Inkspots Blog

The Box on the Form

Somewhere in the middle of explaining why she couldn’t get that letter, she told me she was sleeping outside. She didn’t stop to let it land. She said it the way you’d mention a bus route, as context for why the mail was a problem, and then she went right back to asking about the verification. There is no box on the form for what she told me. That’s the part I keep turning over. People don’t lead with the real problem. They lead with the version of it that the room can receive.

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Inkspots Blog

5 Powerful Things I Learned About Writing a Person While Processing Someone Else’s Paperwork

I never see the people I talk to. Four years at DFR and every relationship I’ve had with a client has come through a phone line — no face, no hands, no room they’re sitting in. Just a voice, and whatever a voice decides to give me.
I had a call recently with a woman raising her four grandchildren. She’d already sent in the legal guardianship paperwork — the document that said, officially, permanently, these are mine to care for. But guardianship wasn’t enough to authorize SNAP and TANF. I needed birth certificates proving biological relationship, and she only had them for two of the four kids. And then, without my asking, her voice cracked, and she told me why: her son — their father — had died by suicide. That’s how she’d ended up with four grandchildren and a filing problem she was now expected to solve while grieving him.

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Fiction LGBTQ+

Updates and more…

I know the silence on this page for the last several years has been deafening. You have my sincere apologies, dear readers. Creativity is a fickle muse at best, and she went dormant on me for too long. Few of you may know of the recent events in my life – a long-term relationship ended, and I moved from one state to another to live closer to my cherished “framily.” With the change came a…

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Fiction LGBTQ+

She Will Become (a novel in progress)

She Will Become is a novel in progress about a young woman, Tristen Callayas, who flees our world for another after her homophobic best friend, Ani, rejects her. Broken-hearted and ready to end her own life to end her misery, she finds a portal to another world where she meets a motley crew of royalty, nobles, gentry, and servant alike. This is the first chapter of Tristen’s story. Chapter OneOnly the Beginning I never expected…

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