Embracing a Multimodal Practice
Meet creative writing major and French minor Arley Sakai.
Hometown: Ojai, California
Thesis adviser: Prof. Sara Jaffe [creative writing]
Thesis: “Plans for an Amphitheater: A Novella”
What it’s about: It’s an experimental novella in three parts about a romance between three artists who work on an ambitious, collaborative project. I utilize different narrative genres (autofiction, prose poetry, scriptwriting) as the characters become closer and embrace a multimodal practice.
What it’s really about: Interdisciplinary art making, collaboration, queer desire, contingencies, active volcanoes.
Influential class or professor: Prof. Jae Yeun Choi’s [creative writing] the Poem Visualized course challenged me to reposition my relationship to words and semantic content via visually focused experimentations.
Cool stuff: Student Body Senate, Japanese Heritage Student Union, Herodotones a cappella ensemble, House of Elvira (student drag club, founded by my close friend Sienna Otero ’24), ÖÆ·þ¾ÞÈé Creative Review.
Concept that blew my mind: Rhizomatic theory has such broad applications and encourages an expansive outlook that goes beyond literature and academia. I try to be multitudes every day!
Influential book: Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative Writing 1977-1997, edited by Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian. My thesis adviser pointed me to the anthology early into my project; it totally reinvigorated my approach to experimental and autobiographical writing.
Challenges faced: My class started at the peak of the pandemic, and not being able to interact freely with most students as an underclassman made it difficult to find the right friend groups and have the experiences that forge deep bonds. But each year brought new people into my life that made Reed a more warm and supportive environment.
How Reed changed me: Reed has made me more critical of assumed knowledge and approaches to problem-solving and creativity. I learned to be a more resourceful person by learning to maximize the resources and opportunities made available to students, such as summer funding or rentable equipment for personal projects.
Special projects: I was given the President’s Summer Fellowship award for a hybrid academic-creative project on “queer musical personas.” I researched a century’s worth of queer musicians with performative personas while creating my own persona for an original music project. This project allowed me to invest more deeply in my passion for music and queer world making and gave me the resources to pick up some technical skills like music recording and production.
What’s next: I will be working at Passages Bookshop in Northwest Portland, doing everything from archival research to hosting community events. I’ll also be doing drag and music performances, and co-hosting events for the Graft Union Reading Series, a cross-college literary arts collective that my friends and I started in May.
Tags: Academics, Students, Thesis, What is a Reedie?