Shutter She Wrote

My name is Miriam K. Lam. I’m a Guyanese writer, literature student, critic, graphic designer, artist, mother, avid reader, and beginner photographer. I draw, paint, meddle with arts and crafts, obsess over language, and have been known to spend an unreasonable amount of time deciding that a perfectly respectable word is, in fact, the wrong one. Much of my creative temperament resembles my father’s, enough that I have often joked that I am some miniature variation of him. Still, I am learning where inheritance ends and I begin. Writing, relationships, friendships, motherhood, mistakes, and experience have all had a hand in teaching me who Miriam is when she is not simply mirroring what came before her.

My literary life began with my paternal grandmother and a copy of L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables. That book was my first real entrance into literature, the one that transformed reading from something I could do into something I wanted to keep doing. Anne’s imagination, emotional excess, stubbornness, curiosity, and remarkable capacity to turn ordinary existence into something larger stayed with me. From there, reading became appetite. My father fed it with A to Z Mysteries, The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Enid Blyton, and whatever else might satisfy a child who had discovered that entire worlds could be concealed between two covers. Eventually, I moved into Tamora Pierce’s Song of the Lioness quartet and, somewhere along the way, graduated into Fyodor Dostoevsky and Luo Guanzhong. My reading habits have never been especially loyal to one genre, period, or degree of emotional stability.

My father deepened what my grandmother first sparked. He is a chronic reader, the sort of person who will seize almost any available interval to disappear into his Kindle. He loves a good mystery, like Agatha Christie, and I remember him retelling whatever he had been reading with the kind of delight that made the recap almost as entertaining as the book itself. We did not always read the same novels, so our literary conversations wandered, but poetry was different. Poetry we dissected. We interpreted, debated, examined the language, considered what sat beneath it and, to use the least academic but most accurate description, analysed the hell out of it.

He also taught me, from a very young age, that knowledge is power. At the time, I thought this sounded excellent. I wanted power. Growing older rather inconveniently complicated my interpretation. I came to understand that knowledge is not valuable merely because it allows you to know more than somebody else. It expands your capacity for empathy, gives context to experiences beyond your own, makes connection easier, and makes ignorance considerably more difficult to defend. Reading did not teach me that the world is simple. It taught me how much more complicated it becomes when you bother to look closely.

Creativity existed beside the books. My father wrote poetry, worked in graphic design, and practised photography, so I grew up around someone who moved naturally between language and image. Life around him seemed to operate in colour, perspective, composition, and continuous learning. I did not recognise the extent of that influence while I was living inside it. Children rarely stop to catalogue their future artistic inheritance. I simply absorbed it. Years later, I write poetry, work as a graphic designer, make art, and am slowly learning photography myself. The resemblance is obvious. What matters to me now is not escaping that inheritance, but discovering what I can do with it that belongs unmistakably to me.

Writing became one of the places where that distinction started to emerge. For years, however, most of what I wrote remained private. Poems accumulated in notebooks, phone notes, loose pages, scraps of paper, and whatever else could catch a thought before it disappeared. Privacy was comfortable because it demanded very little courage. A poem kept to myself could not be rejected, misunderstood, disliked, or interpreted in a way that made me wonder whether the reader and I had encountered the same piece of writing. I loved writing long before I was comfortable being seen as someone who writes.

There was also the considerably less romantic problem of time. Writing has never existed separately from the rest of my life. It has had to negotiate with university, work, motherhood, responsibilities, relationships, fatigue, and the ordinary interruptions of being a person other people occasionally require things from. I learned to write in whatever spaces life surrendered. Sometimes that means hours with a piece. Sometimes it means catching a line on my phone before it disappears. The popular image of the writer alone in a beautifully lit room has never been particularly useful to me. Most of the time, the sentence has to survive somebody needing something.

In July 2025, I stopped keeping quite so much of my writing behind closed pages and created Shutter She Wrote on Instagram. I wanted somewhere my work could exist beyond notebooks and private files, but I also wanted somewhere that could accommodate more than words alone.

The name came from wanting to merge two forms of storytelling that have always fascinated me: photography and literature. A photograph arrests a moment in time. It isolates memory, decides what belongs within the frame, and preserves a fraction of an instant that would otherwise continue without us. Yet a photograph is rarely absolute. It invites interpretation. The same image can suggest tenderness to one person and loneliness to another. The camera records, but the frame also chooses.

Literature gives me another kind of frame. It can stretch a single moment across pages, inhabit thoughts a photograph cannot expose, and articulate feelings that can be considerably easier to write than to say aloud. Photography can condense an entire story into one captured instant; literature can prise that instant open and examine what is living inside it. Both are selective. Both are interpretive. Both ask us to notice.

I wanted a name that could hold those two instincts together. Shutter came from photography. She Wrote gave literature its place, with a playful nod to Chaka Demus & Pliers’ Murder She Wrote. Somewhere between the camera and the page, Shutter She Wrote was born.

I created it as a house for my poetry, my photographs, however few they may sometimes be, and the literature I wanted to put somewhere beyond myself. The Instagram page remains active and is still the first home of Shutter She Wrote. It is also where I began thinking more deliberately about authorship, typography, presentation, atmosphere, and what happens when words and image are allowed to speak to each other rather than merely coexist.

The blog came later because my father would not leave the matter alone. He believed the work needed more room than Instagram could provide and saw the possibility of essays, criticism, reviews, literary discussion, theatre, performance, fashion, culture, and the various subjects I already had a habit of examining long after more sensible people had moved on. I hesitated, partly because creating a blog felt like publicly declaring that I believed I had something worth saying, but my father already believed that. Eventually, I stopped arguing with him. So said, so done.

His confidence in me has mattered because mine has not always been equally reliable. Being believed in does not eradicate self-doubt, but it does make self-dismissal increasingly difficult to justify. I still wonder whether a poem has been revised enough, whether an argument is sufficiently rigorous, whether a conclusion has earned itself, or whether a sentence is genuinely clever or simply very pleased with itself. Confidence did not arrive one morning and evict insecurity; the change has been quieter, and I have simply stopped allowing insecurity to have the final vote.

Studying literature has made passive consumption increasingly difficult. I rarely stop at whether I liked something. I want to know why one line lingers while another collapses, why one image unsettles me, why one performance takes possession of a room while another merely occupies it, what a work intends to communicate, and what it reveals despite itself. Diction, rhythm, structure, symbolism, context, subtext, contradiction, and execution fascinate me because meaning is rarely produced by accident, even when the audience experiences it instinctively.

Poetry takes me somewhere more private. My own work often returns to memory, family, desire, grief, resentment, faith, womanhood, intimacy, love, and the contradictions people carry without ever resolving neatly. I am drawn to polarity: tenderness beside brutality, affection contaminated by anger, beauty disturbed by something darker underneath it. I care just as deeply about how language sounds. Rhyme, cadence, alliteration, juxtaposition, sonic patterning, and word choice can keep me occupied for an indecent amount of time. I have discarded perfectly accurate words because they offended my ear. I continue to maintain that this is craftsmanship.

Graphic design gives me another vocabulary for much the same instinct. Typography, negative space, hierarchy, scale, texture, colour, composition, and atmosphere all alter the way something is received before the reader has consciously decided what they think of it. That is why the visual identity of Shutter She Wrote matters to me. Design is not decoration around the writing. It participates in it.

When I look at Shutter She Wrote now, I see several versions of myself occupying the same house: the girl whose grandmother gave her Anne of Green Gables, the daughter raised among books, poetry, photography and design, the student who wants to know how a text works, the critic willing to interrogate it, the artist who thinks in words and images, the mother writing around the demands of ordinary life, and the woman still discovering what belongs to her alone.

I do not have a finished definition of myself to offer. I suspect I would distrust one if I did.

For years, the safest place for my writing was where no one could judge it. It was also where no one could find it.

The work is still unfinished. So am I.