The Whole Story

The journalist/author/entrepreneur Natasha Khullar Relph writes that “artists shouldn’t have resumes. Artists should have stories.” I happen to agree. Here’s mine:

PART ONE

While proudly Vermont-born (as was my mother, and her father), I did not live in the US until I was 18 and headed to college. 

My father started working for the World Food Program – a humanitarian agency with the United Nations – right out of the Peace Corps in Mali in 1978 and my mother agreed to hitch her wagon to this international and itinerant lifestyle. As such, my two brothers and I grew up moving from one country to the next, primarily in the global south. 

We did spend every summer in Vermont, among grandparents and other extended family. The Green Mountain State became a constant variable in an otherwise changing geographical equation. For me that equation included: 

Mauritania → Philippines → Chad → Italy → Pakistan 

We lived in Islamabad, Pakistan for my formative years (ages 12-18), a time when my identification as a feminist solidified, as did my particular interest in the issue of violence against women and girls. I remember with searing clarity the day a woman came to our school to give a talk about the clinic she ran, one that cared for women who had survived an attempted “honor killing.” She showed us photos of women whose faces had been burned by acid thrown at them by family members. 

In the fall of 2002, I began my four years at Middlebury College, in Vermont (finally, “home”!): the same school my mother and grandfather attended. While there, I pursued a double major in Religion and French. With the former, a focus on Islam, and an initial general interest in feminist Muslim scholarship resulted in a thesis entitled “Sex and Islam: The Forgotten Discourse,” in which I make the case for a sex-positive voice in the texts and tradition. 

My freshman year overlapped with the start of the war in Iraq in 2003 and I quickly began participating in any oppositional civic action that I could, including a nine-hour bus ride down to DC in the dead of winter to attend a march on the capital. In general, this first time living in my “home” country was an eye-opener into just how much I felt misaligned with my government: a feeling that has little changed in the 20 years since. 

A total “Daddy’s girl,” I always assumed I’d end up working in the development/do-gooder sector, with particular attention paid to gender and violence prevention. And that I did. My first year out of college I joined my parents and younger brother for their final year in Colombo, Sri Lanka where I both got some local NGO experience (first at a women’s rights and research center, then at a small public health consultancy) as well as a front row seat to my parents’ struggles reining in a very social high school senior. 

After leaving Sri Lanka (and spending part of my summer driving a Fiat from London to Ulaan Batar, Mongolia), I moved to Washington DC, ready to build an adult life in the US for the first time, and to vote for the “first Black president.” It felt like a historical time to live in my nation’s capital. I landed a gig as a Research Associate for a Congressional Commission mandated to study sexual violence in US prisons and jails. We were the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission. My older brother, also living in DC at the time, suggested I simply tell people when asked (and it was DC, so everyone asked) that I work for the “Department of Justice.” I disagreed. Turns out, people (men) have some strong and strange feelings about prison rape (especially cab drivers). 

In my free time, I started a blog about violence against women, mainly using the research and stats I came across to make the argument that it is in fact a global epidemic, and one so few people seem to be aware of, or worse, care much about. (Once, in casual conversation, when I referred to a “global war on women” a friend scoffed and told me not to exaggerate.”There are real wars going on Joya.”)

After two years in DC, I trotted off to graduate school at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy hoping to gain the credentials needed to find work abroad (DC for this “third culture kid” had lost its luster). At the Fletcher School, I studied the intersection of gender and human security. In between my two years there, I spent a summer in Cameroon with the Advocacy Project who partnered me with a local women’s business network and tasked me with training their members on the uses of advocacy and storytelling to advance their cause. While there I also acquired my first tattoo (a small ‘female’ symbol on my right ankle). 

Back at Fletcher, my graduate research thesis analyzed the evolution of the use of sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo over a 10-year period, based on UN reporting. For a course on gender violence, law, and social justice at Harvard Law, I looked at the overlap between increasingly violent pornography and the sexualized torture evidenced at Abu Ghraib. 

Once I graduated from Fletcher over the summer of 2011, it took me longer than my ego liked to find a job in “gender and development” abroad. Eventually, I was offered the role of a Gender Specialist on a USAID-funded agriculture project in rural Ghana. Off I went where I lived for eight months in a small town called Wa in Ghana’s north-west province. Luckily my colleagues were fab – even if they did make fun of me on my little blue bicycle – and they seemed genuinely interested in learning all about “gender” and what it had to do with tractors (a lot). 

Keen to get back into violence prevention work, I almost landed a highly competitive USAID fellowship opportunity to do GBV work in Tanzania – but didn’t.* Crestfallen, I returned to DC to pound the job pavement, only this time I was determined to be more selective and perhaps not end up somewhere vaguely isolating and challenging for a woman living on her own. I had not been in a real, adult relationship in years, or as I wrote in my journal at the time: “I don’t date; I just crash into people when neither of us are looking.” 

While on the job hunt and subletting a room from a friend, I started to write articles for a new online publication called PolicyMic (now just Mic) and began volunteering at the DC Rape Crisis Center. These non-9-5 opportunities helped me realize two important things: 1) I did not wish to be a first responder in a long-term capacity, and 2) I wanted to write about the issues I had so long cared about, as opposed to engaging from a programmatic perspective. 

Shortly thereafter I was awarded another fellowship opportunity, this time through Global Health Corps (GHC), as a Communications and Advocacy Fellow with Together for Girls (TfG). TfG is a global partnership that conducts research into violence against children and adolescents. That year, TfG launched Safe, the first-ever digital magazine focused on sexual violence, with an emphasis on survivor stories. It was an honor and an incredible learning experience to work on (and write for) that magazine. I became all the more committed to the act of storytelling in the face of violence and injustice. 

A few months before the start of that fellowship year, I met the man I would eventually marry. (*Had I gotten that coveted job in Tanzania, I most certainly would not have.) 

And at the end of my fellowship year with TfG, in July of 2014, my mother died. 

PART TWO

A few days after my mother’s funeral, I interviewed for a Senior Communications Officer role with an organization I had long admired. Much to my surprise, given my emotional state at the time, I ended up being offered the job a few weeks later. I moved in with my then-boyfriend in DC and spent the next two years very happily working for Tostan: an NGO headquartered in Senegal that specializes in a nonformal educational program for rural communities across West Africa. I had the pleasure of visiting Senegal several times, and 18 months into the job, I moved from Senior Comms Officer to Comms Director. I got married and my husband and I started talking about a possible move to Dakar – Tostan’s HQ. And then I watched as my country elected Donald Trump to the presidency. 

It was at this point that I began in earnest to question the ethics behind why I – a cis, white American woman –  was working for a human rights organization in West Africa when my own country was quite clearly a “dumpster fire,” as they say on the internet. In what felt like a sign at the time, I saw an intriguing job posting with the National Organization for Women (NOW) – the oldest, largest grassroots feminist organization in the country. I began to imagine a life that revolved around pushing back against the administration. I applied and interviewed for the position, as Program Manager of NOW’s outgoing President’s newly created National Action Program, intended to engage in just the “pushing back” I was looking to do. 

I landed the job and at first, felt this small team of young, smart women I was now leading and the work we were tasked with doing, together made the dream job. That dream didn’t last. Six months in, NOW held their annual conference in Florida and I saw firsthand the alarming behavior of the baby boomer white women who made up a significant portion of the membership. My team and I also watched, in shock, as they elected a new President who was very obviously deeply problematic, to put it politely. A group of us staged a protest at our own conference. We were ignored. I remember calling my husband in tears from a hotel room; I knew I couldn’t stay at NOW under the new leadership. And I did not. A few months later, I resigned. (This new President was eventually ousted for racist behavior, which the Daily Beast extensively reported on here.)

PART THREE

This was a definitive turning point for me. I could no longer muster the interest or desire to jump into yet another do-gooder job. It was also becoming painfully clear that I had long neglected getting my own house in order. I felt a strong, internal pull towards better knowing my mother’s life and story. After all, despite a career devoted to the lived experiences of women and girls, I knew precious little about the most important woman in mine. I began researching and writing a memoir about her which eventually became: Erasure. 

I banged out a draft in about 10 months. This showed me two things: while I could in fact sit down and put words on a page, I needed to improve my creative or narrative nonfiction skills. I had visited Cape Town in June of 2012 and promised myself that if I ever found a way to move there, I would. A quick Google search one afternoon – amidst a deepening manuscript frustration – revealed a master's program in creative writing at the University of Cape Town where students take courses for a year, and then write a book under the guidance of a supervisor during the second. Perfect, I thought to myself. Luckily, my husband had been seriously considering an MBA for a while. UCT had one of those, too. We applied to our respective programs and were admitted. We had six months to pack up our house in DC, find renters, and buy plane tickets. In January of 2020, we moved to the Mother City, two suitcases each, our dog Hildi not too far behind. 

Five years, and counting – here we still are. I graduated from the creative writing program with distinction and a much-improved memoir in hand. My long-standing love for craft beer morphed into a homebrewing habit during Covid lockdown, which then parlayed into more and more opportunities to write about beer in a country where the industry continues to grow. Craft beer had provided a way to build community in our new city, and then it birthed a new interest in me: how can beer give back? 

I am now one of two editors of On Tap, South Africa’s first and only beer magazine, which means I get to cover the stories about those who make this industry great. I recently acquired a Certificate in Modern Journalism from a joint NYU/Rolling Stone online program to finetune my ability to tell these kinds of stories – and more. 

Looking ahead, I am eager to bring my many years of experience in gender, development, and advocacy, together with my communications, writing, and editorial skills, to tell impactful and conversation-generating stories. Please feel free to get in touch!