AUDIO ESSAY: "Autumn 2019, A Eulogy" by Rachel A.G. Gilman

"Autumn 2019, A Eulogy started as a patchwork essay in the titular season that I worked on for a course with Margo Jefferson during my MFA at Columbia University. After sitting with the piece for a year, however, I noticed there was this contrast between the material I was sourcing that was intended to be experienced aurally (song lyrics, television show dialogue, podcasts) and the diary entries I was interweaving, which were really never meant to be publicly consumed at all. I decided to see what would happen if I leaned into the aural aspects, if I upped the sensory experience of the work, if I exploited the intimacy. The technical production wasn't so challenging because I have a background in radio production, but in revisiting the piece during pandemic quarantine and trying to almost recreate an audio rendering of my life from a year a half ago—one full of people and movement whilst I was now stationary and secluded—I became weirdly nostalgic for a not so distant past."

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Rachel A.G. Gilman's work has been published in journals throughout the US, UK, and Australia. She is the Creator/Editor-in-Chief of The Rational Creature, a columnist for No Contact Mag, and was Editor-in-Chief of Columbia Journal, Issue 58. She holds an MFA in Writing, Nonfiction from Columbia University and an MSt in Creative Writing from the University of Oxford. She lives in New York and works in publishing. More at rachelaggilman.com.