Kincaid – Week Two Recap

I spent this week doing mostly the same things I did last week, which were wrapping up the interview process with my neighbor Arlys and finishing my comic stencil in Makerspace. Next week I will have a different schedule, where I will spend more time doing live sketches and drafting the Arlys stories, of which there are a lot.

I have nine recorded sessions with Arlys, and each is about an hour and a half long. Last week we talked about her childhood, her time in college, and her time teaching abroad; this week we talked about her other international trips, how she met her husband, and started her family. Even if we’ve talked about a particular time before, she always has a new aspect of it to share, so it’s not redundant in the slightest. I combed through most of the transcriptions this week (I only have one to go), and I made a list of stories from each recording that I’d like to touch on. I marked about 20, so I’m going to pare down my list and combine a story or two. Even though the stories are separate events, my goal is to make them fit together into one coherent narrative for the graphic adaptation.

One of the things I was most excited about this week was finishing my comic stencil! (I’m also looking for ideas of other ways to call it— “comic stencil” doesn’t seem to fit right.) I decided to only make it out of wood, as acrylic is expensive and difficult to glue. Even though I would have liked the transparency, it would have been too challenging to be worth it. I also liked the weight of the wood much better than the acrylic; it helped steady both my hand and the paper. I made a copy for myself, and I also made a copy for the school that now lives in Dr. Hurwitz’s room for future students who do graphic adaptations for English class. I attached photos of the one for the school down below.

I didn’t have as much time in the mornings for poetry this week because I was working on the transcriptions, but I still managed to enjoy some. I went deeper into the Mary Oliver book and started on Elephant Rocks by Kay Ryan. I’ve kept writing down poems I like, and I’ve actually found a couple that I might want to make into graphic adaptations. Overall, my process hasn’t changed much since last week. Next week I’m going to start the Shakespeare book, which will definitely take me a fair amount of time. I’ve been reading free verse poetry so far, which is harder to memorize than poems written in verse, and I wanted to try to memorize a Shakespeare sonnet or two.

I’ve also been having a Zoom call with Mrs. Hassan on Saturdays to practice Arabic. Right now we’re studying verb conjugation, which is challenging, but I just need to stick with it.