Elissa Maudlin

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Articles

CAMPUS

Ball State graduate, dining worker and author discusses her books and the experience that helped create them.

By Elissa Maudlin / April 30, 2022

 Kris Ball started writing when she was 6 years old — poetry, song lyrics, short stories. Ball said in the opening of one of her books that, sitting at the foot of her bed, her Aunt Janice — a woman 10 years younger than Ball’s “hands-off” mother — encouraged her to write and “would listen to [her] stupid poems.” 

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CAMPUS

Ball State students ‘walked a mile in her shoes’ for sexual assault, domestic violence march at University Green

By Elissa Maudlin / March 26, 2022

As people clung to their jackets holding protest signs and wind blew through University Green, several men picked a pair of heels in their size from a table and began buckling them onto their feet. With different heel height variations, the men gathered with women to “walk a mile in [their] shoes,” and to march in awareness of violent crimes against women.

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CAMPUS

Muncie residents and workers share their stories amid Ball State's new gender-affirming clothing resource

By Elissa Maudlin / February 26, 2022

It started with a promo of RuPaul’s Drag Race. In a pink, flowing Roman princess gown draped out from the arms, Roxxxy Andrews fawns herself with a large golden fan in front of four pillars with pegasuses flying around her. Her blonde hair fans out from her golden brown face, and black eyeliner and lashes hide the color of her irises.

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COMMUNITIES

Members of Muncie craft shop Forever Baskets talk about basket weaving and the business

By Elissa Maudlin / February 8, 2022

  It starts with the base, a circular slab of wood surrounded by thinner strands, which travel the perimeter of the slab, around and around. Tall strands the size of popsicle sticks reach toward the sky, away from the circular motion of the other strands, almost making a fence. Where the end of the continuous circle meets the sky-reaching fence, the thinner circular strands begin to weave around the taller strands, enveloping them. This is basket weaving.

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BLACK HISTORY MONTH

Muncie Education in Biracial Hair class aims to change the beauty industry

By Elissa Maudlin / February 2, 2022

In a room attached to the kitchen of Erica Robinson Moody’s home sits two salon chairs. A cabinet is filled with different colored hair dyes, an apron hangs on a hook near a large mirror and products stand in single-file lines on the counters.  Her son, Brooklyn Moody, sits in a salon chair where his mom said he often falls asleep, while she takes a comb, twirls it tightly on a small section of his hair and creates a tight, springy curl an inch or two in length. Dozens of these curls lie across his head. Brooklyn’s hairstyle takes 45 minutes to style this way, and the style only stays for about a week —  a reality for biracial hair.

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OPINION

The graduation parachute

By Elissa Maudlin / October 18, 2021

 As students, we need to be aware of the possibility of the picture-perfect portraits of our futures falling apart, and we need to ask for the right instruction from our universities to combat that possibility. 

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NEWS

Ball State's Entrepreneurial Leadership Institute launches new 'Gen: i' program

By Elissa Maudlin / October 2, 2021

With the tap of keys on a keyboard and the click of a mouse, a group of undergraduate and graduate students each pressed “send” on an application. They were chosen from a small pool of applicants after presenting who they are to the lens of a camera and writing a 1,000-word-maximum essay to explain why they should be part of a program that’s never been done before. 

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NEWS

Boys and Girls Clubs of Muncie present Just Desserts fundraiser for 2021

By Elissa Maudlin / September 24, 2021

People in tables of four will gather in one room Sept. 25 after paying $200 for their table at the annual Just Desserts fundraiser for the Boys and Girls Clubs of Muncie. Each table will discuss how much money they will collectively put on the line to beat out other tables to win the prize — their top choice of treats available. The reward will be sweets because, as Amy Gibson, director of resource development at the Boys and Girls Clubs of Muncie, said, “It’s all about the desserts, and who doesn’t love desserts?”

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OPINION

Abstraction: Gay is still normal

By Elissa Maudlin / September 1, 2021

There is still this looming idea that LGBTQ people are different. We are seen as special, unique, brave, edgy, but all those adjectives give off the same impression: we’re still different. 

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OPINION

Abstraction: Generation Google

By Elissa Maudlin / May 3, 2021

The problem is life doesn’t work this way. Life isn’t like Google. It’s an entire journey where you don’t get your answers until later down the line — if you get answers at all.