Olivia Monahan is a Sacramento-based journalist and editor-at-large for the Sacramento Voices project of The Sacramento Bee. Her work focuses on elevating stories and writers from communities normally underserved by mainstream media. She was also a guest artist for Amplify! Creative Writing Summer Camp, working with our young writers on nonfiction storytelling. As summer comes to a close, she wanted to share her own story about her experience in the Ink classroom:
A group of students sign a poster to thank the RCA Community Fund for their generous support of the 2021 Amplify! Creative Writing Summer Camp.
We go back and forth in the class with a lot of different things. We talk about history, and storytelling, the importance of controlling your own narrative, oppressive systems who kept us from that, and how no one else can tell your story the way you do. You know. All that learny stuff.
Part of the class we take some time to write a pitch. For them to tell me a story and tell me why that story is important to them.
I let them write for about 10 minutes, and then we go around and read the pitches. A few kids volunteered. The rest I warned I was gonna call on ‘em, and I did. Eventually.
There were two holdouts. One who was too afraid to speak and didn't really talk at all. One who thought I wasn't going to like their story and it was too personal. So I told them, cool, I'm not gonna force you to tell your story. And we kept it pushing with the lesson.
At the end of the class, I tied it all back together. Them not wanting to tell their stories is fine. Maybe it's not time. Maybe they're not ready. But one day, someone is going to need to hear it. Someone is going to feel less alone because of their story. So I hope one day they share it.
As they wound down, and I told em to move about the cabin, the quiet one came up to me. The one who was too shy to look at me when I talked to him and definitely wouldn't read his story aloud.
"Can I show you my drawings?" he said. Timidly. A big ringed sketchbook in his hand.
"Of course."
So we sat for a few extra minutes as he flipped through each page. How he wasn't sure how to handle emotions sometimes so he would draw people with masks on. How he wasn't really sure how to tell a story, but he wanted to get rid of anxiety and he thought this would help.
"You definitely know how to tell a story. Art is storytelling. Every line you draw tells a story." I told him.
"I did write one thing. On the bookmark I drew. Want to see?"
He takes me to his desk, where a small bookmark, carefully folded into shape on lined paper sits. A pink flamingo is drawn on it. Below it, Japanese letters.
"What does it say?" I ask him.
Without speaking a word, he unfolds the paper and shows me the translation.
"Wholeness is about more than the physical. It is about the wholeness of our whole self."
"Did you write that?" I ask him.
"Yeah."
"Why a pink flamingo?"
"They're weird," he barely whispered, "and people look at them strangely because of their color and their stance. But. They're beautiful. People just don't understand them."
And he looked up at me.
And I looked back at him.
"Sounds like you know way more about storytelling than you thought."
And he smiled. You know, even through a mask you can tell when someone smiles at you, and he definitely smiled. And he hugged his notebook a little tighter.
