The Awakening, by Katie Vogel

Prose, chapbook, 36 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

The Awakening follows an unnamed narrator as she explores questions about what kind of space she needs to feel satisfied and how to make it. Over the course of the essay, this ‘room’ reveals itself to be deeply metaphorical and entirely literal: the room desired is one that might be arrived at by creative process, but it is not one that is itself immaterial.

At once meditative and urgent, this essay transforms into a room of its own, offering up space on the page for the reader to contemplate the modes through which art and literature might mediate relationships between friend and friend, parent and child, author and reader, student and teacher, and institutions and those who enter them by force or free will. It is a love letter to the sacred act of learning, making, and sharing and an affirmation to all those who participate that the pursuit of beauty need not be exclusive of the experience of suffering and an affirmation to all those who participate in these acts that the experience of suffering and the pursuit of beauty are necessarily entwined.

Katie Vogel is a writer, actor, and multimedia artist who grew up in North Carolina and lives in Brooklyn, NY. She is a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree candidate at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute, and her recent work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Moot Point Magazine, BlazeVOX, and The Reservoir. She has presented and performed her own and other’s works at the Kindling Arts Fest, The Shirley Project Space’s Salon Night, and Gallery House’s 2023 spring show.