In the two years I’ve spent working for my local, on-campus newspaper, I’ve served as an artist since fall 2023, a layout artist since spring 2024, a social media manager for a semester, a distribution manager for a summer, a photographer for a day and a graphics editor for a year. Through all the chaos and long nights, I can confidently say that I’ve only been to jail once.
As the subhead reads, it is time for me to retire. Now that I am a fully-indoctrinated graduate student here at the Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History, I am old and weary. I’ve seen the Spirit Rocks get taken away, The Mercury go on strike and get shut down by administration and witnessed the start of a new publication, The Retrograde, its entire visual direction being something I practically birthed. Despite being The Retrograde’s (now former) Graphics Editor, rather than illustrate my goodbye, I will continue the tradition of my forefathers and write my farewell to the paper and its staff.
Through all the chaos and long nights, I can confidently say that I’ve only been to jail once.
I started off at The Retrograde’s parent publication, The Mercury, in fall 2023. I remember receiving the email to apply for an artist position from the then-Graphics Editor, Katheryn Ho, and being extremely confused about how The Mercury got ahold of my email and how I made the cut for their graphics department in the first place. That same semester was a complete reset for me at UTD. I changed my major from Healthcare Studies to Visual and Performing Arts with a concentration in art history; it’d been about two years since I had touched a pencil or pen and drawn, but I was itching to tap back into my creative roots after having been in a pseudo-art-studio environment for five years during middle and high school. To this day, I am about 70% sure I filled out The Mercury’s interest form in my sleep and forgot about it after the fact. Either way, I got in and was immediately put to work, picking up last-minute assignments and making special graphics for special stories.
My favorite piece from my time at The Mercury has to be an illustration I made about former President Richard Benson issuing a lackluster letter to the student body regarding the genocide in Palestine which, in UTD tradition, found a way to disrespect the on-campus Palestinian body. The graphic required lots of revision and conversation among ourselves to figure out how to tastefully depict the issue at hand; after plenty of drafts, I think the piece turned out to be successful. It helped the editorial board at The Mercury keep our administration accountable, especially by depicting Benson as such a looming and ominous figure.
At the same time, I can only hope it was provocative enough to shake administration. Maybe administration could realize that spotlighting the work of one body of protesters while alienating another was the wrong move at the time — although, given the current state of matters, I do not think administration cares.
Spring 2024 was when the then-Graphics Editor and Editor-in-Chief of The Mercury narrowed down their picks for the next Graphics Editor, and after sifting through their many choices, they settled on me. Shock seems to be a common theme in my experience in student media; I am still surprised I ended up as Graphics Editor. By that point, after I was selected for the role, the print production boogie monster snuck up on me. The next promotion I received (in my long-standing list of duties at The Mercury) was “layout artist,” where I started to lay out pages for the print publication alongside my work as a graphics artist to prepare myself for the Graphics Editor workload. It took lots of trial and error to develop my skills and get to the load-bearing position I’ve assumed in our print production process until now. If you’ve been keeping up with The Retrograde’s print issues, I have probably designed about 75% of the pages you’ve seen. I am grateful for our management team’s patience as I learned how to design pages; Adobe InDesign is and always will be my No. 1 enemy.
At the annual Texas Intercollegiate Press Association convention in April 2024, I also won three awards for my work. Specifically, I won third place for an editorial cartoon about administration avoiding student press during protests related to the removal of the Spirit Rocks (another favorite of mine, playing on how silly administration has been with their sparse “commitment” to students); second place for the illustration with former President Benson; and first place for an editorial illustration complementing a critique on UTD’s sexual harassment policies (to my astonishment, considering all of the risqué paraphernalia in the “TOO SEXY” bag).
Adobe InDesign is and always will be my No. 1 enemy.
Then came May 2024. May 1 was the day that our brand-new management team was set to start their term: we had management veterans and newer staff alike within the revamped team, complete with a brand new Editor-in-Chief and Managing Editor. At the same time, four hours into the day, pro-Palestine protesters established an encampment in Chess Plaza and dubbed it the “Gaza Liberation Plaza.” By pure luck, I happened to have a camera with me that day. For the first — and only — time in my experience in student media, I took on the role of a photographer and documented the sights from that day, from the peaceful morning sit-in to the afternoon arrests and documentation of the jail where arrestees were kept overnight.
From that experience of on-the-ground reporting, I have internalized nothing but immense respect for our staff. And as someone who avoids driving on highways like the plague, I will never forget taking the backroads to Collin County Jail with my colleagues as “The Cult of Dionysus” by The Orion Experience played in the background to fuel our solely-running-on-adrenaline levels of delirium. Covering the encampment happenings and going to jail together bolstered our ability to work as a team. The tension, the stress, the frenzy of it all — all of it created a type of synergy which would feed into our future endeavors as a collective at The Retrograde.
Before we get to the development of The Retrograde, we have to address the elephant in the room: the “find out” part of FAFO. Although we probably sound like a broken record, I’m going to hash out old news anyway: in the aftermath of May 1, our management team collectively agreed to publish an “emergency” issue with the front-page headline “Welcome to UTD,” conveniently done so we could hand out the paper to freshmen at freshman orientation. Our campus was forever changed by May 1, and these students had a right to know that. By then, the ensuing battle between administration and our newspaper finally stopped being a tense cold war over press and became a full-scale public battle over the First Amendment. Ultimately, they demoted our adviser and fired our Editor-in-Chief. As a result, all hell broke loose. The Mercury promptly went on strike — and all of its staff was fired by administration. All this pandemonium eventually led to the formation of The Retrograde.
My time at The Retrograde has been nothing but exciting; there’s always something newsworthy going on. When our staff first started developing The Retrograde, I had the honor and privilege of designing our branding, our logo and the front design of the newspaper, something which brings me pride. I hope you enjoy the front and the logo as much as I do! At both The Mercury and The Retrograde, our print issues have also received many accolades, and I am thankful I had the opportunity to help work on layouts for both publications. For instance, our May 20 “emergency” issue earned first place for “People’s Choice” and second place for “Best of Show” at the Associated Collegiate Press convention in Minnesota in summer 2024. Plus, our inaugural issue of The Retrograde earned third place for “Best of Show” at the Texas Intercollegiate Press Association convention in spring 2025. To top things off, The Retrograde earned the Reveille Seven Courage in Student Journalism Award from the Student Press Law Center at the 2025 MediaFest conference in Washington, D.C., honoring our commitment to keeping student press viable and delivering the truth.
All in all, I could not have survived thus far without the support of our staff at both The Mercury and The Retrograde. To Katheryn Ho and Fatimah Azeem, respectively the former Graphics Editor and Editor-in-Chief of The Mercury, thank you for having faith in me when I doubted my every move. To André Averion, the former Distribution Manager for The Mercury and AMP, thank you for your graciousness and kindness, and thank you for showing Rainier Pederson and I the ropes to all things distribution to follow in your historic stead. To our current staff, thank you for being wonderful people. To our editorial board and management team, thank you all for sticking by my side when the hysteria from production settles in and for being just as dysfunctional and weird as I am — you all are a very special, talented and resilient group of people. Don’t give up and don’t go down without putting up a good fight.
I’ll stop being sappy now. See y’all, space cowboys.
