I don’t write about my own work much in this blog. I’m not especially modest. It’s just not the vision I had for it.
As the author of a book about writing, Tell It Slant: Creating, Refining, and Publishing Creative Nonfiction and as a literary magazine editor, I like talking about writing and publishing. I think it matters. I’m aware of the extent to which similar life experiences get recorded in our literature, and different ones get lost.
I think the writers we should most be reading are often the least likely to try for publication. They think, as I once did (and do still, TBH), no one would want to read what they write about. Literature, like all art, can be gallinovular—a word I’m in love with that means chicken-egg.
It’s easy to think that if anyone cared about my x experience, it would be out there already, burning up those ubiquitous bestseller lists. Which is an understandable way to think, but one that guarantees nothing new will ever be out there, to burn up bestseller lists, or just do whatever it does.
It’s scary to write about the things you don’t see all around you, in the literary air. You assume stories like yours aren’t there because that’s the last thing anyone wants to hear about, rather than assuming that your story NEEDS to be out there, for that very reason. It’s not all around you, not because no one shares your experience—that’s never the case—but because there’s still some taboo.
I dropped out of high school. I write about a subject that for many people is the ultimate unspoken: psychosis. And I just finished recording the last bit of a two-episode CBC Ideas radio documentary on neurodiversity, called (last I heard) Gifts of the Gods. It’s a series of interviews and readings with me and several other neurodiverse people, like Temple Grandin. It’s going to be aired across 98% of Canada, in eighty other countries, in the U.S. on Sirius XM and on NPR.
Am I bragging? No, promise. I’m sharing that the first episode airs in a little over a week (April 27) and I’m fairly terrified. How many people are going to know this thing about me, that I experience psychosis? And in an ableist culture, one with a very narrow bandwidth of the “normal,” it’s going to mean to a lot of people that I’m freakish and dismissable. I agree with Lisa Cosgrove and Robert Whitaker, two thinkers and researchers about psychiatry: psychiatry has become a philosophy of the normal, and as such, often offers an impoverished vision of what human existence can be.
I have faith that my own very different mindways have value. But it’s one thing to believe this, and another to feel like the word “crazy” is going to be plastered on your forehead as you weigh apples at the grocery store.
People ask me all the time how I find the “courage” to be so honest. Well, the answer is, I have no courage. Or I don’t feel like I have courage. Maybe I have a knack for not thinking too far ahead. I focus on deadlines, whether for interviews or manuscripts. Sometimes when those “revelation days” happen and my words are really out there, I wonder what I could possibly have been thinking.
I’ve been through this already, what’s happening with this show, and I know it’s never all that bad. I’ll get contacted by good people who are glad I said what I said. None of this prevents that heart-pounding fear of being exposed.
I think maybe my knack for focusing on the process isn’t a bad one. Once you get x experience down just right, it does scare you less and excite you more. Then you can figure out what you’re ready to do with it, and what noises you want to make.