4. hbo's i may destroy you is destroying me in the best way
thinking about grey-ness in storytelling & online resources
Hi there! I’m Ida, and this is tiny driver, a newsletter about research, pedagogy, culture and their intersections. Thank you for being here. Reply anytime, I love hearing from you.
Last week really started off with a bang. I released the zine that I had been working on for months about “Navigating Grad School as a Woman of Color,” and many folks reached out to me (publicly and privately) to thank me for the time I spent putting it together. Honestly, I was just glad that people found it useful enough to share with others, but the feedback really warmed my heart.
Some amazing scholars who are in my field were kind enough to tweet out about it. Also, if you don’t know about their work, I highly recommend going over to their pages to learn more about them!
And then there was also Adrienne’s thread that low-key made me tear up as I was reading it. She is probably the main reason why the zine was able to travel so far, and she has been such a wonderful faculty member at Brown during the time that I was there.
I also want to thank all the individuals that shared my words with friends & colleagues. Here are some that I saw that made me so happy:
And I definitely can’t forget my friend Zsofi’s plug for tiny driver (hehe):
To everyone who took the time to read my zine, thank you. 🙏💓
What I teach.
Still figuring out how to approach revising my syllabi into online courses. I’ve been perusing this website and this website and this website. Let me know if there are other resources I should be looking at as well. I’ll update this section once I’ve thought about things some more.
Right now, though, I’m trying to think about a way to make discussion board posting more engaging. Perhaps coming up with a system where students have pen pals that they email & respond to, rather than having it be all on a board. Although the variety of perspectives might be a bit narrower, I think it may be more engaging because they’ll be writing to someone(s), rather than into a potential discussion board void where no one may engage substantively with their thoughts except me.
What I consume.
content warning: sexual assault
Last week, I was able to binge the first eight episodes of “I May Destroy You” on HBO. The show primarily follows twitter-famous-person-turned-writer Arabella in the aftermath of her sexual assault on a night out in London. So far (*spoilers*), the story has spanned months, as we see the disheartening outcome nine months after reporting the case to the authorities while she continues to attend sessions of a sexual assault survivor group run by an old schoolmate. In the last episode I watched, Arabella walks into the sea in Italy, perhaps in an attempt to cleanse the past away or fall into a void. The show also follows other characters (most notably Terry, Kwame, and Theodora) in their own encounters with sex and sexual assault.
What works so well in this show is the way in which all the characters are neither wholly good nor wholly bad—the grey-ness of their character development leads to moments that are so perfectly complex and painful. It’s not even a feeling of simultaneous empathy and repulsion—it is more a feeling of deep knowing and relatability. Many moments in this show ask us to ask the question, who are we to judge?
I want to finish the show before I write a longer reflection on it, but I wanted to say something because it has been on my mind all week.
Item(s) of note.
This past week, the new Substack Fellows were announced. By winning this fellowship, these independent writers will receive stipends to continue their work and also potentially be able to pursue their writing full-time. You should definitely check them out (Edith Zimmerman’s newsletter in particular) and show them some support if you find their work interesting.
If y’all don’t know, I host this newsletter through Substack, which has really lowered the barrier to entry on this medium for me. (It’s free and a very intuitive platform, so I can just focus on *writing* and not *making it pretty*.) Here are some other Substack newsletters that I really, really love and you might really, really love too:
Foreign Bodies: A beautiful newsletter on the intersection of immigrant/refugee experiences and mental health masterminded by Fiza Pirani. It is filled with personal essays, resources, articles, and reports that are extremely interesting and so incredibly relatable. It is also beautifully illustrated and curated.
Here’s The Thing: Sophia Benoit is out here giving some SOLID advice, one letter at a time. I know that there are a lot of advice columns out there, but this one has the most consistently relatable and encouraging content I have seen. It also just feels so…personal.
Something I Saw: Kimberly Rose Drew gives us one piece of art to look at each day. It’s so simple and so moving at the same time.
The Sometimes Newsletter: A lovely newsletter consisting of pieces of art, photography and writing from Ella Frances Sanders. Her newsletter gives me the same feeling as when I look at this *~soft~* instagram account.
A pup-date.
Sometimes Girlie loves a close-up:
Her little eyebrow hairs really do all the talking.
Thanks again to all of you for reading this week’s newsletter, and I’ll see you in the next one!
Warmly,
Ida
came here to comment on I May Destroy You—so, so good. look forward to a longer analysis when it's all over! (and thank you for the shout <3)