I have written about the difficulty and insufficiency of separating "truth" from "fiction" in this work. However, I want to make something plain: I am the survivor in this story. The sexual abuse and assault that is described in this story was experienced -- in truth, in reality, in NONfiction -- by me. EVERY part of the story that details sexual abuse, assault or rape is TRUE. I have written in many other places, in many other works about the childhood sexual abuse, sexual assault and rape that I have experienced in my life. There was no denying the influences these events had on my psyche as I allowed myself to experience and be healed by Abramovic's work and so, they were an essential element in this work. Also, having experienced sexual abuse, sexual assault and rape in my young life was a primary contributor to the enlarging and sensationalizing of my childhood story in my own head. That is, my childhood, in some ways (not in EVERY WAY, but in some ways) felt absolutely terrifying to me. Because of the sexual abuse, sexual assault and rape, my childhood and early adulthood felt much scarier and much larger and much other-worldly than it really was. There is something in me that used to tell this sensationalized story (the story of the ugly duckling) to myself that has, since I found Abramovic's work, calmed down. Facing the FACT of my sexual abuse, sexual assault and rape -- without the drama of a swan raised as a duck -- has healed the child that used to think there was something wrong with her, that she had done something wrong, that she had some reason to be ashamed. I have absolutely NO reason to be ashamed. I have absolutely NO reason to not declare these events as truth because I did not cause them and I did not perpetrate them. I also did not make them up -- which is the convenient thing the world tells little girls who have been violated: "You must've made that up." It is also the convenient thing we tell ourselves when a hard truth comes spinning to the surface: "She must've made that up." It would be all too convenient if every #metoo story was, in fact, made up. It would mean that every woman with a story is just insane or, at least, just a horrible liar. I am an artist. I am a writer. But I am not a liar -- and, I am also, no longer, a little girl.
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AuthorJodiAnn Stevenson is a poet and writer living on the Northwest Coast of Michigan's Lower Peninsula. Her poetry, fiction and essays have appeared in various print and online journals since 1996. She is the author of three published chapbooks of poetry: The Procedure (March Street Press, 2006); Houses Don't Float (Habernicht Press, 2010); and Diving Headlong Into a Cliff of Our Own Delusion (Saucebox Books, 2011). She has also produced the chapbooks In the Temple of the 7 Buddhas, I Wrote This Poem For You, Hung With A New Rope, Midnight in the Blackbox Theater Saloon, To Make the Words that Made the Language and The (Human) Body for The Broken Nose Chapbook Collective which she co-founded in 2013 with Jeremy Benson. She co-founded Binge Press and its sister online journal, 27 rue de fleures, in 2004 with Rebecca Hardin Thrift and served as the managing editor of both until 2014. She is the author of www.bowlofmilk.com which has been a one-woman show of visual poetry since 2004. You can connect with and support JodiAnn on her Patreon page or by emailing her. ArchivesCategories |