by Art Saves Lives | Apr 30, 2025 | Art Saves Lives, Blog
Confiding to the impartial, sympathetic page paved the way for me to accept myself and finally reveal to my friends and family who I really am and begin to live my best honest life. I write. I write because I want to write; I write because I need to write. I write...
by Art Saves Lives | Apr 1, 2025 | Art Saves Lives, Blog
Editor's Preface In this hybrid essay, Susan Niemi writes with specificity, clarity, and the clear eye of a survivor who knows how much work it takes to forge a path forward again and again. Studded with lines of her own poetry, this essay is a meditation on...
by Art Saves Lives | Mar 9, 2025 | Art Saves Lives, Blog
I sat cross-legged on a curb in the middle of New Jersey in the middle of the 1970s and wrote a poem about despair. I was fourteen, it was humid and windless, and I was waiting outside my father’s girlfriend’s apartment to go home where my father and I had barricaded...
by Art Saves Lives | Feb 1, 2025 | Art Saves Lives, Blog
Usually, I am one to find the thread of dark humor even in the worst of circumstances. But I found myself at a loss. I had been increasingly depressed and anxious since a confluence of world and family events descended, including family deaths and friends’ severe...
by Art Saves Lives | Jan 2, 2025 | Art Saves Lives, Blog
For most of my life, I could not bear my own face. Though I would recognize what I saw in the mirror as familiar, I did not feel it was mine. What I did feel was that it was wrong. I was raised like a prisoner on an island that most consider a paradise. My parents...
