This is the
First Official publication coming from The Bold Testament. The origin of thought for this newsletter came about in April 2012, when I was closing out my freshman year at the University of North Texas. The idea came about on an rather unusual day for me. In common college campus culture it is regular to listen to music on your transit to class, sporting anything from Beats by Dre to the classic white Apple earbuds. I fell somewhere in between, but all that was irrelevant the day my Bose headphones began reached its date of obsolescence. After shook off the initial disappointment, tested my optimism by deciding I would approached the few next days of classes aesthetically.
The first day without my headphones felt like a resurrection of my thoughts and ideas. When walking to class I taken way by the vastness this rat race of education I was currently involved in at my present stage in life. I sat in my entry level astronomy lecture hearing nothing but my own thoughts. The first idea I remembered was about creating a debating society organization at UNT to evoke power onto public opinion. It made perfect sense in my mind but, when I tried to convey my ideas to my friends, I would lose them and eventually lose myself in my attempts to explain my vision in its entirety. After going back and forth about the organization I realized it had to begin with a newsletter.
I came to Henry Ansah with the idea of the newsletter and he immediately begin to vibe with it. We began to meet at least once a month in the Willis Library at The University of North Texas throughout the Fall and Spring semester of our Sophomore year. We would converse over our pieces and share discoveries from books we've read.
Time was running out on our sophomore year and all of the action we've done was all talk. I had hundreds of notes in my notes app, filled with perspective rough drafts of poems, essays, and quotes from books that I wanted to use for the newsletter. One morning about two weeks before we handed out our first newsletter on campus, my phone simultaneously deleted a good portion of my notes I had saved on my phone. I was devastated that something so personal and influential to my future could be so easily removed from my possession willy-nilly. For a fews days I stopped writing. I stopped using the notes app due to my inability to trust it to store my work.
Learning from uncontrollable mishap, I realized I didn't push to solidify my works enough. Now I was going to attack my writing with execution. I wasn't going to keep leaving my writings as rough drafts or just leaving them as concepts. I needed to begin to produce products I was proud of. I needed to move in a more declarative manner. Lucky for me, I write a good percentage of my writing on loose leaf, so I was able to recover some of my pieces. With a span of 10 days we came up with, "The Bold Testament" title for the newsletter, figured out the formatting, got a permit for free speech time on campus, and printed 140 copies of our first issue to distribute on campus.
We've sat back and plotted this for too long, now we're only seeking progression within us, and within our generation. We hope we're able to connect with our peers as they help us fill in the shades of the bigger picture were all trying to paint. Let this be a way people can again unite once again. This is The Bold Testament.
That was a brief thesis of where BT came from.. on this blog we're going to have posts from the three writers from the first issue: Brad Elroy, Henry Ansah, and me Stefan Patterson. The posts are going to be dope, and thats all I'm going to say about it because I'm tried of writing on this one.
if you haven't yet, read the
First Issue from The Bold Testament to see what were about.
PEACE
