Tips on Timeliness & a Research-y Request for You All

OK, it’s been fifty million years since I sent out a blog post. I’ve been sucked into a vortex of:

1) Getting the book that very appropriately has “devil” in its name, The Devil’s Castle, done and delivered. Still working on this one.

2) What I’m calling the Dorothea Buck project, recovering and presenting the work of Nazi sterilization victim and psychiatric activist Dorothea Buck. This has included finding a translator for her amazing book, On the Trail of the Morning Star: Psychosis as Self-Discovery, and placing the translation.

Then it turned into editing, footnotes, writing an introduction . . . It comes out this winter from Punctum Press.  I loved all of it. I love Buck. She’s playing a lead role in Devil’s Castle. But I think I’ve gone beyond good literary citizen to dual citizenship. Tiring travel sometimes!

3) Keeping up with all the other writing I need to do, like my Madwoman Out of the Attic column for Psychology Today.

The last of which leads me to one helpful writing tip I can think of today. And this tip has to do with media writing, opinion pieces, short-form journalism, i.e., not a long-form story such as you’d find in National Geographic. We’re talking more like the pieces that feed into Google News and similar platforms every day. On sites like the Huffington Post, the Hill, Vice, and oh so many more.

Obviously digital media varies widely: oriented toward different audiences and often specializing in different topics, like science, pop culture, politics, LGBTQ+ issues, etc.

The one thing MOST digital media has in common is timeliness. I get messages from friends and acquaintances with some version of, I have an interesting story about my experiences with x or y and I wonder if you could suggest an editor/publication. (Or occasionally, would you send it for me, which in case it isn’t screamingly obvious is a big don’t.) Sometimes I can suggest someone, but the editor or publication’s fit is often only half of what you need.

The other is timeliness. It is wonderful if you have something very specific to say about compulsive lying when, for example, a George Santos is found out. Or a story of some specific effects of abnormal heat when we’re baking through a summer like our last one. But topicality also has to do with times of the year. Not just terrible family stories before Christmas.

Every month and every day of the year has themes, if you look for them. There are some bigger themes like Pride Month and Mental Health Awareness Month. March is Women’s History Month, but within that, there’s an International Woman’s Day (March 8), Women’s Suffrage anniversaries, and so on.

This is one example of how to pitch your work as timely. Editors may not care that there’s a National Tater Tot Day (February 2). Or maybe if you have an amazing story about hiding from aliens who demanded your tater tots, they would. Who knows?

My point is that if you see yourself writing for the media—why not?—it’s a good idea to keep lists of important dates and tie-ins. Another way of achieving topicality is to look into birthdates, death dates, or other key dates in the lives of well-known people who are connected to what you’re writing about, even if the connection is conceptual. Or similar historical anniversaries.

I’ve said this here before, but it’s easy to think our particular positions in/knowledge of the world won’t be welcome. If they’re smart and interesting, you don’t have to be a “name.” Just relevant.

Finally, a request: For my book A Mind Apart I asked random people how they think. Not the what—the how. And the answers were fascinating. One person experienced cognition as an inner elevator that stopped at certain floors for particular topics, eg, family problems might be fifth floor. Another person had an inner government that actually debated. And yet another passed thoughts through differential equations.

Write me if you want to share how you think. I’m collecting answers for a book project. I’d love to know. Credit always given where wanted.

Research as Enabled Curiosity, or Monkeys on Planes

Recently I was flying across the country and my friendly seatmate told me she was a flight attendant. We chatted and then I asked her to tell me the weirdest thing she’d ever seen on her job.

            “I once delivered a dinner tray with grapes on it to a man in first class,” she said, “and a little hand reached out of his jacket and took a grape.”

It turned out the man had a monkey stowed away in his jacket, a small monkey I presume. But this is what she saw: a large hand attached to a man in first class reaching for a grape; a small hand emerging out of his chest also reaching for a grape.

 Did the man sneak through security clasping a monkey in his shirt? Did he bring it through in a carrier then tuck it away? So many questions! But the image of a little hand reaching out for the irresistible grape stays with me. And that this flight attendant thought at first it was a man harboring another, smaller, man.

 I tend to ask this what’s-the-weirdest-thing question of everyone I meet who seems game--cabbies, doctors, people who style hair. I have banks and banks of hidden-monkey type stories. Some make it into my writing; some just remind me of the fact that this strange experiment called life has more odd results than I could imagine on my own.

I do a lot of research, particularly interviewing, in my writing. In The Terrible Unlikelihood of Our Being Here I interviewed many scientists and much of what we talked about involved straightforward questions about theories of things like time. But I always try in my interviews—at the end, when I can’t mess things up—asking a curveball question. What obsesses you? What are you doing that’s exciting but maybe a little strange?

One scientist, Donald Hoffman, told me that he was trying to find a mathematical equation that would correlate in some way with the idea of God. Wow.

Researched nonfiction has become an important part of the genre, particularly the kind of personal yet fact-fueled work done by writers like Michael Pollan, Mary Roach, and Atul Gawande. When I teach research writing I teach it as cultivating and enabling curiosity before anything else. That means when you have a talkative seatmate on a plane, you try to figure out what they’ve seen and known that you haven’t. It also means being curious about those you know, like family members, and trying to draw out their stories. Maybe just cultivating the habit of believing that everyone who passes you by in this world has something interesting and unique to tell you.

The “I” of nonfiction is going to run out of steam sooner or later if it sticks too much to that pronoun. Sometimes that “I” needs to be not alpha and omega but conduit or channel.  

Looking things up is fine. I go online to find out facts many times a day. But information that’s on a website probably has been lifted from another website and that from another, etc. Sometimes you’re just tucking into a brew of common assumptions. Either way, individual human knowledge is different. It involves minds and perspectives that happen all of once in this world.

Ask five weird questions a day until you get in the habit of it. Write me and ask me a weird question, if you need some practice. Write an essay called “Five Weird Questions” with five different people and their answers. If other people do it too it can just be a thing, like writing about your thumbs. Which makes me wonder about the strangest thing you all have experienced while hitchhiking . . . I’ll stop now.

On Writing and Fear of Writing

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.