| Biography. |
[May. 4th, 2009|02:44 pm] |
"Tragedy" is defined by the person who experiences and situations that are considered "tragic" vary from person to person. Aubrey Finch considers the year she turned years old to be the most tragic of her life, but she also credits it with making her the woman she is today. It began a few weeks before her sweet sixteen. She came home from a meeting of the National Honor Society at school to find her parents sitting in silence in living room along with a man she didn't know. Like she was raised, she politely walked in and introduced herself. A few minutes later, she was told that this man was her dad's lover, and that her parents were getting a divorce. Suddenly Aubrey found herself presented with the fact that her fairly 'normal' midwestern family wasn't normal at all, and that her entire life, as far as she could see it, had been a lie. The new home life caused Aubrey to withdraw from her parents and from everyone around her. Her grades began to decline and her bubbly personality dissolved. The only way she communicated with anyone (unless it was absolutely necessary) was through her poetry, most of which she never shared with anyone. To her, it was the only true thing she still had in her life and she didn't want to lose that too. As the weeks went by and the gap between her and her mother widened, Aubrey decided that she was going to move in with her aunt. To her knowledge, she hadn't ever lied to the girl, and living in that house would be better than living in her broken home.
Living with Aunt Blair proved to be a step in the right direction for Aubrey. Though she still wasn't as social as she once had been, she began to open up and once she was sixteen and able to borrow the car and go out at night, she took every chance she got. Her favorite spot was one of the local coffee houses, The Loft, a place where there were a lot of open mic nights and performances from up and coming local bands. Each time she went on an open mic night, Aubrey had her notebook with her filled with scribbles in poems that maybe she would decide one day to share with the world. There was something therapeutic about just coming to listen to the musicians play. It was on one of these nights that she met a musician that would change her life. His name was Jason and he was in a band called That Noise From the Garage, but that night he was playing on his acoustic guitar and sharing a new song he'd just written. After his set he joined the girl in the booth she'd taken residence in for the night and began talking to her. He convinced her to share a poem, and from that poem a relationship was born.
The relationship began as "strictly business." Jason's band needed someone to help them brush up their lyrics and Aubrey was the perfect girl to do it. They began to work together, and Aubrey quickly began spending a lot of her free time with the band and whatever was left of that alone with Jason and getting to know him. After a about a month or so their relationship was taken to the next level and they began dating. They were the type of couple who was good for each other. Aubrey helped Jason as he struggled with quitting his drug addiction and he helped her to see that the world may have been fucked up, but it wasn't all bad. When summer came around and Aubrey was finished with school until August, she moved out of her aunt's house and in with Jason and his roommates Joe and David. The band continued to make their music while Aubrey expanded her poetry, a lot of it which would become songs they put together for their demo. With the beginning of fall came big news from That Noise From The Garage; a record label based in Chicago was interested in recording them. It was the break they'd been waiting for since they'd started the band three years prior.
With the excitement and stress of it all Jason found it more and more difficult to keep his addiction under control. One day in mid September, while Aubrey was at school, he received a visit from his drug dealer, and one tiny hit turned out to be the hit that would take his life. Aubrey came home from school to find her best friend David waiting for an ambulance to come take Jason away. Without Jason, Aubrey wasn't sure what to do. She didn't want to finish school, she didn't really want to do anything.
When she got over the initial shock of the death of the boy she'd fallen in love with so quickly, she began to turn once again to her poetry to cope. Jason had been an inspiration since she met him and there was no reason why he couldn't continue to be that to her. With David's encouragement, Aubrey finished high school and even moved on to college, majoring in English and Creative Writing. It was in one of her Creative Writing workshops where her poetry again got noticed. One of her professors sent a couple of her poems off to a friend who worked at a publishing company and soon Aubrey was being approached about publishing a collection of her poems.
She moved to Chicago after she graduated for a while to work closely with the editors at the publishing company picking out the right poems. All the while she was hesitant of publishing these poems that were so full of raw, harsh, emotion that she was sure that no one could even really relate to, but Jason had always encouraged her to publish something, and she was on her way to doing that. A year later, her first poetry collection "Hammers and Strings" was published and she's now moved back to her hometown while she tries to decide what she will do next. |
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