Sometimes Shoddy, Sometimes Surprising

Dear Vocal and its Voices,

I filled my first real diary with blue-inked adolescent despair. Sometimes my entries rhymed, always they showcased the rooms in my brain where the aesthetic was Lisa Frank Catastrophizing Chic. One entry was read by my mother (when she was “concerned” and “putting away laundry”), and she immediately took me to see a therapist.

I remember sharing my diary with the counselor, upon this kind woman’s request and my mother’s urging, and then relaxing my fifteen-year-old scrawny shoulders against her pleather chair when the psychologist wasn’t worried or shocked. She encouraged me to keep writing, telling me that the good, the bad, and the ugly all belonged on my pages. They were happening in my head, so I might as well be a participant. I wasn’t talking the way I wrote, barely talking at all, so she told me to release the words. Like they were a wild squirrel I’d been keeping locked under my bed. Release it and name it, and then feed it if it hangs around and I enjoy its company.

Since then, I’ve breathed through my words on paper and continued to feed breadcrumbs to my woodland creatures. Works of fiction, flowery questions, poems, lies, stand-up sets, love letters. When my heart has been broken, when nothing makes sense except for the rules of grammar, when I’m so low or so high I can’t reach a moment of tomorrow. It’s been a grace I have given myself, a loving and illuminating connection to my personhood and to all that can be holy, to the weirdness inside and around me.

But I didn’t share my writing before you, Vocal.

I had my son, my first child. And suddenly just having him in the world, his existence, felt like I was whispering when the winds blew, like I was in on the wonder of the world. Without choosing it so, he was a gift I was constantly bestowing and receiving and re-wrapping and releasing and re-discovering. Around and around it went. It was everything to lose, to gain, it was everything all of the time. And I was better for living in the world with him. I wanted to broaden the other ways I could be better, find new words.

Vocal, you gave me new words, new authors, new genres, new questions. New versions of myself to find, like stumbling upon terrariums in my house that I didn’t know existed. I learned right away that your creators on here are incredible, and the pieces humbled me tremendously. I joyfully realized that I was both a terrible and competent writer, so thankful to feel myself evolve with every keystroke or “challenge” I entered. You, Voices of Vocal, you gave me a new way to read and marvel and listen.

In learning about the fresh faces of a story and the bone structure of her prose, I was able to discern something else. My former tradition of locking myself away in my brain to create sense, my isolated way of writing, hadn’t been what I thought it was. Keeping my written words shut in because my voiced words didn’t seem to cut it wasn’t fostering connection, but rather a stifled yearning. On Vocal, when I received feedback or any type of acknowledgement on the pieces I posted, I was reminded that the humanity of writing is louder than my own insecurities. Feeling someone else’s skin when I typed a description of my own eczema-kissed hands set me ablaze, helped me see the art in what I was doing. Thus, it became a little easier to let others in my life read my work too.

Soon, my husband (a pragmatic man and my personal hero) became my chief editor. He has an eye for seeing what I wouldn’t consider – plot holes or truths – and a heart for caring about a dead lobster if I damn-well write about a dead lobster. It shocked me how easy it was to display my warts and let him dissect them. I’d said vows to him, but never had promised access to my soul scriptures. Strangers, sure. But the man who carried a mustache on his lip and my home in his arms? That hadn’t ever been an option, until suddenly it was just a step in the process by which I posted on Vocal. Now he reads my work like it’s his job, his duty. And, I can tell you this, Vocal and its Voices, he is proud of me; like a handprint in my wet cement, this fact has been written into my foundation. When I die, it will endure in my basement.

My husband shared my Vocal profile page with his family, including my brother-in-law (a brilliant artist, novelist, and a person who amazingly turns being a dad or baking a pie into a starry display of care, curiosity, and sharp animation). I couldn’t have anticipated what would happen next. He began providing me paragraphs-worth of feedback and questions and excitement in response to my writing. We’d talk about his writing at Christmas, my ideas in my mother-in-law’s kitchen, and soon other family members were joining in.

I’d been many things to the people in my life: a tired new mom, a bleeding heart, a space cadet, but I’d never been a person who talks about her writing. I was talking, and I was asking and sponging – all with people I love and respect. It was a new wardrobe, a fresh outlook, or a coming out celebration no one but me knew they were attending. I didn’t need to say the words just right because suddenly the people in my life knew that it existed in me – the good, the bad, and the ugly. “Hi, I’m A. Lenae, and I’m a [sometimes shoddy, sometimes surprising, usually weird] writer.”

Then my brother died.

I channeled you, Vocal and its Voices. I came up with my own prompts to help me tolerate and survive the sudden skin-cutting temperature shift in my life. I wrote my speech for my brother's memorial, wrote letters to him and to his child who would grow up without him. I wrote to save my life because the loss of his life will always be a hidden trapdoor on my path. The Vocal challenges provided me new ways to write about him, of course, so I did. And then, I shared them with my parents. Nothing I said could help, but sending them links to my pieces was my way of offering them some cushions when they fell through their own trapdoors.

As 2023 progressed, I felt myself drift away from the communal creative plain that Vocal provides, feeling too stressed and too exhausted to participate or contribute. The writing I did do was aimless and without direction (lacking my own internal prompts or the prompts you, Vocal and its Voices, provide). This continued until I received a Christmas present from a “Secret Santa.”

It was bigger than a gift card, which was suspicious. With family surrounding me, I peeled off the wrapping paper to find a renaissance-esque portrait of myself on the cover of a . . . book. My brother-in-law had assembled everything I’d contributed to Vocal over the course of the previous year, and he had printed my work. My words failed me as I realized what it was, as I immediately fell in love with the idea that someday I could physically hand my children some of my own writing. When I looked at my brother-in-law and attempted to squeak out how grateful I was, I knew he could read my appreciation even if I couldn’t properly convey it. He’s a writer, and I’m a writer, after all.

“Writing is a way of sharing our humanity.” – William McIlvanney

Now, here we are, in 2024. I look back at my time with you, Vocal and its Voices, and I feel a power that arises. That power is fueled by sharing the written word. That’s what I want to do this year – feed that communion, feed the power of authorship.

My goal is to respond to the Vocal prompts that prompt me, and with each new piece I write, I aim to share it with one new person in my life. When I share with someone else, I want to make it clear that it is not just an invitation to read my words, but a promise that I will thoughtfully consume whatever they want to put out into the world.

My other goal is to share you, Voices. As we all appreciate hearing about exciting and thought-provoking authors, I intend to share the Vocal Voices who speak to me. Some of you ask novel questions to challenge old fears, some can tie me up in knots with your poetic compositions and emotional clarity, and some of you fertilize my artistic soil with your ability to destroy and rebuild societal constructs and ideas of self. When I feel newness as I read something shared by one of you, I will share you with someone in my world. I won’t need to say why with my silly words; I will just tell them, “This voice is worth hearing.” And I will let you know that I’m sharing your work when I comment.

As I read and write, and therefore talk about what I’m reading and writing, my hope is that my time with you, Vocal and its Voices, means something new in 2024. I want it to mean solidarity and community in exploration and stumbling, want it to mean unity in feeling different and ostracized sometimes, and I want it to foster safety in the forests of what terrifies us.

We’re contained in our own experiences as individuals, but we share in them as writers and lovers of art. I’m looking forward to it all.