#angela giles patel

All my life I’ve written, and written reasonably well. Notebooks were filled with work as I documented my world. The passionate shifts of a teenager, the confusion of living within a barely functional family, emotions and experience were all fair game. I painted with words. Then my world changed. My sister died, tragically (are there untragic deaths?), unexpectedly (do we ever really look for it?), young (there is no good age to die). A shock wave set in and

it

rocked

me 

hard.

It physiologically altered me, it psychologically altered me, and, worst, it sucked my words into a dark corner that I couldn’t reach. A fetid place opened up in me after my sister died. To even contemplate exploring it hurt. I stopped writing. I stopped seeking beauty, especially in words. I simply existed.

Time passed.

It always does.

Slowly I felt the pressure to write. The desire to put my voice to paper again grew, but my voice was no longer familiar. It was reshaped by the unkind quiet that settled over me after her death. And so I sought a structure in which to learn about who I now was as a writer, a structure that would help me explore the charred landscape inside me. I settled on Stanford’s Certificate Program in Creative Non-Fiction. Toward the end of the program I was assigned a mentor, a respected author who focused on a writer who focused on food.

Anne Zimmerman taught me how to nourish my writerly soul.

Writing the tens of thousands of words that were necessary to meet the requirement established by Stanford was not just a challenge, it was draining.  It forced me to return to the death of my sister, and to revisit the suicide of my father. I live in a world where fathers leave and sisters die.  I threw myself into examining and writing about how one event fed the other.  

Anne read outlines and rough drafts. She read character summaries and walked through timelines. With each successive version that was submitted for review, she found ways for me to wear away callouses that distanced me from the manuscript.

There were days when the words came in an emotional frenzy that left me shaking, prolific in my pain. And there were days when the thought of having to write this story down paralyzed me. Though she had no direct access to the type of loss I was articulating, Anne knew what it was to write from a place that meant something, from a place that was deeply personal. She allowed me to disappear and miss deadlines. To step away from the words and just breathe

She guided me in deeper, and closer to the pain.

She pushed for dialogue and asked for detail.

Anne accepted edits that we both knew were half-hearted and reminded me that even the smallest progress is progress. She taught me that to expose my emotions on a grand scale is not letting the text run away from me. She showed me that being vulnerable is not the equivalent of being weak. She helped me to see that crushingly painful moments can be rendered with grace and beauty.

She refused to allow me to allow myself to fail.

In the end, Anne was as much a midwife as a mother, and the journey she waited for me to complete has left me with a body of work that is an accomplishment bourn as much from my tears as it is from her encouragement. She gave me the space to become reacquainted with my voice. She urged me to shine light on dark places. She let me again imagine the page as a canvas and watched me paint the world with my own hard-earned expression.

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ANGELA GILES PATEL has had her work appear in The Healing Muse, The Nervous Breakdown and The Manifest-Station. She tweets as @domesticmuse, and when inspired updates her blog. She lives in Massachusetts where she conquers the world, one day at a time.