Like the spore from South America
that needled through the only hole
of my screened shelter house,
a killer bee that bored its venom
into my painter’s hand, swelling
it to the size of a boxing glove,
like at the emergency room
and the injection
into the hip,
the healing white magic of medicine
that turned black,
sending me into blackness…

I was lying upon my back
on the tiled floor in high school
below my locker, number 448,
below my classmates—
Trudy, Dennis, Dave, Becky—
hunched over, arms extended.
They had been dead for years.

Hunched over me was a doctor,
his finger pressed to the pulse of my neck,
a malevolent smile of a deity
upon his face, the countenance of one
who delivers life.
“What are the odds of that?”
I heard a nurse cry.

The ricochet had
ricocheted.

Robert E. Petras is a graduate of West Liberty University and a resident of Toronto, Ohio. His poems and short fiction have appeared in more than 60 publications, often writing about personal experiences such as the trauma that occurred in “The Ricochet” and his fight against kidney cancer and is now a 5 1/2-year survivor.

The gurney is covered in thin white hospital issued sheets, the hospital name stamped but faded at the worn corners. My arms are wrapped tightly around myself and I am rocking back and forth. It is something I do to comfort myself. Tears are spilling down my cheeks as once again a nurse checks my blood pressure and readies an IV to put in my arm. I feel the TAP…TAP… of her finger against my clammy skin as she checks for an entry site. I do not question her, but flinch as I feel the pin prick of the needle enter my vein.

The nurse tries to engage me in small talk, wanting to know why I had taken the pills. I am silent. I refuse to talk. She shakes her head as if to say tsk…tsk. The IV is put in, and the nurse hands me a cup filled with a black chalky substance.

“Down the hatch Christine, you know the routine.”

Though I don’t want to drink this awful tasting drink, I know if I refuse, the nurse will get angry, so I reach out and reluctantly take it from her hand. My hands shake as I bring the cup to my lips, and I shudder taking the first swallow. I drink this black chalky substance to counteract the numerous pills I had hastily taken hours before. I have long learned that this substance is activated charcoal and it is an emergency measure used when someone swallows a toxic drug or chemical. Activated charcoal is given in the form of a thick black, liquid suspension either orally for conscious victims or through a tube and into the stomach for those who are unconscious or unable to swallow the liquid.

The nurse gets a bedpan and puts it beside me on my bed. She stands and watches me from about a foot away. She knows from my last visit that I had tried to take the cup of charcoal and throw it across the room. My defiance is not going to be tolerated this time. As this black chalky substance enters my mouth, I want to gag. I almost do, and the nurse says quite crossly,

“We don’t like giving this stuff, why do you keep doing this to yourself?”

I can’t tell her why I keep on overdosing, why my thoughts are consumed with darkness and doom. In my head, I am asking myself “why should I tell her, she won’t understand.” She shakes her head in frustration as if to say “stupid little girl” and abruptly tells me,

“The doctor will be in soon,”

I’m sitting on the gurney, and though my head is foggy, I hear the sounds of the ER around me. I hear patients moaning in pain, the whispered voices of the doctors in consultation with specialists, discussing a line of treatment, and a nurse chirpily asking

“Are you warm enough m’aam? Are you warm enough sir?

“ Would you like me to bring you a blanket?”

This courtesy doesn’t extend to me. I get a cursory glance as the nurses pass by; their annoyance palpable. As an overdose patient, I know I am an annoyance to the ER staff. I have been here so many times this past month. The ER has become a revolving door. I am in, I’m treated and then I’m out again. Sometimes I’m admitted, and when I am, I am sent up to the psychiatric floor, where my stay can be from two weeks to almost a month.

As I sit on the gurney in the ER, waiting for the doctor, my thoughts are everywhere. I look around me. I feel the crust of the charcoal around my lips, and clumsily try to wipe my mouth. I’m so tired. I want to sleep and my eyes begin to droop. I curl up on the gurney, grabbing the sheets and pulling them tightly around me. I lay down; my knees are to my chest. The last thing I see before I drift off to sleep is the tubing from the IV, and I faintly hear the drip…drip… of the liquid in the IV going into my arm.

Today I realize, more than anything the hospital served as a safe, albeit punishing, haven. A place where I knew I could be saved however briefly from the incessant torment going on within my mind. Little did I know then that once I worked through the inner torment that drove me repeatedly into the ER, that I would be free. I didn’t know then that it was the same me that swallowed those pills that would have to climb up from the darkness and undertake a journey through the very torment that threatened to consume me and out into the light. Today I reflect on those days and know that my story, being lived out in so many places, by so many others, also has the power to heal, and that sharing it may help someone else see the light after the darkness and hopefully help them find their own courage to walk out of that pain and into a new life of strength and overcoming.

Christine MacFarlane is a Saulteaux woman from Peguis First Nation. She is an emerging writer and is graduating from the University of Toronto with a specialization in Aboriginal Studies in June 2011. Her story “Choosing the Path to Healing” appeared in the 2006 anthology Growing Up Girl: An Anthology of Voices from Marginalized Spaces, and a creative non-fiction piece titled As A Child appeared in Yellow Medicine Review in 2008, and has a new piece titled “Mother: An Essay” in Yellow Medicine Review Spring 2011. Christine  is at her happiest when she is engaged in writing. She has a regular column in the Native Canadian newsletter, titled Life’s Journey and freelances for Anishinabek News and First Nations House magazine that is based out of First Nations House of the University of Toronto. She writes about issues that are close to her but is also open to exploring new venues to get her writing out there.

But you strolled by,
saw opportunity,
poured that potent drink.
Flipped me, shook me from my flowerpot.
Took what you wanted to take
with palmate hands,
sober hands.

I live on the ground now
where I’ve been splayed atop the soil,
where vetch braids itself across my stalks
and ivy strangles my roots that ache
for moisture, security
in the damp layers of the earth.

Though I can be replanted,
I am like a tree;
what was done is visible
in the knots,
in the heartwood,
in each misshapen growth ring.

Eileen Neary, a survivor, describes writing “as both an important outlet and a hobby”. Her poetry has been published in numerous journals and magazines including The Rockford Review, CICADA Creative Endeavors, Breadcrumb Scabs, South Jersey Underground, Anemone Sidecar, Midwest Literary Review, the poetry anthology “Soft Corners,” and more.

I don’t know what made me go out drinking that night, it wasn’t even my intention to go out on one of the worse drinking nights out in the city.  But it was a long day at work, my nerves were frayed, so Jenn, who is Taiwanese, a fellow Asian friend, called me, and I joined her to celebrate our fellow Asianess on a day for leprechauns and four leaf clovers.    Brendan, Jenn’s boyfriend, was with us.  He’s tall, Caucasian, part Scottish, part German, no Irish green flowing through his veins.     But we were tired after only a few drinks and wanting to escape the mess of the bridge and tunnel crowds swarming the city streets for St. Patrick’s Day, we thought it best to end the night early.

We chose to split a cab between us, on the way home to Brooklyn.   Jenn and I never had problems getting cabs, perhaps the petite Asian woman thing did something to lend us an advantage.  But within minutes, a cab was in sight.  I slid in first, then Jenn.  But Brendan never made it into the car.  A hand grabbed him from behind, shoved him to the ground.    Jenn’s scream echoed in my ears.

When I was younger, I never talked of my brother’s screams.  Nor of my sister’s.   Over the years, their screams followed me in my dreams, hollowed echoes, waking me at night, my hands sweaty, my mind numb from the sound.  I never slept well through the night.  Maybe because it was years of screams built into my memory, pent up, bursting at the walls of my mind.   Once, after a night of screaming, I took out a journal, wrote down the words, “I am scared.”  My brother was there.  He stopped my hand from imprinting the words into paper.  I was taught never to tell these stories.  It was never my story to tell.  I never had a reason to scream.

Brendan didn’t scream.  We heard his grunts from outside the cab, heavy hands forcing him away from the car.  Jenny slid out first.  I second.    The cab sped away, back door swung open, tires squealing around the corner.

Jenn cried, “No! No! Stop it!  Stop it!”  Brendan was on the ground.  I didn’t know how many guys there were.  Maybe four or five.  All Caucasian.  All drunk.  But Brendan was Caucasian too.  But this fight wasn’t about race.

A Drunken Boy tried to connect his fist with Brendan’s face as he yelled, “Our cab! That was our cab!”  There was no logic to this.   These boys were nowhere in sight.   Jenn and I hailed it down.  It was our cab.   But alcohol pushes past logic, works feelings into a fever, makes hands curl, faces red, the urge to hit an instant impulse.

To me, a hit is an imagined sound.  I’ve heard the slap of skin against skin, the hard crack of bone connecting to bone.  A body shoved against a wall.  Glass broken.  The echo of a scream.

As a child, I grew up in the aftermath of imagined sound.  The cause and effect reaction of borders being crossed.  Our house was like a museum.  Perfect carpeted living room and dining floors, dark upturned fibers marking the stroke and push of the vacuum.  Large vaulted ceilings, cold skylights carved geometrically into the wall, light hitting the rooms in perfect angle.  We didn’t raise our voices in the museum.    We had to tiptoe like mice, lower our voices to whispers.  We bowed our heads, kept our feet out of the living room and the dining room.  The carpet was too perfect there.  Its marks bore our disrespect.

A hit would happen when a border was crossed.  My sister slipped out of the house to see a boy.  My brother drank tequila with his friends.  My father found out.  My mother retreated into their bedroom.  My father yelled for me to go to my room.   I sat in my room, door open, in the silence, in the dark.  The screams reverberated the walls.  I clutched my pillows to my chest.  Sometimes, I did leave my room, even though I wasn’t allowed.  Sometimes, I slipped into the hall.   The screams became even louder then.   But my brother always screamed the loudest.  He always screamed the most.

As I neared the screaming in my house, I pictured what I would do then.  How I would throw myself into the fight.  Daddy would never hit me, I thought.   I would come between them.    I won’t think about his fist cracking against my face.    I won’t think of my little body shoved against the wall.  I won’t think.  I’ll just act.

I threw myself into the fight.  I shove the startled Drunken Boy away from my friend.  But the Drunken Boy didn’t look at me.  His eyes were still on Brendan.  A boy his height, his size.   My mouth opened before I could think.  Logic fled the mind in times like this.

“What are you going to do, huh?  Hit a girl?  Does that make you a man?”  The Drunken Boy’s eyes finally find mine.  Who are you? His glazed eyes seem to say.

“Hit me!”  I screamed.  Everyone went silent.

I never threw myself into the fight back then.  I never found the courage.  I backed away, running to knock on my mother’s room.  “Mommy!  Stop him!  Stop him! Do something!”   My mother finally bounded out of her room, rushed past me.  She opened the door.   “Stop it! Stop it!”  She’d finally say.   I backed into my room, sat in the dark, in the silence, my face dry, my body blending into the still of the room.

“Hit me!” I screamed, pounding my chest with my fist.  “If you’re going to hit someone, then hit me!”

Finally, Drunken Boy saw me.  The Drunken Boy yelled, “Get out of my face, Chink.  You fucking Chink!”  He thought his voice would be enough to scare me away.  But it only made me thrust my face closer to his.  His friends held Drunken Boy back, saying, “Dude, come on.  Dude, let’s go!”

“No.  This Chink is in my face!”

“So I’m a Chink?  You don’t like Chinks?  Then what are you going to do about it?  What are you going to do?”  The words tumbled out of my mouth.  A hand touched my shoulder.   Brendan.  “C, it’s over,” he said.  Another hand touched my shoulder.  It’s Jenn.  “C, let’s go,” Jenn urged.

Drunken Boy’s friends forced him away.   Jenn and Brendan pulled me away, walking backwards, my eyes still on the fist that was ready to finally connect with my face.

That night, I have a dream.  A memory of when I was about 12 years old.  I didn’t do the laundry.  I knew I had to do the laundry.  But I didn’t.  I kept putting it off.  Instead, I fell asleep.  My father poured the clothes over my face to wake me up, his voice booming in my ears.  This is it, I thought.  I closed my eyes for the impact.  But all I heard was his footsteps as he walked away.

When I tell this story, Brendan always says, “I don’t know what would have happened if you hadn’t saved me.”  People that hear this story tell me I’m gutsy, tough, fearless for throwing myself into the fight.  I thought I threw myself into that fight to save my friend, save him in the way I couldn’t save my brother or sister from a hit.  But there is no guts or toughness in what I did.  There is only fear.  Fear that the screams would remain pent up in my mind without an outlet.

I never thought that what I witnessed growing up was my story to tell.  But the screams, the sounds of abuse bear their own mark.  They bare their own abuse.

So now, for the first time, I write.  I write my feelings out about the past.  I write, “I grew up waiting for my turn.”  I write so I won’t jump into another fight.  I write so I won’t crave the fist coming towards my face.    I write to let go of my own pent up screams.

C. Goss says: “I am a staff writer and creator of the popular Women in Beer Profile Series for thebeersessions.com.  My other writing credits include ABC’s All My Children, Seal Press’s anthology P.S. What I Didn’t Say, the HarperCollins Yell-Oh! Girls anthology, AsianAvenue.com, and WordRiot.org.”

Skip the
eggs (I still have
half a
dozen in the fridge),
grab a
canister of grated Parmesan
but only
a pint of milk instead of
the
gallon I used to buy.

I avoid
a couple of aisles,
not
wanting the cheese curls
or the
peanuts you used to eat
in front
of the TV.

How much
do I want meat now?
Not
much, but I grab a package of carrots
and a
bunch of asparagus. Then I reach
for the
lettuce and the sprinkler turns on.

I pull
my hand away
and
watch the jets water the dead greens
as if
they might still grow.

Aline Soules‘ creative work appears in numerous literary journals such as the Kenyon Review and the Houston Literary Review, and in anthologies such as The Size of the World/The Shape of the Heart and Literature of the Expanding Frontier.  Her creative credits can be viewed at http://sites.google.com/site/alinesoules/creative-resume.

In the
hospital, they gave you a thirty-two-ounce drip
and
forty-five breaths by respirator each minute
to keep
your organs pink and healthy
until
they could harvest them.

If I’d
wanted, I could have counted
the
number of doctors and nurses and interns and students
who
streamed in and out of the emergency room
in the
hours your body lay at the hospital.

I could
have counted the people at your funeral service,
the
hours and minutes it lasted, the tributes,
the
memorials, the donations, the words and pictures
on the
web site we created, but I didn’t.

What I
know is this: your urn is two by two
by two,
and your ashes are small enough to fit.
What I
know is that you get smaller all the time,
further
away day by day by measured day.

Aline Soules‘ creative work appears in numerous literary journals such as the Kenyon Review and the Houston Literary Review, and in anthologies such as The Size of the World/The Shape of the Heart and Literature of the Expanding Frontier. Her creative credits can be viewed at http://sites.google.com/site/alinesoules/creative-resume.

“Don’t cry. That’s what happens when the good and the young die”.

“Orderly cotton wool clouds form only when the best or the young ascend to Allah”. When she talked about grave things, Gramma had always taken care to put out her cigar, and adjust her gold laced duppatta to cover her hair. The graceful movement jingled the many filigreed lightweight gold rings lining the whorls of her ears to sparkle aflutter. We knew not whose memory overwhelmed her, as she sat unusually silent, her regal features hidden behind the curtain of lush hair, perfectly white on top, while pitch black from shoulder to derriere. We knew, on such days, she would bury herself in one of her favourite books, mostly translations, that her sons ordered for her from the bookshop two villages away.

Never had we doubted, on days when we saw orderly cloud formations, that it was heaven welcoming an untainted soul to step on to tidy puffs of white clouds – lest they be lost -, their feet feeling the first taste of the grace that lay in wait.

Did the clouds rush in to form tidy rows the day she died young and hapless, thrown by the vicissitude of fate on a death-drunk road? Did she climb with ease the steps that came too early and unprepared for her?

Did she look back bemused at her blemish less body, petite and unresisting, laid out for its last rites, scrubbed clean of its earthly burdens? Was she, the rager against fate, full of chagrin at our grief? Didn’t she want to rail against ‘they’ that mourned as well? Didn’t she resist leaving, as she, on that inky night, was on her way to meet us? Were we not to help her dress for the party in that same hour that she lay dead to the world, while her elder sister wrapped her in three sheaths of white to go on her very own cloudburst?

Or didn’t she care at all? Did she disappear like the water slipping through cupped hands, dripping away to a mere trace of wetness on the palm? Did she really become the unnerving silence that we try so hard to erase, by talking about and laughing with her and gathering her into our daily conversations, as if she is still alive, but living thousands of miles away?

It’s so unlike her, who had fought so bitterly against everything inert, dull, and lifeless, not to send us a sign.

None of us were in a state to see whether the clouds reined in themselves at her arrival that day. We were lost in our locked grief and sudden stupor which didn’t let us see anything at all, except feel the rain that poured relentless for three days. It rained so mercilessly that the water refused to be absorbed by the earth. We worried that she’d be soaked wet under her patch of earth. In desperation, I wondered whether the floodwater would throw her up, revived, water borne. Anything was a ray of hope in those desperate nights when we were huddled together, united by a common grief that was, but separated by private regrets for things said and unsaid, done and never do-able again.

As we dragged ourselves through duties, incoherent doubts and thoughts streaming in a state of perpetual sleepwalking, between tears shed and unshed, her living face loomed over everything, her small body leaning casually against you; a small hand lifting to rest lightly on your sleeve; at other piqued times refusing to touch as we cringed with some petty issue or the other; her many burdens that taunted her impulsive laughter; her rage that flared at tiny sparks and sometimes lay tightly leashed; her feisty spring cleanings, that she used to practise her singing lessons; the occasionally echoing the warble of her favourite songs; the shadow of her petite form disappearing around the bend of the stairs, hauling huge buckets of spin dried clothes to the third floor terrace for drying; her refusal to disappoint with a ‘no’;… a dulcet song trapped joyously in a tiny body that sometimes privileged you with a loose drape of a hug as you half-listened to someone talking, and poked you with an angry nudge as an unloved face or voice loomed. She had fought against being a lone island, however splendorous it may have appeared at times to escape the burdens we imposed on her. The guilt of our needs and her generosity of mind that coerced her into the slavery of love needled our half-jumbled thoughts.

“In absentia, reigns wisdom, always arrived at inopportune moments” Gramma sighed.

How we needed her, an essential heart valve, missed sorely, felt at all odd times as a scrape across a gaping wound starting to heal at the rims alone. She had always needed us too. How could we imagine her alone, confined to tiny spaces, or lost in infinite space, god alone knows what. And she had loved large, spotless rooms and mindscapes, where only the disarray of an artist or words was allowed!

“We grieve most for children and younger siblings lost to death. Our hearts simply refuse to come away” Grammma had to know, having survived many.

A small solace was that he was right next to her. But in death aren’t we all utterly alone, each of us wondered, even as we consoled ourselves. We didn’t dare to separate them in death, as she had learned to love him. But in our selfishness we wanted her not to disappear from our lives and perhaps, in moments of desperation and loss, even preferred her to live on, even if maimed: yet we knew she would have hated to wish it upon herself, even in the grip of worst misery. She had worn her unassailable self-reliance proudly.

It rained so badly that night. The rains that shielded her death from others, curtaining the windows of the car as her innards bled silently, continued unrelenting for three days. Fourth day onwards, it spent itself in intermittent bursts, like continued sorrow.

Her mother was too blinded with pain that wouldn’t let go, to even notice the rain.

Once the burial was over, the image of her began to etch itself into every hour of ours. Only the three stitches on her left brow had belied the unblemished sleeping image of hers. The blood had pooled into his eyes so much that her sister had not recognised him, and had walked past the table on which he was laid out. But for her, the cut brow had masked the blood that had poured and filled her innards. So like her, to keep turmoils hidden!

The unbelievable numb hopelessness, as she accompanied the bodies home, of which her sister seldom spoke, always helped the rest of us to control our expressions of sorrow from going overboard.

The children could not understand the logic of their youngest aunt’s sudden disappearance, especially since they considered her as of their age. Because they had no regrets or guilt to assuage, they had none of our sanctimonious air when we talked about her—which, she, anyway would have hated.

A year unto her death, her niece kept drawing her as a figure flat on the floor or sometimes even an upright one, but always with a perplexed look. In all her pictures, the tiny stitched scar bled fat drops of bright red. We forced her to stop being so pathologically inclined by telling her that her feisty aunt never would have liked it anyway. She would have considered our mourning ‘vulgar’.

Our survival through the trauma is relived every monsoon, when the rain swells and brings back the remains of all that the despair: yet, she lives on, a strong presence that unites us in a cloudburst of love and memory in the midst of all family upheavals.

Fathi-Maya is a bilingual writer of poetry and fiction based in Kerala, India. She is just emerging from years of self-inflicted secrecy and writes poetry mostly when not working on a novel long overdue. She teaches literature as a profession in the order to remain in the vicinity of words.

There are those who say
they want it all back.
If they could just re-do it all again; forget
they ever met.
But I don’t want it all back.

I’m willing to surrender,
give in to the feeling that I can change
it, reshape it, mold it, fix it, everything’s-gonna-be-ok,  put-a-smile-on-your-face-while-in-public, only-tell-parts-of-the-story,
withstand it.

I don’t want it all back.
I’m ready  to confront
the tug at the back of my brain.
The tug, the pang, the pain
that knows I should walk away.

Leave you standing in your own assembled mass
of cancerous sarcasm, full-of-shit-wit, counterfeit charm, put-you-down-every-chance-I-get comments, fake superiority complex, make-everyone-feel-they-are-the-dirt-beneath-your-shoe statements, and pick-you-up-and-slam-you-moments.

But I can accept my fault.
I stayed too long.
I gave in too easily to you
taking over and chipping away
the one thing in this world I can call my own – my soul.
But I still don’t want it all back.

I want to remember every moment
of the screaming and choking on tears, the sitting-in-the-dark-figuring-how-to-make-it-without-you, the waiting-until-6-a.m.-for-you-to-come-home mornings, the-caught-you-with-your-pants-down nights, make-me-feel-like-I’m-crazy conversations, checkers-games-of-manipulation-where-you-always-won-my-queen, and the call
to my mom asking her to help me get away from you.

I don’t want it all back.
I’ll hold onto this scar.
I will be thankful
for this lesson.
So I can grow,
teach others,
And know
It is never too late
to hold onto your soul.

About Daniele Purcell: “The Day I knew” is a piece demonstrating where Danielle was just a short four years ago and where you can go when you’re willing and ready to pick yourself up.  After ending an abusive two year relationship, Danielle moved to San Diego for a year and then made it up to Washington to attend law school at Gonzaga University School of Law.  She regards the decision to walk away from the man referenced in the poem as one of the most life-changing decisions she’s ever made.  Ironically, Danielle is extremely thankful for the hell she went through because she learned the important lessons of love yourself first, then love the person you’re with, and never lose yourself in someone else.

like an iron

hot and
pressing

against

my bare
opening.

Tracy Strauss‘s poetry earned the 2005 Somerville Arts Council Literary Fellowship and has been published in The Hummingbird Review, Spoonful, and Ibbetson Street. Her collection, Between You and Me, was a semi-finalist for the 2007 Bakeless Prize.  Her nonfiction writing has been published and is forthcoming from The Southampton Review, The Briar Cliff Review, South Loop, and Drunken Boat. Her writing has earned acceptances and scholarships to the Norman Mailer Writers Conference, the Southampton Writers Conference, and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference.  Currently, she is working on a memoir, Hannah Grace, about healing from trauma through the pet-human bond (http://thehannahgracebook.wordpress.com).

like the sea’s

after a terrible storm

lapping at my dunes

churning forth

this image

comes

crashing

like a tidal wave

engulfing me

your invisible undertow’s

got me by my legs,

waist, my throat’s

(I can’t breathe)

stuck on this image

my mind’s isolation

cut off from

the continuum

of time and space

I am outside myself, watching

my child-body on top of yours

riding the rough ripples

of your dark navy jeans

my inner eye fumbles with

the questionable details,

your button-down shirt

my little girl nightgown

this image disorients

swallows my senses

pulls me in so

I can’t make out

your words, my thoughts

grab hold of my bearings

though I still hear

the drowned tones

that come

from you as

I hold the receiver

to my ear as

my head

goes under

then, now

your voice still

lulls, leads, takes

my attention away

from Safety’s shore

that same way

you took me from Life’s land

down far beneath Recognition’s surface,

down into some cold blue

sea of unawareness

to leave me again

and again to retrieve myself

alone within the forgotten

desperate depths of

my mind’s memory.

Tracy L Strauss says: My poetry earned the 2005 Somerville Arts Council Literary Fellowship and has been published in The Hummingbird Review, Spoonful, and Ibbetson Street. My collection, BETWEEN YOU AND ME, was a semi-finalist for the 2007 Bakeless Prize and will be published in Spring 2011 by Pudding House Press.  My nonfiction writing earned a scholarship to attend the 2010 Norman Mailer Writers Conference, the 2009 Southampton Writers Conference, and the 2008 Bread Loaf Writers Conference. A chapter from my memoir, PERSONAL EFFECTS, an adult trauma-recovery journey about breaking family denial and healing from childhood sexual abuse, will be published by THE SOUTHAMPTON REVIEW this July.

Currently, I’m a Lecturer in the Division of Writing, Literature & Publishing at Emerson College. I’m working on a second memoir, HANNAH GRACE, about healing from trauma through the pet-human bond (http://thehannahgracebook.wordpress.com).