On October 28th 2022 the FEELed Lab met for the sixth installment of Littoral Listening, this time on the topic of marginalia. Five in attendance, we zoomed from four continents and as many parts of the day to listen into and share of murky ideas and ideals of delineating lines, pesky vowels, and inevitable change, all while reading and thanks to an excerpt from Angélique Lalonde’s story “Lady with the Big Head Chronicle” and the poem “a shoreline to stand on” by Daniella Elza.
If we expand the marginal to encompass all things remotely outside of the lines do those lines begin to slowly decay?
decaying like the escarpment,
surfed, trees taken away in a flood,
nothing to hold,
no basis for the story of holding;
like a channel or seawall,
built on mistaken understandings
of what
it means to be an outlier;
we can stand
to lie out.
We read between, around, athwart, and through lines, learning, commenting, crossing sections, crossing each other—again and again until it’s no longer clear what has been crossed where, by whom, or why. How many ways is this conversation? Is it worth counting? Would it not be preferable to spend this time learning to swim, and breathe fire, and understand that these margins—for survivance, for error, for each other—are as big as we allow them to be?
The FEELed lab 