by Shelby
You guys I have great news. Another friend of mine is wanting to write for A Trust Fund! As I’ve said before, my goal is to have this silly little newsletter be a platform for my friends to write whatever they need to get out and say. I want ATF to grow and that starts with more content and more cool people and things. So I have two introductions to make, first our new guest writer, my friend from NY, Aimée!
Hey, all you cool cats and kittens!
(Is that still funny?) I’m so excited to be here as a guest contributor to ATF. I guess I’ve kind of always been “a writer,” but it’s been a while since I’ve really been inspired to get my thoughts out there. Subscribing to this very newsletter and reading some of Shelby and Sydney’s posts reignited something in me. What, exactly, did it reignite? I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.
I know Shelby from our days as graduate students at St. John’s University. She doesn’t actually know this (well, I guess now she does), but I kind of had a “friend crush” on her. Maybe I can elaborate on this in a future post, but basically, as soon as I met her in our class on the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, I knew she was someone I really wanted to be friends with. And look at us now! Collaborating on an awesome project of hers while several states apart and trying to survive a global pandemic. It’s heartwarming, really.
Not to one-up Shelby, but I have not only two, but three useless degrees in English! Well, I guess the “useless” part isn’t entirely true. Because of my degrees, I’m able to work as an 8th grade English Language Arts teacher in Astoria, Queens, NY. As you can probably imagine, it’s a challenging job (13-year-old boys are the devil incarnate, fight me on this), but I still find myself asking how I could POSSIBLY be so lucky to do what I love for a living. And because of those three degrees, I get paid at the highest possible level an inexperienced teacher can get paid at in the NYC Department of Education - not a bad gig at all.
I can’t say that I have a trust fund myself, but my life has been incredibly privileged nonetheless (read: two Master’s degrees & a well-paying career at age 25). I remember talking with Shelby a while back about the guilt we shared for accepting graduate assistantships and tuition remission from St. John’s when neither one of us really needed the money, per se. It’s kind of a wild thing, coping with the idea that you have wealth, whiteness, beauty, charm, loving friends and family, and so much more, when many people have - well, maybe none of that. I guess my main goal is to try and pay it forward in any way that I can. And here, that’ll come in the form of me sharing some of my thoughts and stories. (And I promise I’ll try and keep the humble-bragging to a minimum).
You can follow Aimée on Instagram here! 👇
Second, we have created a personal email for ATF, so now you can continue commenting on each post, but if you have any questions, concerns, comments, suggestions, you can also send them to our new email address at atrustfund@gmail.com.
Finally, we have also created an Instagram account for our newsletter! It is, of course, very basic right now as we work on getting it filled with content, but this is an additional platform for us to post about the newsletter, tag anyone involved in that day’s article, and make sure as many people are reading this as possible. Similar to the newsletter as a whole, all of us will have access to the account and can share whatever speaks to us, though there will be a correlating post connecting to the day’s article. But go follow us and see what cool things we’re doing! 🎉
Shit We’re Loving: READ
Shelby’s Pick: John Donne’s “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” (1611 or 1612)
Coming at you guys HOT this morning with some sixteenth-century poetry to start your week off. It’s about time I flexed my early modern literary muscles more and since I now have my lovely friend Aimée joining us (someone who will undoubtedly flex her literary muscles—just wait till tomorrow’s piece), I have to make sure I’m on my game. John Donne is a crazy awesome poet (and I hate poetry). He was a contemporary of Shakespeare, but more importantly, he was the Dean of St. Paul’s, and while Dean, tucked away in his little basement office, he wrote erotic poetry. Today, however, I’m featuring one of the most beautiful poems ever written: “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.” Most likely written for his wife before he left for a trip, the speaker laments his journey alone but is reminded that their love is like a compass (one of those two-legged ones to map out the seas) meaning they are always connected and always return to each other. Also, please note all the amazing phallic imagery. I intend to provide more poems and my interpretation of them as the newsletter grows. Enjoy:
As virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say
The breath goes now, and some say, No:
So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
'Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.
Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears,
Men reckon what it did, and meant;
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.
Dull sublunary lovers' love
(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
Those things which elemented it.
But we by a love so much refined,
That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.
Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat.
If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the other do.
And though it in the center sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.
Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th' other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.
Daily Intentions
Today I will…
Have a mimosa with breakfast. It’s a Monday and I need it.
Here’s some nifty buttons for you to press, enjoy: