how is connected to foundational story

revisioning?

Graham Rawle was truly one of the most inspirational speakers I have met so far. His ability to create not only a story, but artwork, through the works of others really left a lasting impact on me. He takes old women’s magazines to create stories about the perception of women at the time.  He has written a book called ” A Woman’s World” which shows the life of a woman in the late 60’s, through the media’s perception of how a woman should live. He is able to educate and move people, through the power of literature, and for that, I am truly in awe.

Just by taking clips and bits of paper from hundreds of different magazines, he is able to communicate a completely different story, with different messages hidden within his artistic work. Something that I learned from this experience was really the power of our language, and the amount of variety that has is truly amazing. I was fascinated how Writers like him are able to manipulate the human mind into creating a whole different atmosphere and storyline through different people’s writing. I asked Graham after the talk, “how are you able to portray the emotion and atmosphere that you want, just through word’s that aren’t yours?” He said that I needed to know how to be flexible and keep an open mind. That sometimes the way that you want to portray a feeling or emotion to the audience, will sometimes be said better by other people, and that having so many different options can really inspire you, to think outside of what you thought you wanted. When Alessia, Anaya and I were creating our own poem, we were really astonished by the content we were able to create just with one science fiction magazine. Taking inspiration from Graham, we focused our poem on sexual harassment and the effect it has on girls. The choices of words available to us were so broad and could have been used in any way. Listening to Graham’s advice on flexibility we were so easily able to create a piece we were all happy with, while still having that deeper meaning within all the gibberish it seems to portray on the outside.

I believe that Graham’s style of writing is really connected to our unit on foundational stories. Taking concepts, cultural appropriation, as well as the concepts of development in society. The idea of reenvisioning parts of news and magazines is similar to the unit that we studied on the development of foundational stories over time. He has been able to put a whole new concept of thinking into these pieces of information. His ideas in his stories based on a woman’s life in the ’60s shows the growth and development of our society.

Personally, I loved the idea of using old women’s magazines, as I feel that feminism and the idea of equality have further embellished so greatly over the past few decades. His projects on focusing on the outspoken women back in the 60 really leave an impact on the listeners as we were able to see snippets of his chapters, I realized how outrageous and absurd some of the content is, and allowed me to truly refelect the growth that our society has been through. But after Graham revealed the true persona behind the main “female” character, I was shocked. Just imagining a transgender woman in that decade, and the brutal challenges that she must face were truly mind-boggling.

Some thoughts that crossed my mind were about, how society is always talking about the people who still are not acceptive of many people’s sexuality, but in reality, we have not focused on the lengths that we have come to in acceptance. And I believe that Graham’s book is an amazing example to portray as how far we have come.