Author’s Note:
In the fall of 2002, during my doctoral studies at the University of Iowa, and at the beginning of my second year of living in the United States and in the English language, I took Dr. Linda L. Bolton’s seminar on Levinasian Ethics in Art which – I now recognize – has created a foundation for much of my thinking about belonging, place and identity.
When I copied and cut up the pages of my notebook from that semester, I noticed the many arrows I used in note-taking, as if I were giving directions to my mind and memory, creating my own coordinates of belonging in the language, discipline and country. I juxtaposed the quotes selected from the notebook with copies of childhood family photos to “trace how I got there,” which was Dr. Bolton’s advice about writing literary criticism. Houses and arrows share a shape; and an arrow pointing up is an I with a roof.
Dr. Bolton passed in 2018. This series of visual poems is a tribute to the legacy of her brilliant teaching and generous mentoring.
Polish by birth and Iowan by immigration, Dr. Ania Spyra grew up in a trilingual home in Polish Upper Silesia. She holds the Demia Butler Chair of English at Butler University, where she teaches transnational and postcolonial literature, and currently acts as the Creative Director of the Vivian S. Delbrook Visiting Writers Series. Her academic work on multilingual literature, borderland identities and transnational women writers can be found in, among others, Studies in the Novel, Comparative Literature, and Contemporary Literature. An alumna of the Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program, Tin House and Kenyon Review Summer Workshops, she has also published poetry and creative nonfiction in Colorado Review, Guernica and elsewhere.
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