By Jamie Tortorello-Allen
Editor for Songs of Survival
Author of volcano and my mother collected angels, featured in Songs of Survival, Vol. I Iss. I
Have a story you’d like to share about survival? Submit your piece, whether it be poetry, prose, art, or photography, to our literary journal, Songs of Survival!
As my birthday approached a few years ago, I decided to embark upon a creative journey, writing 50 poems in honor of my 50 years on this planet. At 49, I had devoted the previous 20 years to my marriage, raising three children, and my career as a clergy woman and educator. My life had revolved around nurturing others, and as my children began their adult lives, I was feeling emptied out and knew that it was time to find my own voice. To my surprise, words began pouring out of me. Whole poems emerged, almost as if they were writing themselves. On my 50th birthday, I wrote my 50th–a poem of joy and gratitude for love and being alive.
Not all of my poems were joyful, though. As I wrote, there was grief, fear, anger, and trauma that emerged as well. One of the traumas that I returned to over and over again was the pain that sexual violence had inflicted on my family. Watching my daughter’s suffering, holding her physically and emotionally as she staggered through the darkest days of recovery, and trying to keep our family together had taken a profound emotional toll on me. Writing my poetry was an important step in my own healing.
At first, my poetry had an audience of four–my husband and my three children. Mostly, I was writing for myself. I couldn’t imagine sharing my deeply personal story with even my intimate circle, let alone strangers. How then, did I come to publish two poems in our inaugural issue of Songs of Survival? The answer perhaps lies in my experiences as a reader, rather than as a writer.
I’ve been a reader for my whole life. I read voraciously as a child, and as a young adult completed a PhD in literature. I have immersed myself in the world of books and return to my favorites for comfort when I need a familiar friend. Reading does lots of things for me– it entertains me, teaches me, evokes emotion, challenges me, and makes me think. I’ve read books that are silly and forgettable, and books that are staggeringly beautiful. There are lots of books that I have loved, but only a handful that have entwined themselves with my soul.
I encountered one of those books in the hardest period of my daughter’s recovery. I don’t recall how I found A Tale for the Time Being or how it came into my home. Maybe I checked it out from the library based on the cover blurb or the art. Maybe my husband brought it home for me, having grabbed a few books he thought I might like. I had never read anything else by Ruth Ozeki, and knew nothing about her or her work. After I finished the novel, though, I felt as if she had opened a window directly into my soul, witnessed my pain, and written the one book in the whole world that I needed to read.
I can not possibly do justice to this gorgeous and complex novel in a brief description, but it is, among other things, the story of a teenage girl who has been the victim of great cruelty and is suffering profoundly. It is a story about healing and religion. It is also a story about the power of writing and how it can connect us to one another across time and space. Somehow, as I read it, I felt seen. It was as if somebody had reflected myself back to me. That’s the gift that Ruth Ozeki gave to me when I was lost in my own suffering. And that’s one of the reasons that I decided to publish my poems.
I don’t know if anyone other than my mother read my poems in Songs of Survival. She loved them, as mothers do and as I assumed she would. But my real hope is that there’s another mother out there who felt seen when she read them. Another mother who feels paralyzed with grief, or who is struggling with a crisis of faith, wondering where God was when this terrible thing happened to her child. If my poetry reflects back her own life and connects her soul to mine for a brief moment, then my courage in publishing my story will have been worth it.
The young people who have shared their stories of surviving sexual violence in our first edition of Songs of Survival are real-life superheroes. In deciding to publish my poems, I was inspired by their strength and bravery. If you have a story to tell and you are wondering if you are brave enough to share it, know that your courage and humanity have the power to shine a light in the darkness for somebody who needs it. And if you are looking for a place to share your work and to forge that connection, we are here for you. We are accepting submissions for Songs of Survival Issue no. 2 and look forward to hearing from you.
