About Rebecca’s Work: My prose and poetry reflect, among many things, fractured relationships. Tangled by Blood focuses on the relationship between daughter and mother and how this fracturing relationship influences every subsequent relationship to follow, carrying scars and wounds throughout one’s life. I weave disability, domestic violence, and a fight for survival throughout my narratives with hope that I will start conversations, create awareness, compassion, and tolerance. I hope to inform, in a novel way, what it means to navigate this world as a woman, a Jew, a single mom, dwelling in broken body and spirit. I hope to connect my readers to a new experience, take them on a journey, busting past judgment and borders and boundaries. Mostly, I hope to help them feel less alone in their own experiences.
I realize much of my art is a difficult read, but here I’ve written it. Here, I’ve published some of these pieces. Here it is no longer about me, but my hard work at discovering me on the page and finding a place for this in the world, and in doing so, there will be much-needed conversations, a reminder that abuse lingers with the victim. A reminder how we carry stories across the passage of time, even when healed according to world-therapy standards.
I’ve infused my life’s work as a fitness expert, certified empowerment coach, writer, and poet into courses that I teach high school girls in the Juvenile system on a quarterly schedule through the Canyon County Court System. This work began as my passion project in 2006, offering this demographic support, choices, and mostly, hope. Many of these girls have suffered similar life experiences to my own and in sharing my story, my skillsets, my heart, I’ve realized that it sometimes takes one person who has overcome experiences to reach back and grab the hand of the next. I hope I can be that one person for these girls. Since the participants are court-ordered to attend my program, I don’t advertise. Instead, they are referred by their Probation Officers to attend my workshops. |