Thoughts on writing childhood and a new journal and a favor

 Hi! I’m coming to you, in this very irregular blog post, with a few thoughts for writing childhood in a larger memoir, inspired by recent reading. Then there’s a publishing recommendation and a request for a favor! I hope you all find this helpful. And I hope that you’re not snowed in right now, physically or spiritually. As there are far too many reasons to be.

Somehow, over the past year or so, I found myself reading a large number of nonfiction mss. At least a hundred, possibly more, for different presses and award series. I found a surprising number of manuscripts fell short in the first chapters before finding their stride, with a problem I named one day (to my spouse) as Failure to Launch.

I coauthored the nonfiction craft book Tell It Slant and think of myself as pretty good at breaking down why and how nonfiction is or isn’t working. But I found myself at a loss with this Failure to Launch—books that ultimately succeeded but started off rambling and hard to stick with. I also—sheepishly-- saw in that pattern a problem I struggle with myself.

Many books I read started at the author’s childhood and then went deep into it, regardless of where the book was going. The latter was particular—like the story of a divorce, a trip, a coming out. The former felt rather formless. I sensed an assumption that, no matter how tight the later narrative arc of a memoir might be, all of childhood is fair game.

But turns out, it’s not. Some details just feel predictable—things like a future writer loving reading as a child is hardly surprising. Nor is a child feeling jealous as younger siblings come along, or wanting a puppy, or being fiercely attached to said puppy. (Note: no details I share anywhere here are ones I encountered, just ones similar enough.)

Many stories got off track with long bouts of what the author presented as a “wild” adolescence, consisting of things that aren’t that unusual—using substances, sassing parents, maybe sometimes staying out all night. Not only did this behavior feel less surprising than the author seemed to find it, but it wasn’t integrated into the rest of the book.

Childhood is the foundation of life: it can’t be limited only to very relevant episodes. It also can’t be a long stretch that does nothing to help the reader get to where the book is going. Writers like Bernard Cooper even admit leaving siblings out of certain works, to keep the story heading toward its main arc. I’m not sure I’d do that. But writing childhood is tricky, in a way I felt I hadn’t appreciated—including in my own writing.

I think the immersive nature of childhood—in which the world isn’t questioned, just given—can work against the needs of nonfiction. People recall, and feel it’s important to share, what they loved and feared the most. Readers need some signposting and reasons to care.

I found myself wishing authors had stopped, every few pages, and asked themselves how what they were currently describing connected with the rest of the book. And resolving to do this more myself.

A chapter in my last book, The Devil’s Castle, used my life as a timeline of changes in psychiatry. The piece didn’t begin as a timeline, but through my endless drafting I noticed how strangely well my life worked as one. The switch to biological psychiatry happened as I was entering the psych system, I received shock treatment (not good) at the peak of its popularity. And so on. The timeline material ended up replacing a lot of unanchored material I had had in previous drafts, as I went from being a rando kid to something of a living testimonial to what happened around me, good and bad.

Here are a few ideas, for those of you working on memoir (and how does nonfiction avoid being at least somewhat memoir? The word means memory, after all).

1)    Chart your childhood material against what was going on in the world at large. We are history writ small, as James Baldwin said, and seeing the connections between your life and the world at large deepens memoir greatly.

2)    Do keep the narrative arc loosely in mind. There’s no need for everything to tightly connect but try to be aware of getting too far away. I eventually cut a lot of early material from The Devil’s Castle. What stayed related fairly directly to the mind or one of my subjects.

3)    Show your childhood chapters to someone who doesn’t know the story you’re telling. Ask them where they think the book is going. If they’re way way off or say they have no idea, you might need to revise.

4)    Be aware of any connections between that young-you and older-you, and freewrite about them as you go. I find this is essential. Digging into why something mattered in a particular way to you, to your family, or talking about its lasting impact can bring things like teenage acting out and trauma to life.

About a wonderful new journal: Nerve to Write: A Magazine for Disabled, Chronically Ill, and Neurodivergent Writers is open to submissions. Its editor-in-chief is the amazing Sarah Fawn Montgomery and it is “an online journal publishing poetry, nonfiction, fiction, hybrid work, and art by disabled, chronically ill, and neurodivergent writers. While we welcome work that addresses these experiences, writers do not need to focus solely on these subjects and are encouraged to submit work on any range of topics.”

And a favor: if you’ve read The Devil’s Castle (or plan to), please keep in mind the importance of supporting writers through online reviews, on sites like Goodreads and amazon. Now that it’s been out a few months I’m hoping to build these and it is a free and hugely helpful thing to do, to support books like mine, that quite honestly take some financial investment to write. TIA!

 If YOU have a book coming out, let me know! I may start doing Q&As here now and then.

On the Trail of the Morning Star by Dorothea Buck Is Out!!!

I am sharing today the publication of a book that makes me happy, maybe happier than the publication of my own: Dorothea Buck’s On the Trail of the Morning Star: Psychosis as Self-Discovery. Buck was a German woman diagnosed schizophrenic and sterilized at nineteen under the Nazi hereditary health laws. Buck became an activist who fought psychiatric abuse and reductive biological psychiatry.

Buck also called on the German government to acknowledge Nazi crimes against the neuropsychiatric, both sterilization and euthanasia. And she became an artist. I own one of her sculptures, pictured.

I once heard a story about a writer I know, which my knowledge of him gave me every reason to believe: that one year, after the Pulitzer committee announced its winner, he declared that even if he won a Pulitzer, he couldn’t be happy about it because X got there first. His green-eyed relationship with X was long standing and mostly due to impersonal causes, like X’s age.

I bring this story up to say that while I’m never going to look a Pulitzer horse in the mouth, I’m far from immune to the disease that is writer envy. I can’t imagine not feeling like there’s a year-end list, wonderful review, literary award that should have come my way, rather than the way it went. It can do things to my stomach lining.

The only inoculant for me is getting out of the siloed place where I see myself as a writer surrounded by potential readers and try to see myself as a writer surrounded by writers who also deserve to be read. Some days I’m better at it than others. As editor of the Bellingham Review, I introduced authors—particularly international authors—to U.S. presses, advocated, and ultimately helped yenta several books.

My biggest joy, though, and the most personally important project has been Buck. Dorothea Buck came into my life when I read her obituary in 2019 and found a copy of her book in German. She helped me so much (a bit of this is in my introduction to the English Morning Star) that I wanted her words to be out there helping others. I got the book translated and finally placed with a press.

This brings me to the big news that the Dorothea Buck book is OUT. Out in English, with a beautiful cover photo taken on Buck’s home island of Wangerooge. It is Open Access so you can buy a physical copy of Morning Star for $24 or download it free.

Buck offered me a way to accept and appreciate my own mind, the beautiful and meaningful work of consciousness. So many need this now. And the price is so right.

I suppose I don’t have to worry about Buck’s book the way I do my own. The press does open access, which casts sales in a different light. I am soliciting reviews and such, but tend to feel that, as with me, Buck will find those who need her. But I think it’s easy to forget the power we have, even with a social media post, to amplify someone else.

More often than not, my yenta intros didn’t end up in books, but I think they at least gave the writers involved a sense of their own value. And when you do that, if that writer does get to the Pulitzer before you, you can feel secretly part of it. At least I do. Win.

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.