Em Sixteen
November 5, 1979

At an early age, I loved to write, but failed countless times trying to make up stories I’d never been close to living myself—I was a vampire, sucking blood in a poem driven by the color red, or I was a girl going to Sweet Valley High in a story I eventually threw out for lack of success. It never quite worked right until I revealed myself in those stories, which was hard, and nearly impossible in high school. I was the shyest girl in my circle in the most critical years of adolescence. “Why don’t you talk?” I wasn’t going to tell them that my father had recently died, or that my mother was desperate for a steady job and struggling (it was hard enough to hide the free lunch ticket every day in the lunch line at school). Every time I spoke the truth, the truth was responded to with an air of discomfort, as if I had ruined the glossy atmosphere of high school English class, a teenage sleepover, or wherever I might have been holding my breath and painfully blurting out what was real.

I started speaking autobiographically because there was no other way to speak completely honestly. I realized, later in life, that the truth was all too relative—too many people were familiar with what I was stating, but did not know how to talk about it (so I would be the one to talk). If I did not take a risk and speak out loud about death, class differences, and the tens of other daily realities that seemed to make everyone uncomfortable, then who could I count on to do so?

This piece is a needlepoint recreation of a letter written to me by my late father when I was an infant. It serves as a memorial and as a retelling of personal story—my father’s hopes and dreams of who I would become as an adult; my father, writing a letter to his infant daughter one chilly night in January, 26 years ago. My father loved to write, yet this is mysteriously the only letter I own from him. In making this piece, it was important for me to mimic my father’s handwriting precisely in my stitching, therefore I went to great lengths to digitally reproduce and transfer the characters onto the fabric. I focused on echoing the iconographic imagery prevalent in the traditions of needlepoint and other “women’s crafts”. I explore transformations that letters, lives, and stories such as my father’s undergo once retold by an author or artist.

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About Em Sixteen

Em Sixteen is dedicated to addressing classism, racism, and gender issues through her writing and art. She works in a variety of mediums; including digital art, drawing, video, writing, sewing and printmaking. She has been a youth educator, counselor, and web designer for several NYC nonprofits and has shown her art widely. Her current lust is finding more time to make art. She is based in LIC, NYC.