StarkMarkings

As the school year comes to a close so does StarkMarkings Season 2! With school behind (actually not yet, we both still have finals...) and summer ahead, listen as Angelena and Victoria reflect on this past SM season and the year at large. (PS. If you get far enough, Victoria will explain why her life is like a cartoon... the story involves a puppy and a bagel).

Announcement: We will be taking a summer break (although there might be sporadic, bonus summer uploads)! We'll be back in the fall with Season 3... stay tuned. In the meantime, subscribe to our newsletter, which will continue to run all throughout the off-season.

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How are the people online so perfect? Will the boys at school like me? How do I prevent wrinkles? Growing up means change. And the change you go through on the outside can be just as dramatic and as perspective-altering as the change you go through on the inside.

In this episode, Victoria talks to Sara Amar, a junior in college who exudes self-assurance, to discover her secret to seemingly unwavering confidence and Rebecca Boylan, an English professor who incidentally assigned The Picture of Dorian Gray, sparking the inspiration for this episode. If you're not familiar, the novel by Oscar Wilde is about a young man who switches places with a portrait of himself, allowing his physical being to remain young while the painting grows old. Would you wish to stay forever young? Are beauty and youth inherently intertwined? In this episode, Victoria poses these questions, and both Sara and Professor Boylan take their shots at answering. Listen as both guests discuss their relationships with their physical appearances, the role of beauty standards in their lives, and their thoughts on aging. 

We hope you enjoy! (If you end up liking the episode, consider leaving us a rating!)

It takes time to think through our past and come to conclusions about our present. As we grow up, the simple black and white nature of our youth slowly breaks down. As a result, we get stuck in stalemates with familiar people and familiar ideas alike. Conflicting experiences beg the question: what is the right way to make sense of the world? There’s that cliché rom-com line, “I need some time to figure things out.” So, with the request for time, we often come to a standstill in our personal growth. But, a standstill isn’t a plateau; it’s a moment of recalibration. A pause when we might not be moving forward, but our minds are racing in a million different directions, unweaving the simplicity with which we used to characterize our surroundings.

This episode, we interview Brandon Wu, a junior in college, and Korean-American poet Eugenia Leigh. In our conversations, notice how, in both coming of age stories, our guests find themselves in moments of stillness. Once we discover the simplicity we took for granted as children is counterfeit, stalemates and standstills give use continuous opportunities to pause and reconstruct our perspectives anew.

(content warning: this episode deals with themes of abuse)

“Don’t talk to strangers” is a mandate for every child issued before trips to the grocery store, on school playgrounds, and basically anywhere in public. But as we grow older, should we still take this advice to heart? In the first episode of StarkMarkings’ Season Two sub-series “Common Nonsense,” listen to Victoria and Angelena talk about their run-ins with strangers: people they’ve never met before and haven’t seen since the wholesome, worrisome, or awkward interaction that brought them together. Among other anecdotes, hear about the time Angelena confessed her love to someone she didn't know and Victoria’s connection with a stranger in a graveyard. In this new series, you might realize that the common sayings we've heard over and over again aren't common sense at all, rather they’re nonsense. Enjoy the first episode of “Common Nonsense.” Growing up is timeless.

It’s easy to forget that everyone is doing life for the first time. We all start out with no knowledge of the world, and as a result, we’re reliant on stories, ambitions and explanations that other people give us—until we experience things for ourselves.

What happens when your new experiences give you no choice but to question who you’ve been up until that point? What do you do when you start to feel like old habits, interests or even people don’t suit you anymore?

This episode’s stories show the power of making your own choices in the face of these questions. While trusting your judgment for the first time can be scary, it’s necessary for understanding who you want to be and forging who you are.

We interview Adriana Termeer, a former ballet dancer turned whale enthusiast and a junior in college and Dr. Joseph Hartman, a DC-area native who teaches constitutional law at Georgetown University and holds a PhD in Political Theory. Both share stories of how they learned to carve out who they are from the environment they grew up in, navigating which parts to keep and which to let go.

"What do you want to be when you grow up?"

John Lennon answered “happy.” Maybe he had the right idea.

The way the question is phrased, the typical answer is a noun: astronaut, pop-star, president. Some of us, like Lennon, may opt for adjectives. But is it possible —maybe even smart— to answer with a verb?

And what happens when life forces you to deviate from your planned out answer? What happens when what you thought was true about yourself or what you thought was true about a profession, crumbles? Do you change your answer?

This episode we interview Emily Hardy, a senior in college from Vancouver, Canada and Professor Shareen Joshi, a faculty member at Georgetown University from Jaipur, India. Although both women have grown up in separate generations with contrasting backgrounds, they both have had to grapple with these questions about finding one’s purpose. Growing up is timeless.

WE'RE BACK! STARKMARKINGS SEASON TWO (a shift from Season One): “At StarkMarkings, we recognize our world’s constant metamorphosis; no two decades, years, or even days ever look the same. Despite changing times, we are all bound together by our never-ending journeys of growth as we encounter love, identity, tragedy and other markers of a life fully lived. Each episode features two interviews, one coming of age story from the past and one from the present. By placing these narratives in conversation, our mission is to bring people together by celebrating the notion that growing up is timeless.

New episodes will drop every other Friday starting on February 17, 2023

A Holiday Surprise! Ending the year —and Season One— with a bang! With Nutcracker in full swing, what is the difference between character and caricature? How do you reconcile conservative artistic integrity and ever-evolving social movements? This bonus episode features Phil Chan, a co-founder of Final Bow for Yellowface, an initiative aimed at updating outdated depictions of Asian people and Asian culture in ballet. As a ballet dancer for nearly a decade, I first read about Phil’s work in 2018, in an article published by the New York Times, which mentioned his role in helping revamp New York City Ballet’s rendition of the Chinese Variation in The Nutcracker. Reading the article at sixteen, I was surprised (and maybe a little confused) at how much the changes made to the sixty second dance meant to me. It’s needless to say, I was thrilled when Phil said yes to chatting on the podcast. From separating emotion and solution to grounding his mission in his love for ballet as an art form, listen as Phil and I discuss his approach to advocacy work in his book Final Bow for Yellowface: Dancing Between Intention and Impact. Who would have thought the holiday season might just be the perfect time to talk about racial representation? So, start a conversation, support your local ballet, and get in the holiday spirit; go watch the Nutcracker!

A guest, a book, a conversation, and a mini playlist. 

StarkMarkings aims to explore the assertion that we, as human beings, inevitably experience literature and music within the context of our lives. Like a bookmark, we are placed in the timelines of our lives, only knowing the past, clueless about the plot twists to come. The past versions of ourselves layer over each other to inform who we are throughout time, carving our likes and dislikes, and determining which pieces of literature we reach for, which songs we play. The words we consume are manifestations of who we are: our upbringing, the era in which we’re born, the struggles we’ve endured. With an infinite combination of experiences, we reach for a finite number of books and songs, yet somehow, these finite, unchanging words still manage to whisper unwavering truths to each of us. StarkMarkings embarks on a journey to mesh the dynamic nature of personal growth and the static nature of literature and music together. The pod releases every ten days, so the 10th, 20th, and 30th of each month. Stay tuned for upcoming episodes, the first of which will be released on August 10th, 2022!