When people ask me what I do I say say I teach creative writing, and then I usually follow that up with, I’m a poet. And then I wait for the inevitable subconcsious tick–the raised eyebrow, the slight smirk–and inevitable comment that’s usually some version of, I didn’t know that was a job.
As some of you out there know, making art is labor. It’s emotional, mental, and–yes–physical labor. I always tell my creative writing students that it’s our job as lyric artists to transform darkness into light, to hold the beauty and the ruin of something simultaneously, to lift the reader up so they can see the whole of humanity. That’s very heavy lifting, folks. And it takes a toll on every bit of you.
Why am I saying this? Because I’m thinking a lot about embodiment, bodies, and systems. Because part of what adds to the heft of what we carry is our knowledge gap around impact. Is our work doing what we intended? Are we reaching people? (Helloooo? Is anybody out there?) Are we affecting change?
Enter public digital humanities, which can act as a vehicle for lyric art forms. DH projects aren’t just dynamic or beautiful or touching. They illustrate the interdisciplinary origins of a lot of art, and elucidate research that is overcomplicated and inaccessible to those outside of academia. It can make visible the invisible web of connections that keeps us confined in inhumane systems and ineffectual actions.
Right before Covid I started outlining a digital humanities project that would illuminate the connections between Big Ag, the ecocrisis, and the high suicide rate amongst farmers. The updated front page for Redacted is now live.
There’ll be more announcements about Redacted later this summer. I’ll be presenting the project this fall (along with defending my dissertation. Whoa!) before the holidays kick off (just in time to add some food for thought to the food on your plate).