Val

Since childhood, I have been enchanted by words and sounds. I studied foreign languages, played music throughout my years in college, and did field work in various parts of the world as a graduate student. I was sure that I would be among the anointed for a lifelong career in academia. But gradually, I began to face up to a reality – my love for verbal expression belonged in the arts.

‘The book is used as an effective objective correlative’ wrote my teacher on a copy of my story now titled ‘Where I Sit.’ Notes from a prior fiction workshop reminded me that an objective correlative defines a particular emotion out of an object, situation, or (chain of) events and then re-evokes the sentiment somewhere else in the story.

Recently, a photographer friend of mine said he’d quit chasing success; for him, it was all about fulfillment. This declaration hit me like a gut punch – not only because he was the most successful creative I knew. It was that, as straightforward as prioritizing fulfillment was, I’d never even considered measuring my life like that.

Can you form friendships with dead people? Can the poem you wrote when you were six influence your decision to help a stranger fifty years later? Can you be bigender and Buddhist—someone with two “selves” who believes in no permanent self?

An afternoon stroll down O’Connell Street, Dublin’s main thoroughfare, will take you on a tour of Irish history in a matter of blocks. You’ll follow in the footsteps of Leopold Bloom, protagonist of Ulysses, as you cross the River Liffey, that famed waterway from songs by bands as varied as The Chieftains and Radiohead. You’ll see the battle-scared post office, its pillars pock-marked by English bullets from the 1916 Easter Rising.

During the fall semester of my senior year of college, I was in the eye of a storm. Specifically, a perfect storm of intersecting liberal arts topics and a looming mania, through which my guiding light was storytelling. I finished my first full length play that semester, as well as a TV pilot in play’s clothing—but interestingly, the work that emerged from that period most intact was “Roses.”

Being a witness, or artist, isn’t always a choice if one is gifted with what the western perspective calls “a perceptual phenomenon,” i.e., Synesthesia. I have always stated, as Artists we have a responsibility to take note and “report” via whatever art making modalities we have available to us; using our sensory tools to see, smell, hear, feel with our gut, (and flesh i.e., air displacement,) what is happening in our immediate environment. 

The basement scene depicted in my poem “Beirut, Summer 1982” could have happened at almost any time of the fifteen-year long Lebanese civil war that lasted from 1975 to 1990. I chose to situate it during the summer of 1982 as an allusion to the siege and carpet-bombing of Beirut by the Israel Defense Forces.

I sat down to write a few days after George Floyd’s murder, and never had the writing process felt more precarious. In 2019, it seemed so clear. I understood what I wanted to say and who I wanted to speak for, but more recently, my mind has been fraught with hurt, rage, and disappointment.