Sarah Lord
This year will mark my third working with the Humanities Collaborative at EPCC-UTEP. So far it has provided me the opportunity to be a part of a diverse variety of projects from teaching fifth graders how to explore poetry through the works of William Wordsworth to lending a hand in the development of a database that will aid those researching paratextual verse from English texts published before 1700.
The Humanities and My Rhetorical Situation
Here is a story that might sound familiar to many of you: As a student pursuing a career in the arts and humanities, I began a journey that did not start with me pushing myself to achieve the goal of becoming a professional writer. Rather, my educational choice had responded to my desire to challenge myself intellectually and, ultimately, to achieve a type of success on a very personal level.
"I found myself crying. I could hear my father’s voice telling me the story. And I guess I was sad. But I was also a little bit happy. He left me stories to tell. My dad had them. My mom had them. Stories were living inside us. I think we were born to tell our stories. After we died, our stories would survive. Maybe it was our stories that fed the universe the energy it needed to keep on giving life.
Maybe all we were meant to do on this earth was to keep telling stories. Our stories-and the stories of the people we loved."—Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Dive into the Waters of the World