Elena Maria Rogalle is currently a Course Director in the Media Design M.F.A. Program at Full Sail University. She earned an M.F.A in Creative Writing from Full Sail University in 2013, a graduate certificate in Gender Studies from the University of Central Florida in 2009 and an M.A. in English from UCF in 2008.Her research interests focus on the intersection of the women writers of the Beat Generation’s manuscript culture and the digital archive through the lens of female affiliation, community, and collaboration. Her creative writing has been published in the Florida Review, The Cypress Dome, Revelry: The Literary Voice of the Gwendolyn Brooks Writers Association and The Magnolia Quarterly.

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The Mystory is a hybrid genre that develops from exercises in Gregory L. Ulmer's book, Internet Invention. Exploring our "popcycle," which include discourses in Career, Family, Entertainment, Community results in insights and discovery through the punctum. Through this punctum perceptions into each of the discourses is revealed through a type of re-vision. Adrienne Rich in “When We Dead Awaken, Writing as Re-Vision,” claims that the act of re-visioning would assist women in analyzing “how we live, how we have been living, how we have been led to imagine ourselves, how our language has trapped as well as liberated us, how the very act of naming has been till now a male prerogative, how we can begin to see and name – and therefore live – afresh” (Rich 18). Using visual images and text revelations about each section of the popcycle makes the narrative come to life. The results of this exploration through the Mystory creates this widesite. Ulmer states: “The final synthesis of these ideas is represented by a self-created emblem that represents the student, their history and their method of thinking” (1).  This symbolic image represents the overall thematic feel of the widesite.

Introduction

Using Ulmer’s genre of freewriting and image selection focusing on the punctum, I explore what makes my identity by examining it through four specific lenses. These lenses include dialogues in the Family, Career, Community and Entertainment sectors of what Ulmer calls the popcycle: “the ensemble of discourses into which members of a society are ‘interpellated’” (Ulmer 24). The popcycle is created by self-exploratory exercises created by Gregory Ulmer in his book, Internet Invention: From Literacy to Electracy. Divided into four sectors, one freewrites about each piece of the popcycle looking for signifiers across all four sectors. The punctum points to something in an image that communicates a meaning without citing any identifiable symbolic system. The punctum is unique to each individual viewer of an image. Starting with the punctum, that unidentifiable thing that stings or pricks you during exploration, the writing leads to an epiphany about one’s identity. According to Roland Barthes, all images are polysemous. They have multiple meanings (38-39). Barthes claims how we interpret the images depends on our knowledge of their symbolic/cultural value (48).

Catastrophe Revealed

The Florida Monarch Butterfly population has decreased 80 percent since 2005 (Marchese and van Hoose) and I have a role in this disaster. How can I call myself an environmentalist when I am contributing to the possible extinction of a species? Can I justify everyday convenience and how convenience contributes to the loss of habitat for Monarch Butterflies? Exploring myself through Ulmer’s popcycle I can see how my identity as an environmentalist began and how it flows through each specific area of the popcycle of family, career, entertainment, and community.

Where Have All the Monarchs Gone?

When consulting on a catastrophe, Ulmer reveals, “To function as a consultant, you accept an event of catastrophe as disclosure, as oracle or parable addressed to me, showing me the limits of my being, as my own threshold or bifurcation point” (Ulmer 79). A 37-year survey of monarch populations in North Central Florida conducted by the Florida Museum of Natural History’s McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity demonstrates that “caterpillars and butterflies have been declining since 1985 and have dropped by 80 percent since 2005 and that this decrease parallels monarchs’ dwindling numbers in their overwintering grounds in Mexico” (Marchese and van Hoose). There are five major threats to pollinators and they include loss of habitat, invasive species like non-native plants, pesticides, climate change, and parasites and disease. In Florida the decline of the monarch butterfly population is tied all five of the aforementioned threats, most specifically to the loss of Florida native milkweed. Pollinator loss is also tied to the increased use of glyphosate use in agricultural communities in the Midwest. Glyphosate is the most used agricultural weed controlling chemical developed by Monsanto. It is also used by home and garden enthusiasts and sold as the brand, Roundup. Glyphosate is also deadly to milkweed which are the host plant for monarchs. Less native milkweed equals less monarchs.

How am I contributing to the potential extinction of the monarch butterfly? It’s simple. As a human being, I eat food to survive. Much of the food I consume, like most Americans, comes from the supermarket. Most of the food products in the supermarket are created from crops grown in the Midwest. According to Marches and van Hoose, “a broad pattern is that 95 percent of corn and soybean products grown in the U.S. are Roundup Ready crops that resist glyphosate. That has a national impact.” These crops were developed to control weeds and because this new type of crop is resistant to Roundup, the herbicide can be used in the fields to eliminate unwanted foliage like milkweed. The reality of my contribution to the decrease in the monarch population makes me uneasy. I can be a better consumer by making sure I only purchase products that are not controlled with glyphosate, but can one person make a difference? To that question I would have to answer yes and no. I can create a consultancy geared towards other Americans who have an interest in saving pollinators but don’t know how to start. The consultancy can demonstrate how one person, by making small changes, can contribute to a catastrophe that seems insurmountable. The target audience of this consultancy comprises American adults who are concerned about climate change and the effects it is having on pollinators. These educated adults, ages 18 and older, know something needs to be done but are blocked by the notion that one person cannot push forth change alone. My consultancy is grounded in educating this specific target audience through the use of social media and a butterfly blog site that will house all of the educational components. Like the Butterfly Effect which is defined as a property of chaotic systems by which small changes in initial conditions can lead to large-scale and unpredictable variation in the future state of the system, one butterfly flaps its wings and a tornado somewhere else. One person who stops buying products from factory farms that regularly use glyphosate to produce their crops can lead to many others purchasing food products produced using glyphosate. This consultancy hopes to produce its own butterfly effect.

The second component of the consultancy is an educational portion of the consultancy is called The Pollinators Pilot Project. It is a hands-on educational challenge for fourth graders to learn about the importance of pollinators. Through our website, blog, and mobile app learners will discover about what pollination is and how much of our food comes from pollinators by creating pollinator gardens. Students will also gain knowledge about the effects of climate change on pollinators and what we need to do to protect this vital part of our ecosystem. The pilot project will align two fourth grade classrooms in a contest to see who can grow more pollinator plants. Each student could take home a planting kit and over six months plot the growth progress. Students will document their journey on the companion website and discuss a weekly report on the blog. We would have educators do monthly virtual workshops with the classes and give them the knowledge they need to become changemakers in the future. Educators will be provided with teaching materials and do monthly workshops with each class and pride them with the knowledge they need to become changemakers in the future.

The main goal of the Pollinators Pilot Project is to create a sense of the importance of being part of a community that exists of kind, considerate stewards of the planet. The goal of the Pollinators Pilot Project is to educate fourth graders on the importance of pollinators in our ecosystem. Our objective is to educate students on the effects of climate change on pollinators and what we need to do to protect this vital part of the ecosystem. Students will learn what pollination is and how much of our food comes from pollinators (one out of every three bites of food come from pollination). When climate change causes a decrease in the pollinator population, the lasting effect can lead to food shortages. Pollinators include birds, bats, butterflies, moths, flies, beetles, wasps, small mammals, and most importantly, bees are pollinators. They visit flowers to drink nectar or feed off pollen and transport pollen grains as they move from spot to spot. It is up to educators to redirect the younger generations into creating sustainable lifestyles that protect the Earth. Through this endeavor students will gain hands-on knowledge about the importance of pollinators and how the adverse effects of climate change challenges the pollinator population and as a result can create adverse situations for people.

Career Discourse

I’ve had three major careers since leaving college in 1982. My first was in radio as a traffic manager and producer. The second one involves my career in graphic design which led to my work in television. My last career and the one I was meant to have is teacher. How do these three careers tie into my environmental activism?

In 1990 I was asked by the Nature Conservancy to help with a campaign to raise money to buy environmentally sensitive land in Brevard County, Florida. I designed four-color brochures that were mailed out to registered voters asking them to approve a ballot item that would raise their property taxes fifteen dollars per year and the funds would allow the Nature Conservancy to purchase this environmentally sensitive land so it could never be developed. The referendum passed and the Nature Conservancy asked me to continue the campaign into Seminole, Hillsborough, and Palm Beach counties. These referendums also passed and the Nature Conservancy raised $500 million to purchase lands in these counties that almost four decades later are still protected from development. I feel like as one person you can help. I simply used my graphic design skills to design brochures pro-bono and helped push each referendum to success, but does my current state of mind, one of guilt and unease, cancel those successes out?

I began my career as a graphic designer in 1984 when I walked into a local advertising agency and said I wanted to be a graphic designer. The receptionist who happened to be the owner’s wife, saw something in me so I met with him and was hired in an apprentice role.

I learned graphic design from an award-winning art director who would go on and start her own boutique agency. I would join her and it was there that I was introduced to designing on a Macintosh computer. It was late 1986 when I sat down at a Mac Plus and learned how to design in PageMaker. My main task was designing those annoying coupons that come in the junk mail we get in out mailboxes each week. Junk mail is a pet peeve of mine since it is wasted paper which means more trees are destroyed to encourage more consumerism. I was making my living by killing trees.

In 1987 I landed a job as a television art director and I would work in television for the next 20 years (14 for PBS). It was through my first TV art director job that I was asked to contribute to the Nature Conservancy project.

What Are All These Gaps?

A fascinating assignment in the Ulmer text asked us to link a craft to our career. I stumbled upon macramé as a craft that “is not agriculture.” While looking at images of macramé I was reminded of how macramé is not just knots but it is the knots that create the gaps which create the design.

Gaps are the negative space that allow a design to take shape. The positive use of negative space is a design fundamental. This thought led me to back to my occasional obsession with gaps. I became aware of gaps and how they operate on another level while studying the poetry of Jorie Graham. In the poem ‘Pollock and Canvas’, from her 1987 collection, The End of Beauty, Graham describes Jackson Pollock's radical reinvention of painting as a struggle to “keep the gap alive.” She states in an interview with Thomas Gardner: “In the Pollock poem, it’s what is seized in the space between the end of the brush and the canvas on the floor beneath him. (Pollock did not touch brush to canvas – he used “drip” methods – his gesture nonetheless in total control). By something I’d mean, therefore, a motion which has already posited its own end.” That idea of what happens in between kept me wondering about what happens to that drop of paint as it leaves the brush and before it hits the canvas…what happens in that gap? Another connection to gaps comes from studying the experimental poetry of Kathleen Fraser. When she discusses her writing process for her collection, Moveable Type, she claims “I’d envisioned five or six smaller works perking inside of one larger book. Each of these was a project. Each was something I’d been thinking towards and writing versions of.” The gap between these projects created the space that led to her next project. As we developed our Widesite we were reading theory each week and during the early exploration we read Foucault’s “Las Meninas” from The Order of Things.” In this piece Foucault notes: “The arm holding the brush is bent to the left, towards the palette; it is motionless, for an instant, between canvas and paints (21). It is as if he also is contemplating the gap.

The idea of the gap will continue to appear throughout the exploration of exercises in Ulmer’s book.

Family Discourse and Ties to Nature

How does nature play into my childhood and what was revealed in my popcycle? I was trained from an early age how to smile for the camera. My mother was a fashion model and appearances were everything. The ritual of the annual photo with Santa is one where we had to create the perfect scenario of the happy family. Looking at my little brother I’m thinking he was interrupted by the photographer to take the picture. He was probably in the middle of listing what he wanted for Christmas. Our mother always had us mark up the Sears catalog to make “Santa’s” job easy.

In 1966, my father bought a live Christmas tree that he planted after the holidays. The idea of not wasting a piece of nature stuck with me. I visited my childhood home in 2018 and that tree is still thriving in our former front yard.

I remember this specific Sears catalog and getting to pick out my Barbie camper. It ended up being back ordered (creating a gap between Christmas and my birthday in February). 1968 was also the last Christmas we would spend as a family. 1960s America was enveloped in consumerism and most of the products offered were meant to make life easier, more convenient. This type of spending can take a toll on a family. It did on our family. While enjoying country club memberships and extravagant Christmases, my father’s Volkswagen shop was failing but no one could tell from the façade my parents erected.

My dad disappeared in 1969 (creating another gap). My mother and two brothers lost everything and ended up in a rented house far from my idyllic childhood home. How do these gaps and the sense of loss in my childhood relate to my obsession with gaps? Are these early gaps the driving force behind my fixation with what comes between?

In an exercise in the Family discourse we were asked to describe the situation using sensory details of setting, props, people, event. My epiphany was my first glimpse of being punished for being creative. In Kindergarten I took the class’s red kick ball, covered it in gray modelling clay and turn it into a sculpture of a woman’s head. The face is not well defined but the hair had plenty of texture. I use the clay tool to make the hair wavy.

You could touch the gray clay hair and feel the waves. I was very proud of my work. The teacher was not and I had to stay after class while my classmates were on recess and scrape all the clay off the kickball. This was my first experience with “art as punishment.” My mother who took art lessons and filled our house with her paintings also stifled my creativity by punishing me for drawing faces inside the knots in our rough pine paneling and try as hard as you might, but you cannot copy images off your family’s colonial style couch with Silly Putty. It will get stuck in between the fibers of the fabric (another gap?).

I was born in 1960. It was the Kennedy era and my mother would create our own version of Camelot on Long Island. Ulmer claims: “a good way to locate a productive scene is to use the categories of ideological identity formation as guides to likely sites of conflict or tension. The home is one of the principal training sites for interpellation, in which the parents pass on to children the cultural and social expectation regarding race, ethnicity, values and behaviors” (86). Ulmer urges us to explore these training sites through the following lenses:

• Cultural: Camelot and the Kennedys

• Social: How girls are supposed to act (Top Cat scene) – feminist theory

• Ethnicity: My mother’s disavowal of where she was born (Cuba) and instead saying she is European.

• Values: “keep up with the Joneses”

• Behavior: children are seen and not heard

Before she married my father, my mother was a fashion model working in New York City. I was born seven years after my brother (gap). My mother couldn’t wait to have a girl and I was reminded of my gender every day as she dressed me up for every occasion with patent leather shoes, white gloves, and frilly dresses. One day she found me hiding in the metal trash can outside our house in Huntington and she was appalled. She didn’t understand that I was playing my favorite TV character at the time, Top Cat.

Ulmer states: “A mother’s attention to the clothing and general appearance of a baby girl is part of the social, cultural, and undoubtly also the psychical, construction of gender; specifically of femininity” (87). This statement is exactly how I was raised.

Our fairy tale Camelot ended on the day President Kennedy was assassinated. In 1963, the day President Kennedy was shot, I was almost four-years old, but I remember I was playing outside when my best friend from next door, Patty Lankford. She came running up to me and said, "are you going to make anything for the President?" "Why?" I asked her and she told me he had been shot dead.

I went into the house and found my mother in the den. The canister vacuum cleaner was running, with its long handle lying on the floor sucking at nothing but the air around it. My mother was sitting on the couch in front of the blaring black and white television.  Her face was in her hands and she was sobbing. Her teased and sprayed Jackie Kennedy-like hairstyle was bobbing up and down to the rhythm of her tears.

Initial word came over the television at 1:40 P.M. EST when CBS News anchorman Walter Cronkite broke into As the World Turns with a voiceover announcement over a graphic: "In Dallas, Texas, three shots were fired at President Kennedy's motorcade in downtown Dallas. The first reports say that President Kennedy has been seriously wounded by this shooting." A few minutes later, Cronkite appeared on the screen from CBS's New York newsroom to anchor live reports from Dallas and read news updates from the Associated Press and CBS Radio. It was a day that changed America forever.

In Internet Invention we are asked to explore a 300-word micronarrative based on a memory as part of our exploration of Family Discourse.

Another 90-degree Florida Thanksgiving. The table was dressed with the good china and there was enough food to feed the neighborhood.

I sat quietly pushing peas into a neat pile on my plate when I looked across the table and was stunned by what my little brother was doing. He had made a nine-and-a-half inch high mountain of food: turkey, stuffing, cranberries, green bean casserole with the mashed potatoes holding the mountain intact. He poured gravy over the pile of food and it flowed like lava down the side of a volcano.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“What?” he said annoyed.

“Look at your plate. You don’t have to put everything on your plate at once. You can go back for seconds,” I said.

“Shut up, he said. “Look at your plate. Nothing touches. How weird is that?”

“Oh my God,” my mother said as her fork dropped onto her plate. “Your father used to do that.”

I looked up at them stunned. My father had been gone since I was nine, so I don’t remember what he did with his food. Looking down at my plate I saw what they were talking about. None of my food touched (gaps)!

The three slices of turkey laid one on top of the next, each 1/2-inch down from the previous slice. The gravy flowed down the center of the turkey-steps and stopped precisely at the last slice. The cranberry sauce was placed concisely in the center of the plate. The peas were piled perfectly in unbounded formation like little green army men. The mashed potatoes were packed neatly with a concentric well dug in the center for the gravy. Not one drop of gravy was allowed to run over the edge. Nothing touched. Only the gravy was granted permission to touch another food.

Memories of a Red-Winged Blackbird

Entertainment Discourse and Environmental Causes

Rex Harrison will always be Dr. Doolittle and no number of remakes will ever replace him. I was 7-years old when Dr. Doolittle was released in the theater. One scene that stands out to me is when Dr. Doolittle “kidnaps” Sophie the seal from the circus. He dresses her up as a little old lady so he can allow her to go free and join her husband off the coast of England. He takes Sophie to the cliffs and throws her over, letting her go free. Sophie reunites with her husband and they swim off together. Dr. Doolittle is accused of murder but is eventually found not guilty. He then sets off to find the giant pink sea snail which is an endangered species.

Since I was a little girl, I could not handle animals being harmed. My freak outs were so passionate, I was not allowed to see Bambi, Old Yeller, or Dumbo. To this day I still have these freak outs over any environmental harm that comes to our planet. I trace my environmental activism back to Dr. Doolittle and how the 1967 film was grounded in environmental messaging about care of the earth, species extinction, and conservation. I’ve been an environmental activist since I was 14 by banning the consumption of veal in my family.

I have been the most vocal and active environmentalist in my family serving on the Students for Safe Energy committee at Cortland State in 1979, protesting at a nuclear power plant on Long Island and carrying all my passion for the environment into adulthood into my work for The Nature Conservancy, Sierra Club, and local green initiatives. Ulmer states: “your position in your family is analogous to the position of the character to his/her diegetic world. The idea is to map one story onto the other” (127).

Connecting my family discourse to my entertainment discourse through the 1967 film, Dr. Doolittle brought forward not just my passion for environmental causes but how I took over a leadership position in my family, filling in the gap caused by my father’s disappearance. This connection was revealed through the “associative chain that is fundamental in electracy” (Ulmer 157). Understanding that peace and harmony are connected to protecting the environment developed through the relay of Dr. Doolittle in my younger years and Jackson Browne and the Musicians United for Safe Energy (MUSE) in my early college years. These connections led to making me into the person who uses her voice and her actions to raise awareness and create change.

Community Discourse: Connection to Ecology Through Whitman

I was born in Huntington Hospital on Long Island in 1960. We lived on Gristmill Lane in Huntington (Halesite) until I was four years old.

The Town of Huntington in Suffolk County, New York, United States was founded in 1653. It is located on the north shore of Long Island in northwestern Suffolk County, with Long Island Sound to its north and Nassau County adjacent to the west. Huntington is part of the New York metropolitan area.

Just like me, Walt Whitman was also born in Huntington (West Hills). At the age of twelve, Whitman began to learn the printer’s trade and fell in love with the written word. Largely self-taught, he read voraciously. Whitman worked as a printer in New York City until a devastating fire in the printing district demolished the industry. In 1836, at the age of seventeen, he began his career as teacher in the one-room schoolhouses of Long Island. He continued to teach until 1841, when he turned to journalism as a full-time career. He founded a weekly newspaper, The Long-Islander, and later edited several Brooklyn and New York papers, including the Brooklyn Daily Eagle (Poet).

Walt Whitman’s house in Huntington was built by his carpenter father (also Walt Whitman) in about 1816 and the future poet was born here in 1819. He left Huntington when he was four years old.

Lilacs are one of my favorite flowers. We had them growing at most of our houses on Long Island and I can still smell them today in my memory. Walt Whitman wrote a poem about lilacs, “When Lilacs Last in the Door-Yard Bloom’d.” In the first stanza Whitman writes: “When lilacs last in the door-yard bloom’d, /And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,  /I mourn’d—and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring. /O ever-returning spring! trinity sure to me you bring; /Lilac blooming perennial, and drooping star in the west,/ And thought of him I love” (Whitman).  The lilacs remind me of my father.

Ulmer states: “the goal …is to notice how the community in which one was raised focalizes the story of its founding and existence. The idea is to find the point of view that expresses the values of the community” (191). I developed a love of Whitman’s work as an undergraduate in college but it was later in my academic career where I truly learned of his importance. In Dr. Ernest Smith’s “Whitman and his Heirs” class we traced the creative trail that Whitman forged and his influences on William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, Allen Ginsberg, and Sharon Doubiago.

The mall in Huntington is named after Walt Whitman. When I was about three years old, we went to the mall and upon entering, I fell into one of the fountain pools and got soaking wet. I ruined my that day for my mother.

Emblem

All this self-exploration comes together thorough the wide image as emblem. According to Ulmer, “the emblem is a version of your wide image. It should evoke the mood of your themata” (247). My emblem arose from the signifiers across all four popcycles: career, family, entertainment, and community. The signifiers that appeared consistently were my ties to nature and the environment, my upbringing in the 1960s, and the gaps I kept discovering as I examined Ulmer’s exercises in each popcycle. The peace sign is an iconic symbol in my life. Growing up in the 1960s and living during the Woodstock era, the peace sign was an embodied presence as an item of jewelry, clothing, or something that was always part of my art. By examining the negative space in the peace sign (the gaps), four sections of the popcycle were revealed: (clockwise from the butterfly) family, community, entertainment, career. Family (and nature) are represented by my husband and dog in the upper left, our Long Island community is represented by the lighthouse on Fire Island in the upper right. Entertainment (and my ties to activism) are represented by Jackson Browne in the lower right and career is represented by the books (my educational and teaching careers) in the lower left. Electracy through the emblem as wide image lengthens visual art into one of verbal language.

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. Image, Music, Text. Hill and Wang, 1977.

Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things. Vintage Books, 1970.

Gardner, Thomas. “An Interview with Jorie Graham.” A Door Ajar: Contemporary Writers and Emily Dickinson, Oxford UP, 2006. Accessed 14 Mar 2019.

Marchese, Halle and Natalie van Hoose. “ Florida Monarch Butterfly Populations have Dropped 80 Percent since 2005.” Florida Museum.  McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity, Nov. 2018. www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/science/florida-monarch/. Accessed 31 March 2019.

“Poet Walt Whitman.” www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/walt-whitman. Accessed 2 March 2019.

Rich, Adrienne. “When We Dead Awaken, Writing as Re-Vision.” College English, Oct. 1972 pp. 18-30.

Ulmer, Gregory L. Internet Invention: From Literacy to Electracy. Longman, 2003.

- - - . Avatar Emergency. Parlor P, 2012.

Whitman, Walt. “When Lilacs Last in the Door-Yard Bloom’d.” www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45480/when-lilacs-last-in-the-dooryard-bloomd. Accessed 2 March 2019.

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