Grief, connection and "the beautiful terrible"
2020 was no ordinary year. The question of how to maintain the ASU Library’s connection, during this challenging period, with its patrons, donors and fellow members of our university community became the driver of our 2020 holiday card, which extended a simple message of hope and togetherness at the beginning of a new year.
Appropriately acknowledging the collective grief of our community led us to the work of Mojave American poet Natalie Diaz, winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize and the director of Arizona State University’s Center for Imagination in the Borderlands. The final poem in Diaz’s award-winning collection was selected to inform the card’s messaging and inspire its design. The poem centers on the experience of grief, what Diaz likes to call the beautiful terrible – “a wound that opens you but also shows you the miracles of what is inside you,” she writes. “Rather than try to escape my griefs, I’m trying to recognize them as a wildness I can submerge myself in, to be washed clean by the very thing that aches me so deeply.”
The card achieved the ASU Library’s goal of significantly engaging our university community, as various community members publicly commended the card’s championing of Diaz’s poetry, her Indigenous voice and the right message at the right time. “ASU Library always has the best holiday cards,” wrote one community member. One professor at ASU went as far as to upcycle the card by transforming it into a postcard that she then sent to a friend.
Special attention was paid to the texture, feel and weight of the card in an effort to evoke substance, simplicity and nature, both physically and conceptually. The illustration itself is a celebration of that simplicity and the wildness of our own desert home in Arizona as well as our own inner wildness.
According to Diaz, the Mojave word for “tears” suggests the word “river” – it is this river that we feature on the front of our card snaking through a remote wilderness and into the warm light of a golden sun. Just below this imagery is the selected line of Diaz’s poetry: “We go where there is love.” The message is intended as a tender call for togetherness – a collective embrace as we move through our river of grief, together as a community.
Credits:
Executive Direction: Jennifer Duvernay
Creative Direction: Britt Lewis
Art Direction: Amy Carolyn Watson
Graphic Design and Illustration: Kelsey Hinesley
User Experience Consult: Jordyn Kush
Project Contributors: Patricia Odle, Kristen Johnson, Christina Peck
Produced on Canaletto Felt 111C (neenahpaper.com) in Premium White, through O'Neil Printing, Phoenix, AZ.
Photography: Kelsey Hinesley and Amy Carolyn Watson