In this Sunday Series, you’ll meet writers new and seasoned as they share what inspires them to put #PenToPaper. This week, welcome Donna Miscolta, who writes on finding her voice.
I once wrote an essay called “Can’t You Talk, Girl?” They were the words said to me when I was ten. Said is not quite the right word. Hurled is not quite it either. Spat is close. There was something meant to denigrate and discard not just in the words – the word girl signaling I had no name to humanize me – but in the tone, which suggested girl was a category I might not even deserve.
I was extremely shy as a kid, sometimes almost pathologically so, sweating, trembling in social situations, wishing to flee or magically disappear from them. And yet, in my imagination I thought I could be different if only given the right circumstances. I could be like other kids if, for example, my parents allowed me to spend a week away at summer camp whose brochures showed happy kids bonded in friendship while hiking, singing around a campfire, and making art from pine cones. Then I could be like Trixie Belden, outdoorsy, tomboyish, and fearless, maybe able to solve the mystery of how not to be shy.
All of that existed in my imagination. In real life, one afternoon at the crafts table during that one long week, three attractive blond kids laughed and talked among themselves while I sat, awkward and mute, polishing my little piece of wood to make an amulet, my camp souvenir that would be a reminder of my week of camp adventure. Those kids fit the Trixie Belden profile – blond, fearless, their wholesomeness on display in well-fitting shorts and tanks. I was skinny and brown. I wore glasses and braces. My clothes were cheap and hung loosely on me. I was invisible to the blond kids, until a weird sound escaped from my throat. It was meant to be a laugh in appreciation of a joke one of the blond children told, but because my vocal cords had been dormant during crafts hour, they emitted a strangled bark, like some wounded stray.
When one of the blonde ponytailed girls narrowed her eyes at me and jeered, “Can’t you talk, girl?” all I did was nod that, yes, I could, withholding all proof.
I didn’t know then that I would one day be a writer. At least, I didn’t know it consciously. I like to think the notion circulated in my body’s cytoplasm, trapped in some membrane for safekeeping, that it had always been a part of me, finally to be released in mid-life.
Here, in part, is the proof that I can indeed talk.
DONNA MISCOLTA’s third book of fiction Living Color: Angie Rubio Stories, about lessons a young Mexican American girl learns in a world that favors neither her race nor gender, was published by Jaded Ibis Press in September 2020. Her story collection Hola and Goodbye, winner of the Doris Bakwin Award for Writing by a Woman and published by Carolina Wren Press (2016), won an Independent Publishers Award for Best Regional Fiction and an International Latino Book Award for Best Latino Focused Fiction.
She’s also the author of the novel When the de la Cruz Family Danced from Signal 8 Press (2011), which poet Rick Barot called “intricate, tender, and elegantly written – a necessary novel for our times.” Recent essays appear in pif, Los Angeles Review, and the anthology Alone Together: Love, Grief, and Comfort in the Time of COVID-19. Find her at donnamiscolta.com.
On Thursday, October 8th, @ 7pm Central, join me at Hidden Timber Books to hear Donna Miscolta read from her new book, Living Color: Angie Rubio Stories.
Register for this Small Press Author Reading HERE.