Tag: about the intern

Meet Our New Intern: Jahmayla Pointer

Woman sitting on a bed of rocks the forest. Introspectively looking out over a cloud of fog with clasped hands.
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Language and storytelling. Analyzing it, creating it, and sharing it with others. I truly believe it is the reason we are all here. To experience, perceive, imagine, and record. Those are my bread, butter, oats, and OJ. I am the individual toaster that seals everything into place. A hearty Literary Breakfast to carry along wherever I go and remind me that life isn’t always so scary, and when it is, I just have to write about it or read a good book.

To say that my passion for storytelling began with just one book or just one author would be an overstatement. on January 27th, 2001, I was born to two beautiful people with big dreams. Their dreams were so large that they had to take a backseat for their baby girl. My mother had her sights on journalism. This is something I truly admire: her desire to know and share vital information, and shed light on the news of the world that maybe the next journalist wouldn’t.

My father, however, taught me the beauty of writing, and storytelling through his music. My dad wanted to make it as a music engineer and lyricist. He taught me all about the structure of a story within a song and letting your heart and soul craft a melody. For that reason, for me, the processes of creating music, creating literature, and even analyzing it go hand-in-hand. 

The first time I was unable to break myself away from a book, I knew I wanted everything to do with them. I was seven years old, and it was a biographical title on the Titanic. It was the only book in the house, and I was determined to read it cover-to-cover. The next time I got that feeling, I was nose-deep inside a Barbie book. I forget the name of it, but Barbie and friends go to summer camp and hilarity ensues. It was a glossy hardback with about sixty pages. At least it felt like sixty back then. 

The two titles that have most influenced my tastes today and my writing overall have been Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” and Roald Dahl’s “Lamb to the Slaughter.” Being introduced to those masterpieces in the eighth grade, I thought, “Yes… this is where I want to live,” so I moved in and I never left. Sure, I thought that giving praise to these titles made me edgy and that somehow made me feel better, but I know there was something more than my teen angst powering that feeling. 

I see my journeys with writing and reading as markers for where I am in life. For example, when I first began writing as a preteen I wrote from pain, and as a form of escapism. Now I write because I have such beautiful visions in my head, and I want to make them real. Now I write and read because I may have something important to say or to learn.

My perspective changed when I was about seventeen, during a shift at my barista job. I was finishing Frankl’s A Man’s Search for Meaning during a lull period, and the next person who came up to buy something got an earful of analysis and praise for the book that he didn’t ask for as I frothed his latte. I expected him to engage but he didn’t… rightfully so. I probably seemed like a crazy person. He simply took his coffee, gave me a “You have a good day now,” and left. 

I could only laugh at myself at that moment and forgive myself for being so moved by something that I would talk to a stranger like I’d known him for decades. Everything has been kind of light and airy since then, more or less, and I find something ethereal to fuel me in everything I read, and I try and put a strong message in everything I write.

Jahmayla Pointer is a three-time National Goofing Around Award winner and specializes in consuming gothic literature and horror films. Jahmayla’s playful and observant nature, and deep love of horror, magic, and literary thrills led her to pursue an English and Creative writing degree four years ago. She began taking creative writing workshops in her senior year of high school and fell in love with working with others on various projects. During her sophomore and Junior years at Southern New Hampshire University, she’s also done Men-tee and beta reading work for authors local to Cincinnati, most notably Victor Velez, author of A Triduum of All Hallows. Jahmayla was an ACES member briefly through which she received several beneficial developmental opportunities including courses through the Poynter Institute. During her downtime, she likes to spend time with friends and family, dance, write short stories, and read in copious amounts. Something that means a lot to Jahmayla is grassroots work and helping people directly through mutual aid and acts of service, she puts this passion into action by working with a group of good friends to develop education tools and encourage high literacy in her local neighborhoods.

Meet Our New Intern: Xuan Nguyen | FEYXUAN

Immersive storytelling is my life’s work, and graphic design is one piece to this particular puzzle. As an independent experimental game developer, I do illustration, design, poetry, prose, orchestral composition, and just enough coding to glue it all together. I started out as a writer when I was a child, dreaming of fantastical worlds I never did leave behind. When I turned fifteen, and my mind began to change in ways I couldn’t anticipate, I found myself drawn to experimental long-form prose. My first novel was a queer, dreamlike, and experimental poetry-prose hybrid in stream-of-consciousness form.

What my friends said about my work then is the same as what they say now: This makes me feel something, but I don’t know what it is.

Then I grew up and went to college for a degree in English, but I got accepted into an exclusive program for English majors that was called a sub-concentration, which required a 100-page creative writing thesis and a certain amount of creative writing credits. It basically required you to take all the levels of workshop available, and then some. Those workshops were never designed for people like me. They told me that experimentation is largely undesirable, impossible to parse, and if everyone can’t relate to it, there’s something wrong with it. The university workshop taught me that my voice, my vision, and my audience didn’t matter: the writer was never permitted to speak during criticism.

It took me some time to unlearn that—not as long as it could have, thankfully—but longer than it should have. It took me up until last year, just after I turned 23 as the world burned, that I came to understand there was more to the world than what everyone had always said to me. When I traced my way back to the experimental hybrid work of my painful adolescence, I found incredible, shocking joy and relief. And once I broke that first boundary, other boundaries started to break as well.

In my mind, there is not much difference between the instinct for visual balance required for white space in poetry and the same instinct when it comes to design and aesthetic composition. The same applies for the rhythmic and tonal musicality of poetry and developing an ear for rhythm and tone in musical composition. Maybe it’s an unpopular opinion, but I feel like the divisions between artistic disciplines are regarded as far more ironclad than they need to be, and hybridity of form can really open up your imagination, letting you see past so many more doors that were closed before.

I found my way to graphic design when I rediscovered who I was as a storyteller. What formal creative education told me was this: The literary world has to be this way because it always has been. That’s just how it is, and you have to accept it if you want to survive. But I am thriving now, and what I want to say is, Just because it “always” has been like this doesn’t mean it should be. It doesn’t mean it has to be. And there is more than one way to survive, artistically and otherwise.

Xuan Nguyen | FEYXUAN is a disabled fey orchestral music composer, writer-poet, and illustrator-designer. Their recent projects have involved the solo development of aesthetic interactive fiction games exploring the nuances not exclusive to the following: power, trauma, madness, nonbinariness, divinity, and monstrosity. LIAR, LIONESS (Feb 2021) and the demo for OCHITSUBAKI【落ち椿】(March 2021) are out now. Their books include LUNG, CROWN, AND STAR (Dec 2020, Lazy Adventurer) and THE FAIRIES SING EACH TO EACH (Feb 2021, Flower Press). Xuan Nguyen is the Art Director of Lazy Adventurer Publishing, and they help Grimalkin Records as a Graphic Designer.