Prose faculty member Kristen Millares Young on how silence will not serve us.
I’ve been thinking about silence of late. How best to use our voices? I strategize best in community. Maybe you do, too. I’ll moderate a panel called To Speak with Silence: Writing the Unsayable alongside prose writers Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum, Sonora Jha, Cameron Dezen Hammon, and Lilly Dancyger.
In Your Silence Will Not Protect You, Audre Lorde wrote, “The fear of our desires keeps them suspect and indiscriminately powerful, for to suppress any truth is to give it strength beyond endurance.”
That essay is foundational to my memoir Desire Lines, to come out on October 6, 2026 from Red Hen Press, which also published my novel Subduction.
In Desire Lines, I seek possibilities for women’s liberation despite the erosion of our human rights. Taking its title from footpaths that emerge, eroded yet unforeseen, next to the routes that were planned for us, Desire Lines excavates motherhood, the body, and the sacred.
In the eight years I spent researching my memoir, I pursued the trail of family silence down in diaspora, tracing my matrilineage from Spain to Cuba as I track down a pagan mother goddess cult. Along the way, I reclaimed the power that had been siphoned from my body and my story.
Lorde wrote, “My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences.”
Based on my own pursuit of truth and my refusal of silence, which I have come to understand as the coda of compliance, I have a crafted a series of questions for you to consider:
What is the hardest thing that has gone unsaid in your life?
When did that truth’s origin story begin?
Who peopled your world at that time?
What did they hide from each other?
What was known?
Who have you been protecting with your silence?
In Desire Lines, I wrote that my family has “forestalled conversations for decades, fearful of realities we have already lived. On the far side of silence, I suspect, is joy.” Inspired by Lorde, I have forged communion with other writers by sharing my story. I hope the same can be true for you.
To join our discussion of the craft of silence, please find me in Room 403B of the Los Angeles Convention Center on Saturday, March 29th, at 9 a.m. Or we can continue the conversation at the Red Hen Press Booth 345, where I’ll be signing copies of Subduction on Friday, March 28th, 2025, from 2-3 p.m. at the AWP Bookfair.
Connect with Kristen online at www.kristenmyoung.com and on Instagram @kristenmillares.
Photo credit: by Kristen Millares Young
