Anna Storti attended the Writing Mixed and Queer workshop that I ran, at Mixed Remixed last year. She was kind enough to share a piece that she started at the workshop as well as some photos of her and other folks at the festival.

“There is something so transient about the in-between. This sense of always coming always going, but never here. Because “here” for mixed folk is ambiguity, unsettling, hybridity. It’s as though the inbetween is incomplete, less than, and so painfully inauthentic. But what is this desire to be authentic? What does authenticity give us? 

Is it not also just a norm?

Queer. Mixed. My mixedness is queer. My queerness mixed. Everything is intimate. I crave authenticity so I can intimately feel complete, because what is authenticity if not just another name for real, genuine, true? I am real, genuine, true. I am all of these things, mixed up. But I am none of these things, at the same time. I am multi. My existence is that transient, almost liminal place. Never here, nor there. But both. But neither. I mix that up because that is all I know how to do. My authenticity cannot be defined by your words, by your terms. It is mine. But it is ours.

It’s all so mixed.”