Unlocking Hidden Stories: How CRAFT Transforms Erasure into a Sonic Journey
Since I couldn’t separate my first boyfriend from the song lyrics, I decided to smash them together. I selected the song lyrics I could not do without, and then I wrote a gargantuan and overblown essay before putting the entire essay in footnotes to the lyrics. Those lines I had to isolate and force into an even clearer view than they’d ever been before — they appeared to be the primary content of the essay.
Yes, I was aware that it was very derivative of Jenny Boully’s “The Body.” And yes, as you must have assumed, the mixtape/essay was terrifically unpublishable, and so I shelved the piece shortly after finishing it. By the end of the mixtape/essay, my writing had devolved into self-talk as I realized, on the page, I’d been repeating all of these lines to the only person who really needed to hear them — the only person who would ever be interested in the obscure details — which was myself, as a teenager.
