She will replace Bradley Penner this summer while he is on medical leave.
I’m a former street kid and a lifetime full-contact nerd of words. I started as a runaway and now I chase words all over the place. I’m either studying them, writing them, editing them, teaching them, publishing them, or organizing art festivals for them. This summer, I’m going to use all the word-life experience I have to give a dear friend, Bradley Penner, a little time to heal, so he can return to his word journey as the irreplaceable Editor-in-Chief at Street Spirit. I will do my best to keep up with his pace.
For everyone who is part of the Street Spirit community, I am honored to read your words and share your voices during the short time I am here. I actually owe you big. Publications like this, and the communities that make them and get them out there, are my foundation. Every master’s degree, fellowship, editorship, publication credit, curriculum creation, story, poem, essay, performance, reading curation, and literary festival celebration I have done, as well as everything I will do in my current role as the Editor-in-Chief, all began when I shared my story with folks like you.
I wrote the story 30 years ago, just after my big escape to Portland, Oregon. I was 15. I was homeless. I was in hiding. During the 6pm-9pm dinner hour at the Salvation Army Greenhouse drop-in center, I made an overloaded peanut butter and jelly sandwich, took out the notebook I stole from Fred Myer, and wrote about my Greyhound bus ride to Oregon and the existential bullshit a fifteen-year-old goes through when running away from a ruined life. I wrote about how running away can erase your ability to see the life right in front of you. I kept working on the story until they turned off the lights at Streetlight Shelter, penning the last few words in the dark. I made a story, mostly to put my life somewhere where it could stay quiet and hidden. But writing my story allowed me to see myself more clearly, even if I was afraid to share it with anyone else.
I knew there would be punishment for sharing my life, especially how it was at that time. Even now, I still don’t know how to share things about me that squares and normies could use to disqualify me from being as human as them. Back then, I needed someone to see me and stick around long enough to hear my story. At my drop-in center, Outside In, there was a newspaper dedicated to telling silenced stories, written by and for street kids called Street Times. I figured they were enough like me to get past the sight of me. And they made something out of stories like mine, like they were worth something, so I handed mine over and hoped that they would listen.
My story got published. In print. 500 times, too. Me and eight other street kids shared our stories in that issue. Our lives were on the record. By choice. With our real names and our lives as we saw them. We were undeniable. Each of our stories was a protest to everyone who looked away or tried to push us out of their sight. In those stories, we pushed back and demanded to be seen. And since we wrote them ourselves, the people who read them were going to see us right this time.
If all of us tell our stories, they’ll see, and we’ll see, that there’s more of us than there are of them.
Laura A. Zink is a writer from Oakland, California. She is a former Steinbeck Fellow, an English teacher, and an organizer of the Oakland literary festival, Beast Crawl. For the summer, she will be the Editor-in-Chief at Street Spirit.