The Takoma Park, Md.-based editor and author, who’s day job is being a sign language interpreter, began work on the anthology about 12 years ago.

“I wanted to hear other women’s voices on this,” Shaw said. “But there wasn’t anything out there…nothing.”

Then, Shaw recounts, a friend of a friend sent her a poem about incest, and the author says knowing that someone else out there was interested in reading about the painful subject was “immediately heartening.” After that first poem, Shaw began calling for contributors – writers, poets, artists – to contribute to an anthology of writing and visual art works.

She said that close to 100 women sent submissions, many sending more than one. And, said Shaw, submissions are still arriving even though the book was published last November.

Reading through Not Child’s Play is, to say the least, extremely hard. The detailed essays are truly heart-wrenching, and leave the reader not only with a feeling of utmost respect for the women who have decided to share their past, but many questions as well. Why, especially with a heightened public awareness around child abuse, hasn’t there been more coverage on this subject? Shaw answers from personal experience.

“Even though brother-sister incest is very widespread, it gets dismissed… it become normalized, in a way, so people don’t see it for what it is,” said Shaw. “It’s not adolescent sexual play. It’s about power, coercion … but because the perpetrator and the victim are children, people don’t see it as violence.”

Shaw also said many dismiss this type of abuse as “boys will be boys.”

But when Shaw pulled the curtain back on her past, she shattered the silence through art.

“Silence is a tool of abuse that helps perpetuate it,” she said. “But being able to express yourself in any medium helps you to see. Being able to speak your voice is incredibly powerful.”

One of the most interesting and touching parts of Shaw’s anthology are the photos of the “Incest Survivor Action Figures” created by Shaw and her friends. The idea, said Shaw, started out as a joke – friends said Shaw could use the figures as marketing gimmicks. But the joke soon turned into a method for healing.

Using old Barbie and Ken dolls, clay, magic markers, “found objects,” doll clothes, and other items, the author and her friends sculpted the powerful looking dolls, gave them names, and personalities. One example is “Bugle,” a leather-clad doll with a red Mohawk and a silver horn “who blows the trumpet and stops the incest.” Shaw said the dolls are the “embodiment of survival.”

After finishing the anthology five years ago, Shaw sent it to more than 60 publishers, but no one wanted to pick it up. So she decided to publish it by herself by creating her own publishing outlet, Lunchbox Press.

Shaw said that she has received letters in response to her book from men and women, victims and perpetrators, husbands of survivors, mental health professionals, and others.

“It’s not easy to think about … putting myself out there, exposing what happened to me and my family,” she said. “But it’s been one of the best things I’ve done.”