Create to Escape: Finding My Way Back With Words

Writing has been my reprieve these last few months. All of the endings and new beginnings, the loss, the trauma, the change; it all opened a floodgate of words.

For a long time, those words were silenced. They built up quietly, waiting for me to make space for them again. When they finally came, they poured out in every form: poetry, fantasy, and literary fiction. Through my characters—Claire, Prue, Lane, Cece, and so many others—I’ve begun to find pieces of myself that had been dormant for years.

My mom always saw the writer in me. After she died, I found my first journal, a small notebook she had given me in first grade. Inside the front cover, she wrote:

She was my first encourager. She convinced me to submit my first poem in high school, and when I hesitated, she drove me to a poetry reading at Barnes & Noble so I could read it aloud. She knew that once I shared my words, once I saw that other people could love them too, I would begin to believe in their worth.

But then, for years, I stopped writing.

It wasn’t until recently that I found my way back. I write now with the kind of urgency that comes after silence. My poetry chapbook, Echoes, and my full-length collection, Fractures of Light, both explore that journey, revisiting poems I wrote in 2003, 2005, and 2007 and responding to them as the woman I’ve become. They form a conversation between the girl I was, struggling with body image, grief, and belonging, and the woman who finally found her voice.

There are blank pages that represent silence. Then, after the silence, is the flood.

My mom was alive when I finished my first novel. I was able to read parts of it to her, though she never got to see the full scope of what was born out of the cliff that came after. I wish I could thank her for giving me the map that helped me find my way back to myself, through words, through healing, through creation.

An excerpt from Create to Escape:

Words are the invisible tether
connecting us
in the breaking,
in the silence.
We have all stood
in the same shadows,
naming what was broken,
carving survival into stone.
Each word a breath
I could not take aloud,
each poem a way
to come back home.