We recently connected with Victoria Mikael and have shared our conversation below.

Victoria, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?

I’m currently hosting weekly writing workshops at Mary’s Place, a women’s shelter in downtown Seattle. Since the workshops are primarily generative memoir-focused, many of the women share and process deeply personal stories and trauma they’ve been carrying for years. It’s an honor to witness and hold space with such vulnerability and honesty, and especially so when I can see that they’re sitting taller and feeling more empowered from sharing their story.

In addition to providing prompts and editorial guidance, I’m curating and building a feminist library for them. I love how excited the guests are when I bring in a stack of new donations or manage to fulfill a more specific request. One woman cried when I was able to track down a title she thought was out of print. It feels so gratifying seeing the impact made from simply sharing books and connecting through each other’s stories.

I also have a new project on the horizon, a healing space for widows, in-person and perhaps virtual as well. I lost my husband unexpectedly shortly after our daughter was born. The grief felt endless and at times I thought I wouldn’t make it, but it was through community and finding inspiration in other widowed mothers that I survived. My friend and guiding light these days, Hedwight Amoda (the woman in the photo with me), is the Programs Director for Mary’s Place and is also a widowed mom. Our conversations and desire for connection with other women like us prompted me to license my writing group, Pearl Moon Writers Collective, as a literary non-profit (currently in progress). My goal is to create a healing retreat space for these gatherings as well as recovery meetings, feminist writing workshops, women’s empowerment classes, poetry open mics, and art shows.

Victoria, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My education and professional background is in family therapy, and prior to that, film. But in this chapter of my life, my focus is that of mother/writer/editor and founder of Pearl Moon Writers Collective, a trauma-informed intersectional femme-identifying group for writers and creatives.

I’ve always loved to write, and kept a diary from middle school through my thirties as it was often the one healthy solace and comfort I had. And it was after experiencing multiple hardships within a short period of time that it became a necessary catharsis. During the pandemic I started taking memoir and poetry writing classes through Hugo House and attending Zoom open-mics. I felt an almost instant kinship with many of the writers and quickly discovered how empowering it felt to share what I’d written about my grief and trauma.

My only complaint was that the open-mics were almost always exclusively male-dominated and I struggled to find women-only writing spaces via Zoom that had a specific trauma-informed approach. Feeling frustrated and craving a safe writing community, I founded Pearl Moon. We’ve since launched an online literary Substack journal, Pearl Moon Quarterly. I’m excited that our upcoming issue will feature a couple of submissions from our writers at Mary’s Place.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

My goal is to create and nurture connections among women through writing, poetry, storytelling, and community outreach. For me, the most pivotal and healing moments of clarity have come through writing and reflecting with female mentors and friends. I want to help facilitate and support those transformational bonds and realizations as often as possible. My mission is to mobilize our creative skills as a collective to engage in more outreach in our carceral systems and women’s residential care.

I am also working on a memoir about generational trauma and my 90’s NW evolution from punk outcast to motherhood to widowhood, recovery, and resurrection.

Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?

Yes! bell hooks’ teachings on community and love as a form of activism had a significant impact on me. I have a quote by hooks’ on my desk that reads, “One of the most vital ways we sustain ourselves is by building communities of resistance, places where we know we are not alone.” This serves as a daily reminder for myself and for our purpose as a collective that ultimately it is through community that we heal and make progress.

Impactful Book List in no particular order: The Red Tent by Anita Diamant, The Art of Gathering: Why We Meet and Why it Matters by Priya Parker, The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr, The Moon is Always Female by Marge Piercy, Jowita Bydlowska’s Drunk Mom (one of the bravest memoirs I’ve ever read), T. Kira Madden’s Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, Crazy Brave by Joy Harjo, and all poems by Kathy Acker, Lynda Hull, Jan Beatty, Audre Lorde, Diane di Prima, Rita Dove, Naomi Shihab Nye, Sonia Sanchez, Ntozake Shange, and Warsan Shire. And there’s a really wonderful Red River Metis-Icelandic poet who I follow, Jonina Kirton. Her gorgeous lyrical memoir, Standing in a River of Time, is the last book I read that really moved and inspired me, as does her wisdom and later-stage writer/poet trajectory.

I must also mention that I was lucky in that I spent my 43rd birthday walking through Niki de Saint Phalle’s Tarot Garden, and was brought to tears by what she created from her pain and trauma. It was through that visit, and reading her MOMA exhibition catalog, Structures for Life, that made me realize and appreciate just how extraordinary the alchemy of one’s wounds plus artistic vision (and fierce dedication) can be. I learned that she believed she was saved by art when she was in an asylum and her gratitude for that was expressed in forming these healing and “charged spaces of imagination,” where she envisioned, “you could have a new kind of life, to just be free.” I mean, how could you not be inspired by that?? I also love how Niki de Saint Phalle often centered women’s rights, climate change and HIV/AIDS awareness in her work and installations. My daughter was only four at the time of our visit but still has vivid memories of that day.

Contact Info:

• Website: pearlmoonwriterscollective.com
• Instagram: @pearlmoonwriterscollective
• Substack: pearlmoonwriterscollective.substack.com