MANY VOICES, ONE DU
VOLUME 3 A UNIVERSITY OF DENVER PUBLICATION
Many Voices, One DU
Many Voices, One DU
Volume 3 2019
A University of Denver Publication Edited by: LP Picard with support from University Academic Programs & the University Writing Program
Š 2019 University of Denver Writing Program All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from the University Writing Program at the University of Denver. www.du.edu/writing writing@du.edu 303.871.7448 2150 E. Evans Ave., Denver, CO 80210 Designed & Typeset by LP Picard Page 113: photo credits for images appearing on front cover, back cover, and pages 112 & 114. All other photographs provided by authors or taken by John Tiedemann. For more information, please see www.du.edu/onebook
Many Voices, One DU
Contents Foreword ix LP Picard
The Prompt xi “Cartomancy” 1 Carol Samson
“Hair” 9 Lizzie Stacks
“Memory” 17 Esther Chung
“Grey Matter”
25
“Hard Boiled Eggs”
31
Grace Gonzalez
Keelan Vargas
“hands” 35 Kyah Conrad
“ENGRAVED//CAGED” 43 Connor Rodenbeck
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“Mother and Child Reunion”
47
“Mistakes: No Such Thing” Ellie Janette
53
“How to Make the Words Right”
73
“Someone Else’s Story”
83
“Natalie’s Room”
91
“For the Love of Writing”
101
“Ellipses”
105
Rebecca Arno
Kiana Marsan
Skylar Nitzel
Madalyne Heiken
Tanner Fox
Shelbi Renee Cornelison
About the Cover Submit to Volume 4 (2019–2020 Prompt) Acknowledgments
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Foreword
How do individuals from a wide range of backgrounds and value systems become a community? This is the challenge and reward at the heart of DU IMPACT 2025’s One Book, One DU—a program dedicated to building community through a series of shared intellectual experiences inspired by a common text. Now in its third year, One Book, One DU seeks to provide opportunities for our campus to reflect on the roots of our beliefs, our aspirations, and our values, and to consider how we can leverage our collective experiences toward the University’s mission of contributing to the public good. Other institutions with common reading programs occasionally include an analytical writing activity. What makes One Book, One DU unique is that it invites members of our community to share stories. Inspired by the common text, each year’s One Prompt encourages DU students, faculty, staff, and alumni to learn about ourselves and one another through storytelling. Fourteen responses to this year’s prompt are proudly showcased in this volume. Our 2018–19 selection, Molly Birnbaum’s Season to Taste: How I Lost My Sense of Smell and Found My Way, is a young author’s memoir about how to recover and pivot when plans change. As an aspiring chef, Birnbaum paid particular attention to the scents of the kitchen, trusting smells to signal when a dish was perfectly cooked or seasoned just right. When a tragic accident severs the neural connections between her nose and the area of
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her brain responsible for scent perception, she struggles to understand and articulate the extent of her loss. Birnbaum writes: “I suddenly lived in an unimaginable world. One where my memories of scent were impossible to bring back. One where my loss was almost impossible to describe. I struggled with it. I avoided it. I didn’t know who I was without my sense of smell.”
This sudden loss prompts a journey of investigation, reflection, and recovery. Immersing herself in olfactory research—and its connections to taste, memory, security, and romance—Birnbaum develops a deeper appreciation for what she had taken for granted. Birnbaum’s memoir exemplifies two key functions of storytelling. The very act of constructing a narrative from our lives—of selecting which moments, thoughts, and interactions to include, and of articulating their importance—allows us to process our experiences. It allows us to better understand ourselves. Once the story has been told, whatever we were trying to capture is preserved in both our audience’s memory and the text produced. A favorite haircut, a passion for art, memory, imagination, a childhood home, the ability to express oneself, a loved one. We can leave it and return to it whenever needed. Inspired by Birnbaum’s memoir, we invited members of our campus community to confront and consider loss through their own process of investigation and reflection. What is collected here are fourteen insightful, whimsical, heartbreaking, and inspiring stories of appreciating what is gone and what we fear losing. Differing in unique topic, tone, and modality, they are united in their efforts to process and preserve. LP Picard
Editor, Director of One Book, One DU
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The Prompt
Consider something you take for granted and what it might mean to lose it. It can be physical or metaphorical, concrete or abstract, tangible or intangible, personal or cultural, weighty or whimsical. Tell a story that illustrates your connection to what you fear losing and considers the implications of this potential loss. Alternatively, what is something you’ve already lost and what has that loss meant to you?
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Cartomancy by Carol Samson
for Marie Wiley 1.
We are bound to things that disappear in time. I read that in a book once.
2.
She wrote me postcards, cards gathered from antique shops somewhere, cards with 1950 photographs of houses in England, of brightly colored nature photographs of the rivers in Oregon, of reproductions of pastoral paintings with spotted cattle in a field. The stamps on the cards were images of seashells or planets in eclipse, or roses. The postcards arrived like birds. She sent them, September 7, 2016—August 24, 2018. She printed the messages by hand. She did not include her name. 23 November Because I let go of what I am, I become what I might be. —Lao Tzu 3.
I read in a book once that cartomancy, the reading of cards to tell fortune, is an old trade. I read of a woman named Marie-Anne-Adelaide, a name containing all sorts of feminine history, born a Gemini, born 1772, in Normandy. Somewhere in Austria around that time, another Marie, Marie-Antoinette, a Queen-to-be, was being born, and both Maries went to
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a convent to learn truth. Marie-Anne-Adelaide worked at a laundry, the Queen child never did that sort of thing. And I read that one day Marie-Anne-Adelaide, orphaned now and wandering a Paris street with cobbled stones, found an older woman, a Madame Gilbert, one who knew cartomancy and who could connect image to fortune. This Madame Gilbert could bear witness to celebrity and read cloud patterns and four-leaf clovers. She was a seer, a woman who could pronounce Fate. And so, by standing at Madame’s shoulder, Marie-Anne-Adelaide learned the intuitive. The two women became partners. 4.
The Marie I knew, my student, lived on the western slope of Colorado in a small village town with orchards, apple and pear and peach, a village filled with lines of trees and vineyards, a scripted place. To get there that day I saw the mountains, grey and layered before dawn, become light blue and, there, a road with a running stream and thick mosses and granite stones you had to pass through and, there, a dog, harp-boned of rib, at the road edge, its ears drooping and legs thin as wire, waiting for someone and, there, over there, in the field, the black and roan horses, thick and muscled, one of them patched with brown and white pinto hide. And, to get there that day, I saw golden sandhills in the distance, just there in the sun for a moment, hills becoming lines that held the weaving, the warp cotton threads, the pencil lines, Marie would have said, calling the warp Childhood or Friendship, if she were here, if she needed to say something. 5.
6.
29 September Practice to become human. Do not fear repetition.
In the book I read, Marie-Anne-Adelaide and Madame Gilbert coaxed a handsome boy, a young butcher’s apprentice named Flammermont, to stand in the street and pull in customers for them. He wore a bloodied apron. He told people of the women’s skill, especially of Marie’s ability to name and to know what their lives would be. He spoke of the promise of it all. Even
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dressed in blood, Flammermont was a fine and alluring thing. 7.
At the funeral for my student Marie, in the orchard town, I saw that Marie’s mother had dark-hair and Marie’s eyes, eyes that showed that she was trying still to understand. I saw her brothers, quiet boys, dark of beard, bookends, brothers who spoke of their sister, remembering her as an ever-questioning child, and Marie’s father, broad of forehead, his face listening to the service as he and Marie’s mother sat with the small choir, the father holding a guitar and sometimes kneeling on the floor as he prayed, standing to sing. And I kept considering the words Marie would have wanted someone to say, words to be said here in this town of rolling hills and sage and the water reservoir called the Bay of Chickens, in this place within a place with a canyon to the south, a canyon black and deep which fills with yellow morning sun that expands the green inside the canyon walls as thin pine trees seem to hold the canyon up and where, down in the dark, the river lurks and does what rivers do, purling in a dark so deep we cannot hear it. And I thought of that poet I read in a book once that said that all of this needs us, that which is fleeting needs us in a strange way and things do call to us, we, the ones who live just once, just once for each thing, and that we must bring a word to it, some pure word, some yellow or blue or gentian, some words we find, and we know we are here to name, to say house, bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit tree, window, castle, column. Marie knew, I know she knew, that here is the time for the sayable, that here is the homeland where we bear witness. There are cards. 8.
07 November The Kami, the Japanese spirit that is alive in trees, is both water and the absence of water. Though her physical presence has evaporated in papermaking, she, the Kami, lingers in every electro-chemical linkage in paper. Billions of Kami live in the charged electro-chemical bonds that hold paper in being. ... Artists, writers and papermakers hear the murmurs of the Kami. —David George Haskell, The Song of the Trees
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9.
And what matters Flammermont? That boy in his apron. There is more to know about the cartomancers. Some will tell you, Madame Gilbert was Marie-Anne-Adelaide’s cousin, perhaps an old aunt of her mother deceased. Some say Marie knew the trade from birth, telling the girls at the convent that the Abbess would die or be let go, describing in detail the replacement, the new thing. And she read cards to them, cards she made with handdrawn pictures, stiff paper cards with drawings of foxes and anchors. And, they say, when this Marie was 27, she was arrested, put in prison, deemed a Revolutionary girl while the Queen child, that other Marie, lived at Versailles. In prison, they say, Marie-Anne-Adelaide made cards. There she read the fates of those who would lose their heads on the pedestal and those who would emerge into a world they did not recognize, a world where anyone, a young General, perhaps, would become another Emperor and come to restore all the Revolution had tried to cleanse. 10.
Marie, my student, could trace form as signifier. She could read the fatal poetics of the images of foxes on stiff paper cards on the table. Last Thursday at dawn she went to the lake. She sat on the bike path and looked at the water. She was, she wrote once in an essay for my class, haunted by the labyrinths lined with hedges, the light and sandy ground, the image of her mind. She read a text that described the process of silk worm cultivation. She saw the photographs of three vortex images on tall wooden planks, patterns made of cocoons. Lining these swirling shapes, she wrote once, in an essay, are balls where silk worms are at their work, without knowing the larger processes they contribute to. And she knew the headaches that would come in the night. She heard their song without language. She knew the song we all sing when we are forgetting language. And she saw metaphor. I have developed my own writing metaphor, she wrote once, inspired by a friend’s gift of a piece of geode and its constellated meanings. I thought this geode was how I want my thesis to be—intricate, entrancing, reassuring with its solid heft in the hand, elegant in structure. . .I
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began to wonder how it is that geodes are opened. I assumed that it must take a single devastating blow to force the crystals from their dull shell. . . . I learned that geodes must be opened gradually. . .a geode must be tapped with a hammer, but gently. . .you turn the geode, and scrutinize its surface to see if any fault lines have appeared. . .you might set the geode aside for a few weeks before tapping again. . .When the geode is ready, it will show you how it wants to open. . . .fault lines will appear on the surface, faintly at first, deepening as you softly tap. . . and gradually the geode will open in its own way. 11.
24 July The purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is just to remain one person ... invisible guests come and go. —Czesław Miłoz 12. I will tell your death to you, she wrote once. There will be terror, yes, but a great wonder. 13.
Her mother said, when the ceremony ended, that she would send me the white box that had my name. Her mother said that Marie wrote letters explaining her choice, her decision about last Thursday, on the bike path. Her mother said she does not know what is in the white box, a letter, most probably, artifacts. Objects, her mother said, objects that story. I will mail you your box, her mother said. 14.
If only this were a story, I would know what to do, she wrote once. But what can I do with these echoes, these voices that are not mine? ... I fantasize about giving the journals away. When they are gone, then I will be free. . .maybe then I can stumble into a story, a normal story. A story with an ending. A story with a beginning. But who could I give the journals to? At the laundromat, while my clothes are tumbling round and round, I size people up: who is the most likely character? . . .I settle on someone who looks patient, but with a hint of submerged wildness. You, I think. You can be the one to continue the story, if
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a story is what this is. You can live with the shadows that live in the suitcase. 15.
We are bound to things that disappear in time. I read that in a book once. The white box arrived. It held a small, grey, thumb-cradle-size stone. It had more cards. Sometimes the invisible guests arrive at my house. We sit at the table. I spread the cards out in patterns. We listen for the murmur of Kami in the stiff paper. If only this were a story, we would know what to do next.
Acknowledgments This essay is a tribute, a memorial, to Marie Wiley (University of Denver, Class of 2008). Marie was my student in two Department of English classes at DU in Honors Writing (2005) and American Literature (2006). She was a brilliant academic and a wise and goodly soul. As part of the collage construction of this text, I have appropriated Marie’s own writing, borrowing passages from her essays, her letters, her short stories. Her words are noted in italics. The postcard messages indicated in the text come from cards sent to me by Marie. In section 7, I make reference to the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, borrowing his ideas and phrases about the “sayable” from “The Ninth Duino Elegy” and “The Tenth Duino Elegy.”
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Artist Statement My story “Cartomancy� is a collection of short and numbered writings. It takes on the patterns of a collage or of a spread of tarot cards that the reader must interpret. Form follows function here as the narrator announces that we are bound to things that disappear in time, bound to study the fragments and traces of people we lose. The story is dedicated to Marie Wiley, a fine and wise student at DU who I taught in Honors First-year English and American Literature ten years ago. Marie passed away in August last year, and in order to preserve her poetics, her vision, I have incorporated bits from postcards she sent to me and from selections from her short stories. The story, then, creates a moment when the reader must become a cartomancer, a reader of Marie’s cards.
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About Carol Samson
Carol Samson is an Associate Teaching Professor
Emerita at the University of Denver. She earned her PhD in English/Creative Writing at DU and was a founding member of the Faculty of the University Writing Program at DU in 2006. She has published articles and short stories in several academic and literary journals, one story appearing in a collection that won the Colorado Book Award 2007 and one story nominated this year for the 2020 Pushcart Prize. A playwright and theatre director, Dr. Samson adapted writings from Virginia Woolf for a stage performance at the 2008 Virginia Woolf International Conference and, most recently, adapted and directed the writings of Colorado novelist Kent Haruf for stage productions by Chalk Horse Theatre in Salida, Colorado.
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Hair by Lizzie Stacks
I was born in the bitter cold of Indiana, my parents driving precariously to the hospital, over ice and squinting to see the frosted street signs. I was a unique baby when I was born. Not in my jaundiced skin tone, or my unnerving silence, but in that I was bald. Like an old man, I had a shiny, smooth head, and it was that way for quite some time. I look back at the pictures now—a chubby, wide-eyed, bald baby, posing among yellow flowers and babbling at the camera. How would it feel to be hairless again? And more importantly, who would I be if not for the version of me created by each haircut or hairstyle? It’s not normal for girls to be bald, and a head full of hair is considered feminine. Even the Bible makes this declaration: “If a woman has long hair, it is her glory” (1 Corinthians 11:15). Marie Antoinette piled her long locks into an expensive poof on her head as a statement of wealth. People fawned over Jennifer Anniston’s feathered blonde, the brand identity of a quirky and fashionable Rachel. Hair represents many things for people, specifically women: femininity, security, and identity. I had none of these qualities. To this day, my family still brings up my head bereft of adornment. As a toddler, I thankfully began to grow hair; fine and slightly curly. It would get tangles because of its unruly thinness. I would sit on the shaggy carpet as one of my unlucky parents sprayed the sticky detangler all over my head, dripping into my eyes. They brushed with conviction as I squirmed in pain, inching farther and farther away until they had to ask me to come closer.
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It became especially knotty when I entered kindergarten. I started the day off with shiny, blonde hair, and an energetic (often annoying) excitement. By the time I went home, I had a knot the size of my fist at the base of my neck. I began cute and eager, only to end the day as a mess. The grueling hair brushing process started over again, each afternoon. My parents and I did our best to tame—to tame me and to tame my hair. This routine followed me to Colorado, through first grade and then finally to second. My hair had not been cut in some time. I liked it long, but the tangles were too bothersome for a busy second grader. So, I went to a kid’s haircut place. I chose a movie and sat in a chair shaped like a car. The haircut would only take about 30 minutes, so I started Shrek, but I never got to finish it. I suppose the place only hired unprofessional, scissor-happy hairdressers because when I got off the chair, I had a gruesome lopsided cut. My parents comforted me with the wisdom that a haircut wasn’t permanent, it can always grow out. But the next day at school, my teacher asked if I cut my own hair. My short style was supposed to embody the idea of being put together. I didn’t need to be tamed, I was a whole 8 years old. I was responsible. Instead, the haircut I received was actually the antithesis of what I wanted to be. I looked reckless with my crooked bangs. I immediately went to another place to get a new cut out of sheer embarrassment. I missed my long locks, and I began to hate my blonde hair. It was oily, and I was the only one who had it in my classroom. Most girls had long, full, luxurious black hair, braided patiently by their mothers. Other girls had a multitude of braids, shiny beads adorning each end. My parents didn’t know how to braid and would brush my hair back like Elvis when I got out of the bath. Hair felt the most important in elementary school; it signified pride. Girls would form braid trains and play with each other’s hair during story time while I sat embarrassed of my oily and unkempt mop—and read Harry Potter. The girls socialized; I read alone. Coincidentally, this catapulted my hatred of my hair. It kept me from the other girls. As well, I longed for Ginny Weasley’s beautiful red mane and wished I could have the same. I begged my mom for years to dye my hair. She always said no, that I would regret it. After years of breaking her down, she finally said fine. But
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she didn’t really mean it, the way parents always find ways to compromise with your dreams. She took me to the beauty supply store, told the cashier that I wanted red hair but that I couldn’t get it dyed. He led us to the fake hair section and pointed to a red strand clip on. It looked and felt fake and had a conspicuous clasp. But at least it was something. I went to school the next day content, sporting my new and daring streak of bright red. I felt cool, but the other students didn’t seem to agree. I heard giggles and passing remarks about me being “emo,” whatever that meant. The clip kept falling throughout the day, and I kept pushing it up, fastening it forcibly and painfully into my scalp. I was frustrated with my parents. According to them, haircuts are temporary but dyed hair must be a permanent cardinal sin. Looking back, I find that my parents were right (as they so annoyingly usually are). Chemicals can be damaging to such fragile and young hair. Plus, a head with long and obviously colored red hair would have been more of a social taboo. I gave up on the hair clip rather quickly. I reached the conclusion that I would never look like Ginny Weasley and accepted my fate as the oily blonde. But as the time went by, I gave less attention to my hair. I was about to start middle school, my parents had just divorced, and the last thing I could think of was the curtain of grease and tangles falling past my shoulders. My fifth-grade teacher had a conference with my parents and suggested a middle school named “Quest.” It was for gifted and talented students. I was a bit confident in elementary school; I had finished the Harry Potter series by the time I was nine, wrote stories that my teachers praised, and seemed to be a quick thinker on my feet. They encouraged me that I should attend, so I wrote the required essay, took the test, and was accepted. I didn’t boast, and I felt proud and excited. I had grand expectations for middle school. The first day of 6th grade, I had on a white tank top and black jeans, and my mom curled my hair for me, brushing the hot cylinder against my ear by accident. But the pain was worth it to appear good enough for Quest. Alas, I quickly learned that I was just as smart, as eloquent, and as gifted as every single other kid in the school. In fact, I might have been less than. I was in the lowest math class and had to attend extra help after school. My peers wrote essays just as good as mine, and I could barely manage to get my
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science projects done on time. I wasn’t dumb, but I wasn’t cream of the crop. I found a way to push this feeling of inferiority deep inside me and made friends quickly. I found my crowd, did my best, and got through middle school. I washed my hair with the 70-cent shampoo my dad bought me from King Soopers. I had sleepovers, passed notes, and slipped love letters in Chris Dolman’s locker. I tried sports and improv, and I tried to make puberty bearable. I also made the daring decision not to cut my hair at all in middle school. It grew out long, tangly, but I was cute back then; I didn’t need to tame anything. I seemed to have everything I needed to survive in middle school. I had a small frame, long hair and a bright smile. I was charming and dutiful, even if I couldn’t get an A on every assignment. Nearing the end of middle school, I shoved my practice ACT test, a dull “14,” in my backpack, pushed my hair aside and laughed with my friends, planning our high school experience. I had a boy, a weird and lanky but funny boy, that I liked, and he liked me back. He would always tell me he liked my hair, no matter how long it was, or tangly. He accepted my flaws. I felt proud of myself. More importantly, I felt stable. I knew what was to come each day. On the last day of 8th grade, I braided my hair to the side, picked out a bright blue dress, and gave the boy one last hug. This embrace signified the end of my stability. My family moved around to a lot of places that summer. I felt angry, uncomfortable, and constantly on edge. I didn’t know how to handle myself, what to do about who I was becoming or where I was heading. So I chopped off all my hair. Short to my shoulders. I believed this would fix me. In every teen movie, the girl cuts her hair and takes off her glasses. When she does this, she is suddenly worthy. I was sold the idea that my identity was tied to my appearance—and that both could transform. But when I changed my appearance, my identity didn’t change. I cried, threw fits, stared at the ceiling for months. I sent the boy I had liked so much a picture of my new hair, and he didn’t say anything back. I started high school, sick of who I was, sick of change, and tired of trying all the time. It took me a while to feel good again. I was a smart student my freshman year at a large and unimportant high school, and I had a few friends.
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But I felt empty and stuck despite my potential. I finally got around to seeing a therapist who changed my life around. I was getting better mentally. I felt more comfortable in situations and had made more friends. I felt secure enough to audition for a school show. I had always loved performing, and the way that my hair could give more volume to the character I played. When I was cast in my first show, I was filled with elation. I was Cassie Cooper in Neil Simon’s Rumors. I was the youngest in the cast by far and had one of the leading roles. It was my sophomore year, and I was ready for myself. I was ready to be who I wanted to be. I sat in the dressing room during dress rehearsals, the broken chair wobbling warily beneath me. A senior girl curled my hair into tight ringlets for opening night, complimenting my taste in music, practicing her lines with me. It continued this way for the next few years. Someone curled my hair into a classic 60s look for The Man Who Came to Dinner and made it look unkempt for Avenue Q, and I had a girl braid my hair into a heart for Much Ado About Nothing. Though I was playing different roles, I reached stability once again. I sat in the same place in the dressing room for each show, watching myself grow confident and smarter, working harder and better. I practiced my lines in the shower, teared up during my slam poetry performances, laughed with my friends at Sonic at 1 a.m. I pulled my hair into a ponytail for the SAT, put it in a bun during my long student council workdays. December of my senior year, my best friend and I sat giggling in her bathroom, dying each other’s hair different shades of blonde. She precariously chopped my bangs while I laughed hysterically. Heading into second semester of senior year I had short, homemade choppy bangs. I loved them, even if they were a little lopsided. The boy I liked said I looked like Uma Thurman, and I loved to curl them into a faux 80s look. But as the second semester continued and graduation encroached, I would push my bangs to the side as I worked diligently on college materials, finals, and my last show of the year. By this time, my hair was nearly at my hips, and it fell weakly across my back. I had never cut it more than a trim in high school. I was tired of waiting for the next stage of my life to begin. I scraped by to the end, never checking my final semester grades. My family fussed over me, eager to talk
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about college, about my dreams, whatever. We sat together over a celebratory breakfast. My cap was still on my head and my hair fell limp over my gown. I didn’t bother with it for graduation. Between discussing my future career and dorm room decorations, I interrupted them, “I think I want a haircut.” So that very day, I went into the salon. I told the hairdresser I wanted a bob, real short, and wanted it dyed a strawberry blonde, a muted desire I had had since I was young. She put the clippers against my neck and began cutting. I watched my hair, long and tired, drift to the floor. Years of anxiety, toxic relationships, guilt, practice, successes, failures, all left me. With my new short and vibrant hair, I find so much more time to accomplish what I want. I bake more often, read more often, and find times to laugh when it feels like the world is dull and indifferent. When I look in the mirror, I don’t see a kid. I see someone who took out her own loans for tuition, who cooks her own meals, who isn’t afraid to ask for help. I see someone who has come far. Indeed, my life has been tangled, unmanageable, tired. But I can make it vibrant, exciting, and useful. It’s all in finding what you don’t like, sitting and combing it out for a while. It’s all in finding your own dead ends, the parts of you that don’t serve your purpose, and chopping it off.
Artist Statement I responded to the prompt, reflecting over something we can take for granted, with a bit of rebellion. I wanted to think about something that didn’t matter to me as much as it used to: my hair. My initial response was: “wow that’s a long prompt.” And then I thought about the memories associated with my hair and how my life would be if I didn’t have those memories. As I worked on this piece, I moved away from the prompt. I figured that the story of me and my hair was more meaningful than the story of solely my memories. As well, I feel as if many women have strong correlations between their hair and their life. One of the biggest questions I had while writing is: do I give my hair too much credit? Maybe. After all, it is just hair. I worked hard to get where I am, and I don’t believe anyone or anything else is responsible for who I am. But the story of my hair is so salient in my life that it deserves to be put into writing.
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About Lizzie Stacks
Lizzie Stacks is a first year student at the Uni-
versity of Denver. She was raised in Aurora, CO. She is currently studying film and English with a minor in Spanish. She loves watching films, cooking, and preparing her acceptance speech for the Oscars.
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The University of Denver
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Memory by Esther Chung
Artist Statement Over the summer, I had forgotten about the prompt and didn’t realize it was a thing until I only had about a month left. I am known in my friend group as the goldfish since I tend to forget little things. So, when I learned about the prompt, I thought why not talk about something that is already affecting me? Yet the more I began to ruminate, the scarier the prospect of losing one’s memory seemed. In high school I had taken IB and AP psychology, and, because of my previous experience, I wanted to write about the psychological view of memory. I decided to draw because I wanted to get myself out of artist’s block. And so I forced myself into making a comic about something I was scared about losing. I did not expect that my work would have been chosen to become published, and for that I am very grateful. I hope whoever reads my little comic gains an appreciation for their own precious memories and will not forget how important their memories are.
“Memory” begins on following page.
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Psychology defines memory as a system of processes and structures that influence human behavior and personality.
For example,
Humans tend to base their current relationships on the ones they grew up observing.
We as humans also tend to fear or avoid experiences or objects that we’ve had bad experiences with in the past.
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I like to imagine memory itself as a garden
Each plant whispering to you their own little details and secrets only known to you.
Each little memory has their own flower,
But,
What would happen If you were to suddenly forget everything?
Without all the experiences and information that memory holds, the human body would be devoid of all personality and quirks.
As a child, I witnessed my grandfather slowly lose his memory due to dementia.
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K eys, When you think about it, there are so many things you forget about daily.
bi rt h days, g ro ceri es.
One Day he forgot his way home. It was scary to see him go.
When we found him, he looked like a shell of his former self. Like the person he used to be was gone.
It's terrifying.
Imagine wandering aimlessly to a destination
Unable to identify the face staring back at you and losing who you were before.
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Many Voices, One DU
Currently I manage to only lose bits and pieces of my memory
forgetting little things
where i left my phone, that person's name, or
facts I learned the night before.
Small bits and details that don't seem that significant,
But are always there, in the back of my mind.
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Esther Chung
Of course, there are always those memories that would rather be forgotten,
Those painful thorns that dig deep into your skin and never let go. We've all had moments we'd rather forget. Losing your first pet,
or a fight with a friend that ends the relationship. Yet, in the end, it's those thorns that make you who you are and help you become a better person.
If those thorns where to disappear, a person would become naĂŻve, unaware of the reality of life.
With the bad memories gone, a person would eventually make the same mistakes, falling into the same cycle, remaining ignorant.
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Many Voices, One DU
Losing my memory would remove who I am, good or bad.
Whether the ups or downs,
each and every memory has shaped me into the person I am today
So instead of turning away I choose to guard my precious memories
And move forward, remembering.
Esther Chung, 2018
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Esther Chung
About Esther Chung
Esther Chung is an 18-year-old first-year student at
the University of Denver. Currently a Psychology major with a focus on cognitive neuroscience, Esther is not quite sure what she wants to do with her degree but knows for sure that she wants to help people. Born and raised in Colorado Springs, Colorado, she is the oldest of two, with a sassy younger sibling. Both of her parents are restaurant owners, and she’s been a restaurant kid her whole life. In the entirety of her life, she has been quite the traveler—from traveling to Korea for a majority of her childhood to traveling around France and most of America. Esther’s hobbies consist of drawing, more specifically watercolor painting of surreal landscapes, people, and animals. She also appreciates the magnificent quirkiness of dogs and birds. Esther enjoys cooking and trying out new recipes found on Buzzfeed ’s Tasty.
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Many Voices, One DU
Grey Matter by Grace Gonzalez
When people ask me where I grew up, I answer with a lie—Seattle. In reality, I spent my childhood in the lesser-known outskirt of Issaquah, Washington, a title that holds no fame except for the milestones of my own life. Drive for 20 minutes going east on I-90 and you’ll find my exit: past the park’n’ride, past the tattoo parlor, past the teriyaki shop, and finally, past the decaying wooden sign that marked our turn, leading deep into the forest where my family’s house awaited. The seemingly long drive home may have proven inconvenient and mundane to some, but to me, the winding road and the creeping shadows of the woods created a playground for my imagination to run rampant. I wouldn’t see trees growing from the earthy soil; I’d feel the presence of soldiers standing confident and tall, ready for battle. And I wouldn’t hear a raging, dangerous river; I’d swim among sprites in a murky underwater oasis, dodging lily pads and stones as the current guided me into the exciting unknown. There, at the end of a long, paved driveway lovingly embraced by overgrowth and perfumed with the sweet scent of pine, rested my castle. The dark green shingled walls and double framed red front doors didn’t welcome you in with a friendly smile and trite greeting. Instead, the darkness beckoned you to enter ... if you dared. And those brave enough discovered the chill of tile on bare feet, the creaking of hardwood floors, and the constant overcast of Washington as it seeped in through the numerous windows, leaving a sort of comforting emptiness. This structure claimed many of my
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Grace Gonzalez
“firsts,” like a lost tooth in a strawberry cream cheese Toaster Strudel or a pirate-themed birthday party, and displayed them like trophies along the walls of the endless hallway. Slowly, remnants of these cheerful childhood memories diffused into every corner of the architecture, and the house became a part of me—it created me. My sea-themed bathroom with a mural of underwater life established in me a mystified wonder of the ocean, while the suspicious hole in the wall of my closet provided promise of a secret world, like my own personal Narnia, engendering a wild imagination and the ability to turn the simplest things into something magical. Even the stainedglass floral light on the ceiling of my bedroom, which I stared at every night as I fell asleep, helped mold who I am, instilling an acute attention to detail and an appreciation for life’s little surprises. In 2007, my parents told my two older brothers and me that we would move to Boise, Idaho, the following summer. A place of sunshine. A place of more beginnings. Despite what my parents expected, I never gave any trouble about the move or complained about leaving friends behind. I only felt excitement for what was to come. Instead of selling the house immediately, we kept our Issaquah fortress for many years after the move—a reason to appreciate the economic crash of ’08 and an excuse to embrace this big life change rather than cling to the difficulty of a final goodbye. Every time we returned to Washington to visit family or friends, which we gladly did often, we would nestle into our place on 44433 SE 117th Street like no time had passed. The bears and bobcats of the forest still frequently wandered the property, even if we didn’t, and the walls continued to resound with memories of the lives that had blossomed within. The house never lost its magic. Much of our furniture remained, and my bedroom felt eerily clean with only a bed, wooden table, and pink scalloped mirror, absent of all my toys and personality. But the walls still whispered a subtle pink. The floral stainedglass light still filled my room with a warm glow. The ocean bathroom still bubbled with sea-life. Only their tone was different—what once had comforted me with the promise of security now grew distant and hushed, with the risk of a final parting around every sheetrocked corner. When returning to Issaquah and taking those first steps through the red gates of the entrance, I time traveled. At last! A machine to transport us across the waves of space and the unknowns of time. Upon the arrival at
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Many Voices, One DU
the house one particular visit, I discovered a green beanie resting beneath the wooden table in my room. It had fallen there and collected dust for who knows how long. My favorite hat, I had searched for it in our Boise house for weeks and finally presumed its lost fate. But of course it would be waiting in Issaquah. It was as if the castle called her little princess back, into the safety of sturdy walls and the protection from the evils that accompanied aging. As I held that beanie, for just one moment, home wasn’t 489 miles away in Boise; home belonged back in our dark, woodsy house in Issaquah. After a few years, my parents decided to start renting the house to a family of three—a father, mother, and teenage daughter who rode horses at the arena just down the street. I didn’t like returning to Washington and having to stay in an incommodious hotel room when our perfectly cozy house resided just down the way. I felt silently betrayed that someone else dared call our fortress their own, filling it with foreign junk and meaningless objects. With each return to my hometown and each lifeless place in which we had to sleep, I felt the strings tethering me to our castle grow tighter, the tension mounting as the ropes began to fray. When the last binding string finally snapped, our great kingdom met a time for its demise. My brother and I visited our personally-renowned Issaquah last summer to say our final goodbyes, for our childhood home had officially sold. A worthy and fair price, my dad told me plainly, but no amount of the finest jewels or the greenest paper could equal the memories that reverberated across the rain-stained windows. The renters, due to make a graceful exit the following week, allowed me to tour the fortress one last time. I walked slowly and gingerly through every room. Opened every wooden drawer. Touched every glossy countertop. Silent tears dripped longingly down my cheeks, and my heart felt heavy from carrying the weight of so many memories. Each interaction with the space was emotionally charged and bursting with reminiscence, as if one wrong tiptoe would explode a world of sentimental grenades. I passed through my bedroom, now turned into an office and defiled with black paint. When I had first learned of this vandalism a year or so prior, I fumed with stormy rage. But now the numbness of the moment masked that previous anger, letting it heal into a throbbing scab. I boiled over in relief to witness the everlasting ocean-scape of my bathroom.
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Grace Gonzalez
My brother and I wandered the evergreen exterior of the house in quiet contemplation. We checked to see if the apple core we had planted years ago ever sprouted into the tree we so desperately desired—it hadn’t. I wondered what had become of the bear and her cubs, the bobcats, the howling wolves that called this forest home just the same as me. I questioned just how many soccer balls we lost in the steep graveyard of thorny blackberry bush overgrowth. I inhaled the twang of wet bark, the mustiness of constant moisture, the color green. And I thought of what remnants remained of the many fortresses my brothers and I spent hours building in the beguiling forest. When the dreaded time to depart finally arrived, the renter called to me, saying she had a gift. Unforeseeing, I waited curiously as she returned with a large dish in her hands—the stained-glass, rose-covered light from my bedroom. A piece of my broken time machine. I don’t think the renter— this stranger who had invaded our house and tampered with our sense of belonging—could ever understand what that heartfelt gesture meant to me. It urged more bittersweet tears, but more importantly, it meant a piece of my beloved home could live on with me forever, not just in memory. For I so loved that Issaquah house that it came to symbolize my magnificent childhood. It represented a time before the grief of lost loved ones, before the pain of heartache. Before stress, worry, anger, fear, rejection. My castle protected a time of wonder and hope, where no turret or dream stood too tall. Now when I visit Washington, I feel a dull ache knowing that era of my life is over. My childhood, and all its innocence and carefree adventure, exists only in the libraries of my mind. Sometimes the numbing pain of this loss and the weight of responsibility feels overwhelming, but while Issaquah now exudes a subtle aura of sadness, nothing can strip me of the happiness I cultivated there. It will forever hum with childlike glee. Every grey, overcast day—no matter if I’m running in the foothills of Boise or walking to class in the almost-always-sunny Denver—transports me right back and fills me with inexpressible joy. Though sometimes hard to admit, and even harder to accept amidst the struggle of hardship, it is because of the loss of childhood that I am able to love so deeply, think so profoundly, explore so passionately, and feel so intensely. Without this sacrifice, I would not be able to so enjoy the new wonders and possibility of adulthood. I cannot say where the future will lead, but like the river flowing
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Many Voices, One DU
as an arrow towards my Issaquah home, I can guide myself in the direction of an exciting unknown, holding my stained-glass light in one hand to brighten the way.
Artist Statement When I first read the One Prompt, I initially thought of the most obvious example of loss: loved ones who have passed away. I quickly realized I did not want to address such a heavy topic, and I instead started brainstorming more creative, unexpected illustrations of the prompt. The theme of my childhood home became a clear choice, as we had sold it only the summer before. What I did not expect was for my simple tale of a beloved house to grow into a deeply emotional metaphor for the much more significant loss of childhood. I decided to write with rich imagery, emphasizing the explosion of senses that accompanied our house in the Washington forest, as a sort of eulogy to this place so dear to my heart. Even though aging can be difficult, I want readers to finish my essay and appreciate the promise of adulthood, knowing that something as simple as a place can act as a time machine back to the wonders of childhood.
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Grace Gonzalez
About Grace Gonzalez
Grace Gonzalez is a first-year student at the
University of Denver and calls the rolling foothills of Boise, Idaho, her home. While currently undeclared, she is spending the beginning of her undergraduate studies exploring the myriad of exciting opportunities offered by a higher learning institution, having discovered a particular interest in Criminology. When Grace isn’t burying her nose in a textbook, she enjoys drawing life-like portraits, dreaming of studying abroad, and curating original content and photos for her fashion blog, which is updated twice weekly.
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Many Voices, One DU
Hard Boiled Eggs by Keelan Vargas
“Do you always have to cook hard boiled eggs with the shells on?” Oh … Never mind. If I were to struggle with losing one thing, it would be myself. Not my clothes, not my body, but my ability to be completely alone with myself. I’m not sure if you would call it my mind or my consciousness, but to me, the capability to be alone in my head is vital. Being alone and closing myself to the outside world may seem pessimistic and desolate. But this is not how I view it. One of the most beautiful things about life, about simply being human, is that no one will ever be as close to you as you are to yourself. No matter how connected you are to your mother, your friend, or a mentor, there is always a part of you that is kept secret. There will always be a part that only you can hear, no matter how closely other people listen. I don’t mean that I have dark secrets. What I value is deeply utterly mine. And only mine, not to be heard by or shared with others. If I were to name this thing or idea or whatever it is, I would probably call it “freedom of unpublished consciousness.” This freedom allows me to think the most undeniably stupid, embarrassing, strange things and keep them to myself. The ability to pick and choose the thoughts that you illustrate to the outside world is a capacity that I find incredible. No one will ever know you as well as you know yourself. You live a small
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Keelan Vargas
part of your life in the landscape of your mind, as peaceful or chaotic as it may be. The split-second whims of thought that pass through your mind, your initial judgement of a person, the variations of one single sentence that you construct in your head before writing it, the internal decision about what shoes to wear, and your gut feelings about anything and everything are the things that I take for granted. When I think about how each person I look at could be having a hundred, a thousand, a million different thoughts that are just as quick, fleeting, strange, random, and complex as mine, I remember why being a human being is so fascinating. The mind, although beautiful, is delicate. It takes time and dedication to grow an environment within yourself in which you feel confident, comfortable, and creative. Sometimes this place gets cluttered with things that make it uncomfortable to be with yourself. Sometimes, the walls of your thinking space become a little too soundproof. Being alone is a way to destress and decompress. Yet, I still need interaction with others to break the echo chamber and invite my unpublished consciousness to interact with diverse input. “Freedom of unpublished consciousness” is the separation of the noise in my mind from the clamor of the outside world. I value the space between mind and physical body, that which interacts with others in the world. This freedom allows me to be open and keep to myself at the same time. I could not live without myself, up there all alone in my head. Free to think in solitude. If I were not able to think questions such as, “Do you always have to cook hard boiled eggs with the shell on?” and before even finishing my thought, be able to realize that that question is really, really dumb, it would be debilitating. Being alone is not lonely. It is essential to take time to just sit and be. Be with yourself, be welcoming to your thoughts, no matter how random and stupid, and just be a human.
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Many Voices, One DU
Artist Statement When I first read the prompt for the One Book, One DU program, I really struggled to come up with anything to write about. I knew that I did not want to write about any physical object. The first line of my story, “Do you always have to cook hard boiled eggs with the shells on?” was a question that I asked my dad during the time that I was struggling to come up with a topic. I have always been very independent and value time spent with myself. I decided to take the idea of questions such as the one about hard boiled eggs and explore the ways that I take my mind for granted. Further, I noticed how what I thought and heard in my own mind didn’t have to be shared. To me, being able to share some thoughts with others and keep some to myself is an ability that I could not live without. I hope that the readers of my piece take away the broad idea of how interactions with other humans create close relationships, but, in the long run, you live a part of your life alone with yourself. My goal is that readers understand that it takes time to be comfortable alone in your mind and that it truly is an environment that needs to be cared for. Yet, once you are able to feel calm and at home in your head, it can be used as an escape from the chaos of the outside world.
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Keelan Vargas
About Keelan Vargas
Keelan Vargas is a first-year student at the Uni-
versity of Denver majoring in Computer Science. Born and raised in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, she has always loved to be active outside—so any opportunity Keelan gets to be outdoors, she does her best to take. Keelan is honored to be featured in the 3rd edition of Many Voices, One DU and hopes that you enjoy her piece, “Hard Boiled Eggs.”
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Many Voices, One DU
hands by Kyah Conrad
Artist Statement My song “hands”—an original arrangement and performance—is just one of many examples of the melodic glimpses into my thoughts and emotions. Songwriting has always served as an outlet for me, so when I first read the prompt and saw that I was allowed to write a song in response, I was absolutely thrilled because through music, I can express my true self. I got the idea to write about losing my hands after making a list of all the miniscule aspects of my life that I take for granted and finding that a common theme among them was the involvement of my hands. When I dug deeper, I realized my hands not only enable me to do the little everyday functions, but they also are major contributors to the two most important values in my life: love and music. In my song “hands,” I reflect upon what the loss of my hands would mean and equate it to the loss of my capability to love, to create, and to develop identity. I begin “hands” by talking about the loss of love. As someone who is always in need of a good hug and enjoys platonically holding hands, I most effectively display affection through physical touch. Without my hands, my main mode of touching, I would lose my precious ability to connect with the ones I care about. In the next verse, I shift from relation to creation. If I were to lose my hands, playing my instruments and writing lyrics would become increasingly difficult. The absence of these activities would deprive
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Kyah Conrad
me of the musical map that guides me through the messes in my mind, so without my hands, I would go astray. In the last verse, I pose the question: without these hands, who would I be? It is the combination of love and music that shapes who I am. My passion for music is driven by the love I have for its endless beauty, and, in turn, music empowers me to spread the wonderful love that everyone deserves. If love and music did not exist, I would have no sense of self. My hands are taken for granted every day. With these extraordinary extremities, I can pet my dog, use a spoon to eat ice cream, braid my hair, type these paragraphs, tie my shoes, and drive anywhere I want to. I am so grateful for the wonderful service they have and continue to provide for me. But, in the essence of it all, it is my hope listeners will be able to relate to “hands� in their own way and be inspired to always love unconditionally and to create honestly. your hand is my favorite thing to hold your skin is my favorite thing to touch so without these hands, how would i love? these strings are my favorite thing to strum these keys are my favorite thing to play so without these hands, what would i create? they say the eyes are the windows to the soul but the hands say so much more they read and they write they speak and they fight they wave hello and they wave goodbye they can let you go or they can keep their grip tight these hands are yours and these hands are mine keep them safe they hold your whole life this love is my favorite thing to feel this music is my favorite way to heal so without these hands, who would i be? without these hands, who would i be?
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Many Voices, One DU To hear Kyah Conrad perform “hands,” please visit https://www.du.edu/onebook/ many-voices-one-du/
hands
transcribed by christian litster
= 70 softly
voice
piano
5
vo.
A
8
vo.
so with
ou
th
e
your
your
ski
t
hold
ha nd is my fav 'rite thing to
words and music by kyah conrad
se han
n
is
my
fav 'rite thing to touch
ds,
how wo uld
37
i love?
Kyah Conrad
11
vo.
15
vo.
vo.
these
B
nds,
s
38
what would i cre ate?
y
so with
they
these
out
strum
2
are my fav 'rite thing to pla
stri ngs are my fav 'rite thing to
key
18
the
se
ha
C
sa
y the ey
es are the
Many Voices, One DU
22
vo.
win dow s
the soul,
vo.
to
26
y
so much
more.
30
vo.
ght, they
speak and they fi
but the
ha nds
they
read and they wri te, they
ve good by
and they wa
wave hel lo
they sa
D
e.
they can
3
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Kyah Conrad
33
vo.
let you g o,
they can
36
vo.
keep their gri p ti ght,
nds o f mi ne, ke ep them
40
vo.
4
40
safe
they
E
se hand of your s
hold
your who le
this
lo
ve
is
my
fav' rite thing to
and these ha
the
feel
life
this
Many Voices, One DU 43
vo.
mu sic
46
vo.
nds,
is
my fav 'rite way to he
vo.
who wo uld i be?
who wou ld
so with
i
be?
ou
nds,
50
al
t
the
se
ha
so with
out
these
ha
rit-----ar-----dan-----do
5
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Kyah Conrad
About Kyah Conrad
Kyah Conrad is a first-year student at the Uni-
versity of Denver and is currently majoring in Psychology. She was born in Honolulu, Hawai`i, to her Hawaiian mother and Irish father, but grew up in Parker, Colorado, with her two younger siblings and two dogs. From a young age, Kyah has always best expressed her feelings through music, and she loves to write songs in an attempt to grapple with whatever life throws at her. It is her hope to one day help others through hard times through music and through her professional career as a psychologist.
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Many Voices, One DU
ENGRAVED // CAGED by Connor Rodenbeck
I live inside a rose-petal cage, where I caress the soft stanzas that entrap me. With my left index finger I trace the outline of my fountain pen tattoo, the one I carved into my wrist with a safety pin and Indian ink. I feel the curve of the sharp tip. It drips what the past has taught me: black and cursive, the color of a rainbow bursting in my gut, my brain, my ribcage. It reminds me of what has since been lost to the clouds; The dopamine coursing through my veins as I lived and loved, long before the key locked me in. This poetic prison has become everything. I feel it in the tang of my mother’s pink grapefruit perfume, how the clouds knot up with dusk’s coral bursts, the mellifluous notes emanating from the orchestras that live in my earbuds. I switch hands and run my fingers over the quote snaking up my left arm; A line from the most vulnerable parts of my vast sky, It’s a voice dripping like honey from supple lips, a metaphoric sunset on my pale skin.
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Connor Rodenbeck
If I am let out of its cage, I will fade to darkness, I will become a phantom. My vision will surely blur— Foggy figures zig zagging across a gray landscape. Even in a field of wildflowers, the stench of sun-kissed garbage will bombard me. My tongue will turn to stone and disintegrate; the transient taste of rotting gums will be all that’s left. I will yearn for a symphony, left only with a devious hiss from the asp slithering up my throat. My fingers will burn away— I move to the sketch of the shooting star blasting up the back of my left arm. With every dot I feel fleeting infinity, how January latched onto my cheeks, how the stars filled my eyes, an artist and the universe connecting, a million muses pouring out their stories. I am aware that I am just a person: My heart isn’t a metaphor, my limbs aren’t connected by similes, my voice doesn’t sound like the imagery I love so. But, I am both miniscule and vast, simultaneously an observer and creator: The words and I are pulsing with life. I know that this cage will eventually rust and fade, but I am forever engraved with poetry. The art I have garnered will never be lost to the relentless hours of living.
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Many Voices, One DU
Artist Statement I really wanted to respond to the prompt in the form of a poem because poetry is my biggest passion. I wanted to craft a response that feels personal and accessible all at once. I fear losing the art that has fulfilled me, so my tattoos keep the art close to me at all times; this general fear of losing art can extend to all artists. I chose this subject because it allowed me to reflect on an abstract concept and put it into a concrete mode. I hope that the audience feels the intimacy I have with art and poetry, and that it urges them to ponder their own relationship to what makes them feel alive.
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Connor Rodenbeck
About Connor Rodenbeck
Connor Rodenbeck is a first-year student at the
University of Denver. He is from Aurora, Colorado, and plans on majoring in English with a concentration in Creative Writing and a minor in Writing Practices. He loves to write poetry in his free time and is excited to spend the next few years at DU!
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Many Voices, One DU
Mother and Child Reunion by Rebecca Arno
She twinkles and smiles with her mouth closed, like an elf with a secret, and gives wiry-muscled hugs, enveloping you in her spicy scent. Most of us call her the pocket mom or little mama or mama-san—or Helen. Only the youngest, in her forties, has started calling her mommy, and I can tell she loves it. It’s been more than 40 years since I called her that. It is strange, learning to feel like her daughter again. For my first eight years, I was very good at being Helen’s child, earning a then-rare smile or the warmth of her arm around my shoulders, as I swooped in for a hug while she cooked dinner. When you are small and you have a mother, it is not something you appreciate or acknowledge. Her presence is the air you breathe, as your life faces outward toward school and friends. The only time you notice her is when you have chicken pox and she gives you a soothing bath in oatmeal, or when you fight with her over whether you can have more gerbils, or have to go on yet another boring peace march. We started to lose her when I was eight. She left for an extended stay in a hospital. Our father said again and again, she’s just tired, she needs a rest. I felt terribly guilty. What could have made her tired besides the three of us kids? We were her only job. When we went to visit her in the hospital, they let her leave with us for the day. Our father took us all to the zoo. I remember ignoring the animals and watching her, noticing how the lines around her mouth would deepen when our father talked, but soften when she was hugging my little sister. I felt a hunger for her gaze, for the words,
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Rebecca Arno
That’s nice, Becky, when I told her how I was doing in school, even though she sounded distracted. When she came home from the hospital, she and our father divorced. We moved with her to a smaller house, and then with her new boyfriend, Bruce, to an even smaller one. On weekends, we stayed with our father in his apartment filled with the furniture from the house we’d all lived in together. He took us to Pagliai’s Pizza, and we watched baseball on TV. It felt comfortable, like home. At our mother’s, everything was different. She and her strange new friends drank and smoked all the time, partying long into the night after we went to bed. She started drifting away from us, a flower turning toward a new sun. Then she got pregnant. She and Bruce headed out on the road, leaving us with our father for the summer. Their son, our little brother, was born during their travels and they ended up settling in Colorado. When I was 11, we lived with them during the school year. There wasn’t enough money or space, and our mother got pregnant again. So, she sent the three of us older kids back to live with our dad. First there were letters. Then nothing for many months. During that time, I felt empty, angry, adrift. I fought with my brother and sister. I tried to be perfect for our father, so we wouldn’t lose him, too. I started to learn to live without a mother. Two years later, she got back in touch and we started spending summers with her new family. She asked us to stop calling her mommy. The younger kids called her and Bruce by their first names, and it would just confuse everyone if we didn’t. It was hard to stop. Every time the word would well up in my throat and I’d swallow it down, it felt like I was smothering my need for having a mother at all. Yet in those summers during my teenage years, I worshipped her. We all did. She lived on a cattle ranch where she eventually became foreman, riding horses that she trained, eating from the bounty of her huge garden. She grew strong running for miles over the old ranch roads. Tan, blonde, blueeyed, she’d been the prom queen in high school and was still more beautiful than a mother should be. There were people around her all the time, mostly Bruce’s friends who would drive the twenty miles from town to have dinner around her table. Yet, there was always a sense she wasn’t actually focused in any one moment, that she loved us all in a vague way but the specifics were
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Many Voices, One DU
slipping through her fingers. I grew up, went to college, and built a life, while Helen’s world descended into increasing disorder. She and Bruce moved to California, where alcoholism turned out to be the beast she couldn’t tame. It sucked both of them into its maw. All five children made our own ways into the world, most of us eventually settling back in Colorado. When we visited, there were hugs and I love yous, but we learned not to expect real connection, real interest in our lives. The shifting sands of chaos always threatened to swallow them—they were suing someone, they were being sued, they were being screwed over by someone at work. Only the horses tethered Helen to reality; she seemed most at peace shoveling manure in the pungent light of their stalls. This started to change the year my son was born. Helen got sober. She came alone to stay with us after Nick’s birth. In that quiet week, we held close both our newborn boy and the fragile newness of her sobriety. I was grateful, but I wanted everything to change right away. I wanted to tell all the truths and dig into a new relationship, to turn her into the mother I’d lost so many years ago, a mother I barely remembered. She wasn’t ready for anything like that, and retreated home to her horses and to Bruce, who was still drinking. I stepped back from the shores of expectation and wondered if anything would really change between us. It was easier to think of her as a loving, distant friend. Slowly, Helen built blocks of sanity into the foundation of her life. Her moorings shook when Bruce left her, but she dug in to her sobriety. She retired and took up endurance horseback riding. Over a decade, she rode nearly seven thousand miles and attended hundreds of meetings. In long hours spent between the swing of the saddle and hard church-basement chairs, she found serenity and the tools to sustain a life without alcohol. She lived alone and kept her distance from the family, welcoming us when we went out to visit, but rarely calling and never visiting, using the horses or a riding event as the reason she couldn’t come. Then one day, she called while I was driving. After a few minutes of chit chat, she said the words I’d been hoping to hear for so long: It must have been hard for you kids. I pulled over and took a deep breath. I was going to hear this. She started opening up about what she regretted having lost—and having done—in so many years of drinking. It was a short, uncomfortable conversation. But it
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Rebecca Arno
happened, and the pain we shared sat out in the open for the first time, instead of being buried and ignored where it could fester and keep us apart. I started to believe that it might be possible to understand, and perhaps even forgive, this woman who had given birth to me. Then the opportunity arose for her to move back to Colorado, and she decided it was time to return to the family. She and her horses settled in Parker, on a beautiful ranchette my sisters found. We were there when she got her chip for twenty years of sobriety. She was there when my nephew swam in the state meet at the Air Force Academy. My siblings and I took her to see Paul Simon at Red Rocks, where we sang along to the songs we’d grown up with, hugging each other and swaying to the music. When I moved, she came nearly every day to help pack or paint or take things to Goodwill. In phone calls, visits, and texts full of emojis, she makes amends for the brokenness of our past. It seems that in the spin and whirl of life, we are now joined as a mother and daughter. It’s a miracle. Still, our relationship feels tentative at times, tender like the new skin grown over a wound. I see her there at the table on Thanksgiving, smiling and passing the potatoes to my brother, and my heart fills with gratitude, certainly. But I have to admit, it is tinged with fear. Will we lose her again? Will she shrink away from me if I ask for too much from her? If I don’t do enough? Even writing this essay feels terrifying, because I know I will have to share it with her, and I don’t want to risk our relationship. Fortunately, I’ve come to understand that the real risk lies in not being honest with her, in trying to protect her from how I see our story. I don’t believe we will ever get to the point where I take her for granted like I did as a child; in a way, this feels like a blessing. Relief drifts in and around us, unseen and ever-present, reminding me in every moment that what once was lost, has now been found, and I am stunned by this fact, this amazing grace.
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Artist Statement I decided to respond to the One Prompt and to do so in an essay form, without knowing exactly what I’d describe as having lost. As I pondered this, it became clear that one major loss had defined my life: the loss of my mother to alcoholism when I was a child. She didn’t lose her life to the disease; instead, we children lost her to it. The challenge was to share this loss in the context of a lifelong journey that now has, at least for today, a happy ending. My hope is that others who have had to face the devastation of addiction in their lives will find familiarity and hope in our family’s story. I’m grateful to my mother and my siblings for their support for my submission of the story to Many Voices, One DU.
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About Rebecca Arno
Rebecca Arno is Director of the Barton Institute for
Philanthropy and Social Enterprise at the University of Denver, where she previously served as Executive Director of Foundation Relations. She has more than two decades of experience in the philanthropic sector, most recently as Vice President for Operations and Communications for The Denver Foundation. Rebecca has served on numerous boards, including as chair of both the Communications Network and the Colorado Nonprofit Association. Rebecca earned her master’s degree in Nonprofit Management from Regis University as part of the Colorado Trust Fellows program and has an undergraduate degree in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. She currently serves on the board of Lighthouse Writers Workshop and on the Reisher Scholarship Committee at The Denver Foundation.
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Mistakes: No Such Thing by Ellie Janette
Artist Statement I found the prompt overwhelming at first and immediately flew into a panic—my default response. Loss is a scary concept to consider. Scarier still is the vulnerability it takes to share such a personal loss with others. I had to come to terms with that fear before I could move forward with the project. When I finally uncovered the courage to reevaluate the task at hand, I experienced a breakthrough when I realized it didn’t have to be about something physical that I lost. It could be about some piece of who I am that I misplaced and rediscovered. That resonated with me a lot more. Children are fascinatingly creative little creatures. I was no different. In fact, I’d dare I say I was a little deeper into my own creative world at all times than most. Teenagers are dangerous little creatures: a perfect mixture of insecure and ruthless. I grew to fear the judgements of others more than I feared the prospect of losing touch with my colorful, creative and slightly odd self. I locked up my freedom and threw away the key before I realized the mistake I’d made. I was lost and floundering without direction for several years before a friend of mine helped me rediscover the beautiful and natural sense of purpose and joy that I experienced when embracing my creative self. The less restraints I put on my art and the more risks I took, the more joy, fulfillment and freedom I found.
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In the past year and a half, I have continued to explore my recently rediscovered artistic side more and more, so I decided to pursue this inquiry in my One Prompt response. The prompt simply spoke to the core of my artistic revival, my revival of self. I decided to create a visual and art-oriented response to represent the subject matter and ultimately went with creating a zine. Each page has a watercolor background beneath a collage layer of magazine images. I wanted to make the backgrounds ‘pop’ to emphasize the bold and colorful feelings that I get when I embrace my creative side. The short story that spans across the pages describes my loss of authenticity and creativity, my rediscovery of those things, and how that helped me to discover a firm sense of self and confidence in who I am. Zines are created in a passionate flurry of artistic fervor by individuals who wish to share bold messages with the world. They are meant to be reproduced and distributed with the hope of inspiring new thought in others. The message in my One Prompt response is one that I would like to be reproduced and distributed, one that will hopefully inspire new thought in others: Opening yourself up to your creative side, expressive side, or whatever side you have lost touch with, can teach you to see ‘imperfections’ and ‘mistakes’ as a part of the messy and beautiful process that is life. As my cover says, “Mistakes: No Such Thing.”
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Ellie Janette
The first time I picked up a paintbrush
I was so young I couldn’t say the word “paintbrush” -> each stroke was a masterpiece
an outpouring of my creative, playful,
squiggly,
bouncy soul.
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The next time was met with indifference.
Elementary school weekly art class (Thursday?). I did as told,
but I wasn’t “good”
-> each painted page merely a painted page
a visual representation of my lack of interest in depth,
my soul distracted my need to be the best.
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even older now, I care what people think. That is what steers the ship of my life,
consumes my brain, swallows my soul. I hate the paintbrush. The colors -> I only art
when forced
my work evidence of my self hate, my lost soul.
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fifteen. I know I am lost. I do not know where to find. I feel the sun on my face. I paint the sun.
Now two sources of warmth -> it felt good to paint
my soul wanders, is curious,
is in search of
the rainbow electricity it once was.
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I paint more. Sometimes I hate it. Not perfect enough. The act of brush on paper feels good.
It feels like freedom.
Torn. Many medias -> I keep trying.
determined to
find my soul and
let her free.
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One day I watercolor,
I paint the ocean and the setting sun. It is lovely, but it is a mistake.
I mess up many times as I paint,
but I keep painting.
My vision is not what comes to life, but
my child is perfect
-> once again I create a masterpiece.
My soul has learned. Reunited.
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I cannot mess up,
because I can add more water. More colors. More layers.
If I keep trying,
my creativity and essence leak
through the brush onto my paper and I am set free
-> I am
an artist
Because I choose to be.
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My mistakes do not define me.
I cannot fail as long as I do not give up. I can create beauty from ruin.
My soul is a beauty. wild and free.
Painting taught me that.
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Ellie Janette
About Ellie Janette
Ellie Janette is a first year student at the Uni-
versity of Denver who grew up in a small town on the central coast of California. Her major is journalism and she finds great joy in writing, as well as in creating mixed media art projects that often contain watercolor painting, a collage element, poetry, and sometimes acrylic painting. Additionally, she has a great passion for nature and believes the world would be a happier place if everyone spent more time in the sunshine. In her spare time, she enjoys running, hiking, and working on her art projects.
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How to Make the Words Right by Kiana Marsan
When they told me, B-- has passed away, the words looked wrong. They were too curt, too passing, too simple. The death I knew needed more words than that to make sense, words that were back-breaking and sky-falling kinds of heavy and hurtful. I wanted a punch in the gut that took the wind out of me; it had to have me cough up a dark, fermenting blood. The world had promised a sharp and acute pain, so in my head, in my heart, in my gut—everywhere—I looked for it. But, it wasn’t there. Instead, they told me that B-- has passed away, and I had to read it again and again and again because words that wrong come to your heart scrambled. Language is a shitty messenger of death; its syntax falls apart upon arrival. Instead, they told me B-- has passed away, and I had to try to piece the words back together in a way that made sense. I cried when I couldn’t do it. No matter how long I stared, it looked like a lie because I had never seen you and imagined, this is a person that isn’t going to say goodbye. Instead, I was presented with a free-floating, muddled grief that toyed with me in the blind dark. It pulled out my hair, it poked at my sides, and it tripped my ankles. You weren’t the first person to leave me, but my heart will always count your death first because you showed me its true colors—that it is not always mouthy, that it is not always nameless, and that it is not always kind.
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Earlier in our senior year, there was a girl who had died from suicide. In my classes, I had watched girls hold one another and cry. I had thought with a tongue-tied heart that hurt for them, that must suck. From you, I’ve learned that it does suck—it fucking sucks—to be caught in this limbo between a punch in the gut and a trip to the ankles because my head and my heart aren’t always in the same place. My heart doesn’t always believe it. When it does, I cry. When it doesn’t, I think and think and think of you because I crave a definite hurt that isn’t as illusive and shapeless and lasting as this. A lot of the time, the weighted task of grieving makes me sick with guilt. There are good people who knew you better than I did, and I know the pain I’m shouldering can’t compare to theirs because I never imagined I would be feeling it. Somewhere, sometime, I guess I started to tell myself that people were disposable. If you don’t love someone, then you’re not supposed to be able to lose them. It was a silly thing to think, though, since I still lost you. I’ve lost you even though, if you had stayed alive, we would have never spoken to one another again. You were too theatrical for me by the end. Like, was it serious or sarcastic when you told me that we couldn’t text anymore because our phone operating systems were different, and you had changed plans? It was a joke, Kiana, you had said, but only after I had reached out to your friends in a panic. I had needed to talk to you, and there had been months of silence between us since you had told me that joke. I didn’t laugh. It wasn’t funny that I could never be real or raw with a person that was always putting on their charm as if every moment was their first impression. If you had lived, you would have been one of the many people I drifted from. If you had lived, though, the friendship would have never felt completely lost. It would be a pretty, fleeting memory to pocket away like a snow globe you watch until all the flakes fall. Stare at the winter wonderland, shake the glass, and pretend that you can hold the world in your hands. The difference in our snow globe, now, though? Dead, there are blemishes tainting your memory like smudged fingerprints against glass. There’s a decaying smell that leaks from the inside of the snow globe, and the paint is brittle and peeling away in my hands. The
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flakes are stuck, plastered against the floor, and the picture isn’t as pretty without the snow. When I look into our past, there isn’t airy wistfulness. There is only melancholy because one, instead of both of us, has been left to pose inside this frigid hell and carry the weight of what once was. Now, when I think of you alive, the dead B-- is there, too. We may have been friends in passing, but we were friends in passing for four years. I may hate how your death teases with my heart, but the weight it carries is a testament to how the time we spent time together is concrete and tangible. My loss may not be objective nonchalance, and the world didn’t make good on its promise that I would take a beating that left me with the iron taste of blood. My hurt is still there, though, somewhere in between the two, and the fog that holds me hostage in this no man’s land of grief is finally starting to clear. In its wake, my splintered memories of you lie bare. When I watch our first memories, from the days where we were still learning what made us good, there are ice-breakers and thawed hearts, forgetful names and nervous laughter, kicking feet and shoving desks. Freshman year, we sat next to one another in two back-to-back classes. That first day, I was afraid. Afraid because there had been first days before this that had scarred me with how lonely and chasmic they were; afraid because when the ground is quicksand, when this fever-dream world full of strange faces is moving faster than you can keep up with, it’s easy to lose yourself inside of it. That day, we had gotten through the worst of it and made it to seventh and eighth period. The quicksand hadn’t sunk us as low as we thought it would. Instead, it was more like beachy wet sand you build sandcastles out of. Heavy and sticky, but soft and fun. That sand—it loosened us up so that we could speak to one another when we met in a way that we couldn’t with others. We were still shy, but we made it good, I think, because I remember laughter when we found out you were young, but I was younger, and I was the first younger in our grade you had ever known. I guess, soon, I won’t be younger anymore; you’ll always be seventeen.
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I used to hate always being the youngest person in the room, but now—I would give anything to be younger than you forever. Because when we were still young, you put out so much energy into the world. People threw themselves drunk on it, loving how you wrote jokes and put punchlines into sober contexts because to you, taking yourself seriously was overrated. There was something unapologetic in how you carried yourself, this take-it-or-leave-it mentality that some people gravitated to and other people didn’t. You used to like to sing in the hallway between classes. When someone told you they thought it was less like funny and more like annoying, you stared at them straight in the face and kept on belting “Breaking Free” from High School Musical offkey. The life you carried with you was flush with color. All the people it drew, though, disintegrated us into black and white. Sophomore year, I don’t know if we saw less or more of each other. We were better when we operated outside of class, I think. Inside, our friendship held a different quality because—even though I’ll never know how much of you was real and how much of you was fake—that year, it felt as if you had left the quicksand, while I was still sinking. You were waving your loud, proud, and carefree personality to the world, and it was harder to share when there were more people being flagged down by it. My personality wasn’t strong enough for that. A person can’t sink and swim; they have to pick one, so I couldn’t choose you. And so, our friendship changed from classroom antics to eating lunch together. When I needed a break from feeling like the odd one out with the two nice, quiet girls I normally sat with, you and I would laugh and tease one another off-campus. Outside, where no one could see us, it was easy to go back to that place of sandcastles. There, beached on the shore, we didn’t have to try to swim to the same current. When I think of us then, there are pictures of girlish teens jaywalking the shortcut from school to the King Soopers across the street, playing waiting games in the Starbucks line, and performing musical numbers for anyone that sat too close to their table.
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We ate lunch together so often that one day, one of the nice, quiet girls asked me why are you friends with her? after she had spent the whole lunch with her lips pressed into a pinched smile that looked like someone had sewn it on too tight. She was met with silence, not because I didn’t have an answer, but because I didn’t know how to explain to a person that acted as if they were all grown-up that the people who can take you back to your childhood are the ones you hold on to. Half of the truth, the part she saw, was that we were no better than little kids with a friendship chock full of finger-tasers to the ribs and elbow jabs to the side. The other half, though? It didn’t make us bad together when our childish hearts forgot that love was ‘supposed to be’ an intricate and aged thing. It made us good, and that was why I was friends with you; you brought out the kid in me. For my fifteenth birthday, I remember you gave me vanilla frosting, cake mix, and rainbow sprinkles—make a cake with it, you had said to me when you handed over the bag, here are the ingredients. Those moments, stupid and loveable, were the reason I was friends with you. When my dad and I were standing thick-headed in a big-box supercenter because we didn’t know what to bring to your sixteenth birthday party, I wish I had remembered that gift and bought you wrapping paper and tape and told you, build your own present. You would have liked that, I think. At that sixteenth birthday party, we hugged for the first and last time. Your arms opened first, I know, because I remember that even though it was your birthday, I was the one surprised by how willing the girl who pretended to hate the world was to let love into hers. I live in a shoebox, you used to like joking, I live alone—me, myself, and I. You told people that you were an orphan, or at least that you were as good as one. At that party, though, I met your mom, your dad, your brother, and your sister. You had never breathed a word to me about any of them, but there was no mistaking it: they looked just like you. So, with the family I didn’t know you had watching us, we hugged. My
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arms opened up back because even though I would never have told you—my pride too tall—you were the first friend in a long time that had cared enough to see me after hours. The nice, quiet girls never had parties. At least, they never had ones I was invited to. I didn’t know it, but that hug was the last time we were good together. If I had, I would have held onto you a little longer. We stopped talking after that. Our classes didn’t match junior year, and we stopped eating together because now, I had a nice, quiet girl to talk to that I didn’t have to share with others. My heart started to look less like an island and more like a bridge, so I didn’t need someone to pull me out of the quicksand any longer. I learned how to pretend to swim, like everyone else did, but I still wouldn’t choose you. Some truths know how to hurt, back-breaking and sky-falling kinds of hurtful, so I don’t know how to write how sorry I am for this one: you became the backup friend I no longer needed to keep me afloat. I think you were smart enough to know it too, but we never spoke of what we were losing. We talked when we saw each other, when it would be awkward not to, around the truth. Before you had even left me, I had accepted that you were meant to be left as part of my past. It is there, though, in the place where our friendship was dying, where I know now what I love most about you, what tied us loosely together those four years, and what kept me knowing you were a person I could always come back to. When I look inside our broken snow globe, this understated and freshcut memory shines the brightest: on a day where the air was too heavy and dense to pretend to swim, our teacher called on me. When I didn’t know the answer to the question, an obvious one where the bridge between my school sense and common sense didn’t meet, you blurted it out before I had to end the awkward silence with words that were wrong, words that would flush my cheeks red and pinch my heart tight because I was a person that cared too much. It was a vanilla thing, what you did—a gesture as mute as a person opening their arms to a hug first—but you did it all the time. At those lunches where the nice, quiet girls stranded me, where you let
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me smile and pretend I wasn’t winded from how lonely it was—your heart opened first; in new and bright and scary places where you knew the whole crowd, where I only knew you—your heart opened first. You knew that sometimes, the right words were no words. My friends would disappear off-campus—their lips forgetting to slip me so much as a so-long—and, it didn’t matter if it had been days, weeks, or months since we had last spoke, B--. I could always turn to you. There would be no questions since you knew the answers weren’t pretty. I would sit down, and you would pretend as if we were the same as the day we first met even when it wasn’t so. Tell me, you would say, smiling as you waved me over, what’s it like to be so young? It was that easy. You let me back in every time. When I watch back my splintered memories of you, from the days we were girlish to the days we were strained, there is one solidarity in all of them: hearts opening first, everywhere. We only hugged once, at that sixteenth birthday party, but your heart was trying to reach me all the time, B--. I know that now, and I hope that you can feel all of us, the people who miss you, trying to open our hearts back from across the gap. It’s our way of saying sorry for thinking that when a person does so much saving, they could never be sinking like the rest of us, too. At your funeral, we were given blank cards to contribute to a collection of memories with. The pen shaking in my hand, I wished that you were there with me. I needed someone to tell me how to make the words right again— how to make them capture who you were. When we hugged, her heartbeat was loud, I should have written, because B-- was a person so alive that she could make others feel like people, too.
Artist Statement When I read the One Book, One DU prompt, I immediately knew what I wanted to write about. Two months prior, I had lost a friend. From the day she died, I think I subconsciously knew that I would eventually need to tell her story—our story—to make peace with it. Writing has
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always been the way I’ve coped, but for weeks, I denied myself that process. I turned my back on my refuge, on what had once given me my voice in moments of silence, and it wasn’t because I didn’t have the words to explain what was happening to me. It was because I was afraid of what the words would say. They were words that had been left unspoken for a long time. They hadn’t aged well, so I knew they wouldn’t be nice, and they wouldn’t be pretty. How could they? She wasn’t the first death I had ever known. But she was the first one that put me in a state of grief. I read the prompt, and I immediately knew that writing about anything other than her would feel wrong. I had to break the silence. One of us was gone, but that didn’t mean that the two of us were done talking. So, I wrote her a letter. I want those who read my words for her to know that even though it may seem exposed and vulnerable to talk about, it’s okay. For me, this letter was the easy choice. For me, it was the only thing I knew how to write. Remembering B-- and being able to see my heart, your heart, and everyone else’s through hers—it’s what gets me past losing her. I hope it helps you, too.
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About Kiana Marsan
Kiana Marsan is a first-year student at the Uni-
versity of Denver. Originally from Denver, she is an English major. Her short stories have previously appeared in Germ Magazine and Flash Fiction Online, and she hopes to have a future within the publishing industry. She enjoys spending time with friends and family, and she feels lucky to have such great people in her life.
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Someone Else’s Story by Skylar Nitzel
PART ONE: THE ENCHANTMENT The sky bled into the earth in the approaching dusk, and Dragonhome was washed in swirls of purple and grey. Dark storm clouds and ominous thunder promised yet another night of ceaseless downpour. Dragons lurked in the shadows, jumping whenever lightning illuminated the world, glimmering like sheer, white spider webs. Three nights ago, the storm stole the life of the Dragon Queen, exposing the kingdom during daylight. Sprinkles, the pink dragon of the Sparkle Realm, was their only hope, for she knew of magic deep within the Shadow Forest that would end the dark nights and bring their ruler back from the grave. I hid in the hills with Sprinkles, gripping her back tightly as freezing raindrops cascaded down my face. “Are you ready?” I asked. Sprinkles curled her tail around my leg affectionately, quietly growling before she took to the blackening skies. Faintly, we heard the powerful roar of the fallen kingdom behind us. As tumultuous weather raged on around me as vivid as real life, my neighbors across the street watched me calmly pace my backyard. Years later, I discovered that they approached my parents that day and informed them that I was talking to imaginary people. “Who were you talking to?” my mom asked at the end of the day. “My friends!” I claimed proudly, obliviously. “The ones in the bushes! Can’t you see them? We all had to hide from the storm or the dragons would’ve had their wings torn apart!”
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My mom smiled encouragingly, distractedly, as if she were thinking about what would happen when I wasn’t a five-year-old anymore. To me, this was my world. It was as real and tangible as my own flesh. Sprinkles the dragon was my best friend when I was a kid. I talked to her for hours about everything. She never offered advice; she only grunted in response. She slept in my closet on a pillow and enjoyed roasting marshmallows. The world I lived in was extraordinary for as long as I could remember, even if others did not see what I saw. My days were filled with magic and mayhem, adventures and adversity. I could not fathom what my world looked like without imagination and, as I grew up, I feared that my universe would become bleak, dull, unexciting, and painfully boring if I were to watch my imagination disappear, eaten away by the dreary tasks of living. I was in fourth grade when I decided I wanted to be a writer. Everything I saw in my head could be transferred to paper, and, at the end of the school year, I would take extra, loose-leaf paper from my teachers so I could write my stories over the summers—it was a way of channeling imaginary things into reality. I lived in a world of no expectations, believing in the strange and fantastic. It was an enchantment, true and deep and pure. It came so easily to me at the time—like I possessed an innate desire to marvel at the ordinary. It was a remarkable time to be carefree and innocent, as I’m sure it was for any child. It was something I could not imagine losing lest I descend into a passionless life.
PART TWO: THE BROKEN SPELL When we finally reached the Shadow Forest, I tried suppressing the shiver that ran through me. We ventured deeper, and the trees caved inwards, creating sharp claws that entangled Sprinkles in a cage of thorns and branches. She snarled, but the bramble only wound itself tighter around her. When we could go no further, we froze. A pair of glowing Shadow eyes looked out from a dark hollow in front of us. Aching to move, Sprinkles twitched every few seconds, but the boughs only squeezed her harder. When the eyes landed on me, a voice spoke. “A Dragontamer without a map? Have you no idea where you are, mortal?” I tried straightening myself, but the suffocating wild pushed in on my body. My words came out forced, shallow, and hushed. “I have heard the
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Shadow necromancers can reverse this storm. We need our queen back, and Sprinkles comes bearing a gift in return for your help—” The voice laughed, its eyes flickering in and out of existence as it blinked rapidly. “This cannot be done. The queen is buried. Here.” Two large talons extended out from the darkness, patting the dirt tenderly. Sprinkles wriggled, drawing blood against her barbed prison. My hope turned to fear and then to hurt. Already, I could feel the dragons fading. “Skylar?” Everything real snapped back into place, as if someone hit a light switch. The forest disintegrated and the Shadow eyes dissolved. The classroom came into focus around me. “Hmm?” I asked. I hadn’t heard a thing my teacher said. The barrier between the world I created and the one I lived in now flickered like the heart of a dying flame. I still heard the voice in the woods, felt the trees puncturing my skin. If I avoided my teacher’s gaze, I still saw the strong texture of Sprinkles’ scales, rough and rutted, bumpy and broken … “If you’re not going to pay attention, there’s no reason for you to be here.” His harsh voice cut through the scene in my head, this time stamping itself on my brain. The class stared at me. My cheeks burned, and I said nothing. I became embarrassed, irritated, and nervous, wishing the bell would ring. My teacher turned away exasperated, picking up where he left off. I tried focusing, absorbing information instead of drifting off. I concentrated on the physical things around me: the desk, the people, the floor. In time, it became easier to pay attention. In time, it became easier to recognize the illusions. The day I knew that things were different was the day I didn’t see Sprinkles anymore. It was as if her existence had diminished as other responsibilities in my life took over. She had existed at one point, but I had no idea where she went. Sometimes I wondered what had happened to her. Did she die? Was there some cemetery for all imaginary friends forgotten by children as they grew up? Who knows. I’m still not sure, but I worried that the distance between fictional friendships and palpable playmates would only increase. What scared me the most about losing my imagination was knowing that
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it would affect what I wanted to do—make up stories, create adventures, see delight in the mundane. How could I do that when I was losing my sense of wonder, when taking on new responsibilities meant the gradual death of characters like Sprinkles? How could I be a fiction author if I no longer got lost in my own head? To distract myself from my loss, I resided between the pages of books. If I could not lose myself in personal daydreams, maybe I could get lost in other imaginations. Sometimes I was envious that the authors I read made careers out of their imagination while I struggled to find my own once the spell was broken. Stubborn, I tried to hold onto childish fantasies any way I could; during tedious lectures in high school, my mind drifted to where I was a ruthless queen in a castle instead of a student in a classroom. These flights of imagination did not replace the worlds I lost growing up, but they were still worth trying to hold on to.
PART THREE: THE REALITY I suppose every child goes through it: “No, you cannot be a princess when you grow up.” “No, there is no Santa Clause, Tooth Fairy, or Easter Bunny.” “No, you cannot keep the cardboard box to make a castle.” “Life is not a fairytale.” “There aren’t always happy endings.” “Stop acting immature.” “Stop being childish.” “Be serious.” “Think about your future.” “Welcome to the real world.” “Grow up.” I didn’t want growing up to suddenly mean that the world was no longer as wonderful as it could be, but I soon learned that the adults were also right: life wasn’t a fairytale. As I grew up, the dragon battles and quests barely lived longer than a minute before my mind killed them off with other thoughts. Homework, tests, dates, appointments, college—all of the things that had to be done filled my head instead. A black-and-white checklist for living was washing away the colorful world I had lived in with Sprinkles. And it scared me. Did growing up and facing reality mean that I had to give up imagination? The term “starving artist” became a new nightmare, eating me alive and tearing me to pieces. I was losing myself piece by piece as reality begged me to submit to its demands and forget Sprinkles for good. My dad never stopped encouraging me. He threw wild ideas out into
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the open at the most inconvenient times to try and spark my imagination again. It made me feel better knowing that my dad still saw vibrant colors in his own busy, tax-filled, kid-filled, bill-filled adult world. Still, despite his efforts, I feared I had lost something I couldn’t get back. “You’re going to make it,” he’d say. “You’re going to be happier if you’re doing what you love. You can’t give up on it. You have it in you. You’re going to be a writer.” What could I possibly write about without Sprinkles by my side? Then, during high school, I met a girl whose heart was made of sparkles, and when she fell down the rabbit hole into a dark world filled with darker thoughts, I wasn’t sure how she’d make it back out. Her imagination was clouded by the somber weight of impractical expectations, and the brightness with which she usually glowed was finally extinguished one night when she was placed on a 72-hour hold in the hospital for suicidal thoughts. That night, as she choked back heavy sobs, she told me, “I don’t know what to do.” I didn’t know what to do either. I tried to keep my own breathing steady when I told her, “You’re okay. You’re still here and that’s what matters. You’re a wonderfully graceful dragon who rules over a kingdom of … less graceful dragons. And it’s good and you’re good and all your loyal subjects adore your fair reign and lovely smile. You’re okay.” I had only intended to make her laugh, to put some magical image in her head to drown out the darkness, but … the story kept going. After an hour of talking with her, she had become the most wealthy dragoness in a castle carved of scintillating silver. Gems hung from the castle ceiling like icicles, glowing gently under the sunlight, seeping into her fortress. Her loyal warriors obeyed her every command, celebrated her victories, and enchanted her life with stardust and color and light and music. The sun shone softly over her kingdom, casting rays of gold across rolling hills and oak trees touched by autumn. She was no longer a face, a weight, a grade, or an expectation; she was so much more in her imaginary kingdom. Maybe that was all she needed to see things in color again. Maybe it was all I needed too. The possibility of losing my friend, coupled with my dad’s encouragement, made me realize how much imagination was needed—just maybe not how I had once believed. Little by little, I started seeing the color return
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in my own world. I knew what I could write about then, even if it meant Sprinkles wouldn’t be part of the story this time around. Maybe I had lost creations like Sprinkles, but I had gained the privilege of living through my own adventures. I could use my imagination to tell someone else’s story as well as my own. I could build bridges between abstractions and afflictions. I could use black-and-white words to create worlds filled with color—worlds that might end up saving myself as well as others. As soon as I became aware of what was happening and what I was losing, nostalgia set in, confirming that I really and truly had lost the imagination I possessed as a child. Sprinkles was no longer real, and the adult world no longer needed her. Yet, a different type of imagination emerged in its place, one that helped me slay the monsters of doubt instead of befriend them. If I listened close enough, I was almost certain the roar of dragons hid in its wake.
Artist Statement In crafting my response to the One Prompt, I knew that I wanted to explore something abstract, as opposed to tangible, because it meant more to me. I have always grown up knowing that material items can be replaced, so, even though I have lost physical items that hold sentimental meaning for me, I never considered writing about a physical object when I knew that losing other, more intangible concepts have had a larger impact on who I am and what I wanted to pursue. When I began writing my response, I started with a fictional story just to get into a writing rhythm, but it frustrated me when I couldn’t think of any stories that sparked inspiration. After a while, this idea led me to write about that struggle and consider what made me more resistant to indulge in creativity and imagination. I hope that my audience perhaps considers imagination, or any other form of creativity, in relation to their own lives. I’m not asking my audience to leave my work with a newfound interest in daydreaming or telling stories, but I believe it’s important for everyone to remember that there is a world— magical or otherwise—outside of a daily routine.
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About Skylar Nitzel
Skylar Nitzel is a first-year undergraduate stu-
dent at the University of Denver where she is double majoring in English with a focus on Creative Writing and Journalism. She is from Lakewood, Colorado, where she lives with her parents and younger brother. Growing up in Colorado, Skylar loves the mountains and often takes trips with her family. In her free time, she enjoys reading, writing, and watching movies.
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Natalie’s Room by Madalyne Heiken
SETTING:
A teenage girl’s bedroom. A twin sized bed sits center stage with a night stand next to it stage right. A dresser is stage left of the bed and a window is set above it. A vanity sits stage right of the night stand, and a window is between the vanity and the night stand. All furniture matches in color and it complements the painting of the walls. Color is up to director’s and designer’s discretion. Clothes are spread out all around the room. The space is a disaster. SCENE:
The windows are dark. It’s four in the morning. NATALIE (17) is working on cleaning her bedroom. In the midst of looking through old papers, she finds a journal, and she begins to look through it. She becomes anxious, and she quickly closes the book and frantically searches around for her phone. She finds it. She stands stage right, and she makes a call. It rings. There’s no answer at first. She calls again. She’s unaware of the time. Throughout the scene, both NATALIE and WILLOW are on their phones unless directed otherwise. NATALIE: (cheerfully) Hey, Will, it’s me!
Enter WILLOW (16) who comes in from stage left by the dresser; NATALIE’s back is to her as she stands by the night stand. WILLOW is in pajamas or some form of sleeping clothing.
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Madalyne Heiken WILLOW: (groggy, tired, annoyed) Hi, Nat. NATALIE: (they talk over each other) I know it’s probably late, but— WILLOW:—It’s four in the morning, Nat— NATALIE: I just wanted to talk to you, guess what— WILLOW:—Right now really isn’t the time for thi— NATALIE: I found one of the old journals we wrote in during, like, seventh
grade.
WILLOW: I’m tired, Nat. Call me la— NATALIE: We were so stupid and angsty back then, huh? WILLOW: (giving up; figuring the conversation will be short, she converses af-
ter letting out a deep breath) Yeah. Yeah, I guess we were. (pause, neither says anything for a moment, it’s awkward) Why are you calling, Nat?
NATALIE crosses downstage toward the dresser as she speaks. WILLOW moves in the opposite direction, and she stands on the bed. NATALIE: I was just cleaning and found the— WILLOW: Nat. Why are you really calling? NATALIE: I … I … (thinking, crossing the end of the bed, she stops at the pile
of papers she was looking for before) I just wanted to talk to you (awkward pause) I’ve been thinking about you a lot lately… (gazing at the ground, opposite hand around waist, hugging herself, her voice quivers) I—I … I hope that everything is going good. We haven’t talked in a while, but I’m sure you’re busy with your classes and clubs and friends … (grimaces at her own statement, waiting for a response)
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WILLOW watches Natalie. She sits on the bed, her feet dangling off the side. WILLOW: (confused) Yeah.
NATALIE sits among the papers, shuffling through them. NATALIE: I’m sorry for everything that happened between us in May. (pause) I was stupid. (pause, thinking) I wasn’t a good person then, but I’ve changed.
Hearing her out, WILLOW climbs off the bed and sits behind NATALIE. WILLOW: (voice cracking, broken, she covers her heart) You hurt me, Natalie.
NATALIE takes a moment to think. She finds the paper she was looking for, and she holds it against her chest. NATALIE: I know … I know I did. But I want to make it better. I want to
fix us, fix our friendshi—
WILLOW: (cutting her off) Nothing can do that. You broke me. NATALIE: (her voice is soft, almost a desperate whisper) Willow, I— WILLOW: Nat, we’ve been close—or were close for a while. And I loved
our friendship—
NATALIE: (quieter, more to herself) Loved? WILLOW: I stayed up until the crack of dawn for it. (her tone becomes
more forceful, hurtful) But you stopped responding, stopped having real conversations. NATALIE: (again, to herself) I stopped?
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that you were consuming and never returning.
Angry, NATALIE suddenly rises and crosses the room to get as far away from WILLOW as possible. Her body is shaking. She’s not thinking clearly; her thoughts are silenced by her anger. WILLOW gets up and kneels on the bed. She’s also getting more upset. NATALIE: You were the one that stopped talking to me! WILLOW: That’s not— NATALIE: Yes, it’s true. You were the one that never replied, the one
that let things fall apart. All I’ve ever wanted is to fix things, mend our relationship—
WILLOW: (shocked, repeating NATALIE) Mend our relationship?! You
were the one that betrayed my trust, talked bad about me, told someone else’s secret to Katrina. Katrina! Of all people, it was her. I trusted you, Natalie, and you ruined that. (lethal) You don’t get the right to say anything.
NATALIE crosses stage and sits on the end of her bed. She puts the hand that isn’t holding the phone on her head, running her fingers through her hair. NATALIE: Stop—
WILLOW crawls down the bed. She hovers over NATALIE. WILLOW: Stop what? Telling you the truth? Telling you how it really is?
What really happened? God, Natalie. Your selfishness and consistent need for attention and gossip caused me to lose my friendship with José. He still won’t talk to me because of you. How is that fair? NATALIE: Just stop! Stop it! Stop it! STOP. IT.
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There’s silence as WILLOW moves off the bed, stands behind NATALIE, and watches her. WILLOW: What?
NATALIE is silent. She’s breathing heavily. WILLOW: Natalie. What is it? NATALIE: (voice quivering) Willow, I know you aren’t a Christian, and
you don’t believe in God or Jesus or any of that. But (pausing, taking a deep breath) but I know that God put you in my life for a reason. I don’t think that He’d want you out of it. WILLOW: (voice quieter, she moves closer to NATALIE) I wonder if your
God wanted our paths to cross or stay intertwined. (she crouches next to NATALIE, her profile faces the audience, their faces are close, WILLOW’s words are brutal) I think we both know that answer. NATALIE: (after a moment) I wish I could see you.
The lights around them slowly dim, as the moment becomes more intimate. WILLOW: Why can’t you? I’m right here.
NATALIE suddenly sees WILLOW. She turns toward her. Both of their profiles face the audience. They continue to be very close to one another. NATALIE: (almost whispering) So … is this the end? Everything we once
had—everything we once were—means nothing to you?
WILLOW: (interrupting her, voice gentle) I didn’t say that. NATALIE: (firm voice) Well, it means something to me.
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The lights come back up, breaking the moment. NATALIE stands, walking away from WILLOW. WILLOW stands, watching her, admiring her for a moment before NATALIE talks again. NATALIE: All of the sleepless nights we stayed up texting and video chat-
ting, all of the code words we made to confuse Marissa and Ayla, all of the sleepovers we spent watching YouTube vloggers, all of the times we laughed over absurd and poorly written fanfiction, all of the times I cried to you over school, all of the secrets I’ve only told you. It all means nothing to you?
WILLOW: (talking over NATALIE, slowly walking toward her) I didn’t say
that.
NATALIE: The first time … (considering if she should say it, she goes for it,
emotional) The first time we said, “I love you” means nothing to you? WILLOW: (talking over her, getting closer to her) They do mean— NATALIE: I mean NOTHING to you?!
WILLOW: (she touches NATALIE’s shoulder, trying to embrace her) Yes, you
do—
NATALIE shakes WILLOW’s hand off of her shoulder. WILLOW falls to the floor. As NATALIE tries to cross the stage to get away from WILLOW, she trips. Both girls are on the floor now, within a few feet of each other. WILLOW rubs her arm as if it’s hurt. NATALIE: (quieter) No, I don’t. I don’t matter to you, Willow. Admit it.
God. (running her hands through her hair. She looks up at WILLOW) You only allowed yourself to remember the times we hurt each other, made each other feel like shit. WILLOW stares at the ground as NATALIE speaks.
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and I’m plaguing every happy memory we have of each other. (shaking her head, she moves across the floor trying to get farther away from WILLOW. Each following sentence serves as a crescendo up to the last sentence, NATALIE is speaking quickly) You said you don’t know me, but I stopped knowing you long before. You closed yourself off. You stopped talking to me. You let your insecurities tarnish the thing that made you feel secure. You were the one that made this friendship unhealthy. And you were the one that fell for me. There’s a heavy silence as they stare in each other’s eyes. Intensity. WILLOW tries to close the distance between them. WILLOW: Natalie … NATALIE: I’m done waiting for you to accept my apologies. I’ve said I’m
sorry; I’m tired of crying over you. I’m done.
NATALIE turns her head away from WILLOW. Her body becomes limp. WILLOW crawls toward her. She shakes NATALIE’s shoulders. She’s crying. WILLOW: Nat. Natalie. Natalie! Natalie! (sobbing, voice cracking) I love you.
Lights out. Black out. WILLOW: I forgive you.
Artist Statement At some point in our lives, we lose someone who meant a lot to us. They may pass away or they grow distant or you have a devastating falling out with them. I wanted to explore the loss of friendship and how anger, heartbreak, regret, and nostalgia play in to those relationships. In my experience, I still care for the people I’ve loss, and I still love them which is something I wanted to toy with in my response. I chose to respond in the form of a play script,
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because I’m passionate about theatrical performance, and I find the method of writing to be more expressive yet ambiguous. It allows the reader to make their own interpretations of character motives, and it can heavily reflect how they perceive their relationships. Art is subjective, and I want the audience to play in to the concept. What do they think the writing means? How does it pertain to them? When was a time they lost a relationship? Was the experience similar to this one? These are the questions I’d like them to consider, and I also encourage them to ask more.
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About Madalyne Heiken
Madalyne Heiken is a first-year student from
Aurora, Colorado, studying theatre and journalism at the University of Denver. She currently works with kids at the YMCA and at camps for DU’s Youth Programs. After she completes her undergrad, she hopes to become a theatre educator
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For the Love of Writing by Tanner Fox
I would be terrified to wake up in the morning and not be able to understand the written word. For the alphabet to be as illegible to me as Russian Cyrillic or the Hebrew script, a line of glyphs beautiful in their shape, but meaningless in their contents. Anyone, of course, would be this way. Most rely on reading every day to function across the world. Letters are one of the foundations of civilization, ever since the Sumerians first marked their clay tablets those six thousand years ago, and we rely on them in obvious ways. They make up instructions, signs, and labels, because they are so efficient at communicating. One does not have to be in a room to tell you, for example, not to touch the glass or to explain which highway to take to get to Cleveland. The logical circuits of computer programming are rooted in language, so that anyone trained can edit and understand the code. Our history, our economics, our laws are rooted in the records we keep, ensuring that we keep building on our past rather than trying to recreate it. But for me, and for countless other people, words and language are essential for more than just utility. They are how we share our experiences, and our stories. Our species has grown the way it has because of our ability to be more than ourselves, to contain the knowledge, and the responsibility, of multitudes, and this is done because we are able to, and willing to, write stories and read them. For some, this means the collective ethnic heritage of their own culture, passed down through songs, poetry, and mythology, for
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others the ability to find comfort in a well-written character they’ve never met and yet can entirely understand, or even in the simple pleasure of finding a community that loves the same stories and worlds they do. Regardless, humanity’s ability to create fiction, prose, and poetry that so effectively communicates experiences between people is something that at first glance may seem like filler, fun little activities to pass the time between actions necessary to survive. But for many of us, telling our own stories and reveling in those of others is the reason we want to survive—and often how we build our identities. The sense of being an artist is an identity built on a desire to create, and writing is empowering of this identity. While oral histories and traditions are essential cultural forms, writing can disseminate these ideas and narratives far more efficiently, and it preserves, protecting against time, death, and disaster. Even besides all that grandiose justification, reading for me is simple fun. There is something in absorbing stories through this culturally universal medium of the written word that brings me into a world of my own, where the structure of the sentences, the rigid intricacies of the language, feel completely smooth, and I don’t notice them at all. My eyes slide across their surface, following the loops and turns of the sentences, and I can find meaning behind what would otherwise be pointless scribbles, like a window, perfectly polished, a tool to show me something wonderful and vast. Or else when I’m travelling down the page and crash into a word I’ve not read before, an alien comprised of familiar parts. Then there is the enjoyment of parsing together the sounds, imagining the roots. Perhaps the double “l”s betray Mediterranean origin, or maybe the staccato, rigid syllables were born far off in Japan. I roll the word around in my mouth, like a breath mint, letting it dissolve on my tongue until I’ve absorbed all its flavor, all the promises only a new word can make. And even larger than that, I enjoy story. The emotions the right adjective at the perfect time can evoke, the genius ways a writer can play with the familiar narrative, and the amazing ideas they can have, permeating their writing, subtle but all-powerful as well. I can’t imagine losing this. This world, impossibly wide and deep, of books that are defined by us and define us, who are created by us and create us. Countless pages, impossible to read in a lifetime, each reflecting someone’s own life, a beautiful snapshot of their experience, now preserved. I
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may not remember the name of every author I’ve read, but I remember what they had to say, which is just as much a part of their identity. After all, this is a world I want to join one day. Yes, I want to be an author, if my abuse of adjectives throughout this writing hasn’t already made that clear. I want my stories, my ideas, all these things formed by my experiences, to join the collective narrative of mankind. I think it is one of the humblest ways to become immortalized in art. It is words, communication as created and refined for thousands of years by our cultures, that define a writer’s impact, the sheer ability to manipulate language and syntax in the most effective and entertaining way. Of all the different ways I interact with civilization around me, here is where I feel the most connected. This is a world, an experience, I don’t want to lose.
Artist Statement When I read this prompt, I knew that I could not write about something material. I simply don’t place such high value on my possessions, since I am in a fortunate enough position to be able to replace most of them. Something I value far more is my access to knowledge. I know enough about history to know that we live in a profoundly interconnected moment, and the ability for information to spread across the globe is something utterly unique to our time. However, I didn’t want to simply talk about the Internet, or electronics, because, as I wrote in the piece, there is more to loss than inconvenience. So I knew that, out of all the ways humans communicate with each other, it was writing, the storytelling medium, that I would most hate to lose. To me, stories are more than just information, and a loss of stories is more than an just inconvenience.
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About Tanner Fox
Tanner Fox has lived in the Colorado mountains all his life, reading constantly and impractically for as long as he can remember. He wants to change the world despite having no clue how, but figures majoring in International Relations at the University of Denver is probably a good start. He’s been writing since about the sophomore year of high school, when winning second place in the local youth short story contest likely gave him a somewhat skewed idea about the fiscal realities of the authorial lifestyle.
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Ellipses by Shelbi Renee Cornelison
The development of a memory is a gradual process. Waves of immediate impressions slowly saturate both the soft and gritty sands of limbic response. With a clock-driven pull, the wave eventually retreats; however, it leaves behind glossy visions of itself which slowly absorb into the sands of our memory. Just like the physical feeling of the soft and gritty sands, our memories are coupled with feelings of both joy and sadness. For a moment, take a second to recall one of your favorite memories, one where the emotions lie heavily on your sleeves. More likely than not, this feeling is one that has changed or strengthened your life perspective. Possibly, it helps you through times of trouble and despair. Maybe it was the day you discovered your passion. Or perhaps, it just gives you clarity that you are loved and appreciated. But what if you could no longer feel this memory with its emotion? What if you just had to watch it play on-loop like a silent film? These are questions you will hopefully never have to answer. But, I did. Or rather … I am. For most of my life, I believed my passion to be hockey. This sport completely wrote out my entire identity from the young age of eight. The culture surrounding the sport is a beast all its own. This is a sport where teams seldom recruit players out of high school to play at the next level. Athletes who are serious about the game often leave their homes and families as young as twelve years old. They will either attend prestigious hockey-focused prep schools or they will become a “billet” player with a more elite team in a different state, living in a house with a family they have never met before
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and attending school in a city they have likely never even visited. I was no exception to falling head-first into this culture. As far as I can stretch my memory, there had always been one goal: compete on the Women’s 2018 USA Olympic team. The sheer love, time, and dedication I expended toward this sport is unlike anything I’ve ever done. In two years, I went from practicing once a week and playing 10 games to practicing virtually every day, playing a 35-game schedule, and traveling to a tournament (many out-of-state) every other weekend. Both the physical and mental transition I endured shock me to this day. At the time, the speed with which everything changed didn’t seem out of the ordinary. But looking back, with twenty years of life experience under my belt, I am at a loss for words when trying to justify the transition forced upon youth players. When I began, there weren’t many girls like me, which meant from the ages of 8-16 I played as the only girl in an all-boys league. The intensity of playing with the boys forced me to quickly become a great player, but it was chaotic for my mental stability and confidence. There were girls’ teams and leagues I could play on and in, but in all honesty, the leagues and teams were absolutely awful. In no way would I have been able to receive the competition, coaching, or exposure I needed to step into the next level. But there was no rule stating any boys’ league or team had to let me play. If there were ever a time I fell behind, lacked speed, proved myself unable to compete in any way shape or form, I could easily be replaced. There was never a second where I didn’t have to continue to prove myself and my abilities over and over again. There have been multiple times, more than I could realistically list, where I have been singled out by players, other coaches, and parents just because I was a girl in a male-dominated sport. My ponytail stuck out; it wasn’t really something I could easily hide. Every single time I showed up to the rink, no matter on or off the ice, I felt like I could never make a mistake. And after any minor one that I did commit, I made sure that I would never forget it. Every shift had to be better than the last. At the age of sixteen, the countless hours of preparation had finally created an unimaginable potential when I discovered I was one of forty girls from the ages of 16-19 selected to attend a USA Hockey National Prospect Camp. It was a feat I had only dreamt about, and I never believed it would
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become my reality. On the first day, I slid the brand-new, crisp, blue practice jersey on with the USA National team logo printed across the chest. On the second day I separated my shoulder; and, little did I know, I separated eight years’ worth of personal emotion from my memories. This injury resulted in surgery and a six-month rehabilitation, causing me to miss my first ever (and most important) season of hockey. It obliterated any chances I had of competing in the Olympics—or even at a Division I college, for that matter. Every ounce of who I believed to be was ripped away faster than it began; however, it brought me to what I discovered to be my true passions—theatre and playwriting, two topics I could elaborate on through a rainbow array of colors for pages and pages on end. In the theatre, I experience a connection I never thought I’d feel again. And playwriting allows me to experiment with and stretch that feeling to others through beautiful works of art in written and spoken word. Although the origin where I experience this connection is as far away from hockey as one could make it, somehow the weight of responsibility I feel toward theatre feels just as strong as it did to the sport. I feel like I belong again. It’s a story that I want to scream from the highest rooftops and bring up in every social situation because I am so proud of the journey. I’ve been wanting to bring those two parts of my life together, actually. I’ve been wanting to tell this story of setback, loss, and rebirth for over a year; but every time I sit to write, the emotions lie dead and stagnant within my chest. I feel nothing. Not a single ounce of passion, regret, nostalgia, or burden for any aspect of that eight-year period of my life. I’ve disregarded my lack of emotional connection to hockey by pushing it off as nothing more than lethargic writer’s block; however, I’ve recently come to understand it’s anything but. Especially from a writer’s perspective, personal stories are the most simple, enjoyable, yet emotionally complex pieces I have the pleasure to write. But with this, the memories—although immensely vivid—remain silent. I feel almost as if I am looking into my own mind from a stranger’s perspective. I am able to perfectly conceptualize what it is I want to say; however, the emotional component is lacking and stoically artificial. As I re-read my old status updates and journal entries
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about this time period—desperate to remember any form of emotion—I am blown away by the ease with which the words would flow from my hand. There words were compounded with effortless conviction. While today, the raw sensation and gratification feel forever lodged inside the ink barrel—I can see it there, but it remains impossible to grasp. I’m a dramatically empathetic and sentimental person. I have crates full of memories and pictures. I am the type of person to cry over these memories, out of joy or sadness. I cry at cliché feel good Facebook videos, at concerts, at theatre productions, while listening to music. Anytime I feel a connection with something—a strong sense of admiration, purpose or passion, loss or change, good or bad—I will tear up. I don’t know why. Admittedly, it can be pretty embarrassing at times. But the connection I have with my emotions is something I will never take for granted again. I cried in my dorm for half an hour the night I injured my shoulder. Not from physical pain, but from the sheer emotional pain that everything I worked for was dissolving within seconds, and there was nothing I could do about it. I was devastated. I can vividly remember every single detail of that night and the camp—the wall colors, the taste and texture of the food I ate. I can remember every detail of every hockey team I have ever played with— the names of my teammates, every tournament we competed in and how we placed, the brand of my first ever pair of gloves, the ironically admirable and similar stench that reeks from rink to rink. The emotional links, however, are completely absent. I wish I could explain it in a way that won’t make me seem insane, but I can’t. I replay the memories over and over again, and not even just the memory of the camp, but every memory I have ever developed through my years with hockey. Every single one of them has visions of emotion. I know what I should be feeling and where I should be feeling it, but it feels instead like I am just relaying those attributes to a character in a script and not to my actual life. The best I can describe this loss is the feeling when you’re struggling to find a word or a name. You know you know it. It’s a word you’ve used countless times in the past; you know the definition backwards and forwards, inside and out, but for some reason, no matter how hard you try or how many random Google searches you execute, nothing helps to discover it. That’s
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how I feel. I know everything about the emotions. I can describe them. I can give my words all the power in the world explaining how much I remember of this emotion. But the feeling is permanently vacant. I believe the most inexplainable piece of it all is that as I vulnerably I pour out my missing past for strangers to read, I’m not mad, or sad, or frustrated with my loss of connection. Ironically, separating my shoulder has been the best thing to ever happen to me. It’s taught me that losing something physical or just barely falling short of a goal means virtually nothing when all is said and done. Truthfully, I sometimes wonder what might have happened if I had made it to the end of the camp with all of my limbs intact. Because whether I would have injured my shoulder or moved on to the Women’s National Team, none of those outcomes were in my control. Either (as it did) the fate of the world would have put an end to my hockey career or a couple of USA Hockey bigwigs in suits, sitting at the very top of the rink, would have decided whether the name on the back of my jersey was worthy of representing the name on the front. I’d be foolish to want to crave that powerless feeling again. Even though I can’t emotionally comprehend how my memories of hockey shaped me to become the person I am today, the empty space I feel when trying to force myself to feel emotion helps me to understand my next step in life. It’ll be a challenge to rediscover who I am without the backing of some of the most impressionable years of my life thus far, but I can’t wait for the upcoming journey. It’s not often you get the chance to reinvent yourself. I wish I could tell you how this will all end. But I’m still trying to figure that part out myself. I can probably make a prediction though. Remember how your memory made you feel in the very beginning of this narrative? Yeah … it’ll feel like that.
Artist Statement The psychological concepts of memories have always been a fascination of mine; but it’s never been an interest that spanned beyond Google searches at 3:00 a.m. when I couldn’t sleep or random books I’d occasionally check out from the library. However, when I discovered I lost the emotional ability
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to describe why I am the person I am, I knew I had to share the story. It wasn’t my first plan though. Originally, I wanted to tell the story of how losing the ability to pursue a future in athletics only caused me to wander onto an artistic path of my dreams. But the more I tried to write about it, and the more I erased what I wrote, I realized I could no longer feel my own story. I was confused, mostly, and lost, if I may. But after writing “Ellipses,” I came to understand that being able to tell your finished story isn’t nearly as important as being able to write your next one. I hope that “Ellipses” won’t be perceived as my mini-memoir but rather my shout into the void, that maybe there is someone reading, perhaps even you, who is experiencing the same loss. Because with loss of one type of connection, there is always a gain of another.
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About Shelbi Renee Cornelison
Shelbi Renee Cornelison is a first-year undergrad at the University of Denver from Colorado Springs, Colorado. She is a declared Theatre and English Creative Writing double major. Shelbi is an inducted member of the International Thespian Society and, in addition to her academic and artistic work, competes on the University of Denver’s Club Women’s Ice Hockey team. In her future she has plans to work as a script writer. A few of her writing-based goals are to write for Saturday Night Live as well as writing/producing plays and musicals for Broadway. At the moment, she is currently developing a touch-based musical (the term used in an unorthodox sense) for those who are deaf and hard of hearing.
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About the Cover
In continuing the theme of this collection—a mosaic of DU created by a diverse collection of voices—we’ve invited current students to submit snapshots of campus. We felt the cover should reflect their perspectives of the university. Photographs on front covers, back covers, & pages 112 + 114 taken by: Mara Abernethy, Keanan Anderson, Emma Bliwas, Jenna Brown, Eli Bucksbaum, Bridget Caffrey, Dorothy Conway, Yuvi Crouvi, AJ Ellis, Brady Evans, Kayla Fatemi-Badi, Nicholas Gillespie, Valeria Gomez, Lucy Grumbles, Spencer Haigis, Ryan Karawan, Edward Kemp, Sejal Krell, Haolin Liu, Zihan Liu, Hugo Mata Rodriguez, Katherine Miromonti, Olivia Myrtue, Blake Nordstrom-Wehner, Meijia Oltman, Caitlin Pham, Andres Pulido, Sasha Shadrina, Mingze Shi, Lidet Shiferaw, Michelle Timmins, Anit Tyagi, Charlotte Vieth, Yicheng Wang, Zoe Woods, Douglas Yount, and Jayden Yu. Send us your images for Many Voices, One DU (volume 4)! We’d like to invite all members of the DU community—students, staff, faculty, and alumni—to submit images for the next volume of Many Voices, One DU. Please send high-resolution jpegs as attachments to OneBook@ du.edu by January 1st, 2020. We are looking for images of campus and campus life; crowd shots are fine, as long as there are no recognizable faces in the frame. Images must be original work.
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Submit to Volume 4
The University is pleased to announce the 2019–20 One Book, One DU selection: The Newcomers by Helen Thorpe. The Newcomers follows a year in the lives of twenty-two immigrant teenagers enrolled together in an English Language Acquisitions class at Denver’s South High School—located just over a mile north of DU. Ranging in age from fourteen to nineteen years old, these newcomers have come from nations convulsed by drought or famine or war. Over the course of the 2015-2016 school year, these students adapt to life in the USA as they navigate teenage hopes, dreams, and fears. The Newcomers is a powerful and moving account of how refugee teenagers build a new foundation, confidence, and understanding of what it means to be American. In the coming months, we welcome the DU community to join the incoming 2019–20 undergraduate class in reading and discussing this highly acclaimed book. Check the One Book website (du.edu/onebook) for related community events and storytelling opportunities. The 2019–2020 One Prompt, detailed on the One Book website, asks us to think of a time when one of our communities welcomed a newcomer. Tell a story about this experience that considers multiple perspectives—including both your own and that of the new member of your community. A Call for Submissions for Many Voices, One DU (volume 4) will be distributed in the fall quarter.
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Acknowledgments
When we began this project in 2016, our goal was to celebrate the vibrant voices that combine to form our community, and these fourteen stories reflect that diversity of experiences and perspectives. The collection—and all of the effort that went into imagining and producing it—also represents the collaborative spirit of DU. I’d like to thank the people whose dedication and passion made this book possible. I am deeply grateful to Jennifer Karas, Sarah Hoffman, Leah O’Grady, and Grace Warner, whose roles in shaping, funding, and championing this project were fundamental. I would also like to extend tremendous thanks to Keith Rhodes for coordinating and overseeing the copyediting process this year. My colleagues in the Writing Program—April Chapman-Ludwig, Matt Hill, Heather Martin, Keith Rhodes, David Riche, Aubrey Schiavone, Geoff Stacks, and John Tiedemann—read submissions, selected our final essays, worked one-on-one with our published authors, and edited the stories collected here. Words cannot express how invaluable their efforts have been. John Tiedemann, whose early work shaped the initial One Book, One DU project, also photographed several of our authors for their bio pages. Many students were encouraged to participate in the fall’s Encountering Stories event and submit to this anthology by their professors, including (but
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certainly not limited to) Fredrick Barbour, Brad Benz, David J. Daniels, Maha Foster, Kateri McRae, Anne Penner, and Zoe Tobier. Thank you also to Rebecca Chopp and Jeremy Haefner for their ongoing support of One Book, One DU. And finally, thanks to all of the faculty, staff, and student groups around campus who helped spread the word about this project. Your enthusiasm has provided immeasurable momentum for Many Voices, One DU. LP Picard, Editor One Book , One DU Director Teaching Associate Professor University Writing Program
For a digital version of this collection, please visit: www.issuu.com/DU_Writing_Program/docs/MVOD2019
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UNIVERSITY OF DENVER UNIVERSITY ACADEMIC PROGRAMS & UNIVERSITY WRITING PROGRAM W W W.DU.EDU/ONEBOOK | W W W.DU.EDU/ WRITING