Blog Voices from Our Community

Read stories, updates, and reflections from artists, staff, and survivors. Here, we share the heart of Awakenings — one post at a time.

Logo for Awakened Voices Literary Magazine. Features a silhouette of a face on the left with colorful, overlapping waveforms extending from the mouth to the right.

A Mohawk and a Heart

When we’re brought to city of Amman, Jordan with Shantha Bunyan, we’re briefly wrapped up in all the details, small and large, that make up

  • Memoir
Logo for Awakened Voices Literary Magazine. Features a silhouette of a face on the left with colorful, overlapping waveforms extending from the mouth to the right.

Lost and Found

A familiar image: a bird circling in the sky. With a gentle metaphor, Krista Robey writes to describe survivors’ ongoing pain. A bird circling overhead

  • Memoir
Logo for Awakened Voices Literary Magazine. Features a silhouette of a face on the left with colorful, overlapping waveforms extending from the mouth to the right.

Why Didn’t I Tell?

Shelley Wolf Harris shares some of the details of her experience with rape many years ago, while other memories surrounding this event remain missing-yet that

  • Memoir
Logo for Awakened Voices Literary Magazine. Features a silhouette of a face on the left with colorful, overlapping waveforms extending from the mouth to the right.

The Goldfish

Our earliest discoveries of violence often hold a unique gravity in our memories. In this burst of awareness, Shneiderman comes face to face with the

  • Memoir
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Broken Memories

The strength and earnestness with which Martinez describes her incomplete memories serve to prove that strong feelings are just as powerful as concrete details. Feelings

  • Memoir
Simple black and white line drawing of a bird perched on a diagonal branch, with its beak open as if singing.

Other Me’s Request

Trauma has left us between times and worlds. In a response to our May prompt, “Other Me’s Request” experiments with time as we follow “Me”

  • Memoir
Simple black and white line drawing of a bird perched on a diagonal branch, with its beak open as if singing.

Saturday Stress

In a piece for the current moment, Dominic Bucca reflects on his self-isolation experience and extends his thoughts and attention to those who may be

  • Memoir
Simple black and white line drawing of a bird perched on a diagonal branch, with its beak open as if singing.

Kintsugi; precious scars

What does it mean to feel broken, and how is it possible to rebuild? After sexual violence made her family feel broken, Dreen Lucky examines

  • Memoir
Simple black and white line drawing of a bird perched on a diagonal branch, with its beak open as if singing.

Breaking; Not Yet Broken

There is a difference between breaking and brokenness, between a splinter of pain and falling to pieces. Susanna Penfield explores the nuances of hurt in

  • Memoir
Simple black and white line drawing of a bird perched on a diagonal branch, with its beak open as if singing.

Intentions

Reverend Dr. Barbara Edemea returns to The Nightingale with a series of positive intentions celebrating belief in one another, oneself, and our community of survivors.

  • Essay, Memoir
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New Recipe: Healthy Relationship

In this response to our February prompt, a recipe for healing takes us through the process of leaving an abusive relationship and entering a healthy

  • Memoir
Simple black and white line drawing of a bird perched on a diagonal branch, with its beak open as if singing.

Bearing Myself

While it’s a difficult story to tell, Zeller courageously conveys her experience and highlights the problems within rape culture that normalize sexual violence on college

  • Memoir
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Thank you, Chicago

Katherine Page revisits The Nightingale with a lovely portrait of a healing through traveling. She writes of finding strength as a survivor when she returns

  • Memoir, Prose
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Bodily Authority

One trauma folds into another as Meredith Lindgreen explores loss after a miscarriage and an experience with sexual violence. She meditates on a lack of

  • Memoir, Prose
Simple black and white line drawing of a bird perched on a diagonal branch, with its beak open as if singing.

Rewrite

In response to our October prompt, Katherine Page returns to a piece of writing that is distinctly connected to her past experience with sexual violence-a

  • Journal Entry, Memoir, Other, Prose

Create, connect, & heal

Find your place in our circle of creators, where every artistic choice is valid and every emotion is welcome. Healing isn’t linear, nor a path you have to walk alone.

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