Rekindling the Flame: How Phosphor Found New Inspiration at Wordcrafters
Phosphor Alethes has faced their fair share of challenges, both artistically and personally.
A Wordcrafters member since 2023, Phosphor began writing fiction in 2006 and continued to write it exclusively for the next fourteen years until she found herself disconnected from the genre she once loved so dearly. They were burned out, from trauma and difficult job experiences, from continuously masking and trying to get through life as an autistic person in a society not set up for a neurodivergent person’s needs and experiences, and from major surgery.
After several years of healing, Phosphor was able to restart their writing journey, and found their writing transformed into something new–creative nonfiction.
“Their current project is “a hybrid memoir in essays, which incorporates the mostly fictional artifacts of my previous writings, so as to paint myself by composite, to discover and see myself by rendering my past, my present, my many, long-hidden and marginalized identities into a defiantly vulnerable, coherent, and newly embodied whole,” Phosphor says.”
Their first foray back into the world and reconnecting with their writerly identity came from attending a Wordcrafters event in early 2023.
“Being with writers again was magical. And, outside of my daughter and my dog, my whole life in Eugene and the existence of my book can be traced to that night,” Phosphor says of that fateful Wordcrafters event.
Today, Phosphor is a proud member of Wordcrafters, where she has found new friends, a community, and a writing project that is helping her heal. Phosphore loves the community they’ve found amongst other writers, some of whom have stories and identities similar to their own. And they deeply appreciate finding their way back to writing again, after feeling disconnected from their craft.