Episode 29: A New Hope

Stream the episode now on SoundCloud or your favorite podcast player, and read along with the author.

Well, well, well, we meet again. You may be wondering about the unnaturally long hiatus and why I was gone with nary a goodbye. The grief remains raw, but my father, the OG superhero of my life, passed away in April of 2022, the year I recorded this brief minisode.

Sometimes it feels like I’ve been screaming into the void with this podcast, but podcasting is another outlet for my creativity. I refuse to be boxed in, but I am sorry that I didn’t say anything sooner. But I need this time away to process my feelings and to find the path for me to become a human being again, which, to be honest, I don’t think I’ve processed his passing at all. It doesn’t seem real. And life really doesn’t stop for grief, does it?

I was grieving for our world before COVID, and then I found myself in the precarious world of balancing freelance work while providing at-home hospice care for my dad alongside my mom. In an effort to kind of find myself and to get away from my grief, I took a poetry class through the city of Las Vegas with our former poet laureate, Vogue Robinson, this past winter. It helped me commit some of my jumbled feelings on paper about everything going on in my life at the time. I’m grateful to Vogue for spending her time with me. At the end of our class, I participated in our city’s Story Slam presentation, as she moderated with the theme, Home, this past March.

I started a new job not long after God called my dad home. It’s a completely different field than I usually write for, but I’ve learned a lot in the short time that I’ve been there. I know it’s beginning to influence my normal writing and editing, and that’s never a bad thing. And COVID got me a few weeks after we buried my dad. I was like, can I just have some normalcy, please?

But wait, there’s more.

The spoken word poem I performed for Story Slam was part of my submission package for the 2022 Anaphora Arts writing residency. I didn’t think I had a chance, but I was earnest about why I felt I deserved a spot this year. In short, I’m not where I want to be with my art. I ended up earning a scholarship residency for poetry.

There have been signs my whole life that I should have been a poet. So I’m embracing that. I’ll always write for short fiction, but poetry probably should have been the medium I went with in the first place.

So here we are, season three of Raconteuse Radio. I’m going to start the new episodes next week, I promise. It’ll be a mix of poetry and fiction again, words that have squirreled away for years. And don’t forget, I’m always looking to chat with my fellow creatives in the industry and the wizards behind the screen. So submit your pitch if you’re interested in being on a tiny but mighty podcast.

And I want to thank everybody who has been waiting in the wings for me and supporting me quietly from your own corners of the world. It means so, so much to me. Thank you, and I’ll see you guys next week.

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