Student organization enacts powerful change against homelessness, stigma

Homeless Outreach through Prevention and Education, a student organization founded at UC Davis in 2016, has a mission of assisting those experiencing homelessness and educating others about homelessness through project-based solutions that come from the collective input of all its members. The organization receives the majority of its funding through the Sheila Kar Health Foundation.

Projects have included gathering donations of dental hygiene equipment paired with instruction flyers, computer literacy classes and GED tutoring to increase the chances of those experiencing homelessness to find a job. During the winter, the Interfaith Rotating Winter Shelter provides a warm place to stay.

Sarah Shandy, a fifth-year biochemistry and molecular biology major and co-president of HOPE, felt that the sense of agency she experiences allows her and the team to make a difference.

“We all have a part in the club, and I really like that,” Shandy said. “I can have a real impact on the club.”

HOPE understands that it’s important to educate those who aren’t experiencing homelessness as well because it facilitates better understanding and communication — which leads to more action.

Julia Nguyen, a third-year global disease biology major and outreach coordinator for HOPE, described a way the organization is trying to start this conversation.

“We had a whole presentation about the language we use when we talk about homelessness,” Nguyen said. “When we talk about the individuals that we meet, we refer to them as people who are experiencing homelessness [instead of homeless people]. We hope that through language our peers can start to see that homelessness doesn’t define the person.”

Not defining those experiencing homelessness by unfortunate events that have led them to their circumstances is the first step toward humanizing them as individuals — some of whom have been forced to choose between paying for doctors’ appointments, medication, textbooks or paying rent.

“In high school, I signed up for a park cleanup,” Nguyen said. “The woman leading the cleanup was affiliated with the city, and she [led] us down to a homeless encampment. She said to start clearing everything, and I was really confused because there was a whole community there with tents, bikes and other personal belongings. I remember digging up an ID, and the woman told me to just throw it on the pile.”

While many students cannot give their time or funds to those experiencing homelessness, there is something priceless and more meaningful they can give — recognition.

“They really just want to be recognized when you’re walking on the street,” Shandy said. “Sometimes they’re holding signs and people just look away and not make eye contact. Just say hi or smile.”

Nguyen also advises against not acknowledging.

“The norm is to turn your back when you see someone on the street because there’s this awkwardness of not knowing what to do with yourself […],” Nguyen said.

Tuition spikes at UC Davis have forced some students to experience homelessness by living out of their cars, and HOPE is seeking to further their outreach to that population.

“We haven’t come into contact with very many, but by getting our message out there, hopefully, we can offer them whatever we can,” said Daniel Lam, a fourth-year neurology, physiology and behavior major and co-president of HOPE.

HOPE at UC Davis goes beyond one-time acts of kindness and is always welcoming new members. Brandon Aguilar, a fourth-year biochemistry and molecular biology major and historian for HOPE, shared the benefits he experienced after joining the club.

“Joining the club allowed me to learn more about their lives and their stories,” Aguilar said. “Being able to have that opportunity to really interact with them, you really start to understand that these people are coming from a different background, but that doesn’t mean they’re less human.”

HOPE at UC Davis hosts quarterly meetings. Information about joining and making a difference can be found on its Facebook page.

Written by: Josh Madrid – arts@theaggie.org

Electronic engineer and singer speaks on broken phones, finding herself

Lillian Frances, a 25-year-old Davis-bred electronic musician and singer, constantly takes notes on her phone: phrases she likes, Instagram pictures of babies in retro bright blue outfits and irregular ideas.

“It is all inspired by day-to-day life,” Frances said. “I like to be an observer of what is around me and package it into a song. It’s just random shit that comes to my mind that is remotely interesting or funny. I try to think of little things that everyone would identify with.”

Her synth-pop, experimental electronic music is just as dynamic as she is, so she gets her inspiration from anything and everything. No idea or thought process goes unrecorded.

She listed some song title ideas she had brewing to prove a point: “Your Boyfriend Likes All of My Instagram Posts,” “You’re Literally the Worst,” “San Francisco Smells Like Marijuana and Parking Tickets,” “Fuuu— That Dude,” “It’s Not Called Being Polly It’s Wanting to F— That Dude,” “Has Anyone Ever Found the Emoji They Are Looking For” and of course “Google Docs are Where Ideas Go to Die.” Quirky and relatable, it is obvious that Frances’ music is an unaltered reflection of her. She does not present herself as anything more or anything less.

An acoustic guitar player since the age of 12, her passion for music solidified and expanded after moving from Davis to study urban and environmental policy at Occidental College in 2015.

“It wasn’t until college when I started writing my songs on acoustic guitar and recording them at our student-run recording studio,” Frances said. “But my senior year, I went to go see Sylvan Esso at a free music festival in Los Angeles. They are huge now, but I had never heard of them at the time in 2014. It blew me away. I never had electronic music vibe with me so hard. It plucked every string in my body. I was vibrating for days. That senior year I started taking Music 100 and electronic music classes at my college.”

Extending her formal music education, Frances took electronic music production classes at the Beat Lab Academy in Los Angeles post-graduation. Then, through a teaching program, she moved to the northwest corner of Spain for a year, which allowed her to improve her Spanish language skills. Dual language competency diversified what she could say in her music and how she wanted to say it.   

“Even though I got better at the language, it is really hard to express yourself and your personality in a second language,” Frances said. “Especially since so much of myself is expressed through nuances in language and bad jokes, translating that into Spanish can be hard to tap into. When you’re stripped of language from fully expressing yourself, I learned how to express myself more with my energy. That process of translating yourself through your essence pairs really well with songwriting. Having Spanish as another method of expressing myself in songwriting is liberating. There are a lot of things I can say in Spanish that I can’t say in English and vice versa.”

Because of her experience in Spain, many of Frances’ songs feature her singing in Spanish, like “Bailamos con el humo” off her second EP “Timeism.” With musical introspection accomplished during her time abroad, she returned to Davis in 2017 ready to focus on her electronic music career. Indeed, her first performance of said genre was that summer at the Davis Music Festival.

“I don’t see a lot of young women doing what I’m doing,” Frances said. “Electronic music is unique, different and fun.”

However, such official branding as an electronic musician was forced after developing tendonitis in her hand.  

“I had always been an acoustic artist and I was planning on moving into this electronic sphere but with my guitar,” Frances said. “I love my guitar so much, it was like a limb. Losing this part of me required to lean into electronic music.”

While Frances’ tendonitis has healed and she has begun to take guitar classes again in order to incorporate electric guitar melodies in her new music, such moments of transition and altering identity became the subject of her song “Phone Keys Wallet” from “Timeism.”

“We all lose pieces of ourselves,” Frances said. “It’s about how we separate ourselves from an identity that we always held.”

The beauty in France’s “Timeism” is its ability to package such complex, even lofty ideas into something digestible and relatable. Emotional crutches are equated with a millenial material necessity.   

“It was a looking glass into what I see in my little millenial life,” Frances said. “An invitation to see things through my eyes, which is kind of funny, playful and a little tongue and cheek.”

Even down to her hypnotic high-pitched vocals, she does not overcomplicate or take the album too serious. It’s not laziness, but strategic realness.

“My voice is super wonky and I have to sift through [vocal recordings] alot,” Frances said. “But you should keep the imperfections because people latch onto imperfections. You know that one part of Jeff Buckley’s ‘Hallelujah’ and he hits a super wonky note and he snaps in that one place? They kept it in on purpose to show his imperfection.”

Such is another prime example in Frances’ ability to bring herself and her music back down to earth.

“Everything that I do [that] is awesome is a mistake,” Frances said. “I am not at a point where I can decide what I’m going to make. If I mess things up I’m going to get things I never even thought of.”

With this mindset, Frances stays experimental in her sound — no criteria to meet, no structure to follow. She’s all the more exciting to follow, to witness the development of an artist.

“I’m not at the point yet where I have found my sound,” Frances said. “I think ‘Timeism’ has a sound, it’s great and I’m proud of it. But other than that, it’s whatever comes to me. I would say it’s synth-pop. It’s experimental electronic. It’s pop, but it’s not vapid. I would love to do more hard-hitting electronic, more party bangers. I’m always trying to do that, but haven’t been able to pull it off. I’m loving my new stuff and think it’s better than anything else I’ve done before.”

Her new album initially was going to be based on her solo El Camino voyage that she took immediately after releasing “Timeism” in order to gain new songwriting inspiration.

“I wanted to leave ‘Timeism’ at home, absorb new energies and then crank something new out at home,” Frances said. “The idea was I would take a bunch of sound field recordings across the Camino and take a bunch of notes. But at the end of the Camino, I broke my phone and lost all of my information. So the new album will not be set on the Camino, and there’s not set sound to the new album. It will be me finding myself through music.”

Releasing her first full-length album will be a transformative moment in her music career, releasing an item that represents her.

“I have never released a full album,“ Frances said. “I’ve done two EPs, but I really want to get something out there with my name on it … I really just see myself as a different girl from two years ago. I admire her for her vulnerability and strength, but I feel like a different girl. My album will be my next stage and next sound. It will still be a similar electronic sound but more refined.”

In whatever form her first album reveals itself as, we can be sure it will be something authentically Frances — the good, the quirky and the raw.

Frances will be performing at Beatnik Studio in Sacramento on Jan. 25, and at the Holy Diver in Sacramento on Feb. 8.

Written by Caroline Rutten — arts@theaggie.org

Critically-acclaimed author reads new collection

On Jan. 19, the English Department brought critically-acclaimed writer Deb Olin Unferth to campus for a reading of her new collection of short stories titled “Wait Till you See Me Dance.” The event was a part of the Creative Writing Reading Series that the department has organized. The goal of the series is to bring both up-and-coming and established writers to campus as well as to bolster interest among students in contemporary fiction.

Unferth is an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin and has received many awards for her writing. She was a finalist for the National Book Critic Circle award, has won four Pushcart Prizes and received a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Her writing is concise and poignant, with subtle hints of dry wit and irony present throughout her work. She is able to tackle dark themes effortlessly and has mastered several different genres of writing.

Unferth had a bit of an unusual start to her writing career. As an undergraduate student at Syracuse University, she studied philosophy. She then worked at a homeless shelter in Chicago for some time after graduation.

“I didn’t really know what I was going to do with my life,” Unferth said. “That went on for a couple of years.”

It wasn’t until she was 25 that she would even begin writing. Her career started when she met a man she had an interest in.

“He said ‘I’m a writer, what are you?’” Unferth said. Without thinking, she told the man that she was a writer as well. “And then we started going out, and I had to actually write something to show him,” Unferth continued.

But it was when she sat down to write proof of her ostensible career for the guy she was dating that suddenly her whole life fell into place.

“As soon as I wrote it I was like…this is what I want to do,” Unferth said. “So then I just started writing.”

While the man may be “long gone” according to Unferth, she has continued to grow and improve as a writer.

Unferth has a wide range of work under her belt, including a novel “Vacation,” a graphic novel “I, Parrot” and a memoir, “Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War.” When asked why she chooses to explore so many different mediums and genres of writing, Unferth explained that she has a lot of interest in form.

“I like trying different forms and seeing what happens,” Unferth said. “I feel like a lot of the formal things I learn from one, I can carry over into another.”

Her most recent work uses short stories as the vessel to unleash her ideas. Published in 2017, “Wait Till You See Me Dance” has been described as smart, profound and chillingly dark.

Jenni Ahlquist, a graduate student in the Creative Writing program, introduced Unferth at the event. Ahlquist praised the book and Unferth’s style of writing. Ahlquist, who had read the entire book just a few days before the event, said that “Wait Till You See Me Dance” perfectly encapsulates Unferth’s distinct voice as a writer. She noted that Unferth is a “master of compression in a sentence” and that each story in the book displays such mastery.

“I like to say it’s ‘muscular’ writing,” Ahlquist said. “Every sentence is doing the most work it could possibly do. And it means that it’s just really clean and a lot of her sentences are really simple, but they’re really effective.”

Unferth intertwines a rapid stream of consciousness with short, concise sentences that jar the reader. There is a constant swerving of directions and emotions in her writing that keeps the reader on their toes throughout each story.

“She can devastate you and make you laugh all in one sentence,” Ahlquist said.

At the event, Unferth read two stories from “Wait Till You See Me Dance.” The first story, titled “Your Character,” speaks to the frustrations of writing and the difficulty of creating a plot for a story. Unferth explained how she came up with the idea after getting writer’s block and proceeding to Google, “How to write a book.” She stumbled upon forums of writers offering plot devices or story prompts for overcoming a rut in the writing process. Unferth then wrote an abstract piece about an ambiguous “character” who lives through random plots and story tropes.

There is a sort of humorous self-deprecation that comes across in the story, making Unferth and her writing even more likeable. Jyotsna Natarajan, a fourth-year genetics major, came to the reading for her ENL 5F (Introduction to Creative Writing: Fiction) class. She thought that Unferth’s attempt to get story ideas off the internet was relatable.

“We’re learning in class about tones and inspirations for stories,” Natarajan said.

The second story Unferth read aloud gave the entire audience chills. Titled “The First Full Thought of Her Life,” the story takes place over the course of 15 minutes. It is about a family climbing sand dunes together, as an unnamed shooter watches over them from a parked car. As Unferth read, the room grew silent. Everyone was hanging onto each word she said, desperate to find out what happens in the end. There are dark comedic moments mixed with the sensitive subject matter, making the audience feel guilty for laughing almost immediately after they do.

“That’s what’s exciting to me, the way [Unferth] marries humor with kind of really serious personal quandaries,” Ahlquist said.

The story reads like a punch to the gut, yet stays with the reader long after it is over. Unferth’s writing is enthralling and ponders the deep questions and complexities of life. Surely, all the other stories in “Wait Till You See Me Dance” will have a similar effect upon the reader.

“I guess if there’s any sort of overarching theme as a whole it would maybe be that it’s really hard to help someone,” Unferth said. “But you have to try anyway.”

There will be two more writers coming to campus this quarter on Feb. 7 and March 7 for the reading series. All readings are held at 7 p.m. in the Shields Library.

Written by: Alyssa Ilsley — arts@theaggie.org