A Message from Maricel Santos, Chair of the English Department

On this surreal Wednesday morning, I'm trying to get myself to a place of reflective calm  — and I'm not succeeding. As English Department majors, you know all too well the power of language — to convince, to inform, to challenge, to interrogate. Perhaps what we saw in this election was the power of language to unify in both inspiring and terrifying ways, and that seems true regardless of your political choices. 

Maybe like me, you're feeling like your emotions are all over the place. I'd like to share a patchwork of thought pieces. Reading literature calms and distracts me from feelings of hopelessness. 

• On the bus to campus this morning, I could see a collective sense of exhaustion in the people around me, but who among us is feeling a particularly obliterating kind of exhaustion, like the kind that Langston Hughes portrays in his poem "Tired"?
• Octavia E. Butler's "A Few Rules for Predicting the Future" in which she writes, "the very act of trying to look ahead to discern possibilities and offer warnings is in itself an act of hope".
• Or maybe we're over-thinking things, too well captured in Thomas Lerooy's big-headed sculptures, and need to find different ways to dialogue and mobilize?
• Maybe I hitch myself to this mantra, "It's too late for pessimism", which Kim Stanley Robinson quoted this past Monday during his campus talk "Visioning Climate Change Solutions: The Power of Hope Through Storytelling".  

Do you have texts, nuggets, memes that provide salve and nurture connection? Please share — stop by the office (HUM 484), share your thoughts, make a cup of tea, grab a granola bar. Take good care of yourselves and of each other.