"What are you? What are you? What are you?"

I started singing opera again in early 2016 after a five-year break. Shortly thereafter, I made the decision that I wanted to write and perform a one-person opera exploring my ancestry and my love of sci-fi.

I've been in the process of thinking through all that for awhile but I really took note of the doubt I felt about this project post-election. I felt myself encouraging myself to table it for another moment, because this future moment would require some other effort altogether, which I needed to be prepared for. But then I was like, why would I allow for the self-erasure of this narrative, my voice, my ancestry? Where are these stories and other stories like it disappearing to, as this scary grand narrative comes to consume us all? It is critical to make room for the multitude of selves that we embody, even while the dire consequences of being those selves continue to effect more and more (so many have lived under threat for as long as the U.S.A. has existed - this is not new - the field has simply[ expanded).

This piece for the Creative Independent, which merges with the timeline originally published in THERE IS NOTHING TO DIVIDE US IF WE DO NOT EXIST by Dominica Publishing (http://dominicapublishing.com), explores some of these thoughts as I continue working on the opera. 

- Sara Knox Hunter, 2016