Ivana Montalvo

The material I’ve gathered to create this project, Foreverglades, is the culmination of some of the self-discoveries I have unearthed through my time reading and writing throughout college. The self I have discovered so far relies on her past as much as she does the present, and while memory can be elusive and scattered and wandering the line between fact and fiction, that’s kind of the point. Writing through the imperfect qualities of memory allows me to conjure a self-image that is also imperfect, but expansive and magical in it’s own way. Studying poetry has fostered a fascination with the transportive qualities of language, and learning to use language that possesses a texture unique to me and my interests has helped me conceptualize a project that feels very much like a part of me, that can continue to grow and change shape as my life and sense of identity does. Framing this endeavor within my personal connection to my home state of Florida, where I spent most of my childhood and some of my adolescence stretching into adulthood, has similarly allowed me to let this project maintain the daydream-like qualities of memory that feel most authentic to the way I conceptualize my own self-image.

Foreverglades is working at the intersection of memory and landscape, concerned with daydreams, magical realism, and self-inspection, contextualized by my tropical childhood, fascination with wild things, and metabolization of memory and experience; of danger and playfulness. This work responds to the eternal and surreal qualities of manifesting a personal history, creating a setting for memory and identity that is based more on feeling rather than observation. The piece is more concerned with what this Florida daydream feels like, and the suspended ambiguity of this feeling. Sometimes, (From Foreverglades:) “it feels like driving down a deep blue road where the sides slope down into cosmic knots of swamp moss / like watching a little boy climb a tree while the sky darkens and twists into a thunderstorm / finding shell ornaments on a beach tree”. Other times, there are moments where the feeling is so specific, it could have been confused with a real, concrete memory, like, “peeling a sticky orange before letting your hair dry / it feels like sneaking to the creek behind your house after dark because you are positive there are coyotes and fairies hiding from you somewhere / and bringing your friends there during the daytime only to have them run away screaming because they got sucked on by leeches / it feels like stuttering through the cool music your babysitter listens to in the car”.

Throughout Foreverglades, the idea is to root its reader in this boundless landscape of Florida’s humid wilderness, rendering the familiar extraordinary, and the unfamiliar known. Setting and place becoming an unshakeable metaphor for the inescapable way history, home, and nature defines us. Memory itself can be a cluster of diamonds; ashes of the past compressed into glittering, precious stones that glint in the eye of its beholder.