Classifications are in shared spreadsheet!
Blurbs
Post 1: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the series) season 1, episode 1 “Welcome to the Hellmouth”
Fifteen-year-old Buffy Summers arrives in Sunnydale hoping to leave her past behind and start over as an ordinary high school student. She’s determined to blend in, make friends, and finally have the normal life she’s always wanted. But something about Sunnydale feels off from the moment she arrives. As Buffy tries to adjust to her new school and navigate the chaos of teenage life, strange events begin unfolding around her. Whispers of disappearances, uneasy rumors, and an unsettling atmosphere suggests something is hiding beneath the surface of Sunnydale. Despite her efforts to ignore it, Buffy finds herself drawn into a world she thought she was done with.
In Sunnydale, nothing is quite what it seems, and Buffy may discover that starting over is harder than she ever imagined.
Post 2: No Friend But The Mountains
In 2013, Kurdish-Iranian journalist Behrouz Boochani was detained on Manus Island, where he would remain for years in offshore immigration detention. It’s a first-hand account of life inside detention told through a mix of memoir and lyrical reflection, written in fragments on a smuggled phone in and translated from Farsi. What emerges is a raw, human record of confinement, survival, and the reality of being stateless within a system built on isolation. It captures what it means to endure years cut off from the outside world, and to keep writing from within it.
Post 3: Lost in Translation
When Eva Hoffman was thirteen, she left the postwar city of Kraków and arrived in suburban Vancouver. Lost in Translation traces what followed that dislocation, with the quiet, ongoing struggle of growing up between languages, cultures, and versions of self.
As she moves through adolescence and into adulthood, Hoffman becomes fluent in English, but never entirely at ease within it. The book follows her journey through school, university, and eventually New York’s literary world while she grapples with the split between what she thinks and what she can say.
It captures the experience of adaptation and the lingering sense of being divided between places, languages, and identities. It is an exploration of how deeply language shapes who we become, and what is lost along the way.
Post 4: If I Survive You
In the 1970s, Topper and Sanya leave Kingston as political violence closes in, with the hopes of building a safer life in Miami with their family. What they find is far from stability. Instead, the family enters a world where belonging is uncertain, survival is constant work, and even ordinary life feels precarious.
Told through interconnected stories, If I Survive You follows Trelawny as he tries to find his footing amid economic instability, racial tensions, and the lingering pressures of migration. Around him, his family members each pursue their own fragile versions of security, often having setbacks, missteps, and the everyday chaos of trying to stay afloat. The book explores what it means to grow up between cultures and expectations, and how survival itself can become both a burden and a driving force.
Reflection
Making my experiences public was already built into how I approached my posts. I didn’t think in a deep, reflective way about the fact that my posts would be public, but I was subconsciously aware. I’m not totally sure how this impacted my honesty in describing my experiences. I think they were authentic, but who knows. If there’s anything hidden in my choices, it’s probably more related to subconscious habit rather than intentional self-expression.
Upon initial experience classifications, I focused on when I felt most focused on in each narrative. I struggle with reading and watching things in a consistent way, so I paid attention to the moments where the narrative clicked and I was engaged. Those points became the basis for classification, and then I tried to expand upon them rather than straining to represent the entire narrative evenly.
For the narrative technology classifications, my process was more fragmented. While reading (or watching), I wrote down what I thought might be at work during different stopping points. Later, I went back and reflected on those notes after writing and rereading my experience. If new ideas came up, I compared them to my earlier ideas. If it worked, I tried to put them together. If not, then I would weigh my options and possibly replace my previous classification.
For the final project, I tried to pull everything together by writing out my thoughts for each post, even if they weren’t well structured. Then, I returned to the initial posts and tried to see what aligned or fit, and what was new. I also added in anything Dr. Isbell mentioned during the one-on-one meeting.
With the blurbs, most of the decisions came down to what to include and what to leave out. I tried to keep them short and clear enough. I definitely kept some of them more vague than the originals, but I felt that some were a bit too revealing. After writing them, I went back to make sure I didn’t explain too much or give anything away. I also made sure to add any smaller details I’d previously overlooked (ex. “Who is Buffy Summers?” A 15 year old girl).
I hope my work on this project can add to the understanding of how layered interpretation and experience are when engaging with narratives. Meaning isn’t fixed within a text. Variation in interpretation is productive. Different people notice different aspects of the same narrative depending on what they focus on, how they process information, when their attention is strongest, and an endless amount of other reasons. Not fully seeing what others see is evidence of how complex and layered narrative is, rather than a flaw in interpretation. Over time I started to realize my own interpretations were also tied to how I naturally pay attention and process information. It made me care less about trying to “get it right” and more about understanding my experiences for what they were. As nice as it is to have an eye-opening experience with a text, sometimes it just feels like previous experiences. And that’s okay, too!
