Excerpt
There is a psychic cord tethering me to my mother. It is thick and heavy. It wraps its prickly fingers around the soft skin of my throat. When I was a child, I made a tacit agreement with my mother to keep my family's secrets. Protect her at all costs. I have paid a high price for this silencing.
My voice is raw. My emotions stretched to a thin slit of air, a violin string taut against the bones in my neck, screeching its painful aria. My voice is on fire. It flares with ferocious rage. It bites and singes, eating away the flesh of my will to live.

I am afraid to meet the world. Fearful of ordinary, everyday encounters at the grocery store, at the gas station, friendly greetings as I walk around Lake Harriet. I am afraid to open my mouth and speak because each time I do not know what will come forth. Every hello is fragmented, frayed, fraught with tension and strangled consonants, mangled vowels.

I am afraid of my writing. What has chosen me feels the desperate flames of my struggle to voice my truth. I write of old wounds, unhealed grief, stories that are stored in my bones, my blood, the very fiber of my cell walls. I excavate the mother lode of memory and polish the rough stones into imprefect facets, reflecting the pain and the joys of my life. Will what I write emerge in a clear sweet voice, fluid and honest? Or will the sentences and paragraphs grate against the grasping voice of stagnant secrets? This emotional wound has caused impairment. My physical voice is strained. I can no longer trust my vocal cords. And so, too, I can no longer trust the vocal folds of my inner, writer's voice to bellow this insistent necessity: break the silences.