Hello all, and welcome to my multimodal rhetoric blog!

My name is Gina Mingoia, and I’m beginning my second year of the English PhD program at Stony Brook. I earned my BA in English from St. Joseph’s College (now St. Joseph’s University!) in Patchogue, NY, and my MA in English from Long Island University Post in Brookville, NY. My MA focused mostly on writing and rhetoric– I worked in the LIU Writing Center, and my MA thesis was a study of students in the writing center and their writing processes. I am still very interested in writing and pedagogy, so I am also pursuing the Writing and Rhetoric certificate here at Stony Brook. 

I study grief and  trauma in both writing/composition and popular culture, which are actually way more different than I thought at first, but both ways of looking at grief and trauma are relevant to our multimodal rhetoric course. When studying grief and trauma in writing, I’m particularly interested in the ways that grievers or trauma-experiencers use writing as a way to cope with or heal from loss as a form of (intentional or unintentional) scriptotherapy. This leads me to life writing like autobiography, but I also find myself time and time again looking at the types of writing that are not as polished, especially comments on the internet. For example, if you listen to a song about loss or grief on YouTube and scroll through the comments, a majority of comments are different users sharing their stories and experiences with grief. Their audience is made up of strangers, but strangers who have also sought out this particular video on YouTube, so there is an element of kinship and community. Then, in terms of popular culture, I’m interested in examining the stigma surrounding grievers and trauma-experiencers: the ways that TV series or films, popular novels or even music, explore, combat, confront, or perpetuate certain stereotypes and stigmas surrounding grief and trauma. Both of these ideas seem, to me, to be linked to multimodal rhetoric, and I’m hoping that this course can give me a lens and the vocabulary to continue to study these “alt-lit” forms of expression.

Aside from all of that, I’m also interested in many, many other things, too, and I tend to hop from project to project, losing interest quickly. I started a publishing company, Lightning Tower Press, in 2020, and we’ve since published two books and have a third coming out on Sept. 29. I also completely threw myself into cooking, pickleball, and embroidery this past summer (already started embroidering Christmas presents . . .), and I’ve purchased everything I need to start quilting, but have yet to even touch a sewing machine (like, in my whole life). I did the same with gardening, too: I have packets of seeds and a hydroponic growing system in a nice neat pile, but I’ve yet to open the hydroponic growing system box– and I’ve had it for about ten months. Here’s to hoping this is the month I actually set it up and plant some seeds!

Thanks for visiting my blog, and I am really looking forward to learning and discussing multimodal rhetoric with you all this semester!