Kate Toporski

repurpose to remediate: a transition

 

The transitions that took place from word-of-mouth to repurposing to remediating were immense.

 

It really all began with a boy crying on my living room floor, grilled cheese in hand. After a night of being a clear emotional and physical rebound, the story began to spread about my experience with "The Boy who Cried Grilled Cheese". Whether it was over the phone, around a bonfire, or sitting on bunk beds in the middle of the woods, I started telling everybody about who I referred to as- Grilled Cheese Boy.

 

After spreading the word, I had the opportunity to give a small spurt of the story online in a post on my personal blog- The Sophomore Experience: A Series of Unfortunate Hookups. This post received a lot of views, with readers dying to hear the full versions of my many (oh...so...many...) unfortunate encounters with men.

 

I had the opportunity to transition and extended the original post into its very own website during the repurposing project. A Series of Unfortunate Hookups sectioned off into detailed, individual stories, each having their own "chapter", if you will. To successfully take these stories that I had only written briefly about, I struggled to maintain my voice, humor, and emotion within these awkward "hookups". I began recording myself and typing out the stories while listening to myself telling them. This resulted in funny stories on paper, not only by speech. 

 

In addition to getting the stories written down, I was able to incorporate my feelings of self-respect, confidence, and independence. I found that I able to reach a larger audience of women and girls

 

When remediation rolled around, I was looking for another form of media to convey these stories. I looked to video diaries, posters, movie trailers, and even a Geico parody commercial...I know...too wild. But nonetheless, I found myself at Bitstrips, creating comics in relation to my stories. This allowed for another medium to be approached, all while incorporating similar themes to a similar audience. 

 

I began with word-of-mouth to a couple of silly sentences, sentences to pages, pages to post-its, post-its to comics. 

 

The end result is stunning, compared to telling an obnoxious tale of a crying boy, while my friends roll around in their glory and non-singleness.