The Carousel Never Stops Turning

     Lately, I can’t stop thinking about the following quote from my favorite guilty pleasure TV show, Grey’s Anatomy: “The carousel never stops turning. You can’t get off.” This line plays in the back of my head on repeat. We are in the middle of a pandemic and we have resumed our daily routines, or at least tried to do so. Some of us are working from home on a computer, while others have gone back to their workplace. While I find it comforting to keep busy with my work, I know that this has been difficult for a lot of people who have lost family members or gotten sick. It never stops. There is no time to heal. There is no time to pause. Keep writing. Keep working. Keep producing. One of my classmates wrote about this pressure to be productive in one of her pieces lately, and it struck me. My identity has always been so tied to productivity, and I do not know how to turn it off sometimes. Life just keeps going, and it doesn’t stop for anyone, which is simultaneously comforting and unnerving.

Starting an MFA program in the middle of COVID-19 has been quite the experience. As an instructor, I am teaching ENC 1101 fully remote, which frees up time to work and write from the comfort of my home, since I don’t have to commute. Unfortunately, it also means that most of the time I am teaching to blank squares on Zoom, which makes it hard to gauge if any of my students are even present. I can’t wait to teach a hybrid course in the spring and see some of my students in real life. Can you imagine?

As a student, I spend most of my days reading online articles, books, and discussion posts from a computer screen, which means that by the end of the day, my eyes are fried to a crisp. I find myself having to take walks every now and then to refresh my eyesight. I print as many articles as I can so that my eyes can enjoy the sight of real paper. I have also taken up the art of journaling once again. I cannot wait until we are taking creative writing classes in real life again, sitting in a circle and talking about literature and poetry with books in hand.

My main challenge as an MFA student right now stems from the question that haunts me every time I sit in front of the keyboard: what the fuck is the point of writing my stories when the world is going to shit? Well, the point is to tell our stories as best we can because they are now more important than ever, and we must demand that they are heard. This is only my first semester at FAU, and the program is already paying for itself; I have begun writing essays that I had been putting off for years. I have met classmates and staff that make me feel like I am home. I know, I know, it’s corny, but it’s true. If you are thinking about applying to the program, do it! You won’t regret it. I am hopeful that this MFA will help me become the kind of writer that can analyze some of life’s greatest questions. I’ll let you know how it goes.

  

-Elizabeth Diaz is pursuing an MFA in Creative Nonfiction at Florida Atlantic University. She graduated with her B.A. from Florida International University in 2017.

 

Picture of the Mind

 

Teaching for the first time, during COVID-19, has already produced its challenges in unprecedented ways. Unlike many of my cohorts, I elected to teach my GTA classes in person, as online-only classes disorient me when it comes to gauging students’ attention. But teaching in person has offered quite a similar obstacle.

While the concept of wearing a mask in public is nothing new at this point, wearing one while instructing a body of students who are also wearing masks proved itself a challenge immediately. The great Roman scholar Marcus Cicero once stated, “The face is a picture of the mind with the eyes as its interpreter.” And to this point, it’s wild how much difference a mouth makes. Only being able to see a person’s eyes creates an uncanny valley effect where you might think you’re seeing a different emotion or intention than the one being displayed – it could be a real smile or a fake smile. So to this effect, students peering at me through vacant stares from the backend of (seemingly-infinite) rows of desks has me questioning if anything I’m saying reaches them, mentally or spatially. That same stare can mean a hundred different things: they’re lost in their own thoughts, maybe preoccupied with whatever they did last weekend or are looking forward to doing this one. They probably just haven’t gotten enough sleep and my examples of how to construct a thesis don’t hold enough tangible sway to wake them. Or perhaps my enunciations aren’t clear from inside of my own mask. Or maybe my insecurities are trying to get the jump on me – students are bored at the constant drone of your under-stimulating voice – they have a distaste for the shirt you’re wearing – they just don’t like you. Swallowing these fears from moment to moment can be tough, but I’m getting better at mentally pushing through the awkward silences, learning to not let them faze me because they’re only natural.

In regards to Cicero’s quote, it’s hard to get a window into the mind when that window’s bottom half is covered up (who said eyes were the windows to the soul? Lies.) I guess it takes a pandemic to recognize just how uniquely every facial twitch, wrinkle of the lips, or deadened yawn are all working in unison to excavate and convey the moving, thinking, reacting soul underneath.

Day one already feels like it was months ago, where I mumbled and stuttered over every line of the syllabus while a room of masked youths stared in uncertainty at their masked dictator; all the masks blanketed the room in an oppressive, even sinister atmosphere. Or maybe I’ve been watching too much Watchmen. But a few weeks in, and the off-kilter tension of those first classes seems to have subsided as I get to know my students. Sure, I won’t ever be able to tell just how much I’m actually getting through to them than I would in a pre-COVID-19 world, but so far, they’re engaged and doing the work so I guess I can’t ask for more than that. Still though, if the face truly is a picture of the mind, I eagerly await the day (if it comes) I can interpret the whole picture.

 

 

J Q. Salazar is a South Florida native. After doing a four-year stint in the US Air Force, he earned an AAS in Screenwriting for Film at the Colorado Film School and a Bachelor’s in English at CU Denver. He is currently attending FAU for an MFA in Creative Writing. His first publication can be found here.