Help Vanessa Mártir Journey to a Residency in Alaska

My name is Vanessa Mártir and I am a queer writer, editor, educator, and founder of the Writing Our Lives Workshop and the Writing the Mother Wound Movement. I’m also mom to a 20 year old wonder of a young woman; a dancer and college student, she is the best thing to come from me, in this life and the next.

I’ve been working on a memoir for a long ass time. Last time I checked, it’s been more than fifteen years but who’s counting? Ha! I’ve published quite a bit over this time, including excerpts , but, alas, I haven’t been able to finish for numerous reasons including: 1) some stories just take that long, 2) frankly, I wasn’t yet the writer who could finish the book, 3) I’d been trying to write a story about traumatic experiences that I hadn’t yet processed or healed from (and some I was still living), 4) I have perfectionism syndrome, the worst kind of self-sabotage, 5) when my mother died in June of 2023, she left me hundreds of pages of a memoir she never completed, and this has inevitably changed the story I was writing. I’ve spent much of my grief grappling with the reality that I’m now writing a new book. In many ways I’m cowriting it with my mother, whom I hadn’t spoken with in 364 days when she died.

Despite all my efforts, I wasn’t able to read thru my mother’s writing until October of 2023, when I attended my first month long residency at Blue Mountain Center in the Adirondacks. It’s there that I really understood what I’ve heard from writers countless times over the years—that artists need dedicated time away from our lives to develop our practices, experiment, and create art with our whole hearts. During that month in the Adirondacks, I read all my mother’s writing in the first 3 days, hiked 70+ miles and translated most of ma’s stories, which she’d penned in Spanish, her mother tongue. Doing this brought her words into my body in ways only language can do. I also acquired a next level admiration for translators and their efforts. You think you’re bilingual until you have to translate.

I’ve been working on melding my stories with my mother’s since then. The first excerpt from that effort, An Epistle for Edenia, the first chapter of this new book, was published last April in Agni journal.

I’ve been working on the book since. I’ve made some enormous discoveries about this new project that both excite and terrify me. I no longer think the entire book is epistolary—the entry to the book is. I know now that the book is in two parts. I know the names of the chapters in each section and can give you a synopsis of each one. I also know without a double that time away is what I need to keep digging and writing on the level I did over that month at BMC. That’s why last year I applied for and was awarded a month long residency at Storyknife in Homer, Alaska in July 2025. This is why I am raising money.

It’s expensive to travel from New York to Alaska—upwards of $1800+ last time I checked. Being away for a month also means I won’t have income for those four weeks. Like many artists, I am a gig worker (an industry that hasn’t yet fully rebounded since the pandemic), and being away from a month without reliable wifi means I can’t make money. That’s why I’m raising 5K.

It’s a hard time for many and I’ve gone back and forth on whether to fundraise. So much has come up for me—shame, imposter syndrome. There’s just so much going on in the world. So many of us are struggling. I am clear that this writing residency is a privilege, how dare I even… but the truth is that I won’t be able to attend the residency if I don’t raise money… and my want and need for this is louder and more true than any of that denigrating self talk.

And as a friend said and a student echoed: “don’t rob us of the chance to help an artist we admire.”

So here I am—humble and hopeful.

I need to raise $2k asap to secure my flight and travel expenses. Someone asked me if I accept miles, and yes yes yes! I think we’d just have to figure out details on that but yes again.

Anything helps. Please do share.