28 minute read

Kristen Millares Young Brainstorm

BRAINSTORM

Kristen Millares Young

It was May 2020, and despite our fears, we were on the highway, heading east. My husband steered past mesas I once toured with my father. Brian said nothing, but the air tightened between us. A tacit acknowledgement that my birth family remains unhealed. A cloud shadow moved over the mesas as I looked out the passenger window. I once traveled those hills in unspeakable silence with my dad. Pregnant and nursing, I rode in the back with my toddler, with whom I played despite my fury. After decades of deferring our confrontation, I could not believe my father’s petty lack of reciprocity for the forgiveness I had long offered. While my son slept, I took notes, trying to mitigate the hurt with grammar. Seeing this landscape again, I searched for virga, rain that never meets the ground, though it be thirsting. I wanted to make a metaphor about me and Dad. Watching the horizon, I willed the sky to splatter the desert. The tears, I denied myself. Six years later, I had never gone over this territory again. Until now.

Last year’s road trip began with a 9 a.m. call from my husband’s sister, after which Brian and I conferred in the shower. It’s where we share troubles and forge strategies. I told him, If your mom is in the hospital with no memory of how she got there, we need to hit the road. Three hours later, we left, fully loaded. Other parents will know that is an accomplishment. I had been hankering for a long drive, though not the 2100 miles it would take us to reach St. Louis. Brian and I had planned to camp the whole way, but on the first night, we’d already miscalculated. The parks of Idaho were closed, and night was falling. We’d been driving all day, our boys on their tablets in the backseat. We figured we’d camp near Boise, but no luck. Maybe the Bruneau Dunes State Park, we thought. Closed. We searched the Idaho power company’s website, which showed their campsites were closed. Eventually, we cracked and called Brian’s friends in Boise, who invited us to stay. Overwhelmed, grateful and tired after driving only nine hours, I said yes, thinking we’d camp in their backyard. She is a frontline worker. A nurse testing for COVID-19 in tents outside. But safer than a roadside, I thought. In their immaculate home, every surface was sprayed with Lysol. Through their masks, they said, We haven’t been in this room in weeks, you can just stay in here. We’ll hang out in the backyard. So we did. Their firepit was lined with deliberately crushed glass — not the result of messy drunks who leave shards like the ones I’d find the next night on federal recreation lands, the echoes

of distant gunshots yammering through the hills. Beautiful but deadly, like all of America. Driving away the next morning, I was flooded with dread about the risks we’d taken. Anxiety came forth in great torrents which could do no good in retrospect. We should not have done that, I cried. We cannot just cave! We had a plan. We have to stick to the plan. We were driving into a situation. My husband’s mom was still in the hospital, and she couldn’t remember why. We didn’t know what Connie would be like if they let her go home. We had to uphold the protocols, or we risked bringing the plague with our rescue.

Our road trip was punctuated by calls. Brian’s sister was hysterical because the hospital would not allow her to visit. Talking to her as Brian drove, I filled my notebook with nurses’ names and their phone lines if I could get them, and upcoming tests — CT scan, EEG, MRI, echo-something or other. An altered mental state had persisted for Connie, we were told. Some confusion, but it was clearing. By his mother’s designation, Brian needed to be consulted about medical decisions, given her state of mind. Riding a wave of good cell service, I called the hospital and spoke to a nurse on my third try. Not just technological, the coverage gaps were everywhere. Pattern recognition did not ease my frustration. Aiming for federal recreation lands, we drove through Utah, with one stop just past Devil’s Slide, where I took a picture of our coolers on a metal rack extending from the tow hitch, and the red rocks with dry shrubs up their backs. We drove past factories — concrete, cheese — and power stations. Our predecessors have turned over every rock to see if it would glint in the sun. Welcome to Wyoming! Atop a bucking bronco, a cutout cowboy raised his hat to the sky. Over the highway, a lit-up sign proclaimed that Wyoming’s state parks were open only for state residents.

Road kill, white spires, cattle and horses, clusters of unmasked people touching gas pumps with unwashed hands. It felt like we weren’t in a pandemic, but for the body count. Rail cars, river beds, fly fishermen with trucks parked next to abandoned trestles. I am nostalgic for an idea that never was. Plastic bags on barbed wire, literal tumbleweeds, the distant outline of trees. Beneath infinite skies, trailers had slipped off their blocks. In Green River, there was a municipal horse corral, a Western trope writ large. Patches of land are no longer easy to acquire. No amount of proving up will do. Up the hill from a Loaf N’Jug, two women nailed a cross hatched fence over the crawl space beneath their doublewide. We camped on the northwest corner of Flaming Gorge, near one official shooting range and within earshot of its wild cousin. When trucks

rolled by our quiet tent in darkness, I didn’t pray, but sometimes I wished I did. Dispersed wasn’t quite the word for the vast distance between us and other people that night, but it was the only allowable camping for travelers like ourselves. The next day, we bypassed Nebraska, where all campers had to be self-contained — no tents, only RVs, and We don’t want you here anyway, the campsite supervisor implied on the phone. Social distance both does and doesn’t mean what it used to.

I told Brian, I am going to write an essay about this road trip. I’ll try to provide some drama, he said. That is not his way, though the smile that played upon his lips has kept me hooked for seventeen years. I love this man, and I love the woman who made him the man that he is and has been to me. I didn’t mind driving to help his mother. By the riverside highway, guys in hoodies tailgated on the frontage road, their trucks and flip flops dusty, one with a kid. This pastoral scene made me long for my childhood in the way of fireflies, an insect I’ve yet to see in Seattle. You can learn a lot about a culture by the recurrence of its billboards. In Utah, in Wyoming and further east in Kansas and Missouri, the signs said that the opioid crisis affects us all. The left half, red. The right half, blue. May I kill you? My youngest asked my oldest in the backseat. Minecraft, I supposed, but I could not see their screens. I cocked an ear back and waited. He dropped the gold, my eldest said. I have the gold in hand. They might have been talking about our times. One by one, my little family crossed through states which, as governing bodies, paced out the deaths of their residents. It is difficult to decide when commerce trumps infirmity. How soon shall the meek inherit the earth? Just before the West flattened into the Midwest, we got another phone call by which we learned that Brian’s mother lost a large swath of time, her memories of the last two years entirely vanished. It was temporary, but we didn’t know that then. In 2020, imagine the possibilities. What strange grace, forgetting those last two years. The pandemic, erased. Half of Trump’s presidency, unmade. Picture being reminded. The dulled ache made sharp again. The doctors diagnosed her condition as a bout of transient global amnesia. My Black brother-in-law said his folks call her condition a brainstorm, which felt truer to me. On a green hill — all of spring still upon the land, trammeled and glorious — sheep bleated. Brian’s dad, his mom’s ex-husband, called. Be careful, he said. Be careful. Everyone had become afraid, but we’d begun to forget of what.

It’s hard to tell what I was looking at. What you can see from afar is not a community’s sole truth. On the undulating hills by the highway, fences. Later I learned that these were windbreaks. Maybe they prevented snow drifts from blocking the highway in other seasons. Wind turbines rimed distant ridges. Pioneer wagons left ruts you can still see in the clay. If mine is a love story, it is of this land, stolen though it may be. I broker peace with our recurrent history as a nation, a family. I neglect to remember how we repeat our mistakes. I found a placard for the Oregon trail. Like early settlers, we left poop cairns across this country. For that, I am truly sorry. We had to get to Grandma. There was no way I’d bring my sons into public restrooms during a plague. No way, no how, as I heard ranch hands say when I was growing up. At Bitter Creek Road, we took a break for my eldest. He commented on how swiftly the flies found his pile. Nature is quick on the draw, I said. Most truths contradict themselves upon utterance. When we passed the exit for Fossil Butte National Monument, I tried to get our kids to care that this desert was an ancient lakebed from the Eocene Epoch, more than 30 million years ago. They exclaimed Cool! and Wow! so I wouldn’t take their tablets away. We kept going, stopping for nothing but urgent necessities. But who needs to hurry? We have all of time. Here, there were cattle guards on the ramps. Before we crossed the continental divide, I dreamt of pronghorn antelope wandering by the tent, their thin legs and delicate muzzles outlined against men cracking beer and laughing with banal danger. In arid lands, messages arise. A handmade sign — Withdraw the US from the UN — abutted rock mesas crumbing into dust, the Rockies ploughed into the ground by rain conjured from the Plains. A good metal canteen fell from our car at the next gas station. It was my fault. I had left it on our roof. I popped out to find it right away. To my astonishment the guy at the next pump had already grabbed it and was giving me the hard stare like nothing happened. I canvased my path, again and again, performing confusion. We left with empty hands and a full tank. Long past Church Butte Road, billboards told a sad story. Outside of Fort Riley in Kansas, near old ramparts with artillery, we saw advertisements for PTSD and depression treatment. Also:

Relax! 17 Marble Showers. Little America.

Who is Jesus? Dial (83) For-Truth

BATTLES ARE WON WITHIN. Join the Marines.

Caregiving is Tougher than Tough. Depicted large enough to be revered at high speed, a muscled man stood, resolute, next to an elder in a wheelchair. Near them in a rush of miles were storefronts for cash advances and cell phones. A strip mall across from a trailer park down the way from a rodeo. The Native Stone Scenic Byway was not what I thought. I confess that petroglyphs excite me. It is instead a series of limestone walls installed by Kansans incentivized to close down the open prairies by our federal government. To contain the uncontainable sometimes destroys it. Any writer could tell you that. We pulled over to pee. Just as soon as we were done, a blue Buick rumbled by on the unpaved road, dipping down into the valley and disappearing over the rise. Not too long passed before I saw with a pang of dread that this same car had turned around to travel toward us. The driver looked like I feared he might, a white man with an old hat, his bulk filling the bucket seat. We were already in our vehicle, my husband behind the wheel. The man hemmed us in with his window down on the passenger side, neck craned toward us, eyes locked on mine in suspicion. A sense of real menace arose in my animal body, the adrenaline thrilling and sinister. No gas pedal at my feet. Let’s go, I said. My husband was rolling down his window. The man asked, Y’all having car trouble or something? His accusatory tone did not offer help, instead implied, You do not belong here. Move along. Strangely, though I could tell he was angry, my husband answered, Nope, just needed to stop and give our kids a pee break. He couldn’t help adding, Is this a private road or something? Their mirroring and antagonism escalated in increments I sensed with indescribable agony. It is unusual, the man began to reply, but by then my husband had responded to my low murmured begging and was moving, the foreign power of our luxury Volvo an immediate advantage as we accelerated onto the highway ramp, joining the constant flow of traffic leaving this man and his ilk behind. I let some miles whir beneath our tires. I have learned not to jump on Brian when he’s done something wrong — in this case, engaging a man likely to be armed. When my husband’s hackles are up, he is prone to further argument. I took deep breaths. I watched men walk into the Passion Adult Boutique, with no windows but so many trucks. I thought of sex workers and salespeople breathing each other’s air. Restaurants and bars had reopened in Missouri, the eighth state we journeyed through and our final destination. Above us, in yellow dots on a black background, the government instructed, IT IS YOUR JOB TO KEEP OTHERS SAFE. In a few days, both where we were and where we’d been would erupt in protests after a white cop called Derek Chauvin killed a Black man named George Floyd, strangling him against the pavement with a bent knee. For more than nine minutes, again and again, Floyd suffocated to death, calling for his mama in front of everyone. Murder in the streets, and now,

people and police officers and tear gas and batons and gallons of milk. The civil rights movement has never ceased. One year later, the murderous Chauvin would be convicted. A small measure of justice. But while Floyd’s family received a $27 million settlement, the city of Minneapolis paid out more than $35 million in workers’ compensation packages to cops who decided to leave the force when their city and indeed the whole nation protested police brutality against Black lives. America protects commerce at all costs. In Kansas, the toll booths were not staffed. By Missouri, the state wanted that money. Skip it and take the ticket, my husband suggested, but I was already pulling into the lane. We owed the state $3.50. The booth worker seemed startled to see my cloth mask. Few people, I think, cared to protect him. The fingertips of his blue nitrile gloves were blackened. I was careful not to touch his outstretched hand. Brian said we should have taken the ticket; he was right. Cursed by my own frugality, I was also on a deadline. Did I mention that?

Due to give a virtual reading for a bookstore in Pittsburgh, I’d launched my debut novel a month before. Technically I was still on tour for Subduction. The events I’d planned in fifteen states became me, clicking into a Zoom room again and again, promoting the performances on social media platforms I monitored at the algorithms’ demand, liking and responding to stray comments. Leaving on Friday, we had to cross half the country before my event on Monday. At the KOA campground, we woke before dawn. The birds were in song, and the passing semis sounded like wind. Good enough for a Monday morning. I was happy in my own way. We had four hundred miles to cover by that afternoon. I bustled, packing up our things while Brian prepared breakfast on the picnic table. Have you ever disinfected a tabletop made of 2 by 4s? My Clorox wipe left fibers where the surface splintered. We hadn’t scored any disinfectant spray before we left Seattle. We couldn’t find any during our trip. The global supply chain was fresh out of resources we once thought were unlimited. Something about this era feels preordained. We drove the final leg in one straight shot. Six hours. Champions throughout this trip, our sons had tired of being at home. Watching me scowl at my laptop and my phone. Listening to Brian conduct calls. Getting their own screens when they couldn’t be put off with drawing or toys or playtime. We did our best. Cheerful meals. Bedtime reading. Walks in the park less often than I intended. It didn’t feel like enough. More like, I didn’t feel like enough. I needed to become quantum. I needed to occupy many different spaces at once. I would have broken myself into a rainbow if I could have found the right prism. Instead, we ate drive through. I learned that McDonalds will put three lemon slices in a Diet Coke if you ask. I did get the straw. We

created a steady waste stream of plastics as we moved eastwards. I recycled what I could and pitched the rest, careful not to touch the garbage cans. We washed our hands from a water tank strapped next to our coolers of food. We stayed together. We kept going. I am among the most privileged people to live on this whole earth.

Connie’s brother-in-law picked her up from the hospital and brought her home that very same Monday. She had recovered her working memory and was glad we were coming. She was a little embarrassed, I think, though she tried not to be. It’s hard to be made vulnerable. When we pulled up, she hugged us with her eyes. Do you know what I mean? Above a mask when someone smiles it is possible to see the crinkling of their eyes, how warmth leaps into the irises. A real smile suffuses an entire face, even if you can only see the top half. We didn’t have much time before my event. We spaced out two tables on her patio, a setup we would use again and again as balmy spring yielded to the bone-crushing heat of midwestern summers. By the beginning of our second hour in St. Louis, we had unpacked the car and fed our kids. Convinced by her conversation that she had returned to her faculties, Brian sat drinking a wine spritzer with his mom. Our boys darted around the lawn while I set up my ring light on the basement dining table. With my laptop propped on books to raise the camera to a more flattering angle, I could place my microphone just outside the view. In full makeup, unshowered for several days, I sat, smelling like a campfire, and clicked into a digital greenroom. Five minutes later, I discussed the ethics of research for an audience that would grow into the hundreds. Most online events happen once but occur in perpetuity, viewed in great rushes that dwindle into trickles. An apt metaphor for late capitalism. I should be glad my videos haven’t gone viral. It would have been for the wrong reasons. But I had to salvage my book launch, and did. This road trip was like a vacation, despite the fear that we’d become caretakers for our forgetful matriarch. With Brian at the wheel, I could clutch my thermos and watch the road unspool, calmed into not thinking by the hum of our tires holding the line. Amidst chaos, we toed the edge of breaking down. Our whole society is riding that whetted blade.

Though it is a full year later, suburban St. Louis still blooms green in my memory. Just now, I pivoted a geode so that its crystals refracted the light from my window in Seattle. Jutting from the geode is a turkey feather we picked from the tall grasses behind Connie’s house. We tried so hard to be careful. For the first weeks after we arrived, we committed to seeing her outside and socially distanced. We laughed and took pictures of us lifting and lowering masks to sip drinks.

Her backyard abuts a brushy creek that forms the central corridor of her subdivision, where I watched our sons chase deer, the boys so fleet I worried they’d get kicked. In the evenings, fireflies rose from the silty banks like paper lamps, aflame amidst the recurrent croaks of frogs. A barred owl favored the nearest snag. As summer progressed and I paced the lawn, talking on the phone, I heard its feathered passage through the hot night. Goodbye, little mouse. Of all the wildlife that teemed through that subdivision, the snake startled me the most. Writing a book review from my makeshift table on the grass, I looked down at a rope of black scales moving past my bare feet. I didn’t know it was possible to leap backwards while seated. Turns out that species is harmless. While Washington state prides itself on wilderness, Missouri’s animals are cheek to jowl with humanity. Subdivisions were carved from corn fields planted on the corpses of gone forests and unheralded civilizations. You can hear their bones rustling in the stalks. Every day, Americans wake up to the nightmare of racism in our country. Looking up the history of Creve Coeur, the cluster of subdivisions where Brian grew up, I found the town website proclaims its origin story like so: Legend has it that an Indian princess fell in love with a French fur trapper, but the love was unreturned. There are so many things wrong with this sentence. Indian princess. The love. Did it not belong to a woman? Her love, more like it. Even her great offering was dehumanized. White people say she jumped from a waterfall with a broken heart. Creve Coeur earned a name; she lost hers. Sheltering with an elder in this suburb so close to Ferguson, I tried to figure out how to respond to systemic racism. We are a nation of families. What do we owe each other? Money to BIPOC-led organizations was my first answer. We moved a Black family into our Seattle home to give them a respite from their housing. For WaPo, I profiled a young Afrolatinx woman who manages a domestic violence shelter. These small acts slid through my fingers, and my hands felt empty. Maybe that’s why folks make a fist.

Soon after arriving, we began to rely on Connie for daily childcare and schooling. Formerly a first-grade teacher, she had recovered without incident. We came to call this summer a blessing, a word which implies a religiosity I do not share with my mother-in-law, though I remain grateful for her help. She ended up saving us, not the other way around. In stark contrast with my birth family’s withholding, her generosity moved me. I hid the mottle of my morning tears. Nearing my birthday, as I am now, I was scheduled to moderate a conversation with the author who wrote the cover blurb for Subduction. We were to be on stage at Benaroya Hall. That night, I read my children a bedtime story and worked until two in the morning. This pandemic taught me to stay grateful for my privilege. I have endeavored all of my life not to be erased from the record. Thoughts flickering westward, I know my aims are not available to most

people. An autonomous zone was born, thrived and died in Seattle before I got back. As a reporter, I experienced waves of regret for not being on the frontlines all summer. As a freelancer, I know for a fact that my clients would not cover the bills if I got sick, would not help my children if I died, and might not defend me in court if I got arrested. Ambition is no stave against mortality. In less turbulent eras, social distance was defined as the perceived or desired degree of remoteness between a member of one social group and the members of another, as evidenced in the level of intimacy tolerated between them. When I stop pretending like everything is fine with my father, our relationship explodes and pulls apart like an expanding universe. I have decided to let entropy happen. Too many harsh acts. Our briefest conversations can be like waking up in a bathtub without an organ. Six years ago, we drove in bitter quietude to the Grand Canyon without peering into its vast beauty. When I read how Minda Honey described doing the same in Burn It Down, I was stunned to find another father-daughter dyad so keen on dysfunction. I thought we were special. Maybe what we are is common. I want to suggest something here about American grief, and loneliness, and becoming so independent that you are vulnerable. As a nation of ragged individuals, we insist that breaking away is possible. Better off alone. We strike out to make new claims on old territories. But liberation leaves you helpless at times. No one to rely on. If I were to die, I fear what my family would teach my children.

Maybe this isn’t a story about why I drove across the country without seeing my kin. Maybe this is a story about what becomes possible for women who insist upon a better kind of freedom. For decades, I bided my time. I divined common interests with my dad. History, for example. As a child, I remember reading about the civil war. Not the battles, though my father took me to emptied fields. Even then, I was waiting for him to see me, to value my doings, to be present for my life, to discover how to be around me without finding fault. But our toxic dynamic has intensified along with our differences, suffusing what should be innocuous situations, not unlike our nation. We are living in the graveyard of what might have been. We break fresh ground only to find old bones. They do not belong to you. So why does it feel like something is missing? Statues of Southern generals and other colonizers would be toppled, one by one, during the summer I whirled in place in suburban St. Louis. Suckled on the complicity of the North in slavery, a pet issue for Dad, I still want Black people to reap the rewards of the nation they built. America owes reparations. Though he studies history, my father shames me for wanting to tell the stories of our shared past. To express his anger, he shuns me.

His refusal to face even the facts of my girlhood proves to me that stories are powerful and dangerous, just as Audre Lorde said of women. We are the keeper of hazardous truths. If every cradle rocks above an abyss, then none of us are on solid ground. There was a time I straddled the chasm between who I hoped we would become and what we have done instead. My feet are slipping. Few are watching for the fall. I am old enough to know this earth has accepted more important bodies than my own.

Despite driving 4200 miles to Missouri and back, I did not extend my road trip to Florida, where my father lives within walking distance of where he left us. Dad claimed work as the reason he wasn’t around. In retirement, he visited even less. I’m not sure what to make of the fact that he has always used our scant days together to trumpet his plans to spend more time with my sons. After he doesn’t, the blame starts. I am inconvenient, you see. I moved far away. Which is true. Last summer, I planned to close the distance between us, but I kept calling Dad only to find him eating in restaurants. I googled the town where I hoped to picnic with my unruly elder. Internet photos showed the beach thick with bodies — an unprecedented number of tourists. I canceled. We can’t do it, I said. It’s not right. I am complicit in every ill that I can name. We spent those months barely interacting with the Missourians beyond Connie’s property. I blamed the virus, but it was a relief. I didn’t like worrying that speaking Spanish with my kids in public would put us at risk of assault or diminishment. It’s strange not to share values. Aside from the threats, there are awkward moments. I won’t describe them here. God and recycling and racial difference, not in that order. I could provide a surreal portal to the false normalcy I glimpsed on our weekend excursions to hot woods and mud rivers. I could tell you about driving by crowds of partiers with smiles bared to the sun. Do you remember those times? Were you afraid of others, then? Are you now?

Astounding, how my father shows up in essays, given how little he presents himself in real life. His absence is an obstacle around which my prose has flowed. For decades, his judgments compressed my doings. When I internalized his beliefs, I was relieved from feeling their burden, as Sara Ahmed wrote. Now he senses that I will not be muted. The subsequent pressure is unceasing. He cc’s family members on punishing emails and texts, accusing me of treason, essentially. He wants my husband to be his bridge to the boys, despite the bloodline that runs through my body. Dad is angry he can’t control the narrative of my childhood. It is laughable. I am a middleaged journalist, essayist, and author, and my old man thinks he can muzzle me from across the country. Once again, we are in an unspeakable silence.

Silences grow louder with time. I once hoped estrangement would unmake his hold on me. Let there be peace in my family, I was tempted to command, but our ceasefires are brokered by suppressing the truths of our shared past. My family expects forgiveness without contrition, not unlike our government. What does it take to get free from old damage? Distance alone cannot do the trick. As a writer, as a daughter, as a mother, I want to unshackle us as a family, as a people, as a land. Forgetting brings its own kind of freedom. For a while. And then it delivers you straight back into avoidable atrocities. America taught me that. Storytelling is a form of protection against future trauma, whether from kin or country.

I thought to describe what befalls the memory of those who leave. I prefer to investigate what becomes available to those who break away. For that, I have my husband. Always willing to put up with my venomous family squabbles, he knows when I need to hold my ground. He keeps things fun when I am grieving. For my birthday last summer, Brian took me to a river in some of the oldest mountains in our nation. Even the simplest origin stories are unimaginably complex. The Amidon Memorial Conservation Area is commemorated by a plaque. As you scan Missouri’s landscape, volcanoes usually aren’t your first thought, but the pink rocks tell a story of eruption and molten lava from __ _illion years ago. Those blanks were burned into the plastic, the 1.5 billion bubbled into dark brown spots that no lighter could create without burning your thumb. Maybe they brought a torch, which chills me. Do creationists pack pistols to hike? Near rapids that widened into swimming holes and narrowed into rivulets, I eyed riverside piles of clothes, looking for lumps of metal. I digress. The Saint Francois Mountains formed when huge pockets of magma welled up in dome shapes and slowly cooled, forming igneous rocks of granite and rhyolite…Over time, the upper Castor River eroded softer materials exposing the large granite boulders. Chutes, or shut-ins, were formed. Now, I don’t get shut-in from chute. Let me provide you with a definition. Shut-ins occur where a broader stream is “shut in” to a narrow canyon-like valley. Helpful? Good. We need terms we can agree on in this country. If we break our connections to each other, to our shared history and to the land which holds us in keeping, there will be no grief large enough to fill that chasm. Warmed by the sun, my beloved and I swam in clear water. We rested on rosy granite which has endured eons that my own mind struggles to behold. Green oaks flickered in the breeze. Unmasked people waded by. I too tipped my smile toward the sky. For that day of my birth, I belonged to a river which keeps flowing, cradled by forces that none can escape. The silences in my family bored a hole through the softest parts of me. Though I once believed their aperture drained my spirit, it is where stories emerge. What could be eroded from my being has been sent

downstream. What remains is hard enough to withstand relentless pressure. Those who wish to wear me down will have to go around. I intend to take up space for as long as this earth will allow.

Kristen Millares Young is the author of the novel Subduction, named a staff pick by The Paris Review and called “whip-smart” by the Washington Post, “a brilliant debut” by the Seattle Times and “utterly unique and important” by Ms. Magazine. Shortlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, Subduction won Nautilus and IPPY awards and was a finalist for Foreword Indies Book of the Year and two International Latino Book Awards. Her short stories, essays, reviews and investigations appear in the Washington Post, The Rumpus, PANK Magazine, the Los Angeles Review, the Guardian, Joyland Magazine, Fiction International and Literary Hub, as well as the anthologies Alone Together, which won a Washington State Book Award in general nonfiction, and Advanced Creative Nonfiction: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology. She is the editor of Seismic: Seattle, City of Literature, a 2021 Washington State Book Award finalist in creative nonfiction. A former Hugo House Prose Writer-in-Residence, Kristen was the researcher for the New York Times team that produced “Snow Fall,” which won a Pulitzer Prize.

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