garden that I found another civilization. At night I talked to the lamp and heated soup on the only burner that worked. I made terrible beginner’s bread and froze half of it for the journey I knew was coming.

Amy Miller’s poetry and nonfiction have appeared in Barrow Street, Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, Narrative, RHINO, Terrain, Tupelo Quarterly, and ZYZZYVA. Her poetry collection The Trouble with New England Girls won the Louis Award from Concrete Wolf Press. Recipient of a 2021 Oregon Literary Fellowship, she lives in Ashland, Oregon, where she works for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and is the poetry editor of the NPR regional listeners’ guide Jefferson Journal.


Kenli Doss holds a BA in English and a BA in Theatre-Performance from Jacksonville State University. She is a freelance writer and actress based out of Alabama, and she spends her free time painting scenes from nature or writing poetry for her mom. Ken’s works appear in Something Else (a JSU literary arts journal), Bonemilk II by Gutslut Press, Snowflake Magazine, The Shakespeare Project’s Romeo and Juliet Study Guide and A Midsummer Night’s Dream Study Guide, and The White Cresset Arts Journal.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Astronauts by Amy Miller

This selection, chosen by guest editor Kenli Doss, is from Astronauts by Amy Miller (Beloit Poetry Journal 2022).

The Story

My sister does this thing with the telephone. Turns it into an extraction device, a many-pronged grabber that snakes through the line and comes out my earpiece. It’s tiny. It only takes a memory, a flash of pain, then whisks it back to her end where she puts it under a microscope. I can tell she has a little piece when she starts asking questions: But didn’t you want to kill him? Did you suspect he was doing that? She’s reading the dyed cells of my brain, and that slice on the slide is now hers, a thing she can catalog and reread and bring out whenever she needs a small lever, a shocking little photo. I collect pieces of her too, pictures of the mountains of boxes in her house, her TV’s watering eye, the city of lost artifacts on her coffee table. I need these things of hers to use—anti, voodoo, autoimmune. Even our blood is in battle. Every time I lose some, she knows it and has to hear. The story is better than the blood.

Amy Miller’s poetry and nonfiction have appeared in Barrow Street, Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, Narrative, RHINO, Terrain, Tupelo Quarterly, and ZYZZYVA. Her poetry collection The Trouble with New England Girls won the Louis Award from Concrete Wolf Press. Recipient of a 2021 Oregon Literary Fellowship, she lives in Ashland, Oregon, where she works for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and is the poetry editor of the NPR regional listeners’ guide Jefferson Journal.


Kenli Doss holds a BA in English and a BA in Theatre-Performance from Jacksonville State University. She is a freelance writer and actress based out of Alabama, and she spends her free time painting scenes from nature or writing poetry for her mom. Ken’s works appear in Something Else (a JSU literary arts journal), Bonemilk II by Gutslut Press, Snowflake Magazine, The Shakespeare Project’s Romeo and Juliet Study Guide and A Midsummer Night’s Dream Study Guide, and The White Cresset Arts Journal.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Astronauts by Amy Miller

This selection, chosen by guest editor Kenli Doss, is from Astronauts by Amy Miller (Beloit Poetry Journal 2022).

Silly Putty

When she went to the bathroom, someone replaced her with a pod of Silly Putty. The hands looked normal enough when she came back, idle on the dinner table, but were clearly unset clay when they tried to lift the bowl of beans. It was a darned good likeness, but they didn’t get the hair quite right, more scalp than I remembered, and overall, too much of everything, ears suddenly long and flat, eyelids not quite fit to the sockets, sour mouth that could eat a table whole. And the skin—smudged and gray, imprinted backward with every insult she thought I’d said, so later she could look in a mirror and relive them.

Amy Miller’s poetry and nonfiction have appeared in Barrow Street, Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, Narrative, RHINO, Terrain, Tupelo Quarterly, and ZYZZYVA. Her poetry collection The Trouble with New England Girls won the Louis Award from Concrete Wolf Press. Recipient of a 2021 Oregon Literary Fellowship, she lives in Ashland, Oregon, where she works for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and is the poetry editor of the NPR regional listeners’ guide Jefferson Journal.


Kenli Doss holds a BA in English and a BA in Theatre-Performance from Jacksonville State University. She is a freelance writer and actress based out of Alabama, and she spends her free time painting scenes from nature or writing poetry for her mom. Ken’s works appear in Something Else (a JSU literary arts journal), Bonemilk II by Gutslut Press, Snowflake Magazine, The Shakespeare Project’s Romeo and Juliet Study Guide and A Midsummer Night’s Dream Study Guide, and The White Cresset Arts Journal.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Astronauts by Amy Miller

This selection, chosen by guest editor Kenli Doss, is from Astronauts by Amy Miller (Beloit Poetry Journal 2022).

Astronauts

The first rule is: don’t answer the phone.
The people of Earth may try to call.
We smoke the alien PCP then float
down the airlock of the stairway and stop
before we reach the neighbors’ window where
their father lies all day in his hospital bed
so he can see the birds.

We turn and climb the lunar hill
back up to the ship. Even then, gravity’s
a joke—broken, with heads and feet
floating on thin tethers. I wear my moon boots,
hand-stitched from ripstop and down, a kit
I got in the mail, which always

make us laugh—outlandishly large,
their canvas soles swishing on the carpet.
We walk a minimal-G ballet, slo-mo arms.
No music: that would only confuse
our synapses already snapping and swelling.
We’ll have a half hour if the dose

was right. If too much, we’ll die over and over,
trapped in our suits. I remember stories
of guys jumping from rooftops, of the hearts
of fifteen-year-old girls stilled to motionless
fists. My own heart hammers on its pipe
in the empty black. We’ll have

about a year of space walks before
the oxygen effervesces its bright little blades
and carves the wrong initials in my brain.
We’ll never speak of this.
We can’t love our alien selves forever.
That file is sealed, even to us.

Amy Miller’s poetry and nonfiction have appeared in Barrow Street, Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, Narrative, RHINO, Terrain, Tupelo Quarterly, and ZYZZYVA. Her poetry collection The Trouble with New England Girls won the Louis Award from Concrete Wolf Press. Recipient of a 2021 Oregon Literary Fellowship, she lives in Ashland, Oregon, where she works for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and is the poetry editor of the NPR regional listeners’ guide Jefferson Journal.


Kenli Doss holds a BA in English and a BA in Theatre-Performance from Jacksonville State University. She is a freelance writer and actress based out of Alabama, and she spends her free time painting scenes from nature or writing poetry for her mom. Ken’s works appear in Something Else (a JSU literary arts journal), Bonemilk II by Gutslut Press, Snowflake Magazine, The Shakespeare Project’s Romeo and Juliet Study Guide and A Midsummer Night’s Dream Study Guide, and The White Cresset Arts Journal.

Sundress Reads: Review of Dead Uncles

I’ve read many poetry books written by Southern and Appalachian authors, and I can confidently say that Ben Kline’s chapbook, Dead Uncles (Driftwood Press, 2021), is fifty-one pages of some of the most painfully beautiful, goosebump-raising writing sourced straight from the hollers of Appalachia. In these pages, readers will walk across the land of not just the dead, but those walking beautiful, often painful lives. Through Kline’s sharp words, anyone can learn about the magic of blood ties, family origins, and the special connection such ideas share. 

Set against the backdrop of a community in the throes of addiction and loss, many of the poems in the collection ruminate on death and identity. In “Dead at 46,” Kline writes about the inevitability of the end: 

If I die that Wednesday afternoon– 
another distant uncle gone– 
I hope it doesn’t hurt, 
hope I hover embryonic, 
a meteoric ghost burning up 
no closer to heaven. (21)

Like shears, Kline’s harshly vivid descriptions tear through the fibers of what it means to truly live while also trying to survive and prepare for the end. Every uncle, including the “distant uncle” in “Dead at 46,” is a mirror for the speaker to look into, a reflection of true familial experience, be it 100% factual or slightly exaggerated for the sake of its poetic purpose. In these poems, readers will find unedited people reduced to their very core, and a speaker who dares to tell their stories.  

The theme of queerness is another axis on which these poems spin; the poem “Will / Inherit,” is a prime example of how Kline explores this: “Suddenly / late summer / shirtless in the loft / he watches me / surmount the top rug / Soft timothy exhaling June / The twine breaks / spreading blue / purple florets on which we lie” (9). The use of colors in this poem spark images in the reader’s mind, pulling us into the speaker’s own world of sexual desire and companionship. The poem ends with the speaker pondering the “silver rings my nephews will inherit / as we leave / behind nothing.” I would argue that the title’s reference to inheritance, which is revisited at the end of the poem, could also be read as an inheritance of struggle for LGBTQ+ people. What we leave behind as individuals are not just physical things like rings, but also the intangible, the fight for our rights, for safety, to be seen and heard. We leave behind the wondering, hoping that two men holding hands in public will one day be safe. 

Although this collection exists as its own little regional ecosystem, universal ideas are relayed in nearly every poem. Take “Be Prepared,” for example, a poem that uses a hungered robin and an earthworm to describe the desperation of survival. Kline writes, “In the bluegrass an earthworm thrashes / toward God,” and “Home, I splash cold water on my face / and check the packed bag / under the bed” (16). The natural cycle of the food chain echoes the speaker’s preparedness throughout the entirety of the collection, which takes form in literal acts of preparation for death and in preparing other things, like a concoction of ingredients to conjure past lovers. These lines from “Giving Up the Dew” stand out as an example: “Once home repeat those lovers’ names / three times as you drool / your weed cup into the second / and fifth cups. Wash your hands” (12). With every poem, there is something to be said about how Kline uses simplistic poetic forms to explore the complicated intersectionality of fatalism, queerness, and rural life alongside connective thematic threads, such as identity exploration and love.   

The final poem in the collection, “Corpse Reviver,” is a summation of the pain and love that this collection embodies as it pulls us back to uncles: 

uncle Rick counting pills, placing them
in neat rows. No amount of knowing 
changes the outcome: dead uncles
blue in the face, red 
leaving their lips. (Kline 29)

Kline’s colorful, tragic words here are an ode to the uncles that have come and gone, those too soon and others not soon enough. What the reader sees here is not just a tragic ending, but a reminder that no matter what is experienced throughout one’s life, there is only one way in which things truly end. Much like its last poem, Dead Uncles is a reunion—a place where the dead, the living, memory, folklore, and daydreams collide. If there’s one place where all of these family members, and especially these uncles, will live forever, it is in these poems. Anyone from anywhere can read this collection and walk away having felt it in their bones.

Dead Uncles is available from Driftwood Press

Leo Coffey is a trans fiction writer born and raised in Southern Appalachia. His stories engage with class distinctions, rural life, gender identity and sexuality, and the tension between memory and reality. He earned his BA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina Asheville. His work has appeared in Still: The Journal, Appalachian Review, and Dead Mule. He is the fiction co-editor for Reckon Review. 

Meet Our New Intern: Hedaya Hasan

A brown woman is posing to the side in a greenhouse with a tall green plant. She is wearing a black hijab, varsity jacket, blue jeans, and red handbag.

My first passion was reading. I did all the things keen readers do, though “keen” would not even begin to describe my addiction. Visits to the library became a weekly ritual. I grew hard muscles in my small arms from the heavy bags of books I carried home with me. I read when I wasn’t allowed to; late-night reading earned me more than one scolding and my teachers complained that I kept my nose to my books instead of paying attention. I read myself into deep headaches, completely blocking out the world around me before lifting myself to do something trivial like eat. I outgrew my supposed reading level and was moved to an advanced reading group at school before I outgrew that as well. None of my classmates could believe me when I announced that I had finished reading the Harry Potter series after starting it just two or three weeks earlier. The smartest girl in class was still on the fourth book after laboring through the series for two months which, according to grade-schooler logic, made me the new smartest girl.

I was officially a child prodigy. The kind of child prodigy that excels at one thing more that most people do at a young age but isn’t encouraged enough or given the opportunities or just lacks the verve necessary to carry that genius into adulthood. The older I got, the less impressed people were by my reading compulsion. The class prodigy label was slipping as I began to stray into teacher’s pet and know-it-all territory. I was no longer special. Not only that, but I was insignificantly average. In a desperate attempt to be praised and included, I slowly turned my eyes to illustration. It wasn’t easy to stray away from my books. In fact, I might have read more than ever during the transition period, though most of what I consumed became about painting or drawing. Being artistic or creative, in any form, is a universally likable trait and is apparently more impressive than being well-read. Any artist can tell you that hearing “I can’t even draw a stick figure” is an inevitable and endlessly repetitive phrase thrown around by the ungifted, unartistic peasants that crowd the human population. Not one single person thought I would pursue anything but illustration.

As it turns out, most things that are born with the intention of serving others stay headed down that route. When the time came for college applications, I very boldly applied to one art school. There was no back up plan for me, which I would come to sorely regret. The summer before I was due to start, I panicked. I had been accepted with a full scholarship and had really enjoyed the tours and orientations. One hot summer day, I opened my bedroom window to take a break from the stale air conditioning. Suddenly, sitting there with my chin on the sill, I felt the weight of my future float down and settle on my shoulders like a leaf drifts off a dry, red tree in autumn. I felt it blanket me and grow exponentially heavier. I was suffocating very quickly. To make a long story short, I do not have what it takes to be an artist and lack the wealthy background to be an artist regardless of the former fact. I had planned to study art at university for almost a decade, and that plan crashed before I could understand that it was crumbling. It was the only plan I made, which led me directly to a nervous breakdown. I begged my mother to let me take a gap year (she refused). I switched my major three times before school started and ended up suffering through a semester of film, which taught me many lessons and the importance of being around your own people. Whatever “my own people” may be, they are undoubtedly not film students.

The decision to switch to an English major was made purely by the fact that I had recently become reinterested in reading, this time with a focus on Palestinian literature. It was easy to begin reading again when the stories I read were sincerely important to me. I discovered that I enjoyed and had some talent in writing in a required course. In another course, I discovered that I enjoyed editing even more. It was almost like déjà vu, the way my Cinderella foot fell perfectly into the glass slipper of editing like it belonged to me. I’m more than grateful to have this opportunity as an Editorial Intern at Sundress Publications. Reading has created the parts of me that I love most, and I’m honored to be a part of uplifting more stories that shape people into their own slippers.

Hedaya Hasan is a Palestinian writer and designer based in Chicago.