welcome to words unheard

about this newsletter and my current work-in-progress

This year, I’m working on a book that was born out of grief.

When my papa passed away in 2022 after a long battle with Alzheimer’s, I was left to make sense of the void he left behind. He was an architect by trade, but devoted his life to art in many forms. He painted natural landscapes and vignettes with watercolor, oil, pastel, and acrylic, using his travel photography as inspiration. He loved photography, both film and digital, often creating vacation presentations of his slides for the family.

As my grandfather, he taught me how to love my family unconditionally, to care for all living beings, to be gentle and understanding. As an artist, he taught me to be devoted: to trying, to failing, to learning, and to the muse.

As I was looking back through old photographs, I started sifting through my papa’s film slides. Years ago, I digitized slide after slide so our family could enjoy them on our screens; however, they were unorganized and unlabeled, and therefore difficult to sift through and parse.

There were slides of European and Hawaiian vacations, of my mother as a teenager, of my mother as a child, of my mother inside my grandmother’s protruding belly. There were slides of my papa’s architecture firm, of the tree he planted outside the family home and how it grew and changed season by season, of long-dead family pets, of my great-grandparent’s various art projects. These were records of a life lived fully, and I started saving my favorites and organizing them by theme, subject, and place.

I started using these selected slides for my writing practice and as a basis for short prose, essays, and poetry, and I’ll be sharing those slides and pieces in this newsletter as I begin collecting them into a working manuscript. I’m unsure if this project will be multiple books or one collected volume. I’m also unsure if this is something I’d submit for publication or if I’ll publish it myself. I guess we’ll figure that out on the way.

Inspired by Audre Lorde’s literary term bio-mythography, this work will fuse biography, memoir, family myth, and my own poetic style to create a living portrait of my papa’s life as seen through the lens of my grief. For each of my papa’s slides, I’ll be writing a companion piece: an essay, piece of prose, or a poem drawing on the themes or subjects present within the photograph. Some pieces will be transcriptions of the slides themselves, some will be vignettes of memories both real and imagined, and some will be confessional or historical.

As an upfront disclaimer, I hope you will read this work knowing that it will be personal at its core. Some of these slides feature family members that are still alive, and we are all human beings with real emotions. I will be approaching this work with love, empathy, and respect for my loved ones and for my papa himself, and I hope you will also engage with this work in the same way. I reserve the right to not provide explanatory information and I will remove any private information and names as I see fit.

Ideally, this publication will be the structure and accountability I need to work on this project while allowing friends and peers to engage with my work before it is ready for publication and print. Because of the highly personal nature of this project, and because I hope to publish this in the future, any post relating to this work will be for paid subscribers only. However, here and there I’ll be posting other works-in-progress for free, including non-fiction essays, short prose, and poems.

Thank you for reading, and I look forward to sharing my work with you!

Megan

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Note: This isn’t my first newsletter, but I failed in maintaining my old one; so much so, that I had to completely delete the other one and restart (not a long story, but certainly not an exciting one). If you were a previous subscriber and wondering if you’re seeing double, you’re not imagining it! However, I wasn’t able to migrate my old subscriber list, so you’ll have to subscribe again if you’d like to stay up to date with new posts here. I appreciate your support <3