April 27, 2026

How did you first hear about Bennington?

I love telling this story.

I’m living at the family house with my mom in Baltimore. It’s late 2019; the days are still long and warm, and we hang out at the Barnes and Noble in Pikesville or Owings Mills, gift each other books.

This time she comes home with a paperback that’s black and white greyscale; a woman’s round face pushes to the margins in yellow-brown skin (though I can’t tell all the way because of the grey, so I imagine it, based on the light parts with more aperture). 

And her box braids spill down the same line as that margin like they’re in agreement or acceptance, or maybe just conversation. A moving-along-side, we-are-not-the-same-and-that’s-more-than-alright-cause-we’re-headed-the-same-way. A burgeoning tension, that, if the reader allows, could be music. 

My eyes go down and the title arrives in my favorite color, goldenrod yellow. It’s why my mom bought it, she says: Morgan Jerkin’s This Will Be My Undoing, a story of shedding armor, risking social death, sometimes death-death, in order to be more free. At least I think. I can’t get past the first few chapters. 

I think I’m mad she said anything at all, at the author’s audacity, like, “wait, *she* gets to write? (So can you) Like this? (you tell us a story, then).”

I’m not super trained in cultural criticism except through emersion…people like Margo Jefferson, Lorraine Hansberry, and lately Saeed Jones, so the words I’m looking for still shake and buckle like Bambi legs, scraping the roof of my mouth trying to hold on, stand straight, and get upright. We do so much damage trying to get right. 

I miss not knowing enough to feel unqualified. 

All I know is the book–the fact that it even exists– activates an awareness of my own armor and it hurts. This woman I don’t know is saying things we both know better than to talk about…they’ll smell blood, a gremlin says, “they” meaning everyone our caregivers hardened us against. 

In speaking, she compromises a safety that was never really real forreal but I’m still protective of it. Armor protects our illusions, too. And the air is thick and muggy underneath, so hot you start to hallucinate, convinced it’s keeping you alive even as your chest cracks when you go to breathe.

I get through being mad and look up Jerkins’ literary agent when I learn she went to Bennington’s low-residency MFA program for creative writing– and now she’s published. I don’t know what that really means to be published, but it’s enough.

I’m getting that creeping feeling again like if I don’t get the heck out of dodge, thefuck out of Maryland, I won’t survive. I wonder if it’s a generational thing, escaping home to feel worthy of it.  

What were your most memorable breakthroughs?

Grace isn’t something you coax or account for…that you earn, it isn’t available for that, for being accredited to a something, a somewhere, or a someone.  

It happens when ego finally exhausts itself, it’s a dangerous place, loosening its grip from around the abacus inside your heart, crowding you, keeping you safe so you can keep score, keeping score as evidence that you’ll never be safe.

I’d come to Bennington for the same reason I was always travelling, aspiring, reaching: I was running away from home. Running but also wading, in a wound I’d carved out with ritual, through socially sanctioned process addictions like workaholism, codependency, television, a preoccupation with aspiration, and a predilection for the epic.

The summer after her book-gift my mom dies. And I ask what my relationship with performance is now, and can it be root work. Can I gather myself there and draw up energy? Organize and be a witness? Can I create home there, one that won’t compel me to always be on the run?

I was running away from endings into green, mountainous wilderness where grace caught me.

Spring comes and my students teach me the heartbreak of feeling inspired. Think how furious the commotion must be in the bulb of a flower before it bursts into bloom. A heart does that. I remember what it’s like to be a fan, to be available to awe.

Enchantment is the beginning of so many good things. But what makes you stay?  Or like, choose to come back? Again and again. What are the choices that keep you while you’re there? We deepen this inquiry in the course series Performance as Radicalism in Practice.

Students interrogate their relationships to performance and reconcile it with their needs as citizens, as people who want to practice the labors of relating, and render these insights into dance, poems, immersive readings, images and song.

In a world that prescribes numbness, performance is public embodiment, an engine for shaking people awake, the performer, especially. All of us want to be enraptured, laid bare and tended to as we gather the pieces that we are into something new. 

Their ability to do this for us is something grief and awe have in common.

Craft teaches us that we are built to break. The practice inside of it gives you a place to recycle what comes out so there's nothing lost, only surrendered. Craft is about giving yourself over. 

And maybe you try to give the sensations each their own name but you’re too busy feeling them and you can’t control it and it happens in waves and you don’t know why you scream or gasp for air when someone transmits this feeling or how they’re doing it, it just comes. 

If the heart is a muscle, letting your heart break is a practice, and being with these artists, having a chance to teach them and learn from them, reanimated that practice for me. 

It’s the amplitude, the emotional rigor of the thing, and having the capacity not to try and rush it away: this is the beginning of feeling equipped to relate™.

Grace is a new logic for me, by which craft is less about imposing one’s will onto an object and more about attuning oneself to what a feeling is asking you to notice. It’s about holding the line and stewarding the conditions by which one is available to be enchanted. Enraptured. 

Let this world affect you and show us what we’re all feeling. You, especially you, are, in fact, built for this.

Epilogue

It always happens like this. You go through a thing and at the very end you know exactly how you wanna do it but then it’s over now.

Michael Wimberly and Susan Sgorbati host a music and dance improvisation course where I reintegrate voice into…a something else: when I move the only way I can register that my body is moving in physical space is when I vocalize with it, as if the immateriality of the sound is the only thing encasing the movement and making it legible in material space. 

I didn’t know this was the case for me, that sound, and more particularly vocalizing, was the thing that made me feel real. When you start with the felt sense that you are of consequence and you’re expressing that and experiencing that, not pursuing it, what happens to the sound? And what does the sound do to you and the physical space outside of you when it hits the air?  These are the byproducts of your matter, the evidence that you matter.

The things we can’t see, like feelings, don’t just give our material world meaning; they illumine us to our relationship and even further our sol/o/-ship with the material world. We are of it.

Here I thought my feelings made me unfit, and yet here I was, also, embodying the truth: that my feelings are evidence that I am capable here, that I’m home here, that I am equipped to relate.

For a while, what shaped my experience of sound, voice, and music, was how I imagined my body and its material place in the world. I still feel the way, but how I see myself is changing. And the more visible I became in performance, the more remote and distorted that image was, and the more disembodied I felt. 

The singer archetype and the idea of a singular artist obscures a much broader truth, that it’s not just me, it’s we. I’m part of a larger network of systems, a landscape, a series of material consequences. 

To become disenchanted with singing, then–the thing I learned to do in order to be present in a room, to remember that I was real–was a metaphysical crisis. Had I known…maybe the shame that formed wouldn’t have been so convincing. 

When shame loosens like it’s been doing, the things you need to feel cared for feel less like a risk to your attachments and prospects, and more like the essential rampart for connection that they really are.

If the voice can be made material through movement–the ethereal made into matter–this also reflects the value of my labor, natural ability, and how I experience the making of things. Not just music but all things. The making of a life. 

In an interview with Mike Birbiglia, Steven Colbert says about improvisation, “it’s bigger than you, and yet it couldn’t happen without you.” Outpours this wonder, and sincere awe over a happening, and Bennington and I were both there.