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Lisa Philip's avatar

I took a poetry writing class in in eighth grade. I really enjoyed the class. I wrote a few poems when I was in an arts’ camp and on and off throughout high school. After that I forgot that I liked to write. During the pandemic, I was working in the hospital while most people were at home. I realized I needed a way to express my emotions and I came back to writing. About a year after it began I learned about the Isolation Journals. I started to respond to the prompts. For the first year I never shared my writing with the community. It felt too personal and I didn't feel I was good enough. Now I share almost every week and people are very encouraging and kind. At the same time as I started to respond to IJ prompts, I discovered Narrative Medicine and began to participate in their rounds whenever I could. In those meetings you have only four minutes to write.It is a much smaller group than the Isolation Journals’ community and I started to share my work there. I received positive feedback which made me more open to showing others my work. On my own which I found that there were patients and situations that really touched me and I felt that I had to honor their stories. I wrote about them and also about my self.

I showed some people a poem I wrote about a patient who froze to death and they encouraged me to try to get it published. I sent it out to one journal who rejected it, but a second one liked it and it will be published this month in an academic journal. The success of the first poem has emboldened me to try with another.

Recently I started to participate in monthly poetry workshops with a different poet every month. Even though I work a full time job with very long hours (about to go to work in a few minutes) I realize that if something gives you joy you can find time to do it and it even makes it easier to get through the work day. In last month’s poetry workshop with Joseph Fasano he described the need to write as what he imagines an oyster experiences when it has an irritant in its shell and needs to form a protective coating which creates a pearl. An oyster cannot rest until the pearl is formed and neither can I when I have something to say.

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Kim.'s avatar

Dear Suleika, the most joyous news, to have your loves by your side. I only hope to be across the seas—to sit in the hush before the lights dim, to feel the charge in the air as words take shape, to witness the alchemy of it all.

I hesitated before writing it.

A name badge, a blank space, a sharp-tipped marker waiting in my hand. I could have used the name I had long hidden behind—the small one, the soft one, the one that asked nothing of the world. But instead, I wrote my own. The real one. The one I had avoided, misplaced, allowed to shrink.

Later, a woman I admired glanced at it & smiled.
"A beautiful name," she said, tracing the letters with her eyes before looking at me. "It could be from anywhere. A name that carries distance. History. Like a face that belongs to many places at once."

A compliment that settled, in a way I’d not felt before.

For years, I did not place my name on the things I made. Not on my images. Not on my work. Not on the small, careful moments I offered the world. It was easier that way. To remain at a distance. To let the work exist without pointing back to me.

I had a name once, not the one given to me but the one I was shrunk into. A childhood nickname—something soft, something small, something that fit inside the narrow space I was allowed to take up. It followed me longer than it should have, long after I had outgrown it. I used it without thinking, signed emails with it, introduced myself that way, as if I were still trying to fit into the version of me they had made.

There is safety in the background. In quiet observation. In being the one who sees, rather than the one who is seen.

But something shifts when you name yourself.

To write is to place myself inside the frame. To step forward. To take the weight of my own voice & let it stand.

It is a small thing, & yet—

It is not.

Because a name carries history. Mine carries the weight of doors shut behind me, of hands that let go, of a family that has not spoken my name in years. But still—it is mine.

And I am here.

With thanks also to Ann for her words, which met me at exactly the right moment.

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