What’s the Narrative?

Have a story you’d like to share about survival? Submit your piece, whether it be poetry, prose, art, or photography, to our literary journal, Songs of Survival!

Beyond my personal journal, I’ve never really been one to foster my own creative writing skills. Of course I study English Literature at school and have loved reading fiction for as long as I can remember, but the thought of translating that love for reading into something like writing in that style intimidated me to no avail. I was the person who wanted to write articles, academic essays, and research papers. I wanted to explore and focus my thoughts on what was going on in the world around me. 

I vividly remember the fall of 2017 when the #MeToo movement started. I hadn’t really engaged with these kinds of events on a personal level; I knew they happened and had certainly had many a conversation, but I hadn’t really confronted the deeply rooted systems that were in place. I thought about it a lot that fall, but there was one distinct idea I couldn’t shrug off, this feeling that something was missing from the narrative. It felt like this big hole that I couldn’t figure out.

But then I got it. While the stories themselves came from survivors of sexual violence, the media coverage seemed remarkably impersonal. It was almost as if the machine of journalism was simply trying to meet the machine of sexual violence. But this issue is not a machine. It’s about real people, about individuals. And I couldn’t help but feel like they were getting lost amidst the rhetoric of that fall.

So why Survivors to Superheroes? Why Songs of Survival? All of those voices, all of those stories that were missing from the media can come to life through creative writing. It’s not about the facts or details of any one experience, but rather about focusing the narrative on the voices that matter: survivors and their loved ones. For me, our literary journal addresses this astronomical gap between the lip-service that promotes a survivor-centred approach, and the reality that it all-too-frequently silences the very individuals it claims to support. Using a space such as creative writing, where deeply personal stories can be shared according to those who experienced them, our literary journal is able to tangibly address this gap seen in media and society.

As our production chair, I get to bridge the divide between the wide-reaching topic of sexual violence and the individual stories of survivors and their loved ones. One of the most rewarding parts of my job is figuring out how to order our journal. The main question I ask myself is how one piece of writing flows into the next. While the editing team focuses on the individualism of each submission, I get to look at their themes, tone, form, and medium in order to create a larger journal that reflects the overarching story of survival. 

Because our journal’s focus is on survival, we have a unique task; while other journals often explore different themes within each issue, our theme remains the same. And yet we still see an incredible amount of diversity amongst our submissions. So, by the time submissions come to me as the production chair, I continue to come back to the question of flow, asking myself how each story contributes to the larger narrative of survival. For me, it’s about recognizing the individual aspects of survival and how they appear in each submission, and then asking myself how they can be highlighted as we create the flow and order of the journal in its entirety. It’s important that I don’t forget that survival, although sometimes used as a universal word, is a deeply personal experience. While it’s my job to curate the journal as a whole, each submission still functions as an independent story. If we’ve done our job properly, each piece first tells a unique story, and then blends into the next as the reader adds each new perspective to their larger understanding of survival and sexual violence.

Circling back to my ideas from the fall of 2017, one thing I think our literary journal makes extremely clear is that these stories are not sensationalist. It’s not enough for journalists to simply gloss over these stories only to move on in their search for the next “breaking news”. While I hope (and certainly think) journalists are not in the business of doing this, I know it definitely feels that way sometimes. For me, Songs of Survival is about creating a supportive community for survivors where they can contribute their own stories, feel heard and understood, and learn from other survivors. We as a journal are at the service of survivors and their loved ones. Not the other way around. So I think my reflection in the fall of 2017 was an accurate one: there was a massive narrative missing. The most important narrative. With Songs of Survival, we want to put an end to this; our entire focus is on these missing voices of survivors. And it’s about time we brought them to light.