Thanks to Vocal I'm Making a Spoken Word Visual Album

Hello Wonderful Community,

During my time at Vocal, I've written quite a lot starting all the way with the 2021 Summer series, hopping in right at Death by Chocolate.

The poetry part didn't begin until the From the Across the Room challenge and, much to my surprise, I got one of the Runner Up positions when I decided to challenge the prompt!

I think there was still a stubborn part of me that wanted to insist that I was fiction writer. Fiction was my hobby and I was married to the idea. That is, until it was time for haiku deluge.

I was up to elbows in haikus, chasing prompt after prompt and all it did was forge me in the fire while stoking my own.

And, in the meantime, I found a community of people, like Vocal + Assist whom I came to value and enjoy. Later, when Queer Vocal Voices was founded, I would find another lovely home!

I was slowly but surely, starting to come into this idea that, perhaps, I was able to be a poet, too.

And then I got into an emotionally abusive relationship. A la Mimi Zhu, we'll call him X because I don't want him to be my anything anymore. X constantly told me that I was wasting my time entering these challenges that I would never win (the facts: I have five runner ups and ten top stories now). The fears and self-doubts I had, he voiced them.

And then the limerick challenge came.

And I wrote serious ones, subverting the purpose of limericks to invoke cognitive dissonance that our relationship left me with. And during one of our break ups, which I thought was for good, I poured my heart and soul in a fever haze of serious limericks, and when I was done, I had an entire chapbook that I self-published. A chapbook that couldn't exist without Vocal, couldn't exist without the raw non-fiction of my life.

I talk more about how emotional abuse sneaks up on you in my confession here:

X, thankfully, has now been gone from my life for over a year after I left for good. And I finally wrote the full length manuscript to the chapbook after self-discovery and continued healing.

It's called The Poet Outside the Door. It takes you on a surrealist journey into the self in the midst of crisis as I ask myself, “how does one recognize that they are in the same intergenerational cycle of trauma as their family, process this, and begin to decycle?”

Writing this was my therapy (along with actual therapy). I am a poet. An actual poet.

It helped me to finally realize what about writing pushed my pen (digital, of course!) forward: I write to invoke, to process, to honor, to resurrect, and—sometimes—to grieve but, above all, to be free and set free.

But even more news: from this manuscript, I am, with the help of a wonderful production team (including the fabulous and talented Muchtar Suryawan),

creating a spoken word visual album/short film featuring 22 curated poems and music from a composer.

(Three of those poems you can read here:

)

Seeing this dream come to reality is more than I can ask for and I can't wait for this journey.

I'm opting not to share with my friends and family since I write under a pseudonym, so if anyone would be willing to consider donating and/or sharing with your friends and family, I would greatly greatly appreciate it.

On my profile, I write that I hope you'll "follow along for stories about a little bit of everything (i.e. nostalgia and other affairs of the heart)" and, well, I hope this is one journey that you'll stay along with us for.

Thank you kindly! Light and love🌻🌻🌻