The Anthropology of Toxicity

The process of creating my “Narrating Body Burden” project was a unique experience for me. While I have experienced writing creative works modeled after other pieces, whether structurally or conceptually, this was the first time that I engaged with the process of modeling a short piece after multiple sources, unspecified within a wide array of options, and the type of inspiration I could draw from these sources was totally up to me. It was difficult to narrow down my topic to something which could potentially draw inspiration from some of the works we read in class, both structurally and conceptually, while still selecting a topic I felt I could give unique insight and experience into, and about which I could write something unique and original.

As I mentioned in my meta-narrative, I knew going into my creative process that I wanted to focus on a body of water. I feel that water demonstrates the permeability of bodies, living and nonliving, in a way more obvious than the human body, which falsely appears isolated from its environment. I looked to bodies of water which I have personally seen, touched, and been immersed in, as I felt this was necessary to write a genuine narrative.

From this starting place, I went back through the pieces we have read for the course and sorted out those that I felt centered on water for inspiration on form. Then, I thought of pieces we had read that were particularly compelling in form, whether or not their subject overlapped with mine. After compiling these relevant resources, I was ready to start writing my narrative.

I was particularly influenced by Suzanne Antonetta’s train-of-consciousness style in Body Toxic, and I adopted this in both theory and practice, allowing myself to reference relevant people, places, and things that came up in my own mind as I was writing about a particular lake. In addition to form, this train-of-consciousness style aided my content, since by selecting water in the first place I was attempting to emphasize the permeability of all things of an in environments. In the end, I found this creative process incredibly rewarding both structurally and conceptually.

Engaging with sources while being creative was an interesting balance of staying true to what I could draw from and applying those undefined constraints to my own unique ideas. It was both a challenging and rewarding process; I struggled to reconcile the juxtaposed ideas of constraint and creativity, but I was very pleased with what I was able to produce.