Performed by Val Cole

Get to know the writer:

1. What is your short story about?

A biomythographical experience as a teenager... doing my best to come to terms with my identity and desires during a time when being closeted was an absolute necessity in the 1970s. I describe the experience of growing up

2. What genres would you say this story is in?

My story is a biomythography. Biomythography is a genre created by Black lesbian author and poet Audrey Lorde in her 1982 book, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. She wrote that this genre enables us to use our experiences to compose what identity means to us, and that we can use emotions, along with imagery and perception, to express our truths.

Biomythography – weaving together myth, history, and biography in epic narrative form, a style of composition that represents all the ways in which we perceive the truth. Biomythography is a writing down of our meanings of identity... with the materials of our lives. We are the culmination of it all; experiences are painted with imagery, perception, and, mostly, emotion. Details that become true in the telling.

3. How would you describe this story in two words?

Tragic, sad

4. What movie have you seen the most in your life?

Honestly, I don't have an answer.

5. What is your favorite song? (Or, what song have you listened to the most times in your life?)

Cats in the Cradle by Harry Chapin comes to mind.

6. Do you have an all-time favorite novel?

Aunt Sookie and Me by Michael Scott Garvin comes to mind.

7. What motivated you to write this story?

The need to heal, the need to remove the deep pain within me, and give it another place to exist. To put the pain somewhere else to live instead of within me.

8. If you could have dinner with one person (dead or alive), who would that be?

Oprah Winfrey, I have so many questions for her.

9. Apart from writing, what else are you passionate about?

The love of my life and the life we created together doing property investments and raising our Great Dane.

10. What influenced you to enter your story to get performed?

I needed to know whether it was worth sharing, whether others could relate to and benefit from my experience. To let others know that there is hope. And if my story got picked up for performance, that would answer my question.

11. Any advice or tips you'd like to pass on to other writers?

Write what you feel. Write what's deep inside you. Write what is most uncomfortable. Let it live in writing. "Your body is not a coffin for pain to be buried in." (Ehime Ora). Write biomythographically.