Describe yourself in three words.

a good time.

***K. Rae***, 2024 CSS Liberation Generation Fellow

Tell us about the work you brought into your Fellowship and why this work is important to you.

I worked as an editor for literary publications and did freelance developmental editing. I’m a poet and performed a lot in Baltimore and DC as a youth. My visual art is self-taught & grew from interacting with other queer & trans artists online. Prior to this fellowship, I collaborated with the Underground Rainbow Experiment and pivoted that collaborator role into a consulting one with SCRIBEONHIGH. And recently, since I acquired a disability in 2020 and wanted community for that experience, I participated with People's Hub and Fireweed Collective on the zooms.

Summarize your fellowship project and how you are using narrative strategy to expand the impact of your work.

My project for the fellowship was starting off the early phases of SCRIBEONHIGH, a cultural strategy think tank. I use narrative strategy in my work as a way to acknowledge and fuse the ways I resist dominant narratives in my day to day into a strategy toolkit for making art and organizing.

I started using tarot & the bicycle deck as a research tool to build stories and self-reflect. I put it together with the CSS Archetypes Tool, battle of the story, cornerstones, and narrative strategy tools & methods from Narrative Observatory, ReFrame's yearly predictions, & CultureHack Labs. I called it Soup As Method, mainly because the method has nothing to do with the tarot, bicycle deck, or astrology at all and everything to do with how you read your everyday life, connect dots, and see patterns. The origins of that name are both the perennial “is cereal a soup” meme and something I read from Hortense Spillers talking about ideology as nebulaic & soup-like.

So using that, I wrote a book. It's called “a world for us”. It's a book full of art, poems, stories, and prompts. I wanted it to be an interactive experience as much as possible! Something that could be used in groups, y’know? And I ended up using it as a case study for how the backbone of the self-reflection and research process works

Explain to us why you are doing this work and at what stage you are in your process.

I do this work because I need to, it's not optional. It's the medicine I needed and need!

I'm in the opening up phase. This past year or so was a lot of laying the groundwork, starting back in December 2023. Now that “a world for us” is finished I’m hoping to move into using Soup As Method for consulting clients.

How would you describe Story-based Strategy (SBS) to someone who has never heard about it?

It's basically like you took a bunch of critical media studies and communications concepts you learned at night while watching video essays & playing games to revenge procrastinate, your storytelling/art skills, and fused them into decades of political organizing tradition and narrative change experience to make a cultural organizing toolbox.

How did SBS affect your work on the project? What specific SBS tools did you use or center in to move forward your fellowship work?

So before I got confirmation for the project, I’d been studying the SBSU course and was already thinking of how to integrate reading the bicycle deck into the tools CSS offered. I also wanted to figure out how to make the work not drive me crazy. So, getting more acquainted with SBS, I realized that what I had could work very fluidly through all the tools and was especially helpful as a tool to prompt and self-reflect during the process.

But above all, points of intervention really gave the project what it needed and made Soup As Method what it is. It ended up being about intervening in the ways that dominant narratives are weapons that kill a lot of black trans folks and disabled folks because that was what my work as a poet always has been about, really, and needed to be.

So the tools for Soup As Method ended up being things I'd use to figure out where I could fit my own work and a description of how I've always thought and moved but backed up by new ways to make it make sense.

If you could have another iteration of your work, how would it have changed?

I made the installation “Our Voices Will Inherit The Earth” and the book “a world for us”.

With another run of “a world for us”, I would do the collages physically. I wanted to do the “pratfall from grace” collage painted, with gold foil & feathers. I'd also want to do the work of the book as a themed zine or with other Black trans femme artists, since the backbone of the text is symbols, so it's very fluid and separate from me and can be repackaged.

And I’ll have to re-do some of the work from this, anyhow, the main sculpture for “Our Voices Will Inherit The Earth”, the installation, burnt in a small fire in my house. So that’ll need to be remade.

Do you think SBS will change how you relate to future work in collaboration with others? How? And why?

Yeah! It helped me pinpoint and apply interventions in the stories that impact our everyday life. I would probably use it more as a discussion tool and prompting with groups of people than with groups with consistent interest. And because of that SBS also shifted my attention from product-oriented art to more interactive art that can prompt discussions and build relationships rather than being the hot new thing & fading fast.

What other kinds of CSS workshops and opportunities would you like to see?

Y'all should build a paid cultural/narrative strategy apprenticeship program for QTBIPOC youth and one for disabled people in career transitions!

Share how folks can get involved with your work or see your work’s final product.

Buy the e-book of the chapbook I made, pre-order a physical copy, or download a free preview to get a taste! Visit the website www.scribeonhigh.org to see a sampler from the book. And visit linktr.ee/scribeonhigh for everything. I wrote an in-depth case study for my process with this project. It is a companion to the book, please read them together! That’s available on the website.

The final product was a sculpture installation and this book, anyone interested in a consult can pull up to www.scribeonhigh.org or email me @ scribeonhigh@proton.me. Or follow me on social media, I'm using Bluesky mainly & Instagram, @scribeonhigh on insta and @scribeonhigh.org on Bluesky

Soup as Method