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Unveiling the Inner Artist: InterArts Cabinet of Curiosity

Marley Orange

Marlaina Orange is an 18-year-old artist who is from Philadelphia, Houston, Boston, and New York City. Her medium of choice is writing, and she explores this through many different vessels. She often opts to write music, with the occasional creative writing, such as poetry and prose. Marlaina has recently been hired as a Writing Associate for the Trinity College Writing Center, where she will help others with their own writing. In the field of music, Marlaina has pursued the acoustic, electric, and bass guitar, as well as the ukelele and piano. She has been playing the acoustic for nearly three years and the bass guitar for two years. Marlaina played and sung with a rock band called "The Kilts" in high school.

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Something Out of Nothing Poem (TW homophobia, homophobic slurs)
By Marley Orange
Something out of nothing
Please highlight the text below to read the poem.
You saw a blank slate of wood
A canvas for your own art
And out of that nothing you created something

My door is not your canvas.

You wielded your paintbrush
In the shape of a pocket knife

And there you chiseled:
FAG.

FAG?
Am I to be devalued to such a word
For who my heart is drawn to?

I could see it in blinking lights
Ten feet long and luminous
Irradiating the dim hallway on the second floor of Jackson.

FAG.

My first month on campus and
You placed a target on my back

It’s none of your business.
You made it everyone’s business.

You keep your own face, own identity
You show to the world what you wish for it to see

You hold deep within you
Secrets
To remain secrets

You have robbed me of that luxury,
Where my privacy once was is
A lonely carving of an
Ugly word

I would like to share everything
I would like to share nothing

You do not deserve to be in my art or in my mind
You are nothing.

I’ve created something out of your malicious acts
I’ve created something out of you.

Reflection
For this poem, I thought about creating something out of nothing, and began by writing about creating something out of the nothing that is a blank page of paper. This is something I do all the time as a writer. Then I began to write a stream of consciousness, talking about what I wished to fill the paper with. I wrote the stanza: “Shall I speak to my affinity for women / To get an A? / Exploit hate crimes I’ve endured / For pity points?” When I wrote this, I realized there was a lot of unresolved emotion behind it that I have yet to tackle with my writing. I decided to do this subject matter, but to not do it for “pity points,” I was doing it to tell my story of what happened to me. On October 25, 2020, I had realized that someone had carved “FAG” into my dorm room door on campus. (Jackson 204). It was actually a friend who pointed it out to me at first, and then it became all I could see on my door. I was so embarrassed and mortified. I told my RA about what happened, and he helped me fill out a work order. The people wrote back to me and told me that the doors would be replaced the next year, and to put a sign over it for now. I had to push really hard to finally get them to send someone to just sand down the area of my door that said the ugly word. Here is an image of the door before it was sanded down.

I had the idea to put my entire poem in white text, so it originally looked like nothing, and then the reader has to literally create something out of nothing by highlighting the text and discovering the poem. I also did this because of the desired privacy that I speak about in my poem. Only the people that look for my story may find it. Whenever I write poetry, I write about 15-20 stanzas, half of it being entire nonsense. I then try to make sense of my own gibberish, and order the lines into a coherent poem. Once I did this, I asked for the help of my fellow InterArts student, Chris Chiasera. He was able to help me a lot by reminding me to show and not tell, something I sometimes forget to think about. One of the lines in my poem was originally: “You maintain your privacy and anonymity and I the opposite.” Chris reminded me that this was pretty openly stating exactly what was happening, instead of more subtly showing the reader the way I feel. With Chris’s help, I changed this into several stanzas: “You keep your own face, own identity / You show to the world what you wish for it to see / You hold deep within you / Secrets / To remain secrets // You have robbed me of that luxury, / Where my privacy once was is / A lonely carving of an / Ugly word”. I found this to be much more effective.
she (a gift for Gill)
By Marley Orange
she
she lives with three others, i live down the hall
she is just ten steps away
she Laughs and i know everything will be okay

she wears sundresses, flashy pants, and works of art upon her ears
she carries a maroon backpack and a blue hydro flask
she flaunts chipped paint in open-toed birkenstocks

she covers her wrist with a rose
she looks at it and sees a pause between two clauses amidst leaves and petals

she likes to create and she likes to paint
she doesn’t realize how good she is at things others attempt

she likes tie-dye, i think
she has an aura of orange, red, and maybe pink
she is a warm summer day in January

she is as if the ideation of an optimist has been manifested into five feet and eight inches
she has curly hair like ramen noodles
she can’t seem to stop several stubborn locks from obscuring the sight of her glistening eyes

she sees the best in people and the best in the world with those eyes
she often does not understand the hatred that plagues it for
she is kind and she is warm and she is devoid of hate

she looks into the fiery pit of a nucleus sweltering with hatred and the delusion of superiority
she stares it in the face, and with the bravery of one woman
she Laughs.

she has hopefully realized that it is no coincidence
she makes connections with people wherever she goes and this is because
she is a special type of person.

she has a way of making you feel like you are a part of something when you are a part of nothing

she is a supernova, a powerful explosion
she is thousands of light-years away, but she illuminates the universe
she will someday leave a black hole in her place, and we will be nothing but lucky to have seen something so bright and grand
she doesn’t know if god is real

she lives with three others, i live down the hall
she is just ten steps away
she Laughs and i know everything will be okay
Reflection
As my process for writing this poem about Gill, I began by talking to her and trying to pick out several small details to take mental note of. For example, I took note of her tattoo of a rose on her wrist, her Birkenstocks and chipped paint on her toe nails, etcetera. I also tried to take note of more abstract things, like the way she makes people feel. I began to feel overflowing with inspiration, and began writing down stanzas in the Notes app on my phone as I was walking with her. I rushed back to my room to write these stanzas down in a document, so as to format and order them. About 15 minutes later, I went to the library and did a total brain dump on the page. The poem was a stream of consciousness. I actually liked the way it sounded, how you could almost hear the thoughts as they were coming out of my head. I felt as if it made the poem more personal. I reformatted and reordered a lot of things, but tried to leave some of the original wording and ordering in the poem. I purposefully have dehumanized Gill on one line, and then humanized her on the next. Example: “she will someday leave a black hole in her place, and we will be nothing but lucky to have seen something so bright and grand / she doesn’t know if god is real”. This poem was supposed to be an ode in a way. I made the decision to not capitalize anything except for the L in laugh. I was debating whether or not I should capitalize every She and Her, as if she was a god, but I decided I did not like the way it looked. I like the lack of capitalization throughout much better, and it makes the word laugh stand out a lot, which I like. The near-final stanza about supernovas was something that just came out as I was writing out a stream of consciousness. I used to be really into space when I was younger, and know a lot about supernovas, black holes, and other things. To make sure everything I said was accurate I double checked with a NASA article I found online entitled “What is a Supernova?”[1] Another important aspect of the poem is how I chose to only have lines starting with “she,” and never mention Gill by name. This in a way empowers her to be more than just one person, but the ideation of some woman for anyone who may read it. This did make things a little difficult on the writing side however, because it isn’t easy to always write sentences starting with “she,” because I wanted to make a lot of other observations about how she makes people feel for example, and had to work around this by relating everything back to her. All in all, starting every line with she definitely made sure that I couldn’t go off on a tangent, and had to keep my focus on Gill the whole poem.

[1] “What is a supernova?” NASA Science, Oct. 23, 2019, https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/supernova/en/, last accessed Apr. 23, 2021.
Bass Guitar
By Marley Orange
My found object is my bass guitar. I feel as if this is an object that captures my own essence. It is a fundamental to my music, and therefore to my art.

The bass guitar has four strings and it is essentially used most of the time to play the lowest notes of the chords the other guitar plays. The bass is such a fascinating instrument because a listener will never realize how essential the bass is to the music until there is no bass, and all of the sudden the song is missing something, sounding almost empty. This also makes playing the bass for a band, which I have done on numerous occasions, relatively low pressure because for the most part my job is to support the rest of the musicians and make the guitar sound more full. This is not to say this is the only job of a bassist: many songs completely rely on their bass line. Take “come as you are” by Nirvana for example. The song has a completely unique bass line that is a fundamental element of the song (and is very fun to play). Another important job of a bassist is maintaining rhythm. The drummer and the bassist must work together to keep a rhythm for the rest of the musicians to play off of. When the drums are not prominent in a part of a song or there is no drummer, the job of keeping rhythm falls almost completely on the bassist. 

I only began playing the bass two years ago. I have felt a strong connection to music my whole life, but I never really fell in love with an instrument until I played the bass. I was in a band, playing rhythmic guitar and singing mostly, when our bassist broke her arm and couldn’t play. Her bass line was pretty simple, so I offered to try learning it. Once I learned how the bass worked, I needed one of my own. My parents finally got me one for Christmas, and since then I have treasured my bass. The bass is the perfect instrument for me because one of my strengths is definitely keeping rhythm, but I also get to do fun scales and lines, and I have experience playing the acoustic and electric guitar. 

When I play the bass I feel like I am unapologetically myself. I can’t stop my whole body from moving with the music when I play: I have had many people wave to me from my window while I am jamming on the guitar in my dorm room. I make crazy faces and bodily movements that probably look hilarious without the music (or even with it). But in the moment that I am creating music, I’m on cloud nine and I can’t help myself from looking like an idiot, and I don’t care. It feels like being on a rollercoaster. My bass is a constant reminder of how I love to live. My bass is a significant found object because it represents who I am: a musician and a free spirit. 
Will you like me? (Risky behavior in college freshmen)
By Marley Orange
From the Watkinson Library website page I went to browse the archived and digitized objects. I was able to find an article on the Trinity College Digital Repository. I found the article I liked best by exploring different disciplines, and picking social psychology under the psychology section, which was under the social and behavioral science section. The article was titled “The Effects of Parent and Peer Attachment on Risky Behavior in First-Year College Students,” a thesis by Trinity College student Jamie L. Callahan. The article is about how first-year students at college are more likely to indulge in risky behavior, such as “substance use and risky sex” especially when they have weaker relationships with their friends and family. This behavior stems from low self-esteem and insecurity, and therefore worse emotion regulation. I was interested in this article because I have always been very interested in psychology, specifically the study of social psychology and using psychology to analyze behavior. When I read this article, I was inspired to write a song from the perspective of a first-year student at college who feels pressured to indulge in these behaviors to make friends and because of a bad relationship with their parents. I really loved this prompt, because it has been a while that a song inspiration came so abruptly and immediately to me. I have been struggling to find new ideas to make art about recently, and sometimes it is easier to write from someone else’s perspective and narrative. As of right now, I only have the first two verses, a pre-chorus, and the chorus but hope to complete this song soon. This first part of the song came very naturally to me. Here are the lyrics thus far:

[VERSE 1]
I’m a first year and I wanna be cool
So I go around campus saying fuck the rules (Right, guys?)
But I kinda think that some rules make sense
‘Cuz total anarchy is kinda intense.

[VERSE 2]
Now I’m off at college and I’m all alone
But I guess it’s better than being home.
My dad never really looks at me and my
Mother is a shadow of who she used to be.
Seems like everybody else’s family is a team
But mine just hurts my self esteem.

[PRE CHORUS]
Anyway, I’m here for the next four years,
And having no friends is my biggest fear.

[CHORUS]
If I drink, will you like me?
If I smoke, will you like me?
If I do something that I’ve never done,
Will everyone think she’s super fun?
Will you like me? Will you like me? Will you like me?
Will you like me? Will you like me? Will you like me?

I believe that a hard copy of this thesis could be included in the Watkinson cases. It is a very interesting and informative article. The article also says a lot about the culture we exist in the midst of, living on a college campus.
CITATION
Jamie L. Callahan, The Effects of Parent and Peer Attachment on Risky Behavior in First-Year College Students, Trinity College Digital Repository.

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Marley Orange Headshot