Interview with Rebecca D. Martin - WOW! Q2 Creative Nonfiction Contest First Place Winner

Rebecca D. Martin is a Virginia-based writer, educator, and museum docent whose work has appeared in various publications. Her essay “Mute,” on autistic muteness and hyperlexia, and her poem “Your Mind the Map,” on autistic stimming, have received particular recognition. Her passion is teaching, her inspiration is art, her safe place is nature, and her sustenance is poetry. Find her at rebeccadmartin.substack.com talking about all these things.

--interview by Marcia Peterson

WOW: Congratulations on winning first place in our Q2 2026 Creative Nonfiction essay competition! What prompted you to enter the contest?

Rebecca: I have been aware of Women on Writing for a while, appreciating the offerings and contest opportunities. This is my second time submitting and my first time placing. "How to Disappear" is such a strange little essay, and I hoped the way it refragments and aligns a particular kind of female experience would connect with other women readers and writers.

WOW: “How to Disappear” is a beautiful essay and the format (including great subsection titles that tell their own story) worked well here. What inspired you to write this particular piece?

Rebecca: Thank you! This piece developed over time in a segmented fashion--first, three years ago, the missing cat narrative that bookends it, then other elements, like the church memory and the experience of teen sexual awakening. Many of these flash fragments were written in memoir workshops. They couldn't quite stand alone, but I knew there was something there. One of my writing instructors, the marvelous Joanna Penn Cooper, challenged me to put them in conversation with each other, to see what would happen. That's when the essay began to become itself. I'm interested lately in pushing boundaries with prose: where can I replace explanation with juxtaposition? How can I make it more interesting without losing the thread?

WOW: Do you have any thoughts or advice for writing about difficult things?

Rebecca: I am not sure if I'm the right person to advise on that! Writing about painful things is what moves me through them toward healing. There isn't much I won't write about (though making that writing public is another matter). I know writing about pain or hardship can be too painful an experience for many, not worth what it stirs up. You have to know yourself. There is also the aspect of distance. The events of the teenage summer cabin fragment happened when I was 15; at 47, I was only just ready to say some of these things out loud. I think it's important to be gentle and patient with ourselves as storytelling humans. I also find it important to wait a while after writing something very personal before publishing. I composed that fragment two years ago, and now was the time to take a deep breath and let others read it.

WOW: In your bio, you say that your sustenance is poetry (love that). Could you share a few of your favorite poets or poems?

Rebecca: Oh, absolutely! The difficulty will be limiting it to a few. The sounds and rolling rhythms and environmental concern of "Inversnaid" by Gerard Manley Hopkins (so many of his poems, actually) galvanize me. There's Joy Harjo's "Perhaps the World Ends Here," which feels like the truth of everything, and Prageeta Sharma's "I Am Learning to Find the Horizons of Peace," which is a stop-me-in-my-tracks reading experience. I revisit Sylvia Plath's "Black Rook in Rainy Weather" every year on my birthday. A recent discovery is Linda Hogan's "Home in the Woods." I've been rereading it a lot lately. The way it ends: "Can you keep me / here? Can you unharm me?" There are so many poets right now, crafting incredible lyric and phrase around images we need in order to be fully human. I love the idea that I'll be discovering new poems till the end of my days.

WOW: Great recommendations, I will check those out. Thanks so much for chatting with us today, Rebecca. Before you go, can you share a favorite writing tip or piece of advice?

Rebecca: I'll go back to the advice I received that helped me create this essay: if you're uncertain or stuck, try putting pieces in conversation with each other. See if they want to connect and create something bigger than themselves. After all, all of your writing comes from you, and it's likely there are undercurrents and through lines that will reveal themselves. That's my theory, at least. Other advice would be that gentleness and patience--have it for yourself, as a writer and a person, always.

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