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The Santa Clara community celebrates ‘home’ at the de Saisset Museum

You might be surprised to learn that, as an assistant professor of creative writing, most of the students Miah Jeffra teaches are non-English majors.

Creative writing courses at 91����Ƶ fulfill the arts core requirement, meaning students from every discipline pass through them, many encountering creative writing for the very first time. 

“I can’t tell you how many students come to my class and say, ‘I’m not a creative person,’” says Jeffra. “And that’s heartbreaking. First of all, we all are. You’re just not exercising it very much.”

That’s why Jeffra designed ENGL 74: New Forms for Creative Writing—to demonstrate to students in a post-AI world a single, liberating idea: that all writing is an experiment, and it’s a worthwhile thing for all humans to do.

“By thinking creatively, especially through language, you begin to forge better problem-solving and relationship expertise in all avenues of life,” they explain. “We shouldn’t be pigeonholing ourselves. There are so many selves; as Walt Whitman says, ‘we are large, we contain multitudes.’”

Another way Jeffra has connected their students to the creative process is through “Where From / Where To?,” a collaborative exhibition now on view at the de Saisset Museum.

The show brings together visual artworks and written responses from undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and staff across the campus community. The prompt was deliberately accessible, but with thousands of possible interpretations: home.

“The idea of home has radically changed in recent years,” says Jeffra, who co-curated the exhibition alongside de Saisset Assistant Director Lauren Baines as part of the museum’s new Faculty-Driven exhibition series. “What was once home now feels almost foreign to some. But also how we create salve and comfort in tough times has changed too.”

That range of feeling is visible across the exhibition’s nearly 30 visually diverse works, ranging from the literal to the lyrical: including images of a familiar house to what Jeffra describes as “speculative ideas of what home could be, or inner visions of home.”

Each selected artwork was paired with either a student from Jeffra’s ENGL 74 course or a faculty colleague in the English department, who wrote an ekphrastic response—a poem, prose piece, or hybrid form (one student even wrote and recorded a song)—without knowing the artist’s identity or the title of the artwork.

The resulting anthology, which visitors can carry through the gallery, creates a guided dialogue between the two forms. As Jeffra puts it, “the university is the universe housed in a single microcosm”—and this exhibit might be the best proof of that.

Read on to explore a few pieces from “Where From / Where To?”—now on view at the de Saisset Museum through June 13, 2026.

Making Do

Written by Courtney Avrit ’28

(after “Boy Reading a Book,” oil painting by Yuan Wang, engineering faculty)

As I sit here, in the back of my econ class, I notice a beam of light on my shoulder. It’s so bright, so warm. Bringing a little bit of brightness into this dull, beige colored room. The silence only filled with the monotone voice of my professor, talking about something almost as featureless as the room. The beam of light gives me comfort at this moment. It’s such a familiar feeling.

I’m mentally teleported back to when I was a kid. Sitting in my childhood bedroom, curled up with a book. As I sat on my bed, the light from my window would always fall just right. Illuminating my legs, my arms, making the words on the pages of the book that much more vibrant.

I lived in two worlds. The first was one with my tangible family and friends. My family was always chaotic—lots of yelling. Unhappy parents who wound up in divorce, yet still had insane expectations for me. They wanted me to be some kind of prodigy, as if they passed along the right genes for me to accomplish that. Needless to say, it wasn’t the best life.

Then there was the superior world, the world of books. Hundreds of characters intertwined to make the most intricate stories. There was something so magical about being invested in something other than your own life. It made me feel a part of something bigger.

I catch myself smiling as I think about back then, my childhood. Life was much simpler. I didn’t know much, but I did know what made me happy, and that’s more than I can say about myself now.

I get knocked out of this haze when my professor asks me if I’m paying attention. I want to say that I’m not. I want to say that don’t give a crap about allocative efficiency or stagflation. I’m only doing this because it’s “going to get me a well paying job” or at least that’s what my parents say. But I just smile and nod—I don’t want to seem disrespectful.

I notice a tightening in my chest and I have to blink away the stinging feeling in my eyes. My passion was always for reading. I wanted to be a writer when I grew up. To be the creator of such beautiful combinations of words. To initiate an emotional effect on people that I fashioned out of nothing but my mind.

I had the most wild imagination. I could see the characters from the books come to life. I felt like I was a part of their lives, like I somehow existed alongside the words on a page. And I always wanted to be able to produce that for someone else.

But here I am, holding onto nothing but a beam of light of what once was. And now it’s too late. I graduate soon and I am going to be stuck in a job I won’t like, surrounded by people who I’m sure won’t like it either.

I’ll make a decent living though. I’ll save up, get married, buy a house, have kids. I’ll do the things you’re supposed to do. But on top of that, I’m going to teach my kids to love to read. I will read to them every night. I will buy them books every holiday.

Eventually, I will see them in their room with a book in hand. Just like I was, and I will be content. I will encourage them to do whatever they wish with their life. I will not pressure them into making money. But I will pressure them into doing what they love. Even though it couldn’t be me, maybe my kids will be able to follow their dreams.

The beam of light hasn’t moved. It’s still here sitting on my shoulder, the same way it used to stretch across my bed and the pages of a book. Back then it felt like a doorway into another world. Now it’s just a reminder of everything I can’t have. So I just make do.

Momma thinks my Barbies will make me gay

Written by Kai Harris, assistant professor, English

(after “Flower Girl,” multimedia piece by Emmanuel Aboagye, lecturer, studio art)

even though I’m a girl [and I’m already “made,” far as I can tell]. We can’t afford Ken dolls, so I pretend like Fashionista Barbie is Barbie’s lover, rub their humps of plastic together noiselessly beneath the covers on my bed. I dress them up in different outfits for work and for school and for the nights when they don’t wanna do nothing but stare into each other’s eyes, search for the moon.

Momma thinks my Barbies will make me gay, not realizing it’s me making my Barbies gay. I swap Malibu Barbie’s minidress for overalls, use a black sharpie to draw tattoos on her forearms and a stud in her nose. I chop off Rockstar Barbie’s hair with the kitchen scissors (only dreaming of chopping off my own once while watching her curls fall, free, into the sink). When my cousins come over with their Barbies—they have a Ken doll and a dreamhouse—I choose to keep my Barbies alone, together, happily sleeping in the little bed I made them out of an old shoebox with scraps of socks as a blanket.

The Barbies ain’t the only things Momma thinks will make me gay. There’s also:

–episodes of Sesame Street with Bert & Ernie
–my cousins on my Daddy’s side
–rainbows
–that one lady at church who died, and in her obituary left behind a “special friend”
–The Wizard of Oz

None of this makes me gay, but it does make me happy. And if I can choose happy—if I can build my own house on the moon and live there with my Barbies and my sock blankets—why would I choose different?

In the end, as it turns out, the thing that makes me gay is the thing Momma forgot to get rid of in the first place, the thing she taught me herself: Ain’t nothing in the world like being properly loved by a woman.

Departure

Written by Jack Engle ’28

(after “Between Red,” photos by Hanna Roth ’27)

We shuffle in droves through the city to find our place,
Shoulders press together on sidewalks too narrow to belong to anyone.
Each step feels measured. Each glance avoids another.
We follow lines that someone else already drew.

We cross when the signal gives permission,
A crowd moving with the buses and train doors.
Coffee cups sit tight in our hands as footsteps echo down the blocks,
Our days blur together like copies of the same map.

We were all told this would lead somewhere.
Follow closely, work harder, want the right things.
But the streets repeat themselves,
And the end never shows.

Then someone breaks away.

A stranger walks past the final stop,
Turns down a road the crowd refuses to see.
The noise fades behind them like a door shut tight,
And the city suddenly feels wider.

Streets turn into paths instead of orders,
Corners open instead of being direct.
I move now where the air feels unfamiliar,
And find something like freedom in what no one gave me.