“I don’t know if there was a day I firmly decided,” Chanel Miller said about her decision to include her byline in her book. “I did know that I wasn’t going to let the fear of what men might do, dictate what the rest of my life was going to be.”
Miller, a writer and artist best known for her book “Know My Name,” a story about her sexual assault case, came to UW Oshkosh and led a fireside chat March 13.
Audience members asked Miller a number of questions about discoveries she’s made from her experiences and the process of writing her book.
Miller said she originally wrote “Know My Name” anonymously, but later realized that fear wasn’t going to stop her from releasing her name.
Miller was asked to speak at UWO by the University Speaker Series in a student vote organized by Angie Zemke, fraternity and sorority life program advisor. The University Speaker Series “is a student-led initiative that helps bring speakers to campus about various topics that you all are interested in,” Zemke said.
“When I signed the contract to write the book I was still anonymous,” Miller said. “I promised my publisher that I would turn in at least 90,000 words, but I did not promise that I would come forward after I finished writing it.
Miller has spent the most recent part of her life attending interviews and answering questions about her traumatic experience.
“Deciding to use my name meant I’d have to learn to speak my story out loud, but as the request for interviews started pouring in, I grew angry and my panic attacks returned,” Miller said. “I did not know the difference between an interview and an interrogation. I was showing up to send a message.”
Miller said her experience with the court system and writing her book made her realize that these issues were nothing new. She also learned the process was part of the solution. “Sexual assault is everywhere and we’re all part of it all the time,” Miller said. “I had this misconception that it’s just in the corner of society or that the people in the women’s center will handle it, when really we’re all getting affected and we can choose to educate ourselves about it or not.”
Miller said if she could travel back in time to her younger self she would make sure that she knew that writing this book was her way to be the builder of her story using her own poetic words.
“When I think of my past self I didn’t enjoy being in the courthouse because it was really suffocating,” Miller said. “I was just this little person in this cold and artless environment where I had no power. I wish I knew that later I would become the writer who then gets to … recreate the courthouse from the ground up.”
Traveling to do interviews has allowed Miller to meet so many sexual assault survivors and she said she’s proud to be in a group with such strong individuals. “I’ve been able to meet so many other survivors and they’re the kindest people,” Miller said. “Even though this is a strange club with a really distorted way of being initiated, I love being in it.”