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Debut author and trafficking survivor Jen If introduces us to her book of poetry, “Monarch Child”: Monarch Child is a collection of nineteen memoir poems about international child trafficking. Look through the eyes of a small child smuggled abroad for organised abuse. A searing and uncomfortable insight into a world rarely shared. Our eyes of distant rain. Remnants of summer sun through her ever-shifting hair. Did her hands overflow with love, shame, or lies, when she passed that child, to not-her-uncle? This collection may be upsetting or triggering for people who have experienced S.R.A. This slim volume of poetry is a testament to all survivors and a cry for help from those still caught in such an insidious industry. I cried on the inside as I read these poems. So much is not said and is just as important as the words on the page. Another part of me wanted to take action to end this abuse. If you are a survivor heed the warning in the front of the book. You can buy this book:
https://www.amazon.com/Monarch-Child-Jen-If https://www.goodreads.com/-monarch-child You can follow the author: https://x.com/WriterJenIf https://www.jen-if.co.uk https://www.facebook.com/-Jen-If Copyright © Mark L. Schultz 2025 except for the author’s introduction
47 Comments
Mark
1/27/2025 04:09:47 pm
You're welcome, Jen. I love to read and chat with authors. I am pleased that you chose me to help promote your book. Promotion and marketing are more like an ultra-marathon than a sprint.
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Love to! Beyond the bio, hmm. So people know I'm a survivor of trafficking from an early age. This first chapbook of nineteen poems is from a time I left the place I thought of as home and was taken out of the country for organised abuse. I had all my milk teeth and looked up to bigger girls who had wobbly teeth or who had lost theirs so I know I was definitely younger than seven years old. I can tell you more about that, if you like? What would you like to know?
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Mark
1/28/2025 09:51:10 am
Not knowing how old you were devastates me. Thank you. Let's move on.
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It is upsetting that it's part of the reality we're in, right now. I'm not even entirely sure it was the first time - it's just the first time I can remember.
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Mark
1/28/2025 10:54:09 am
We do live in a broken world and it's full of broken people. There are no unbroken people.
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Clean romance sounds about right! I used to read a lot of F. Scott-Fitzgerald, Jeanette Winterson, Patrick Suskind, Kate Chopin, Salman Rushdie, Dylan Thomas, George Elliot, Kurt Vonnegut, Sylvia Plath - bit hard to pin to a genre. Beyond that, I'm mostly about poetry.
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Mark
1/28/2025 01:26:53 pm
That is a pretty wide field you are adventuring in. I am reading broadly also. I read almost exclusively sci-fi during my formative years if I had the choice. I think it was in the eighth grade I was given a paperback set of the Lord of the Rings. I fell in love with fantasy and read the set 3 times before graduating from high school.
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Lord of the Rings hey, I love hobbits! But the whole Sauron thing felt a bit too scary, no? Saying that, I did have a big Stephen King phase. Did you? Does everyone?
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Mark
1/29/2025 07:47:41 am
The Eye of Sauron was very intimidating because he controlled so many and was able to extend his power over others.
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Thanks for your good wishes :)
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Mark
1/29/2025 10:28:00 am
You're welcome.
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Oh my gosh, Mark, these ideas are solid gold! You're so good at what you do. I'm copy and pasting all over this place.
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Mark
1/29/2025 12:22:59 pm
I love helping authors of any stripe or experience and I learn things along the way.
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M&S is Harrods but smaller and more 'mumsy'.
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Craig Crawford
2/2/2025 07:06:36 pm
Hello--I've been following along but not been vocal.
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Hi Craig,
Mark
1/29/2025 04:18:11 pm
I am not a writer. I am a reader. First and foremost, I love to read. I learned to read from a retired schoolteacher before I entered the first grade. I was always reading a couple of grade levels above my current grade. My mother loved to read also. Curiously, I have no memories of her reading to me. I don't have a lot of memories from the first 6 or 7 years of my life.
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Being a reader is a beautiful thing. It sounds like there was a lot of warmth and love in your family. Some people are natural readers and pick it up, easily. You were doubly blessed.
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Mark
1/30/2025 08:41:30 am
You make a lot of sense. I learned a lot about SRA many years ago. A young woman was seeking counseling for the abuse she suffered as a child. My wife and I knew a counselor who worked in that field, a godly woman. The young woman needed transportation and support during and after appointments. We went through the sessions with her and transported her also. God used us in unexpected ways to facilitate her healing.
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SRA is horrendous and I'm so glad she got help and you got to be a part of that.
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Mark
1/30/2025 12:18:49 pm
Pantser is the term for someone who writes without benefit of notes or an outline. Plotter is at the other end of the scale and is a person who makes notes or an outline before starting to write. Many authors do a little of both.
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That's a helpful explanation of non-linear writing, great article, thanks!
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Mark
1/31/2025 07:41:13 am
I like the idea of writing out of sequence. Especially writing the last chapter first. Then you know what you are aiming for. I heard about one pantser, he outlined each chapter after he wrote it. He said it was much easier to find a section in his book that way.
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Outlined it after he wrote it? That would definitely clarify where it dragged and make editing easier. I'm going to give that a go.
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Mark
1/31/2025 09:29:47 am
I agree with you about the utility of AI and the crummy stuff it writes. AI has been fed many thousands of books, and I know that every book has errors of one kind or another. I read 30 to 40 books a year, some years more. I find spelling errors in all of them except for one. Once a year for the past 11 years I find a book free of spelling errors. They jump off the page at me I don't have to hunt them down. I am talking only about spelling errors, if I read slower, I see grammar and punctuation errors also. I conclude that AI writing will likely have errors also.
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That's an uncanny talent. Thank you for sharing it with us less focussed folks. Does it detract from your enjoyment of reading?
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Mark
1/31/2025 10:03:01 am
Spelling errors do interrupt my reading pleasure. I can't not see them, I can ignore them, but the damage is done. I am good at recovering, though.
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I've rarely entered a contest (perhaps the Bridport Prize once) but having work included in literary mags (print or online) feels like winning. I find the process of submission draining so I rarely submit anything, for instance, I only sent 'Monarch Child' out to two publishers.
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Mark
1/31/2025 01:33:11 pm
Querying and submitting a manuscript is very wearing. Most manuscripts don't get more than a 30-second look, if that.
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Mark
2/1/2025 04:46:05 pm
My situation is similar to yours. None of my immediate family are writers. I am ignorant of most of my extended family. I know a couple of people at church who are writing memoirs. But that is it, though my church is experiencing rapid growth and I don't know many of them.
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What you said about publishers stuck with me, I never thought of it that way, before. I assumed my little collection would be difficult to place because of the subject. I don't shy away from sharing how awful being trafficked was / is and that's naturally likely to be upsetting so I imagined no-one would invest in me.
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Mark
2/1/2025 06:51:42 pm
There are publishers who specialize in non-mainstream stories. They already know that a book will not sell a lot of copies, so they depend upon the author to cover the cost of publishing either by the author purchasing a hundreds of copies of the book or by charging many hundreds of dollars to publish the book. There is no free lunch.
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Thank you for your kind words about what I'm doing.
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Mark
2/2/2025 07:09:41 am
I am glad you are being careful. I report and block those frauds daily.
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Found it online, there's a lot of information, there, thank you.
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Mark
2/2/2025 09:24:05 am
I reread books a lot when I was in high school. Sometimes for the entertainment value but frequently because I didn't have a lot of books, and the library and school were far away. Before the internet and computers. Sometimes I reread funny stuff because I was sad. I read and re-read Tolkien's Lord of The Rings three times before graduating from high school.
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Sorry, you did say that. You immersed yourself in Tolkien's world. There's my great concentration and ability to absorb information right there.
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Mark
2/3/2025 08:22:08 am
I didn't know that worshippers of evil would take children to churches. It is a good cover. Thanks for letting me know. We take ministry to children very seriously and have many safeguards in place to protect them when they are with us.
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They do, it's an insidious practice and often the adults will become very active in the church community (though that wasn't the case in my life) so I'm glad your church has robust safeguarding measures. Prevention is easier and better than cure.
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Mark
2/3/2025 08:29:06 am
Your "one question" is very similar to what others have answered.
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Craig Crawford
2/3/2025 07:30:13 pm
Hi Jen--thanks for replying!
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Who am I?An avid reader, typobuster, and the Hyper-Speller. I am a husband, father, and grandfather. Archives
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