The third year is a trip. It may be the hardest year. It may be the most rewarding year. It is an uncertain and fun-ky liminal space. It is the year I hear most professors reference Emily Dickinson’s “tell it slant” poem, and reason that life deals with perspective, positionalities, perfecting the ability to reframe situations, and weave black-and-white yarn into a tapestry of colour. Still, I have much to learn and process, and cannot believe the year is actually over – the exciting potential of autumn and the bleak, bitter winter fading in the rearview mirror.
I turned 21. I failed my driver’s test. I saw Shawn Mendes live in concert. I went bunburying and watched a local production of Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. I rescheduled that driver’s test. I repeated to myself, thanks to a Snoopy graphic on Substack Celebrity’s laptop, that “Doing it scared is just as brave.”
I ended my second-year article reflecting on the campaign I ran and won, becoming the president of the English Undergraduate Student Association (EUSA). I was excited to give the English community on campus the kind of fun that I’ve seen other departments get; excited to give that kind of experience to friends and myself as well. I promised myself that even if events were only made up of an executive team of friends, that was all I needed—and sometimes, that was the case. When we ran a Taylor Swift Tortured Poets theme night in the height of The Life of a Showgirl hate, we partied with friends and a few who did not even like her but wanted to support the club. We listened to music, made bracelets, spun cotton candy, and hosted a watch party of All Too Well (Short Film Version). Another good thing came of that, though, as I lived out my influencer dreams by going around campus asking whether a line was the work of Taylor Swift or a tortured poet. It went viral, amassing over 64K views and 2,800 likes.
Sometimes our events were friends and more, like when we hosted our first book-to-movie night featuring Little Women. People actually dressed in pioneer dress. I spent the night before popping popcorn in a steel pot (my popcorn machine broke after the first batch), but it was completely worth it as we laughed out loud, cried, took pictures, and everyone told us which March sister they are. Another movie night we did was Dead Poets Society, where we saw up to 30 people join us for hot chocolate and cookies, laughing, groaning, and crying at every moment. The energy in the halls those nights felt like what a movie theatre should be, and everyone, recently acquainted, felt comfortable commenting and laughing aloud. Near the end of the year, the EUSA hosted all four Hunger Games films, culminating in a “Mockingjay Marathon,” with a pizza party. I felt like a schoolteacher handing out slices of greasy pizza and smiling widely. Even through the semester’s stressors, a movie night was always something to look forward to.
Ribbon Girl and I had $60 and a dream. We wanted to host two events a month, release our literary magazine at Biblioasis, and finally head to the Stratford Festival overnight, but with no previous leadership experience or crash course on how to book tables at the student centre, get funding, or write cheque requisitions. This made our early events much harder. We had big ideas and no knowledge of how to execute them, except for the very little bits we had collected or knew how to do. For our English lounge opening, we decided to go big and supply free iced coffee. I whipped together two Tupperware containers, and Ribbon Girl split half of it into a reusable bag. It was a learning process about what worked, what didn’t, and what was necessary. Early in the fall semester, Ribbon Girl and I attended a FAHSS student club meeting organized by Hilary Duff Enthusiast. We met all sorts of seasoned club leaders, and they kindly offered their help if we ever had questions. This marked the beginning of a novel lesson that year: to ask for help is imperative. To let people into the circle you are creating will strengthen it. I was really confused about where my duties as president ended and began, and struggled to ask for help, but then realized that asking was the only way to safeguard our vision, while balancing an RA position, a full course load, and a part-time job. There is a lot of communication involved with this position, from emailing to booking rooms to making department-wide announcements. Our first meeting with Hilary Duff Enthusiast lasted three hours. By the end of it, though, he was confident that even our craziest endeavours as new club leaders with an essentially dormant club were possible. We knew we were determined when Ribbon Girl and I walked business to business, through the coldest weather Windsor has had in a long time, to drop off sponsorship packages for the EUSA’s trip to Stratford, business names written in spindly hand.
We started to glean events that made money and how to upsell a mystery poem along with a pastry at a bake sale. Yes, the club began with the intention of fun bookish experiences, but it taught me valuable time management skills that I lied about having on my resume a few years ago (but now have). It taught me, on a lower but realistic scale, how sponsorship and businesses work.
Late last year, I asked a professor about doing research, and she presented Ribbon Girl and I with the chance to help her conduct research on disability and children’s literature. We were sent scholarly articles and logged our hours during the year until it came time to produce research of our own. Now, I have this tendency to not be able to do anything unless I am passionate about it… pretentious, I know. So after watching Wicked: For Good in theatres, I knew that the world of Oz was something that I wanted to explore. I picked up a beautiful illustrated 1939 movie tie-in edition of L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz from Barnes and Noble and “Oddities of Oz: Precarity in The Wizard of Oz and Revisionist Adaptations” were born. Presenting this research early on a Saturday morning with a University of Windsor nametag fastened around my neck, pressed into a grey vest, and fasting for Ramadan was a challenge. Picture this: no coffee, no food, 8:30 am, 15 minutes worth of selected research, and a microphone waiting for me, while the carafes of Tim Hortons hot coffee wafted at me from the back of the room. Against the odds, it was a success, and established scholars in children’s literature and disability studies told my peers and I that this did not seem to be our first time presenting research, which was a win. Sharing a room with established scholars, exchanging research that we are passionate about, was the nerdiest space I could picture being in, and I enjoyed every second of it—more so than I thought I would. I felt inspired by scholarly work and comfortable with the fact that like-minded people will read it. If the way I contribute to the world is through well-researched publications, sending original work out into the world, then so be it—to be called a doctor for it, even better. It felt inspiring. I hope to get “Oddities in Oz” published. Fingers crossed.
A legacy I adopted as co-president was the responsibility of the 2026 edition of Generation magazine. A little about this… Generation is a local literary magazine and one of Canada’s oldest student-led journals, compiled by the English Undergraduate Student Association. Around since the late 50s, it became dormant during COVID and for years to follow. From 2023 to now, issues have been released and excitingly enough, our 2026 issue, Generation: Liminality, saw a record number of submissions so large that, for the first time in history, we printed two volumes of the magazine! Some would say we’re the first “generation” to do that. With the rise of AI, Ribbon Girl and I made it a priority that everything included in both volumes be produced by local students and creatives, even the cover was hand-painted! As I said at our launch,“[i]n the time of artificial intelligence and budget cuts, we have to promise to continue to be basket weavers.”
We made the theme reveal a big deal, teasing one subtheme a day until our event, dubbed “Conversation with an Editor,” where a freelance editor for HarperCollins spoke about her experience in the field, where we unveiled it. Our theme was ‘liminality’, the state of being in between—a kind of limbo, one I have felt my entire life, one magnified just this year. Substack Celebrity is graduating this year after we just met her a year previous, and Red Wine Superpoet will not be around for the winter semester next year. It became clear that the only ones in our executive team who would not be graduating were the two presidents. Everything was changing for the people around us, and in one year, that would be our position as well. I’d log onto my UWinsite and see that my degree was 80 percent complete. I learned that I was guilty of rumination: the habit of obsessively and repetitively dwelling on negative thoughts or fears. When December came around, the month of holly jolly, and I just felt like a weary, broken ornament. But it was more than that. My family grew restless and considered uprooting. I could not conceptualize changing my life in that way. I knew what I wanted. I wanted to make all the work I did done over these past three years at university not go to waste, and after knowing that nothing productive ever comes from your amygdala calling the shots, I worked on putting my pre-frontal cortex in charge, which, while bringing more exhaustion, ultimately pays off.
Ribbon Girl and I are similar in the sense that we do not like talking about the future. However, there was a distinct fear that it was not sustainable with our fourth year around the corner. So tentatively, the conversation has been broached, and with it, I have welcomed a lot of rumination, but that is something I am working through. Time has always felt like an inexorable concept to me, but even more so this year. It often feels like everything has passed before my eyes, but the pictures and memories are proof that meaningful time has elapsed. When I was a child, I thought I could plan everything that was to occur in my life—that kind of God-like concept that only a child who knows it all would have. That type of reality had broken down in high school, but I guess I thought I could still plan it all somehow. Alas, as Wilde once said, “I am not young enough to know everything,” except that the only actions you can control are your own and that sometimes even that is out of your hands. In other words, you can marry yourself to a future all you want, but there is no guarantee that a divorce is not around the corner. There is no guarantee a war won’t break out back home, that a president across the river won’t upend your career plans. There is no guarantee that someone, somewhere, will not act rashly or derail your relationships. But you cannot control people’s actions. What is important is making a decision, even if it’s the “wrong” one, because at least a decision is made. At least some semblance of a plan pertaining only to you is in place. I am still figuring that one out, too.
But yes, stream of consciousness tangent aside, the theme of liminality for the 2026 edition of Generation felt inextricably tied to my life. We opened the magazine intervarsity and hung up posters in local cafés around the city, keeping it open for two months. We got numerous responses from Toronto, Ottawa, and locals, making for a record number of submissions: 85. We had the privilege of publishing quality work that fit our theme and wove a narrative. Myself, Ribbon Girl, Substack Celebrity, Red Wine Superpoet, and Synthesis Witch sat in the library basement for 6+ hours poring over the submissions. We worked on a tight schedule of planning, formatting, printing, and finalizing the hand-painted cover. The importance of a print proof may never be understated.
In the end, our launch was released on April 4th at Biblioasis bookshop, set with three-tier platters, drink dispensers, bookmarks, disposable cameras, and a lavender cake.
Among all the business of the year, it was hard to find the time to submit to any literary journals or magazines. It’s even more difficult to be motivated when you don’t hear back. However, a local zine was created this year that paid writers for their submissions. Money from a part-time job is good and all, but spending money made off of my creative work is a privilege, a privilege that I was given this past March from Synthesis zine for the first time … I am definitely framing that cheque. I submitted a poem called “under a belgian moon” about my time in Belgium last May. It was the first time I travelled independently, expanding my knowledge of people, politics, and perspectives. The train ride I wrote that particular poem on was when I first realized I wasn’t home when the moon was following me around the stair-stepped brick buildings. I matched a black blazer and silk skirt and read my poem out loud. I recited my poem from almost a year ago to a crowd with my ruffled socks peeking out the tops of my loafers. My mom made fun of my sock style, but lo and behold, my coterie – Ribbon Girl and Substack Celebrity also had their ankles adorned in ruffled socks. I digress. Since then, I have submitted to more paid journals and contests, wanting more than ever to get my poetry about conflict in the Middle East visible to a wider audience in hopes that I may use my words and passion for writing to push for awareness and amplify Arab voices. I may get rejected from all of them, and it will sting, but there is a first rejection for everything, so it’s about time to begin the process.
One class I had as a result of a schedule complication was all on John Milton. I did not presume to be interested in the class, but it was with one of my favourite professors, so I had some hope. We studied Paradise Lost, and “Lycidas” and I learned so much, especially about the story of Adam and Eve. Who is responsible for the Fall? was to be our final exam question, revealed to us on the first day of class. It felt, then, as though the entire semester had led up to answering this question (I argued that Adam was to blame, by the way). But it wasn’t until later that I understood that, though divine authority like God or the Devil is incredibly powerful, temptation and action are ultimately in the hands of Eve and Adam because, like us, they are endowed with free will. Since “reason is but choosing”, humans choose. It is sometimes the wrong thing, or it is the right thing, but the fact is, free will is an important human attribute. I also began to realize, over and over again, that Milton really is the backbone of English literature and to have such a strong foundation is necessary for understanding so much… like did you know that town in the GTA is named Milton after him? Also, a special shoutout goes to the Comics course, where, for the final project, Ribbon Girl and I got to produce a comic short story called Scraps N Scissors, all about the importance of preserving memory, hands-on crafting, and lending meaning to what others would call junk. I always knew when we had the time that we would make a book, but nobody could have told us it would be a comic. Finally, this semester, I read my first Toni Morrison book. I’ve been wanting to read her work for a very long time, but felt too intimidated. We read her debut novel in a class called Imagining Women, and The Bluest Eye was unlike any book I’ve read before. I understand why now Christopher Paul Curtis, renowned children’s author, cites her as one of his best teachers, as he would curl up with a book across the river in Detroit and learn from her work.
Christopher Paul Curtis was the 2026 writer-in-residence at the University of Windsor. I had met him before as a child at a signing at Windsor Public Library—I got a picture with him in fact, but I just can’t prove it. Anyway, when my creative writing professor said that he would be writer-in-residence, I was overjoyed. I remember seeing his books all over Scholastic book fairs, and I had no idea he lived in Windsor, let alone that he penned most of his novels at Windsor Public Library and Leddy Library. When I was a kid, and my sister needed to use the laptop, I’d walk to that same library to log into my Microsoft Word and type on the bulky keyboard. The opportunity to have him look over my work and give me advice excited me. When he read my short prose, he told me he hoped that I was, in fact, currently working on a book. I told him I was and have been for years. Later, he signed a copy of Elijah of Buxton for my sister and in it, embedded encouragement for my writing. To hear this from a renowned author felt like an honour and a privilege, renewing my confidence in functional writing after two years honing my poetry in a professional workshop. I also decided to be bold: I pitched to him the idea of writing the foreword for the first volume of Generation. He had already written a reissued introduction to Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper, so I was sure that he’d be up to the task. He so kindly agreed, and as he is an author who likes to let his sentences marinate, we went back and forth for a while about the best way to conclude it. The final paragraph explores how passing the torch to younger writers is a kind of liminal space in itself. Interestingly, Ribbon Girl and I perfected the last two sentences for him… this felt like tangible evidence of the so-called “passing of the torch.”
Finally, I should add that Ribbon Girl and I joined forces with numerous other FAHSS groups to host a gala highlighting all participating departments. In the backs of pamphlets covering the circumference of every table, me, Ribbon Girl and two other people from our creative writing course had our poems. That night we got keychains, good pictures, and danced the night away.
Soon, the EUSA will complete their year-end goal: Stratford Festival’s matinee of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I have never been, and I am so excited to explore this town through a literary lover’s lens. With that being said, I have been thinking a lot about geographic luck lately, and how just a series of events has kept me from being back in the Middle East, putting my writing, relationships, and ambitions to see Shakespeare staged—onto the sidelines because of a senseless war and resistance to occupation. I should mention, I watched Hamilton for the first time at the beginning of this year, and why do I write like I’m running out of time? Because that is what the girl I traded places with would be doing if she could. Because time feels inexorable and I want to channel whatever it is inside of me for the collective…I have not written 51 essays quite yet, but I am not throwing away my shot.