Jenn Mikitka Final

Process Reflection:

The hardest part of the entire composing process, at least for me, was sharing my story with everyone. I knew we would have to share what we wrote, and ultimately, what we created. I also knew that I wanted to write about sexual assault because it is something I feel very passionately about. But when the time came to actually share all of the things I had done, I felt very vulnerable because my topic was very dark and personal. I considered changing my story many times out of the fear that I had picked something too serious, but I’m really glad that I never did.

            Aside from that, I also struggled a lot with figuring out what visuals to use when portraying something as dark as sexual assault. I knew going literal wasn’t the way to go because that gets into a lot of other issues, and it would be incredibly uncomfortable to watch. Instead, I wanted visuals that would help bring out the emotion in my words, without distracting from them. I originally only experimented with clips of dancers. Then I moved to ink blots, and eventually ink in water. The intensity of the ink and the vulnerability of the dancers ended up pairing really well together and I’m really happy with how they turned out. I’m also very proud of how the layering came out.

            As for the original writing part of it, I struggled with how to keep my story relevant without making it too personal. I wanted it to appeal to everyone and also respect the survivors who I reference in my story. I liked my first story a lot, but I knew that those stories were up to those people to share, not me. So when I was rewriting, I looked into a lot of slam poetry and monologues. As someone who does a lot of theatre, I ended up siding more toward a personal monologue on how I feel about the subject. I’m still a bit critical of it, but it gave the privacy back on the survivors I mentioned and gave me the ability to use a range of emotions by focusing on myself instead of others.

Philosophy of Storytelling:

We tell stories in order to learn lessons and to evoke feelings. I think that’s why so many children’s stories are didactic. Because we’d remember the boy who cried wolf longer than we’d remember our parents telling us not to lie about things. When we read books by Dr. Seuss, we remember that a person is a person no matter how small and it sticks with us forever. People write about things that are important to them, and if something is important to you, you’ll want people to remember it. Even in the Harry Potter series, the quotes that stick out to us are ones that have a lesson behind them or make us think a little more. For example:  “We’ve all got both light and dark inside us. What matters is the part we choose to act on. That’s who we really are.” These books contain so many words and phrases that people could choose to quote, but the ones that appear over and over again are the ones that remind us what is important in life and I think that speaks volumes as to what we value in stories and storytelling. Of course, we want to read a good story that keeps us interested and involved, but we also want to gain something morally from it. We love to hate the characters who make bad choices and hurt others and celebrate when something stops them.

            As for evoking emotions, stories have a way of getting us to let our guard down and to become vulnerable. When we listen to or read a story, we allow ourselves to be put into the world of the story. Our minds begin to wander and we imagine the story as we would experience it. Our minds develop images of characters and we can hear their voices in our head when we read what they say. We allow these stories into our minds and past our insecurities. This allows stories to make us feel certain things. When we allow ourselves to be submerged into a story, we become emotionally invested, and when hard subjects are brought up, we don’t have our protective wall up, so we sympathize and feel those emotions purely. We become empathetic and relate to the storyteller, and that’s when we are in our moat understanding form.

            I believe storytelling can be both aural, print, and also digital. Obviously storytelling started aurally, then was eventually written down, but now we’ve moved into the digital age of storytelling. The combination of visuals paired with audio portrays stories much more immersive and full than its counterparts. There is so much you can do when telling a story digitally, whether it be adding sound effects or music or even adding symbolic or realistic visuals to pair with it. It strengthens the original story and makes it unique and personal.