Even as I sit down to plan out the next 18 weeks of my life, I’m staring at the working title of my project going “is that the right verb tense? Should I use ‘a’ or ‘the’? Is it worth either questioning the exact title when you in fact know that you are going to be working on this project for the next 18 weeks or so of your life?”

All of these questions are valid and fun, and I am very excited to answer them over time, but as we start this latest chapter in the Mixed Media with Mikkel endeavor, let’s start from the top.

What Are You Doing?

Abode Press is holding a chapbook contest. The pertinent premise, rules, and regulations are as follows.

We are seeking chapbook manuscripts that explore themes of identity, origin, and culture. We want to read about the ghosts in your closet, the heritage that guides your cooking, the cultural emblems that decorate your walls. Share what evokes a sense of home to you 🧡

Please be aware that this year we are only accepting poetry (up to 30 pages) and hybrid chapbooks (up to 40 pages)! 📚

And I, being someone deeply vested in mixed media, became very enamored by the idea of making a hybrid chapbooks. I became further enamored once I was reviewing the work I had generated earlier this year and saw a clear theme and through line.

As many things are, I am an intersection of many other things. And my Filipino-American-ness intersects with my non-binary-neess intersects with my Luddite-ness interesects with my lapsed-Catholicness, and I’m sure you get the picture. And a lot of that has manifested in the form of the “manananggal,” a Filipino vampire-esque creature that separates its top half from its bottom half to hunt.

Which you know, kinda makes it a perfect metaphor as vampires have always been associated with queerness in some way shape form.

This was the first part of the puzzle. The second part was a pile of papers that have been sitting by my desk.

On Aforementioned Pile of Papers

Many years ago, my mother passed away. In the basement of a house I know longer live in, my mother had boxes upon boxes of her writing. My father, unwilling and unable to keep all of these old relics, tasked me setting aside the stuff I wanted to keep. I did my best to collect what seemed most pertinent and for many years, the papers have collected dust. I have skimmed through their contents, but have not read them thoroughly.

But what better opportunity to take my mother’s unpublished work forward than to synthesize with my own? What better way use of mixed media than aged paper. I did inventory. I have four notebooks, three folders, four loose packets, three envelopes, and two bound collections to sift through. I may digitize all of them. I may digitize some of them. These decisions will come in mind.

On The Task At Hand

I am naturally a reflective person, but I am also a capable planner when I need to be, and if I’m going to be spending 18 weeks doing this, I am in fact going to need a plan. Eighteen, being divisible by three, means that we are in the perfect position to view this in roughly three major phases.

Phase 1: Curation/Collection

During this first six weeks, my main focus is going to be to on curating what I have. There are poems that I have in mind, there are artifacts I need to discover, there are ideas I have in mind.

Over the next six weeks, the focus is to get the scaffolding in place. Figure out what I have and what I still need.

Phase 2: Arc-welding

This phase will probably blur with phase 1 just because of how I work, but that “what we still need” is going to take time to fill in. Forty pages is both a little and a lot, and given how I want to approach this with poems, visuals, and other somesuch, I need to make sure that the scaffolding is solid and that the scaffolding has things that I’m proud of.

Phase 3: Revision

Editing is my least favorite part of the process, but editing is in fact a necessary part of the process, and one that I am definitely going to treat more seriously this time around. After 12 weeks of building, it makes sense to spend a fair amount of time making sure it all works as intended.

What you can expect going forward.

Since I am submitting this to a contest, I’m not going to publish my works in progress here. If you want to see the work in progress, you can message me directly and I’ll figure someway to get it to you when its ready. For now, a lot of this is going to happen in the crevices of my mind but I will definitely want readers.

But this newsletter will be a reflection. A companion piece and meditation on what it’s like to revisit one’s past and someone else’s, and that’s going to be a fascinating endeavor methinks.

Welcome to the next 3.5 months. I’m excited to see where this ends up.