When completing SmokeLong Quarterly’s Micro March Marathon, I discovered a fun trick to help when I didn’t know how to start: describing a photo. So when my wonderful friend Sky sent me Publish Her’s anthology call for the theme, “Dear Body,” I knew I could do something. After all, I was about eight months postpartum, and there had to be something I could write about that.
But I didn’t know how to begin.
So, I looked through some old photos and stumbled upon this: a picture of me and one of my closest friends (who gave me permission to post it) from our senior year of college. Ten years ago, wrapping up our senior year of college, thrilled and terrified to discover what was waiting for us after we graduated.

So, I pasted it into a Google Doc, started with describing it, and saw where it took me.
This photo is from Love in the Afternoon, a love-song-themed concert the choir club held every February. That year, that concert, I held a solo for the girls’ number. So I couldn’t describe the solo without describing the song and how much I loved to sing. When I was twenty-two-years old, I was singing about seven hours a week, give or take, in rehearsals. Who knows how much I was singing in the car or in the townhouse (my roommate likes to joke I was like Cinderella, singing as I woke up in the morning)? Either way, vocally, I was at my best.
And that was the link I needed between myself ten years ago and me.
The result is the piece, “What My 22-Year-Old Self Didn’t Know,” which Publish Her accepted for their anthology. The anthology will be published later this year, and I couldn’t be more thrilled for my body and voice to be included.