why I write Archives - Christi Craig

September 27, 2020September 26, 2020

Guest Post: Donna Miscolta on Why I Write

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.

September 20, 2020September 20, 2020

Guest Post: Carly Israel on Why I Write

In this Sunday Series, you’ll meet writers new and seasoned as they share what inspires them to put #PenToPaper. This week, welcome Carly Israel, who speaks to the stories that are often always inside of us, waiting for the moment when we finally begin to listen.

The stories have always been within me. I have carried them for longer than I could explain. The forest. The fire. The ghettos. The backseat of the car as I screamed and hit the driver’s seat, begging to pull over. It wasn’t until the end that I started getting the words out.

I found an unused Composition notebook and poured my truth onto its pages. “I wish someone could find these words so they could know I need help.” I asked the page questions I could not ask anyone else. “Is it fair to stay here, smiling for everyone, while I am in dying within?”

And then, as I looked around at the burnt embers of the life I had created, I saw no other way out. And after swallowing, handful after handful of pills, I laid on the floor and waited to die. But the universe had other plans.

After the mile and half walk home in the snow, signing myself out of Obleness Hospital, against medical advice, I began a new story. And on the pages of that Composition notebook, God and I began to talk. And I mean, really talk.

From there, journal after journal, I bled my heart and fears and dreams onto page after page. I could not fill them fast enough. But those words were only meant for the two of us. And I could not breathe without my pen and my lined little journals. I could not experience this world without a place to download my thoughts or untangle my questions.

And days turned into years turned into a foundation, and I unfolded into this world. And as I unfurled my once broken wings, I found that my voice was stronger than I ever could have imagined.

There was a solo trip to Israel when I was about 22. I had just sat on the edge of the Hospice bed and watched a woman named Alice die. She was a friend of mine’s mother. And because I had taken a course in Death and Dying over the summer, from a Buddhist professor, I knew what to whisper in her ear. And on that trip, that never went as planned, I found that my notebooks were not enough. That the conversation with God was not going to cut it if the conversation with myself didn’t start to change its tone.

And we, God, me and myself, sat on the carpeted floor of an expensive hotel in Nice, France (don’t ask) and had a much needed, hours-long conversation with the mirror. There was laughter and tears and amends and promises. As I picked myself up from that floor, with the carpet indentations on my knees, a new story began.

Fast forward a few decades, three children, one divorce, years of sobriety and lessons and pain and growth and I found myself, once again, needing the page. Only this time, my thoughts were too fast for the pen. They needed the keyboard, and post after post, gratitude and lessons and gifts turned into a following of strangers who begged for more of my words. And a fairy-godmother, let’s call her El, came back into my life, in the form of a Facebook message, asking me if I ever considered writing a book. Turned out that El owned a wicked smart Indie publishing company and she wanted to see if I could turn my posts into an actual book. A dream that lived, secretly, inside of me, all of my life.

Like any solid fairy-godmother, she pushed and stretched and threw back what I brought her and told me to dig deeper. And what I unearthed were stories that spanned decades and lifetimes into my ancestral caves and I heard whispers from great grandparents I would never have the privilege of meeting. Police records, and pictures and articles, and secrets. All of which were my responsibility and privilege to share.

Carly Israel, founder of the podcast Northstar Big Book, has written
about parenting, divorce, and recovery for the Huffington Post and other venues. She mentors in recovery and is committed to looking for the gift or lesson in every experience.

The Host of the podcast In Your Corner Divorce, she is also a relationship/divorce coach. She focuses on helping clients get rid of the emotional baggage so they don’t harm their children and on empowering them to write the next chapter of their lives. Read her latest COVID piece and listen to her most recent podcast.

Join me at Hidden Timber Books this Thursday, September 24th, at 6pm Central for a reading and discussion of Carly Israel’s memoir, Seconds and Inches. This event is free but registration is required. I hope to see you online!

August 23, 2020August 23, 2020

Sunday Series: Vicki Mayk on Why I Write

In this Sunday Series, you’ll meet writers new and seasoned as they share what inspires them to put #PenToPaper. This week, welcome Vicki Mayk, who speaks to how a story sometimes finds us and we are compelled to write.

When people ask me why I chose to write my book “Growing Up On the Gridiron: Football, Friendship and the Tragic Life of Owen Thomas,” I tell them: I didn’t choose it.

The story chose me. In 2009, I had started to occasionally attend services at a church less than five miles from my home. I’d lived near that church for more than 25 years. A lapsed Catholic with bad memories of attending Catholic school, I’m not a person who follows an organized religious or spiritual practice. Nevertheless, I began attending services there.

Just months later, in April 2010, Owen Thomas, the son of the church’s senior pastor, Tom Thomas, died by suicide in April 2010 at the end of his junior year at the University of Pennsylvania. In this age of social media, someone set up a memorial page on Facebook – R.I.P. Owen Thomas. I joined it, even though I had never met the young man with the engaging smile, piercing blue eyes and a shock of red hair that made it seem as if his head were on fire. Membership on the page grew to 3,000. Posts about Owen came from teammates who loved him, from casual acquaintances who recalled his kindness during chance encounters, from high school teachers and Penn professors who remembered his sharp, questioning mind and from members of his father’s congregation who knew him as an impish kid who crawled commando-style under church pews.

The comments and stories people wrote haunted me. I began asking myself: Who was this boy and what about him inspired such love, such loyalty? By that September, something else emerged: Owen was found to have chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, the traumatic brain injury that was being found in professional football players. Owen’s was a landmark case because he was an amateur player never known to have a concussion.

I’d been a writer for my entire career, first as a newspaper reporter, then as the editor of university alumni magazines. I earned an M.F.A. in creative nonfiction in my 50s. There’s no question that writing is at the center of my life. Even after years spent defining myself as “writer,” the answer to the question of why I write only became clear after I chose to write about Owen Thomas. I’d never written about sports. Yet I couldn’t let go of the thought that this was a story I needed to write. One day I saw a quote from Lin-Manuel Miranda, who wrote the musical “Hamilton.” He said, “You have to live with the notion of, If I don’t write this, no one’s going to write it. If I die, this idea dies with me.”

I completely understood what Miranda meant. The story had chosen me and I was compelled to write it. I teach a class for college freshmen called “The Power of Story.” In the class, students learn that neuroscience researchers have proved that humans are wired for story – and are drawn to story almost against their will. Neurons in our brains light up when we watch or read a good tale. I didn’t need scientific research to convince me. It’s been that way for me since I was kid. I love fiction, but for me, true stories became what I most wanted to read and write. Sometimes my own stories, sometimes those of other people. As I researched Owen’s story, I attended high school football games for the first time in more than 40 years, toured the brain bank in Boston where his brain was studied, and sat with young men and women while they shed tears over their lost friend.

I learned I wasn’t just writing a book about football. It also was a book about friendship. It took me ten years, but I never considered giving up because of something that is true for writers of fiction and nonfiction alike: I didn’t want to come to the end of my life with this story in my head instead of on the page.

A former reporter for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, VICKI MAYK has enjoyed a 35-year career in journalism and public relations. She has reported for newspapers in New Jersey and Pennsylvania and her freelance journalism also has appeared in national and regional publications, including Ms. magazine and The New York Times.

Her creative nonfiction has been published in Hippocampus Magazine, Literary Mama, The Manifest-Station and in the anthology Air, published by Books by Hippocampus. She’s been the editor of three university magazines, most recently at Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

Her nonfiction book, Growing Up On the Gridiron: Football, Friendship, and the Tragic Life of Owen Thomas (Beacon Press) is available Sept. 1, 2020. Her love affair with football began at the age of nine, when her father first took her to a Pittsburgh Steelers game. Connect with her at vickimayk.com.

Join Vicki Mayk, along with authors Athena Dixon, Berry Grass, and Tim Hillegonds for a Night of Nonfiction (as part of HippoCamp 2020’s virtual events) on Saturday, August 29th, 6pm Eastern. This event is free via Zoom.