Womanhood & Trauma Series — "Give Us a Smile"

800,000 Clenched Cervixes

Childbirth is often heralded as one of the most amazing and profound experiences a woman can have. But what happens when the birthing mother has been sexually abused? Lan Tran shares her experiences, shadowed by trauma, of birthing naturally and via C-section. […]

Womanhood & Trauma Series — "Give Us a Smile"

The Tree is a Body

Disassociation. Panic. Looking back and freezing. Moving between nude art modeling, trauma, and becoming a tree. How do we ignore the way our body hurts when we don’t move it? How do we let other people look at our bodies? […]

Womanhood & Trauma Series — "Give Us a Smile"

On Suffering

The girl sweeping cedar chip insulation in the bitter cold of winter becomes a teenage girl drowning in the heavy metal that seeps through the wall between her room and her brother’s. While drunk at a house party, this malcontent teen confronts the man who stole her innocence. We leave the girl pondering her fate spelled out in a fortune-teller’s tarot cards. Will she alter her doomed journey? […]

Womanhood & Trauma Series — "Give Us a Smile"

in which a woman closes, then opens, a door

The piece considers the aftermath of trauma in the context of a woman revisiting her childhood. It weaves together personal narrative with a meditation on temporal displacement in La Jetée (1962), to consider how trauma creates temporal vertigo – and ties us to the past whilst simultaneously alienating us from it. […]

Womanhood & Trauma Series — "Give Us a Smile"

That time I made yoghurt blankets and called it The Habit

Can you find control within the luminosity of an eating disorder? As blended ingredients cadence from her mouth, Cara holds on to The Habit like an anchor. For her, co-existing with bulimia pulses her between posturing and shame as she lives alongside the pulls of anxiety, OCPD, addiction, and a need for social belonging. […]

Womanhood & Trauma Series — "Give Us a Smile"

Firsts

This piece explores the stereotypical “firsts” we romanticize—first kiss, first date, first time having sex—and how those firsts are distorted by the violence and threat of violence prevalent in rape culture. Rape culture then introduces young people, and especially young women, to new, terrifying firsts. […]

Womanhood & Trauma Series — "Give Us a Smile"

Hymns to the Lares

An adoptee returns to Brooklyn, to the setting of her father’s stories and her adoption, and tries to find identity and truth in worlds that exist only in her father’s memories, and in files she is not allowed to see.   […]

Womanhood & Trauma Series — "Give Us a Smile"

I Fear Men Like I Fear My Billy Goat

My mom and I stood alongside the fence line and watched my billy goat chase his mother around and around the pen, trying to mount her. “See that Cleo?” Mom tried to educate me. “That’s what men are like. All they want is sex.” I listened, but I would have to learn for myself. […]

Womanhood & Trauma Series — "Give Us a Smile"

Therapy Baby

This is a work of nonfiction about the relationship between a mother and daughter, both coping with aging and revealing secrets to one another. Some scenes delve into humanitarian efforts in prisons and assisted living, as well as other career paths. The subtext reveals the deeper pursuit of women’s rights. […]

Podcast

Episode 9: Daughterhood

Four daughters lose and find their mothers, engage and disengage with them, learn and unlearn who these women are and who they were before they came along. These daughters, intentionally and unintentionally, look for meaning and identity in the women who gave them birth; because whether we like or barely tolerate them, whether they put us together fragment by careful fragment, or whether they undo us with the tug of an errant string, who they were tells us everything about who we will become. […]

Womanhood & Trauma Series — "Give Us a Smile"

Ten Dollars

The narrator of “Ten Dollars” goes out for a night of fun and dancing, but instead finds herself in a nightmare situation. Because she tries to defend her feminist principles at a club, she finds herself protecting her friend from physical danger—a danger that is, ironically, gendered in nature. […]

Womanhood & Trauma Series — "Give Us a Smile"

A Too Personal Retelling of the Modern Romance

May Bennet approaches a sadly familiar story (the aftermath of assault) nontraditionally to discuss how past traumas link and entangle, further complicating one’s life long after the events have transpired. This essay emphasizes how a history of trauma affects new relationships and how one might regain autonomy in the aftermath of abuse. […]

Womanhood & Trauma Series — "Give Us a Smile"

A Guide to Not Comparing Stalkers

A woman catches herself minimizing a dangerous situation in her past by measuring it against what happened to her friend. Giving herself permission to remember unlocks once-forgotten details and allows her to honor her friend’s bravery—and her own. […]

Womanhood & Trauma Series — "Give Us a Smile"

Home and the Breaking Point

“Home and the Breaking Point” explores the realities of small-town rape culture as the author witnesses three peers discuss the assault of another, in a story about the price of a place in the conversation. […]

Womanhood & Trauma Series — "Give Us a Smile"

Fast and Without Too Much Sadness

Schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorder have created many versions of me and because of that, it’s hard to know myself. I think back to being psychotic and wonder who that was, and I think about myself now and still wonder the same thing. […]

Womanhood & Trauma Series — "Give Us a Smile"

Obituary

“Obituary“ is the story of a woman learning a pastor she once admired died several months ago. As she reads various eulogies in parish newsletters, her inner eye presents her with flashbacks to times when she was close to him, revealing the true nature of their relationship. […]

Diaspora & Immigration Series

Episode 8: The Elusive Burmese from Liminal Space

We take you into the world of a Burmese woman’s quest to piece together the fragments of her identity as Su Su Maung. We also learn about how that quest led her to found the Myanmar-based psychological consulting firm, Citta Consultancy. Citta helps empower the people of Myanmar with social and emotional intelligence so they can heal, transform, and grow to reach their fullest potential and contribute to the development of their country. […]

Podcast

Episode 7: Motherhood

Motherhood has often been considered a pinnacle of wisdom and serenity, a sort of joining together of all those parts of ourselves in lesser focus. But in truth, motherhood opens more doors than it closes. It is an endless series of complications and ambiguities that are put into sharper relief by the arrival of a daughter. What emerges from the following four stories is this precise push and pull, pondered through the lens of devotion and loss, of privilege and resentment, of injustice and forgiveness. […]

Nasiona Books

What Would Happen If One Woman Told the Truth about Her Life?: New Book, ‘Vestiges of Courage,’ by Mireya S. Vela

Vestiges of Courage is a collection of personal essays that explores inequities and injustice. Raised between two cultures and two languages, Mireya S. Vela discusses how the systems in her family and in society worked to create an abusive environment that felt crushing, confusing, and hopeless. In her book, Ms. Vela delineates her experience of living through sexual, physical, and emotional abuse. This book is much more than a collection of experiences, though. Ms. Vela wants to know how and why abuse thrived in her family. She digs deep to understand why these things happened and how she survived. […]

Podcast

Episode 4: Systemic Abuse of Women

We share four essays included in Mireya S. Vela’s forthcoming book, Vestiges of Courage, Collected Essays—a collection of personal essays that explores inequities and injustice. Ms. Vela discusses how the systems in her family and in society worked to create an abusive environment that felt crushing, confusing, and hopeless. In her book, Ms. Vela delineates her experience of living through sexual, physical, and emotional abuse. Ms. Vela wants to know how and why abuse thrived in her family. […]

Ep. 2: Mireya S. Vela's Vestiges of Courage
Interviews

Episode 2: Mireya S. Vela’s Vestiges of Courage

What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? Mireya S. Vela is that woman. In this long-form interview, we discuss her art, creative nonfiction, social justice, motherhood, womanhood, being marginalized in the United States, and her new book, Vestiges of Courage: Collected Essays, which we, The Nasiona, are happy to be publishing in April of 2019.Vestiges of Courage is a collection of personal essays that explores inequities and injustice. Raised between two cultures and two languages, Vela discusses how the systems in her family and in society worked to create an abusive environment that felt crushing, confusing, and hopeless. She delineates her experience of living through sexual, physical, and emotional abuse. This book is much more than a collection of experiences, though. Ms. Vela wants to know how and why abuse thrived in her family. She digs deep to understand why these things happened and how she survived. […]

Umberto Boccioni, "Head Against the Light (The Artist's Sister)," ink on paper, 1912, bequest of Lydia Winston Malbin, 1989, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Womanhood & Trauma Series — "Give Us a Smile"

Diptych: Origins, Neurodivergence

A shock medical diagnosis. A child’s awareness of her otherness in the neurotypical world. In her two-panel essay, Deborah Elderhorst ponders the gaps that exist between one person’s perceptions and another’s lived experience, even within the closest of familial bonds. This is a mother’s heart-song to her daughter. […]

Photograph by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash.
Womanhood & Trauma Series — "Give Us a Smile"

Finding Jean Palmer

*WINNER OF THE NASIONA FLASH CREATIVE NONFICTION PRIZE, 2019*
“Finding Jean Palmer” recounts a long quest to locate Hannah Huff’s great-grandmother’s grave in a vast memorial park. […]

Photograph by Joel Fulgencio on Unsplash.
Columns

Perspective

Perspective is more than just a specific view of things, it is the parallel lines that spread outward in all directions but are all sourced from a singular experience. Memoir doesn’t just ask for the what, but also the why, even if that why can never be answered. […]

Gustav Klimt, "The Kiss," painting, 1907-1908, Österreichische Galerie Belvedere Museum.
Womanhood & Trauma Series — "Give Us a Smile"

Wedding Portrait

Centered around the televised royal nuptials between Prince Harry and Ms. Markle, “Wedding Portrait” tells a larger personal story in which racial boundaries are transgressed and questioned. Jennifer Bostwick Owens describes finding the courage to stand up to external censure and sketches a picture of building a life of evolving, ongoing love. […]

"Rubbing of Apsarases (Dancers)," Cambodia, ink on paper, 20th century, gift of Mr. Jean Laur, Curator of Angkor, 1959, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Uncategorized

About Chains

In a letter to her daughter she put up for adoption, Holly Pelesky muddles through the emotional distance from her own mother who tried to leave her father once. An exploration of the tension between mothers and daughters; a reflection on how the choices we make wedge space between us. […]