Who am I? While we never really stop asking ourselves this question, my curiosity—and my writing—centers on when we start asking it, and what happens when our answer differs from internalized expectations.

As the character Kate asks in my middle grade novel-in-verse, Redwood & Ponytail:

What if my me is entirely different than the Mom-me?

What if the me-me isn’t as good

or smart

or perfect

as the Mom-me?

Then who will I be?

Nobody?

 

In Ben Y and the Ghost in the Machine, my multi-modal middle grade novel, Ben Y ponders an adjacently alarming thought:

It’s a terrible feeling

to be surrounded

by a crowd

and to know that

even with

so many people there,

you’re actually

completely

alone.

I write about these adolescent reckonings because, like so many other authors, as a young person I struggled to find any kind of personal representation. I read voraciously, not realizing I was searching for visibility, for recognition, for relevance. When I was unable to find any relevant reflections, I began to morph into who I thought I should be; who I thought would find acceptance and relevance.

In much the same way a student taking a class on rare diseases begins to diagnose themselves with all of the improbable maladies they’re studying, I went to college and absorbed the art critiques and philosophical manifestos I read. Parroting Old Dudes’ Accepted Opinions made me feel anchored. I found a way to be opinionated without actually having an opinion. I found a way to be heard without saying anything new. I found a way to be visible while keeping my true self safely invisible.

I stayed cloaked in this carefully constructed camouflage until I took Dr. Ann Reynolds’ three-hour art history seminar the second semester of my junior year. It only took Dr. Reynolds two seconds to shatter my carefully constructed veneer. As I answered a question in front of the class, she kept dispassionate, even languid, eye contact as she listened to me parrot an Old Dude’s Accepted Opinion. Her eye contact never broke as she raised her hand, stopping me in mid-sentence so that she could say, simply: No. That’s not what I asked. I want you to tell me how this piece makes YOU feel, not how someone else has told you to feel about it.

An immediate, vast emptiness overcame me. I literally didn’t know how I felt about the piece because I literally didn’t know how to feel on my own anymore. Not because of a fear that I would say the wrong thing, but because of a debilitating fear that any true feeling I might share—about anything, not just art—might actually reveal me to be wrong in an uncorrectable, existential way.

Until that moment, one of my big college takeaways was that the raw feelings of young, queer women, when dared to be spoken aloud in class, typically earned more scorn than respect. Except… Dr. Reynolds’ interruption didn’t feel scornful. Her measured response simply showed that she did value a young, queer woman’s opinion about something. Her gentle reproach communicated that the filter of an Old Dude’s Accepted Opinion wasn’t necessary (or welcome!) in her class. She not only included me in the conversation, she welcomed my young, queer thoughts and ideas.

Dr. Reynolds’ recognition of my own agency was the first glimpse I had of a reality that didn’t require me to mask or muzzle myself to achieve success. Did she know her response to me in that class, in that moment, was going to have this earth-shattering effect on my life? Probably not. Did she, as an educator, hope to have that kind of impact on her students? I can only assume she did.

From that moment, art, education, philosophy, writing… pretty much everything felt entirely new to me. I began to understand that just as an educator trusts their students to learn the truths purposely conveyed in a lesson, they also inherently recognize that their students will bring their own truths to each lesson. As I’ve grown older and transitioned from studying art history to writing books for young readers, I’ve found this to be true in my own work as well.

There is a brazen brilliance found in the liminal spaces of art and education. You find these spaces in the page turns of picture books, and within the celebratory eye contact of a struggling reader who’s just finished a book for the first time. This liminal space lives in the spaces between graphic novel panels and in the rainbow flags hanging on the wall in a classroom. And, most crucial to my own work, this liminal space is the beating heart within the whitespace on every page of a novel-in-verse.

Just as neither I, nor Dr. Reynolds, could know the specific impact she would have on my life that day, I can’t know the specific impact my work will have on young readers. What I do know is this: lives are changed in the liminal spaces of life and in art. My work might not have every answer for every reader, but hopefully it will provide the answer key for some.