Author: Deirdre DeLasho

By now, I think most people have at least heard of Hamilton: An American Musical. Based on the biography Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow, the music, lyrics, and book were all written by Lin-Manuel Miranda and tell the story of the life of founding father Alexander Hamilton through a hip hop musical. If you weren’t already overly-invested in Alexander Hamilton’s life (like I’ve been for the past few years), you will be after listening to this soundtrack. Trust me. One interesting idea that comes up repeatedly throughout the show is that of legacy and story-telling.

Continue reading “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story”

“This has to be the Shia LaBeouf-iest thing Shia LaBeouf has ever done.”

This is how K.M. McFarland describes Shia LaBeouf’s latest stunt, and I can’t say I disagree.

Shia LaBeouf is an interesting man. Once known for his childhood antics on the Disney Channel’s lighthearted Even Stevens, he’s more recently managed to transcend the known planes of reality into a new one of his own making. This year, a video of LaBeouf in front of a green screen went viral. He urges us to “just do it” and to “not let our dreams be dreams.” However, this blog post is going to focus on something that, for me, exists in a completely different realm: Shia LaBeouf’s performance art.

Continue reading “Just Do It”

“[Ferdinand de Saussure] argues that language does not have a direct relationship to reality but functions as a system of differences: words (signifiers) have no inherent relationship to the concrete things that they describe (signified), but generate meaning as a result of their differential relationship with other signifiers.”

Joe Moran, Interdisciplinarity

I was inspired by my linguistic faux pas this week to include an epigraph (read: not an epitaph) in my blog post. So, speaking of words, one of my favorites is “esoteric,” and I think that’s partly because the word itself is somewhat esoteric. Continue reading “Words”

I think that everyone, writer or not, has at one point heard the advice to “write what you know.” I’m not saying that this is bad advice, because I too have written what I know, but sometimes, a writer hits a wall. And that wall, cold and brick, has red spay-painted letters displayed across it: YOU DON’T KNOW ANYTHING ELSE. THE END.

So what do you do when you’ve already written about everything you know? Well, you write about something you don’t know.

Continue reading “Write What You Know”