Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast. I'm Emanuel Vaughn Lee, executive editor of Emergence

magazine, located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Mewalk people of present-day

Marin County. Each week, we feature a new interview, narrated essay, or story, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

Jamie Figueroa is Boricua, by way of Ohio, and a longtime resident of northern New Mexico.

She is the author of the new novel, Brother, Sister, Mother, Explorer,

just released this month.

In this essay, Jamie brings her pen to the blank pages of her family's history,

exploring writing as a tool of revelation and reclamation

and confronting a legacy of generational trauma and assimilation into white colonialist culture.

This is my archive of silence.

The small, lined notebook in my left hand is cumbersome.

My fingers grip the sides as best they can to steady the pages.

The pencil I use is dull, the soft, blunt, lead digs into the

space between each blue line. On this first page, I am careful to make the stems of the H's and

Ds tall, careful to hook the G in the right direction. I can write a handful of two and three-letter words.

The spiral at the top of the notebook glints,

catching the sun as the wire coil shifts and response to the pressure of my writing.

My mother and my two older sisters lie on a nubly yellow felt blanket in the grass.

The top edge lined in unraveling satin.

Kneeling behind my mother, I study her and my teenage sisters.

Their arms and legs are longer than anything I have yet to experience,

potential in self-possession outstretched, browning darker by the moment. Uninterrupted by trees, the backyard is vast. It rolls

...