Davis, P. G. (2022). Midmood: Songs and Shades of Body. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.14418/wes01.1.2530
Midmood: Songs and Shades of Body is a creative memoir about the changing body. The work begins with the ending of girlhood, and the entrance into an unknown, blue space, which consumes the body and colors the rest of my experiences. There is a look back into childhood, figuring the kid body as opposed to the adult one. Moving from there, I introduce anxiety as a force that upends the body, and afterwards write of a friend's accident and my new relationship to her, her physicality, and our past in dance together. Relationships and love then become the focus, and I rework the metaphor of blue to better represent my time with various people, as well as detailing the affect they had on my body. Following those, I return to myself, and work through a feeling of partiality in the body, a lack of solidity. Then, I spend time with my mother, grandmother, and Nina Simone, thinking on how each interact with blackness, my own and more generally. And after walking through my birth, I try to make evident the tension between my blueness as it presents in reality and as it is in writing. My end is a dream, in which I can leave the color blue behind. Ultimately, I aim to pull a reader through the capacities and questions of the body, hope to highlight its moodiness, its colors, its incomprehensibility.