Why This?

The “digitalverse” is crowded with ideas, but the platforms demand brevity and certainty. I’m interested in the spaciousness of rumination and the possibilities of questions.

Why write?

• I was drawn to writing at a very young age, seven-years-old. I no longer remember exactly what inspired me. I was a big reader even then, so perhaps I read about a writer in a story. I began making my own journals with notebook paper, needle, thread, and ink. I stitched the paper together, and cut cardboard for covers. I usually illustrated the cover in ink. I recorded my days, nothing deep, just the ruminations of a child. At some point, I began writing out my dreams (great fodder for later years). It was a creative outlet.
• Soon after, I started working out problems for myself. I began questioning the world and what I was taught in school. For instance, it bothered me when I heard the phrase on the news or read it in the paper that “it hasn’t been this hot since ….” drumroll … three years before. I always expected to hear it had been decades or more. Even then, I saw dramatic rhetoric that framed the facts. I didn’t yet understand why that frame was always in place, but I knew it was misleading. My journals created a space to ask questions.
• Much later, years later, I would realize that writing helped me think. Writing helps us think. Reading helps us learn. Asking questions take time, and I think it needs spaciousness.

This bloggy zine space isn’t paper, and I don’t have a needle and thread, and I’m not tucked away on balcony daydreaming in the humid NYC summer anymore, but the motivation is much the same now as it was then.

I don’t really know exactly what I want to write or read here, but I’d like it to be a thoughtful space to explore ideas, take risks, and ask questions. I’m calling it the Mixtape Anthology because I’m feeling nostalgic for the time and thought it took to make a mixtape, the effort of it, and the serendipity it often involved.

I hope the entries connect with other thoughtful people, and I would like to invite others to contribute. I want to create a space that invites risk-taking and conversation, dialogue, opinions, and more than anything, questions. All of this here is just a draft, and drafts are all about revision.