Author Talk with Jenny Q – Author of Held Together

I went through a life-changing experience. It was a difficult health crisis in which I survived a coma and became an amputee.

But this did not just happen to me. My daughter and now-wife, my parents and siblings and my tight-knit community all went through the trauma of it as well.

As my wife is a musician, the way she processed her trauma and grief was to write songs. She sang to me as I lay in a hospital bed, and she recorded those songs and worked on putting them together into an album.

At the same time, I worked on my grief through my own medium: words. I started writing and gathering stories from my community members to weave around my pages and worked on putting them together into a book.

Fortuitously, these two projects came to a close at the same time. Not prone to ignore such signs, I petitioned Myshkin, my prolific wife to work with me on creating a performance piece that merged my book, Held Together, and her record, Trust and the High Wire.

Our first performance included sixteen readers and an eight-piece band that was performed at a gorgeous venue in our hometown of Joshua Tree. Then we took the show on the road after I rewrote the script to accommodate the two-piece show.

We were received with appreciation for being so open and sharing such a vulnerable time of our lives. It achieved what I wanted, which was to reach out to those who have been through a traumatic experience or lost a loved one and to let them know that they are not alone.