The Lady's Story



May I now introduce you to The Lady anoNYMous, a pseudoNYM and alter ego of writer and composer anoNYMous Raven. The Lady is ethereal and can take many forms. The Lady has many aspects. She began her existence as a fictional creation while anoNYMous (Nym for short) was living in the small coastal town of Seward, AK which primarily offers fishing and a maximum security correctional facility for commerce and employment. The Lady was to be a star in fantastical tales, primarily retellings of events in Nym's life told as if they took place in a magical land with other fictionalized representations of people, places, and circumstances. However, her stories were never told and she rested within her author's imagination.

Circumstances were such for Nym that he lived in Seward while also keeping an apartment in Newberg, OR, an attic that had been converted to include a kitchen and a bathroom. After three months in Seward, Nym returned to this eccentric little dwelling and took up employment in Portland, the city his social life was beginning to center upon. Not long after his return from Alaska, he began seeking a place to live in the city. Portland became his home and continues to be home in Nym's heart, though life there would only last for the next ten years.

Nym became an active member of the genderqueer community, exploring gender for himself and identifying comfortably as female for several years, envisioning herself as a strong, confidant, intelligent, sexy, and potentially dangerous woman in a community that allowed her express this aspect of herself. Nym continues to identify as female, but is also comfortable being recognized as male, and therefore considers herself bigendered. While being referred to as male is not necessarily correct, an aspect of duality in Nym's nature and the way she presents herself is recognized. Therefore we will refer to Nym as either of the binary genders, or as "they," whichever strikes us as fitting or flows naturally for the current sentence.

While living in Portland, Nym became an activist and an advocate for the transgendered. His platform was the spoken word, delivering poetry and prose to audiences in order to educate them about gender identity and expression beyond assigned or assumed sex. For these performances, he would take on the role of The Lady anoNYMous. Beyond make-up and clothing traditionally designated for women, Nym did nothing to alter her appearance when taking on this "persona," which is not necessarily the correct term, for she lived as The Lady anoNYMous, adopting this title as her full name. Make-up and dresses were merely her style of dress for appearing for audiences. In daily life, as a person who hiked, biked, romped, and rolled around in the dirt with her dog friend Theo, they were more likely to be seen in work boots and Carhartts, or naked.

Circumstances arose that have transplanted Nym from Portland to Grandview, MO, just outside of Kansas City. As a radical queer, the adjustment from Portland's unique, liberated, and accepting sphere of inclusion and protection to a population that commonly assumes everyone living among them lives in fear of a certain male god has not been kind. Nym has also encountered health issues that now prevent him from living as the physically active carefree spirit that he was in Portland, but he carries his experiences with him, as well as The Lady anoNYMous, who now expresses herself through the written word and music. Nym has always been musically inclined, playing the piano from a young age and being active in his schools' choirs. During the transition from teenager to twenty-something, Nym sang for metal bands, heavily influenced by the likes of Korn, Tool, and Marilyn Manson at the time. Their health crisis currently prevents them from singing because of tears in their esophagus, but they have turned their attention as a thirty-something adult to composing. It has been primarily a reunion with the piano, but all the sounds of their life: from finding beauty and solace in Sarah McLachlan, Loreena McKennitt, The Cranberries, and world music in their early teens; to being liberated as an individual and free thinker by Ani DiFranco and Tori Amos in their mid-teens; to expressing anger at the circumstances of the world and the intimate pain of everything that came before with the forming of the NuMetal genre; to seeing the larger picture with bands and artists both familiar - who Nym has grown alongside - and new, who have introduced them to new genres and sounds... All of these sounds Nym now carries with them and finds in the music that they create.

The Lady anoNYMous is an artist, an identity, and an experience. She wishes to communicate with you now through sound. She wishes for you to take experiences with you from the sounds and for you to carry these sounds with you through your experiences. Here you will find access to these sounds in a variety of ways. Ways to experience these sounds now, ways to take them with you wherever you go, and ways to share them. May your inner snails be resilient and determined.


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