“Writing became my palette, my lifeline, when the weight of my story became too heavy to carry alone.” I used to think resilience was invisible—a quiet, colorless force that held me together when everything else was falling apart. But I’ve come to realize...
What device do you use tokeep your vice in a vice?Creativity forges the keys to release us from these shackles. This instrument can also break locks. Every time I try and break free, I try & find moments to capture, the goal is to paint a polaroid of time. A...
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...
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...
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...
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...
