Exhale

We all have stories to tell, and Exhale is designed to be a safe and inspiring place for those stories.  But how do we dredge up those stories from past experiences, spinning them out in a way that will be meaningful to others?

Four months after my son was born dead in 2007, I found myself sitting alone on a sagging park bench in Ecuador’s teeming capitol of Quito, and I took out a pen and tiny notebook that I’d been carrying around in my backpack.  I had bought these at an outdoor market, just in case I felt inspired to start a diary about losing a baby – but until then, no words had come to me.  Now, though – with trucks rumbling past and children shouting in Spanish nearby – for no particular reason I felt ready to write.

I didn’t write about the details of the event itself; these details I’d already relayed ad nauseam to the people closest to me, and replayed a thousand times over inside my head. Instead, what emerged was a different story, rather a small chapter of my epic tail of baby-death which I had not yet discovered or told.

This one was about being trapped in a strange space between motherhood and un-motherhood, about the pleasure of imagining with great ease who my child would have become as a teenager, and the conflicting frustration of not being about to see or touch him.  Words poured out of me, my ballpoint pen pressing against my already-calloused finger.  I stopped hearing any of the city-sounds around me, tears pricking occasionally at my eyes and dropping down onto the page.  I didn’t stop writing until the sun began to set over Quito.

Back in our hotel that night, where my husband was to meet me after his multi-day biking excursion, I felt buzzing and relieved all over – as though I’d just taken the best piss of mylife.  It was as though I had carved some emotional gunk out of my system, this heavy and burdensome weight of painful memories now chiseled down a bit and propelled outward in a meaningful and coherent way.

Of course, a tale scrawled into a tear-stained notebook and shoved into a dark backpack forever doesn’t do much good, so some time later I gathered up the proverbial balls to show it to the world.  This particular story – the first words I’d ever written about my post-loss feelings – eventually found a home in the now-defunct Mamazine.

Seeing my own piece in public inspired me to keep writing – and it’s been a rough journey of ups and downs.  For every mini-story I’ve found a “home” for, I’ve gotten what feels like a hundred rejection letters.  It’s a risk, putting your writing out there for others to read and react to in this highly competitive literary world.  With good reason, I’ve come to expect rejection.

At the same time, I also find myself now in the ironic and not-so-fun position of sometimes rejecting others’ work.  Here at Exhale, we have the profound honor of receiving a lot of very personal and poignant stories in various forms.  I am fortunate enough to get to read them firsthand.  In the end, I have to make difficult choices: to publish or not to publish.  That’s the hardest part of my job.

What I look for is writing that does more than simply narrate the details of a stillbirth, miscarriage, infertility treatment, or other painful circumstance.  I look for stories that bring readers to a place they haven’t been before; that dig around for universal messages and truths and expose them in a compelling way; that find humor or poignancy in unexpected places.

I believe it is these stories, poems, photographs, and other works of art that enlighten the world, bringing our experiences (even grim and deeply personal ones) outward to where readers can understand and learn from them.

All of this is to present a semi-serious challenge to everyone, myself included: let’s keep expressing ourselves through language or other artistic mediums – and as we do it, let’s dig deeper into the topic for little gems of insight that will give something back to the world.  What can we draw from our past stories that will teach something, or make others see life in a slightly different way?   I believe that in looking back at unhappy life events in such a way, we learn recursively from them – and can use our personal stories to make a positive literary and artistic mark on the human community.

It’s how we take something awful, and spin some goodness out of it – even if we can’t always see or define what that “goodness” might be or who it will affect.

To me that’s what Exhale (and maybe even life?) is all about.

Peace,

Monica LeMoineExhale Founder/Editor