the boogyman
When we are born we all come out a little waxy; maybe a little red, purple, or blue. Smooth and supple. Screaming or smiling. As we age our skin wrinkles and dimples. We tan and spot and freckle. Sometimes we callous and scar. Our skin hardens in the sun as leather tans. Our vision clouds and our voices crackle in time as our cords stretch and begin to wither.
When we are born and until we die, we fear. Lullabies sing us sweet somber tales of monsters and near death experiences. Our bedtime stories and fables warn and teach us lessons. Be afraid. The dark might swallow you. Don’t venture too close to the water. You might fall in. Don’t go into the woods. You might get lost or eaten. Don’t throw your baseball into the neighbor’s yard. He might run you down.
The boogyman comes in many forms: wild animals, thin ice over water, run-away balls that end up in the road, the strange kid at the end of the street that doesn’t come out to play. Be afraid.
Of him. You learned to be afraid so long ago.
You met the boogyman when you were five, when dandelion yellow was your favorite color. He wasn’t a shadow monster under your bed. He wasn’t a ghost in your attic or phantom whispers in the night. He wasn’t a creature with claws and fangs that hungered for blood and fed on the screams of his victims. He didn’t have a tail or hooves or horns. He wasn’t covered in mossy hair and tangled mats. He knew nothing of your sins and he couldn’t read your thoughts. He was not omnipotent. He couldn’t smell your fear and he didn’t call you by name.
The boogyman was real. He had a face with two eyes, a nose, and a mouth. He had gray fading hair and a mustache. He had rough, sun scarred skin. He had a name, one you never spoke. He wore old shirts with holes and stains on them. He stunk a musty stink that you couldn’t begin to understand when you only stood about three feet tall. He was a man, human. He was born and grew and aged and rotted and festered. In a physical form of lust and desire, he hunted and preyed.
You didn’t have monster spray to save yourself from him in your nightmares. You didn’t learn to pack him away in a box and store him in the closet under your dusty school photos until you were much older. Suppression was a myth. His face never went away, neither did his voice or his grotesque laugh. His hands, you’ll always remember those horrid hands. How rough they were, how uncaring and calloused. They were stained from work executed without gloves, scarred from cuts and splinters. Pocked craters burrowed into the thick tan skin, leaving little oases of shiny pale pinks in their basins. Even though you moved across the country he followed you, always behind the door and in the cold spots of the room. Those hands followed you. The strangling tightness of nightmares you could never pull yourself out of.
The boogyman was not a murderer, not this time. No. He was a thief. He stole something of yours. It wasn’t for another year that you learned what it was, something you had, something you could own.
A year later, you sat in a circle with other little girls and boys, and you learned of his sin. On the colorfully-itchy carpet covered in bright bubbly letters and animals, you sat with with your friends. None of them quite like you. You had stories to tell, no longer a blank slate in pigtails and jumpers in elementary school. Your class had been brought down to the library where the big tube television was wheeled in, covered in dust. It was a video day. Expecting an episode of Reading Rainbow or Bill Nye, you all wiggled with excitement. That was until Mrs. Snow, the school counselor, and her chipper cockatiel riding on her shoulder, Sandy, waltzed into the room, both squawking. She introduced the video you’d be watching with a slight tone of caution as she spoke carefully. She reminded everyone that at any time you could ask questions or leave the room if needed. You couldn’t figure out why anyone would want to leave the room during video time.
In the video, you all learned about a hypothetical uncle Joe who liked to hug a little too much. He’d gone camping with his young nephew and when it was time for bed, he blew out the lantern and zipped them both in the tent. Everything seemed normal until you noticed they weren’t actually going to sleep. Uncle Joe was “hugging” is nephew in the sleeping bag. When the nephew asked him to stop, Mrs. Snow paused the video then stepped in front of the dull screen, rippling with static.
She asked if anyone understood what was going on. No one jumped to answer right away, like they would have if Bill Nye had been on the screen. This time, everyone seemed a bit disoriented. Why shouldn’t they? They knew there was nothing wrong with hugging your uncle. You were the only one who suddenly got a chill down your hunched-over back.
Mrs. Snow was forced by the silence of the room to explain from an adult perspective what uncle Joe was doing wrong. Glazed over eyes that failed to understand skipped over her and got comfy on the bird resting on her shoulder. Her radiant feathers called for attention much more than any hypothetical story did. What would a typical six year old know about this warning? Life had been sunshine and playtime. Crayolas and nerf guns were soft and welcoming. Bug-spray and Neosporin were what stung. Cherry flavored cough syrup and Brussels sprouts made children wretch. Mom had always said you were special, she couldn’t have meant like this.
The counselor taught you the term “private parts” on that suddenly tacky carpet, long after your mother had given you their true names. This was the first slice at your femininity, the first hushed voice saying, cover up. They might see you. This was the moment clothing became your best friend, the reason so many people would stare when you’d wear your vibrant orange and teal sports winter jacket in the middle of the stagnate August heat. You felt a twinge of safety wrapping yourself in its slippery fabric.
It was in that circle of tangled braids and unkempt cowlicks you learned the power of the word no; like a blade you could sheath and unsheathe when you needed it most. Your voice could shake hills and flatten trees. Shout one magical word and those around you would tremble and fall to their knees, losing all power. But it was too late. You didn’t know the power of this word the year before, during your confrontation with the boogyman who hadn’t yet been given the title. That was the next lesson Mrs. Snow had planned for the day.
Tell, always tell. Never let anyone touch you, make you feel uncomfortable. You wanted to tell, wanted to scream how sorry you were. You wanted everything to flow out but instead a botched wall of slime and crust was forming in your throat, choking back your story. She was making you uncomfortable. You wanted to tell her that. You wanted to beg her to stop and let you go somewhere else, somewhere you could escape. She was torturing you, but a pattern began to form.
You sat silently, trying to blend in. You eyed all the others, trying desperately to memorize how they reacted; unaffected by the story, by the rules, by the seemly easy means to an end. Their faces didn’t shift, no darkness entered their eyes, still bright with wonder. Smiles didn’t faultier. You did your absolute best to mimic, a skill you’d slowly master.
It was then that the word “sorry” became too hard to say. You were so fucking sorry. You just weren’t strong enough to climb out of silence.
Adults were to be trusted, they wouldn’t lie to you. They would do anything in their power to keep you safe. A child could always ask for help. You were fat, chocked full of the lies you’d been stuffed with. The fluffy whipped-cream topping of those lies hid in the form of cancer causing sucralose, saccharine, an imitation of real sweetness. You were the one who’d let him do as he pleased, you never said no. It was you who did as bid and told no one. You were just as evil as uncle Joe. This, you were more certain of than the reality of the sickly life you were now to lead, full of lies and secrets. Your head fell a little lower that day and got stuck, as though it finally found the correct notch to rest in.
He didn’t just touch you—grab you. You weren’t robbed. You weren’t even attacked. Nothing about it was violent. You followed his commands willingly. You didn’t shy away when his voice called you to the slaughter like a lamb following your shepherd blindly behind the shed he’d constructed the summer before in your front yard. It stood un-sided, still the sharp yellow of unstained plywood, unbent from the hurricane winds and without rot from the sweltering summer rains.
Nothing hurt then, but every time you thought about your blind faith you felt as though the air was too heavy and you were stepping on tacks, one wrong step and the skin would be pierced. Your arms wobbled and your face burnt bright hot red in the sickening shade of shame. Your breath wavered and you felt as though the Earth had fallen to a different axis, rotating in a suddenly different direction. You’re the only one who felt it.
You had a secret, a big one. But how does one hide a flushed face of crimson blushing cheeks when you had no control over it? When a strictly emotional reaction betrayed you and took physical form, how would you cope? You were becoming a fast learner, eloping with improvisation, the need to react fast. Broadway was where you belonged, a little cheating, lying actor, practicing so religiously. Surely you’d play Brutus well in any piece.
This was when you learned wits. Your mother was the leader of a girl-scout troop. Every Sunday night, in the dusty banquet hall of the First United Methodist church, ten little girls, your little sister included, would sit around a long oak table, covered in try-its and art supplies. It was here that you’d have to face the same story and warning about another uncle Joe.
You were becoming an addict. The fighting need to hide slowly became inextinguishable. Not one hair out of place was allowed. You had to be like everyone else. They’d know. Here was where you’d perfected the mimicking technique you’d studied so closely. You’d paint a matching set of smiles, frowns, narrowing eyes of confusion and calm, easy breaths. You didn’t tremble. You didn’t even blink.
What Mrs. Snow had told you was only a warm summer breeze compared to the catastrophic typhoon that came from your mother’s weak lips. You had thought the carpet was a prison cell. The banquet hall was death row. It was different to lie to a school figure, but your mother? You were a malevolent force, sinking lower and lower into the pits the cage you’d locked yourself in. Your body slowly hollowing out into a shell, home to guilt that haunted the empty rooms like a poltergeist, running through the halls shaking chains and wailing into the drafty damp air.
Now you knew what happened was wrong. You knew it was all your fault, you never said no. You didn’t stand your ground and now you’re to blame. A little five-year-old girl, sick with shame; so afraid to tell. You don’t remember being threatened. You don’t remember your mother’s and father’s lives being thrown in the mix. And yet, you couldn’t tell them. The secrets were beginning to rot your insides. You wanted to tell, wanted it so badly but you couldn’t. You knew there’d be consequences. Maybe you’d be called a liar. Maybe you were the one in the wrong and you’d be punished. You’d failed your family, let their name be weakened with faults.
You had become the perfect little factory of mistruths that you believed so easily. You believed dad would do something stupid. It wouldn’t be the first time. He’d broken his hand over a missed touchdown on the tv the year before, after a hard punch to the floor. He was never around anyway, how would he ever understand? His love of sports and beer, though maybe not true, seemed to place you and the rest of your family in the backseat of his life. His fatherly love came in the form of forgotten dinners that ended up being fantasies of warm meals served on stale bread and old lunchmeat; or even meats grilled into shoe leather after one too many discarded cans on the back deck beside the rusting propane tanks.
Maybe he’d fight him. Maybe he’d get arrested for instigating a physical altercation. Maybe he’d blame you as much as you already did. His daughter should have been smart enough to know better.
You never blamed dad for the way he was. You knew everyone had their own demons, his called from inside aluminum cans and from the bowling alleys he spent most nights at. His good-night kisses were the few interactions you remember from your father, not the typical teaching of bike riding or fishing, or even driving much later. His only gifts to you were superficial to say the least, your name and fear of textured foods. Your father was a stranger that lingered in your childhood memories, appearing seemingly at random, unlike the boogyman.
You believed that mom wouldn’t be able to take it, to know the truth. You knew your mother well. Full to the brim of low self-esteem—daring to spill—which led to extreme weight gain and day-long naps that countered with nights of insomnia. She’d crumble. Maybe she’d just die.
Mom was so busy with your little sister who battled her demons externally. Born twenty months after you with a disorder that didn’t quite yet have a real name, she couldn’t bond and never made eye contact. Mom knew there was something wrong with her second child the moment her dark, unfocusing, eyes found her’s. As she grew, anger and frustration took physical form in unidentified selfishness. It was the only way she knew how to thrive.
Your little sister required a map to know what to feel. In her muteness of early childhood, you needed to craft ways of being a leader rather than rehearse the role of the victim you wanted so badly to play. You didn’t get to stand center stage, rather off to the side, giving everyone else a chance present their monologues. You needed to comfort your sister when she struggled in school and your mother when she couldn’t handle her frustrating mystery daughter anymore.
This was your lot in life, to put yourself second. You were the eldest. You should have been paving the way for your only sibling with golden bricks, leaving little signs of direction along the way; but the only materials you had were inorganic self-assured faults, leaving the path you constructed full of potholes and divots large enough to ruin suspensions and crack rims. You knew you had to shield you sister and support your mother, there was no room for your errors too. That would be the back breaking final straw. You had only yourself to lean on.
One daughter who switched schools at the rate a rich man changed cars, and the other, a shining pupil in class. How would mom react to know that she had unintentionally ruined one child in the womb and ignored the seemingly successful other at the entirely wrong moment? You didn’t dare find out.
You believed that maybe your little sister was one of his victims too. You never dared to ask. How low you’d have fallen to know that your little sister may have suffered just like you and was just as afraid to tell. You just ignored that possible reality for as long as you could. Every time you thought about it, the ghost inside you shrieked and pounded on your walls, starting to crack the damp sheetrock.
Every year, the scout leader, be your mother or another women, would have to give the uncle Joe warning. You wished it was so simple to have called it just that. To you, it was the annual insemination of guilt that used vacant threats to break down the wall in your throat. It unfortunately did quite the opposite, adding a layer of crystalizing putrid puss during every educational sit-down, every you can always tell us beratement. You’d make up an excuse to either not speak during the assault of information, examples, and rules, or find an escape from the extremely stifling room.
In silence you rehearsed a plea of forgiveness, falling deeply into meekness. For many secret Christmas wishes you begged to the god you’d been told always listened, always cared, to take you away. Your faith didn’t stand as tall as the shed that stalked you from outside your bedroom window. It wavered at best.
On a family tip to Disney World, you stood beside your parents, both wrapped in tropical prints, and your sister, lost in an exclusive world of her own, watching the nightly fireworks. This was one of your few times away from the toxic dungeon you called home. Music played throughout the park in the voice of Jiminy Cricket. He explained so well that a wish could always come true above the melodies of magical childhood dreams. The brilliance of the exploding magnesium hundreds of feet above only insisting the truth of magic and wishes. You believed, you had to. You tried anything to make him go away; to make everything about him go away. On those fireworks you wished to live another life, a better one. You were ten.
You cultivated new fears easily as you grew, ailing from an invisible injury. The ticking clocks and ripped pages from the calendars made you shutter. Only nine years to go. Only six more years to go. Only three more years to go. Buckle up, you need to face what you’ve done, you tell yourself. The statute of limitations on child sex crimes in your home state was three years past the victim’s eighteenth birthday. You’d looked it up when you were sure no one was awake, a risk that you wince from to this day. The water was rising. You knew you had very limited time to learn courage.
In that time you failed yet again, but this time you were aware of your failure as it passed you by, a barreling semi, destined to crash. You blamed yourself for not only your cowardice to tell your parents, but you didn’t even tell your friends, your sister. You didn’t alert the authorities and in doing so you let another little girl fall into his trap. You let other little girls find their boogyman. You didn’t know them, never saw them, never heard their stories. But you knew they suffered because of you. You had no hard proof of their fates but in your solitude, you built these characters and suffered with them. A tormented mind makes friends with shadows and ghosts to show they’re not alone.
You’ve relived that day many times, difficult to pause once it began. You’d get sudden visions of his face, no matter where you were or what you were doing. His voice whispered to you in your bed. It still does sometimes. Those awful fucking hands. Sometimes when holding a pen or pair of scissors, the faint yet enticing thought of gouging your eyes out tickles your fancy. Maybe then you could stop seeing him.
You’d finally found that box in the closet to put him and everything else that had any connection to him in. That box was built of silence and hidden shame-filled tears. Secrets weighed you down so far that you think you might sink through dry land. It was big, like a cardboard refrigerator box beside one holding engagement ring. It was deep. Deep enough to be filled with the five years that you remained in his house. You couldn’t escape him. He owned your family’s home. A sorry excuse for a landlord.
At night he’d hide in his small run-down shack of a house behind the fence of your yard. The siding falling off in corners of the garage that he called home. Covered in shade and surrounded by mud, it was no surprise that a monster lived there.
His little dog would get loose and run to your door and no matter how cute she was, you knew who she belonged to. That turned her from the bubbly wire-haired terrier to the snapping dark hound from hell. Your shaking hand reminded you every time you reached out to pet her, even when he didn’t accompany her. She might be the reason behind your disdain of dogs.
The large rusted satellite dish in his yard beside his house was often filled with rubbish that he’d sometimes light on fire. Once and awhile, a loud explosion of an aerosol can thrown into the fire would give you just a hint of freedom. Maybe this time he would be close enough to catch flame and burn through the earth into hell. But that was never the outcome. You, a young girl, imagined a man dying a painful, fiery, death. How cruel you were becoming.
Another year, he decided to cut down all the swamp pines from your front yard. The pines were over thirty feet tall and littered the saturated, fire-ant covered yard. One by one they fell to their deaths after he’d taken a chainsaw to their bases. With no safety equipment down to ensure the trees didn’t fall on your home, mom kept you in the living room for the day, minimizing your chance of being crushed if one were to fall in the wrong direction. Secretly, you hoped she had miscalculated. You hoped that you were in the direct path of the falling pine. Then you’d finally be away from him.
When the last day of living under his roof came, you were filled with ground shaking excitement on top of crippling anxiety. You were leaving his realm and maybe he’d get angry. You could smell the freedom wafting from the slowly filling the bright yellow moving truck your uncle flew down south to drive. It was that truck that made you nauseated by the color yellow.
States away, hundreds of miles between, the nightmare was over. That’s what you thought. That’s what you had dreamt of. That was a lie. No amount of space between you and your predator could save you. Not from the stinging pain deep inside your chest of hate, or the boiling bile of shame that stained you inside and out. You thought you’d be able to move on, to forget. That was a lie too. Pick the scab.
You replay his face from the second time he approached you to this day. Him outside. You in your home watching him water the blazing red azaleas in the front yard. Him pointing to his disgusting bulge and smiling at you. You managed to ignore him this time.
You never felt comfortable being unclothed. Even after a hot shower, the need to throw on pants and a shirt with long sleeves was dire. You felt that if you were covered, maybe you could hide. Many times when you’d fight with mom you’d choke on your tongue, ready to spill the very heavy sack of beans. But you’d never do it. Even now, you can’t. You know how much it would hurt her to know she couldn’t protect you. Or how much she’d cry if she knew you didn’t trust her enough to tell her.
You began to build demons from your experiences that tortured you. You used to worry when the house phone would ring. He could be calling. But why would he? You were very good at coming up with reasons for him to have been the faceless voice on the other line. Unknown numbers were the worst. He’s calling for you again. You trembled when someone rang the doorbell when no one was expected. He’s here, you’d think. He’s traveled all the way here just to find you and make you stand for what you’ve done. Maybe he wanted to play again. You’d like to think this time you would tell him off, maybe even hurt him. You dreamed that during your next encounter, you’d become the predator, hungry for his blood, for his screams. You wanted him to quiver in fear from the very thought of you finding him. There has always been a part of you that knows you’ll be the one quivering in fear. That never stopped the thoughts of going back and burning down the property. It never stopped the idea of going back and waiting for him, hungry for your revenge.
For many years after the move, you kept everything about him to yourself. Sometimes mom or dad would tell a funny story about your “crazy landlord.” They’d joke and tell stories about how they too thought he’d blown himself up. They laugh! They had no idea. Of course they’d laugh. You often remind yourself that they didn’t bring him up to punish you. How self-centered you were to think any of this was about you.
******
When you entered the eight grade in a city public school system, you thought for sure you’d be eaten alive, a little southern girl in a major Yankee city. Accent hidden away long ago. Words that once rolled off your tongue buried in the sand of the southern beaches you missed. To your surprise it was there that you began to thrive. The hard friends you made there showed you how troublesome it was to grow up anywhere. You faced new tragedies from the histories of their pasts.
It was there that you learned that you were not special and that you should be happy with the difficulties you’d faced. No one beat you senseless. You didn’t watch your mother or father kill each other during a domestic argument that went sour. You were a silly, dramatic, self-centered child, but you still kept your secrets to yourself. The color of frozen blue water was now your favorite color.
The school days there flew by. You were kept busy and therefore able to escape your self-created torment for awhile. You slowly started to come out of your shell. You felt that maybe this could be the beginning of your healing. How wrong you were.
When the summer between middle school and high school came, a dark cloud entered your life and cored out all the light and warmth. You did not enjoy the summer as it quickly began to feel like a nuclear winter. At this point you lived on the same street as your grandparents. They had quickly become like a second set of parents, only they constantly belittled your biological ones, reminding you why mom had moved the family to the south the begin with.
Grandpa stepped up and became more of a father than your’s ever had in the many years before you really knew them. When the cold cloud moved in, it was their porch you hung out on to escape for what time you could. That was before grandpa lost his job and actually had to work every day.
When you were unable to visit you often stayed in your modestly homemade, loft bed. You still shared a room with you sister but in your darkness you became chained to the pillows and blankets. Like a patient charged with the consumption, no one bothered you. Mom worked nights and slept all day, a continuation of her natural state. Dad worked all day at the local grocery store, and your sister continued to hide in her own world that took on the form of a computer which she quickly became tethered to.
All the strength you’d built that school year seemed to be sucked out by the cloud. You couldn’t rise from your bed without extreme motivation. You’d mastered the art of going unnoticed and in doing so you began to wither away. Closed curtains allowed for you to be trapped in a summer of endless flashbacks and looping thoughts that forecasted an abrupt end. This was the only time you considered that maybe numbness was not the answer and instead a final solution could be substituted in the recipe that was the shit show of your life.
You survived that painful summer and made it to high school where things got no better nor worse. You existed on another plane in-between hell and earth, a purgatory of sorts until the untimely death of your grandfather three days after Christmas your junior year. It was his death that left you both fatherless and grandfather-less. He had been the one that taught you how to cook, garden, ride a bike. He was the one that showed up to every extracurricular that you’d enrolled in.
With your only male role model gone, life seemed like it would melt in the boiling light that were the expectations placed on you by everyone who didn’t really know you. No one pushed you to do well in school. Options for colleges were given. So were threats of rent charges in your mother’s house. You were to be financially isolated on top of an ignored major self-image issue of being unworthy of the better things in life. This included the love of a man or of a family. You’d been working for three years at this point, in the circus that was the store your father also did his time. You knew you’d surely expire if you stayed there. College was the only way out.
Your success in life hung by spider silk, a thread so small it almost didn’t matter. You didn’t have a dream job to shoot for nor did you have any kind of plan. Grandpa had been the only one that pushed you to do better, to be better. He didn’t know your story but he was the only one you felt safe with if you were to tell. That opportunity never came, he was stolen by cancer. You lacked any motivation to strive or money to get you there. He took away any worth that you were born with. Self-pity ate up your organs and hardened your outer shell even more, like plaque on teeth.
These issues were gifts wrapped in mildew and mold. The looping memories were far from the only gifts given by boogymen. Sure, nightmares are common. So are flashbacks, and you’ve had plenty of those. Your scars are the scars of guilt that sprouted in the form of an autoimmune disease that mom and dad think was caused by an exposure to high levels of iodine in the drinking water. Only you know the truth: that autoimmune diseases can form out of heavy unacknowledged stress levels. Your sister formed one too; the untold reality you still try to ignore.
Another one of his gifts came in the lasting fear of being cornered. You met a man in college who would never harm you. He was one of the good ones, someone you learned to trust very quickly. Yet one night in your room he closed your door and locked it behind him. You panicked. He had only wanted some privacy from your three roommates, but you, being a wounded animal began to gnaw at your leg caught in a trap. You looked for a way out, not forgetting that you always had the window beside your bed unlocked if not open, as an escape route. The panic stuck around anyway.
You’ve slowly discovered patterns in your behaviors that have links to him. One ensures that if in a relationship you are the one with control, power. He cannot be stronger than you nor can he outwit you. You weighed more than every one of your partners and they’d let you hold the reins in most decisions without question. How shallow and toxic.
When thinking of baby names with the man from college who would become your partner—your shelter in the storm—you made sure that his name was never one of them. Everything that reminded you of your time in that house spooked you and unsettled the tightly wound knots in your stomach that you’d perfected. The active avoidance of certain subjects would build a brick wall between you and your loved ones.
******
Eighteen years later, five years out of your mother’s house, you’ve learned to let scabs form and to not pick them. The floodgates of your story are slowly being released to people with no ties to your domestic life. You have begun to open the zipper, but you still walk a very thin line about what can be said.
The dream of leaving him, ending the nightmare never came to be. Instead, you’ve rested your head upon new pillows where selfless dreams began to spout. One where you could have saved the other little girls from the boogyman. Others where you could help those like yourself learn to scab, not scar.
He was once the net of thorns tangling and trapping you to your bed in your depressed slumber, forbidding you to rise. Now, you’ve set flame to his withered veins of legacy. The wildfire you once called fear, smolders in the basement of your mind. Its kindling, the shed you both hid behind. Steam hisses from the embers as drips of love fall between your cracked floorboards, no longer covered with rugs.
You’ve learned to sing. In your songs you’re naked, no more hiding behind heavy layers of cloth that only built a facade of protection. You’ve learned to tell stories. Ones that bring people to tears, and anger others to snap. Golden yellow of sunlight through honey is your favorite color. You are not clouded by the tales of woe and warnings from childhood, not that you really had one. Instead, you’re sewing your own lullabies and painting new fables. Your children will not be sung fearful banter, but rather they will sleep to melodic prose of strength and love. They will not know your story, they will be built of it.
Distinguished Voices Personal Essay Prize Finalist
Selected by Elissa Washuta
Neely Benoit will be graduating from the State University of New York at Cortland in May, 2019 with a Bachelor’s degree in Professional writing. In the fall, she will begin to pursue a PhD in Anthropology, focusing on Feminist Anthropology while teaching Rhetoric at the University of Iowa.