Send Vanessa to Tin House Again

A few weeks ago, I applied to the Tin House Winter Creative Nonfiction (CNF) Writing Workshop . I applied last minute, on the day the scholarship ap was due, knowing full well that if I didn’t get the scholarship, I wouldn’t be able to go. But if I’m anything, I’m a risk taker, so I did what I do: I submitted a portion of the memoir that I completed this past summer and I proceeded to kick that scholarship letter’s ass:

When I write, I am that little girl up in the plum tree in our backyard in Bushwick, Brooklyn. I am watching my mother tend to her garden, treating the tomato vines and pepper plants with a tenderness I rarely felt. I am that little girl sitting at my mother’s feet. She is sewing a flower onto a table cloth as she tells me stories of her childhood in La Ceiba, Honduras where she endured the kind of poverty we only see in Save the Children Commercials. She grows quiet when she gets to the part about coming to the U.S. at 15. That’s where she always stopped, no matter how much I tried to pry it out of her. I write to fill in those silences to understand why and how she became the woman and mother she did, and why I, in turn, became an unmothered woman.

I haven’t always known this. It was in my Tin House workshop with Lacy Johnson in February 2016 that I uncovered this. Lacy asked, “Where is your mother in this?” During our one on one, she said, “A memoir attempts to answer a question.” I heard the question right away: How have I and how will I continue to live without my mother?

I walked into Tin House thinking I was writing a memoir called Relentless about my journey through grief after losing my brother Carlos in 2013 to a fifteen year heroin addiction. Lacy helped me see that I was in fact writing the same book I’d abandoned when Carlos died: A Dim Capacity for Wings. I couldn’t finish it because I hadn’t faced the grief that has haunted me my entire life: the grief over being unmothered.

This past summer I sat with my stories and everything I learned at Tin House. I tried to find the structure to put the book together, and it was reading Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water that gave me the permission to say, “Fuck traditional structure!” I braid stories. My book is a mixtape. Lidia Yuknavitch helped me own that.

It was at Tin House that I unlocked the first half of this book. I’m in a transitional period in my life and my work, and am ready to tackle the second half of Wings and the question that arose in the writing: what is resilience and what is about me that I’ve been able to create something beautiful out of these ghosts that haunt me while my brother Carlos was taken out by his? I know that Tin House can help me unlock this second part and finish this book that I’ve been writing for more than ten years.

I had some tremendous epiphanies while at Tin House in February. Sitting on the veranda with Dorothy Allison, the backdrop the crashing Pacific Ocean, I was reminded of why I’m writing this book and why it’s so important: it tells the story of unmothered women like me who somehow make their way in this world, who have survived and thrived in spite of (and maybe because of) all of it.

I didn’t get the scholarship though the folks at Tin House did make it a point to tell me that I made it to the final 7 of the 215 applicants.

I immediately went into how-the-fuck-am-I-gonna-afford this mode? The workshop costs are: $1300 for the workshop and housing at the Sylvia Beach Hotel on Nye Beach. That doesn’t include the flight from NYC to Portland or transportation to and from the airport or meals or incidentals…

I took to Facebook.

Status 1 – So what do you do if you get into a really prestigious and competitive workshop (1 in 5 got in), and though you made it to the last round, you didn’t get the scholarship, but if you go, you will work with someone whose work helped you finish half our book, how do you proceed?

Status 2 – Full disclosure: I got into Tin House’s CNF Winter Workshop. I did not get the scholarship. I cannot afford it. I could work with Lidia Yuknavitch whose Chronology of Water helped me figure out the structure of my memoir and, as a result, I was able to finish half of it thiss summer. I have some big decisions to make this week… Gah!

Status 3 – At what point do you feel worthy of the love you are given? Tonight I had a talk with my daughter about getting into Tin House but not getting the scholarship. I  told her about the love people are offering me in the form of money and praise and “we gotchu.” I admitted that I was uncomfortable. She asked why. I told her about the money I raised a year ago for the same workshop (from which I walked out with the question the memoir attempts to answer which, if you’re a writer, you know is momentous and necessary). She said: “What does that have to do with anything.” Then she looked at me, all wise and shit and said, “You can’t turn down people’s love. You give so much, mommy. It’s okay to accept love too.” I’m a big ball of emotion right now. Bear with me, fam. This unmothered woman is still learning how to mother herself and let others love her.

Status 4 – Bruja sis Lizz said, “You feel uncomfortable because you think you don’t deserve it.” This is the thing about emotions: even if logically we know we give and grind and are relentless, emotions are not logical. These kind are rooted in our traumas, in what we didn’t get as kids, those ghosts that haunt us, waiting for vulnerable moments like these to pounce and remind us…despite all the work we do, they are there to push us to keep doing the work, keep manifesting the holy spirits that we are, for if it is true that God created us in Her image, then it’s true that we carry God in us and therefore, I dare say, we are Gods too…& perhaps the journey of this human life is to see that and own that and manifest that God essence we all have within us, right? Don’t mind me. I’m blabbering. I’m trying to work through all this emotion y’all got me feeling gifting me all this love and “we gotchu.” All I can say right now is that I am grateful and I’ll get back to you. Loba’s got some big decisions to make.

So many of my FB friends and familia reached out to tell me that they had my back. They inboxed me, responded to my statuses, texted me. The overwhelming consensus was: I deserve this. I should do it. I should crowdfund. I should let my community love on me, so here goes everything.

I am raising $2000. Why so much?

- Tin House is $1300. A generous donor sent me $450 which with the $50 my partner gave me covers the deposit I put down earlier this evening. So, that leaves $800.

- The flight is upwards of $425 plus taxes, fees, etc. averages out to say, $500.  

- I need to feed myself while I’m out there and get around (taxis from airport, etc.).

- And finally, GoFundMe takes a percentage of the money you raise… They are a business, after all.

Who am I?

I am a NYC based writer, educator and mama who is currently completing my memoir, and chronicles the journey in my blog: vanessamartir.net. A five-time VONA/Voices fellow, my essays and fiction have appeared in The Butter, Poets & Writers Magazine, Kweli Journal, As/Us Journal, the VONA/Voices Anthology, Dismantle, and Smokelong Quarterly, among others. I have penned two novels: Woman’s Cry (Augustus Publishing, 2007) and The Right Play (as of yet unpublished). I have served as guest editor of Aster(ix) Journal and The James Franco Review. In 2010 I created the Writing Our Lives Workshop through which I've led hundreds of writers through the process of writing personal essays and memoir. I currently teach the class in NYC and am it bringing it online in the Spring of 2017.

I am relentless. I am on a mission to finish this memoir and I need your help to do that. Thank you.