Tag: memoir

Sundress Reads: Review of
The Watch: Time to Witness the Beauty of It All

Sundress Reads logo, which shows a sheep reading, with glasses on and a book. Logo is black and white.
Cover of the book The Watch, showing a clock in clouds

An introspective memoir about loss and life, The Watch: Time to Witness the Beauty of It All (Wildhouse Publications, 2025) by Paula Sager is a healing walk through the process of being present while a loved one passes away. The Watch is part diary and part philosophy, the author using her strong mind-body connection as a teacher of the Alexander Technique to feel her way through what her soul is undergoing. Collecting many quotes from various authors, philosophers, and family members, Paula Sager offers that our emotions can be processed through the Discipline of Authentic Movement, and that it’s possible to stay mentally present even in the most difficult of times. Trigger warning: If you’ve had a loved one pass away or expect someone to pass soon, this can be a healing, but also at times difficult read. Please give yourself time and private space to process thoughts and emotions while paddling through this book.

While reading The Watch, I felt like I traveled back in time to when my grandparents were completing their life cycles, only this time, I felt more present in my memories. If you’ve had a loved one die slowly of cancer or other medical issues, this book will deeply resonate with you. Sager’s writing captures daily life, the little and big tasks that continue to need doing, while also showing how she stays present and tries to enjoy every moment she can before there are no more moments. One quote from Sager’s father, Bob, continues to float in my mind:

  “These are the waves of yesterday’s wind.” (Sager 53)

This small sentence encapsulates what it feels like after realizing that someone you’re close to has little time left. You’re propelled forward by the waves from yesterday’s wind that blew your life onto a new path that will soon depart from the path of your loved one. Dwelling on the circle of life and her family members that are still in the beginning or middle of the life cycle helps Sager through the process. She writes of her brothers and her children, as well as how their pasts and futures seem to mirror not only her own, but her passing father’s. The watch, which began mysteriously falling apart after Sager’s father died, appears recurrently as a reminder of time, both precious and fleeting. When Sager trades watches with her father, it’s as if she’s giving him the best gift she can: more time with her and love.

Despite life’s limitations, a sense of calmness and acceptance imbues the book. The way Sager bares her raw emotions for the reader and conveys a calmness is rather wonderous. Some of her conversations with her father are true gems. For example, Sager’s father Bob says at one point, still a bit hazy from anesthesia:

  “I want to tell you about something I dreamed … First there was the dream of death
   … And it was fine! … And then there was the dream of birth—and it was spectacular!
   … They really have it figured out. It all makes sense, and there is nothing to worry
   about.” (Sager 65)

It’s hard to accept death, even though we know it’s coming. The most amazing takeaway for me personally from The Watch is a new sense that I might finally be able to let go of fear of the unknown. Somehow, through reading about Sager’s life, her peaceful moments, her father’s insights, she has talked me free of fear of the unknown. One of her and her family’s extraordinary abilities seems to be to take life in stride. Although there are certainly tough time periods, overall, Sager enjoys the last moments with her father and calmly accepts her experiences, letting fear depart as well.

Kayaking Watercolor by Everly Arts, showing a kayaker paddling on the water towards a sunset between two mountains
Kayaking Watercolor by Everly Arts

Sager’s father loved to kayak, and the family ultimately return him to the water he loved in a unique kayak flotilla funeral. This poem Sager quotes is quite fitting:

“Wave of sorrow,
Do not drown me now:
I see the island
Still ahead somehow.

I see the island
And its sands are fair:
Wave of sorrow,
Take me there.”
(Sager 51, quoting “Island” by Langston Hughes)

Sager takes readers there, showing us the beauty of our lives that remain after loss and the love of memories we will have forever. She also touches on some intriguing supernatural experiences she has had surrounding her father and his passing period, such as feeling pain at the same time as him, a swan flying up to the family that seems to embody some presence of her father’s, the watch falling apart after he died, and unusual mind-body connections she experiences through Janet Adler’s Discipline of Authentic Movement.

I recommend this book for readers that are of the “middle generation,” that have both children as well as parents in their lives. I would also like to recommend the following tea pairing with this book: Tulsi & Ginger Tea from Traditional Medicinals. This tea provides calming stress relief and warming ginger to heal your body and soul.

The Watch: Time to Witness the Beauty of It All is available from Wildhouse Publications

Ana Mourant sitting on grass reading a book. She has light skin and blonde hair, has a sunflower in her hair, and is wearing a green sundress.

Ana Mourant (she/her) is an editorial intern for Sundress Publications and a recent graduate of the University of Washington’s editing program. She holds a Certificate in Editing as well as a Certificate in Storytelling and Content Strategy, and a BA in English Language and Literature, with a minor in Professional Writing. Ana conducts manuscript evaluations, edits, and proofreads, as well as provides authenticity and sensitivity readings for Indigenous Peoples content. Ana loves nature writing and Indigenous cultures, and, when she’s not working, is often out in the wilderness tracking animals, Nordic skiing, or just enjoying nature.

Sundress Reads: Review of Fever

Sundress Reads black-and-white logo with a sheep sitting on a stool next to the words "Sundress Reads." The sheep is wearing glasses and holding a cup filled with a hot drink in one hoof and holding an open book in the other.
The woods here are tinted in a turquoise color. The tree barks have specks of green on them. There is two red spikes peeking out from the left side and the bottom right corner. "Fever" is in the middle and below that is the author's name "Shilo Niziolek."

Part bisexual awakening, part chronic illness memoir, Fever by Shilo Niziolek delivers a brutal, heartfelt recounting of the mostly-inner life of a queer woman whose body continuously betrays her. Told in untitled, fragmented vignettes, the book spans decades, reflecting on Niziolek’s past abusive relationship, addictions, her current partner, and her chronic health conditions.

Before the narrative begins, Niziolek greets readers with the definitions of two medical terms, one being “vulvar vestibulitis: a neuro-inflammatory condition in the vestibule, or opening of the vagina, in which inflammation starts from any number of a long list of reasons. This inflammation can cause severe pain during intercourse.” Upon seeing the definition, I was immediately excited to read this book. As a woman who also suffers from chronic vulvar pain, I was eager to hear another person’s experience of the challenges that appear when sex hurts. To my knowledge, the last non-medical publication about vulvodynia (an umbrella term for chronic vulvovaginal pain) is a book called The Camera My Mother Gave Me, written by Susanna Kaysen, who is better known for writing Girl, Interrupted. By simply writing this book, Niziolek contributes to a much-needed dialogue for a community of women that is much larger than one might think, with 16% of women in the U.S. suffering from vulvodynia at some point in their lives.

In a stream-of-consciousness style, Niziolek writes, “I wonder what it’s like to have a sexual body, not just a sexual being trapped inside an unsexual body (14). I felt seen when I read this, both jealous and grateful that this writer found such a succinct way to describe what many women go through when their bodies start saying no, when their minds still want to say yes.

After having vulvodynia for so many years, Niziolek rarely desires physical touch from her partner, which is a common occurrence for women who experience chronic vulvar pain. (Imagine that every time you eat a donut, you get punched in the face—you’re probably going to stop craving donuts at some point.) Thus, instead of moments of in-real-life sexual desire, this book is filled with desirous dreams. It’s almost like a dream journal—but forget the famous Henry James quote, “Tell a dream, lose a reader.” Niziolek poetically dissects her dreams and relates them to her real life, assigning them meaning and pulling in the reader.  

Early on, she questions her dreams and their potency, writing “What kind of woman have I grown to be, who only dreams about bodies on bodies?” (25). After journeying through her dream realms on the page, it seems she arrives at an answer, referring to her dreams as her “double-life, cheating on my waking life with this terrifying and exciting and vibrant and cruel other life” (162). For Niziolek, dreaming is not just playing in the imaginary, but a survival tactic—a brief escape from a bodily existence rooted in illness. The dreams are placed among other non-linear vignettes of her life, both real and imagined; the fragmented style serves as a reflection of the divide between her mind and her body.

At Niziolek’s MFA graduation ceremony, a professor acknowledges her writing, saying, “writing cannot restore the female body, broken into parts, the body in decline, but…writing can regain the body, the words on the page become their own body” (19). Like her dreams, the very act of writing this book is another coping mechanism: a space where she can question her sexuality and attend to every desire that pops up, even the most fleeting. In this way, the words on the page come alive, allowing Niziolek to carry out a version of her life in which she is not chronically ill. Like her dreams, she can love whomever she wants, however she wants, on these pages.

Chronic illness—especially invisible illnesses—can be isolating and lonely. In these pages, Niziolek builds a support system—and not just for herself. This is a must read for any person living with chronic pain, and especially for those living with chronic vulvar pain. It’s a great chance to step away from the medicalization of our bodies and to turn inward, meditating on how this condition affects our innermost being and finding ways to live and love around it.

Fever is available at Querencia Press.

Heather Domenicis (she/her) is an Upper Manhattan based writer and editor. She holds an MFA in Creative Non-Fiction from The New School and her words appear or are forthcoming in Hobart, JAKE, [sub]liminal, and Anti-Heroin Chic. Born in a jail, she is writing a memoir about all that comes with that. You can follow her on Instagram @13heatherlynn1.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: All We Knew But Couldn’t Say by Joanne Vannicola

I needed the silence. The page and pen became my friends, my confidantes, my soft place. It would be the one place where my thoughts, voice, politics, ideology, and identity could exist freely.

I believe that I will be okay. I believe that using my life for the purpose of helping others matters. That creating space and being okay within my own skin matter — being authentic and vocal, emotional and present, trying new things, and even if I fail, getting up to try again. And if I am lucky, I will learn many lessons and rise to as many occasions as present themselves. What exists in me now is the belief that I can make a difference, that my story and life experiences have value. I have much more to do in the world. Art, writing, poetry, music, film, and self-expression matter.

In my deepest place, I go to gratitude and love. It’s love and hope that keeps me motivated, the idea that there is so much more out there. And there are so many young people who have it right, like the Parkland students and young feminists and intersectional queer kids who are ahead of my generation culturally and politically, who are invested in the equity of race and gender, of embracing our differences, and of helping the planet and changing the world. So many beautiful souls.

It is impossible to continue without mentioning the Me Too movement and the women who are bringing awareness to sexual violence and rape. Brave women such as Anita Hill and Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, and, in Canada, women like Lucy DeCoutere — warriors who stand up in the face of hatred and fear and speak out regardless.

Historically, there has always been backlash against women who stand up and against any movement that threatens the power of those who hold it, that tries to right the wrongs of oppression: misogyny, racism, homophobia.

We will win these battles one day. We need to believe that.

As writer and civil rights activist Audre Lorde said, “Revolution is not a one-time event.”

In honor of National Women’s History Month, this selection comes from the book, All We Knew But Couldn’t Say, available from DunDurn Press.  Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Nilsa Rivera.

Joanne Vannicola is an Emmy award-winning actor, author, and advocate. Vannicola is the chair of outACTRAto, the LGBTQ+ committee at ACTRA Toronto, and sits on the sexual assault ad-hoc committee for women in film and television. Vannicola is the recipient of the Leslie Yeo award for volunteerism (2019), and the recipient of The Margaret Trudeau Advocacy Award (2020). Joanne founded the non-profit organization, Youth Out Loud, raising awareness about child abuse, sexual violence, youth rights, and LGBTQ+ equality. http://www.youthoutloud.ca All We Knew But Couldn’t Say, was released in June, 2019, and has been featured as the Top 21 memoirs to read in summer by Bustle magazine, and was featured on The Next Chapter by Shelagh Rogers, the Toronto Star, the Globe, CTV mornings, NOW Magazine, The Girly Club, and the Lambda Literary Reviews. They are currently co-developing a new series, and working on their second book, exploring themes of LGBTQI homelessness. You can learn more at: http://www.joannevannicola.com. Or on Twitter or Instragram: @joannevannicola

Nilsa Rivera Castro writes about women with a socio-economic disadvantage and the effect of trauma, hearing loss, homelessness, and violence in their lives. Her work has been featured in Huffington Post, 50 GS Magazine, Six Hens, The Selkie Literary Magazine, LipServices Miami, Writing Class Radio, and The Cream Literary Alliance. Follow her on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram at @nilsawrites.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: All We Knew But Couldn’t Say by Joanne Vannicola

I HELD ON TO MY SECRETS about my mother in feminist circles. I had to. No one talked about women who hurt women. I didn’t want to take away from the larger conversations about sexism,
racism, or male violence against women, but when I started to ask or mention the idea of women as perpetrators, I was chastised. It kept me out of the circle, unable to speak to it because the space was
needed to talk about misogyny. I understood because I felt the same way, except I needed to be silent once again, even though I wanted to fight the women who screamed at me, and on a few occasions I did.
“It doesn’t mean I hate women because they hurt me. I know what it’s like to be hurt by men.” I wanted to say It’s not my fault. It wasn’t, wasn’t my fault that I carried my mother on my back, all
the shame she heaped on my shoulders. I apologized for exposing it when I heard things like “It’s so rare, there aren’t even any stats” or “It’s not the same.”

I wasn’t comparing, and if it was rare, then I was rare but just as real.

But it wasn’t healthy to apologize for a history I had no part in making. They could not hold on to my reality while battling sexism; it inspired a rage in others I didn’t know what to do with, so I apologized.

Women could not let go of their ideas of the struggling mother or the good mother or the abused wife, and the narrative I presented took away from that focus. But people forgot the context — that men and women who grew up in violence or abuse were not immune to repeating the patterns of abuse simply because they might be female. We hadn’t been able to get the culture to acknowledge that sexism and male violence were at the core of so many of our struggles as women, so to expose the abusive woman, the abusive mother, was just too much for many.
Women may live in a misogynist culture, but so, too, do women have power over those more vulnerable: children. We do no one any good by believing we do not have power, or power over. Just
as my mother had been an abused girl, had been victimized by the province she grew up in and the rules of her generation, she, too, had power over her children. All of this was true at the same time.

I couldn’t allow myself to feel invisible, not after surviving both my parents, not after the journey to get to where I had arrived. It had been a lifetime of trying to tell. I could not speak when I was a
child, could not find words as an adolescent, had nearly died from starvation while trying to tell the world about my mother and my father, and had almost erased my lesbian identity to keep others
safe, to not rock the boat, to fit into the industry. It had been a lifetime of secrets. I could not allow my reality to be dismissed in order to protect someone or something else anymore.

Every woman I met carried their experiences in their bodies. It was in every face and story shared, even by the most stoic and brave of women, the toughest women or butches, even those who
had killed men or had been in prison, whose armour cracked and who shed tears while recounting the wounds of homophobia, hate, rape. I presented an unusual and complex reality without reference for others, which made it difficult to believe and hold.

So I found solace in silence again, the safest space.

In honor of National Women’s History Month, this selection comes from the book, All We Knew But Couldn’t Say, available from DunDurn Press.  Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Nilsa Rivera.

Joanne Vannicola is an Emmy award-winning actor, author, and advocate. Vannicola is the chair of outACTRAto, the LGBTQ+ committee at ACTRA Toronto, and sits on the sexual assault ad-hoc committee for women in film and television. Vannicola is the recipient of the Leslie Yeo award for volunteerism (2019), and the recipient of The Margaret Trudeau Advocacy Award (2020). Joanne founded the non-profit organization, Youth Out Loud, raising awareness about child abuse, sexual violence, youth rights, and LGBTQ+ equality. http://www.youthoutloud.ca All We Knew But Couldn’t Say, was released in June, 2019, and has been featured as the Top 21 memoirs to read in summer by Bustle magazine, and was featured on The Next Chapter by Shelagh Rogers, the Toronto Star, the Globe, CTV mornings, NOW Magazine, The Girly Club, and the Lambda Literary Reviews. They are currently co-developing a new series, and working on their second book, exploring themes of LGBTQI homelessness. You can learn more at: http://www.joannevannicola.com. Or on Twitter or Instragram: @joannevannicola

Nilsa Rivera Castro writes about women with a socio-economic disadvantage and the effect of trauma, hearing loss, homelessness, and violence in their lives. Her work has been featured in Huffington Post, 50 GS Magazine, Six Hens, The Selkie Literary Magazine, LipServices Miami, Writing Class Radio, and The Cream Literary Alliance. Follow her on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram at @nilsawrites.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: All We Knew But Couldn’t Say by Joanne Vannicola

“We have received a complaint about you both,” said the director of the program at George Brown College. Elia and I were taking some courses together and had both been summoned.
“You’re kidding, right?” Elia asked as if she already knew why.
“What for?” I asked.
“There was a complaint about your kissing in front of the school.”
“Are you serious?” Elia asked.
I didn’t say anything. For the first time in my life I had a girlfriend who was demonstrative, who didn’t hide her lesbianism and did not care what other people thought. Fuck them. I had a right to kiss outside like other young lovers did. Being gay was no longer a crime under the law. If we wanted to kiss, that was our choice.
The meeting with the director didn’t last long. She knew she had no right to ask us to hide.
“Let’s have a kiss-in,” Elia said when we were outside again,
looking around at all the other students who shared programs with us. “I wonder who the homophobes are?” Elia and I looked for straight couples. Were other people kissing, holding each other?
Was someone looking at us with a scowl on his or her face?
“Kiss me now,” I said to Elia, making sure we were as close to each other as possible, facing each other on the steps in front of the main doors with our hands reaching out to one another. We kissed as if it were our wedding day.
After a long kiss we walked back inside the school and went to class.
We made it a rule to kiss as often as we could on campus. Other people would just have to deal with it. We hadn’t committed any crime, and unless kissing was going to be regulated for all students in love, straight and gay, then we would kiss every chance we had.

In honor of National Women’s History Month, this selection comes from the book, All We Knew But Couldn’t Say, available from DunDurn Press.  Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Nilsa Rivera.

Joanne Vannicola is an Emmy award-winning actor, author, and advocate. Vannicola is the chair of outACTRAto, the LGBTQ+ committee at ACTRA Toronto, and sits on the sexual assault ad-hoc committee for women in film and television. Vannicola is the recipient of the Leslie Yeo award for volunteerism (2019), and the recipient of The Margaret Trudeau Advocacy Award (2020). Joanne founded the non-profit organization, Youth Out Loud, raising awareness about child abuse, sexual violence, youth rights, and LGBTQ+ equality. http://www.youthoutloud.ca All We Knew But Couldn’t Say, was released in June, 2019, and has been featured as the Top 21 memoirs to read in summer by Bustle magazine, and was featured on The Next Chapter by Shelagh Rogers, the Toronto Star, the Globe, CTV mornings, NOW Magazine, The Girly Club, and the Lambda Literary Reviews. They are currently co-developing a new series, and working on their second book, exploring themes of LGBTQI homelessness. You can learn more at: http://www.joannevannicola.com. Or on Twitter or Instragram: @joannevannicola

Nilsa Rivera Castro writes about women with a socio-economic disadvantage and the effect of trauma, hearing loss, homelessness, and violence in their lives. Her work has been featured in Huffington Post, 50 GS Magazine, Six Hens, The Selkie Literary Magazine, LipServices Miami, Writing Class Radio, and The Cream Literary Alliance. Follow her on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram at @nilsawrites.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: All We Knew But Couldn’t Say by Joanne Vannicola

I had thought that once I’d escaped my mother and my past, once I’d found independence, that somehow all my fantasies and dreams would come true. It was all a lie, all a bunch of false information that we ingested from television shows, news, and school, the fallacy of a
better tomorrow. Lies.
There would be nothing better, nothing to look forward to. I knew too much. I believed I knew everything there was to know. I believed that kids like me, from violent or broken homes, couldn’t buy in to societal norms. They were lies, imposed concepts — marriage and children, houses, nine-to-five jobs — designed to keep us in line. Lines I had no use for. I lived outside of them. I wanted nothing to do with them. With anything.

I was fifteen and no longer satisfied with just starving.

In honor of National Women’s History Month, this selection comes from the book, All We Knew But Couldn’t Say, available from DunDurn Press.  Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Nilsa Rivera.

Joanne Vannicola is an Emmy award-winning actor, author, and advocate. Vannicola is the chair of outACTRAto, the LGBTQ+ committee at ACTRA Toronto, and sits on the sexual assault ad-hoc committee for women in film and television. Vannicola is the recipient of the Leslie Yeo award for volunteerism (2019), and the recipient of The Margaret Trudeau Advocacy Award (2020). Joanne founded the non-profit organization, Youth Out Loud, raising awareness about child abuse, sexual violence, youth rights, and LGBTQ+ equality. http://www.youthoutloud.ca All We Knew But Couldn’t Say, was released in June, 2019, and has been featured as the Top 21 memoirs to read in summer by Bustle magazine, and was featured on The Next Chapter by Shelagh Rogers, the Toronto Star, the Globe, CTV mornings, NOW Magazine, The Girly Club, and the Lambda Literary Reviews. They are currently co-developing a new series, and working on their second book, exploring themes of LGBTQI homelessness. You can learn more at: http://www.joannevannicola.com. Or on Twitter or Instragram: @joannevannicola

Nilsa Rivera Castro writes about women with a socio-economic disadvantage and the effect of trauma, hearing loss, homelessness, and violence in their lives. Her work has been featured in Huffington Post, 50 GS Magazine, Six Hens, The Selkie Literary Magazine, LipServices Miami, Writing Class Radio, and The Cream Literary Alliance. Follow her on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram at @nilsawrites.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: All We Knew But Couldn’t Say by Joanne Vannicola

I stuck my head out the window to get away from the moving walls. I stared at a tree, but it was breathing too. Everything was breathing in and out — the night sky, the leaves, parked cars, even the moon. Why hadn’t I seen the moon breathe before? I held myself and rocked back and forth to the rhythm of breath all around me. I looked at the moon again and wondered if it were possible for the moon and sun to collide, to explode and scatter fallen ashes around the Earth like dust.

In honor of National Women’s History Month, this selection comes from the book, All We Knew But Couldn’t Say, available from DunDurn Press.  Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Nilsa Rivera.

Joanne Vannicola is an Emmy award-winning actor, author, and advocate. Vannicola is the chair of outACTRAto, the LGBTQ+ committee at ACTRA Toronto, and sits on the sexual assault ad-hoc committee for women in film and television. Vannicola is the recipient of the Leslie Yeo award for volunteerism (2019), and the recipient of The Margaret Trudeau Advocacy Award (2020). Joanne founded the non-profit organization, Youth Out Loud, raising awareness about child abuse, sexual violence, youth rights, and LGBTQ+ equality. http://www.youthoutloud.ca All We Knew But Couldn’t Say, was released in June, 2019, and has been featured as the Top 21 memoirs to read in summer by Bustle magazine, and was featured on The Next Chapter by Shelagh Rogers, the Toronto Star, the Globe, CTV mornings, NOW Magazine, The Girly Club, and the Lambda Literary Reviews. They are currently co-developing a new series, and working on their second book, exploring themes of LGBTQI homelessness. You can learn more at: http://www.joannevannicola.com. Or on Twitter or Instragram: @joannevannicola

Nilsa Rivera Castro writes about women with a socio-economic disadvantage and the effect of trauma, hearing loss, homelessness, and violence in their lives. Her work has been featured in Huffington Post, 50 GS Magazine, Six Hens, The Selkie Literary Magazine, LipServices Miami, Writing Class Radio, and The Cream Literary Alliance. Follow her on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram at @nilsawrites.

SAFTA Presents.. Monsterworks: A Writing Workshop on Revision

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Sundress Academy for the Arts is holding a new writing workshop in February for both beginning and advanced writers. Hosted by Sundress Publications authors Sarah Ann Winn and M. Mack, “Monsterworks: Hybrid Genres and Revision” focuses on creatively revising unfinished work and promises to send participants home with more than a few Franken-pieces to be proud of.

The success of this workshop depends on how much “body” you bring to work with and how creative you are with slicing up your work and reinventing it! Besides bringing some writing in need of revision and re-imagining, the only requirements for this workshop is that participants bring a journal, pen, scissors, glue/tape. Creativity is also a plus, but if you lack that or lack pages of your own writing to work with, there will be plenty of spare parts to go around.

Sarah Ann Winn lives in Fairfax Virginia. Her poems have appeared or will appear in Bayou Magazine, [d]ecember, Massachusetts Review, Quarterly West, and RHINO among others. Her chapbook, Portage, is forthcoming from Sundress Publications this winter. Her life as a poet-free-range-librarian-workshop-leader is a hybrid work in progress.

M. Mack is a genderqueer poet, editor, and fiber artist in Virginia. Mack is the author of the chapbooks Traveling (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2015) and Imaginary Kansas (dancing girl press, 2015). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Fence, Gargoyle, Menacing Hedge, Finery, The Queer South (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2014), and elsewhere. Mack holds an MFA from George Mason University and is a founding co-editor of Gazing Grain Press, an explicitly inclusive feminist chapbook press. Theater of Parts is hir debut collection and will be released in 2016 from Sundress Publications.

This workshop is for writers of any genre or experience level who want to have fun with words and see their writing in a new light. Monsterworks will cost $25 to attend. Paying early is always recommended to reserve a spot, as they will start to fill up the closer it gets to the event. It will The workshop will be on Saturday, February 7, from 1PM – 4PM at Firefly Farms located at 195 Tobby Hollow Lane, Knoxville TN 37931.

Sign up at the SAFTA website or our online store!

“Memoria” by Nicole Oquendo

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Lately, I’ve been losing my memory. Mostly my short-term memory, but I’m also finding myself losing older memories, too. Sometimes the images or names I’m trying to remember are just beyond my reach. I can remember the color of the walls in my room when I was three, but I’ve been losing names and numbers.

For days, I’ve been trying to remember my hairdresser’s name. I‘ve needed a haircut for weeks, but I can’t bring myself to call and fumble around asking for, you know, the blonde, the one with the tattoos.

There are tons of essays and blogs out in the universe dealing with memory and how it plays into nonfiction. Of course memory is subjective. Of course memory can change over time. I am proof of this now, and in some ways grieve for the parts of my life I’ll never think about again.

I’ve already written a book full of memoir. I hear people talk about writing their memoirs, the plural of this word, at the end of their lives, as if they’re resigning themselves to the idea that they’ll never again have another memory worth sharing. I didn’t take this route, and instead wrote about the most challenging parts of my life right after they happened. I’m twenty-nine, and last year I finished my book full of memoirs.

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If you don’t count blog posts like this one, I haven’t written an essay in over a year. The one I finished after I wrote my book of memoirs was published, and since it has floated as a disconnected memory. Over the last year, I’ve finished a book of poetry, and all of the poems are true in the sense that they came from me and it hurts to not be honest, but they are not essays in the traditional way we understand them. When I try to write an essay, I grasp at memories that have the texture of smoke. Lately, I can’t hold them long enough to write paragraphs. This is why I’ve been writing in stanzas.

 

I spent almost an hour this morning looking for my deodorant, late for work and tearing off sheets, throwing piles of laundry, meticulously inventorying every item in the bathroom, on the shelves, under the bed. I opened up a new one when I had given up; the memory of where I placed the object is lost. Last night, it was an hour looking for the phone I had put down minutes before. Objects, like memories, are never where I leave them.

It’s a side effect of medication, as far as I know. There’s no mystery other than what I did yesterday or the day before. I keep lists upon lists now to make sure I remember what I did each day, but this doesn’t always work. I experience events that cause excitement and disappointment more than once each, not in the way a memory will inspire a feeling.

There are notes now for a book of nonfiction I’d like to start writing soon. It will be a book full of memoir in that I’m researching hard, and plan to add my observations to events I’ve never experienced. As far as I know, this book will not be about me, and I wonder, in the realm of narrative nonfiction, if that is even possible. Maybe it will always be about me; in nonfiction, my narrator’s observations characterize me, the narrator. Observations are subjective; a memorial.

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The point, because I swear there is one, is that research has taken the place of memories as the foundation for my nonfiction work. And this is okay. In college we wondered as a group what we as essayists were going to write about when there was nothing exciting going on. How do you craft an essay when you have no experiences of your own to write about? Of course life is always happening, but what if what’s going on doesn’t mean anything? Research can mean digging through what’s left of what I can remember, too.

There’s no easy answer. What happens to memories when they are lost? What if who I am is a thing I forget? Right now I am focusing on memories that others have documented, and I think for now that will be enough.

 

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Nicole Oquendo is a writer, teacher, and editor interested in multimodal compositions of nonfiction and poetry, including multimodal translations of both genres. She is currently an Associate Course Director at Full Sail University, and serves as an Assistant Editor for Sundress Publications, as well as the Nonfiction Editor for Best of the Net. Her work has appeared in DIAGRAM, fillingStation, Storm Cellar, and Menacing Hedge, among others. She also runs the websitetimetopublish.com, which posts daily reviews of literary markets.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Excerpt from Adriana Páramo’s My Mother’s Funeral

EXCERPT FROM ADRIANA PARAMO’S MY MOTHER’S FUNERAL

Cows’ brains. That’s what Mom cooked the day my brother left. Whenever she was in a foul mood, we all paid. She cooked angry food, which is to say, we ate angry food in tense silence. The brains kept slipping off Mom’s fingers as she tried to wash them in the sink. They looked like a conglomerate of cauliflower heads covered by a thin membrane that made them appear wet. Red blood vessels traversed the yellowish matter.

After the veins and the membrane were removed, Mom dropped the brains into boiling water. She added bouillon cubes if she was splurging or plain salt if she wasn’t. The day my brother left, she used salt. As the brains cooked and their surface became tender and malleable, their smell also changed. It went from gamey to homey; it morphed from alien and backwards to something familiar, something that made our bellies twitch.

On the kitchen counter Mom chopped garlic, onions, and tomatoes, although it looked as if she were doing much more than just chopping. She was murdering the white bulbs of the onions and, with them, she was killing something else. She swung the hollow green ends into the garbage like she was trying to fling them out of the kitchen. What a wild chef Mom was that day.

“My biology teacher says that the green end is the most flavorful part of the onion,” my oldest sister Dalila said, looking at the scallions in the can.

Mom shot her a narrow-eyed, watch-it look. “Who’s cooking, me or the biology teacher?”

We knew better than to take the issue any further and watched in silence as Mom sautéed the onions and the tomatoes in reheated pork lard. When the mixture was ready, she jumbled it up with the garlic bits, the cows’ brains, and three eggs. She beat the concoction with fury. The fork’s prongs rose and fell, breaking the gelatinous texture of the brains, the viscosity of the eggs, and in a moment she had created something very similar to scrambled eggs, filled with protein and maybe unsuspected diseases.

“I have a project for my biology class,” my oldest sister said. She was the only one talking. My other three sisters and I knew that Mom was not in a talking mood. We didn’t scrape or clatter our cutlery against the plates. It was a quiet meal.

“I could get an A+ and extra points if I complete the whole thing,” Dalila said. I looked at her and couldn’t help noticing how perfectly shaped her nose was, how much lighter her skin was than mine, how, when she smiled, her teeth shone even and white like marble sculptures.

“About time you bring home good grades,” Mom said. “What is it you have to do?”

“An anatomy project,” my sister said. “We need to assemble a skeleton.”

My mother, who had never been known as squeamish, had no qualms about this. If her daughter needed a skeleton to do well in her class, a skeleton she would get. Or two, as it turned out.

Back then, graves in Colombia were not final resting places. They were a liminal phase of the disposal of human remains. The bodies were buried in graves leased for five years. At the end of the term the remains were disinterred and the surviving relatives given two options: to increase the term of the lease or to rebury the body in perpetuity. In either case the caskets—if still in good form—were reused and the graves leased again. Disturbing the dead used to be a good business. When the bodies went unclaimed, they were placed in plastic bags and thrown into common graves, which were later incinerated or buried for good, depending on the resources of the cemetery—the final touch of social stratification. Yet accidental disinterment sometimes happened. Twenty years later, my grandfather’s grave would be mistaken for somebody else’s whose lease had expired, and his remains would be disinterred. Mom would go to the cemetery in Mariquita to leave flowers on his grave and find the place desecrated. She would spot his remains in a burlap bag among the undertaker’s tools, other burlap bags containing unclaimed bones, and an army of worms creeping out of a skull. She would cry, humiliated and indignant, lamenting that this would not have happened had her family been upper class.

This excerpt appeared in Adriana Páramo’s memoir, My Mother’s Funeral, available from CavanKerry Press!  Purchase yours today!

Adriana Páramo is a Colombian anthropologist winner of the Social Justice and Equality Award in creative nonfiction with her book Looking for Esperanza. Her writing has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Los Angeles Review, Consequence Magazine, Fourteen Hills, Carolina Quarterly Review, Magnolia Journal, So To Speak, Compass Rose, and Phati’tude, among others. Páramo has volunteered her time as a transcriber forVoice of Witness, a book series which empowers those affected by social injustice.

This week’s Wardrobe Best Dressed was selected Nicole Oquendo. Nicole Oquendo is an Assistant Editor for Sundress Publications, and the Nonfiction Editor of Best of the Net. Her most recently published essays and poetry can be found in DIAGRAM, fillingStation, Storm Cellar, and Truck.