The nurse processing my intake at the psychiatric hospital looked like the kind of person with whom I would strike up a conversation while waiting for a drag show. Everything about her seemed to match, down to the color…
One Once there was a hungry woman. Some said she was a giant and some said she was a witch. That woman is me. She might be you. I’ve always been voraciously hungry. Even before the years I starved…
Prologue I must begin by telling you that I am Black. This is a very strange thing to have to say out loud. It is usually something self-evident that goes without saying. But my light skin and blur of…
Here they are, the two men in my life who have stepped forward in an executioner’s line. We’ll take the shot, they’re saying, as they assume positions in twin chairs stationed in every cardiologist’s office we’ve visited since my…
Ananda Lima is an alchemist. With a spellbinding touch, her writing transmutes the mundane into the extraordinary, summoning readers to journey alongside her through the complexities of a global life. In her debut short story collection, Craft: Stories I…
Seven years ago, we—Kate Schapira and Erika Howsare—published a collaborative volume of poetry, which no one bought. Kate has published half a dozen other books of poetry and teaches writing at Brown University; Erika has one solo poetry book…
Essay by Michelle Sinclair • If one were asked to compare the experience of reading to that of eating a dessert, would it be so far-fetched to connect reading flash fiction and enjoying a cookie? Both are “bite-sized” and…
By Ann Guy • Wading through a sea of blond hair and blue eyes every day felt normal in the tiny, rural Western Michigan town where I grew up. So did biking to the public library and loading up…
It’s an ugly thing to follow a woman along the street but this is what I did. She was a copy of Patti Smith during the early Mapplethorpe years, before Horses and Mineshaft and all the BDSM, when they…
Is your mom a mail-order bride? I was once asked by a classmate in fourth grade while we sat at our desks making fake nails out of Elmer’s glue squeezed into the hollow of our plastic rulers. No, of…
This essay began as unlinked vignettes in the wake of my father’s death. To grieve, I had been reading through the letters he had written to my mother when they were pen pals in 1973–1974. As I read the letters, intending to learn more about my father, a window opened to my mother’s life before she was my mother. My father was gone, and my mother appeared to me in new ways.
(Re)acquainting myself with my mother by remembering my father was like taking the scenic route on which, for most of the drive, I was not concerned with a destination. Memories came at me in fragments and dreams. I followed my curiosity about who my mother is and was, especially now that I am a mother myself. I realized that 40+ years of being a daughter doesn’t make one an authority on one’s parents. With each vignette, I interrogated my memory and checked it against the proof—the letters, the photographs, my mother’s stories, scholarly articles.
Writing this piece allowed me to fuse my own impressions of my mother with what I was learning from my father’s letters. Over the months it took to chisel the essay into shape, I would occasionally call my mother to ask her for a clarifying detail (What was the name of your ex-boyfriend? What did you know about America before you married Dad?),thereby weaving her voice into the stories. What resulted were collaborative portraits of my mother, and proofs of love in my family’s history.
My background in photography compels me to see how writing can also be a visual art, mirroring the physical form of experience. As this essay came to me in parts, I strung them together until they looked something like an island chain: an archipelago. While each island maintains its unique qualities and histories, together they can exist as one entity. The vignettes of this essay surfaced the way I imagine the islands of the Philippines did—through undersea volcanic eruptions, each a tiny birth, emerging side by side into a whole.
Being mixed race, I am always seeking ways to piece together my parts—my mother’s narrative and my father’s—and the geographic inheritance they dealt me. In searching for completion, I have to be okay with including the holes, the things I cannot know. I have to accept that the holes are actually ocean. The deep unknown. What else defines an archipelago if not the propinquity of parts, and the spaces in between?
ELISABETH VASQUEZ HEIN is a mixed-race, second-generation Filipina-American writer, photographic artist, and mother based in Seattle, Washington. Influenced by her upbringing in disparate geographies, her work explores displacement, in-betweenness, and belonging. As the daughter of an immigrant, she seeks to understand her roots in the context of diaspora and colonization. She is a graduate of the Certificate in Fine Art Photography program at Photographic Center Northwest, where she exhibited her thesis project “In Skin and Spirit | Sa Balat at Espiritu.” She holds a master’s degree in Latin American studies from the University of New Mexico. Elisabeth’s community work has focused on education, language, and marginalized populations in Washington, Texas, Chile, and Peru. “Archipelagic” is her first published writing, with forthcoming work to be featured in the Pinch. Find her on Instagram @fuzzybrowngirl.
