By Marah Hoffman
For me, this has been a year of unmaking and unmasking. The pandemic’s necessity for us to conceal half our faces is a potent symbol of how I have felt these last semesters—obscured. This semester, after much debate, I dropped my secondary education concentration. Now, I am solely an English and creative writing major. I am without the simple, anxiety-erasing answer for what I want to do after graduation. When I used to tell people English secondary education, they would smile. “So, you want to teach teenagers?” they’d probe. And I would hush the voice that whispered No! and answer, “Yes!” Now, they frown, uncertain where such degrees will take me.
Slowly, in the space where teaching used to be, I have found time for creativity. I have taken on an exciting remote internship with Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA) and, along with a few of my peers, planned my first trip to the AWP Writer’s Conference. Three days before the trip—signaling its significance—I received my first job offer to be a long-term writer in residence at SAFTA in Knoxville, Tennessee. One day before the trip, I accepted. I found my answers to the questions I was getting asked by others and myself.
So, as we stood, huddled, on the Philadelphia train station platform, I felt I also stood on the precipice of a new self.
Our first hours in Philadelphia were marked by excitement and exhaustion. We lounged in our hotel for an hour, ate a quick brunch at Reading Terminal Market, and then, slowly, yet giddily, made our way to the Pennsylvania Convention Center. Once inside, we bought more books than our bags could contain. It seemed each of us became drunk on the ostentation of wisdom. We kept pointing out names and titles to each other. Never had we seen so many writers in one space. At the end of the day, my cheeks hurt in a way they hadn’t in a long time. It was the ache of too much smiling.
The next days were each bookended by delicious meals (a traditional British dinner, obscure ice cream flavors, a litany of lattes, eggs served in various aesthetic fashions) and filled with learning. When we gathered after each AWP session, we gushed about ideas. Ideas for what to write, read, and become. With the inspiration from AWP, I plan to dabble in food writing, haunted memoirs, and personal essay hybrids.
The finale of the trip was a visit to Magic Gardens, a walkable mosaic masterpiece on South Street, designed by Isaiah Zagar. A few steps into the garden, we were in collective awe. There were shattered antique plates, blue bottles, pregnant mermaids, bicycle wheels, breasts made of bowls, suns made of glass. What was immediately magic about the garden was that it turned scraps into art.
A book discussing the history of Magic Gardens said, “In 1969, Zagar suffered a mental breakdown and attempted suicide, which prompted him to start mosaicking as a form of therapy.” Zagar’s search for happiness suffuses the garden. It is a place of hope. One of the many poetic lines in garden says, “a brief history of the future.” That is what I found there—a melding of my past and my aspirations.
For so long, I had been looking at things too up-close. I’d missed where my passions united. One of my favorite moments from Magic Gardens was when we were admiring a collection of broken tiles, and a worker walked by to tell us the tiles formed Zagar’s wife, Julia. We stepped back. And, indeed, there before us the whole time had been an enormous portrait of love.
Yes, English majors may have a propensity for hyperbole, but this trip changed me. My boyfriend once told me that pupil dilation is one of the body’s signals for love. It struck me that every time I glanced in the mirror, my pupils looked wide and awake—as if my body were trying to become soil where all these ideas could bloom along with this new self I stood on the edge of. The panelists were possible future selves. The glass ornamenting Magic Gardens mirrored my 22-year-old body in fragments. Every painted eye was a symbol of new vision.
This trip allowed me to metamorphose into mosaic—a self where nothing is lost or wasted but where every experience is beautiful.
Marah Hoffman is a senior double major in English and creative writing at Lebanon Valley College. Within her campus’s lively literary community, she is a writing tutor, mentor for prospective and new students, co-poetry editor for Green Blotter, and president of her college’s International English Honors Society chapter. Marah enjoys reading classic and contemporary literature. She has written poetry since she was twelve but has lately found herself wandering the realm of creative nonfiction, particularly personal essays. Besides being a bookworm, Marah is an avid runner. She is a member of LVC’s cross country and track teams. When Marah graduates, she hopes to find a position that allows her to continue pursuing her passion for books.