By Nicholas Velillari | Observer Contributor
MWCC English Professor, Michelle Valois, expressed her struggle with throat cancer in a poetry book she wrote, titled, My Found Vocabulary, which released January 1, 2015.
Valois had throat cancer starting back in 2011. Because of the aggressiveness of it, she was unable to speak for some time, which made it hard to communicate with friends and relatives. When she got her voice back, My Found Vocabulary was a title she coined for a poetry book.
“I didn’t do much writing during treatment,” states Valois. “Poetry was unusual for me to write in general.” However the majority of her poems in her book focus on voice loss.
Valois also got inspiration through small facts about historical figure’s lives. In her poem, Lives of the Dead, she speaks of Confucius being a corn inspector and how Thomas Edison, inventor of the light bulb, was afraid of the dark.
“I collected all of these little unknown facts about historical people,” says Valois, “I tried to bring them together in my poems.”
Valois also stated how everyone has their own form of “darkness” that humans are all afraid of. According to her, it’s up to us as people to overcome that darkness. The main message she wants to get across for readers is, “It’s all about finding your voice.”
Even with her struggle, writing and organizing her poetry wasn’t an easy task to overcome. It took Valois around 2 years to write the book in its entirety. She says she “had to go through a lot of revisions” when going through Aldridge Press Publishing.
My Found Vocabulary has around 20 poems that are thematically and symbolically arranged to tell her story. She’s currently not focusing on poetry; she is however working on another book based on her mother’s life during The Great Depression.
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