Blue Fay

Admitting that I want to be a writer frightens me because it feels as though I would have to relinquish my own temporality.

The year 2016 was supposed to be one of infinite promise. I turned 19 harboring the secret belief that it was an auspicious age.

But the true chaos of hyperrealist art is that it takes reality and makes it excruciatingly real, moving it intimately closer to the eye.

I have been considering the microphysics of apocalypses. Not blazing lights and the pale horse of Judgement Day, but smaller devastations.

When I visited UC Berkeley for the first time as an admitted student, it did feel a bit like I had been dropped from a tornado.

My mother taught me how to love art. She taught me to look for detail, to hold space for emotional impact, to decide for myself what feels beautiful.

It’s been years, but I still have the black dress and I still think of the W.H. Auden poem at certain times of day when the hills cast long shadows and airplanes fly out of San Francisco.

The result is a portrait of a man who drags the truth out of others but who is resistant to letting himself be exposed in the same way.

While this might have left certain traditionalists on edge, the promise of catastrophe was enough to draw everyone’s eyes to the stage.

The festival, the first and largest of its kind, serves to amplify a set of narratives whose right to be spoken proves increasingly contested.