Lily Proulx-Scandone, Sophomore
Watch out Cupid, February isn’t just yours anymore! Aromantic Writing Month, also called AroWriMo, is a Tumblr-hosted writing challenge during the month of February that celebrates aromantic themes, content creators, characters, and stories. Both aromantic-spectrum-identifying people and allies come together to celebrate and share stories in the work. Aromanticism is different from asexuality, and while both groups of identities are similar, AroWriMo wants to highlight their unique experiences while spreading awareness of what aromanticism means.
There are multiple terms used by the broader community of aromantic and asexual identifying individuals. One of the most common, is the shortening of terms to “aro” and “ace” respectively. Other frequent terms are aspec, arospec, and acespec, meaning aromantic-asexual spectrum, aromantic spectrum, and asexual spectrum, indicating the various identities that are similar in some ways to aromanticism and asexuality. People who feel romantic or sexual attraction are often called allosexual or alloromantic, also known as “allo”.
February is traditionally seen as a month of romance and love. Arospec people have an overall lack of romantic attraction, making February somewhat difficult for some to navigate. Most movies and cultural ideals point to entering romantic relationships and potentially even sexual relationships as people age, but many people, both aspec and allo, try to avoid such themes for a variety of reasons. The host of AroWriMo, Skye (they/them), happily provides such a space for content creators; mainly writers and comic artists.
AroWriMo started from a conversation between Skye and another user of Tumblr: Saltyaro. Skye and Saltyaro both wanted to see more support of aromantic themes and writers, but noticed that most works with such themes didn’t gain much traction outside of the aro community. “I'd just come into the mentality of 'just do it' at the time, so I did,” Skye comments on the actual creation of the blog. Even though they are not very good at using social media or experienced at organizing community events, word has gotten out through various means since August 2019.
Since then, hundreds of submissions over the three years that AroWriMo has been active have come in from across the globe and the LGBTQ+ community. Skye doesn’t know what AroWriMo has specifically done for the arospec community, but they “certainly hope that it can, or will, show people that there is a demand for arospec content. That there are also people who want to create it.” With media representation a hot topic for marginalized groups, AroWriMo places agency to create meaningful representation within writing and to allow such works to gain traction.
Concerning the prompts and the actual guidelines of the contest, the community at large plays a major part, voting on the themes and prompts every year. Skye considers AroWriMo to be a welcoming space; Tumblr and other social media platforms have frequent discourse over the validity of aro and ace identities. They turn away no one: questioning, ally, or sure of their identity; “Even if people are questioning their identity, there's going to be no policing of identity in AroWriMo. I really hope that it can also give people the chance to explore aromantic themes and connect with other people who are feeling similarly, even if they're not sure of everything yet.”
As of the writing of this article, the official AroWriMo Tumblr is posting works related to the last theme of the event. You can check out the Tumblr with current and archived works here.
Comments